Dear Nikola,

Haven't heard from you for a few days, and very much hope that you are well.  I sometimes wonder whether with my response to your suggestions about mathematics I offended you. If so, I am sorry and I apologize.  Reflecting about my ignorance of, and incompetence in mathematics in the context of my "inability to understand", i.e. finding confused and confusing Kant's theory of knowledge and his ethics, I ask whether my mathematical and philosophical inadequacies are parallel, and whether in both cases my failure to understand is of the same pattern and has the same roots. 

I've spent more time reading in Ernst Cassirer's three volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, of which I possess only the English translation, and have found on the Internet only volume one, about language, in German.  Cassirer's writing is reportage of what he had seen and understood in his passionate life long journey through the intellectual landscape, an account of the images of reality that he saw. But I looked in vain for an explanation' of what it means when someone says "I know" or "I understand", what more than acknowledgement of being confronted with, surrounded by, and immersed in reality, which is the fate of all living beings.

Mindful of Socrates' wise assertion that all he knew was that he knew nothing, I ask (myself) whether it would be productive (and edifying), instead of pursuing epistemology, and asking what is knowledge and truth, to pursue trumpology, and ask what is ignorance and what is falsehood.  I myself, in any event, am pervasively unaware of (and indifferent to) what I know, to my knowledge; but acutely and painfully sensitive to what I don't know, to my ignorance. My knowledge I accept as a matter of course as assimilation in the encompassing (divine) nature, (deus sive natura) The insufficiencies of my thinking, understanding, knowing turn me into a Goethean microfaust.

"I know" means that I am at home in the intellectual world, kept warm and cozy by the spiritual emenations of the other creatures in the academic barn, like cattle in winter. "I don't know, I don't understand" means that I have taken a wrong turn, that I am alone, shivering and lost.

I hope that you are well. Feel free to telephone whenever you feel like it. Give my regards to your parents.

EJM