GRGR Nothingness (was Re: Pynchon as propaganda)

[S.R. Prozak]

This seems a very Judeo-Christian-centric view. After all, eastern religions demanded nothingness as an essential concept for many years before "Judaism" was created.

----- Original Message -----
From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2003 09:46:17 -0400
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: GRGR Nothingness (was Re: Pynchon as propaganda)

> 
> 
> 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.
> 

-- 
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