MDDM World-as-text

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 3:55 PM
Subject: Re: MDDM World-as-text
>
> So, Pynchon's texts endorse  pluralism
> (Philosophy-- The belief that no single explanatory system or view of
> reality can account for all the phenomena of life). Pluralism,
> philosophically speaking, is as American as apple pie.
>

Or should be.

>
> At least three critics have argued that Pynchon is influenced by
> American Pragmatism and Pluralism. Somehow, considering his age, his
> education, this makes more sense to me than saying he read a bunch of
> postmodern literary theory.
>

Agreed, and as I've said before I believe that a lot of contemporary
literary theorists have learned from his art and not vice versa.

Other quotes from the interesting links you've posted:

"The attitude, reminiscent of what Dewey called the "quest for certainty,"
amounts to a particular way of understanding the world which reduces meaning
to a single set of truths and a single hierarchy of value. Although each
version of the attitude is grounded in a different philosophical language,
each is led in practice to exclusion, intolerance and attempts to eliminate
difference. Against this logic of domination, an indigenous attitude
characterized by commitments to interaction, pluralism, community and growth
became apparent to non-native people who rejected the colonial attitude and
became part of a long intellectual tradition that includes classical
pragmatism, anti-racism, and feminism"
http://www.uoregon.edu/~uophil/faculty/spratt/native.html

I remember that we talked about Dewey during the V-reading.

"The classic and the Christian systems were both systems of ideas, attempts
to seize the eternal morphology of reality and describe its unchanging
constitution. The imagination was summoned thereby to contemplate the
highest objects, and the essence of things being thus described, their
insignificant variations could retain little importance and the study of
these variations might well seem superficial. Mechanical science, the
science of causes, was accordingly neglected, while the science of values,
with the arts that express these values, was exclusively pursued. The
reverse has now occurred and the spirit of life, innocent of any
rationalizing discipline and deprived of an authoritative and adequate
method of expression, has relapsed into miscellaneous and shallow
exuberance."
http://dept.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/whitman-per-santayana.html

 Otto

>
> I argue that the "classical" pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce,
> William James, and John Dewey, is a way of thinking embedded in a much
> broader tradition whose origins are found in Native American philosophy,
> in particular in the philosophical perspective of the Algonquian and
> Iroquoian peoples of the north and northeast. To demonstrate this point,
> I trace the central ideas of pragmatism from their origin in Native
> American philosophy, through their influence along the shifting borders
> between Native and European America, through their influence on the
> Black nationalist and feminist movements of the 19th century, to their
> emergence in the work of the classical pragmatists. While no other
> history of American philosophy develops the connections I present, there
> is nevertheless substantial evidence that the central commitments of
> pragmatism emerged first in Native American philosophy and then again
> and again along the borders within North America where cultural
> differences were contested and their coexistence sought.
>
> http://www.uoregon.edu/~uophil/faculty/spratt/native.html
>
>
>
> http://dept.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/whitman-per-santayana.html

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