(np) ranging afield

[Mark Kohut]

yes, it seems the mean genius who was Wittgenstein actually cuffed hard
one student, maybe causing his ear to bleed..........

From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 10, 2011 2:44 AM
Subject: (np) ranging afield

so, Paul Auster.  Pretty good stuff.  Like it a lot!  Sometimes even
really zingy!

Possibly one of the best bits is the nuggets of literary history -
mention of Wittgenstein making the rounds of his former students from
when he taught grade school asking their forgiveness for how mean he
was, and not one of them would, is how much of a creep he had been...

or, and this is the one that got me thinking, one of his characters
writes a book set in US at the end of the 19th cent, sort of just
before AtD perhaps
and has somebody named Ellery Channing giving a copy of his bio of
Thoreau and a compass that belonged to HDT, to Emma Lazarus while
riding on a train with her, so it's like how Thoreau's moral compass
was passed to Emma Lazarus

so I looked up Ellery Channing and missed by a generation, because
although Auster was referring to William Ellery Channing the poet
(1818-1901) I found myself getting intrigued with his uncle, William
Ellery Channing the preacher, 1780-1840, who was involved in the "New
England Liberal" church movement.  Apparently there were the Old
Calvinists, the Hopkinsians, and the Liberals -- and out of this I
think somehow the Unitarians and Universalists emerged...

Calvinism involving something about inherent vice being the most
important, perhaps sole constituent of human nature - and then you've
got your predestination, so some are elect and some are not -
--- which would seem to me to make it pretty irrelevant to try to be
good...or to try and help anybody else
--- but old WE Channing actually knew the Hopkins of Hopkinsianism and
they were friends.  Hopkins was a good dude, very antislavery and
alienated most of his congregation by speaking out against bad things,
gave away much of his income to charity

so the theology of Calvinism may have conduced to virtue and only its
misinterpretation leads to horrendous self-righteous elites...
sort of like Marxism's misinterpretation leads to revolutions (I read
recently that he specifically said revolutionary groups shouldn't
seize power)


Anyway, Channing and your Liberals were kind of moving away from
predestination toward "Arminianism" which floats the idea that people
have tendencies to both good and bad, and that God's help is available
to all to strengthen the tendencies to good.  And that there is free
will.
Which makes a lot more emotional sense to me.


Anyway, there was a pretty strong intellectual current in them days
regarding that difference of opinion.  But having paved the way for
Transcendentalism, Dr Channing believed of the Transcendentalists that
they went too far.

Of course I find ecclesiastical history endlessly fascinating!
Doesn't everybody?


I wonder where the original William Slothrop would fit?  Would he be
an original New England Liberal?
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