Dear Marion,

Thank you for the telephone conversation.  I would never
forgo the opportunity to talk, because as I've confessed
before, I'm addicted to the sound of my own voice. 
Telephone conversations I find a very efficient method
for clarifying disagreements or misunderstandings, and I
am content to repeat the exercise as frequently as you
like. Our long distance rates are very low, and I should
be pleased to initiate any conversation. All I require is
your directions. It also seems very desirable to select
in advance a topic, a text or a set of questions that we
propose to discuss. If you were interested, we could
read Goethes Faust together - over the telephone.

With respect to Margrit, we have, I believe agreed to
disagree, at least to agree on the conclusion that the
intensity of my emotional and intellectual relationship
to her is incompatible with your more detached and tolerant
approach.  Nonetheless I would like you to be uninhibited
about confronting me with new considerations, new questions
or new criticism. It's valuable to me to be contradicted,
I thrive on dialectic, and I thank you. 

Your pointillist psychology, as I mentioned, reminded me
of Leibniz monadology, and stimulated me to read again a
few pages of that historically so significant tract. 
Nonetheless it would be inappropriate to suggest that
your account of the array of colored dots should need
to take into account all the contradictory and insoluble
issues that Leibniz raises. The colored dots I interpret
not as a philosophical theory, but as a metaphor of which
no theoretical consistency or universality should be
required.

The metaphor of the pointillist painting equates the
individual with a colored point. The point has no
intrinsic meaning, but derives its significance from
the array of which is is an anonymous member. While I
agree that such an account of human nature is plausible
in a totalitarian society, - where the group is everything
and the individual is nothing, such a scheme does not
correspond to my experience. I believe it is also
incompatible with Judaism, as I understand it, which 
holds that the individual being made in the image of
God, is fundamentally active and creative, rather than
a passive member of an incomprehensible tableau. The
pointillist view of human nature and human society,
if I understand correctly, precludes all artistic
creativity, which alone, in my experience, gives
meaning to ones life.

Jochen