Breakdown of On nie czuje niczego, wszakże nie ma sumienia.
on
he / it (m)
mieć
to have
nie
no / not
nic
nothing
czuć
to feel (sensation) / to smell
wszakże
after all / as is well known
sumienie
conscience
Questions & Answers about On nie czuje niczego, wszakże nie ma sumienia.
Why use wszakże here instead of a more common word like przecież?
Both words can translate to "after all" or "as you know," but wszakże belongs to a much higher, more literary register. While you would use przecież in everyday conversation, wszakże adds a dramatic, almost poetic weight to the sentence, emphasizing that his lack of conscience is an undeniable fact.
Does the suffix -że in wszakże change its meaning compared to just wszak?
Why does the sentence use niczego instead of just saying nie czuje nic?
This is the "Genitive of Negation" in action. The verb czuć normally takes an accusative object, but when negated, the object must switch to the genitive case. The genitive form of nic is niczego. In everyday colloquial Polish, people often just say nie czuje nic, treating the short pronoun as an exception, but niczego is the strictly correct grammatical form and perfectly matches the formal, elevated tone set by wszakże.
I have seen wszakże translated as "however" before. Is that what it means here?
Not in this context. In older or historical Polish texts, wszakże was indeed used to mean "however" (similar to jednakże). In modern Polish, its primary use is to mean "after all" or "since." In this sentence, it introduces a justification: he feels nothing because, as we all know, he lacks a conscience.
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