19970730.01

Dear Chuck,

     Thank you for your detailed, thoughtful and compassionate
reply.

     You write: The "edge" you put on your expressions leads me
to suspect deeper, somewhat sombre, even melancholic ruminations.

     I think that is allright, since the same might be said of
Kierkegaard himself, about whose writings our considerations
purport to revolve.

     You continue: Your seeming obsession with murderers lends an
even darker shade to the already twilit evening of the
Spenglerian landscape you paint.

     I didn't know I was obsessed with murderers, but I take your
word for it. I have in fact never killed anyone, cross my heart
and hope to die. I did once kill a dog, in anesthesia lab, a
beautiful tawny Labrador retriever, such as a child I had always
wanted to have, by giving the poor creature too much ether,
putting her into level 4, which is death, while the instructor
wanted only to demonstrate level 3 of anesthesia.  But I followed
the instructor's directions exactly; I did what I was told to do;
I was not responsible.  I understood well enough that only by
unquestioning obedience to the instructor could the maxim of my
action become universal law (Kant, Categorical Imperative #1).
Besides nobody seemed to think there was anything wrong with
killing a dog.  Do you think there is?  What they blamed me for
was not the killing of the dog, but the remorse for what I had
done. The instructor took me aside and said if I was so squeamish
about killing (a dog) I could never become a doctor.

     Frankly, I don't think I am obsessed by anything. I consider
myself like a newspaper reporter who walks around town and
reports what he sees. And what I see is a lot of people obsessed
with two crossed pieces of wood on some of which is mounted a
figurine of a dead man; and what obsesses me, - I know I
contradict myself, - is that when you ask them what it means they
say, "Oh, nothing," and they certainly act as if it meant
nothing, or at least nothing more than the rabbit's foot that
they have dangling from the rear view mirrors of their
automobiles.

     You go on to say: You say that virtue is not apparent
because truth is inward subjective. These sound like parodies of
the Kierkegaardian notion that truth is subjective and
inwardness. As I have noted before on this list, Kierkegaard goes
on to talk about "subjectivity as untruth." My interpretation of
this is that the notion that truth is subjectivity is the
Socratic approach to truth--whereas the Christian is the latter.
The Christian believes that truth is not found inside himself or
his consciousness or unconsciousness but in the teacher, who is
Christ, God become Man. Anything we Christians might do--unless
it subsists in some way in and by the will of God--is sinfulness.
So truth--my truth, the truth of my existence does not rest in me
but in my resting in God.

     Unfortunately my reading in Kierkegeaard's writings is so
fragmentary that I have not yet come across the decisive
paragraphs in which you assert that Kierkegaard repudiates those
long, explicit passages in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript
in which he praises subjectivity as truth.  However, given the
dialectic of Kierkegaard's thought, I can well imagine such a
contradiction, consonant for example with the celebration of
being in the wrong before God with which Either/Or, one of his
earlier writings, concludes.  Permit me to say, as if you did not
know, that Kierkegaards sentences are anything but the "protocol
sentences" of the logical positivists. What I meant, in
reiterating in my last letter that "Subjectivity is the truth",
was not to state a "fact" but to remind of a paradox.

     Your efforts to attenuate Kierkegaard's assertion that
subjectivity is truth are unpersuasive to me; for if I understand
it correctly, that assertion is self-validating.  The sentence:
Subjectivity is the truth cannot be objectively true, because
such objective truth would contradict the sentence's meaning.
Therefore, if subjectivity exists, then it _must_ be subjectively
the truth; or, if subjectivity is, as you intimate untruth, then
subjectivity does not exist.  But if you deny that subjectivity
exists, then as my granddaughter Rebekah will tell you, "You are
in big trouble."

     Which brings me to the apodosis of your theology:

     You write: The Christian believes that truth is not found
inside himself or his consciousness or unconsciousness but in the
teacher, who is Christ, God become Man.

     If I parse your sentence correctly it asserts that truth is
not "inside" the individual. If truth is not "inside" the
individual, then truth must be "outside" the individual, and if
your sentence further asserts that truth is "in ... God", then,
if the words inside and outside are to retain any meaning, God
must also be "outside" the individual; and if you propose that we
should worship a God who is "outside" the individual, i.e., a
deity which is objective, then I will, as I just told my wife who
is reading over my shoulder, have you dancing around the Golden
Calf in no time.

     Kierkegaard wrote:
     Saaledes protesterer Christendommen mod
     al Objektivitet; den vil, at Subjektet uendeligt
     skal bekymre sig om sig selv. Det, den spoerger om,
     er Subjektiviteten, foerst i denne er Christendommens
     Sandhed, hvis den overhovedet er, objektivt er den
     slet ikke.
                     Concluding Unscientific Postscript I.

     In this manner Christianity protests against all
     objectivity; it demands that the subject should be
     infinitely concerned with himself. What it requires
     is subjectivity; for Christianity's truth, if at all,
     exists only in subjectivity.  Objectively Christianity's
     truth just isn't there.

     Of course it is your privilege to argue that Kierkegaard was
just pulling our legs and didn't mean what he wrote.  And I
should be much interested in the philology or the logic by which
you might try to prove that Kierkegaard actually meant the
opposite of what he said. But unless and until you persuade me, I
must praise Kierkegaard, in terms that I just learned on this
maillist, as the great Judaizer of Christianity, who at long last
accorded to Christ the same anonymity with which the Hebrews have
glorified Jahwe ever since Moses returned from Mount Sinai with
the tablets of the law.

     You conclude with a homily for which I express to you my
gratitude, as unironically as I am able; for it echoes the
sentiments of my parents when they caught me, then fifteen or
sixteen years old, reading Nietzsche and listening to recordings
of Don Giovanni.

     You write: Let me just say that in general I have found in
my own life that such views are very unproductive and self-
destructive. Carried to their conclusions you may find yourself
in a place and before a door that I call the land of no return.
It is a barren and desolate place and nothing grows there. A
large sea on an endless beach extends infinitely to a twilight
horizon.  There is no sound to that sea because there is no life
in those waters. In that land there is not life but death. A
familiar yet ominous presence lurks behind that door waiting to
greet you. You do not need to ask who it is--you already know.
The lack of a moral cohesiveness to your views deprives them of
the kind of force you would like them to have.  The level of
ambiguity that you exhibit in terms of an overall moral purpose
dissipates your remarks and turns them into a vicarious venting
of emotion rather than a serious and committed blow to the
structure of hypocrisy that you justifiably find so odious.  I
believe that were you to speak from within a moral framework,
where you challenge the reader with a choice between one way that
is good and one way that is evil, then your views would carry
more weight. In finding the will to communicate this moral vision
you might also end the seeming despair in which you live.  You
despair over this land and over yourself.  But to end this
despair you must find yourself.  This, perhaps, is the search you
are on and where it will end I do not know. I pray that it begins
in your coming to find yourself in the true place where all rest
and all truth and all beauty have their source.

     That is real poetry, I am appreciative of its quality, and I
thank you for it.

     Nonetheless your words echo as a final threatening call to
repentance like those of the Commendatore when he finally
accepted Don Giovanni's dinner invitation:

     Pentiti, scellerato!
     No
     Si
     No
     Ah, tempo piu non v'e


     and then the gates of hell are thrown open. But isn't Don
Giovanni's fate the ultimate exhibition of what it means to be in
the wrong before God?

     I am perplexed that you should bemoan the desolation of the
earthly landscape that you construe to follow from my
reflections.  I was taught in Sunday School, or
"Kindergottesdienst" as it was called, to expect such desolation,
because the Kingdom of God "is not of this world." Can we as
Christians faithfully and truthfully conceive of Golgatha as
anything other than a "barren and desolate place" and can we
Christians faithfully and truthfully conceive of this world as
anything other than Golgatha?

     You discern no "moral cohesiveness" to my views.  Could it
be that the cohesiveness is there, but that you are unable to
discern it? You complain that I do not speak from "within a moral
framework". Could it be that you do not recognize it?

     You are not the first who has feared solicitously for my
spiritual well-being.  But my experience is just the contrary.  I
feel well, and perhaps that is an ill omen and a sign of my
depravity, so did the Don at his Last Supper.

     In my defense, I remind you of the account of the Children
of Israel in the Wilderness (Numbers 21: 6-9) The ills that
plague us as a society and as individuals are the fiery serpents
with which God has afflicted us, as punishment for our sins, if
you like.  By fashioning the brazen serpent, an (hitherto
prohibited) image of that which plagues us, and raising it high
for all to contemplate, we secure for ourselves immunity from the
poisonous fangs that tear into our souls day after day.  This, in
my view, is the true function of art in general, and of poetry in
particular.

     So you will understand me better if you can accept the fact
that I fancy myself in the immunology business, forever
preoccupied with developing new vaccines to protect me from my
idealizations and from the lies with which I am tempted to lull
myself to sleep.  Assuming that what works for me should also
work for at least some of the other correspondents with this
list, I publish the formulas that I have swallowed myself and
seemingly survived.  And as you know, many patients newly
vaccinated develop a reaction a bit of rash, a touch of nausea
and vomiting, when they first read what I have written. But, to
the extent that the vaccine is potent, perhaps its effects are
delayed and it will ward off more serious disease in the future.

     At first consideration, I was appalled at your finding that
I was "obsessed with murder", fearing that you might have
discovered in me some serious psychiatric disorder. On second
thought I think this is not the case.  The matter came up, you
will remember, because Kierkegaard was tasteless enough, or
Bishop Mynster thought he was tasteless enough to insist that
Jesus would draw all men unto himself from a position of
lowliness; and that this lowliness was a position high on a
cross, crucified between two murderers, a circumstance from which
I infer that if Jesus were to be sought today, he should be
sought as an innocent, holy one who today is imprisoned on death
row between two murderers and who is executed with them tomorrow.

     It turns out that my account stimulated a strong and perhaps
not unhealthy spiritual antibody reaction (and at least one case
of anaphylaxis) among listmembers.  My plain and simple
observation has been misquoted to the effect that I imputed
badness to Jesus or goodness to the murderers.  I made no such
imputations: I said merely that we poor myopic mortals would be
no more able to distinguish between them than could the poor
myopic mortals who shouted before Pilate: "Let him be crucified."
It was not I, but various correspondents with this list, who in
the throes of their allergic reactions objected to the
juxtaposition of Jesus with "cold blooded killers." Thinking
about what words mean, which I know is in bad taste, it occured
to me that cold-blooded is exactly what we are all supposed to be
in order to optimize the nation's economic growth rate and keep
the stock market from collapsing.  That, it seems to me is a
simple and uncontestable truth.  So you see, I am not possessed
by demons.  I am just a poor and perhaps misguided philologist at
heart.

     You write further:

     But to end this despair you must find yourself.

     Forgive me for pointing out that you contradict yourself.  I
thought you said that to end the despair, granting arguendo that
it exists, I must find Jesus. Furthermore, it is incongruous,
except in the context of (pseudo)religious presumption, that you
should attribute to me a despair which I don't experience.  No
comparisons intended, but do you interpret that Antigone is a
monument to Sophocles' despair, or King Lear to Shakespeare's?

     Perhaps the most constructive interpretations of our
disagreements is that they are essentially hermeneutic and
reflect differences in interpretation, or more specifically
differences in our understanding of poetry, be it the poetry of
Scripture, of Kierkegaard's literary productions or of our own
literary efforts. Literature, as I read it, is always only a
mirror in which we recognize our own images, an echo which wafts
to us our own voices. If you discern in my accounts a bleak and
desolate landscape, this is not the case because your eyes can
penetrate the secrets of my life.  The landscape which you
recognize can only be the world in which _you_ live, and to the
extent that my writing facilitates such recognition, it will have
accomplished its purpose.

                            * * * * *

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