M&D: Cowart article/ch.35

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Paul Mackin wrote:

> The only connection might be that language has a feel of indeterminacy
> about it (which P likes to underscore) that is analogous to the feel of
> modern physics. Yes, I was being playful and analogical in applying
> Heisenberg to history and other writing--as I assume (like Terrance)
> Heisenberg was being in applying Aristotle to physics, which is nothing
> against Aristotle, an early analogizer and manipulator of available
> concepts found lying around the house and/or Academy.

Thanks Paul, I want to try to get back to Cowart's fascinating article on M&D.

I don't think Heisenberg is being playful, but rather indiscriminately alluding to
Aristotle's energeia or entelecheia, and dynamis.

http://www.knight.org/advent/cathen/01124a.htm

Now if only Aristotle had found lying around the house and/or Academy some cannon balls
and stood on the shoulders of Theophrastus and dropped them on the toes of the nearest
Sophist, but this wouldn't do, no, he would need balls of various weights and then perhaps
with the help of his Great student, he could roll them up and down the peripatos and would
not have confused the effects of gravity's pull with the distance travelled.

>
>
> Don't know if it's being too Panglossian, but I've never really minded that
> a certain amount of so-called indeterminacy seems to persist in the way
> we describe and  understand the modern world. Where's the problem in that?
> Just another manifestation of mortal existence and a rather minor one
> to boot. Like St. Augustine I tend to identify it all with Original
> Sin--another early analogy popularized by that African genius.
>
>                 P.
>

I do want to return to Cowart and History, so let me pick up from Augustine and work back
to Plato and Aristotle/Wicks and History. Augustine, as you well know is a Plotonist of
sort, but with an important disagreement with Plato that is germane to our current
concerns:
Augustine does not retain Plato's Logos in the pre-existing pattern of reality.

In a previous post I attempted explain how Plato's Logos, as described in Timaeus, relates
to a major difference in his view of Change, from that of Aristotle. The phenomena of
Change is essential to an understanding of how each treats History.

For Plato, the universe was made and is governed and piloted according to a
pattern discernible by Reason, while the order of reason is resisted and BROKEN
by the materials in which that order is embodied (Timaeus 29B).  In contrast, Aristotle
seeks the causes of change in the science of physics where the causes of motion and change
are two:
Necessity, which is IN the matter of things or animals, and the End, which is IN the form.

Augustine presents the classical Christian account of God as creator and Man with free
choice of the will. Turning to Augustine, Confessions xii.13, and we find Augustine
reading Genesis without a Logos in Plato's sense. For Plato, something  pre-exists and is
the pattern for creation. For Augustine "to know everything together without any
vicissitude of time," is a claim that the pattern *itself* is the result of a creator God.
In 'On the Free Choice of the Will', Augustine argues that "because of justice, (here is
Plato's--and others, for this idea is quite prevalent in philosophy at this
time--comprehensive justice--very interesting to Pynchon imho) whatever is equal or
superior to the mind that possesses virtue and is in control does not make a mind a slave
to lust." Of course whatever is inferior can not do this. "voluntas et liberum arbitrium."

Paul, as well you know, this notion of original sin and brokeness or indeterminacy has
various representations in  philosophy and literature East and West, but to return to
Cowart's "The Luddite Vision: Mason & Dixon," Cowart states: "[Pynchon] exposes the
fallacy of scientific rationalism at the moment of its great efflorescence in the
eighteenth century." And, "Pynchon suggests that the subterranean realm represents a
vital, if dangerous, alternative to Enlightenment self-delusion. The darkness of this
realm figures the something tenebrous at the human heart--and at the heart of history
too."

Let me send this off and see what happens and we can pick it up from here if you are
interested.

"Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and of time, A moment not out of
time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a
moment in time but not like a moment of time...Men have left God...In an age which
advances progressively backwards?" .... "We are children quickly tired: children who are
up in the night
and fall asleep as the rocket is fired; and the day is long for work and play."

T.S. Eliot


Terrance