inconvenience

[Mark Kohut]

Should read "makes men cling" not menacing...and a couple other obvious
typos. Sorry,
I sent accidentally while preparing to copyedit.

On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 6:11 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> either mine or yours. We have explored the meanings
> in Pynchon.
>
> Some have wondered who this great writer about America, this
> great novelist of ideas about America (and their failure as ideals so
> often);
> this voracious self-educated writer who went after whatever he could
> to create and deepen his vision; this writer who wrote that his influences
> were right there, on the surface of his prose; who spins Emerson and
> Melville
> and so many others into his allusions and associations,-- who else he has
> read.
> With the concept of chance in AtD and a few other key concepts, some wonder
> about America's greatest philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce. I have here
> anyway.
>
> CS had some of his most important work--essays,papers, whatever we call
> them---appear on
> popular monthlies of his time. Wide early readership, a couple of them
> became the best introduction
> to some key notions. They have been anthologized and are part of
> about every intro book on Pierce
> written. Books available when TRP was reading everything.
>
> A long introduction to make one point: he only had to read these couple
> papers to be able to scavenge
> some ideas and words even for his work. His deeply American work as
> Pierce's philosophy is the
> deep fountainhead of America's major contribution to philosophy,
> pragmatism. William James himself said so; some of Pierce's
> major ideas influenced the more famous great philosopher, L Wittgenstein
> when they were
> brought to him and discussed like the world depended on it by Frank
> Ramsey, young genius who died
> young.
>
> Second point and subject header: I have recently reread one of those early
> pieces. *The Fixation of Belief.*
> Look it up. How a lifetime of scattered living and supposedly thinking
> makes one see it all differently. (Just as
> rereading *The Stranger *after a lifetime made it almost an entirely
> different book for me.) Anyway, in that essay.
> Pierce is tackling Descartes and his "certainty' over knowledge. One can
> lift it from that real context and see it
> as a piece on anyone's certain certainty, so to speak. Psychologically
> seen, which is the late mind surprise:
>
> "Still oftener, the distinctive dislike of an undecided state of mind,
> --[I interject a reference to Fromm's Escape From Freedom,
> a book which has been circumstantially proven to be a pynchon influence in
> its themes]--exaggerated into vague dread of doubt, makes menacing
> spasmodically to the views they already take. The man feels that, if only
> he holds to his belief without wavering, it will be entirely satisfactory.
> Nor can it be denied that a stead and immovable faith yields great peace
> of mind, It may, indeed, give rise to *inconveniences [emphases mine],*
> as if a man should resolutely continue to believe that fire would not burn
> him, of that he would be eternally damned
> if he received his *ingesta *otherwise than through a stomach pump."
>
> Who knows, eh? but we know that inconveniences in Pynchon are happenings
> that challenge one's beliefs in action, played with ironically as well by
> that fun guy TRP, not just
> minor problems we solve as the word has come to mean, it seems.
>
>
>
>
>