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Hi Mike. Thank you for your questions, but just so you know up front: I am not a scholar of Percy, like quite a few on this list; I’m just a layman lover of his prose and insights.
It has, also, been many years since I last read Thanatos …. and so I shall lay low in answering your question about his intentions when writing that particular story.
Your first question is interesting to me: Was Percy enamored of scientism? I had to look that word up, to be certain on the import of your question. Webster gives two definitions:
2.
an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science
applied to
all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences,
and the humanities)
Percy
studied medicine, and was therefore schooled in science. I think it’s more than safe to say, however, that he didn’t place an “exaggerated trust” in science. His thinking was quite to the contrary, as
reflected in this well-known quote from Lost in the Cosmos:
“You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological
advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”
In saying this, however, Percy was not expressing a distrust of science.
He was focused more on the fact that a person can still fail — despite
the undeniable advances of scientific knowledge — to see himself (or herself), or to see or understand his (or her) place
in the “cosmos.” And perhaps he thought the scientific advances are the cause of some of this dislocation — I’ll leave that question to the scholars here.
In any event, I don’t think Percy would, for example, join the ranks
of today’s science deniers on the right. I think, moreover, that he would be quite disturbed by the difficulty so many have today — due to polarization, and folks living in information silos — with understanding just basic facts (such as the fact that the
2020 election was not stolen).
Anyway … my thoughts.
Karl Terrell
On Nov 5, 2022, at 4:45 PM, Michael Larson <larsonovic AT gmail.com> wrote:
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