Good Morning,

and thank you for your letter. "Die Sonne war eben praechtig
aufgegangen." (Eichendorff) Its rays are filtering through the 
dense foliage of the tall wild cherry, maple and locust that have
grown up in conseqence of our benign neglect where there once
was a meadow, replacing an exhilarating view of the valley with
peaceful shade. If the trees weren't there, I'd be blinded by the
rising sun, and have to move inside to write my letter, drawing
inspiration instead from the luxurious 11 by 22 foot oriental
carpet that I helped my mother buy one day in 1952 or 1953 in
an extravagantly stocked bazaar in downtown Boston. I don't
remember the name of the street, but I know exactly where it was,
could find it without difficulty, if the street were still there,
which it isn't. In the past 50 years Boston has been completely
remodeled, not once, but twice. The Apostle had it right:
"Das Alte ist vergangen. Siehe, es ist alles neu geworden."

Before considering the questions your letter raises, I want to
"paste" here some notes that I made yesterday in preparation
for leaving, in an effort to arrive at some tentative conclusion
to my recent ruminations.

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

It's not by accident that Soeren Kierkegaard and Baruch Spinoza
stand as two pillars of modern thought.
Both were satisfied to live and work in obscurity.
Both were fortunate to have escaped
the social and intellectual corruption of the universities.
Both wrestled with their respective religious heritages.
Both asserted the primacy of subjective experience over the objectivity
that dominated the intellectual landscape in which they struggled
to define their understanding of their world and of themselves.
Both were, so far as their religious compatriots understood,
outcasts, whose writings were ignored during their lifetimes,
but which became iconic after their deaths.

Spinoza created his identity by distinguishing himself not only
from the theological conformity in which he was brought up,
but more consequentially, from the Cartesian dualism that was,
in one form or another, the conventional wisdom of his age.
Spinoza's monumental achievement,
far beyond the scope of Descartes spirit,
was the identification of religious verities
in the context of radical intellectual experience.

Kierkegaard created his identity by distinguishing himself not only
from the theological conformity in which he was brought up,
but more consequentially, from the Hegelian dialectic that was,
in one form or another, the conventional wisdom of his age.
Kierkegaard's monumental achievement,
far beyond the scope of Hegel's spirit,
was the realization of intellectual verities
in the context of radical religious experience.

One might plausibly argue that Kierkegaard was beneficiary of Spinoza's
achievement of integrating subjectivity into a philosophical tradition.
That tradition was bequeathed to Kierkegaard through Lessing, Kant,
Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Schopenhauer.
Kierkegaard might even be interpreted as the reformer who sought to purify
that tradition by an appeal not so far as I know to Spinoza,
but to Lessing who confessed on his deathbed
to having been a "Spinozist" much of his life.
Hegel himself is cited to have written:
"You are either a Spinozist or no philosopher at all."
(History of Philosophy)

Spinoza, so far as I can infer, 
discovered the inwardness of the God-Substance that he proclaimed
by the examination and critical analysis of his own passionate
religious convictions. (I want to review Harry Wolfson's book
for possible roots of Spinozas subjectivity
in traditional rabbinical theology.)
Kierkegaard, I suspect, had much support for his identification of
divinity with inwardness from 17th and 18th century German pietism,
and from the mysticism of such authors as Angelus Silesius
whose equation of God with individual conscience is
subjectivism as radical as anything Kierkegaard ever proposed.

The deviancy from Spinozistic purity
against which Kierkegaard protested,
the subjection of individual inward religious experience
to the presumption of positive history,
was an historicism with which Spinoza never had to contend.
In any event, it was in this guise
that the insults of contemporary religious indifference
assailed Kierkegaard's sensitivity;
and it was against the interpretation of
religion as history that he struck back.

I am not aware that Kierkegaard ever commented
on the pantheism that Spinoza espoused.
I rather suspect he took it for granted.
Arguably he endorsed it in a negative mode
in his consideration of the impossibility
of Abraham's personal relationship to God
for which the sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah
became emblematic, an impossibility that Kierkegaard
chronicled in Furcht und Zittern.

Given the circumstances of Kierkegaard's theological background
it's not surprising that the agony of a relationship to Jesus
rather than to Yahwe was the focus of his concern.
However, the consequences of their religious struggles
were the same for Kierkegaard and for Spinoza:
the identification of deity with inwardness, with subjectivity,
the confirmation that God was not somewhere without,
not on a throne somewhere in heaven,
not an object of research somewhere in history.

It may be argued that the inwardness of the divine
asserted by Spinoza and Kierkegaard each in his own way
was ultimately inconsequential, inasmuch as neither of them
became a figurehead for an intellectual tradition
as did Plato and Aristotle. In any event, not yet.
Both authors do exert far-flung influences in literature,
in thought, and in the professional philosophy of the universities.
But perhaps even more consequential if less apparent
is the possibility that both authors'
pervasive and uncompromising insistence on subjectivity
is in fact complementary to and compensatory for,
and has thereby facilitated if not indeed made possible,
the extraordinary evolution with which
over the past four hundred years
expanding and proliferating natural and moral sciences,
Natur und Geisteswissenschaften,
with their uncompromising objectivity,
have progressed to dominate our intellectual,
emotional and political existence.

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

I'm aware, of course, that for me at least, there is never a last word. 
Inevitably the last word becomes the next link to a new consideration.
With respect to the passages from Spinoza I quoted in my last letter,
and my comments on them, I am pointedly aware that whoever made the
translation had a mind of his/her own which unavoidably tinted or tainted
the text. In Belmont I have a copy of the Gebhardt edition of Spinoza's
"Opera" in the original Latin. I must check it out to make sure that I'm
not being hood-winked by a latter-day St. Paul trying surreptitiously
to turn the Temple into a Benedictine monastary.

What you write ueber die Gemeinschaft der Besonderen, the communion of
saints, as its known in Christian theology, is obviously valid.
Even the elite, - das bedeutet die "Auserlesenen", want to enjoy their
cocktails at the Harvard Club in the company of their "peers". There's
no stopping the flocking together even of aristocracts.  Sometime you
should read Hermann Hesse's Glasperlenspiel, if you don't have it,
so to speak, under your belt already. But the ultimate in respect to
becoming "etwas Besonderes" is to become God, which is really the 
ultimate Do-It-Yourself project. "Wenn es Goetter gaebe, wie hielte
ich es aus kein Gott zu sein, also gibt es keine Goetter." at least
that's what Nietzsche's concluded. Of course, becoming Christlike,
Imitatio Christi, the Imitation of Christ, die Nachfolge Christi -
that concept so dominant in Christianity, means becoming "etwas
Besonderes" with a vengeance. 

As for monotheism, it's only in the past few years, that I have
become appreciative of the treasure of humanity that inhabits Olympus.
Not long ago I re-discovered a college essay that I wrote about
Aeschylus' Prometheus - for none other than F.O. Matthiessen in his
undergraduate course on the drama. Not when I wrote it, but when I
recently reread my paper, I was struck by the courage implicit
in the worship of Zeus, a character who doesn't really like mankind,
and is prepared to inflict Dick-Cheney like tortures on the upstart
Prometheus who dares to aid and abet the uppity human race as it chants:
We shall overcome! Compare the courage of the Greeks with the piety
of the Hebrews, whose Jehovah could do no wrong, even when he evicted
them from their Garden for, of all things, wanting to get an apple,
or was it a college diploma, off the forbidden tree of knowledge.
Then cursed them with disease and death, and drowned all but a handful.
Read Kierkegaard's Furcht und Zittern, to get some idea of how Abraham
was tortured on his journey to the summit of Moriah, and then the
horrible slavery in Egypt. And when Moses prohibited them from even
uttering His name, wasn't that, in a way, saying to his people: "Shut
up and don't complain." - Disclaimer: I don't really believe what
I've just written.  It's the effect on me of reading too much Maureen
Dowd and Gail Collins.

What I really believe is that Mosaic monotheism, by making His face
invisible and His name unutterable forced the introjection (erzwang
die Verinnerlichung) of the divine, and thereby made us human beings,
introduced, as the Quakers say, "that of God in every man," and
made possible the intellectual and emotional development that culminated
for example in the spiritual intellectuality of Spinoza, in the poetry
of Hoelderlin and of Rilke.

Finally, before starting to pack for the trip north, some comment
about my understanding of law, a topic which will occupy me over
the next several months, and the raw, uncooked elements of which
I can e-mail you samples, in the form of the legal briefs that I
shall be composing.  I don't know where to begin:
I read laws and legal opinions as an ultimate phenomenon of
language, a bridge between my thought, my feeling, my understanding,
and the society in which I live. In his Tractatus, Spinoza has many
important insights into the social and political function of the Mosaic
laws. I understand law as the apotheosis of idealism where the presumptions
of language to represent reality are ultimately shattered and the nature
of truth is finally revealed: Among themselves, the lawyers refer to 
legal testimony as "lying contests", and Leonard Boudin, (who defended
Dr. Spock) then a visiting professor at the law school, once confided
to me about how Rehnquist has refused to recuse himself in a case in
which he had participated as Attorney General: "The Government lies.
the Government always lies." It's an insight which in my legal career
of six court cases, I've found consistently valid; an insight which
also is an important component of my current legal enterprise:
Meyer v. Nantucket Building Department et al., Suffolk Superior Court
Civil Action 2008-05664. I'll clue you in on the details as they
emerge from my computer printer, - to the extent that you want to know.
But for me there will be no shortage of topics to pontificate about. 
And now to start packing. It's 9:50 a.m. and time is flying.

Jochen