 
                        20080627.04

     The term "German philosophy" embarrasses me.  In an
indicative mood it borders on nationalism, if not
chauvinism.  In the subjunctive, it strikes me as unduly
dismissive and disparaging.  What I find remarkable is the
thread of mysticism that can be traced, I think from Luther
and Leibniz through Kant, Hegel and Schelling to Husserl
and Heidegger, and of course Kierkegaard, if you consider
him, notwithstanding his vocal objections, an honorary
German.

     The mysticism is facilitated, if not indeed made
possible, by the fuzziness of the language, where fuzziness
denotes that quality of a term that makes it amenable to a
spectrum of meaning, an implicit ambiguity that imparts a
poetic ambiance even to prose of great precision, and
invests even mundane designations with auras of
subjectivity.  Because of their connotations such fuzzy
terms are often untranslatable into English. A telling
example is Dilthey's "Geisteswissenschaften" rendered into
English as "Spiritsciences", which, to my ear is the
ultimate malapropism. In English, spirit and science are
mutually exclusive, because intangible spirit is inherently
incompatible with science as the organized search for an
array of palpable facts. Conversely I come across many
English words, especially those of Romance provenance, with
meanings that are specific and precise, for which I can
find no equivalent in German.

     Your statement that you have never understood German
philosophy stongly suggests to me that you have in fact
understood it better than most, like the child in
Andersen's tale about the emperor's new clothes. I believe
the academic atmosphere in which it is the teacher's
unconditional obligation to know, is incompatible with
discourse about experiences that are inherently unknowable.
True understanding is the wisdom to be able to accept the
circumstance that understanding is impossible, if only
because the intellectual mysticism it not translatable into
logically unambiguous exposition.  Luther made much of St
Paul's avowal that the just are saved by faith; the same
might be said of academic philosophers.  Socrates' claim or
confession, that the only thing he knew was that he knew
nothing, seems to me still relevant. If I interpret
correctly, Socrates' scepticism was aimed at the dogmatic
rhetoric of the Sophists, it was doubt about the validity
of the conceptual world they were peddling. Of late it has
occurred to me as a corollary to doubt about the objective
(conceptual) world, there might also be appropriate and
potentially productive doubt about the subjective universe,
i.e. about the intuitive experiences of remembering,
seeing, hearing and understanding.

     As for my own relationship to academic "philosophy", I
admit that until I was about thirty years old, I was
preoccupied with the composition of a more or less formal
treatise. I gave it the title "The Sources of Doubt", with
the descriptive subtitle, "Ethical and Esthetic
Consciousness as Sources of Doubt about the Conceptual
World." I did not realize at the time that in a very crude
and awkward manner, I had reinvented the wheel:
existentialism.  A classmate of mine at Harvard University
Press told me they would publish it, if I could get an
endorsement from the Harvard faculty. That was hopeless,
because what I had written, good or bad, was so out of step
with the prevalent style that the faculty would not even
look at it; and of course, so far as academic capital went,
I was a pauper.

     I survived ophthalmology by cultivating the habit of
writing down my thoughts.  Initially I believed it was
essential that what I wrote should be organized in topics,
chapters, and sections.  After some years, and after some
hundreds of typewritten pages, it occurred to me that in
trying to organize my thinking I was censoring my thoughts,
with the possible consequence that the seed might be
destroyed while only the chaff was preserved.  Thereafter
what I wrote was determined not by the requirements of the
outline, but by the imperatives of the mind.  No, I wasn't
hearing voices, and I don't claim to have written down the
dictates of any spirit other than my own. I simply recorded
what came to mind, as clearly and eloquently as I was able.
I have no clear memory, and I haven't tried to find in the
binders and boxes that line the walls of the attic storage
room in Belmont what it was that I might have written prior
to 1983.  That was the year in which I started to write
with the computer.  So far as I know nothing has been lost,
and everything is immediately accessible to me on the
computer screen, sometimes to my considerable
embarrassment.  Of the twenty five and a half years from
1983 through 2008, I have posted ten and a half years'
notes on my Internet website under the heading
"Tagebuecher", even though many entries are in English. For
better or worse, - and probably for better, - no one has
bothered with them, no one has ridiculed or scolded me.
There have been no comments.

     When I scan these entries myself, I find that only on
occasion do I remember writing what I did. When I look at
it anew, much of what once seemed worth writing down, now
strikes me as trivial, some as ill-conceived, some as
confused, and some seems plainly wrong. Only an occasional
insight seems worthwhile. Nonetheless, aside from
correcting obvious errors in syntax and spelling, I change
nothing. What is there now has an existence of its own,
which I must respect. Conceivably there may come a reader
who will find it worth his or her while to try to retrace
my thoughts, and not at all because these thoughts should
be deemed valid or true, but because accessible as they
are, they might shed light on the mediocrity of the human
mind or on its pathology.

     I will try to counter the boredom and uselessness of
old age by continuing to make additional contributions to
my collections of scrap thoughts; and as I have time, I
will add to my website the files that I wrote between 1983
and 1996. That's my resolve on my birthday at age 78.

                     * * * * *
Copyright 2008, Ernst Jochen Meyer
