Pavlo Vlives!

[Lear's fool]

> --
> A dialogue between the Intellect and the Senses.
>     I: It is by convention that color exists,
>        by convention sweet, by convention bitter.
>     S: Ah, wretched intellect, you get your
>        evidence only as we give it to you,
>        and yet you try to overthrow us. That
>        overthrow will be your downfall.
> 
> Democritus
> http://www.readin.com/books/presocratics


What a shame we have but fragments of this great mind not
overthrown!

And even in those fragment and what the others have made of
him we may discover a consistent philosophy that includes a
theory of the cosmological processes and of human affairs. 


This is the dialogue of knowledge by the senses or the
"bastard" and knowledge by the intellect or the
"legitimate." That metaphor would struggle to life again and
again in Plato, Augustine and later, Shakespeare would give
it a Semantic presentation in his King Lear. Shakespeare's
best, I think. What has this to do with Pynchon? Well,
nothing, but it is interesting that for Democritus, the
animate flock together and the inanimate flock together.
Birds of a feather flock together, says Aristotle, but
Democritus says, not only birds and all irrational
creatures, but the inanimate as well--"the pebbles on the
beaches." Like to like. 
  
Atoms and the void; being and non-being; the origin of
knowledge in objective images; truth and opinion; the
perfection of human life in Cheerfulness, moderation,
friendship; and a materially manifested relationship of a
beneficent god to man and to that quarter where all thought
is done (the mind) and the universe where necessity governs
all things and like is attracted to like and attracts like. 

Oh! what cheerfulness and moderation are the fragments from
Abdera.