                           20050625.02

     The circumstances of my intellectual development that had
the most felicitous consequences were my recognition and
acceptance of the fact that I could not successfully compete for
a professorship in the academic market place, and that I could
not successfully compete in the contest of publishing my novels
or my philosophical writings.  My response to the first was to
study medicine, my response to the second was to abandon the
ambition to be a recognized, if not famous published author, and
instead to devote myself to exploring my own experience, my
thoughts, my own mind.

     I have elsewhere elaborated on my conviction that thought,
that reflection, meditation is an introduction to inwardness, to
subjectivity, and hence to the blessedness which Kierkegaard
equates with salvation.  Without abrogating that definition, a
second consequence of reflection and thought occurs to me: to the
extent that the reality in which we live is a conceptual one, is
representation in the sense of Schopenhauer's Vorstellung,
reflection, thought, analysis is capable of transforming, of
modifying, refining, clarifying that conceptual reality. This
capacity seems to me of extraordinary importance; not only as
facilitating a more accurate description of the world in which we
find ourselves, but also as facilitating more effective action.

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