  

     To write what I have on my mind is the best prophylaxis
I know for "writer's block" (Schriftblockade). To address my
letter to you even though I may never mail it, is a matter of
style rather than of substance. Although I might, I am
disposed now not to accost you with yet more correspondence,
but to wait until I have received a reply to my two most
recent letters, a reply which I understand well enough, may
be a long time in coming.  I consider it one of the wonderful
virtues of e-mail that it costs nothing to send, costs
nothing to receive, and costs nothing to delete; but yields
marvelous benefits in the effort of composition which I find
exhilarating. It is its own reward.  I can think of no more
enjoyable way to spend my time. And the "spam" mail, which I
suspect floods your e-mail box as it does mine, serves as the
welcome background that lends its indiscriminate camouflage
to all e-mails: those of Scripture or Shakespeare as readily
as to the more conventional ones that are scurrilous,
fraudulent or obscene.

     Quite in general, I find it necessary, when I write, to
have someone in mind to whom the writing is addressed.  I
remember that when I was in college, and for years thereafter,
I would have imaginary discussions, disputations (Auseinander-
setzungen) with various of my teachers, conversations which
remain buried in silence, with no literary monument, not even
a marker to commemorate their content or even their occurrence.

     As I get older, my conviction grows that it is impossible
for me to think in isolation.  Whether in this respect thought
and feeling are distinguishable, whether one can, or what it
means, to feel in the absence of another creature that potenti-
ally shares ones feeling, what it means to experience feeling
in isolation, is a separate and a very important issue which I
want to address a bit later.

     Undoubtedly, the presumption to distinguish between
thought and feeling, between reason and affect, is to some
extent arbitrary, and cannot be sustained beyond some albeit
unpredictable point.  In any event, a speaker needs some one
to listen, a writer needs some one to read. But the
hypothetical listener or the hypothetical reader need not be
of a crowd. A single one suffices.  "Hiin enkelte", that
singular one who presumably cared, and possibly understood,
whom Kierkegaard fantasized as his reader.  Whether such an
"enkelte" ever existed, or can exist, is arguable.  Indeed,
there is some advantage to having a virtual listener or a
virtual reader as distinct from a real one.  The real
listener or the real reader gets tired, bored, or angry. The
real listener or the real reader fails on occasion to
understand, and is prone to misinterpret.  The virtual ones,
by contrast, are infinitely compliant, sympathetic and
approving.  If I were a poet, I would need not a celestial
muse, but only one (virtual) listener to inspire me.  If I
were a thinker, I would need nothing more to keep the
dialogue going than a single imaginary partner.

     So much for the introduction. My attention has been
focussed on a statement in your letter of November 30:

     You wrote:

     = But I think I am not up for deep analyses-- = ....  =
And I think, sometimes, that the more abstract we get, = the
further from the reality of feelings, = which is what
interests me.

     Which raises in my mind the issues: a) how to
distinguish thought (deep analysis) from feeling, b) how to
express feeling, c) how to communicate feeling, and d) how to
understand feeling.

     As to the distinction between feeling and thought, I am
reminded of Kant who wrote:

     Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer,
     Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind.

     (Thoughts without content are empty;
     Intuitions without concepts are blind.)

     It is interesting and perhaps significant that this
couplet is conventionally paraphrased:

     Begriffe ohne Anschauung sind leer,
     Anschauung ohne Begriffe ist blind.

     (Concepts without intuition are empty,
     Intuition without concepts is blind.)

     To my mind, these two citations are illustrative of the
problems of Kant's exposition. His tautological statement
that thoughts without content are empty is inadvertently
interpreted by his readers in a sense that controverts Kant's
system, based as it is on a network of thoughts devoid of
intuition, on thoughts whose meaning is derived (recursively)
from their relationships to one another.

     It's a verbal quagmire, and I'm not sure I can climb out
of it.  Let me try: Words are items of language, with which
we indicate to each other how we feel: hot, cold, hungry,
thirsty, tired, sad, happy, confident, discouraged. We
understand the meanings of words, words which mean the same
or something similar to each of us, because of common
experiences. We know what we mean by "cold" because we have
shivered together. We know what we mean by "sad" because we
have observed each other's tears and remember how we felt
when we shed our own.

     To get anywhere at all in this discussion, we must be
more precise and conscientious in our use of words. It is
important to understand that the vocabulary on which we rely
is preliminary, incomplete and imperfect, and we must be on
guard not to be mislead by apparently unambiguous terms. The
words Anschauung, intuition and feeling are not synonymous;
yet they must be substituted for one another if the argument
is to proceed. Etymologically, Anschauung and intuition seem
to point to the same experience, that of perception of
something by looking at it, in the absence of all verbal,
logical or mathematical designation. It is the absence of
such designations which permits the identification of
Anschauung and intuition as a species of feeling.

     Referring once more to thge Kantian couplet:

     (Concepts without intuition are empty,
     Intuition without concepts is blind.)

     The protasis clearly implies that intuition (feeling)
alone gives meaning to concepts; and that the presumption to
construct a logical system in the absence of, separate or
independent of feeling (intuition) is a delusion. At the same
time, the apodosis, that intuition (Anschauung) without
concepts is blind, is also palpably in error.  The elemental
(fundamental) experience of vision (Anschauung) is the
discomfort of photophobia, a pain which is undeniably
feeling.  It is impossible to separate photophobia from the
experience of light perception; and it is similarly
impossible to distinguish light perception from the
perception of shape.  But from the perception of shape, there
follows immediately and without hiatus, all other visual
cognition.

     Concepts arise from the re-cognition, from the repeated,
consistent perception of identifiably identical shapes; or
more generally, identifiably identical perceptual experiences
which are designated by articulated sounds (words)
corresponding to them. The calculus of words that corresponds
to the most diverse of conceptual experience is language.
Language arises from the concourse and conversation of
individuals one with the other, language which is cultivated
and preserved by each society, language which becomes the
basis of logic, of mathematics, and of the complexities of
science and of thought.

     There can be little question, that language and logic,
that mathematics and science do not solve all problems, but
they in turn eventuate in the construction of a conceptual
Tower of Babel, from which we recoil by trying to go back to
basics, i,e, to feeling.  As Faust explained to Gretchen:

          ...Gefuehl ist alles;
     Name ist Schall und Rauch,

          ...Feeling is all there is;
     The name is sound and smoke,

     Hence the recourse to feeling as pre-verbal, pre-
rational experience, and the literary task, quite simply, is
to express, communicate and understand feeling without being
distracted or enmeshed, without being trapped in the language
in which that feeling might be conveyed.

     The communication of feeling cannot be passive.
Specifically, the apprehension, the understanding of the
feeling, of the emotional experience of another individual is
an activity, which is far from simple, which requires effort
and experience, sensitivity and awareness if it is to be
meaningful.

     Music is both the expression and the index of feeling;
it is evidence prima facie of feeling; evidence also that
feeling can not be (exhaustively or adequately) expressed in
words.


                      * * * * *
Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
