This is the draft of my letter for which you asked:

September 26, 2023

Dear Donald,

Four weeks ago I received your letter of August 23, 2023.  Thank you. As of this evening I am still alive.  When I was born, in 1930, my life expectancy was 58.1 years.  This week marks my having contributed to global warming for 93.25 years.  Statistically, my death is now 35.15 years overdue.

I find the statement in your letter that you purge about 2500 messages a week from your e-mail inbox eminently encouraging.  It means that you have an efficient and effective way of dealing with a communication that may prove to be inappropriate both in its length and in its content.  I calculate that in the 33 days since you sent your letter, you have presumably similarly purged (33/7)x 2500=11786 additional items.  Let this be letter no. 11787 to be erased.  However much I value reading from you, please feel no obligation to reply.  Please accept the circumstance that I write with abandon and that I choose not to censure my thoughts.  I consider this page similar to one of the many leaves on the numerous trees outside my windows.  Those leaves will soon turn red and yellow, and will be tossed to the ground by "the wind which bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth." Once on the ground they will become instinguishable one from another, all of them hiding among the unkempt unidentified shrubs studding the unshorn grass below.

Half each days' 24 hours I spend in bed. Some nights in deep impenetrable sleep. Other nights are haunted by vivid dreams, often of the distant past, I find myself lost returning from a hike to a mountain peak I never reached, I am appalled to discover myself as a surgeon in the operating room, masked and gowned, suddenly remembering that I have forgotten how to perform the scheduled operation. Some other hours I spend in phantasies, what it must be like to be tortured by the SS, by the Gestapo, by the CIA ..., I wonder what HE thought and felt, or whether HE thought and felt anything, when not his agents or angels, but HE himself killed all the firstborn of Egypt whose safety was not secured by a doorpost anointed with the blood of a lamb.

I remember how in the Bible, HE commands our forebears to conquer the Promised Land, placing city after city "under the ban" - which meant every man, woman and child was supposed to be slaughtered at the point of the sword.  For example, in Deuteronomy 20:16-18 HE orders the Israelites to "not leave alive anything that breathes… completely destroy them …". I remember the story of the Amalekites (Numbers 13,14), the War against the Midianites (Numbers 31), and the account about the battle of Jericho (Joshua 1–6). I imagine what it must be like to commit suicide in a cattle car on a train bound for Auschwitz like my great aunt Antonie Rosenthal Meyer, to avoid being forced naked into a metal chamber ostensibly "to take a shower", to hear the door bolted, and to take the painful suffocating breaths of cyanide before losing consciousness....

It is perhaps emblematic of my senility, that I understand and interpret all documentation with which we try to communicate to each other, including mathematics, about the realities of the world in which we live, as species of poetry, as symbolic representations with which an individual seeks to influence the mentality of his herd and to obtain a position as its leader, where the reality alluded to is never attained, but is functionally replaced by the transient social context that arises in the effort.

In my efforts to understand "the Holocaust", I am reminded that six million, which is the number of Jews who were killed, is probably less than a tenth of the sixty or seventy million human beings who died in the course and as a consequence of World War II. I begin by considering Dante's description of Hell, which, if I understand correctly was divinely designed and instituted in furtherance of a perfect universe in which the suffering meted out to the human beings who "sinned" is proportionate to to the gravity of their "transgressions" of "laws" whose codification is inscrutable to me.

Recently, perhaps subsequent to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the responsibility for an hypothetical perfection of the world, and within it of humanity, was reassigned to Nature. Specifically the publication by Charles Darwin in 1859 of his book: "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." The spiritual if not strictly scientific groundwork for Darwin's thesis had been laid by Thomas Malthus, and Darwin's insights were promoted by Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) who was the English author of the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in his treatise Principles of Biology (1864) after reading Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species.  Although that term strongly suggests natural selection, it was Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics.  The ideas of Malthus, Darwin and Spencer were amplified by Sir Francis Galton FRS (16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911) a British intellectual in the Victorian era, who was a proponent of social Darwinism, of eugenics, and of scientific racism. Galton was knighted in 1909.

"In addition to being practiced in a number of countries, eugenics was internationally organized through the International Federation of Eugenics Organization Its scientific aspects were carried on through research bodies such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, the Cold Spring Harbor Carnegie Institution for Experimental Evolution, and the Eugenics Record Office. Politically, the movement advocated measures such as sterilization laws. In its moral dimension, eugenics rejected the doctrine that all human beings are born equal and redefined moral worth purely in terms of genetic fitness. Its racist elements included pursuit of a pure "Nordic race" or "Aryan" genetic pool and the eventual elimination of "unfit" races. Many leading British politicians subscribed to the theories of eugenics. Winston Churchill supported the British Eugenics Society and was an honorary vice president for the organization. Churchill believed that eugenics could solve "race deterioration" and reduce crime and poverty." (Wikipedia) Of course, it was mainly Adolf Hitler, but not only he, who took us to Auschwitz and who brought us to where we are now.

In my despair to try to escape from this labyrinth of insanity and inhumanity, I turned to Immanuel Kant's Metaphysik der Sitten (Metaphysics of Custom). But what I found didn't help at all.  I found a monumentally dispiriting game with words, implicit in which is the author's presumption that it is his prerogative to invent a system of his own design, where it is he who establishes the rules, selects the terms and defines their meaning. A threshold difficulty is the translation of the word Sitte, which as Kant uses it implies moral values to which the translating term "custom" is neutral.  There are "good" customs and there are "bad" customs, but in themselves customs are neither good nor bad.  But Kant wants to have his cake and eat it too.  He contemplates a categorical imperative required on its own account as a superior "Sitte", and an inferior hypothetical imperative chosen on account of something else that is desirable. According to Kant, only the categorical imperative has ultimate, "moral" value.  Compliance with the categorical imperative is pursuant to an abstract duty, eine Pflicht, which whether burdensome or not, is necessarily devoid of pleasure. To allude to the experience of pleasure, Kant avails himself of the term Neigung. Neigung poisons the categorical imperative and turns it into an hypothetical imperative.  To my thinking all this is nonsense.

Here's a specific example: The categorical imperative must be susceptible to becoming universal law. Suicide cannot be universal law. Preserving (ones own) life is a categorical imperative. Therefore it is a moral obligation for me to eat my spinach. If I eat my spinach although I hate spinach, that's morally good as the victory of my duty (Pflicht) over my desire. But the fulfillment of that moral obligation will be contaminated by Neigung, by pleasure, in the event that I love, perhaps even crave to eat spinach; because under that circumstance I cannot sure that my compliance with the categorical imperative is in consequence of my determination to do my duty, something which is incompatible with pleasure.

The acceptance of Kant's ethics has three dimensions. What Kant refers to as its "categorical', its absolute nature, satisfies my need for unconditional certainty, for unconditional "truth", for uncontaminated beauty, for the everlasting, omnipotent, omniscient, immortality which is epitomized in the divine, to compensate for and offset my frailty, my forgetfulness, my fallibility, my mortality. To act pursuant to the categorical imperative is a simulation of divinity which is otherwise forclosed and forbidden to me.

The second dimension of Kant's ethics is its reliance on law, instead of relying on individual conscience, sympathy and understanding.  Interpreting, enforcing, adjudicating legal imperatives is an inherently social function. The professing and teaching of Kant's ethics implicitly and explicitly supported and sustained the social institutions which it involved. Compare the anti-social revolutionary implications of the teachings of Jesus.

The third dimension of Kant's ethics is his invention and introduction of arbitrary concepts and functions whose relation to the experience of the reader and prospective disciple is tenuous if it exists at all.  No reader can deduce Kant's meaning from his own conceptual or intuitive experience; and therefore each reader is required to redefine and reconstruct Kant's sytem anew on his own. The resulting isolation is abated in a scholastic environment, where competing and collaborating scholars reconcile their analyses, descriptions, and recapitulations. Hence a 21. Century Kant University even in Kaliningrad.

My own interpretations are very different. In the first place, I am wary of Kant's assumption that each of us entertains and acts upon a reliable will. I find myself unable to identify any set of mental processes as my will other than my present consciousness, my awareness of who I am, where I am, what I have done in the immediate past and what I expect to do in the immediate future. These mental processes appear and arise spontaneously perhaps from some state that might be called subconscious; they are not in any functional sense under separate control by me, but obviously in a very real manner they interact, and insofar as they interact they may be said to control each other.

To the extent that these aforementioned mental processes are accessible to my memory and are amenable to description by me, they summarize and recapitulate in any definable period of consciousness who I am. And it is not any recognizable will, but this constellation of mental processes which are affected, perhaps controlled by each other, but not by any separate and identifiable "me" (ego) with which I explain to myself what I have done, what I am doing, and what I am about to do.

In reviewing these mental processes which I have cited, I am acutely aware of my "actions" affect and will affect my future being; whether they will cause me to be hot or cold, exhausted or refreshed, satiated, hungry or thirsty. I am aware also, that my actions will impinge on my surroundings. I will, temporarily at least, postpone consideration of how what I do will affect other animals, plants, the inanimate environment in the near and perhaps more distant future, and focus on the effects that my actions will have on other human beings.

My experiences of myself are both subjective and objective. They are subjective insofar as they are thoughts and feelings. They are objective insofar as they are accounts, descriptions or images of myself such as are as accessible to others as well as to myself. I consider the classical Biblical injunction "to love thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul and thy neighbor as thy self." I construe love not as eros but as agape; I defer consideration of what might be meant by agape of God.  I construe agape of "my neighbor" as projection on him both the objective and the subjective experience which I have of myself. The objective part is straight forward. The projection of my subjectivity requires further consideration.....

At this juncture I stopped writing, realizing that I should not expect you or anyone else to care about my thoughts ...