MDDM: ch. 67 "Garden Pests"

[Paul Mackin]

Sounds all very Neoplatonic.  Reason, science, and law as the content of the
divine consciousness. Perhaps it would help to turn to St. Augustine on the
Trinity. Augustine saw traces of the Trinity in the act of human cognition,
consciousness, and self consicousness, the latter being man's  contemplation of
himself. But if with postmodernism comes the recogniton that meaning (human
meaning) is at root meaningless, then this downgrading of the human personality
may also be in a sense a downgrading of the one God in three divine persons who
we can it we wish  (without of course any actual meaning being attached to the
exercise) interpret as Reason, Science and Law.

Food for thought.

P.

Terrance wrote:

> Otto wrote:
> >
> > Only the American sun? Isn't that provincialism? Meanwhile I think that
> > postmodernism is the post-WWII branch of modernism. What do you think of the
> > Barthes-quote I posted, applied to Pynchon in general? Especially the last
> > sentence, because I was thinking of you when I typed it last night:
> >
> > "In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say
> > *writing*), by refusing to assign a *secret*, an ultimate meaning, to the
> > text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an
> > anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to
> > refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his
> > hypostases--reason, science, law."
>
> God and his what? Hypostases? The ground? The foundation? The essence?
> The underlying reality? God in three persons?
>
> Whatever, I can't quit figure out how/why writing does this.
> Also, the world itself is not a text or any possible sum total of texts.
> Is it?
> Why exalt the text thus? Why reduce literature to writing and exalt the
> text--equate it with the world.  The world is always both pre-textual
> and post-textual in that it gives rise to and yet transcends all actual
> or possible theories, including postmodern theories.
>
> Shakespeare is literature. Shakespeare is  surely not the same thing as
> **writing** a post to the Pynchon list or writing a letter to my aunt
> Lucy in Jamestown NY. Also, remembering my days as a Jesuit, it seems to
> me that most theological/textual  activities rarely involved the fixing
> of anything. I think most lawyers would agree that the same is true of
> the law. Hell, while science may be read as a text of fixed, determined
> and determining laws it is far from that. Isn't it?
>
> I don't like postmodernism philosophically,  I think it's sophism in a
> semantic epoch, but I do like the application of theories to literature,
> including some pomo ones.