V2nd, C3

[Mark Kohut]

just want to connect (later)  Wittgenstein with notions
very akin to some of the James you quote here...
Lots say and know it......

I think P finds many ways and images to embody 
the pluralism of perspectives in the modern age, a key
meaning. 20th Century is NOT the 13th, fer sure...



----- Original Message ----
From: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Fri, July 23, 2010 6:45:21 PM
Subject: V2nd, C3

You’all've made some interesting obs these last couple of days while
the monks and nuns here kept me busy. Sorry to've been so absent. To
chime in where things tickled my subject most:

Joseph noted in response to my take on the local perspectives:  “I
have a different response. Not that they don't perceive the role or
power of Europeans, but that they are unable to think of resistance as
a route to a personally meaningful change.  Their cultural identity is
steeped in 4000 years of imperial overlords, foreign and domestic.
Gebrail's thought that Paradise is wishful thinking is more
revolutionary than any bomb.”
And I agree whole-heartedly. Feuerbach figures in here, in my opinion.
Trying to keep some perspective on how much P. would have had time to
read at the ripe old age of 24, it occurred to me I read Marx and
Feuerbach about that age, and I was a hick.

David wrote:

“One final note about the closing lines that Laura quoted: ‘Vision
must be the last to go. There must also be a nearly imperceptible line
between an eye that reflects and eye that receives.’ On a literal
level, this refers to eyes of the assassinated victim (i.e., there's a
point at which the eyes go dead and just reflect light instead of
receiving it). But As Laura noted, this is also Stencil's
self-reflection (all the sections end with self-reflection, I think),
for Stencil has crossed this point. Of course a statue's eyes
reflect--and do not receive. But I think that Stencil (or his
embodiment) only fully crosses this point at the end of this section.”

I keep thinking about this multiple perspectives thing and I think it
relates here, so I went on a rush search (using a rare day off to
explore the in’net) and I found this on James’ Pluralistic Universe:

“Originally delivered in Oxford as a set of lectures “On the Present
Situation in
Philosophy,” James begins his book, as he had begun Pragmatism, with a
discussion of the temperamental determination of philosophical theories, which,
James states, “are just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole
push ... forced
on one by one's total character and experience, and on the whole
preferred — there
is no other truthful word — as one's best working attitude” (PU 15).
Maintaining
that a philosopher's “vision” is “the important thing” about him (PU
3)....” More at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/

Giving the nod to Alice and the emphasis on American Lit and wisdom, I
do think it is likely that P. would have had some awareness of James
even at a young age, because of his background, and, if, as seems
likely, The Education figures in this section (and others), would it
not also seem to fit that James accounts for something here, too? I
agree with the assertion that there is more than AmLit to account
for--We know, for instance P. read Wittgenstein--but I suspect a
predisposition to it as ground material. So, could the failing vision
be emblematic of a faltering philosophical perspective?

Notions of epistemological pluralism and even anarchistic pluralism
were emerging at the end of the 1950’s, too (
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/ ). I can’t help but
wonder.... Still, I fear putting too much emphasis on the ideas in the
novel, lest anyone think I mean to interpret it as a “novel of
ideas,” which I do not mean to do. But the serendipity, dare I say,
synchronicity, of these items seems too prevalent to dismiss out of
hand.

-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."