Prosthetic Paradise (was Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #1012

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

> 
> rj wrote:
> >
> > The tools are in place, and have altered irrevocably the very conditions
> > of human survival. In fact, it is humans who now have to learn to adapt
> > to a technological environment. In a very real way the balance between
> > man and machine has shifted.


What is "the balance"? It's important to  distinguishing
tools from machines, technology from technological activity,
the manipulation of resources for an end in view from
biological applied technology. For example, when humans add
grasshoppers to an environment that did not have and support
them previously, we do not get environment plus
grasshoppers, but a new environment. New technologies change
what we mean by "knowing" and "truth"; they alter those
deeply imbedded habits of thought which give to a culture
its sense of what the world is like--a sense of what is the
natural order of things, of what is reasonable, of what is
necessary, of what is inevitable, of what is real. Think of
how language is changed by new technology and how language
affects thought, action, and expression. This is why I think
Pynchon insists that humans not be put on the scale. Humans
are not to be valued for their usefulness, understood by
their purposes, but for their unique human elements and
antecedents. On this, Pynchon pulls away from Plato, Neo or
Christian Platonism. Though a dialectician, he rejects
Plato's dying words in the Phaedo, words that would, with a
blending of Aristotle and others, define the world and man's
place in it for thousands of years. Pynchon returns to the
philosopher Plato rejects in favor of a Reasoned universe in
the Phaedo, Anaxagoras, not the Reasoned universe, but
scatter-brained mother earth.