Paleface Pynchon?

[Terrance]

Dave Meury wrote:
> 
> But it seems to me that this problem of rejecting the excluded middle
> covers many subject areas.  The truths of the world as ontologically
> concrete facts versus the world as experienced are often seen as contraries
> like light being either particle or wave -- can't be both, can it?  Maybe
> someone can fill us in on the transcendental unity of apperception.
>  (Terrance?)

Maybe not.  

I would take Seb's advice and use that Kant Generator, but
that little bit of Plato stuck in Kant's Aristotle, that
transcendental reality (Kant's Noumenal) we cannot know,
would only gum-up the words, knotting my sentences and
paragraphs with Beings and Linguistic Turns no Copernican
Revolution in Science or Philosophy could Solve to
disentangle. These are the days not of miracle and wonder,
but of
language. Now, we look to the Word, no gods to silence the
machine gun syntax of our despair here in an
existentialist's no man's land where G.E. Moore despairs
that the problems of philosophy are not scientific, but "the
problem of trying to get really clear as to what on earth a
given philosopher MEANT by something which he said." 
Of course, as Rudolph Carnap, probably only a foot note in
the introduction to philosophy of games we play in
postmodernism, (a required course for all hep freshman
nowadays, those stodgy old professors long sent out to
pasture with their dusty greek tomes), wrote in his Logical
Syntax of Language, "Only then will it be possible to
replace traditional philosophy by a strict scientific
discipline, namely, that of the logic of science as the
syntax of the language of science." 
Replace, reinvent, murder and create, out with the old, in
with the new, down with my father's world and up with mine,
a big sky-scraper erected on the rubble of war torn wastes,
a Copernican turn, a linguistic turn, death of god, of
metaphysics, of the novel, of the novelist, of the
characters, of plot, of the reader, turn, turn, turn, to
everything.... 

	In merging Rahv's paleface and redskin traditions, such
writers are creating a literature that's both brainy and
potent, a literature fecund with ideas and in sync with the
invisible thrum of the
zeitgeist. The finest  pale-red books not only capture our
cultural
vertigo, they also attest to the vitality of literature
today. They prove that
rumors of the novel's  demise -- repeatedly promulgated by
scholars like
Harold Bloom and  Alvin Kernan -- are vastly exaggerated,
that
literature has managed to  survive deconstruction and
decanonized
curriculums, the dot-com revolution and the siren call of
Hollywood, that
young authors continue to revere the art of writing even as
they reinvent
its form. 
      --MICHIKO KAKUTANI, New Wave of Writers Reinvents
Literature

Reinvent the wheel, but to be a wheel and not something
else, it must turn, turn, turn. Such turnings are often
accompanied by a blinding (Kant had a blind spot didn't he?)
and by high hopes and enthusiasm, hoopla and fanfare--Great
Instaurations, Copernican Revolutions, Linguistic Turns. 
Turning and Turning in some Irishman's gyre, mere anarchy,
some revelation at hand.  Or down the stairs with a bald
spot in the middle of Eliot's mind or that Hamlet's To Be or
not Being at the bottom looking up to Buck Mulligan
descending or Pirate Pretice with a load of bananas. Into
the existentialist's flux of being, the ontological flux of
coming-to-be and passing away, like that stream or snot
green mother of consciousness one cannot step into twice.
The flux of being becomes an ontic flux, the flux of meaning
a semantic flux in which the "text" never has the same
meaning twice, for meaning depends on a particular
interaction or transaction (Pragmatism's contribution to
reading process theory) of "text" and reader (can we put the
reader in quotes too?). Knowledge is perception says
Theaetetus. Plato's Socrates
like Pynchon, never really concerned with getting the other
guy's ideas as the other guy would get them if he were not a
playful puppet on the stage, takes this idea and treats it
as if it were an alternative formulation of Protagoras'
doctrine (the mantra of the sophists old and new) that "man
is the measure of all things," and treats both as founded on
the view that all things are in flux and perception is but
the momentary interaction of the two. What does that
Mondaugen say? Bandwidth or something? Anyway, at the
extreme, this flux cannot be signified by the Word. But how
then do we speak the truth, must we be silent? Kant, as I
suggested above, 
was a lot of Aristotle (branchesof knowledge that have
become scientific and A's
Theoretical, Practical and Productive and K's Pure,
Practical, Judgment, Judgment BTW is where pleasure and Pain
are addressed) with a piece of Plato, and Aristotle (being
Greek) considered this problem of flux and the Word:
Because they saw that all this world of nature is in
movement, and that about that which changes no true
statement can be made, they said that of course, regarding
that which everywhere in every respect is changing, nothing
could truly be affirmed. It was this belief that blossomed
into the most extreme of the views above mentioned, that of
the professed Heracliteans, such as was held by Cratylus,
who finally did not think it right to say anything but only
move his finger, and criticized Heraclitus for saying that
it is impossible to step into the same rive; for HE thought
one could not do it even once.
Oh boy, well I think Cratylus worked in the granary and took
too much mold in the 60s. Anyway, that piece of Plato in
Kant is the noumenal, both
Plato and Kant use this term "noumena," Plato opposes
noumena to horomena, or things perceived by the mind to
things seen, while  Kant opposes noumena to phenomena or
appearances. Kant differs from Plato and this goes to your
question, at last, in that for Plato the noumena are
knowable, but in Kant they are not. For Kant, Nature as an
object of sense can be known theoretically, but there is a
subersensible that we cannot have knowledge of. Kant, like
Aristotle is a reflexive thinker and disciplinarian. So the
disciplines, sciences, branches, all depend upon the mind's
reflexivity. The highest principle in the sphere of 
knowledge is the original synthetic unity of apperception by
which different intuitions are united in one consciousness.
It is through this principle that the knowing mind
determines itself, for the categories of the understanding
correspond to the conditions of such unification. This
principle is analogous to thought thinking itself in
Aristotle. But such thinking can be paranoid or dull or
folly. 

>From Jolly Jane and Mr. Niles 

The day after the Hurricane came

Jolly:
jingle bells on a sacred cow
come dance like a scrap in the wind
come out of the world of the mind
come to the sea and dance with me
come leave all your paper behind
such  vain deluding joys
are no match for flying toys
why read from dead men's books?
Why think of thoughts all thought
Come out and learn what nature teaches
Why children laugh and dance at beaches
And why the waves are in love with the wind
 
what in the wind will we find?
that all men like milton are blind
like homer, like lear, afraid of their fear
like samson crushed neath a stone, 
like little lost sheep, 
like dorothy searching for home.

A blustery day that lifts the hay
And makes the horses sneeze
Oh come out and play in the wind today
Oh please, Oh pretty please


And what will I wear in the wind
The TV would say, with commercials and news
How that tube is a peddler of profits and dreams
How it tricks and dresses us up 
beguiles with styles and fashions new
a newspaper hat on the a tattooed jew
and basement gothics
dyed black in a fascist's boot
soldier's fatigues on the cold steps of monuments
Freaks from the ward green ragged and stained
in a rusted can with tongue flapping disdain
coffee shirts, business ties on murdering trains
I've nothing to wear in the wind

Just come as you are, just come out and play
 

where politics coils in corners clean
and hides in hotels with sugers and cream
and whips the boys with its cane
where the lawyer holds a barb wire note
the banker a debt to a slaughtered goat 
where there is a pleasure perverse without pain
all sheep dressed up in the blinding terrain
searching for a ditch or a little dogs bone
I think I'll stay in here alone

But there's  magic out here in the wind
You can not dig blindness out of the mind

but what shall we find in the wind?

http://antioch-college.edu/~andrewc/home/kant/body_kant_glossary.html