Dear Marion,

In your last letter you commented:

"I have the impression from a previous letter in which you contrasted 
Darwin's publicly accumulated understanding of evolution
with Spinoza's and Kierkegaard's quiet, individual development
of their philosophies, that you somewhat disparage the former."
 
The disparagement was unintentional. For many years now, I've been
reflecting, meditating, ruminating on the significance of subjectivity
or inwardness, a concept which has so central a place in Kierkegaard's
writings. My tentative conclusion is that the "inward" direction
to which Kierkegaard, Spinoza (and other mystics) referred, dates
from pre-surgical culture when inspection of the "inward" aspects
of the human body was incompatible with human life.  Given the
facility and relative safety with which modern surgery exposes what's
inside of each one of us, the term inwardness has become an anachromism.
Accordingly, I translate inwardness or subjectivity to mean aloneness,
loneliness, social isolation, while objectivity implies its opposite:
society and community, the parade of the intellect. Consequently it is
reasonable to infer that Darwin's account of evolution is characterized
by objectivity, while Spinoza's and Kierkegaard's reflections about deity
are characterized by subjectivity. When I make such sweeping statements,
it is imperative to remind myself of the geometrical reality, that there
is no inside without an outside, and no outside without an inside, that
Kierkegaard's and Spinoza's thought demand objective correlates, - and
I'm not prepared off the top of my head, to suggest what these objective
correlates might be; while Darwin's objective exposition is in need of
subjective compensation. Something like that was on my mind, when I
compared Darwin's experience of the past, with the experience (Erleben)
of a twelve year old child. When I pointed to the absence from
Darwin's accounts any intimation of the subjective qualities of
the experience (Erleben) of time, when I tried to elaborate
what survival might mean subjectively to someone who has made 
competitive survival the theme of his description of animate society,
I was trying my hand at very preliminary sketches of what the
subjective implications of Darwin's thought might be. I haven't
yet given that much consideration to the objective implications of
Spinoza's work. With respect to Kierkegaard, however, I've made
some effort to explore the epistemologic implications of his
theology.

My very tentative reflections suggest that Kierkegaard's rediscovery
of subjectivity was a translation of historical contingency into
the compelling immediacy of passion. His point of departure was
a challenge articulated by Lessing that religious faith may not
be predicated on historical fact. I ask whether an immediacy of
apperception, analogous to the theological immediacy of faith
that Kierkegaard rediscovered, might not similarly be at work
in ones acquisition of knowledge.

The conventional view of knowledge, which has so stymied epistemology,
is that knowledge consists in sets of "facts" which are stored,
on the one hand in encyclopedic fashion in the volumes of books
in libraries, or more recently, in the random access memories
or on the fixed disk drives of computers, and which are stored
in similar fashion in as yet anatomically undefined compartments
of the human brain. One attends school, one goes to college, to
have one brain compartments stocked with appropriate facts, as if
the brain were some kind of warehouse for the storage of knowledge.
My own interpretation, which is fundamentally a biological one, is
different. I think of knowledge as a modification of the organism
by the environment. I see all the beautiful people stretchted out
on the beaches of Nantucket having their skin tanned by exposure to
ultraviolet, I imagine the bones of baseball champions enhanced by
stress, the muscles of Marathon runners strengthened by exercise,
as the most primitive examples of human "knowledge". Notorious
also is the child's learning to see by the eye's exposure to the
configurations of natural objects, and the corresponding failure
of the visual sense to develop when the eye of the child remains
covered. It's called "amblyopia ex anopsia".  Such modifications
of the organism by the environment are very impressive to me.
Even though some such environmentally induced changes may be
observed or demonstrated as objective phenomena, fundamentally
all learning, all acquisition of "knowledge" is an unconscious,
subjective process, of which learning to speak, whether ones
native language as a child or a newly acquired foreign language
as an adult, is a preeminent example. Acquiring mathematical
skills, learning to solve differential equations, proficiency
in vector or tensor analysis are similar environmentally induced,
unconsciously acquired, modifications of the organism. Such is
the present state of my understanding of epithemology. I'll save
ethics for another letter.

Jochen