Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

["James Piat" <piat1 AT bellsouth.net>]

Dear Steve,

I am not familiar with the pros and cons of Gnosticism and have not
wittingly been part of that discussion. I say this not to criticize the
discussion but merely to clarify my role in it.   OTOH I am following and
enjoying your interesting and informative comments about literary vs
scientific approaches.  I appreciate the mere fact that you find the subject
worthy of comment.  And I agree with much of what you say about the value of
humility vs arrogance.  I think however I may be more sympathetic to the
scientific approach than you seem to be.  I think, for example, that the
scientific approach is humble.

In any case I've commented on a few places where you and I seem to see the
distinctions between the literary and the scientific somewhat
ifferently  -- not to deny the truth in what you say (as I happen to think
what you say is true) but more to further the discussion.

> So, there it is: The scientific approach is a disordered attempt at
mastery
> over Truth; The literary approach is one of obedient submission to the
order
> of Truth.

Interesting!  You seem to equate science with attempts to master the truth
and literature with attempts to understand truth.  I think science is most
scientific when its practitioners submit to the data.

I think what we know as individuals is, in a sense, self evident or
evealed  -- I take science as an attempt to collate these individual
experiences or observations in such a way so as to help determine what is
true for us all -- a bit like democracy at its best works in the political
domain.


>In fact, Percy repeatedly said that when he forced is writing,
> when he inserted himself into it and controlled it, when he was trying to
> make an argument in his fiction, he always produced garbage. He had to
> submit to the act of it and let the stories find themselves.

Yes, I find this to be true even in my own attempts to express something.
The more I try to impose my order or view of things the less satisfying the
results.  Better to submit to the data --even when all the data seems to
come from within!


>Unity in the Cosmos cannot be
> achieved through our own efforts to know things -who could look back on
the
> twentieth century and think otherwise?-- but only through submission to
the
> order that is revealed to us.
>

I think one could also make the opposite argument  -- that many of the
horrors of the twentieth century were the result of those who thought they
had the revealed truth  -- rather than by those who sought to know the
things.



> Also, one last thing, in C.S. Lewis' Abolition of Man, he outlines very
> clearly how our struggle to master the world has only resulted in the loss
> of the very things that make us human.  In the most monstrously ironic
way,
> the Gnostic drive for mastery over self and nature is the very thing that
is
> giving nature a mastery over us -though we haven't yet blown ourselves up,
> we might be slowly losing those very human attributes that keep us from
> doing it.

Sounds to me a bit like the communist argument against capitalism.   Does he
credit Marx?

Cheers,
Jim Piat