depth of gravity in Gravity's Rainbow

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Positivism may have "promised a utopia of reason," but the positivists were not Cartesian rationalists. Newton notwithstanding, they explicitly acknowledged that their work was based on the extreme empiricism of the Immortal David Hume. 


----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Mark Kohut 
  To: pynchon -l 
  Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2008 10:58 AM
  Subject: depth of gravity in Gravity's Rainbow


  In the George Eliot chapter of a new book,
  "Proust Was a Neuroscientist", Mr. Lehrer
  writes:

  ""Positivism" , a new brand of scientific philosophy...
  promised a utopia of reason...."

  "like all religions positivism promised to explain everything"...
  ...."But the first question for the positivists, and in many ways
  the question that would be their undoing, was the paradox of 
  free will. Inspired by Newton's theory of gravity, which divined
   the cause of the elliptical motions found in the heavens,
  the positivists struggled to uncover a parallel order behind
  the motions of humans." *

  We know how this concept plays out, updated, in Gravity's Rainbow.



  "Newton, not so naive, said: "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but
  not the madness of people". "







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