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     I remember Dr. Beecher as a medical school lecturer in
whose presentations I failed to find much inspiration.  When
his article appeared I was rather surprised that he should
be the one to raise this perplexing issue.  At the time I
justified the experimental surgery in which I was involved
with the rationalization that medical practice is
unavoidably experimental, and that there is some virtue in
acknowledging its experimental nature. To what extent this
is a sophistic argument, I am not sure. On the contemporary
scene, of course, experiment is defined as practice outside
of guidelines; hence the question might be rephrased, not
whether it is morally defensible to experiment but whether
it is morally defensible to permit ones practice to be
governed by guidelines.

     I don't know much about Thomas Szasz. I once wrote a
letter to the editor (or a review) that actually got
published about something very critical that Szasz had
written about the psychiatric evaluation of juvenile
delinquents.  Szasz argued that psychiatric interpretation
of deviant behavior was a threat to civil liberties. I
thought then, and think now, that the psychological and
sociological interpretation of  destructive behavior is the
only intellectual response which does not itself become
destructive, and that Szasz' rejection of psychiatric
interpretation is a refusal to sympathize with the patient,
and as such is yet another version of the argument with
which Cain tried to justify himself: Am I my brother's
keeper?  The correct answer, of course is, yes.

     I am very much uncertain whether I want to spend my
time and energy, what little I have left, in writing for
possible publication.  I have discovered that my
indifference to publication has given me much freedom to
develop my thinking and has led me to insights that I could
never have reached, if I had permitted myself to be
inhibited by the constraints of considering what a potential
editor or reader might think.

     At the present juncture in my writing, I am on the
threshold of letting one of my fictional characters give an
informal but impassioned account of the theory of knowledge
and of the ethics which I have elaborated in my own mind
over the years.  I now read Plato's dialogues as
compositions which reflect their author's reluctance or
inability to express the processes of complex and profound
thought in more formal expositions.  I think that Plato
expressed his thought as he experienced it; there inheres in
this simple immediacy of the dialogue a candor which I find
much more persuasive than for example Kantian contortions,
or Hegelian obfuscations of thought.  Perhaps when I finish
the present novel, I will be ready for a style more
conventional both in form and in content

     As I mentioned to you,  there seems to be general
philological agreement that the Septuagint was much
influenced by the style and content of Plato's writing, that
the authors of the New Testament absorbed the Jewish
tradition  not through any direct access to an underlying
Hebrew text, but through the Greek of the Septuagint,
suggesting to me that Christianity may have (unrecognized)
roots in Greek thought.  The Septuagint was compiled about a
century after Plato.  The question comes to my mind, whether
there were earlier translations of the Hebrew texts that
might have contributed to the monotheism which plays so
important a role in Plato's and especially in Socrates'
expositons. I also wonder whether it is really possible to
identify an interpretation of the Hebrew which has not been
affected by the Septuagint Version, and if so in what
respect this extra-Septuagint theology might be different.

     These questions are, of course far beyond my linguistic
abilities.  Nonetheless,  if you have any Hebrew texts,
dictionaries or primers which you do not need, and which you
could lend me for an indefinite period of time, they would
be welcome. It is unrealistic to expect that I could  teach
myself anything substantial in a week or even in a month or
two.

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Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
