Today's discussion question

[Mark Kohut]

Alice writes succintly:
ICan it be that history has placed too much emphasis on ideas and
ideals, on dogmas and political concepts?
If these are only soft things we fall back against to protect and
advance private gains and interests, how meaningful are they to
history? Why study these ideas, the history of ideas, if they don't
really matter in the end, if what matters is money and resources,
weapons, and fortune?
And how can we untangle grand ideas like Liberty or Democracy from the
forces of religion and economics and science?"---alice
__________________________________________________-
 
I think this a very good thematic reading of Pynchon.......a novelist of "ideas' 
who is anti- their explanatory power for much of our understanding of 'life 
and history.

From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2013 7:26 AM
Subject: Re: Today's discussion question


We started with Mencken, whose attacks on what he called Puritanism,
and sometimes New Puritanism, was at the core of his critique of the
American People. The quote from Mancken about the American turning to
the East is typical of his wit, his utter disdain for most Americans
and for their failure to appreciate anything that requires a true
turning of the mind toward anything other than the garbage culture it
has made and the hypocritical zeal it leans on whenever it is asked to
think or act with conviction. Mencken hated the fact that America's
New Puritans hated art. On religion, there is nothing said by Marx
that Mancken doesn't say better. Yes better, with a a magical touch
that it reminds us that Mancken was no more a  misanthrope than Swift,
and that his disdain for Americans was equal to his love of American
Language.

We moved on to conversions and the difficulties a Westerner faces in
turning East, to Buddism, Hinduism...and we moved on to very person
experiences with the failure of some, we added in the history of
violence against Muslims by Buddists in Burma.

In his Introduction to 1984, P notes that Orwell, for all his
presience, did not see the religious wars coming. P then publishes
AGTD, a novel that, like M&D, GR, and V., idives deep into the history
of Balkenized lives, the dividing of peoples along lines tangled and
mangled by conflicts, profane and sacred. If all the Great Religions
advocate Peace and Brotherhood, Charity and Humility, so on, why all
this war and hatred?

ICan it be that history has placed too much emphasis on ideas and
ideals, on dogmas and political concepts?
If these are only soft things we fall back against to protect and
advance private gains and interests, how meaningful are they to
history? Why study these ideas, the history of ideas, if they don't
really matter in the end, if what matters is money and resources,
weapons, and fortune?

And how can we untangle grand ideas like Liberty or Democracy from the
forces of religion and economics and science?

And then, as Mencken reminds us, is language. What the use of one word
means, what the user intends, what the interlocator understands. What
meaning is lost over time, out of context, and what new meanings of
terms are applied by history.

We do fly through the clouds. I am reminded of the novel,
Trans-Atlantic again, the men have disconnected the communication
cables they wouold use to speak to eachother. Other communication
systems must be devised. The math, the experiences of war, the shared
numbness and fear, the daring and the fortune, the mail that must get
through.

Perhap Mencken is right and Emerson, a man Melville called a Plato who
speaks through the nose, transcends nothing. He only finds it a useful
diversion to strip himself down to the naked eyeball in the woods.
Maybe all philosophy, all religion, is mindfucking afterall. We turn,
as T. S. Eliot's hollow men and women feared to because we need hope
or we want to believe in something other than the tangle of lines.

The other day thousands of men, on their knees, facing Mecca, prayed
under my window. The street was closed. Alternate side of the street
parking was suspeded. Rhamadan ended. The men finished their prayers,
went home to eat. The violence excalated. Not here, but there, where
they and their religion come from. Our President droned in Yemen, cars
explded in Iraq, so on. Whyare these men here on their knees? Are they
here to learn from the West? to Teach the West about the East?

In a couple of days my son will return from the East. He is a soldier.
I am nervous now because he is so close to me and still so very close
to all that violence. I fear most that he will be damaged in the
spirit. His violent job will turn him against the East, against the
West. Or that both will turn against him. Or he will think they have.

And of Nishida Kitaro, a Japanese philosopher who took an interest in
the West. He had a difficult time as he was attacked by the Left and
the Right.


from Wiki:

According to Masao Abe, "During World War II right wing thinkers
attacked him as antinationalistic for his appreciation of Western
philosophy and logic. But after the war left wing thinkers criticized
his philosophy as nationalistic because of his emphasis on the
traditional notion of nothingness. He recognized a kind of
universality in Western philosophy and logic but did not accept that
it was the only universality."[1]

Having been born in the third year of the Meiji period, Nishida was
presented with a newly unique opportunity to contemplate Eastern
philosophical issues in the fresh light that Western philosophy shone
on them. Nishida's original and creative philosophy, incorporating
ideas of both Zen and western philosophy, was aimed at bringing the
East and West closer. Throughout his lifetime, Nishida published a
number of books and essays including An Inquiry into the Good and "The
Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview." Taken
as a whole, Nishida’s life work was the foundation for the Kyoto
School of Philosophy and the inspiration for the original thinking of
his disciples. The most famous concept in Nishida's philosophy is the
logic of basho (Japanese: 場所; usually translated as "place" or
"topos"), a non-dualistic concrete logic, meant to overcome the
inadequacy of the subject-object distinction essential to the subject
logic of Aristotle and the predicate logic of Kant, through the
affirmation of what he calls the "absolutely contradictory
self-identity", a dynamic tension of opposites that, unlike the
dialectical logic of Hegel, does not resolve in a synthesis, but
rather defines its proper subject by maintaining the tension between
affirmation and negation as opposite poles or perspectives.
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