IVIV (1) Thinks He's Hallucinating

[Mark Kohut]

Alice,

all interesting but none of it relevant to the phrase in IV, imho, nor in Pynchon's world.......TRP hands Descartes his ass in a cart in AtD........

Descartes' "rationality" is part ot the sickness of the West, TRP may be suggesting in his only-suggestive associational but steady way.

--- On Mon, 8/24/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: IVIV (1) Thinks He's Hallucinating
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Monday, August 24, 2009, 6:57 PM
> >   "'Thinks he's
> hallucinating.'" (IV, Ch. 1, p. 1)
> 
> Is she talking to us? No, Alice, silly girl, it's the way
> people talk.
> But, my dear Humpty, it's as if she has walked on stage and
> now
> provides an authorial comment on another player, in this
> case, Doc.
> 
> And suppose he does think he's hallucinating?
> 
> Suppose we change the sentence from the vernacular, add the
> subject
> pronoun,  so,   "HE" thinks he is
> hallucinating.
> 
> He Thinks,  He is.
>  "He thinks, therefore He is"
> "He is thinking, therefore He exists"
> 
> "Cogito, ergo sum" (Usually translated in English as: "I
> think,
> therefore I am", but can be less ambiguously translated as
> "I am
> thinking, therefore I exist" or "I am thinking, on the
> account of
> being"), sometimes misquoted as Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo
> sum
> (English: "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am"), is
> a
> philosophical statement in Latin used by René Descartes,
> which became
> a foundational element of Western philosophy. The simple
> meaning of
> the phrase is that if someone is wondering whether or not
> they exist,
> that is in and of itself proof that they do exist (because,
> at the
> very least, there is an "I" who is doing the thinking).
> 
> (fr. WIKI)
> 
> 
> Descartes, recall, seeks in his own individual existence a
> truth that
> is independent of that existence. After much study and
> travel, He
> makes himself the object of his study. From his famous
> statement above
> it DOES NOT follow that YOU or ME or ALICE or anyone else
> exists. Each
> thinker must follow the process that Descartes went
> through, founded
> on his own "Cognito," in order to establish for him or her
> self the
> truths that Descartes established for Descartes.
> 
> The roots of this Turn inward in Western thought,  can
> be traced to
> Protagoras (Man is the measure of all things) and to
> Xenophanes who
> writes:
> 
> The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,
> While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red
> hair.
> Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,
> And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their
> gods
> Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would
> shape
> Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.
> 
> And is evident in Montaigne's essays, in William James, in
> Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Walt Whitman, Dostoyevsky, others.
> 
>