Dear Marion,

Thank you very much for your thoughtful letter. I want to
reply without delay, because intellectually and emotionally
I'm in the process of pulling up the stakes and taking down
the tent, so to speak, of the mind-set in which I've been
living and working here in this idyllic landscape for the
past five and a half weeks. We've decided to start back on
Sunday October 17, instead of Monday as previously planned.
Klemens will be leaving on one of his trips on Wednesday,
October 20; I want to take him to the airport early in the
morning; I want to be sure that I've caught up on my sleep
after the long trip from Virginia.  I'll comment on the
issues in the order in which you raised them in your letter.

1) Please don't feel obligated to answer or even to read
my letters. Writing is a morbid obsession with me, and you
should respond to my overtures only to the extent that your
efforts are of value to you. That, of course is an estimate
beyond my ken.

2) My mourning for Margrit is a transformation of my longing
for a close, for a closer relationship to her while she was
alive, and is tinged with remorse and sadness for my failure.
The older I become, the more aware of the burden which my
peculiar and admittedly para-pathological desire for intellectual
and emotional - mind you, not physical - intimacy has constituted
for the various members of my family, - down to and including my
grandchildren. It was my problem, not Margrit's; and it remains
my problem and will remain my problem until I die.

3) I find your discussion of fact vs. theory valuable and useful
for my understanding. I make it a practice to scan what information
the periodicals "Science" and "Nature" provide without charge on the
Internet. If I thought I had the time and the memory to make use of
the plethora of information, I would subscribe. I'm very respectful
of the scientific viewpoint which you present to me, and I want very
much to become proficient in its description and interpretation.

At the same time, in all fairness to you, I should articulate
explicitly that much of the past fifty years I have spent in the
attempt to define and to exercise an alternative epistemology,
without making any claim that I was at all successful. My conscious
point of departure was Kierkegaard's explicit rediscovery, in his
books "Philosophical Fragments" and "Concluding Unscientific Postscript"
of "subjectivity" as obviating the purportedly "scientific" theology
of mid-nineteenth century historians of religion. If my memory isn't
tricking me, I seem to remember that David Friedrich Strauss was the
bete noire both of Nietzsche and of Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard mentioned
the natural sciences not at all; but I reasoned that the human mind was
not dichotomous, and if, as it seemed, Kierkegaard's argument was valid
for the history of religion, it was valid for history, for
Geisteswissenschaften in general, and if valid for Geisteswissenschaften
it must also be valid for Naturwissenschaften. At the same time, I saw
that "subjectivity" in the natural sciences was the topic which preoccupied
20th century philosophers, specifically Edmund Husserl, who called it
"Phenomenology" and his student Martin Heidegger. I spent some years reading
Husserl, but I made no attempt to learn the language that Heidegger invented
to express his ideas.

My own efforts began with a book-length manuscript which I composed in 1960,
with the title "The Origin of Doubt" and the subtitle: "Ethical and Esthetic
Consciousness as Sources of Doubt about the Conceptual World."  Harvard
University Press told me they would publish it, if I could get faculty
endorsement. That was not forthcoming. I was not surprised that I could
find no publisher. I returned to the subject repeatedly in handwritten
and typewritten essays composed over the years, until, beginning in 1983
I started making notes in computer text files, some of which I have
published on the Internet, but none of which, so far as I know, anyone
has ever read. Most recently, my interest in the topic surfaced in the
exposition that I put into the mouth of Maximilian Katenus in Chapter 42
of Die Freunde. I mention it for the record. It's there. I don't ask you
to read it; I don't ask you not to read it. I think you will be annoyed
by what I wrote; no reason why I should want to annoy you.  On the contrary,
I want to stay on good terms with you.

Consider me color blind for scientific facts. I can't distinguish them
from theory, any more than I can distinguish certain shades of blue and
green. It's a genetic defect; instruction, exhortation is of no help.
Goethe argued "dass alles Faktische schon Theorie ist", that all facts
are theories, - or if you prefer all theories are facts. There's no 
difference between facts and theories. My present stance is that the
identifying characteristic of theory is its symbolic nature. Language
is symbolic. Therefore any experience which is asserted in language
is theory. All facts require expression in language. Therefore all
facts are symbolic and being symbolic are theory. However, I am mindful
that our discussion is about definition of words. I'm very much open to
the postulate of a spectrum of theories which vary in reliability,
predictability, constancy; in other words, in a postulate that certain
theories have all the characteristics of "facts". By the same token,
I'm prepared to accept the translation of all "theory" into "facts",
with the understanding that "facts" are not all created equal. My
interest is not in quibbling about words. My interest is in elucidating
the function by which facts or theories - a rose by any other name -
facilitate the mental processes by which we adapt or assimilate
ourselves to the natural and social world in which we must survive.
I'm almost certain that the consideration of my half-baked notions
is not worth your while. But thank you for writing.

Jochen