Religious analysis was Pynchon and fascism

[Michael Joseph]

> Good stuff. The religious content in "texts central to the Western
> Rationalist Tradition" interests me. If allegiance to values "reinforced
> by mythical rather than by rational means" is enough to qualify as
> religious I find some expressions of postmodernism as religious or quasi
> religious, which amounts to the same thing.  I'm thinking of the
> crumbling of intellectual grounding and how it is seen not only as
> disturbing and confusing but as liberating and empowering to groups that
> heretofore were shut out of the the universal order of things. This
> sounds to me like a not-at-all-invisible invoking of the religious
> notion that we are all God's children and are brothers, etc. etc. and
> our dignity as such requires that we be equally important parts of the
> Universal System. Diversity and all that, which I'm not against, but
> it's a value hardly based on any rational foundations that I know of.
> Since there are no rational foundations anyway.
>
> P.
>
Rationalism is suffused with irrationality and visa versa. We may agree
that it is better to accept arguments that can be justified according to
logic or by appeal to universality, but only through an apriori commitment
to a belief in the superiority of reason. (Yesterday, I was conversing
with three missionary students who asked me if I had any reasons for not
believing in the afterlife, and I gave a very rationalist response, of
course otherwise I'd be crazy, wouldn't I?) I think according to similar
reasoning, we may share an apriori belief in the sacrality of the
individual life, and find acts of slaughter and torture, even capital
punishment, repugnant, and hence find repugnant texts in which slaughter,
torture, etc. are valorized. While we might also dislike these texts for
other, aesthetic or ethical reasons, a religious analysis would attempt to
engage with the underlying precritical beliefs, such as a belief in the
magnitude of macho individuality or the right of the nation or of mutual
erotic attraction. The thing to bear in mind is that the power of any one
of these beliefs must be construed to govern other beliefs, and ultimately
explain the text in a way that we find compelling. So, I don't mean to
argue that religious analysis is about finding that x has a penchant for
complex sentence structure and obscure diction, but rather that x has a
kind of archetypal intuitive sense of the pure value in linguistic play,
and in the creative authority of art-that for x, creativity forms an
essential, irreducible, defining quality of the human in some way that
transcends cultural constructedness. Ah, sorry that this tends to collapse
at the end.


Michael