Dear Marion,

My letter of February 13, requires, at minimum, the following
corrections:

_...and was expanded in an unpublishable typescript: The Sources
of Doubt about the Intergreted World in Ethical and Esthetic
Consciousness, (1960), ....

should read:

_...and was expanded in an unpublishable typescript: Ethical and
Esthetic Consciousness as Sources of Doubt about the Interpreted
World, (1960) ....

================================

_... 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, ....

should read:

_... Kierkegaard's concern with the incongruities of historical
rationalizations of the Life of Jesus (David Friedrich Strauss) and
his own experience of religious faith led him to challenge the
objective validity of ALL historical accounts, ....

================================

I also offer the following amplification:
Because I was tired, I inadvertently abbreviated my discussion
of de-idealization. It's an unmelodious word, but I haven't
found a better one. Entidealisierung is almost as bad.

De-idealization is an expression and implementation of
Urenttaeuschung.
De-idealization is a key not only to the Faustian perplexity,
ignorance of the "essence" of nature, (dass ich erkenne was die
Welt im Innersten zusammen haelt)
De-idealization is also a key to the Miltonian perplexity,
the desire for fame that is "the last infirmity of noble mind."
(Why can't I get my book published?)

As a paradigm of de-idealization consider the dissolution of 
the ideal geometric line as the shortest distance between two
points, and as itself a set of an infinite number of points
everywhere infinitely dense. That definition is intuitively
meaningless until a line is "visualized". The "visualized"
line may be de-idealized in two respects: a) the line drawn
on paper, when magnified, will appear as an irregular, albeit
roughly linear, agglomeration of specks of graphite which defies
the definition. It is composed of a set of points which is 
neither infinite nor dimensionless, whose centers would be 
connected by lines set at angles to each other. Thus the 
definition of a line is not susceptible to visual representation.
The "visualized" line may also be de-idealized via a second route,
by identifying the individual retinal receptor cells, rods and
cones, stimulation of which results in the perception of a
straight line, even though these rods and cones themselves do not
lie on a straight line. Accordingly linearity, and specifically
ortho-linearity turns out to be a kind of illusion, an idealization. 
De-idealization correspondingly is (nothing but) the rational
identification of idealization as such, as distinct from
reality. I condend: 1) that idealization is integral to and
inseparable from ALL intellectual activity; 2) that the
dogmatics of natural science are idealizations, and that in
practice natural science is intellectual evolution, a dialectical
process in which established idealizations are destroyed,
i.e. de-idealized in favor of new, emerging idealizations.
I further contend: 3) that historical sciences (Geisteswissenschaften)
in general, and history in particular are idealizations. The
de-idealization of intellectual history, of the religious traditions,
and specifically of the process of reading, provides a key to the
conundrum of literary publication. My argument, which I've
elaborated elsewhere in detail, is that the book functions in
part as a screen onto which the reader projects his/her
intentions, that this projection requires faith that the book
has a socially recognized meaning.  The function of the publisher
is to engender such faith by creating and maintaining the book's
social standing. That is what Helmut was unable to do for me.

Jochen