Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter, and for your generous estimate
of my writing. I don't need to tell you, that when it comes
to composition, you're no slouch yourself; and if I'd been 
fortunate enough to have had you as my biology teacher,
I might have learned something. Your account of the evolution
of Darwin's thought is very persuasive.

I spent most of the day on my legal brief, with which I think 
I'm making reasonable progress, especially since Michael Joseph
Donovan hasn't been heard from. Tomorrow I plan to spend time
in the library, initially to review some of the cases which
Superior Court Justice D. Lloyd Macdonald cited in support of
his ruling against me; then perhaps to start scrounging around
for some elegant rhetoric that I can flaunt before the Appeals Court
and say: Look who's on my side! My surmise, however, is that this
citation of cases is intellectually the most dubious stage of the
legal process. It's to the lawyers' advantage, of course, because
they can bill for snoozing in the library; the judges like it 
because it serves as a verbal wardrobe that makes it unnecessary
to produce ideas of their own. Most significant: the cited legal 
decision has only a tenuous resemblance to the reality it purported
to adjudicate, and its pompous pronouncement serves once and for
all to seal the sepulchre of truth.

As usual, I want tonight to get along as far as I can with 
answers to the questions that your letter brings up. First,
with respect to the religion thing, I've said often enough
that I'm no evangelist; I don't proselytize; I don't solicit
confessions from others and I don't offer my own.
My relationship to matters of religion is dual: I want to
understand, and I need to act, I need to explore ideas. The
terms create and creativity I consider too pretentious.
I'll leave construction of the world, in part or in whole,
to God and to the cosmologists.

The earliest emotional-intellectual (geistige) experience
of my childhood was an urgent desire to be understood -
verstanden zu werden - and when we lived in Germany, I
thought my mother, and only my mother, really understood me.
After the summer of 1939 and the move to Konnarock, I began
to accommodate myself to disappointment, and I determined
that if it was to be understanding that bound me to the world,
the process would of necessity have to be transitive: I would
learn to understand, and I gave up as unrealistic, the
expectation of being understood. It was early on in college,
when I discovered that I wanted to spend my life understanding
and interpreting: first the members of my family, then the
books I read, my teachers, my patients, my world and ultimately
of course, myself.  That's what I've tried to do consistently
for the past 70 years, and that's all the religion I need.

The second issue of which your letter reminds me is the
problematic relationship to "scientific" truth. In surfing
the Internet for insights about Darwin, I came upon a provocative
Wikipedia essay which claimed that the certainty of some
scientific theories was so great that they should be treated
as "facts", an assertion which reminded me of the profundity
of Goethe's wisdom: "Das Hoechste waere zu begreifen, dass alles
Faktische schon Theorie ist." (The highest wisdom: to understand
that every fact is already theory.) As a physician, I've long
suspected that theories are often misleading and deceptive,
and that I must rely on experience, objective and subjective,
Erfahrung und Erleben. At least, that's what the Hippocratic
authors prescribed. But in our culture, dominated for so many
centuries by symbolic thought, simple non-logical and non-
mathematical experience no longer suffices, if it ever did.
I must accommodate myself to the circumstance that immediate
experience is not enough. It is necessary also to assimilate
secondary experiences of a higher order mediated as they are
by the symbolisms of language and of mathematics.

There would seem, on first glance to be two species of such
secondary experience: verbal and mathematical, conjoined in theory,
but not in practice, by mathematical logic. Actually, I think
the distinction between sentences and equations is only superficial.
The acquisition of both verbal and mathematical skills is passive,
by exposure, by assimilation.  Just as I learn a new language by
hearing and imitating, (rather than by memorizing declensions and
conjugations,) so I learn mathematics by mimesis, by permitting - or
forcing my mind to trace the processes of addition and subtraction,
multiplicaion and division, differentiation and integration
and in the process letting my mind adapt itself and be changed to
incorporate that which it is learning. This expanded mind, then,
is open to experience of a higher order, both objective and
subjective, Erfahren und Erleben. Understanding theories of all
kinds, be they of Darwin or Spinoza, of Einstein or Kierkegaard,
requires experience both objective, (Erfahrung) and subjective,
(Erleben). Such understanding doesn't come easily and it isn't
cheap.

Pride, self-esteem and self-confidence would seem to reassure me that
my perceptions and my decisions are correct, - well, if not always,
then in general or most of the time. I'm more comfortable, however,
to forego judgments of value, to be pragmatic, and to content myself
with the conclusion that my decisions are correct to the extent that they
work for me, that, in Darwinian terminology, they make me sufficiently
fit to survive. As a thought-experiment I sometimes transpose myself to
the fourteenth or fifteenth century to ask myself, would I have been
among the first or the last to accept the notion that the earth was
was more like a sphere than a plane. Probably I would have been among
the first to entertain the new idea, but among the last to test it.
Rather than venturing out with Columbus or with Magellan in those
dingy, smelly little boats to test my beliefs, I would have stayed home
among my books, writing letters, - just like this one.

Jochen