Eric Goodfield writes:

> My dear Ernst,
> 
> how old, sober and grey we have become when "youthful"
> irony looses its ability to jolt us out of our approximations
> of reality, when we meet it with our own ideological purposes.
> if you have not already read my response to Andrej on the
> paradoxical and alienated relationship of the far right elite
> and the masses than you missed out on the interiority of the
> anxiety which must be understood in the relation of personal and
> sociological experience in the modern world; it is the ironic
> religiousity which continues to bind whole and part, even in
> the modern world.
> 
> I am afraid that your constipated solemnity will never
> recompense for a heart which can not at once look upon
> its world and say: "what have I done to myself?".
> you are right, of course, one apocalypse is enough. 
> unfortunately the instrumentalist insidion of western
> civilization and its capacity for barbarism are more
> so the antecedents of germany and germany's hitler,
> than it could be argued that they remain a Fackenheimian
> "planet" unto themselves. 
> 
> My dear Ernst, the holocaust is not over. The Nazi gun
> has become the economic whip. Master and slave continue
> to push to its limits the demands of superiority and power,
> one assisting the other.  it is ours to ask why it is so,
> not to make a liberal world the negation of Naziism but to
> realize the deep seated relationship between totalitarianism
> and anomic civil society. you have just become lazy and cultured.
> 
> the only violence you saw in my "correspondence" is the violence
> you know exists. the invidious calumny is in your, and our,
> longstanding unwillingness to see this. but then it suits us,
> both few and many, this way. we are way lost and speaking
> in merely rational "tones" continues to get us nowhere (it
> is just that you have already arrived!) 


Dear Eric,

Thank you for your letter.  I would like to obtain 
a better understanding of your political sociology,
and to understand also how it relates, if at all, 
to Kierkegaard's religious, philosophical or 
political views. You write:

  >  it is ours to ask why it is so, not to make a
  >  liberal world the negation of Naziism but to
  >  realize the deep seated relationship between
  >  totalitarianism and anomic civil society.
  >  you have just become lazy and cultured.

I agree that there is a deep-seated relationship between
totalitarianism and anomic civil society. I agree also
that I am lazy; but the term "cultured" has a ring which
is too teutonic for my tastes that I should wish to be 
associated with it.

I acknowledge your belief that "speaking in merely
rational 'tones' continues to get us nowhere", but
I do not share it. I believe that rational discourse
is the most effective, and ultimately the only way
for us to make peace with each other and with nature.
The subjectivity on which Kierkegaard insists is to
my mind the epitome of reason; and one of the interesting
and important issues of disagreement on the List reflects
the circumstance that various listmembers associate
subjectivity with just the opposite of reason.

I construe your earlier comments:

  >  give those alienated elitist sensitive bastard
  >  intellectuals hell Locke! ...the displaced masses
  >  and the budget cutting fascists are right behind
  >  you!!! vive le apocalypse!!!!!

as a species of literary expressionism calculated to
startle or shock us out of our complacency. However
such a style would be effective only if the interpretation
of history upon which it relies were obvious and
uncontestable.  That however is not at all the case.
The assumptions underlying your expressionism are 
inapparent, and in their absence your words and phrases
sound violent and brutal.

You must be very careful not to be misunderstood.
I do not think you knew what you were saying when
you wrote: "vive le apocalypse". The term "apocalypse"
means "revelation" and refers to the revelation of
God's purpose, and by metonymy to God's cataclysmic
destruction of injustice and the institution
by him of a just society. At one point you wrote,

>   "Lyle Bate for president (and he didn't even mention GOD
>    once!!!!!). weeeeeeee"

When you refer to the apocalypse in the absence of God's
justice, you refer to the Holocaust; and that this was indeed
on your mind, is implied by your assertion "the holocaust is
not over".  Thus your statement "vive le apocalypse" is in
danger of being rendered by some translator, schmanslator
as "vive le Holocaust", and surely you didn't mean to say
that. Or did you?

I think you would do well, if I might respectfully say so,
to devote your energies to describing your own philosophical
convictions instead of relying on others, whom perhaps you
do not understand, as targets which you attack in an effort
to define your own identity. Take my advice and do some serious
thinking independent of your adversaries; and I shall take
yours, and hurry to the drugstore to buy a bottle of laxative.

Ernst Meyer
review@netcom.com