Eric  Goodfield asks me:

> must you always pawn off in all directions
> your sop(h)isticate and sublime mockery
> and status fetish?

I am embarrassed and apologetic that it appears so.
My condition is analogous in miniature to Kierkegaard's,
after Bishop Mynster's death.
As he could not bear to have Mynster described as a
true witness to Christianity, 
so I, in my humble way, will not keep silent
when it is intimated that subjectivity
which for Kierkegaard was the divine source of light (truth),
if not suitably attenuated,
becomes obscurantism,
the source of darkness.

So far as "status fetish" is concerned, I don't
think I know what it is. I claim no status;
I play no roles, and I do not pretend to
be different from what I am.


Eric Goodfield further asks:

> are the dangers of culture and abstraction
> not already apparent to you? 

I suspect we see the same dangers,
but disagree about their nature.
The dangers attributed to culture causes
that we do not want to see.
Abstraction is like a sharp knife,
the danger of which is its unskilful and improper use.



Eric Goodfield writes:
	
>    All philosophy is homesickness" (Novalis)
> 
I like the citation. Thank you. I tried unsuccessfully to find
it in the original. I infer it to have been "Alle Philosophie
ist Heimweh." If so, it corroborates by hypothesis about the
impossibility of translation, because to my ears "Heimweh" is
subjective to the individual who experiences it, a feeling of
loneliness and pain, while sickness is an objective, societally
acknowledged state of mind or body which is subject to diagnosis,
codification and treatment, and for which insurance benefits may
be collected.
> 
> (From Marcuse's EROS AND CIVILIZATION: "The Images of Orpheus and
> Narcissus"):
> 
> "Reason is the rationality of the performance principle.
> Even at the beginning of Western civilization,
> long before this principle was institutionalized,
> reason was defined as an instrument of constraint,
> of instinctual suppression; the domain of the instincts,
> sensuousness, was considered as eternally hostile
> and detrimental to reason. The categories in which
> philosophy has comprehended the human existence have
> retained the connection between reason and suppression:
> whatever belongs to the sphere of sensuousness, pleasure,
> impulse has the connotation of being antagonistic to reason -
> something that has to be subjugated, constrained." 
> 
This is Nietzsche's thesis in Die Geburt der Tragoedie
aus dem Geist der Musik. Heine blamed the suppression of
pleasure and sensuousness on Christianity. Freud, if I
understand him correctly, built much of his psychoanalytic
theory on similar premises. I don't know whether such theories
are true; I don't even know what meaning the concept of truth
has in this context. Perhaps I have been irreparably corrupted,
but I perceive no conflicht between sensuousness and pleasure
on the one hand, and reason on the other.

Eric Goodfield explains:

> Purified reason, and its cultural aspiration
> to a bounded dialogic aesthetic,
> is the dirempted vestige of an earlier,
> more whole and unified existence. 

I don't understand; perhaps that is why I feel
no deprivation.

Eric Goodfield comments:

> what sorrow, what glazed and veiled conceit
> do we sling at each other?

The sorrow is for the pain of existence, which is
neither caused nor assuaged by our conceits.
It is because we have such difficulty in speaking
to each other that our sentences seem glazed and veiled.

Eric writes:

> Dear Ernst,
> 
> so sorry to offend your baronial sensibilities.
> my, how morally and intellectually clean we are
> when we regard the text with little concern
> for the reality it aspires to represent.
> my applause and compliments on your philosophical
> and ethical hygiene! long live the void!

Dear Eric,

My sensibilities, baronial or otherwise,
have not been offended. I replied to your messages
in the manner which I deemed aesthetically appropriate
and politically essential. I very much hope I
did not offend you.

Your inferences regarding my lack of concern
for the reality that the text aspires to represent,
seem to me so fanciful, that they could not possibly
offend me. When I go cross-country skiing in winter
in a dress-shirt and necktie, the fellow skiers who
encounter me on the trail make sarcastic comments
on my attire, and draw from it inferences concerning
my skiing skills, my character, and for all I know,
my sanity; where the only real issue is my sense
of humor. You, however, should have learned from
the first pages of Either/Or that the outside is
not the inside.

Ernst Meyer