pynchon agnostic? II
Abdiel OAbdiel
abdieloabdiel at yahoo.com
Sun Mar 2 07:08:39 CST 2003
--- thomas kyhn rovsing hjoernet <tkrh at worldonline.dk>
wrote:
> On 02/03/03 2:13, "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
>
> > on 1/3/03 11:42 AM, prozak at anus.com at
> prozak at anus.com wrote:
> >
> >> > I find some religions abuse categorical
> thinking in a form called
> >> > "dualism"; gnosticism seems to me, as something
> derived from an older
> >> > religion in which such artificial abstractions
> did not exist, an
> >> > intermediate step and one that is less
> destructive.
> >
> > I'm not sure about "categorical thinking", but I
> agree that the physical
> > "truth" of a bullet hole in the chest is
> incontrovertible.
> >
> In order to operate with this truth,¹ you depend on
> concepts such as
> physical,¹ bullet,¹ hole,¹ chest,¹ not to
> mention truth.¹ That is, you
> depend on (a) language and on its divisions,
> designations, etc. You need a
> defined concept of truth,¹ incl. criteria, etc.
> Truth¹ depends on a system
> in which to evaluate correspondence or identity; two
> singularities cannot be
> nominated instances of the same, i.e. identical,
> unless that same¹ has been
> established as an abstract category that different
> phenomena, etc. may fit
> into. This, of course, is not to claim that what we
> would call a bullet
> hole in a chest¹ is without consequences.¹
>
>
> Thomas
One of the problems with this thread is that began
with a series of errors and false claims about
Gnosticism. To these were added a pile of
contradictory definitions (i.e., "dualism", "myth",
"gnosis" ). These were spliced together with "googled"
quotes taken out of context and grafted to an
argument that should have been dead on a arrival. I
mean, given its author's inability to provide life
support to the hundereds of corpses he parades before
us, bullets holes in their chests, their legs, their
heads and hearts, not to mention in the signs they
carry that read, "my name is dummy, Come, come and
get tangled in my strings", I can't quite understand
why we don't sweep the stage clean and let Mr. Perez
have the spot light.
The history and the nature of Gnosis is an internet
trollers fantasy topic.
What is Gnosis? The troller can hop about like
rabbit, from Alice hole to Looking glass, from
mythmaking to Plato to Jungian dialectic. Notice how
the authorities on the subject are abused. This is
quite common on the internet.
And with Gnosis it is still quite easy to get away
with it. For starters, there is the fact that people
on the internet tend to be a bit "paranoid" in their
thinking. A lot of what ends up on the internet is
politically motivated conspiracy theory stuff and some
folks think that "surpressed" information" and
"alternative Points of View are more available on the
WWW than in a good public library. This is probaly the
case in places like China and Iran, not the case in
the Americas or in Europe.
A lot of what is available on Gnonis is not very
easily digested by non experts. Much of the early
stuff is in German. Some of it has been translated and
some of these translations are good.
Hans Jonas is a good source.
He was Pynchon's primary source.
Nag Hammadi.
Kurt Rudolph.
James M. Robinson.
Elaine Pagels.
Hans Leisegang
R.M. Grant
R. Bultmann
R. McL. Wilson
F.C. Burkitt
G.R.S. Mead
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