Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter which I received late in the evening
before our departure. Though we drove through much rain and 
some fog, the trip was uneventful. Now, back in Belmont,
I'm confronted with six weeks' accumulation of mail, much work
to do on the appeal, and a large house and garage to clean up
and put in order. Assuming there are no legal complications,
I hope that by September 1, we'll be able to go back to Virginia.
Unavoidably all the work that I need to do will limit my writing,
but that may be just as well. If I'm not as long-winded as
heretofore, please don't take it personally and continue to laugh.

Your criticism of my comments on inwardness or Verinnerlichung
is very useful. I'm much aware of the tenuousness of my argument,
which deserves more scrutiny. The terms substance and subjective
as used by Spinoza, and subjectivity and inwardness as Kierkegaard
uses them not infrequently strike me as embarrassing for lack of
definition. "Innerlich" and "inward" are words that antedate
modern surgical techniques. They hark back to a time when
observation of the "inside" of the human body, specifically
of the heart and of the brain, was incompatible with life. Because
what transpired in these organs was literally secret and hidden,
"innerlich" and "inward" came to refer to experiences that cannot
be shared with other humans. Nowadays the geometrical implications
of "inward" with respect to the human body seem incongruous.

I prefer to consider questions posed by "subjectivity" or "inwardness"
as issues of individualization of human experience which unavoidably
occurs as we grow up and as we grow older. We begin our lives imbedded
in families and other social networks. Language, learning to speak and
learning to think, is a social process. But, if only because we are
physically separate organisms, with different emotional and intellectual
needs and capacities, unavoidably exposed to different environments,
we distinguish ourselves from each other and from the society into which
we were born and which gave our personalities their initial form.
This individualization seems to me to have the most profound and
far-reaching consequences and to be essential for the development
and in fact for the survival of society.

I take religion seriously, very seriously. I don't believe God,
or the gods, are merely the frosting on the cake of an essentially
secular human existence. I believe that in a very real and practical
way deity, whether recognized or not, permeates human existence.
It seems obvious to me that the gods and the human beings
who "believe" in them are quasi mirror images of each other. The
god who is worshiped in society, in public, reflects and reinforces
a social and public psyche. That psyche is transformed, is individualized
when the worship of god(s) becomes private and secret. Such I understand
to be the implication of the instruction:

"But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet,
and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret;
and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."
Matthew 5:6

This sentiment I consider an interpretation and implementation of Moses'
definition of an invisible and ineffable deity. One becomes an individual
(only) when one prays to ones god as an individual. Some of us are more
individual than others. Clearly there is a wide spectrum of propensity
and need for isolation, aloneness, for individual experience and
individual expression. Not everyone is able to enjoy the frenzy of the
sports arena; not everyone can be happy in the solitude of the forest.
There is no requirement that we should all be alike.

Jochen