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     I want to give my interpretation of German philosophy,
and to describe how I envision my own thinking to complement
it.  For this purpose it is obviously conventional and
appropriate to try to recapitulate, to attempt to summarize
the important conclusions at which the renowned philosophers
whose work is considered to constitute that tradition have
arrived.  And yet, when I undertake to do this, when I try to
reconstruct and reproduce their essential arguments, as, for
example I might expect to do on a general examination, I
become aware with considerable dismay and in fact
embarrassment how little of what I once memorized, I
remember; how much I have now forgotten; how spotty my
knowledge in fact proves to be.

     The temptation, obvious it seems to me, is to try to
recoup the loss, to try to relearn all that I once knew, and
to learn even more, preliminary to proceeding with my
ambitious and perhaps presumptuous undertaking.  It is nt
from indolence (laziness) or indifference that I fail to do
so, but from the insight that at seventy six years of age, I
cannot expect my memory to prove adequate to the requirements
of such a project, and to retain the large volume of newly
acquired information.  In addition, it is obvious that the
years or perhaps even only months that are left to me for my
work are so limited, that I might be able to accomplish one
or the other, but surely not both.

     But the summary and recapitulation of the intellectual
history, even if I were successful in publishing it, would
unavoidably be less stringent and less complete than what
more competent authors have accomplished, e.g. Ernst
Cassirer; and without the opportunity to articulate my own
work, the effort to summarize and to write history should
prove of little if any value to me.

     One of the skills of life, and I suppose of the
intellectual life in particular - or especially, is to make a
virtue of necessity: which is most commonly done under the
rubric of aesopian sour grapes.  In the present instance one
would consider whether the knowledge that would be gained by
conventional study and research would, beyond a certain
minimum, be valuable at all, whether indeed it would not
cloud and obscure the significant issues (questions).

     One may ask whether the true study of philosophy is not
learning to think; whether the fruit of such study is not an
ability rather than a storehouse of words and phrases that
are meaningless except to the extent that they find
expression in thought.

     Indeed one may argue that the summaries of philosophical
arguments of premises and conclusions do more harm than good,
in that they create a barrier and a screen between the
thought, which is necessarily his own, and the would be
thinker.  It is not an issue which I am able to resolve.

                    =====================

     Each of the pre-eminent issues with which philosophy
deals, epistemology and ethics, seem to me to entail the
polarity of the divine and the individual.  I interpret this
circumstance as an unavoidable consequence of the
Reformation, of its (re)discovery and its assertion of the
essential relationship between the individual and his God.
What is critical here is that the experience of the
individual (as such)(of himself) is subjective experience and
that the experience of deity also becomes subjective
experience. As a result there occurs a collision or
concatenation of these experiences: and it is this
coincidence which is the essential element of the
philosophical tradition.

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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
