P & Teilhard ----goes out for Ish

[Jochen Stremmel]

> Here is the beginning of Teilhard's essay from September 1946:
>
> ONE EARLY DAWN in the “bad lands“ of Arizona, something over a year ago, a
> dazzling flash of light, strangely brilliant in quality, illumined the most
> distant peaks, eclipsing the first rays of the rising sun. There followed a
> prodigious burst of sound. … The thing had happened. For the fist time on
> earth an atomic fire had burned for the space of a second, industriously
> kindled by the science of Man.
>
>          But having thus realized his dream of creating a new
> thunderclap, Man, stunned by his success, looked inward and sought by the
> glare of the lightning his own hand had loosed to understand its effect
> upon himself. His body was safe; but what had happened to his soul?
>          I shall not seek to discuss or defend the essential morality of
> this act of releasing atomic energy. There were those, on the morrow of the
> Arizona experiment, who had the temerity to assert that the physicists,
> having brought their researches to a successful conclusion, should have
> suppressed and destroyed the dangerous fruits of their invention. As though
> it were not every man’s duty to pursue the creative forces of knowledge and
> action to their uttermost end! As though, in any event, there exists any
> force on earth capable of restraining human thought from following any
> course upon which it has embarked!
>
>
> And the first explosion of an atom bomb "something over a year ago", July
> 16, 1945, was neither in Arizona nor in Nevada but
> in New Mexico.
>
>
>
>
>
> Am Fr., 14. Feb. 2020 um 14:03 Uhr schrieb ish mailian <
> ishmailian at gmail.com>:
>
>> And, this explains why other strong readers here have recognized that
>> Pynchon's affinities with Emerson, for example, and with James and
>> Dewey and Darwin, and with Chardin too, have to do with this notion
>> that we evolve creatively, there may not be a Telos, in Chardin's
>> sense, or even in the sense of consciousness, Atman or whatever, but
>> the creativity, as Pynchon says of Education when he cites Henry Adams
>> evolves and evolves.
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 14, 2020 at 7:55 AM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > A Jesuit AND a Scientist. And, as he makes an appearance in GR, and as
>> > Jesuits are important to Pynchon's novels and as his ideas influenced
>> > many of P's generation, including, of course, Don DeLillo (_Point
>> > Omega_), note that the title of DD's novel reverses a concept known as
>> > the Omega Point, much as Pynchon reverses Teilhard's Return in GR;
>> > Teilhard believed the universe was evolving towards a greater level of
>> > complexity and consciousness, so the essay or Chapter in question,
>> > Chapter 8 of the famous book both authors use and reverse,  _The
>> > Future of Man_, a book a lot of hip people were digging back when GR
>> > was composed, is used thematically, in an inverted madness it haunts
>> > the American Landscape and Consciousness, as an haunting inversion-- a
>> > psychological and physical entropy, an escape-velocity- history of no
>> > future on Earth.
>> >
>> > Why would he argue that it is impossible to stop the bomb project?
>> >
>> > Now there's the rub, there's the connection to C.S.  Peirce and the
>> > American metaphysical branch of philosophy. This is how it becomes
>> > clear that Peirce is more likely, as Mark has intimated, a parodic
>> > figure.
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>