NP Re: article: Leni Riefenstahl: Ethics of an Auteur

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Millison" <millison at online-journalist.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, August 09, 2002 10:37 PM
Subject: Re: NP Re: article: Leni Riefenstahl: Ethics of an Auteur


> Humans make mistakes and often fail to live up to their ideals.  Human
> crimes are committed by humans, however, not by the gods, or religions, or
> by any abstract ideal.  As Pynchon says (paraphrasing loosely), it's not
> Technology or God or Democracy or Nazism that's trying to kill me, it's
the
> guy over there pulling the trigger of his gun and pointing it at me.
>

Can you tell me where he says so & give me the page number? I don't
remember. I think his novels are more about self-organizing systems:

"Summary of Paradigms
With this brief background sketch of the origins of modernism as a reaction
to the medieval paradigm of "occult" sympathies and influences, we can now
summarize the essential points that distinguish the premodern, modern, and
postmodern paradigms:

. Premodern paradigm-Age of faith/superstition.
Knowledge is derived from authority; meaning is derived from sympathies
between things, as in the Hermetic doctrine of "As above, so below."
Causality is of four types: material, efficient, formal, final. Guiding
metaphor: Created organism.

. Modernist paradigm-Age of reason/empiricism/science.
Age of analysis/reductionism/individualism/mechanism. Efficient causality,
mechanical causality, is the only way things move or change. Guiding
metaphor: Machine.

. Deconstructive Postmodern paradigm-Age of relativity.
All knowledge as correspondence between ideas and reality is reducible to
linguistic and/or social and historical constructions. Causality is context
dependent. Meaning is foundationless. Guiding metaphor: Text.

Implicit in this characterization of postmodernism is a move beyond the
limitations of reductionism and rational analysis-beyond rationality. Such
postmodern moves are seen, for instance, in the anti-rational philosophies
of Paul Feyerabend (1924-1993), and of deconstructionists and
superstructuralists such as Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), Michel
Foucault (1926-1984), Jacques Derrida (1930-), and Jürgen Habermas (1929-).
"Postmodernism" in this sense is seen as the final end of metaphysics and
even of philosophy, where not only rationalism, but all meaning and
knowledge are declared to be without foundation."
http://www.deepspirit.com/sys-tmpl/contd5/

>
> At 10:25 PM +0200 8/9/02, Otto wrote:
> >So why 2000 years of Christian history are full of the contrary of what
> >Jesus has said?

Let me add: and Popes who claim to be infallible, beginning with St. Paul.

Otto

"Stendhal: "God's only excuse is that He doesn't exist.""
(quoted by John Barth, "How To Make a Universe" at "The Friday Book", NY
1984, p. 18)

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