Dear Marion,

It's necessary for me to make one very important emendation
or correction of what I wrote yesterday. I wrote that neither
you nor I could have experience - Erleben oder Erfahrung -
of "Western society in recent centuries." That declaration
of scepticism was and is and will remain valid. However what is
also susceptible to both Erleben und Erfahrung, both yours and
mine, is logos, das Wort, the Word, the writing, the scripture,
the chronicle, the story, the history.  And here we are again,
having come full circle, in the words of that coarse, vulgar
rabid anti-semite:

Das Wort sie sollen lassen stahn
Und keinen Dank dazu haben.
Er ist bei uns wohl auf dem Plan
mit seinem Geist und Gaben.
Nehmen sie den Leib,
Gut, Ehr, Kind und Weib,
Lass fahren dahin,
Sie habens kein Gewinn,
Das Reich muss uns doch bleiben!

Das Wort sie sollen lassen stahn
The word they still shall let remain

Und keinen Dank dazu haben.
Nor any thanks have for it.

Er ist bei uns wohl auf dem Plan
He's on our side upon the plain

mit seinem Geist und Gaben.
with his good gifts and spirit.

Nehmen sie den Leib,
Take they then our Life

Gut, Ehr, Kind und Weib,
Goods, Honor, Child, and Wife,

Lass fahren dahin,
Let all be gone,

Sie habens kein Gewinn,
They've nothing won.

Das Reich muss uns doch bleiben!
The kingdom ours remaineth.

The word they still shall let remain
Nor any thanks have for it.
He's on our side upon the plain
with his good gifts and spirit.
Take they then our Life
Goods, Honor, Child, and Wife,
Let all be gone,
They've nothing won.
The kingdom ours remaineth!

What a paen to Jewish fortitude, to Jewish survival
and to the immediate and unconditional bond between
the Jew and his God!  The great poet who wrote this
must have been a Jew; or if he wasn't, we must declare
him an honorary Jew for the eloquence with which he
described our religious experience.

In the first chapter of Die Andere, Jonathan Mengs
tries to persuade Doehring of his discovery that with the
Protestant Reformation religion became the study of literature,
and the study of literature became religion.

The spoken word, the discourse between two individuals,
is the basis of language.  Speech is the intellectual
bond that binds individuals to one another and that binds
the individual to society.  The word is the cement that
holds the structure of society together.

It is language which expands the narrow boundaries of my
immediate experience. Such an expansion occurs whenever someone
else relates to me what he or she has heard or seen. The expansion
of my experience  - Erfahrung und Erleben - is more comprehensive
when it is written language which I apprehend, because writing
is permanent. What I can potentially read, is infinitely more diverse
and complete than what I will have occasion to listen to. Such
literary expansion of experience of each individual is in fact
the basis of political, social and economic society.

What we can experience (erleben und erfahren) of "Western society
in recent centuries" is what we learn when we study the documents
that have been preserved for us in our libraries. (The libraries,
therefore are the true temples.)  Listening to the story as it is
told, reading the history as it has been written, is the only and
is the conclusive access that we have to the world remote from
immediate experience.  Listening to the spoken word, or reading
the written word, provides Erleben und Erfahrung that permit us
to reach far beyond the immediate present, and permit us, with
corresponding degrees of reliability, to assess the treatment
accorded to women in the remote and recent past.

The experience (Erleben und Erfahrung) that is mediated by history,
is qualitatively different from immediate experience. This qualitative
difference is what occasions the doubt about the conceptual world,
albeit that the interpretation of the conceptual world is the very
substance of our intellectual life. There is a very broad spectrum
of potential interpretations. The elaboration of these interpretations
constitutes the world in which we live.

I have no reservations about the desirability of making women as
healthy, as happy, as creative and as productive as possible. I do
have reservations about the ability of self-appointed feminists
to further these goals, or even to identify them. The participation
of women in the military is a vivid case in point. There are other
occupations, both lowly and exalted, to which I, man or woman, would
not want to devote my life.  As a matter of fact, I ask myself
whether the economic system which requires each of us to spend his
or her life in an occupation, a trade, a profession in order to
flourish or even to survive, is not a pattern of slavery so universal
that we are unable to recognize it as such: that the freedom which
Doehring afforded his deceased wife Elsbeth to be a real human being,
a private person, was far more desirable, far more valuable than any
academic or professional recognition or reward she might have received
in the rough and tumble of the market place.  The clarion call of
feminism for a Crusade against male dominance, against "male chauvinism",
seems to me especially dubious, top-heavy with ideology that such a
clarion call must be.  Ideology makes its adherents blind and insensitive;
it has forever been the enemy of reason. It it were possible to discern
all the consequences of the feminist Crusade in their complexity,
it seems possible that the cumulative effects on both men and women
of the feminist Crusade would be anything but beneficial; but since these
consequences are impervious to our scrutiny, the attempt to answer this
question would reveal nothing but the prejudice of him or her who gave it.
Jochen