Determinism & Apocolypse: the Grim Irony of Our Fortunate Fall

[Michael Bailey]

Thanks for all of these elucidations.

So, maybe the opposite of gnosticism is positivism, sort of?

"...to value more highly the little, unpretentious, cautious truths,
arrived at by rigorous methods, than those vast, floating, veiling
generalities for which the yearnings of a religious or artistic era reach."
(Nietzsche quote at the beginning of _Postivism_ by Richard von Mises)

I'm not going to pursue this, at least until I've learned the argument,
but based on what I know so far Pynchon's books are more positivist in nature,
(Wittgenstein swam in the positivist stream, too, didn't he?) and
depictive - and critical -
of Gnostic phenomena...

but I could easily enough be getting that wrong, so never mind