Chapter 45: Body & Soul

[Terrance]

Scott Badger wrote:
> 
> Page 25. I'm not even through the intro yet and the Pynchon parallels are
> quite, er, prolific...Haven't gotten far enough to offer any expansion
> (maybe you can rouse Charles) but you might be interested in this:



> 
> "No great Greek ever wrote any recollections that would serve to fix a phase
> of experience for his inner eye. Not even Socrates has told, regarding his
> inward life, anything important in our sense of the word. It is questionable
> indeed whether for a Classical mind it was even possible to react to motive
> forces that are presupposed in the production of a Parzival, a Hamlet, or a
> Werther. In Plato we fail to observe any conscious evolution of doctrine;
> his separate works are merely treatises written from very different
> standpoints which he took up from time to time, and it gave him no concern
> whether and how they hung together." page 10

P seems to like Macrohistory or Universal theories of history, at least
he likes to use them in his fictions. Adams or course, St. Augustine,
Freud, Joachim de Fiore, Etc......that being said, I don't know of any
hard evidence that he read Spengler. 

Spengler is a classic good read. I must say, however, this idea about
the Classical mind is utter nonsense. Sorry, but these universal
theories of the world and humanity are always full of lots of wonderful
but silly things.  The example of Plato is almost too silly to comment
on. There is no conscious evolution of doctrine in Plato's dialogues.
Why not? And, each one takes up a different standpoint. Why? What is
Plato up to? 

First, the doctrine: 

On Platonic Virtue: 
>From The Works of Plato, Jowett Tans, Irwin Edman: 

  The world of Platonic ideas, if it is one thing more
  than another, is a world of values. Shining in implacable
  eternal beauty, it constitutes a metaphysician's dream of
  order amid the harassing and perplexing confusions of the
  world of experience. For though Socrates in the Parmenides
  is made to admit that in strict logic there must be Ideas,
  also, of mud and hair and dust and dirt, as well as of
  Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, he makes the admission reluctantly.
  "What," as Professor Dewey suggests, "is the realm of
  ideas in Plato, but the realm of things with all their im-
  perfections removed." It is a universe constituted out of
  the purified essences of the heart's desire. It is a realm
  of changelessness for a heart saddened by the spectacle of inevitable 
  change. It is order for a mind perturbed by a
  night-mare of endless chaos. It is the cosmos of reason of which
  one may have a glimpse in any thing of beauty, in any
  item of clarity. in the turbulent regions here below the
  moon. It is the pattern which the mind of man may come to know,
  and the life of man and of society within limits exemplify
  and follow.For in addition to being a metaphysician and a poet,
  Plato was also, perhaps above all, a moralist. He was not
  a moralizer. He was a moralist in the grand architectonic
  sense of believing that it was possible to educate men, at
  least a small group of philosophic spirits, to a disciplined
  knowledge of reality, as contrasted with veering opinions
  about appearance; in the light and by the guidance of
  that steady vision of the truth, they could bring to being
  on earth something like a realization, at least a decent ap-
  proximation of the divine pattern of the   good. Plato's
  whole enterprise, taken in the total context of the dialogues,
  might  be said to be that of indicating how the Good Life might
  be lived. The whole body of the Platonic writings aims
  to define the Good Life, to define it, not in a formula, but
  in a series of suggestions, converging around the ideas of
  unity, consistency and validity in the individual soul, and
  in that co-operation of souls which is Society or the State.
  The Early Socratic dialogues indicate the insistence of
  Plato, here closely fo11owing his master, on the identity of
  virtue and knowledge.

On the Dialogues hanging together: 


"Dialectic" is Plato's word, it comes from "dialegesthai,"
  to talk with, and Plato's philosophy is worked out in
  Dialogues. The dialectician must deal with the answers he
  gets to questions he asks, and both questioner and
  questioned are the method of the dialogues. Since there are
  unlimited interlocutors, there can be no system of the
  dialogues. All things may be part of a single system, but it
  is beyond our knowledge according to Plato. Each of us encounters the
real in
  our own way, and these encounters do not constitute a single
  method or system. So the dialogues are fragments,
  philosophical fragments that establish order in a limited
  domain. The order of each dialogue is dialectical in
  endeavoring to preserve and transcend the standpoint of the
  other. Dialectic succeeds, not when one maintains a tension or an 
  agon or a fixed position against the other, but when one
  loses and transcends his position in interaction with the
  other.

  "We have, then, with Adams and Nietzsche, a
  common prognosis of a nihilistic future, and two diverging reactions
that may be
  roughly characterized as Apollonian rejection and Dionysian embrace.
Both
  reactions are incorporated into Pynchon's work, where they correspond
roughly to a
  humanity-centered norm without effective defenders and to the
dehumanizing forces
  and/or conspiracies that besiege it. Yet another antithesis that
correlates with
  these reactions is that between the scenario of an existential
wasteland that
  is prey only to a growing spiritual emptiness and entropy's
indifferent
  ravagings, and the scenario of a world in the grip of fanatical cabals
that
  seek control of the historical process. It would not be an unfair
summation of
  Pynchon's development to say that he moves from the scenario in his
early short
  stories to the most urgent consideration of the second in Gravity's
Rainbow. In
  between, the two possibilities form, in various mixtures and guises,
the
  onto-epistemological cruxes that have fascinated critics" 

  These considerations constitute the parameters that generate
  the complex RELIGIOUS DIALECTIC (my caps) of Pynchon's
  fiction: a fluctuating tension between nostalgia for cosmic
  harmony and commitment to amoral power worship, superimposed
  upon the fluctuating tension between the notion of a
  neutral, structureless universe and that of a universe
  infiltrated by insidious structures of Control.

  *The Gnostic Pynchon*  Dwight Eddins,  Cutter's University
  Press  1990