Dear Marion,

Thank you very much for your thoughtful and provocative comments
a) about Helmut's sympathy for contemporary American culture - including
literature
b) about Helmut's rejection of my writing, and
c) about the Ur-Enttaeuschung reflected in the theorizing which I
put into the mouths of Doehring, Mengs, Magus and Katenus. 

I believe your interpretation of a) Helmut's sympathy for contemporary
American culture - including literature to be correct. My assumption is
that Helmut's father was not only a political but also a cultural
conservative who had no sympathy with expressionism, with James Joyce,
Bertold Brecht, Guenter Grass, etc, and that Helmut's embrace of a
culture alien to his father was a generational revolt which was
complicated by Nazism, war, and the American conquests, but not without
considerable ambivalence, inasmuch as Helmut retained much sympathy for
authors such as Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Goethe and especially Hoelderlin.

Your comments b) about Helmut's rejection of my writing also have my
endorsement. He did not think my writing was "bad", but merely 
unpublishable. On the literary scene, Helmut felt vulnerable. In
choosing to be a translator rather than a primary author, he sought
the protection of names of the established recognized writers whose
works he translated.

It's about c) the Ur-Enttaeuschung reflected in the theorizing which I
put into the mouths of Doehring, Mengs, Magus and Katenus that I owe you
an explanation - and perhaps a psychoanalyst's fee. I take the radical
epistemological amd hermeneutic ideas which I put into the mouths
of Doehring, Mengs, Magus and Katenus VERY seriously, so much so
that my words convict me of megalomania. However, I'm too far gone,
beyond the point of return, and in my role of Don Giovanni I choose
at age 81 1/2 to go down in ignominy rather than repent.

Uhr-Enttaeuschung might be the disappointment I feel when I miss
my plane because my watch had stopped. What you mean, I believe,
is Ur-Enttaeuschung, the primal, primitive disappointment or
disillusionment, to which I plead guilty. My primal disappointment
has two phases: i) the classical Faustian despair for the failure
to understand nature (dass ich erkenne was die Welt, im Innersten
zusammenhaelt) ((that I might understand the innermost constraints 
of the universe)) and ii) classical Miltonian disappointment for 
lack of recognition and fame - that last infirmity of noble mind, 
which is eminently treatable with extract of sour grapes. These two
phases of Ur-Enttaeuschung are initially quite separate; ultimately
I believe they merge in unfettered scepticism.

For me the Faustian despair has its roots in my college days.
It's first expression was an essay which I wrote soon after
graduate school about the reception of Ossian in England,
and was expanded in an unpublishable typescript: Ethical and
Esthetic Consciousness as Sources of Doubt about the Interpreted
World, (1960), an elaborate set of variations, if you will,
on Rilke's verses in the 1. Duino Elegy: "Und die findigen
Tiere merken es schon, dass wir nicht sehr verlaesslich zu Haus
sind in der gedeuteten Welt." (And the canny animals have 
noticed already, that we are not much reliably at home in the
interpreted world.) The seven chapters of this text constitute
my own description of the existentialist experience. Ignorant
at the time of Kierkegaard, I was re-inventing the wheel. Today,
I'm critical of the style of that juvenile effort. In substance,
however, I consider it unassailable.

The next stage of my scepticism addressed Kierkegaard's assertion
in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript that subjectivity is the
truth. Kierkegaard's concern with the incongruities of historical
rationalizations of the Life of Jesus (David Friedrich Straus) and
his own experience of religious faith led him to challenge the
objective validity of ALL historical accounts, quite persuasively
to my understanding. Kierkegaard, however, was unconcerned with
natural science. He had no comments on mathematics, physics,
chemistry or biology. It seemed to me the subjectivity in the
historical sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and objectivity in
the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) constituted an
unacceptable contradiction, a discontinuity the resolution of
which I considered, and consider, the primary task of contemporary
thought. That is the perhaps quixotic project to which I have
dedicated much of the past 40 years.

My conclusion, which for purposes of exposition, I put into the
mouth of Katenus has three parts:

A) Knowledge can be most consistently construed as assimilation,
i.e. as pervasive and continuing modification of the human organism,
creating a correspondence between the mind and that which it perceives,
explaining the validity of Goethe's "Gleiches wird nur von Gleichem
erkannt." (Like is only recognized by like.)

B) Language as the primary instrument of knowledge is inherently
productive of synthetic configurations which we recognize as
(cognitive) ideals, which are i) indispensable for our interaction
with nature, while at the same time ii) interposing themselves
between our minds and nature and blocking our perception (of nature).

C) The analysis, the dissolution of (cognitive) ideals, i.e.
de-idealization, Entidealisierung, is the essential dialectical
complement if idealization. Together, the processes of idealization
and de-idealization are the most adequate characterizations of
intellectual activity I have been able to define.

ii) The second phase of Ur-Enttaeuschung addresses the intellectual
and social characteristics of reading. The Bible, as the prototypical
book, becomes meaningful and indeed intelligible only with the
investment of "faith" in the validity (or holiness) of the text,
The same is true of our perusal of all written material. I must
make some allowance for differing qualities of different books.
The poetry of Hoelderlin and of John Updike are not the same.
Yet I must not forget that what we recognize as "greatness" today
has often been overlooked and ignored. Goethe and Schiller failed
to acknowledge Hoelderlin. Goethe did not see the genius of Kleist
that we recognize today. Shakespeare's works were bowdlerized for
decades if not centuries. The qualities of the books which Helmut
admired were in (large) part projections of his own spirit.
As for myself, the "recurring leitmotif lurking beneath ...(my)
preferred perspectives" is not disappointment (Ur-Enttaeuschung)
of any kind, but a pseudo-Promethean bravado - hast du nicht
alles selbst gebildet, heilig gluehend Herz - (Goethe) which
makes a fetish of pretending to assault Mount Olympus.

Jochen