SLSL Intro "Our Common Nightmare"

[William Zantzinger]

--- Otto <ottosell at yahoo.de> wrote:
> >
> > Evil?
> >
> > Yes, believe me, some people kill for no reason at
> > all.
> >
> 
> That is not necessarily evil, but in most cases
> sick.

 
> Good and evil are of course absolutely relative
> terms. A decisive definition
> for all possible cases would be just another
> logocentric myth.
> 
> 'Say at last--who art thou?'
>      'That Power I serve
>      Which wills forever evil
>      Yet does forever good.'
> 
>      Goethe, Faust
> 
> Just as every cop is a criminal
> And all the sinners saints
> 
>      Rolling Stones, Sympathy ...

---------------------------------------------------

Our common nightmare, Victorians (Darwin), Ethics
(Dewey). 

Doug wrote: 
"The New Convergence, By Gregg Easterbrook" 
Science luminaries who
in the '70s shrugged at faith as gobbledygook —
including E. O. Wilson and the late Stephen Jay Gould
and Carl Sagan — have endorsed some form of
reconciliation between science and religion. ..."
continues at:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/convergence.html


"My reading at the time also included many Victorians,
allowing World War I in my imagination to assume the
shape of that attractive nuisance so dear to
adolescent minds, the apocalyptic showdown."

    "I don't mean to make light of this. Our common
nightmare The Bomb is in there too. It was bad enough
in '59 and is much worse now, as the level of danger
continued to grow." 

"Damn them all to hell!"
Planet of the Apes 

Culturally and in many ways socially, the Victorian
period (often divided as Early, Mid, Late) saw the
outset and display of the biggest problems of the 20th
century. This was period when change rather than
stability came first to be accepted as normal in the
nature of human outlook. Ancient foundations of
religious belief were eroded, among intellectuals, by
scientific advances, especially the biological
discoveries of Darwin. 

"…here to preach, like his colleague Teilhard de
Chardin, against return." GR.539.12

In GR the dialectic of Science and Religion = THEM

Teilhard de Chardin's _The Future Of Man_ was
published in 1959. 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a visionary French
Jesuit, paleontologist, biologist, and philosopher,
who spent the bulk of his life trying to integrate
religious experience with natural science, most
specifically Christian theology with theories of
evolution. In this endeavor, he became enthralled with
the possibilities for humankind, which he saw as
heading for an exciting convergence
of systems, an "Omega point" where the coalescence of
consciousness will lead us to a new state of peace and
planetary unity.

There are many "Omega Points" in GR. All these Gnostic
"absolute points" and the "one way paths" (against
return) to them are ridiculed in GR. 

Heresy & the living planet

One could assume that Pynchon is not ridiculing de
Chardin's convergence of science and religion.  It is
not de Chardin, after all, but a colleague of his that
preaches against return in GR. 
Moreover, de Chardin preached heresy and his ideas
included a living planet. Nevertheless, De Chardin's
Heresy and his living planet do not include a
scatterbrained mother earth and his heresy remains
Christian. de Chardin welcomes as inevitable, the
glorious end of the species, the destruction of the
earth, the second coming and the disappearance of the
cosmos. 



Ethics: Dewey's ethical theory discredits traditional
searches for a summum bonum and the
various dualisms found in classical ethics, e.g., the
separation of individual and community, means and
ends,  intrinsic goods and instrumental goods, moral
goods and non-moral goods,  moral virtue and
intellectual virtue, etc.  He replaced this with a
commitment to the power of practical intelligence via
a systematic use of the scientific method, for finding
solutions to practical, moral problems.   So while the
subject matter of science and ethics differ, the
methods and forms of solving their various problems do
not. Another important feature of Dewey's ethical
theory is that there are no moral absolutes.  There
is no single good which must be pursued in every
situation, there is no single first principle of
ethics. Instead, each moral situation is a unique one
with an irreplaceable good (cf. Dewey, "Reconstruction
in Moral Conceptions," p. 627).  In some situations,
virtue is the highest good.  But in other situations,
it could be health, knowledge, or presumably even
wealth or pleasure (Chicago School, Aristotle). 










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