From: "Alexander Patterson" <nou-AT-clnet.cz>
Subject: PKF: Feyerabend, Holderlin, Chomsky, Keyes
Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2000 10:07:20 +0100


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Feyerabend is returning from a walk in the woods back to his cottage. It is not yet dusk. He runs into a madman. The madman is the famous German poet, Fredrich Holderlin. Holderlin waves his arms at Feyerabend and gestures  for him to come over to a tree. Feyerabend is gracious, so he goes over to the tree where the German poet now waits. Holderlin points to the bark of the tree, and says, "Look." Feyerabend looks and he sees carved into the bark of the tree Bertrand Russell's famous formulation for descriptions: (($x) Fx & (("y) Gy iff x = y)). Holderlin, pointing at the carving in the tree, manages a sentence: "What a schizothemic thought!" he cries, although not outwardly distressed. Feyerabend is gracious and nods. Then he continues on his way home to his cottage, leaving the mad poet.

Shortly after the story is relayed to Chomsky. Chomsky remembers, Mark 8, 24, and thinks, upon this, that Holderlin's situation with regard to his encounter with Feyerabend, was pre-figured by the blind man whom Jesus cured, and who, in the story, had said, just upon gaining sight, "I see men as trees." Chomsky knew that Feyerabend had offered no salvation to the poet.

Patterson's brainchild was everpresent, and he reflected, on a Christian note which he had hoped Chomsky to take more openly, that salvation was part of physical matter, and in a state of quiesent messianicism at all times of human need, which included bread, water, shelter, love, touch, and thus pointed toward a non-crude form of marxist material implication, with the strictest of antecedent- consequent structures. Thereafter Patterson lay in a desert of his own making, Holderlin's encounter, and Holderlin himself,  no longer clear in his mind, and he thanked God for it. For Patterson knew that there was no other way that the story could have been relayed to Chomsky.

Following on a quiet period of recuperation from the desert mind which had taken hold of him, as a cause of the Feyerabend-Holderlin-Chomsky brainchild, Patterson was able to take walks again in the hilly forests of Central Europe. His period of recuperation had brought to him certain beliefs: In modern political discourse Feyerabendian non-conformism was being used by social Cardinals to put controls on the read behavior of human beings, much in line with the Inquisition.

He was able to cite Alan Keyes with regard to this dogmatism of anti-foundationalist arbitrarity in human legal application. Alan Keyes, he had noted several years ago in his Diaries, had spoken to a group of lawyers on November 11, 1996, and had said the following:  "The simple fact of the matter is that being as how as a people we have found no substitute for the principles of the Declaration we ought to go back to them and take them seriously. This is indeed very hard for people who have been brought up to believe that intellectual adults are not to take seriously the existence of God. It is very hard to know how you can turn to a document in which it's taken very seriously. But it's indispensable. You see after all these many years, I think you can reach the conclusion that those who wish us to reject the principles of the Declaration, including just, by the by, the principles of natural law implied in the Declaration, have found no substitute for them except arbitrary will." 

Patterson was stunned having returned to this entry, because these words returned him directly to the center piece of the encounter between Feyeranbend and Holderlin, and the directness of the return was uncomfortable. He noted down the following after a return from a walk:  "Keyes has more support from scientific, theistic, and logical reasoning combined than he thinks. Because what he's talking about in regard to the Declaration, is of course God; and we can, in view of these things and in a proper foundation of the concept of the human person (as he likes to say) in legal theory, declare, on the basis of a necessary conclusion, that God is the integral form of [F] and [G]; and that human beings, or the human person, lacking such an integration, derives that part of his or her existence which is integral from God; and that in this lies the inalienability of the human person. And this should be enough for a rock-hard foundation in the domain of legal theory which will give us the universally relavent regime which we are looking for in our legal world of human rights." He noted further:  "And in these senses creatures are the ways in which God maintains a sufficient quantity of disintegration, that life may be sustained." It was the inscription in the tree bark of the encounter: (($x) Fx & (("y) Gy iff x = y)).  Not least of all a mythical turn had transpired, things had gone Full Circle.

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