February 4, 2022

Dear Nikola,

Thank you for your telephone call.

This letter requires no answer. Most likely it is senile loquaciousness that induces me to expand our telephone conversation with these ramblings in which I translate and expand the notes I composed after we "hung up".

On the telephone I quoted Rilke's explanation of his intimations concerning the suicide of his friend Wolf Graf von Kalkreuth:

"Das was geschieht hat solchen Vorsprung vor unserm Meinen, dass wir's nie einholn, und nie erfahren, wie es wirklich aussah."
"All that has come to pass, has such a running start on our assumptions, that we never catch up with it, and never find out what it really looked like."

I read this quotation as a statement of Rilke's "philosophy", contradicting and refuting the claim of Leopold von Ranke and the scientific historians in his wake, who asserted that "scientific" history should report "wie es eigentlich gewesen", what it was really like. 

I find this reservation, that I am unable to find out what it was really like, applicable to all events outside my purview, relevant to all academic pursuits, to all that is conventionally taught about nature (Naturwissenschaften, natural sciences), as well as about human affairs (Geisteswissenschaften, moral or historical sciences) relevant in fact to everything, up to and including "philosophy", that is declaimed from the lecture-hall pulpit. 

The claim to pronounce truth (or describe reality) from the lectern, paralyses my anticipation of what will happen, of what is happening and of what has happened, paralyses my attempts to understand what the world is - or was - really like. This paralysis, which may admittedly be nothing more than a limitation of intellect and spirit peculiar to myself, defines an hypothetical limit of all academic endeavors. It suggests that all academic teaching up to and including all academic "philosophy", is unavoidably "scholastic", inasmuch as it derives it persuasiveness not primarily from individual, subjective experience, but from the communication and hence from the communicability of that which is taught. The science of the university is the science of the (human) herd.

What came first, the chicken or the egg? Is my "knowledge" the consequence of my having assimilated the knowledge of the community, knowledge which the society promulgates and propagates as "propaganda"? Or is my knowledge the effervescence of my own spirit, of my own intuition, however undeniably that spirit, complete with my native language, complete with the musical and mathematical skills with which my family has imbued me, is an expression both of my "self" and of the society that has contributed to making me the individual that I am. 

It is undeniable that knowledge is a function of community and a social phenomenon; that inorder to become "knowledge", my intuitions, my insights, my perceptions, my reasoning, require communication. They are the consequence of my understanding of others and require to be understood by others.

Thus important limitations of all academic philosophy, down to and including all academic knowledge are defined. That philosophy, that knowledge, is unavoidably scholastic, inasmuch as its meaning which must origiinally effervesce from individual consciousness and experience, is altered if not adulterated by the imperatives of communication. This implicit rejection of scholasticism is countered by the scholastics, by contemporary academicians who claim that only what is teachable, only what can be learned from textbooks or lectures should be the learning by which one is redeemed from ignorance, the only learning for which doctorate degrees may be bestowed.

Philosophy as I have outlined above is the archetype of all thinking, of all knowledge, and of all sciences, threatening me as they do, with their mystery, secrecy, and obscurity, especially as epitomized by their alleged queen, mathematics. The truth, the validity, the meaning of mathematical propositions are consequences of their susceptibility to being communicated. Such communicability is a function not only of the content, of the structure, of the substance of that which is (potentially) known, but of the abilities of students and teachers to assimilate and to promulgate the expressions in issue. As all of us, both teachers and students, are subject to limitations, so there occur failures, discontinuities, discrepancies, contradictions in knowledge and its dissemination. These faults are indispensable ingredients to to my understanding of what I have tried to learn and what I have tried to teach.

Docta ignorantia, learned ignorance, is the key to what I have failed to accomplish.

EJM