teleological principals as a dualistic paradigm

Daniel Petersen · 31 Mar 2012, 22:33 · from 2012-March.txt.gz

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From: danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com (Daniel Petersen)
Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2012 23:33:59 +0100
Subject: (urth) teleological principals as a dualistic paradigm
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Extremely interesting, Marc.  I just want to know what you mean more
precisely by two terms:  'spiritualist' and 'dualism'.  The former conjurs
in my mind the believer in contact with the dead through mediums, but I see
in the dictionary it can also indicate more widely someone who simply
believes in a spiritual reality.  You mean it in this latter sense?  If so,
I assume that's also what you mean by dualism - what philosophers refer to
as mind-body dualism:  belief, essentially, in an immaterial spirit and/or
soul (a belief the majority of whom seem to not accept, since, to their
reductionistic and materialistic view, it is 'non-scientific' as you say).
 I would suggest that such 'mystery' is indeed in tension with
'rationality' in Wolfe, but that they are also in 'play', sometimes
fruitfully, creating a larger world, making a bigger better sense of things
(to Wolfe's way of thinking) even if also being paradoxical - a view
perhaps both Thomistic as well as Chestertonian.

-DOJP

On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 8:25 PM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com> wrote:

> As I was finishing up the commentary for the rather straightforward "The
> Largest Luger", I just wanted to mention exactly where I think Wright
> oversimplified in "Attending Daedalus".
>
> Wolfe is that rarest of individuals as a creator: educated as an engineer
> who served in the military, yet likes to read mysteries, fantasies, and
> literary classics; he is also a spiritualist.
>
> His mysteries are so "detail" oriented that they are clear reflections of
> his engineering background - how is this constructed?  What material is it
> constructed of?  How would that work?  What physical properties would it
> have under these conditions?  Thus the study of cause and effect and the
> grounding in simple physics is overwhelming in these early stories, and
> Wright has picked up on this teleological design scheme in New Sun.
>
> Yet beyond elided cause and effect, there is the true dualism and the idea
> of free will that Wolfe sometimes stresses - that there is a separate and
> equally valid "reality" - possibly one free from the senses and our
> interaction with the physical world.  Wright, I feel, ignores the equally
> strong strain of dualism and its implications in Wolfe's most complex
> creations.
>
> I think this is what makes interpreting Wolfe so very very hard at times:
> there is the seemingly opposite pull of a non-scientific dualism but also
> the insanely ordered feeling of cause and effect, sometimes reversed,
> inexplicable, or hiding underneath the perceptions of our narrators, that
> seem to be pulling in somewhat opposite directions - yet in Wolfe, they
> might sometimes point the same way eventually.
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