Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter. One should be no less wary of spouting dogma
about reality than one should be wary of propounding dogma about God.
Negative theology is an appropriate pattern for negative epistemology.
Negative epistemology would not imply the absence of reality -
just as negative theology does not entail the assertion of God's Not-being,
but negative epistemology is radical scepticism about the statements which
I or anyone else can make about reality. In other words, I've come full circle.
It was doubt not about the real world, but about the conceptual world
concerning which I undertook to pontificate in 1960. Neither facts nor
theories are to be equated with "reality"; rather facts and theories are
to be interpreted as _pointers_ to reality, pointers of varying and not
entirely predictable validity. Facts, we agreed are more reliable pointers
than theories. The reality to which facts (and theories) point is beyond
language, beyond symbolism. It is, if I may coin a term, meta-symbolic.
I was wrong when I stigmatized reality as unconscious or subconscious.
Symbols, verbal or mathematical, are not exhaustive of consciousness.
There _is_ conscious experience (Erleben) of reality distinct from the
sentences with which we attempt to describe that reality. We employ
the word _subjectivity_ to allude to the conscious experience of reality
which eludes symbolic representation. The essence of symbolic representation,
i.e. language, mathematics, is its communicability. It is the community
created by language which constitutes the _objective_ world. - Kierkegaard,
as I've pointed out before, was inaccurate when he wrote: Subjectivity
is the truth. He should have written: The truth is that subjectivity is
reality. Furthermore this statement:"Subjectivity is reality" is inherently
contradictory because it purports to be objectively true. And that's
enough of that, for now.

For me, the controversy surrounding transsubstantiation,
initiated by Bengarius Turonensis, the early Scholastic who
died in 1088, 22 years after the Battle of Hastings, is
obviously of no theological significance. I can dispense
with the pros and cons of the implicit latter-day cannibalism.
What strikes me as significant about Bengarius, is the diversity 
and triviality of the issues which in the course of millenia,
have seemed worth arguing about, have seemed worth violence and
wars.

This human propensity for conceptual conflict, it seems to me, is
of more immediate concern to ourselves than we might assume. Lessing
was berated by Goeze for publishing the Bengarius manuscript, and
although he tried to reason with Goeze in a civil and humble manner,
Goeze apparently needed the controversy to maintain his political
clout (shades of 21. Century USA) and Lessing felt sufficiently
threatened to fight back with mounting acrimony. Kierkegaard
himself at the end of his short life, found it necessary to
engage his church in conflict over a seemingly trivial matter:
After the death of Kierkegaard's friend and patron Bishop Jacob
Peter Mynster, when Mynster's successor Hans Lassen Martensen
eulogized Mynster as an "irreplaceable ... veritable witness
to the Truth," Kierkegaard erupted into a rage that strikes me
as a badge of insanity, - but who am I to talk, - and castigated
Martensen for having defiled the memory of true martyrs. 
Could Kierkegaard's meaning have been himself? In any event,
controversy often, if not always, has its inapparent roots.
Conflict, it seems, is an ineradicable expression of human
nature. Is the pacifist, someone like myself who refuses to
fight, a coward or merely an idiot?  We've been here before:
Things are seldom as they seem, skimmed milk masquerades as cream.

A postscript concerning Kierkegaard and the Christian "communion".
Although a theologian, and I believe an ordained pastor of the
Lutheran Church and the author of numerous printed sermons, on his
death bed at age 42, Kierkegaard is said to have refused "communion".
Jochen