GRGR Nothingness (was Re: Pynchon as propaganda)

[Terrance]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 2003-04-07 at 00:42, davemarc wrote:
> > From: Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net>
> >
> > > So far, nothingness seems to mean a lack of God's grace.
> > >
> > > Nothingness is the Christian 'Other.'
> > >
> > Isn't this consistent with Dostoevski's portrayal of Svidrigailov in Crime
> > and Punishment...and with some of the (religious) imagery in Paradise Lost?
> 
> I'd say so. Svidrigailov freely opts for nothingness. A free
> existentialist man.
> 
> Doestoevki is theism in it's most extreme form. In his awareness of the
> nothingness without God.
> 
> If there is no God, all is permitted.
> 
> And if we come out of nowhere we are headed for oblivion. Don't know it
> he said this or was it someone else but it represents his position
> perfectly I think..
> 
> P.

In a Godless world, Man is condemned at every moment to invent Man. 

"Dostoyevsky said, 'If God didn't exist, everything is possible.'
That is the very starting point of existentialism...



See Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism, trans. Bernard Frechtman (NY:
Philosophical Library, 1947), pp 27-28. Originally published as
L'existentialism est un humanisme (Paris, 1946). 

Of course, Pynchon toys with existentialism in the short stories. In his
Ford Application he tells of his youthful wanderings in these
philosophical ports and storms.  

We should do well to consider where it is that Sartre and Heidegger got
the concepts "nothingness" and "das Nichts" in the first place and of
course it's fairly obvious that they got these from Judeo-Christian
theology (the merged streams of Greek and Jewish thought). And Pynchon,
as far as we know, was raised in the catholic faith and read neither
Sartre nor Heidegger. We know that he read Augustine, Aquinas, de
Chardin, and Miguel De Unamuno. We also know that he read Max Weber and
Elaide and Freud and Milton and Thomas Hooker and so on. So perhaps we
need to compare grace or creativity or Genesis with  nothingness the
void (what Dante names Dis) and annihilation or "breaking out of the
cycle" (Blicero). 

We should do well to read the "Essence of Catholicism" (Pynchon alludes
to this text in the novel V.) because the the forces of passion over
rationality, heart over head, faith over reason, can be both creative
and destructive.  Max Weber, sees creativity not in the will of God but
in the charismatic individuals who claim to represent his will. In GR,
the arbitrary creativity of charismatic individuals becomes routinized
in rational and traditional authority. To understand the evil that
Blicero represents (pathetic Bureaucratic man become a God-man), we need
to remember that Charismatic authority is revolutionary. And

"Charismatic authority is thus specifically outside the realm of
everyday routine and the profane sphere. In this respect, it is sharply
opposed both the rational and particularly bureaucratic, authority, and
to traditional authority, whether in its patriarchal, patrimonial, or
any other form." 

Thus Jews and Greeks each arrived independently at the real discovery of
death--a discover which occasions, in peoples, as in men, the entrance
into spiritual puberty, the realization of the tragic sense of life, and
it then that the living God is begotten b y humanity. The discovery of
death is that which reveals God to us, and the death of the perfect Man,
Christ, was the supreme revelation of death, being the death of the man
who ought not to have died but did die. 

Of course, the reply to this tragic sense of life, to what Paul of
Tarsus, the hellenizing Jew and Pharisee termed "Nothingness" was the
birth of Christian theology--death, resurrection, redemption,
salvation...even of the body. Ah, there's the rub.