Determinism & Apocolypse: the Grim Irony of Our Fortunate Fall

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The "earlier Wittgenstein" was a positivist -- a hero of the Vienna 
Circle -- but he quickly found himself more and more at odds with 
positivism. The "later Wittgenstein" rejected the "earlier Wittgenstein."


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Bailey" <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, October 02, 2009 10:19 PM
Subject: Re: Determinism & Apocolypse: the Grim Irony of Our Fortunate Fall


> 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
>


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