Subject: UHR-ENTTAEUSCHUNG From: "Marion Namenwirth" Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2012 18:07:49 -0600 To: "Jochen Meyer" Dear Jochen, Thanks immensely for the plush reply, a narrative one can sink into, curl up in comfortably. Just a couple of comments for now.....then I'd better do a little work. I gather that after WW II, American movies and books, and the prototypical characters and situations that they described, became overwhelmingly popular in many European countries. Flinty, proud, practical, assertive, plain-spoken men-of-few-words were all the rage. Young people often sought to model their own behavior on this image, with or without blue-jeans and cowboy boots. The lace doilies and other encumbrances of traditional civilization were to be shoved aside in favor of exhilarating freedom. Isn't Helmut's infatuation with Carver, Faulkner, et al, to be seen in this light? His rebellion, his alienation, would have had to be against this post-war cultural norm, and he adapted to it instead. As Helmut grew older it would have been more and more important to be seen to share the values of the contemporary culture, lest one be expelled for being hopelessly outdated, over-the-hill, out of touch with the zeitgeist (completely impermissable for a publisher). (The last sentence would be applicable to Margrit as well.) I envision Helmut as struggling to accommodate himself to evolving cultural norms. Take into account that he had to find his way through the cultural labyrinth somewhat informally, improvisationally, since he hadn't had the opportunity to mature within a catered university environment. In raising the doubts of Doering in this context, are you saying that you think Helmut traveled an analogous trajectory? Or that the works of literature Helmut admired were a random collection as to true quality, but Helmut failed to realize that? Now as for Jochen himself, there seems to be a recurring leitmotif lurking beneath his preferred perspectives. Like the boy who announced to all that the emperor had no clothes, Jochen sees The Authorities, the Guardians of Conventional Wisdom, as deceived, as unworthy of deference. Included are the Academy of Literature, of History, of Medicine, the Edifice of the Law, at the very least. The re-enactment of this drama over and over in your thinking makes me wonder what UHR-ENTTAEUSCHUNG was it in your youth that set this model in motion? Marion ========================= Subject: Addendum From: "Marion Namenwirth" Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2012 18:23:05 -0600 To: "Jochen Meyer" Oh! One more thing. I think that for someone in the Editor / Publishing profession to shop around (promote) your writing to others (publishing is a collaborative venture), would require substantial self-confidence (or pig-headedness), or else incontestable prestige. Because Helmut would have had to anticipate that many editors, publishers, publicists whom he would have submitted your manuscript to, would have been baffled, uncomprehending, incredulous. This would have reflected on Helmut's own judgement, and he might not have dared. It could have been a different story had Helmut had his own publishing concern, in which case he wouldn't have needed the consent and approval of others. Marion ====================================================== 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 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: The Sources of Doubt about the Intergreted World in Ethical and Esthetic Consciousness, (1960), an elborate set of variations, if you will, one 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 quite critical of the styles 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 subjective 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 which stimulates them. 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-idealisation, 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 characterics 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