January 13, 2022

Dear Nikola,

Thank you for your immediate reply to my letter. You regale me with a cornucopia of thoughts and experiences (Erleben) to which my reply can never do justice, no matter for how long, or how much I write. It's all the more important to get started.

a) I respectfully suggest that you take sleeping medication, if at all, only on the recommendation of a psychiatrist. There is a broad spectrum of chemicals which will induce sleep. Most of them are habit-forming, some are addictive. I never take them. To induce sleep, I regularly resort to a set of fantasies. When these don't do the job, I try to exploit my insomnia as an opportunity for exploring facets of consciousness that are normally buried under the imperatives of my daily existence. 

b) http://73.253.255.20/ is the current dynamic numerical URL of my website.  Hitherto my Internet service provider, Comcast, has kept the URL constant, except after an interruption of service i) on its part, for unidentified reasons, or ii) on my part, when I recycle my modem, or when there is an interruption of the power supply to the modem. 

For about a year, I subscribed (for a mere $25) to https://www.noip.com to which my website uploaded its dynamic URL every 30 minutes for linkage to a constant, unchanging address http://ernstjmeyer.ddns.net. Some months ago, when I inadvertently neglected to inform them of a change in my credit card number, noip.com interrupted the address translation. I haven't re-engaged them, because I am ambivalent. I'm uncertain whether what I have placed on my website is appropriate for publication. 

c) When I write, I try to express what I think, what I feel, what I have experienced, and, most saliently, what I experience as I am writing, (was ich erlebt habe, und was ich beim Schreiben erlebe).  Nobody wants to read about that. I ask myself, and I ask you, is the publication of what I think and feel and experience, anything more than an exercise in narcissism and exhibitionism?  Is there ever any spiritual justification for publicity and fame? and is my professed preference for anonymity, for remaining incognito, anything more than a devious and dishonest scheme to conceal my rejection of grapes which are too sour?

d) All the more remarkable, especially in this stage of my life, when I cannot walk without a walker or at least two canes, when I can no longer climb a mountain or even take a short hike through the woods, - it has even become impossible for me to walk to the mailbox - when in fact I can no longer do anything but sit on a chair and type ideas of questionable sanity into the keyboard, I find it difficult to accept the circumstance that there should be anything that I cannot do, specifically that there should be anything that I cannot learn to know and to understand. Even now, at this late date, I feel unending remorse for never having learned to play a musical instrument, and of course I am forever chagrined by my ignorance, ignorance of everything, ignorance which only increases in old age as memory of what I once knew, weakens and fails.

e) Was it a mistake that I spent years thinking about knowledge, reading about epistemology, trying to concoct a theory of knowledge, meditating on "Erkenntnistheorie"? If I was unable "to know" everything, I considered it next best to "understand" what it means "to know" something. Perhaps even better: to understand what it means not to know something. I have finally learned to redefine ignorance as the consolation prize for the inability to possess knowledge. I'm fascinated by the title of an early Renaissance essay, "de docta ignorantia" Of Learned Ignorance" - or should it be translated as "Of Ignorant Learning? - a tract written in 1440 by Nikolaus von Kues, where Kues is a village deep in the Moselle Valley which I visited about 30 years ago, when I was still busy trying to learn and to understand everything. It's emblematic of the shallowness of my studies in philosophy, that I attach profound meaning to titles of books I never read, or whose contents I have forgotten.

My preoccupation with epistemology led me to conclude that learning is inherently a passive process. What an ingenious justification for laziness!  To learn, I persuade myself, is to expose my mind to ideas, circumstances, sentences, formulas that are strange and foreign; and that in consequence of such exposure, my mind assimilates and "naturalizes" what once was alien.  Such assimilation alters the mind, makes it different, makes it new.  My model for the acqusition of knowledge is the process whereby exposure to the ultraviolet light of the sun stimulates melanocytes to produce more melanin and darken the skin. Hypothetically, biochemists or histologists might correlate specific items of knowledge with specific demonstrable chemical or physical changes in the brain; but such correlations would unavoidably be coarse and crude, enhancing our "knowledge" of biochemistry or biophysics without enhancing my knowledge of the knowledge in issue.

The interpretation of knowledge as assimilation seems to me to open new perspectives and new intellectual opportunities even and especially for me now, at my advanced, decrepit old age. In the conventional academic environment,knowledge entails facility in providing prescribed and expected "correct" answers to specified questions. But the knowledge which satisfies the instructor is the mimesis or parody of predigested intellectual experience, now regurgitated as "correct" answers to preselected questions. Instead, I argue that when knowledge is construed as the assimilation of my thought processes to the material being taught, the value of that knowledge is determined not only by the presumed imperatives intrinsic to the knowledge, but also, and to a perhaps significant degree, by the initiatives and sensitivities of my mind, by the manner in which my mind assimilates a foreign reality or is assimilated by it. 

I reflect on the distinction between Geisteswissenschaften, "moral" sciences, as John Stuart Mill called them, and Naturwissenschaften, natural sciences, which was a focus of German academic philosophy 120 years ago. The natural sciences, especially physics and chemistry, supported by mathematics, were deemed the pre-eminent (academic) disciplines, held up as models of knowledge with which other pursuits such as biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology and history could not compete. 

The threshold of my own private epistemology is to ask a) How do I distinguish the present from the past, b) What do I mean when I claim to remember events that occurred ten months or ten years ago? c) How do I assess the validity of an account of past events which I have forgotten or to which I could not possibly have a witness. I look at the sky, and I see the Milky Way. I check the Internet and infer from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way_(mythology) that I am  by far not the first to have asked about its origins.

"The Greek name for the Milky Way (Γαλαξίας Galaxias) is derived from the Greek word for milk (γάλα, gala). One legend explains how the Milky Way was created by Heracles when he was a baby.[2] His father, Zeus, was fond of his son, who was born of the mortal woman Alcmene. He decided to let the infant Heracles suckle on his divine wife Hera's milk when she was asleep, an act which would endow the baby with godlike qualities. When Hera woke and realized that she was breastfeeding an unknown infant, she pushed him away and the spurting milk became the Milky Way." (Wikipedia)

I take another look at the Internet, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way and find a different story:

"The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with an estimated visible diameter of 100,000–200,000 light-years. Recent simulations suggest that a dark matter disk, also containing some visible stars, may extend up to a diameter of almost 2 million light-years.[12][13] The Milky Way has several satellite galaxies and is part of the Local Group of galaxies, which form part of the Virgo Supercluster, which is itself a component of the Laniakea Supercluster.[25][26]

"It is estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars[27][28] and at least that number of planets.[29][30] The Solar System is located at a radius of about 27,000 light-years from the Galactic Center,[3] on the inner edge of the Orion Arm, one of the spiral-shaped concentrations of gas and dust. The stars in the innermost 10,000 light-years form a bulge and one or more bars that radiate from the bulge. The galactic center is an intense radio source known as Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole of 4.100 (± 0.034) million solar masses. Stars and gases at a wide range of distances from the Galactic Center orbit at approximately 220 kilometers per second. The constant rotational speed appears to contradict the laws of Keplerian dynamics and suggests that much (about 90%)[31][32] of the mass of the Milky Way is invisible to telescopes, neither emitting nor absorbing electromagnetic radiation. This conjectural mass has been termed "dark matter".[33] The rotational period is about 240 million years at the radius of the Sun.[17] The Milky Way as a whole is moving at a velocity of approximately 600 km per second with respect to extragalactic frames of reference. The oldest stars in the Milky Way are nearly as old as the Universe itself and thus probably formed shortly after the Dark Ages of the Big Bang.[34]" (Wikipedia)

I ask myself, and I ask you, how do we interpret these two differing accounts.

No one will challenge us if we designate the explanation of the Milky Way's origin as consequence of Hera's interrupted lactation to be a myth which tells us nothing about astronomy. I interpret this myth to serve as a mirror, in which I discern outlines, however rough and approximate, of the thoughts of the Ancient Greeks as they gazed into the sky and attempted to understand and explain what they saw.

Everyone would consider me insane if I dared to argue that the contemporary astronomers' explanations of the Milky Way are adumbrated by incongruities which are different but analogous to the incongruities of the ancient myth.  Yet, in order that these astronomers' explanations should become susceptible to rational understanding, they must, like the myths of the Ancients, be treated as accounts which in order to become meaningful require to be believed, require validation albeit with a special, a different, a scientific faith.

The faith required for the validation of scientific claims to reality is a faith in the constancy and reliability of symbols, both verbal and mathematical. For example, the sentence: "The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with an estimated visible diameter of 100,000–200,000 light-years," becomes meaningful on the assumption that the Milky Way and a barred spiral galaxy are each of them recurrently identifiable objects, and that a dimension of 100,000-200,000 light years is measurable with reasonable accuracy. In this context it is useful to distinguish between the rational and the intuitive meaning of 100,000-200,000 light years. The length of one light year is 5.879e+12 miles. 100,000 light years == 5.879e+18 miles.  200,000 light years == 1.1758e+19 miles. These distances have no intuitive meaning in ordinary experience. They develop a derivative intutive meaning from the experience of comparing similar "measurements" of "estimated visible diameters" of other celestial objects. In my experience, at least, the intuition of 1.1758e+19 miles requires a leap of faith. Similarly, in my experience, the intuition of Hera's milk splattering a visible barred spiral galaxy, also requires a leap of faith, albeit arguably of a different nature. The fundamental epistemological challenge is to determine the criteria by which the two cited leaps of faith might be distinguished. Can you help me?

EJM