Otherworldliness vs.this-worldliness

[grip at netcom.com]

On Tue, 11 Jul 1995, Bonnie Surfus (ENG) wrote:

> On Mon, 10 Jul 1995 LOT64 at aol.com wrote:
> 
> > In a message dated 95-07-10 10:34:47 EDT, you write:
> > 
> > >I'd say there are metaphysics and metaphysics.  In V., the Conspiracy
> > >that
> > >Stencil imagines (and which is reinforced by P's imagery) is of some
> > >malign
> > >Otherworldly Presence whose mission on earth is to enhance the
> > >eventual
> > >triumph of entropy--the movement toward inanimation.
> > >
> 
> I don't know.  I see the "Otherworldly Presence" as something more 
> "worldly," something Pynchon illuminates through what Robert Holton reads 
> as a retrieval of the sublime.  But what he exposes is only, partial, 
> fragmented, achronological.  This is how history is always situated, 
> despite the imposition of a false stasis.

Somewhere in GR is a reference to Arthur Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being. 
In the context of the dialectic on the forms of "worldliness", one might 
look at what Lovejoy had to say.

<Speaking about the two great strains of Platonic and neo-Platonic thought>
"...The cleavage to which I refer is that between what I shall call 
otherworldliness and this-worldliness. By otherworldliness I do not mean 
a belief in and a preoccupation of the mind with a future life. 
<This>...may be the most extreme form of this-worldliness;..."
"By `otherworldliness', then ... I mean the belief that both the 
genuinely `real' and the truly good are radically antithetic in their 
essential characteristics to anything to be found in man's natural life, 
in the ordinary course of human experience, how ever normal, however 
intelligent, and however fortunate. The world we now and here know -- 
various, mutable, a perpetual flux of states and relations of things, or 
an ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thoughts and sensations, each of them 
lapsing into nonentity in the very moment of its birth -- seems to the 
otherworldly mind to have no substance in it; the objects of sense and 
even of empirical scientific knowledge are unstable, contingent, forever 
breaking down logically into mere relations to other things which when 
scrutinized prove equally relative and elusive."

(pages 24 and 25 of Great Chain of Being)

By the way, although this was first published in 1936, it is still in 
print. I lost my first copy 10 years or so ago but found three copies on 
the shelves of Barnes and Noble a few months ago.

grip