The Gnostic Pynchon

[Terrance]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> Very interesting, the idea introduced by Vaska that lit crit techniques
> might be a very desirable tool in the world of commerce. I'm sure it's
> well founded. What could be more important to material success than
> knowing how language actually works? I heard somewhere that successful
> CEOs tend to have even bigger vocabularies than college professors. What
> immediately comes to mind however is (and stop me if I'm wrong) the very
> pronounced left-tending anti-capitalist SOURCE of deconstruction (not to
> imply it might not also have right-wing adherents). What in other words of
> the idea that what French intellectuals REALY wanted was to topple
> capitalism--but that when they saw (after '68) that this was not going to
> be possible by  DIRECT means, it was decided instead to attempt the deed
> INDIRECTLY by developing techniques for exposing flaws in the language
> upon which capitalism depends.
> 
> Not that the strategy is likely to work. Language is still plenty good
> enough for capitalistic purposes. Terrance, I've changed my mind. Let the
> kid study lit.
> 
>                                                 P.

Right now he's more interested in Nature (not Darwin exactly
but...). 

You raise a very interesting issue: 

Was Augustine vs the Pelagians a dress rehearsal for the
Reformation and for Gravity's Rainbow. Very possibly.

My scattering brain cells to the wind on this one, sorry for
the spelling and grammar. 

 Augustine is on Dave Monroe's mind too, so we can talk
about Peter Brown and all, masturbation, children... If I
remember correctly it was a child's voice that first spoke
to Augustine, but anyway, Pynchon's interest in infant
baptism (anabaptists) and Plato convinces me that he was a
skeptical reader of Weber as with almost everything else he
read imho. When recent essays on American Pragmatism &
Pynchon surfaced, plus your comments on what I think is a
mock pragmatic WE/They SYSTEM in the Roger pissing on the
table episode, got me to thinking of Dewey again. Dewey, no
stranger to controversy in education,  was influenced by
Darwin, in fact he gave a lecture on the influence of
Darwinism on philosophy which emphasized the creative power
of Darwin's work. Biology/Philosophy/Art/History.  A-and I
bet you a dollar for Puritan's Hershey Bar that Pynchon was,
unlike I think the way Weber is read today, attracted to
Weber's interests in world religion and his total disregard
for subject-boundaries, but I digress, again.

According to Dewey, Darwin introduced a mode of thinking
that was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and
hence the treatment of Morals, Religion, and Politics.
Dewey, in another lecture, inveighs against the conceptions
which he says reigned for two thousand years, conceptions
resting upon the assumption of the superiority of the fixed
and final and upon treating change and Origin as a sign of
defect and unreality. In his LOGIC, he attempts to do for
the modern day, what old Aristotle did for the science and
culture of his day, but listen to this, here is how he
summarizes the difference between the ancient and modern
conception of NATURE: 

"The change in the conception of Nature is expressed in
summary form in the idea that the universe is now considered
a s open an in process while classical Greece thought of it
as finite in the sense in which finite means finished,
complete and perfect."