Letter to Paul on His 65th Birthday

Autumn 1988

Dear Paul,

the title of the issue suggests the intimate form of address, dear Feyerabend!

10 years ago you taught the long-established at the ETH Zurich how to shudder, swinging your crutch like a virtuoso and performing the anti-academic Paul Feyerabend-dance with refreshing empathy. Philosophy Live!

Following the insider tip (or better: the talk of the town?), I sat there, 1 year before that, having thrown classical studies as a degree as an astro-psychologist in the moult in the overcrowded auditorium. To have witnessed your first appearances in Zurich, which decades before had reacted with deadly seriousness and anxious conservativeness to the Dadaism born in this city (in a 0.75 km linear distance to the place from which you spoke) and also mine childhood that hadn't exactly made it easier for me is still in the aftertaste of the memory a lovely satisfaction.

In this important phase of my life - as always when I listen to my inner voice - I once again had to contend with the prejudices of my surroundings, because the astrowave was only just beginning. You came just in time for me during my three-year stopover in Z. And I knew, even without understanding all the scientific details of your explanations: I like to hear the message; I understand you!

As a non-reader I am dependent on such rhetorical fireworks and as an esoteric mole I feel related to other subversive beings, provided they are peace-loving.

If your generosity in your current jubilee year adds a particularly bold annual ring accordingly, I am confident that you will forgive me if I reduce your work and activities to just the one pithy sentence "anything goes" (it's so good to remember!) : great truths and simplicity go hand in hand as a matter of course.

These 2 words (always expressly marked by me as a quote from your flood of words) were often my secret weapon in discussions about my way of thinking and working, especially since in these cases I not only refer to you in your capacity as "dear Paul", but as a long-standing US-prof led into the field.

Secret weapon because I first held it behind my back - like Old Shatterhand once did his Silberbüchse - and then I was amused by the puzzlement or outrage when my opponents were not prepared for "something like that" and started rowing.

Secret sometimes, too, if I didn't feel too much desire or strength to convince an ignoramus of his narrowness, since there was a danger of his world view collapsing and then therapy would have become more necessary than a chivalrous discussion tournament.

So PKF remains an open secret for many!

I thank you on behalf of all honest outsiders and autodidacts for these 2 exquisite words, which I always knew inside me, but probably never could have formulated so beautifully - and certainly not so competently.

The fullness of your thinking, which is as parallel as it is jumping across, and spherical-complex associating together with critical illumination is also quite astrological and supple Nitroglycerin in the washed-out shafts of linear thinking.

When I met you over a plate of spaghetti or something similar in Z., this sparkling food was the appropriate course in my life menu at that time.

In response to my written request for your dates of birth (I was now curious as to what intention of the cosmos was hidden behind the cipher PKF and which manifested itself in such an original way), your postcard, kept short with an Capricorn sense of duty, came - but immediately. In the pub you then willingly gave me all sorts of life data to rectify the time of birth, which I will return to you at this point with the advance of 2.5 minutes (= 22:57:30 CET) - solemnly, as is understood from the current occasion.

This is not a great birthday surprise and certainly not a good idea for a gift, as I considered your data more as a loan and treated it with friendly respect.

Since your consciousness, wandering through the fields on the dial of your cosmogram, arrives at the lunar node of your birth according to one of the possible methods in the first half of the year 1989, an extremely deeply touching new beginning is imminent. Assume that you will move on to even bigger issues.

For this reason, and also in order not to bore you with the usual ones, I am giving you your birth picture this time in a heliocentric version as a compass for the next, for all of us, as many years as possible.

Sincerely, Alexander