Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter. For reasons not at all clear to me,
my thoughts are sluggish, whether from sadness for Margrit's
absence, from frustration with the bureaucratic stupidities
of banks and brokerage houses that I must accept as I try
to arrange my own affairs so as to make the settlement of my
own estate, perhaps sooner rather than later, as efficient
and inexpensive as possible. Perhaps the blame should be assigned
to an unavoidable waning of my ability to concentrate as I
get older. Perhaps it's merely the touch of melancholy which
from time to time attends everyone who is at all sensitive and
creative.

Beyond the annoyance of the bureaucratic harrassment I meditate
on a concept which seems to me, perhaps unduly so, to be of some
significance. As I write, I remember that between the sublime
and the ridiculous there is an inapparent boundary, which I
may well already have crossed.

I note that "law" is inherently universal.
A "law" which at some time, in some place, from some perspective
is illegal is an absurdity, a contradiction which negates itself.
The inherent universality of law is a phenomenon that becomes
explicit in Kant's formula for his Categorical Imperative
specifying that the ethical value of an action is contingent
on its susceptibility to becoming "universal law". Even when
laws and regulations purport to specify, as they usually do,
the circumstances under which they are to be applied,
the generality of the specification remains an unimpugned
monument to universality.

That law should be inherently universal seems to me to have
its most cogent explanation in the psychology of language.
Every law is an expression of the compelling effect of the
word on mind and spirit. And yet, the word, the formula, is
inherently incapable of "doing justice" to the actuality of
immediate experience.  The indispensable intervention of the
judge in the interpretation and application of the law reflects
the incapacity of universal propositions to come to terms with
individual situations.  Paradoxically, the task of the judge
is to repudiate, to revoke the universality of the law, making
it applicable to the given specific instance, and thereby
in effect rescinding it. Similarly, the prohibition: "Judge
not that ye be not judged", articulated by Jesus, is a
repudiation of law.  Law and judgment are inseparable.
Without judgment there is no law. Furthermore, the simple
description which purports to characterize its object serves
as judgment of that object. No formal determination of right
or wrong is required.

The foregoing considerations open a new theological vista:
the conflation of Christianity with what is conventionally 
called "existentialism," replacing as it does, a legalistic
and consequently historical account of experience with a more
immediate, intuitive "existential" apperception, where
"Christianity" is not the tragedy (or farce) of the historical
tradition, but a literary construct based on the texts with
which Christianity is documented.

Parallel to these considerations of ethics, and complementary
to the reduction or clarification of ethical conduct as
activity controlled (or determined) by the immediacy of
experience, is a different understanding of "knowledge",
an epistemology which shifts attention from verbal, logical
and mathematical constructs to the spectrum of experiences
to which they point and which they presume to explain.
I am reminded of classical Greek medicine in the tradition
of the Hippocratic school which taught physicians to rely
on "observation" and to distrust theory, focusing instead
on the physician's immediate experience as the source of
his "knowledge." The manner in which immediate experience
can serve as knowledge is an important, but a separate topic,
about which I will write to you in a future letter.

Jochen