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

[Paul Mackin]

Otto: i'm surprised that you are quoting from the deepspirit website, which
belongs more to the crackpot world of Doug Millison than anywhere else. If you
had included this guy's fourth "paradign" which he calls "constructive
postmodernism" the true nuttiness of his formulations would have been
immediately apparent.

On your pope comment, it was St. Peter, not Paul, who  started the line of
popes and the infallibility idea come into being much more recently.

P.





Otto wrote:

> --
> -- 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)
>
> __________________________________________________________________
>
> Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - http://mail.yahoo.de
> Yahoo! präsentiert als offizieller Sponsor das Fußball-Highlight des
> Jahres: - http://www.FIFAworldcup.com