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Nietzsche, Whitehead, & Levinas

2012-01-23T10:26:00.000+05:30

Among recent philosophers, perhaps only Whiteheadcan claim to have accounted for the life of non-human objects, though hisposition is haunted by other serious difficulties. The problem is that everyonewants to avoid the naive versions of realism, but they also don’t want to bedriven into the patent absurdities of solipsism, since it is far safer not toadopt any metaphysical position at all. Having painted itself into a corner onthis issue, contemporary philosophy is left with the sole emergency measure ofinventing sophistical compromise phrases such as “internal realism,”“quasi-realism,” or “the mad human subject positing the very gap between realand ideal.” But all of this reduces reality to its effect on humans: a positionbetter known simply as idealism. NAIVEIDEALISM 427 Graham Harman PHILOSOPHY TODAY WINTER 2004

Braver accuses Nietzsche of backsliding intonoumenal naiveté of a sort that Hegel had ended, and that even Putnam is praisedfor transcending (159). For despite Nietzsche’s apparent dissolution of realityinto infinite interpretations, “this metaphor of interpretations brings in theidea of the text that gets interpreted, masks [that] imply an original face,and so on” (159). Braver’s verdict is clear: “[Nietzsche’s] Kantian way offraming the issues is strewn with conceptual traps…. Another revolution isneeded” (159). For Braver that revolution is found in the later Heidegger, withthe early Heidegger paving the way. AFESTIVAL OF ANTI-REALISM 203 Graham Harman PHILOSOPHY TODAY SUMMER 2008

I think my first bet would be on Levinas standingthe test of time a lot better than many of my friends think he will. So manypeople seem to view Levinas as just a preachy old finger-wagger who talks aboutGod too much. That’s not the Levinas I know. Then again, the Levinas I know wasencountered through Alphonso Lingis, who isn’t exactly a preachy oldfinger-wagger who talks about God too much. Maybe you need to encounter Levinasthrough Lingis to be able to see Levinas as an utterly cutting-edge thinker,which is exactly the way I see him. 4th and final Philosophy Today article now posted by doctorzamalek“Levinas and the Triple Critique of Heidegger.” HERE.

Integral God: Footnotes to Plato

2012-01-19T10:02:00.000+05:30

Intimations of an Integral God: A lecture at CIIS | Footnotes to Plato: 'via Blog this'

Slide 8: Emmanuel Levinas, who was heavily influenced by Buber, finds God in the infinite responsibility that takes the ego hostage in any authentic face-to-face encounter with another. He writes: “The free [human being] is dedicated to [her] fellow; no one can save [herself] without others. The inside-out domain of the soul does not close from inside” (Humanism of the Other, p. 66). The soul is infinite, and so it seems it cannot find wholeness without relating to divinity, which for Levinas is the holiness of others. This notion of a soul unable to close from the inside also reminds me of Teilhard de Chardin’s question as to why “we are not more sensitive to the presence of something on the move at the heart of us that is greater than ourselves?” (The Human Phenomenon, p. 120).

Slide 9: An integral God would not only foster community, but would deepen the intimacy of our relationship to the cosmos. Teilhard’s love of matter goes a long way in this direction, but I think the German shoemaker turned mystic Jakob Boehme’s vision of the relationship between God and creation may have even more to say to us. The physicist Basarab Nicolescu distills the essence of Boehme’s cosmology of divine self-manifestation as “a threefold structure leading to a sevenfold self-organization of reality” (Science, Meaning, and Evolution, p. 90)."

Goal of Evolutionary Nature « Sri Aurobindo Studies

Sri Aurobindo points out that if it is the goal of Nature to awaken man to awareness of the supreme Reality and liberate him from the action of Nature in the world,...

Don Salmon on Evolution

2012-01-08T10:15:00.000+05:30

This is a collection of excerpts from a book I wrote with my wife, Jan Maslow entitled Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness: Seeing Through the Eyes of Infinity, based on the Integral Psychology of Sri Aurobindo. The previous essay in this series examined the controversy over the idea of direction or progress in evolution. Frank Visser wrote a very interesting response (see "Theories are Confessions: Response to Salmon"). I originally posted my response to Frank's article in the Integral World Forum ("Up the Evolutionary Stream Without a Paddle"), which Frank took and posted here at Integral World. If you have questions or criticisms, but don't have the time to put together an essay, I invite you to join me over at the Integral World Forum or on the Integral World Facebook page.

My intention in posting these excerpts is not to claim that when looked at together, the findings of neuroscience and evolutionary biology prove some kind of directionality or purpose to evolution. Rather my goal is to elucidate what I find to be some extremely interesting parallels between the two. Whether this suggests the working of any kind of "quasi mystical" force or is merely the result of a "blind, uncaring shuffle through Chaos"[2] is left for the reader to decide. Ken Wilber's Evolutionary View Gets a Trim With Ockham's Razor ...
http://www.integralworld.net/salmon10.html

PhilPapers is a comprehensive directory of online philosophical articles

2012-01-07T23:49:00.000+05:30

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Wilber's Aurobindianism

2011-10-28T13:05:00.001+05:30

For The Turnstiles by DGA on Oct 27, 2011 8:10 PM

To draw some threads together: Suppose it is true that the argument of Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality is predicated on positions taken by Nagarjuna, Plotinus, Schelling (and by extension Hegel), and Aurobindo. Also suppose that it is this argument that predicates most of the theoretical work in integral studies that follows after it. Problems accumulate.

There are problems in the way Wilber advances his claims on Nagarjuna. Specifically, Nagarjuna's description of emptiness in no way coincided with Wilber's, where Emptiness is reified into Spirit and made to equate with the metaphysics of Meister Eckhardt. Raphael Foshay's essay "Tension on the Left" in a recent JITP addresses this in part as well, as do my essays in The Integral Review. At a minimum, this warrants a detailed and uncompromising comparative analysis of Wilber's appropriation and deployment of Nagarjuna's methodology.

There are problems in the way Wilber describes Plotinus' philosophy. Brian Hines' essay "What Wilber Gets Wrong about Plotinus" is convincing enough, to my mind, that a similar detailed and uncompromising reconsideration of Wilber's use of Plotinus in the context of the rest of his work is warranted.

There are problems with the way Wilber deploys German Idealist historicism. This is the topic of all three of my contributions to The Integral Review. My point is not that Wilber misunderstands Schelling or Hegel (he may or may not, I do not have a pony in that race). My point is that this kind of idealist historicism is untenable logically and reproduces the social relations that produced it (e.g., it is a cipher for imperial capitalism). I think this warrants a similar reconsideration of Wilberian natural history and cultural history.

Charles I. Flores' essay on Aurobindo demonstrates related problems with Wilber's appropriation and use of that writer, strong enough in my opinion to open an investigation into the validity of Wilber's Aurobindianism.

In all four cases, care must be taken to consider how these doctrines are used in the broader context of Wilber's argument. This is a genealogical analysis I am proposing: what are the consequences of disproving this or that premise? What happens to subsequent claims that, before, had followed from that premise?

This is separate from the broader question of the reason behind Wilber's arguments, which are also very suspicious to my mind and to others. My point is that if Wilber's premises are faulty, then his broader systematic claims are definitely subject to critique as described above (and should have been since Jeff Meyerhoff's book or before).

Four Theses of Flat Ontology

2011-09-13T16:18:00.001+05:30

The Democracy of Objects
Levi R. Bryant
OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS, AN IMPRINT OF MPUBLISHING, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LIBRARY, 2011
Contents
Dedication
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Towards a Finally Subjectless Object
1. Grounds For a Realist Ontology
1.1. The Death of Ontology and the Rise of Correlationism
1.2. Breaking the Correlationist Circle
1.3. The Onto-Transcendental Grounds of Experimental Activity
1.4. Objections and Replies
1.5. Origins of Correlationism: Actualism and the Epistemic Fallacy
1.6. On the Alleged Primacy of Perception
2. The Paradox of Substance
2.1. Introduction
2.2. Aristotle, Substance, and Qualities
2.3. The Paradox of Substance
3. Virtual Proper Being
3.1. The Mug Blues
3.2. Deleuze's Schizophrenia: Between Monism and Pluralism
3.3. Virtual Proper Being
3.4. The Problem With Rabbits and Hats
3.5. Žižek's Objecting Objects
4. The Interior of Objects
4.1. The Closure of Objects
4.2. Interactions Between Objects
4.3. Autopoietic and Allopoietic Objects
4.4. Translation
4.5. Autopoietic Asphyxiation: The Case of the Lacanian Clinic
5. Regimes of Attraction, Parts, and Structure
5.1. Constraints
5.2. Parts and Wholes: The Strange Mereology of Object-Oriented Ontology
5.3. Temporalized Structure and Entropy
6. The Four Theses of Flat Ontology
6.1. Two Ontological Discourses: Lacan's Graphs of Sexuation and Two Ways of Thinking Being
6.2. The World Does Not Exist
6.3. Being is Flat
Bibliography
Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.9750134.0001.001
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The Life Divine is the culminating point of the Indian mind

2011-08-21T18:15:00.000+05:30

Home > E-Library > Magazines > Sraddha > November 2009 > Contents

The Dharma of The Gita Sri Aurobindo 7

Sri Aurobindo Arabinda Basu 10

Veda Vyasa’s Mahabharata in

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri Prema Nanda Kumar 25

Sri Aurobindo and Vedic Riks Dr Sampadananda Mishra 39

The Path of Nachiketa: The journey Alok Pandey 47

Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine:

The Immortal Text On The Divine Truth R.C. Pradhan 54

Sri Aurobindo and Uttarpara Speech Trija Roy 69

The Mother Abides Nolini Kanta Gupta 89

A Canadian Question 92

Twin Prayers 95

November 17, 1973 97

Integrality Matthijs Cornelissen 98

Practices in Integral Yoga Larry Seidlitz 111

Spiritual Knowledge Martha G Orton 121

Sri Aurobindo and the Hindu Muslim Problem Kittu Reddy 134

The Theme Of Urvashi In

The Indian Renaissance:

Madhusudan Datta,

Rabindranath Tagore , Sri Aurobindo Ranajit Sarkar 141

The National Value of Art Pabitra Kumar Roy 159

Cover Design : Dhanavanti’s painting ‘Rainbow rhythm’

Editorial

Space permitting, there is also a proposal to reproduce some of the ‘golden oldies’, essays of extraordinary depth and insight written by authors of eminence, most of whom are no more living. These priceless treasures secreted in the ageold vaults of the Advent, Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, Mother India, Srinvantu, Sri Aurobindo Circle, etc. need to be dug out and their authentic and authoritative views made known to a wider audience, especially among readers of this generation and those who wish to make a serious study of Sri Aurobindo. [Recent developments in analytic philosophy, Language and Mind, Vol. 1: A Western Perspective (Kant, Fodor, Searle, Kripke)]

Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine : The Immortal Text On The Divine Truth

R.C. Pradhan

Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine represents the spirit of man in ascending the higher realms of the divine Truth. It is a text of the immortal voice of man aspiring for the highest Truth realisable in human life. If the Upanishads laid the foundations of the immortal life on earth and the Gita propounded the Karmayoga to effectively make it a part of the worldly life, The Life Divine further established the transforming power of the Supermind to make the earth its home. It has fulfilled the prophetic vision of the Upanishads and the Gita in concretising the immortal Truth of the Divine Reality on the rugged surface of the earthly life surrounded by darkness. The Life Divine is the culminating point of the Indian mind in its evolutionary history from the primitive to the most enlightened forms of spiritual realisation.

What I will do in this essay is not to summarise the vast knowledge unfolded in the text, but to throw hints as to how one could wade through the labyrinth of the divine drama created and enacted in Sri Aurobindo’s immortal text. Mine will not be a textual reading but an interpretation of the most important concepts dealt with in the text.

The National Value of Art

Pabitra Kumar Roy

Man, for Sri Aurobindo, is always the traveller of the cycles of society and his road is forward. This thesis holds no less in the domain of man’s aesthetic adventures. As elsewhere, he gathers in his material from the minds and lives of his fellow-men around him and makes the most of the experience of humanity’s past ages, and does not confine himself in a narrow mentality. The dialectic of individual and humanity is a characteristic of the logic of the evolutionary process. At one pole of man’s being, he is a variation of human individual, and yet belonging to his race and class types. He has his svadharma, according to which man resembles some, and differs from others. Society is formed on the ground of human affinity. Social affinity enriches the individuals, and his enrichment, in turn, enriches the society. For Sri Aurobindo, in modern times, society is the nation. By enriching the national life, the individual helps the total life of humanity. But it should not be understood that he holds that one’s nationality is one’s exhaustive identity. Rather, “if by a part of himself he belongs to the nation, by another he exceeds it and belongs to humanity.” 1 (HC, p. 81).

Man’s societal self-limitation and subjection to his environment and group is hardly the last credential of a man’s existence. He shares something of the infinity, complexity and free variation of the Self manifested in the world, and thus has a necessary tendency of expansion and transcendence of his environmental affinities. The individual lives in humanity as well as humanity in the individual. The point is that nation is a temporary necessity. This view of nation and nationality we have to keep in view when we discuss Sri Aurobindo’s ideas concerning the national value of art. [Beauty Art and Man, David Hume;: A critical introduction to his theory of knowledge]

Univerisity of the Integral Yoga: Integral Library

2011-08-20T17:51:00.000+05:30

Integral Library Integral Yoga 1. Sri Aurobindo and Mother - 2. Yoga for Every Day - About this blog

Sri Aurobindo and Mother left us a huge gift of knowledge about the practice of yoga, the device of the universe and human psychology. On this blog we will regularly put the words of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, help us to understand increasingly the work performed by them on the ground and how we ourselves can contribute to its development.

Human existence contains a set of planes of being: physical, vital, mental, and others that can be accessed at the present time we have is limited. We plan to create multiple partitions on a blog, each of which will gradually reveal the details of each of the levels of our being, and use this knowledge in everyday life.

About our center

There are different centers, each of which expresses and presents some ideas and deeds. Our center - a center of striving towards the Divine and the possibility of realization of God in the phenomenal world.

No and no rigid concept of the center, which is essentially a dynamic implementation. As we move along the path, there will be corresponding changes in the center. This center is not only a virtual phenomenon. He should and will be embodied physically in order to provide an opportunity for live communication and exchange of experience.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, what is their teaching that they brought the earth and mankind, what is their job? We will try together to find answers to these questions. What the seeker, the soul is awakened when he heard the call of God, but the mind does not know where to start and what to do when the usual boundaries of society begin to compress the chest and cover your breath? Perhaps this project could partly solve these problems.We do not pretend to much, we just try to do your job well and be faithful to the call of his soul.

There are people who are in search of something elusive, searching for the truth of his soul. Perhaps they will find here the sound to a note that always sounds inside.

We are not a closed society and we are sincerely glad to help anyone who wants to help in the development of our center. This is not an easy job in which there is no rapid progress, and every achievement requires more effort. According to Sri Aurobindo, we can not find any authority other than on himself. Stepping on this path, we must be prepared to give everything, but only Allah and none else. Requires full commitment. His mother says that if a person does not sincere in their aspirations and these words are not in tune with him, he should not undertake this yoga - it's a flame that burns.

No seclusion can not move forward in this yoga far enough. Over time, there comes a time when it is necessary to take the next step, and if it is not done, will move in a circle, and progress will stop. No individual progress is impossible without a collective component, repeatedly talked about Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. We sincerely hope that the collective component finds its rightful place here and help us all make a few more steps on the path of ascent to the divine.

Center for the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother Univerisity of the Integral Yoga VladNesh's Channel - YouTube - Vladnesh | Integral Library

The Human Cycle; epub v.1.0 Posted on 16/07/2011 by Vladnesh

Hi friends! Today we are publishing one of Sri Aurobindo major works “The Human Cycle” which includes in itself three titles: “The Human Cycle” itself, “The Ideal of Human Unity” and “War and Self-Determination”. I hope you will enjoy this … Continue reading → Posted in ePub, Integral Yoga | 1 Comment

The Synthesis of Yoga; epub v.1.0 Posted on 16/07/2011 by Vladnesh

Hi friends! Today we are publishing one of Sri Aurobindo major works and this one is particularily dear and presious to my heart, it is: “The Synthesis of Yoga”. This book in great detail shows human psychology and possibility of … Continue reading → Posted in ePub, Integral Yoga | 1 Comment

Sri Aurobindo’s Letters to his wife Mrinalini Devi; epub v.1.0 Posted on 16/07/2011 by Vladnesh

Hi folks! Today we are publishing a unique collection of Sri Aurobindo’s letters to his wife which gives us a rare opportunity to peek in to the past of our Master, his early years of private life which reveals us … Continue reading → Posted in ePub, Integral Yoga | Leave a comment

Syncretism in Sri Aurobindo’s thought – part 2 Posted on March 18, 2010 by Sandeep

One of the pleasures of reading Sri Aurobindo’s works is that such contradictions do not exist because he resolves every contradiction by tracing it to its Divine origin and reconciling it as part of a larger Truth. He explicates how every principle has it’s play in a certain context but if we over-generalize, then it loses its value. […]

What can we glean from the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on the Nature versus Nurture debate? We are given the understanding that nature and nurture can be reconciled in the greater spiritual truth, that there is an soul within Man evolving towards Divinity. This soul persists across incarnations, puts forth its own distinct personality in every life and is also influenced by the genetic makeup of the parents as well as by the prevailing Zeitgeist. […]

Intelligent Design raises valid questions about abiogenesis (i.e. how life arises out from inorganic matter) and speciation (i.e. how do new species arise) but is unable to satisfactorily answer them with a suitable teleology, other than to posit the existence of an extra-cosmic entity which must be managing the Universe.

On the other hand, Neo-Darwinism only examines the superficial evolution of forms, and remains unaware of the greater aeonic evolution of souls as they are reborn in progressively more complex forms, (plant, animal and human) as determined by the evolution of soul consciousness.

We present the synthesis of the above ideas as discovered in the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Speciation is explained by the fact that consciousness precedes form in evolution [12]. Consciousness precedes form in evolution

Sri Aurobindo scores over Whitehead

2011-08-19T15:00:00.001+05:30

Joy of being: All about life The Hindu August 18, 2011 R. DINESH

Though I had been brought up exposed to Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy, I actually re-discovered his teachings in his writings, “Essays on the Gita’’ and translation of the Upanishads. Initially, they were hard to understand, but soon I realized that once the essential Truth is understood, every word makes sense and can be experienced and related to every situation of our life, both in thoughts and actions.

The Upanishads, 1st US Edition by Aurobindo Ghose Words of a Master, October 14, 2010 Amazon Review Written by John Pellicci (Palm Beach Gardens, United States)

There are few who can compare with Sri Aurobindo Ghose. His erudition is only surpassed by his realization. A wordsmith of the highest order, who can bring to light and clarity the often confusing and veiled jargon of the ancient Rishis. His commentaries on the Upanishads opens vistas of thought that allow the earnest and informed seeker the opportunity to sit at the feet of a modern master-sage. Comment | Permalink

Process Philosophy and OOO from Larval Subjects . by larvalsubjects

We get a lot of lectures about Whitehead explaining Whitehead to us, but I think this misses the point that our differences with Whitehead are not failures to understand him (cf. my post on transference), but because of genuine disagreements with Whitehead. For me, there are three basic points of divergence. First, I believe that Whitehead is a complete non-starter so long as his account of God is not severed from his thought and his thought isn’t thoroughly severed from process theology. Following Donald Sherburne, I think that Whitehead’s account of God is incoherent and at odds with the ontological foundations of his own philosophy. Any engagement of Whitehead that doesn’t sever it from his concept of God and substantially modify his ontology is, I believe, a priori to be excluded. …

Am I a process philosopher? Sure. I argue that objects are processes and processes are objects. Yet all of my work is focused on the precise nature of what processes are and how relations come to be forged. Above all, I’m interested in how relations can be broken so that we might be able to form a more just and equitable society than the one we find ourselves in today.

Shaviro on The Prince and the Wolf from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman) HERE. …

Like many other readers of Whitehead, I find that Steven is projecting a dynamism into his instants that is there in only the feeblest sense, and is perhaps over-reacting to the connotations of the word “process.” I find this to be especially the case among readers of Whitehead who are inspired by Deleuze. But there’s simply no comparison between the two thinkers, however much people want there to be. In all the important senses they are polar opposites, for the same reason that Whitehead and Bergson are polar opposites. 11:09 PM

Bogost on firehose materialism from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harham)

Ian now responds to Steven Shaviro, HERE. My favorite part of Ian’s post is probably the final sentence:

“…the fundamental dispute between OOO and process philosophy is a legitimate philosophical disagreement, not just a failure to communicate or understand.”

Levi made roughly the same point in his own post. The problem cannot be reduced to claiming that one side is misunderstanding Whitehead. No, there’s an actual philosophical disagreement at work. Incidentally, I should also add that Steven’s posts are always welcome, since they stay on topic.

So much hinges upon the avoidance of confusion and error

2011-08-18T16:37:00.000+05:30

sam mickey | July 29, 2011 at 12:56 pm

I’m thinking of four anthologies released in the last few years that bring Whitehead into philosophical and theological dialogue with Badiou, Derrida, Deleuze, and others. Process and Difference (Daniell and Keller), Secrets of Becoming (Faber and Stephenson), Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson (Robinson), and Event and Decision (Faber, Krips, and Petus). …

If you’re interested in postsecular theology that addresses the challenges of our current historical moment, check out Clayton Crockett’s new book (if you haven’t already), Radical Political Theology. No Whitehead (although he does mention a little process theology, particularly Catherine Keller, perhaps the greatest process theologian), but there are plenty of helpful resources for understanding atheism and nihilism in their contemporary contexts.

Matthew David Segall | July 31, 2011 at 6:22 pm Glad you stopped by, Sam.

When I argue against metaphysical atheism in recent posts, I’m not thinking of the sort of “atheism in the name of God” that Alan Watts used to talk about. The “atheism” of the later group of thinkers you mention (Haraway, Derrida, etc.) is unlike the type that Bryant is arguing for in his responses to me. He seems to suggest that naturalism has made the “God hypothesis” (not the way I’d want to construe theological speculation) irrelevant, which is surprising to me since I didn’t think an OOO philosopher would try to lean on scientific materialism/naturalism to marginalize religion. He doesn’t seem to have read his Whitehead, or my posts on Whitehead in response, since he keeps accusing me of employing the concept of a transcendent “God” to explain natural processes when I’ve explicitly criticized such concepts. God is not a hypothesis meant to explain the universe, anymore than “matter” could be conceived of as such.

Matthew David Segall | August 1, 2011 at 10:14 am

Speculative philosophy must hold the binary (God/no-God) together to form a coherent image of the universe. The question is not: “does God exist?” but “what is the universe such that God does and does not exist?” Theism makes no sense without the possibility of atheism, and vice versa: they are interdependent, sometimes parasitic, sometimes symbiotic modes of thought.

What is Philosophical Realism? | The Radical Academy by Jonathan Dolhenty, Ph.D.

Philosophy is the attempt to understand the most basic facts about the world we inhabit and so far as possible to explain these facts. This enterprise is not the exclusive concern of certain specialists, but one in which every human being is deeply involved, whether or not he is clearly conscious of it.

Every way of life is based upon a way of looking at life. The way you look at life is your philosophy. Just as there are many ways of life, so are there many philosophies, some more true and some less true. So important is this basic enterprise of man, so much hinges upon the avoidance of confusion and error, that since the time of the ancient Greeks a certain discipline has been set aside for the concentrated consideration of philosophical problems and for the careful comparison and criticism of different ways of answering them. This discipline is called philosophy.

Husserl’s endless reductions, Heidegger’s endless preparations, Whitehead and Bergson are polar opposites

2011-08-14T23:09:00.000+05:30

Shaviro on The Prince and the Wolf from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

HERE. Unsurprisingly, Steven sides with the Latour/Whitehead relationism against my critiques of that position. But it’s a well-written and thoughtful response to the book, also unsurprisingly. […]

As for Whitehead, I’m not sure I know what Steven means when he says the eternal objects are there as a source of novelty rather than a source of connection. The point is, prehension is always mediated by the eternal objects, and the eternal objects are in God. It’s hard to be more of an occasionalist than to say that God is the mediator of all relations and that entities exist only as occasions. It’s textbook occasionalism, in fact. Like many other readers of Whitehead, I find that Steven is projecting a dynamism into his instants that is there in only the feeblest sense, and is perhaps over-reacting to the connotations of the word “process.” I find this to be especially the case among readers of Whitehead who are inspired by Deleuze. But there’s simply no comparison between the two thinkers, however much people want there to be. In all the important senses they are polar opposites, for the same reason that Whitehead and Bergson are polar opposites.

Potentiality and Virtuality « Larval Subjects 26 May 2007 larvalsubjects Says: May 27, 2007 at 4:17 pm

This occurs often with political theory as well. Endless preparations to get things just right without jumping into the fray. This is the issue I have with epistemology: Kantianism, Husserl’s endless phenomenological reductions, Heidegger’s endless preparations to pose the question of the meaning of being (he argues that there has to be all sorts of preliminary work before the question itself can even be posed!), the epistemological debates of the 17th century, and yes, the endless refinements of critique among the critical theorists. Lacan liked to say that obsessional desire is the desire for an impossible desire. As a structure– i.e., something about a particular form of life, not an individual –obsessional desire sustains its desire by perpetually deferring the object of its desire, and it defers its object of desire by rendering that desire impossible. Critique, in my view, often functions in this way.

Are philosophers obliged to favor a Godless system?

2011-08-08T22:09:00.000+05:30

philosophical obligations from plastic bodies by plasticbodies

Leon

has linked to an article which explores the question: is God necessary for Whitehead’s system? This raises the question: say you are presented with two metaphysical systems identical save for the fact that one includes God and the other omits God. Are we as philosophers obliged to favor the Godless system?

Whitehead and Catholicism Monday, August 8, 2011

Is God indispensable to Whitehead's metaphysics? The following article attempts to answer that question (pp. 666-669) as well as clarify Whitehead's relationship to Catholicism.

Norman Pittenger, "Whitehead and 'Catholicism'" Theological Studies 32 (1971): 659-70.

Re: The Parable of Two Birds by Sandeep on Tue 05 Jul 2011 10:49 PM IST | Profile | Permanent Link

It is essential to have a holistic perspective of the full spectrum of topics such as Creation, Evolution, Reincarnation, Karma in order to arrive at the right answer to these questions.

On Ultimate Ends: Heaven & Hell from ANTIDOTE by naturalorder@gmail.com (Sauvik)

Ludwig von Mises said that the Science of Human Action is all about "means and ends." Now, this choosing of means towards ends is firstly a Moral Question - and Adam Smith was a Professor of Moral Philosophy, for there were no "economists" then. Adam Smith therefore encouraged our "natural propensity to truck, barter and exchange," and proposed a System of Natural Liberty as a Moral Solution to Life.

But Socialists have done otherwise, and have encouraged Aggression - which even Sigmund Freud told us to "sublimate" - through their System of Legal Plunder. Now, Ludwig von Mises said that, whereas the choice between means and ends is directed at short term goals, there are what he called "ultimate ends," and Mises said that the choice of ultimate ends are "a matter of the soul and the will."

[A theory of government from Cafe Hayek

One theory is that government exists to correct externalities and provide public goods. The other is that government uses the language of helping people to justify giving stuff to the politically powerful out of the pockets of the rest of us.]

Comment on The Accidental Tagore by Amit Chaudhuri by abdul lateef from Comments for Posthuman Destinies by abdul lateef

“To recover Tagore today as a poet and writer must entail some sense of the Bengali language becoming a realm of literary possibility….”

AL: This seems to be akin in some ways to trying to recover Sri Aurobindo’s Guru English that he expresses in Edwardian prose and Romantic poetry to restore contemporary relevance. The project requires both a refolding of language and the modernist aesthetic.

Husserl, Heidegger, Whitehead, & Sri Aurobindo

2011-08-06T16:39:00.000+05:30

Did God Create Man, or Did Man Create God? « Sri Aurobindo Studies

Sri Aurobindo points out that some may hold that “the spirit which now presides over the human soul-experience was originally formed by a human mentality ...

Is common sense merely plausible? rom Love of All Wisdom by Amod Lele

In sum, it does not seem that, even on Thill’s view as developed here, common sense qua common sense carries any epistemological weight beyond mere plausibility. There is some “extra-commonsensical” criterion or criteria according to which common sense may be judged infallible or not. Once we hear what that is, we can debate whether it is correct that this criterion allows us to declare certain beliefs infallible. Regardless: according to this quote here, certain kinds of common sense are proposed to be infallible; but it is not and cannot be the fact of their being common sense that makes them so.

speaking of phenomenology from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

When Derrida was king (and keep in mind, I did not like that period) this accusation could not be made. Derrida knew Husserl and Heidegger and Levinas extremely well, and was very much digesting all of it and doing something new with it. You could disagree with his personal spin on it (I did) and also find his style often worse than exasperating (I did). But there was never any question that Derrida was deeply rooted in the phenomenological tradition, which –like it or not– is still the gold standard for recent continental philosophy. The situation became more problematic on this front after Derrida’s star began to dim somewhat.

Deleuze takes off in a completely different direction, and a very refreshing direction in many respects. But he never really came to terms with the Husserl/Heidegger legacy, and the passing remarks on phenomenology are among his most impressionistic and shallow.

With Badiou and Žižek it’s a bit more complicated. They do full justice to Heidegger in terms of praising him, talking about how great and important he was, and so forth. But he leaves too little trace on their own philosophical positions, which are basically Hegelian and Lacanian and have little direct resonance with Heidegger. As for Husserl (despite Badiou’s claims to understand him well) they don’t get the point at all, though in this respect they’re no worse than most others at present.

At the top of my wish list for continental philosophy in 2030 … is that we need to get back on the Husserl/Heidegger page again and push things further, not simply pretend without proof that they are vaguely archaic figures. You have to work your way through figures of that magnitude, and at least Derrida was trying.

The Battle For Eyeballs: Take #2 from ANTIDOTE - Jul 30, 2011 Second, all of you must read Paul Johnson's excellent book titled Intellectuals.

In this excellent book, Johnson has compiled brief biographies of many, … who wrote completely stupid books on how "society" could be better "organised" - and all their stupid books led the world astray. There is Rousseau, Marx, Sartre and more.

The BATTLE For Honest, Sunnah Money Is NOT For The Faint-Hearted from ANTIDOTE by naturalorder@gmail.com (Sauvik)

My first book, published in 2000, Antidote: Essays AGAINST The Socialist Indian State, contains an essay on money, sub-titled "Why private money is the only sound money" - but my thoughts have developed far beyond that essay written so long ago, thanks especially to my study of the works of Ludwig von Mises. My best so far is the one in my 2007 book Natural Order: Essays Exploring Civil Government & The Rule of Law, which reflects the study of the works of Jesus Huerta de Soto, and this essay can be read online by scrolling down the right-hand bar.

Understanding plurality and underlying relationships

2011-07-22T21:40:00.000+05:30

Free philosophy from preconditions and prejudices

Philosophy aims at understanding the plurality and their underlying relationships. But the puzzle remains unresolved after thousands of years and people begin all over again after every few decades. The basic difficulty, however, is to translate the multiplicity in terms of the essential unity. Performing this, obviously, is an absurd demand but man never tires of attempting to accomplish it empirically.

For professors drawing salaries from secular universities a peculiar paradox is at play. Like Kant and Hegel in their time or Levi and Harman today, they carry the burden of manufacturing metaphysics sans any Divine contagion. Further, they are at pains to give the impression that their output emanates from their free thinking, whereas, in actuality, it is geographically-challenged and paradigm-driven. Camouflaging dishonesty in sophisticated verbiage is the most debilitating tendency that afflicts most sincere-seeming quest for knowledge today.

Philosophy, to be true to its task, must free itself from preconditions and prejudices. As science and technology progresses and human beings undergo ever increasing perplexity to keep abreast as well as making sense, philosophy will continue to be a source of solace. 20th century has grappled with enough of uncertainties; let the 21st be the era of assurance. Over to Savitri Era. [TNM] 8:39 PM Saturday, July 10, 2010

Demolishing Sri Aurobindo’s opposition is our prime task

Sri Aurobindo is yet to receive the recognition and respect he deserves and demolishing Sri Aurobindo’s Opposition is our prime task. The story of his life and the writings he has left behind constitute a fount of inspiration for generations to come and disseminating those across the globe is a gigantic challenge. The occult significance of the work of The Mother & Sri Aurobindo is exceedingly complex and hence to fathom it is beyond the scope of individuals engaged in routine life. Most are, therefore, happy with their own understanding of things and hardly feel the necessity of being acquainted with the teachings of The Mother & Sri Aurobindo. Mind boggling multiplicity of New Age offerings and their aggressive marketing is another major cause of our ware being marginalized.

That the philosophy, psychology, politics, & poetry of The Mother & Sri Aurobindo are the sole and supreme avenue of man’s emancipation is no hyperbole. No human being living at present has the capacity to scrutinize them as regards their efficacy. It is only through a ceaseless yearning for their servitude that we earn the fortunateness of partaking an iota of their grace.

This in the secular-academic domain, paradoxically, poses a grave methodological problem. The transmission of the teachings of The Mother & Sri Aurobindo is largely academic in nature. Their interdisciplinary implications rather fall mostly at the postgraduate level or above while the ritualistic dimensions are only a miniscule. Applying the theory concurrently in one’s day to day life is also part of the learning process. The three aspects form such an integral whole that the unique subjective nature of the ongoing and ever changing concoction tends to defy any sort of syllabi or evaluation. With communication modalities morphing multifariously, molding our worn out teaching techniques and modulating them to the signals of the future, therefore, is a priority. [TNM] 8:04 PM Monday, July 05, 2010 Links

Francis Bacon is McLuhan’s key partner

2011-07-21T23:12:00.000+05:30

Marshall McLuhan from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

Philip Marchand helps us celebrate with AN ARTICLE posted at Laureano Ralon’s Figure-Ground Commmunications blog. Individual reasons for celebrating McLuhan may differ. If asked to summarize my own reasons for liking him, I’d respond roughly as follows:

1. He has a tremendous sense of how the background conditions for any statement or appearance are more powerful than the statement or appearance itself. In this respect he can be paired with Heidegger’s critique of presence-at-hand, which I happen to think was the single most important insight to come out of 20th century philosophy.

2. Unlike Heidegger, McLuhan has a very detailed sense of how background and surface can trigger each other and reverse or flip into each other. This is why he isn’t a “technological determinist.” It lies within your power, individual human, to create something really remarkable that transforms the medium in which humans work in any specific area. (Example: It may have been true that academic illusionist painting was in trouble in 1905, but it was by no means “determined” what Braque and Picasso had to do next. Things could have gone in a number of different directions at that point. The individual is in fact extremely powerful in McLuhan’s vision.)

3. Formal causation as more important than efficient causation. I’ll save these remarks for my talk in Brussels. But Francis Bacon is McLuhan’s key partner here, and if you don’t like Bacon– you will. (For starters, go early into the second half of the Novum Organum and look for a long list headed something like “Instances Agreeing in the Nature of Heat,” in which Bacon tries to sum up a list of all warm and hot things in the world. It’s hilarious, remarkable, and has a fascinating metaphysics of formal cause underlying it.)

Reality and causal efficacy are two separate things

2011-07-12T07:03:00.000+05:30

a couple of live debates within OOO from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

Some reader mail just reminded me of this. I should make up a list of all the points about which there aredisagreements within OOO circles. We haven’t gotten around to clearly articulating all of our differences yet.

Since I’ve had the most such email debates with Levi Bryant as compared with the other OOO-related authors, here are the two issues about which Levi and I tend most to disagree:

1. Levi’s a fan of dynamic conceptions of entities, which may well reflect his Deleuzean origins. By contrast, I am a committed actualist (like Latour, or at least the early Latour). A thing is only what it is right now, and to explain how changes occur is a tricky thing, not one that should be implanted in the heart of objects from the start.

2. Levi tends to hold that anything that has an effect is real. By contrast, I hold both that many real things may have no current effects (Levi is somewhat open to this concept of “dormant objects”) and that many things have effects that are not real (here Levi would disagree, I think). For example, all of the objects of experience have some sort of trace emotional or intellectual effect upon us, but for me this not the same thing as reality. Reality and causal efficacy are two separate things for me.

I just thought of this because an Australian reader was asking me about point number two. Point number one has become a debate within analytic metaphysics as well.

(title unknown) by enowning

nonsite.org interviews Robert Pippin about Hegel. Here's the question on the subject's determinacy:

OH: Despite the fact that Hegel saw emerging in society something like, as you put it, “a general solution to the problem,” he also speaks to the incomplete, or unrealized, character of subjectivity in modern society. In contrast, most critical social theory since has rejected the category of subjectivity as an Enlightenment “illusion” that we should rid ourselves of. But if we understand subjectivity in modern society as a task, rather than a fact to be affirmed or rejected, the question becomes far more interesting. What do you think Hegel would have to say about such renunciations of “subjectivity”?

RP: This kind of critique of human subjectivity is essentially the result of those Paul Ricoeur called the “masters of suspicion”: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. These are the first to suggest that the domain of conscious intention, decision, and judgment is merely an appearance, while the true determinates of what we take ourselves to be consciously determining are actually inaccessible to consciousness. The domain of our conscious attentiveness is a kind of illusion, a pretension to run the show of our own lives, whereas it is actually some manifestation of the relation between the mode of production and the relations of production in a given society, or the will to power, or the unconscious. What poststructuralism did, which is essentially a post-Heideggerian phenomenon, is intensify the skepticism about the possibility of running any show, by destabilizing the attempt to identify these so-called true forces of determination—the unconscious, the will to power, economic relations of class, and so on. Such an intense skepticism that we could ever come to any determination about those latent forces leaves one in a of condition of complete indeterminacy—a “floating signifier.”

The central response from the Hegelian tradition we have been discussing is that the conclusion of utter indeterminacy points immediately to its own practical unintelligibility. In other words, suppose you are convinced that human subjectivity, in this somewhat crude sense of “running the show,” is an illusion. What would it be to properly acknowledge this fact, in one’s life, from the first-person point of view? Are you supposed to wait around indefinitely, to see what your indeterminate forces do? There’s some enormous overcorrection in the history of Western thought since roughly Marx and Nietzsche, in which all sorts of babies are being thrown out with all kinds of bath water. The dimension of a free life that Hegel is interested in has not, by virtue of these critiques, been superseded or gone away, unless we have some way of understanding what it would be to actually acknowledge such a departure in life. The postmodernist critique of subjectivity is “overdone” to the extent that it leaves us with no concrete way to understand what the actual position of subjectivity should look like to an agent.

The problem of freedom, as Hegel understands it, is not freedom from the interference of external impeding forces. Hegel is one of the first to offer a critique of the liberal democratic tradition for its emphasis on isolating the realm of entitlement to mere non-interference. You can be un-coerced, and do what you take to be appropriate, and still have a relationship to what you do that is not identification, that is not affirmative toward it. We are finite beings, of course. Much of what we do falls within a constructed realm of possibilities that we do not determine. But, for Hegel, what is crucial is the kind of recognitive relation between that realm of possibilities and what you actually do, and the conditions for you to be able to enjoy that kind of identification are social and public. They are largely determined by the kind of world you grew up in, or the kind of world you have to deal with when you are grown up. So the problem of freedom, for Hegel and those who follow him, is not freedom from external constraint, but the establishment of the social conditions under which the life you lead seems to be the one you have determined.

Rebirth and The Meaning of Life from Sri Aurobindo Studies

Recently in Washington DC, The XIV Dalai Lama mentioned during a program that a Sufi Master friend of his had indicated that he starts his teachings by propounding 3 questions. 1. What is the Self? 2. Is there a beginning? 3. Is there an ending?

These three questions are worth consideration as we take up the new chapter The Philosophy of Rebirth. There are some who believe that the self is a specific human personality or ego, born at a certain time, existing for a certain number of days, or years, and then dying. For such individuals, who see the self as a limited formation, with a specific beginning and a specific ending, it is impossible for them to assign any greater significance to human existence. There are those again who expand upon this and present us with a limited self and a beginning, but then indicate that after death there will be a resurrection and eternal life with our earthly family rejoined. In this instance, we see that there are some conceptual limitations involved as well. Others look upon our current personality and ego-formation as one in a long series of births, successively building upon the past in a more or less systematic way. And still others do not accept any ultimate reality to the ego-personality but accept that there is continuity in some form from life to life. There are as many different ways of looking at this issue as there are philosophies and religions.

In the present chapter we shall take up a review of the question of rebirth as it is important for our attempt to understand the significance of life that we see the true perspective on the issue without the egoistic or the temporal ignorance which we discussed in the immediately preceding chapter.

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 20, The Philosophy of Rebirth

Metaphysical truth is the nucleus

2011-06-18T16:39:00.000+05:30

The "Arya's" Fourth Year 07-1918 Sri Aurobindo

All philosophy is concerned with the relations between two things, the fundamental truth of existence and the forms in which existence presents itself to our experience. The deepest experience shows that the fundamental truth is truth of the Spirit; the other is the truth of life, truth of form and shaping force and living idea and action. Here the West and East have followed divergent lines. […] Our view is that the antinomy created between them is an unreal one.

Spirit being the fundamental truth of existence, life can be only its manifestation; Spirit must be not only the origin of life but its basis, its pervading reality and its highest and total result. But the forms of life as they appear to us are at once its disguises and its instruments of self-manifestation. Man has to grow in knowledge till they cease to be disguises and grow in spiritual power and quality till they become in him its perfect instruments. To grow into the fullness of the divine is the true law of human life and to shape his earthly existence into its image is the meaning of his evolution. This is the fundamental tenet of the philosophy of the “Arya”.

This truth had to be worked out first of all from the metaphysical point of view; for in philosophy metaphysical truth is the nucleus of the rest, it is the statement of the last and most general truths on which all the others depend or in which they are gathered up. Therefore we gave the first place to the “Life Divine”. [ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY AND YOGA: SHORTER WORKS - 1910-1950 (The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Set in 37 Volumes, Volume 13)]

Does anything really matter? Aljazeera.net - ‎ Peter Singer 18 Jun 2011 08:53

A new book tries to explain how it may be possible to view moral judgements as objective truths. Can moral judgements be true or false?

One major argument against objectivism in ethics is that people disagree deeply about right and wrong, and this disagreement extends to philosophers who cannot be accused of being ignorant or confused. If great thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham disagree about what we ought to do, can there really be an objectively true answer to that question?

Parfit's response to this line of argument leads him to make a claim that is perhaps even bolder than his defence of objectivism in ethics. He considers three leading theories about what we ought to do - one deriving from Kant, one from the social-contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and the contemporary philosophers John Rawls and TM Scanlon, and one from Bentham's utilitarianism - and argues that the Kantian and social-contract theories must be revised in order to be defensible.

Then he argues that these revised theories coincide with a particular form of consequentialism, which is a theory in the same broad family as utilitarianism. If Parfit is right, there is much less disagreement between apparently conflicting moral theories than we all thought. The defenders of each of these theories are, in Parfit's vivid phrase, "climbing the same mountain on different sides".

Readers who go to On What Matters seeking an answer to the question posed by its title might be disappointed. Parfit's real interest is in combating subjectivism and nihilism. Unless he can show that objectivism is true, he believes, nothing matters.

When Parfit does come to the question of "what matters", his answer might seem surprisingly obvious. He tells us, for example, that what matters most now is that "we rich people give up some of our luxuries, ceasing to overheat the Earth's atmosphere, and taking care of this planet in other ways, so that it continues to support intelligent life".

Many of us had already reached that conclusion. What we gain from Parfit's work is the possibility of defending these and other moral claims as objective truths. Peter Singer is professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. Revised editions of his books Practical Ethics and The Expanding Circle have just been published.

Savitri Era: Continuum-discrete conundrum

The primacy of grammar by Nirmalangshu Mukherji

2011-06-03T13:26:00.000+05:30

The primacy of grammar - Page 75 - Nirmalangshu Mukherji - 2010 - 278 pages - taking computer simulations—whether computers can be programmed to mimic human understanding—too realistically, then we might readily agree with the spirit of the argument (Chomsky, Huybregts, and Riems- dijk 1982, 12). ...

The architecture of language - Noam Chomsky, Nirmalangshu Mukherji, Bibudhendra Narayan Patnaik - 2006 - 89 pages - In this book Noam Chomsky reflects on the history of 'generative enterprise' - his approach to the study of languages that revolutionized our understanding of human languages and other cognitive systems.

Interpretation and transformation: explorations in art and the self - Page 1 - Michael Krausz - 2007 - 154 pages - Nirmalangshu Mukherji observes: Much of what we grasp, understand, and act upon is a result of some interpretive activity directed on some object of interpretation. As Immanuel Kant taught us, little of the world comes to us via ...

Sexual solipsism: philosophical essays on pornography and ... - Page vi - Rae Langton - 2009 - 405 pages - For helpful conversations at the University of Delhi I want to thank NirmalangshuMukherji and Veena Das. For conversations that helped me think more carefully about objectification, thanks are due to colleagues at Sheffield University, ...

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition Jared Diamond (Paperback - Jan 4, 2011)

The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without It Philip Ball (Hardcover - Sep 1, 2010)

Our Man in Tehran: The Truth Behind the Secret Mission to Save Six Ame… Robert Wright (Hardcover - Jan 11, 2011)

One Nation Under Debt: Hamilton, Jefferson, and the History of What We … Robert E. Wright (Hardcover - Feb 20, 2008)

The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism Howard Bloom (Hardcover - Nov 24, 2009)

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel Nicholas Ostler (Hardcover - Nov 23, 2010)

Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin Nicholas Ostler (Paperback - Sep 2, 2008)

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other … Guy Deutscher (Paperback - Feb 2011)

We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism John Derbyshire (Paperback - Oct 5, 2010)

The Mathematics of Life Ian Stewart (Hardcover - Jun 7, 2011)

Listen to This Alex Ross (Hardcover - Sep 28, 2010)

Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics (Hardcover - Nov 15, 2010)

Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death Irvin D. Yalom (Paperback - Apr 20, 2009)

When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession (P.S.) Irvin D. Yalom (Paperback - Apr 1, 2011)

Why Marriage: The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality George Chauncey (Paperback - Dec 13, 2005)

Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom bell hooks (Paperback - Sep 18, 2009)

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love bell hooks (Paperback - Dec 21, 2004)

Communion: The Female Search for Love bell hooks (Paperback - Jan 1, 2003)

Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern Anne Friedberg (Paperback - Aug 31, 1994)

Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain Antonio Damasio (Hardcover - Nov 9, 2010)

Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter Terrence W. Deacon (Hardcover - Nov 21, 2011)

Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception Charles Seife (Hardcover - Sep 23, 2010)

Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishf… Charles Seife (Hardcover - Oct 30, 2008)

Alpha and Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe Charles Seife (Paperback - Jun 1, 2004)

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea Charles Seife (Paperback - Sep 1, 2000)

Bursts: The Hidden Patterns Behind Everything We Do, from… Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (Paperback - May 31, 2011)

The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student L… Steven Strogatz (Hardcover - Aug 3, 2009)

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age Duncan J. Watts (Hardcover - Feb 2003)

The Mathematical Structure of the Human Sleep-Wake Cycle (Lect… Steven H. Strogatz (Paperback - Nov 18, 1986)

Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity John Gribbin (Hardcover - Apr 5, 2005)

The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest… John Gribbin (Paperback - Aug 10, 2004)

The idea of a cosmopolitan right

2011-05-26T13:43:00.000+05:30

Kant’s relevance for anthropology today from The Memory Bank by Keith Hart In order to understand the world, we must begin not with the empirical existence of objects, but with the reasoning embedded in our experience and in all the judgments we have made. This is to say that the world is inside each of us as much as it is out there. Our task is to unite the two poles as subjective individuals who share the object world with the rest of humanity. Knowledge of society must be personal and moral before it is defined by laws imposed on us from above.

Kant published Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view in 1798. The book was based on lectures he had given at the university since 1772. His aim was to attract the general public to an independent discipline whose name he more than anyone contributed to academic life. Remarkably, histories of anthropology have rarely mentioned this work, perhaps because the discipline has evolved so far away from Kant’s original premises. But it would pay us to take his Anthropology seriously, if only for its resonance with our own times.

Shortly before, Kant wrote To perpetual peace: a philosophical sketch (1795). The last quarter of the eighteenth century saw its own share of “globalization” — the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic wars, the rise of British industry and the international movement to abolish slavery. Kant knew that coalitions of states were gearing up for war, yet he responded to this sense of the world coming closer together by proposing how humanity might form society as world citizens beyond the boundaries of states. He held that “cosmopolitan right”, the basic right of all world citizens, should rest on conditions of universal hospitality, that is, on the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory. In other words, we should be free to go wherever we like in the world, since it belongs to all of us equally.

“The peoples of the earth have entered in varying degree into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity.” (Kant 2003:18).

This confident sense of an emergent world order, written over 200 years ago, can now be seen as the high point of the liberal revolution, before it was overwhelmed by its twin offspring, industrial capitalism and the nation-state. [11:35 AM]

The Politics of God By Mark Lilla The Times Magazine: August 19, 2007

The twilight of the idols has been postponed. For more than two centuries, from the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity — these were the questions that divided us.

Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused.

Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong. [5:22 PM, 3:25 PM]

Curiosity, contemplation, & the cinematic

2011-05-25T07:44:00.000+05:30

The Stone: The Flight of Curiosity New York Times (blog) - Justin Eh Smith - ‎May 22, 2011‎

What appears to us today to be a core is only what is left over after a centuries-long process by which the virtue of curiosity — once nearly synonymous with philosophy — migrated into other disciplines, both scientific and humanistic. As this migration was occurring, many curiosity-driven activities — such as insect-collecting and star-gazing, long considered at least tributaries of philosophy — were downgraded to the status of mere hobbies. This loss of curiosity has played an important but little noticed role in the widespread perception that professional philosophy has become out of touch with the interests of the broader society.

(title unknown) from enowning In-der-Blog-sein

The Owl on what Arendt to read.

“Contemplation had once been the queen of knowing and philosophy, but modern rationalism had come to dethrone the queen and sit on the throne of knowing. The reversal of contemplation and action had to be reversed. This was the philosophic vocation of Heidegger and Arendt.”

An Event?: Stenger’s “Thinking With Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts” from Networkologies by chris

Just got my copy of Stenger’s Whitehead book from Amazon. Firstly, it’s massive, and has a nifty, short but nice looking intro by Latour. But in thumbing through the book, it seems like a real wonder, and I’m so psyched to start to plow through this.

Starting the The Concept of Nature, the first work of the later (post-Principia) Whithead, Stengers weaves her text in and around citations from Whitehead right in the text differentiated by italics. The result is something more like the commentaries and exegeses of medieval scribes.

Vision? by debbanerji from Comments for Posthuman Destinies by debbanerji

The relation between Bergson and SA in the matter of intuition, duration and the cinematic has been lately in my mind wrt the Vijnana Chatusthaya. Here is a passage from my essay on the subject, which includes another quote from SA. Delueze’s essay Bergsonism (particularly the chapter Duration as Immediate Datum) can provide potent passages to juxtapose with this:

In thinking about the experience of Time, Henri Bergson has noted that indeed all the past is present in every present object. This continuing presence and continuous passage of Time is what he calls duration. Gilles Deleuze points to this in his discussion of Bergson’s methodical use of intuition. It is due to the continuing duration of Time that one can intuit, that is, directly apprehend the past and the future in the present, for the sum total of developing realities in the present comprise the virtual space of the future. It is the extension of this intuition that Sri Aurobindo seeks, a conscious identity with the body of Time. The Bergsonian intuition of Deleuze bears comparison in its extended possibility in this quote from Sri Aurobindo:

Technontology from Silika Mohapatra

The articulation of technology uncovers at least two trends: first, it harbors an impulse to duplicate, to create phantoms. Their numbers multiply as culture evolves. To see how: Alexander Graham Bell created the miracle that is a telephone. Space could no longer constrain verbal communication because the technology for the production of phantom sound was made possible.

However, by duplicating sound and enabling it to cut across continents, the telephone not only creates a double, but alsoenhances reality. This, I construe as the second trend. The two are closely tied since by (a) imitating the real, technology is also able to (b) transcend the real. It transcends by overcoming the limitations of reality, its finitude: […] There is a certain irony about the phantom. While it enhances an object, it also is one step removed from the object.

Mira Alfassa was a great modernizer and reformist

2011-05-20T22:38:00.000+05:30

Indian ode to the West wind: studies in literary encounters, Sisir Kumar Das - 2001 - 248 pages

Guru English: South Asian religion in a cosmopolitan language - Page 153 Srinivas Aravamudan - 2006 - 330 pages

The meeting of the East and the West in Sri Aurobindo's philosophy Sisir Kumar Maitra - 1956 - 451 pages

The participatory turn: spirituality, mysticism, religious studies - Page 301 Jorge N. Ferrer, Jorge Noguera Ferrer, Jacob H ... - 2008 - 388 pages

Beacons of the Light: One Hundred People Who Have Shaped the ... - Page 519 - Marcus Braybrooke - 2009 - 681 pages - Preview

Female ascetics in Hinduism - Page 126, Lynn Teskey Denton, Steven Collins - 2004 - 218 pages

The graceful guru: Hindu female gurus in India and the United States, Karen Pechilis - 2004 - 260 pages

The hero's journey toward a second American century, Michael E. Salla - 2002 - 224 pages

Journeys East: 20th century Western encounters with Eastern ... - Page 78 - Harry Oldmeadow - 2004 - 505 pages - Preview

Invading the sacred: an analysis of Hinduism studies in America, Krishnan Ramaswamy, Aditi Banerjee - 2007 - 545 pages

Transcendent in America: Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements as ... - Page 229 Lola Williamson - 2010 - 272 pages

Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Politics, History, and Culture) by Leela Gandhi and Julia Adams (Paperback -Feb. 28, 2006)

Esalen: America and the religion of no religion - Page 477, Jeffrey John Kripal- 2007 - 575 pages

The quest for the inner man: transpersonal psychotherapy and ... - Page 213 Joseph Vrinte - 1996 - 282 pages

The perennial quest for a psychology with a soul: an inquiry into ... - Page 436, Joseph Vrinte - 2002 - 568 pages

GOD SHALL GROW UP Body, Soul, & Earth Evolving Together - Page 17 Wayne Bloomquist - 2001 - 351 pages

Sri Aurobindo Ghose: the dweller in the lands of silence - William Kluback, Michael Finkenthal - 2001 -

Jouissance as Ananda: Indian Philosophy, Feminist Theory, and ... - Page 114, Ashmita Khasnabish - 2006 - 239 pages

Tantra: sex, secrecy, politics, and power in the study of religion - Page 101 - Hugh B. Urban - 2003 - 372 pages - Preview

Feminists under fire: exchanges across war zones - Page 203 - Wenona Mary Giles, Women in Conflict Zones Network - 2003 - 238 pages - The "Mother"- Mira Rachel Alfassa of Sephardic Jewish origin from Egypt and France - was a great modernizer and reformist and is revered even today, thirty years after her death. Many European and American socialist and communist women ...

Hinterlands and horizons: excursions in search of amity - Margaret Chatterjee - 2002 - 139 pages - Preview

Conversations and transformations: toward a new ethics of self and ... - Page 33 - Ananta Kumar Giri - 2002

Netaji Subhas Confronted the Indian Ethos (1900-1921): Yogi Sri Aurobindo's "Terrorism", Poet Tagore's "Universalism", and Mahatma Gandhi's "Experimental Non-Violence" - Page 139 by Adwaita P. Ganguly - 2003 - 224 pages

The graceful guru: Hindu female gurus in India and the United States, Karen Pechilis - 2004 - 260 pages

The Kundalini book of living and dying: gateways to a higher ... - Page 110, Ravindra Kumar, Jytte Larsen - 2004 - 271 pages

Sanskrit and the evolution of human speech: based on Sri ..., Sampadananda Mishra - 2005 - 171 pages

The strides of Vishnu: Hindu culture in historical perspective - Page 210, Ariel Glucklich - 2008 - 241 pages

Freud along the Ganges: psychoanalytic reflections on the people ..., Salman Akhtar - 2005 - 451 pages

Sri Aurobindo, Jung and Vedic Yoga by Satya Prakash Singh (Hardcover - Apr. 15, 2005)

Swaraj: Thoughts of Gandhi, Tilak, Aurobindo, Raja Rammohun Roy, Tagore and Vivekananda by Amulya Ranjan Mohapatra (June 30, 2009)

Modern Indian political thought: Ram Mohan Roy to present day Mitra Nandan Jha - 1975 - 348 pages

Mazzini and his impact on the Indian national movement Gita Srivastava - 1982 - 312 pages

Maha yogi Walt Whitman: new light on yoga Odayamadath Kunjappa Nambiar - 1978 - 258 pages

Emerson and the light of India: an intellectual history Robert Cartwright Gordon - 2007 - 255 pages

Rūmī and the hermeneutics of eroticism - Page 36 Mahdi Tourage - 2007 - 260 pages

Sex from Plato to Paglia: a philosophical encyclopedia - Page 1044 Alan Soble - 2006 - 1176 pages

Dante and the Orient - Page 100 Brenda Deen Schildgen - 2002 - 160 pages

Divine justice according to Kambar and Luther Ci. Vi Cavarimuttu - 1978 - 110 pages

Destiny and human initiative in the Mahābhārata - Page 242 Julian F. Woods - 2001 - 237 pages

Holy war: violence and the Bhagavad Gita, Steven Rosen - 2002 - 229 pages

Kṛṣṇa and Christ: in the light of some of the fundamental concepts ... Ishanand Vempeny - 1988 - 498 pages

Boston Confucianism: portable tradition in the late-modern world - Page 127 Robert C. Neville - 2000 - 258 pages

Bruteau's philosophy of spiritual evolution and consciousness: foundation for a nursing cosmology MP McCarthy - Nursing Philosophy, 2011 - Wiley Online Library

Under western eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay Balachandra Rajan - 1999 - 267 pages

Between Jerusalem and Benares: comparative studies in Judaism and ... Hananya Goodman - 1994 - 344 pages

One Cosmos Under God: The Unification of Matter, Life, Mind & Spirit by Robert W. Godwin (Paperback - Dec. 2004)

India: Mystic, Complex and Real : A Detailed Study of E.M. Forster's a Passage to India: His Treatment of India's Landscape, History, Social Anthrop Adwaita P. Ganguly (Hardcover - Sep 1990)

The Rose and the Lotus, Partnership Studies in the Works of Raja Rao. - Page li Stefano Mercanti - 2010 - 280 pages

Rainbow Bridge: A Comparative Study of Tagore and Sri Aurobindo by Goutam Ghosal (Hardcover - Feb. 2, 2007)

Homer and the Iliad, Sri Aurobindo and Ilion; Illumination, Heroism and Harmony (Unknown Binding - 2004)

The Tragedy of the Earth; From Sophocles to Sri Aurobindo (Unknown Binding - 2003)

The universalistic thought of India: from the Rigveda to Radhakrishnan - Ramnarayan Vyas - 1970 - Amazon.com

Visualizing space in Banaras: images, maps, and the practice of ... - Page 186 - Martin Gaenszle, Jörg Gengnagel - 2006 - 358 pages - Preview kkk

Writing the West, 1750-1947: representations from Indian languages - Page 198 - C. Vijayasree, Sāhitya Akādemī - 2004 - 214 pages - Preview

Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual ... - Page 242 - Andrew J. Nicholson - 2010 - 266 pages - Preview

Green Spirituality: One Answer to Environmental Problems and World ... - Page 314 - Chris Philpott - 2011 - 352 pages - Preview

The radiance of being: understanding the grand integral vision : ... - Allan Combs - 2002 - 380 pages - Snippet view

Gurus and their followers: new religious reform movements in ... - Antony R. H. Copley - 2000 - 235 pages - Snippet view

Decolonizing the Hindu mind: ideological development of Hindu ... - Koenraad Elst - 2001 - 657 pages - Snippet view

Father India: Westerners Under the Spell of an Ancient Culture - Jeffery Paine - 1999 - 336 pages -

Looks at the influence of India on the lives, thought, and desires of such twentieth-century Western writers and thinkers as E.M. Forester, Carl Jung, W.B. Yeats, and Martin Luther King, jr

Father India: how encounters with an ancient culture transformed ... - Jeffery Paine - 1998 - 324 pages - ... Aurobindo and the Mother became spiritually one. And Mirra Richard achieved her synthesis, her work, in defiance of the European highbrows like Dickinson who argued that "the contrast is that between India and the rest of the world. ...

With Medhananda on the shores of infinity - Medhananda - 1998 - 144 pages - Reminiscences by a German disciple of the Mother, 1878-1973, chiefly about Sri Aurobindo Ashram; with a few texts translated from French and German.

Sri Aurobindo's Writings - The Mother's Collected Works

Hawking Dawkins had a grand fall

2011-05-19T13:55:00.001+05:30

'Maya' mired in an overly ambitious plot Bangkok Post - ‎May 14, 2011‎

MAYA By Jostein Gaarder 346pp, 2001 Phoenix paperback. Available at all good bookshops, 279 baht. His later novel, Maya, attempts to do for evolutionary science what Sophie's World did for philosophy: render it inspiring; reveal it in all of its ...

Stephen Hawking tells Google 'philosophy is dead' Telegraph.co.uk - Matt Warman - ‎May 17, 2011‎

Speaking to Google's Zeitgeist Conference in Hertfordshire, the author of 'A Brief History of Time' said that fundamental questions about the nature of the universe could not be ...

I'd stake my life that Stephen Hawking is wrong about heaven The Guardian

Stephen Hawking, science and sharia Washington Post (blog)

My twelve-year-old son Rumi, is a fan of Stephen Hawkings' book, A Brief History of Time. He has been blogging about the book for nearly a year now.

Islamic philosophy is genuine and is not Greek Iran Book News Agency - ‎May 17, 2011‎

In the reviewing meeting on the book "Farabi"; written by Nasrollah Hikmat, Davari Ardakani said: " The philosophy which began with al-Kindi and was established with Farabi, is authentically original and isn't Greek.

Lecture on Spinoza and Islamic Philosophy Iran Book News Agency

Dr Michiel Leezenbrrg, professor of philosophy at the University of Amsterdam is going to lecture on 'Spinoza and Islamic Philosophy' at Iranian Institute of Philosophy.

A Philosopher in Love New York Times - Robert Zaretsky - ‎May 6, 2011‎

TODAY is the 300th birthday of David Hume, the most important philosopher ever to write in English, according to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Monk, mystic, mechanic Ha'aretz - Avner Shapira - ‎May 13, 2011‎

Ludwig Wittgenstein's complicated ties with his Viennese family, the suicides of three of his siblings, his ambivalent attitude toward his Jewish origins and his homosexuality - all are examined in a new exhibition in Berlin in honor of the great 20th ...

Sri Aurobindo's Writings - The Mother's Collected Works

Wide variety of other philosophical orientations

2011-05-15T08:46:00.000+05:30

Where the Hell Am I? Some Remarks on the History of SR and OOO by larvalsubjects

From time to time people have raised questions about why SR/OOO might have arisen at the time it did. I don’t pretend to have a comprehensive answer to this question, but I suspect that it has a lot to do with the unique experience of our generation, especially as it pertains to the new technologies. Folks like Graham, Morton, Bogost, and I lived through a fundamental transformation of culture. We saw the first Ataris, then the personal computer, transformations in the telephone involving call waiting, caller ID, multi-party calls, the rise of cable television, the invention of the cell phone, the rise of the internet, the transformation of grocery stores and food, etc., etc., etc. We have lived through and in a transition between two cultures. As Jameson suggests in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, such transitional lives between histories tend to generate a particular critical and speculative sensibility.

We have lived– as does the current generation that grew up in this ecology –in a world awash in objects of all sorts. Not only did we develop in a world of objects, we developed in a world awash in mysterious or withdrawn objects (here, for some reason, Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive and Christine both come to mind as they depict a world animated by all sorts of mysterious, frighteningly lively machines). And what we discovered, perhaps, as we began our studies in the world of theory was that that theory was deeply inadequate in helping us to understand this strange new world we were living in. Roughly we were presented with three options: the linguistic turn focusing on signifiers, texts, and signs, phenomenology focusing on the analysis of intentionality and lived embodied experience, and the new historicists with their focus on networks of power and discursive structures.

Figure/Ground Interview from Larval Subjects

Well apparently it’s been a banner day for interviews! Here’s another interview with me over at Figure/Ground. I talk quite a bit about Pedagogy and new media.

The internet changed all of that, especially with the emergence of blogs. Suddenly the relations between nodes in networks opened up significantly, leading to all sorts of surprising encounters among researchers. This has led to people discovering theoretical orientations and trends that they might not have ever otherwise discovered due to the relatively restricted nature of the earlier academic networks. Additionally, communication has intensified such that discussion takes place between people from diverse backgrounds on a day to day basis. As a result, theoretical shifts and development have intensified as a result of cross-fertilization. I now find that I have to think about a wide variety of other philosophical orientations in my own work that I wouldn’t have even been aware of in an ecology prior to the internet. […]

First, I’d say it’s important to value the process of writing for its own sake. A lot of students and people see writing is the end result of a process whereby ones ideas have already been developed. But that’s not really how it works; at least for me. The writing is the thinking, not the result of a thinking that has already taken place. The activity itself is what generates the ideas. It’s important to get into the habit of writing regularly to develop your ideas. This also leads to a diminution in the anxiety surrounding articles and conferences.

Second, participate and communicate with others. My experience online has been invaluable because it has forged relationships with scholars from all over the world. These relationships have not only created countless opportunities for articles and presentations, but have invaluably deepened and enriched my thought. There are a number of trajectories of thought that I would have never followed if discussions with others handn’t instigated them in me. No one knows that you exist if you don’t participate and communicate. While it’s certainly true that articles are more important on your CV, a mere handful of people ever read articles. It’s crucially important to get yourself out there and engage with the work of others. Not doing so both renders you invisible and denies you countless opportunities to develop your thought.

two Levi Bryant interviews just posted May 11, 2011

At New APPS, the interview by John Protevi can be found by clicking HERE. At Figure/Ground Communication, the interview by Laureano Ralon is HERE. Posted by doctorzamalek

Reharmonizations of ancient metaphysics and philosophical contributions in a fortified form

2011-02-09T14:18:00.000+05:30

Part IV: Toward an Archaeologico-Hermeneutical Fusion from Per Caritatem by Cynthia R. Nielsen

By incorporating Gadamer’s metaphysics and ontology into his account of epistemai and mutable historical a prioris, Foucault would have access to non-constructed shared structures, which because of their web-like interconnections and flexible boundaries, would be both amenable to his episteme-specific conditioning rules and would provide the present-yet-absent background “space” needed to fill the gaps between epistemai. In other words, these interconnected metaphysical structures, given their identity-range and ongoing concealment-unconcealment dialectic, would give Foucault a way to explain the transitional movements between epistemai and how elements from past epistemaican be taken up in subsequent historical periods, be reconfigured and yet still recognizable as echoes of something else, and come to play a completely different role in the new episteme. These common structural yet non-identical overlaps across epistemai, in which former discursive elements, concepts, and practices are reharmonized in a new episteme and inhabit an organization “place” along a continuum of central and peripheral roles, support and strengthen a view of epistemai with porous and permeable rather than rigidly fixed boundaries and internal rules.

Just as Foucault is reticent to speak of historical a prioris as metaphysical principles, he is also reticent to make explicit claims regarding transcultural structures or capacities possessed by all human beings—even though his account presupposes such structures. We have also seen that Foucault’s expansion of his methodology to an archaeology-plus-genealogy and his affirmation in later writings of our inability to step outside of the conditioning of our own episteme allow him to overcome deficiencies of his earlier formulations. Foucault’s methodological amendment and the accompanying implication that the archaeologist too is historically conditioned share family resemblances with Gadamer’s notion of our socio-cultural and linguistically shaped hermeneutical horizons. Because they both affirm the contingency of these socially-formed conditioning factors, neither thinker advocates a social determinism locking us into a particular horizon or prohibiting us access to other historical periods.

Like Foucault, Gadamer, as Taylor points out in his essay, presupposes some kind of common human nature or shared transhistorical metaphysical structures.[12] Unlike Foucault, Gadamer acknowledges and makes explicit his appropriations and reharmonizations of ancient metaphysics to support a historically-friendly view of shared human structures. In light of the fact that Foucault’s notion of power relations, resistance possibilities, and his analyses of active subjects and self-transformative technologies presuppose common volitional and rational capacities among humans, he has much to gain from joining hands with Gadamer and making these metaphysical assumptions explicit. Given Foucault’s expanded archaeology and his affirmation of our finitude and interpretative constraints, my proposed archaeologico-hermeneutical fusion would, if my account is correct, allow him to retain his innovative insights and philosophical contributions in a fortified form. Not only would his account become more coherent, but the emancipatory aspects of his analyses would be redoubled and their viability amplified and available for application to current socio-political issues.

OOO: A negative theology of the object? from An und für sich by Adam Kotsko

I suspect that OOO is more analogous to negative theology than to deconstruction, insofar as the object is supposed to have some kind of content. In fact, in conversation with Levi he has said that the “withdrawn” object includes unrealized potentiality, which then serves as the ground of the possibility of change. I still maintain that we don’t need any hidden content to make change possible. You can get change through negativity or inherent ontological incompleteness, and indeed I would argue that the change achieved in that model is more “real” than the change Levi was promoting in that conversation, because the unrealized potential of the object is “always already there” even if it doesn’t manifest at any given moment. (This isn’t the main point of the post, however, and I may be wrong about what Levi meant.)

What’s more, everything I’ve read from Harman and Levi indicates that the object is the self-identical “ground zero” of reality — so that the withdrawal of the object from all relationships (including and especially its relationship to human cognition) serves to reinforce its base-level self-identity.

So overall, it seems to me that OOO’s approach to the object is similar to negative theology’s approach to God. Am I getting anything horribly wrong here? (Just to be clear, I don’t mean to say that OOO is “secretly religious” or anything of the sort — I’m only talking about the formal similarity between OOO and negative theology.)

Philosophical despair & post-secular spirituality

2011-02-08T15:45:00.000+05:30

Integral Anthropology and World Religions by Debashish Banerji

Posted by DEBBANERJI | POSTHUMAN DESTINIES: FEBRUARY 8, 2011

Two of the major figures I would like to refer to in this regard are both Americans. One is Richard N Bucke, who wrote a book called Cosmic Consciousness in 1901. The book was inspired by an experience, on which he wrote in the third person due to a sense of impersonality that had entered his consciousness. […]

1901-1902 is also the year of the publication of a major work, one may say, the foundational text of world religions, of comparative mysticism, and of one might call the subjective science of the future. This is William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. In this work, James characterizes all mystical experiences by four features. It’s interesting that James first characteristic of mystic experience is stated in terms that may almost be taken out of the description of his experience by Richard Bucke Bucke says of his experience that he had an exaltation “followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe.”

In Search of Method in the Age of Transition Monthly Review - Dominic Alexander

István Mészáros. Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, Volume I: The Social Determination of Method. Monthly Review Press, 2010. 463 pp.

The book in effect presents a number of case studies on particular thinkers. One example is the discussion of Hannah Arendt in the chapter on the 'Rise and Fall of Historical Temporality'. While Arendt was a critical writer, Mészáros shows that she accepted certain premises which trapped her thinking within the bounds of bourgeois thought. The horizon of the possible becomes limited to capitalism.

Thus the possibility of democratic control of production is ruled out of consideration before her analysis begins. Arendt is further taken to task for a relativistic argument concerning the meaning of history, leading to pessimism about knowledge itself, and is shown to be caricaturing Marx's understanding of the manner in which humanity makes its own history (pp. 123-5). The decay of bourgeois thought is exemplified here in Arendt's treatment of Descartes, which for Mészáros is as distorted as her treatment of Marx. Descartes' principle of doubt was a point of departure 'which in its explicitly stated positive aspirations aims at the constitution of secure knowledge' (p.122).

The problem is not just at the level of epistemology and history. Philosophical despair at the possibility of knowledge becomes practical despair at the possibility of changing the world. Arendt stands here therefore as an exemplum of a whole range of twentieth-century schools of thought.

Incipient mentality must already exist on the level of subatomic particles

2010-12-30T21:25:00.001+05:30

The Speculative Turn from The Pinocchio Theory by Steven Shaviro

The Speculative Turn, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, has now been published. This volume gives the fullest account to date of (so-called) “speculative realism” in all its varieties. There are articles by the four initial speculative realists (Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux, and Ray Brassier), together with work by other thinkers who have influenced them (Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, Delanda, etc) essays by later contributors to speculative realist trends (Bryant, Srnicek, Reza Negarestani), brief interviews with Badiou and Zizek, and more. The volume contains my own article/critique of Harman, “The Actual Volcano: Whitehead, Harman, and the Problem of Relations,” together with Harman’s response.

The Speculative Turn can be purchased in hardcopy, or downloaded as a free pdf, here. It doesn’t seem to have made it to Amazon.com yet, but I am told it will be there shortly.

Fruit Flies and Slime Molds from The Pinocchio Theory by Steven Shaviro

It may be noted that research into biological free will and biological decision-making is not entirely unrelated to the questions about panpsychism raised by such analytic philosophers as Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, and Sam Coleman, and which I have discussed previously in this blog. For Strawson, the emergence of mentality from non-mentality is a serious problem, even though the emergence of life from non-life is not. He argues, therefore, that an incipient mentality must already exist on the level of subatomic particles. I suggest that it helps to make sense of this claim if we understand mentality in terms of “decision,” rather than in terms of consciousness or “qualia.” The evolution of biological decision making, and biological free will, might well depend upon, and make use of, an implicit potential of all matter. If decision were not already possible, then living things that actually do make decisions could not have come into existence. Rather than decision being a power of life, then, life would be a consequence of the potentiality of decision.

Cyberspace and Postmodern Democracy

2010-12-15T09:22:00.000+05:30

An important thesis of Habermas's text was what he saw as the degeneration of a rationally based mode of public deliberation into a consumerist society dominated by a mass media that was itself compromised by its relationship with the State. His critics, in turn, have argued that such a transformation was not in fact a degeneration but a marker of a more egalitarian and democratic public culture. This conference seeks to re-examine the contours of this debate in the light of the significant transformations in digital technology and human communication that have taken place over the last few decades.

XIII International Conference

Forum on Contemporary Theory, Baroda in collaboration with Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh

Theme: The Virtual Transformation of the Public Sphere

15-18 December 2010 Venue: Hotel Parkview, Chandigarh, India

Program-Schedule

Thursday, 16^th December Venue: Banquet Hall (Upper)

10.00 – 11.30 am Inauguration Chair: Prof. Bhupinder Brar

10.00 – 10.10 am Welcome by Prof. Rana Nayar, Head, Department of English, Panjab University

10.10 – 10.20 am Welcome by Prof. Prafulla C. Kar, Convener, Forum on Contemporary Theory, Baroda

10.20 – 10.35 am Thematic Introduction by Dr. Gaurav Desai, Convener of the Conference

10.35 – 10.40 am Remarks by Prof. Lewis R. Gordon, on the Special Issue of the Journal of Contemporary Thought, “Degrees of Statelessness”

10.40 – 10.45 am Release of the Special Issue by Prof. Nicholas D. Mirzoeff

10.45 – 10.55 am Remarks by Prof. William D. Pederson, Editor of the Volume, Abraham Lincoln without Borders

10.55 – 11.00 am Release of the Volume by Prof. R. C. Sobti, Vice-Chancellor, Panjab University, Chandigarh

11.00 – 11.05 am Remarks by Prof. Akeel Bilgrami, the Editor of the Volume Democratic Culture: Philosophical and Historical Essays

11.05 – 11.10 am Release of the Volume by Prof. Javeed Alam, Chairperson, Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi

11.10 – 11.20 am Inaugural Speech by the Vice-Chancellor, Prof. R. C. Sobti

11.20 – 11.25 am Address by the Chair, Prof. Bhupinder Brar

11.25 – 11.30 am Vote of Thanks by Dr. Surbhi Goel, Department of English, Panjab University, Chandigarh

11.45–1.00 pm First Session Venue: Banquet Hall (Upper) Keynote Address Chair: Gaurav Desai

Speaker: Nicholas D. Mirzoeff, Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies, New York University, USA

Topic: “Global Visualities in Crisis”

Second Session 2.00 –3.30 pm Venue: Banquet Hall (Lower)

A1: Theorizing the Public Sphere Chair: Jasbir Jain

a) Meera Chakravorty, “The Virtual Transformation of the Public Sphere and Its Dynamics”

b) Nishat Kazi, “Internet and the Dynamics of Public Sphere”

c) Surhita Basu, “News and Public Sphere: Discourse is Power”

B1: Political Agency–Virtual and Real–1

Chair: Pushpinder Syal Venue: Conference Room

a) Anup Shekhar Chakraborty, “Identity and the Virtual Spaces among the Zo Hnahthlak: The Emergent Zo Cyber Politics”

b) Esha Mahadevan, “Internet as Public Sphere – The Emergence of New Forms of Politics”

c) Hiba Aleem, “Virtual Activism, Real Repercussions: An Analysis of How Facebook Impacts the Public Sphere in Light of Some Recent Campaigns”

d) Padam Nepal, “Virtualization of the Politics of Recognition: Mapping the Physical-Virtual Complementarity in Lepchas’ Struggle for Recognition as PTG in Darjeeling Hills (West Bengal) and Sikkim, India”

C1: Democracy, New Media and the Public Sphere Chair: Harpreet Pruthi Venue: Board Room

a) K.M. Johnson, “Cyberspace and Postmodern Democracy: A Critique of the Habermasian Notion of the Public Sphere”

b) Garima Kalita, “Attested Freedom: Public Sphere of Media Democracy”

c) Timothy Allen Jackson, “Cybernecology: Liberation Aesthetics in the Public Sphere”

Third Session 3.30 –5.00 pm

A2: Historicizing the Public Sphere Chair: Parul Dave Mukherji Venue: Conference Room

a) Mary Bachaspatimayum, “Technological Advancement and Its Influence on the Public Sphere”

b) N. Nagaraju, “New Communities and ‘Their’ Public Sphere”

c) Anju Dhadda Misra, “Noosphere in Cyborg: The Virtual and the Virtuous”

d) Ashes Kumar Nayak, “Media Literacy: Strengthening the Public Sphere”

B2: Political Agency – Virtual and Real – 2 Chair: Meera Chakravorty Venue: Banquet Hall (Lower)

a) James Winchester, “Global Justice, Institutional Change and the Public Sphere in the Age of the Internet”

b) Arturo Brahms & William Pederson, “Media Transformations from Lincoln to Obama”

c) Mandakini Jha, “New Media’s Use and Misuse of Lincoln as a Democratic Symbol in Asia”

C2: Representations 1 Chair: Sunita Manian Venue: Board Room

a) Jasbir Jain, “Mediations between Collective Voices and Future Time: Politics and Media Representation”

b) Jaspal K. Singh, “Images of Sikh “Tortured Bodies” and the Construction of Sikh Solidarity and Identity within the Indian Nation-state and the Diaspora”

c) Divya Joshi, “Culture of Confession in The Bachchans: From Autobiography to Blogging”

Fourth Session (Plenary) 5.15 – 7.00 pm Venue: Banquet Hall (Upper)

Re-Reading William Godwin Chair: R. Radhakrishnan

Speaker: a) Tilottama Rajan, Canada Research Chair and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Western Ontario

Topic: “Mediating the Novel: Speculations and Discipline in Godwin’s St. Leon”

Speaker: b) Gour K. Das, Former Professor of English, University of Delhi and Vice Chancellor, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar

Topic: “Culture of Anarchy: On the Shaping of Contemporary Media and Literary Cultures”

There is clearly an action of involved knowledge at work

2010-11-21T06:14:00.001+05:30

Whitehead/Levinas « The Pinocchio Theory 11 Aug 2009

Everything in Whitehead cries out against the unilateral thrust of Levinas’ vision. Levinas conceives a single grand transition: something that does not happen in time, so much as it determines and instantiates a new sort of time. The apotheosis of the Other ruptures linear, homogeneous clockwork time, and installs instead an “infinite” or “messianic” time: a “discontinuous” time of “death and resurrection” (Levinas 1969, 284-285). For Levinas, in striking contrast to Bergson, “there is no continuity in being” (284). Continuity is false, because the appearance of the face ruptures it once and for all. This epiphany points to a radical anteriority: an instance that precedes, and that can never be contained within, the extended present time of lived duration.

Now, Whitehead also rejects Bergsonian continuity; but he does so in a very different manner, and for very different reasons. “There is a becoming of continuity,” he writes, “but no continuity of becoming” (1929/1978, 35). That is to say, continuity is never given in advance. “The ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism”; but out of the basic atomic constituents of reality, “there is a creation of continuity” (35). Both continuity in space (which Whitehead calls the extensive continuum – 61-82) and continuity in time (Bergsonian duration) must actively be constructed, in the course of the “creative activity belonging to the essence of each occasion” (1938/1968, 151). In other words, continuity is approximated through a series of discrete, punctual “becomings” and “transitions.” Transition is the very basis of continuity; this means that the experience of transformation is not unique, but common. Concern is not the result of some sublime epiphany; rather, it is an everyday experience. For Whitehead, even death and resurrection are commonplace occurrences. Everything is subject to a rule of “perpetual perishing”: “no thinker thinks twice; and, to put the matter more generally, no subject experiences twice” (1929/1978, 29). If this is so, then there can be no single, specially privileged moment of transition, and no radical alterity such as Levinas demands. Time is irreversible, and irreparable; but there is no traumatic moment in which my sensibility would be breached, and my primordial enjoyment definitively interrupted.

Whitehead therefore rejects any grand narrative of a passage from self-enjoyment to concern, or from the aesthetic to the ethical. Just as every actual occasion has both a physical pole and a mental (or conceptual) pole, so too every actual occasion evinces both self-enjoyment and concern. Indeed, this is precisely why these terms form a patterned aesthetic contrast, and not an irreducible ethical opposition.

Whitehead refuses to choose between concern and self-enjoyment, just as he refuses to “pick and choose” between “the red glow of the sunset” and “the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon” (1920/2004, 29). If Whitehead is on the side of aesthetics as opposed to ethics, and on the side of immanence as opposed to transcendence, this is not because he would reject either ethics or transcendence. Rather, he finds an immanent place for transcendence, and an aesthetic place for ethics. He insists that every occasion is already, by its very nature, a “conjunction of transcendence and immanence” (1938/1968, 167). Indeed, “every actual entity, in virtue of its novelty, transcends its universe, God included” (1929/1978, 94). But this transcendence is just the other side of an immanent, actual fact. An object is transcendent as a process of decision, or “as a capacity for determination”; but it is immanent as an already realized fact, or “as a realized determinant” of other objects (239).

Similarly, Whitehead gives an aestheticized account of ethics. He never provides a Kantian, categorical basis for moral duty; nor does he ever mount a Nietzschean attack upon conventional morality. Instead, he insists that fact and value cannot be cleanly separated. They are always intimately entwined, since value is intrinsic to existence: “everything has some value for itself, for others, and for the whole” (1938/1968, 111).

Hyperobjects and OOO from Larval Subjects

I loved it but I didn’t trust it. Yet, in What is Philosophy?, I found an answer, for Deleuze and Guattari argue that philosophy is nothing more than the creation and critique, the invention, of concepts. And here, concepts precede, in their own way, any investigation of the world. Moreover, they made the strangest claim of all: concepts are not simply about something, they are something. For D&G, concepts are not ideas in the head, but are real things, real actors, real events, in the world.

Nagarjuna [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] 4 May 2005

Theory, in Nagarjuna’s view, was the enemy of all forms of legitimate practice, social, ethical and religious. Theory must be undone through the demonstration that its Buddhist metaphysical conclusions and the Brahminical reasoning processes which lead to them are counterfeit, of no real value to genuinely human pursuits. But in order to demonstrate such a commitment, doubt had to be methodical, just as the philosophy it was meant to undermine was methodical...
In his revolutionary tract of The Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, Nagarjuna abjectly throws this elementary distinction between samsara and nirvana out the door, and does so in the very name of the Buddha. “There is not the slightest distinction,” he declares in the work, “between samsara and nirvana. The limit of the one is the limit of the other.” Now how can such a thing be posited, that is, the identity ofsamsara and nirvana, without totally undermining the theoretical basis and practical goals of Buddhism as such? For if there is no difference between the world of suffering and the attainment of peace, then what sort of work is a Buddhist to do as one who seeks to end suffering? Nagarjuna counters by reminding the Buddhist philosophers that, just as Gautama Sakyamuni had rejected both metaphysical and empirical substantialism through the teaching of “no-soul” (anatman) and causal interdependence (pratityasamputpada), so Scholastic Buddhism had to remain faithful to this non-substantialist stance through a rejection of the causal theories which necessitated notions of fixed nature (svabhava), theories which metaphysically reified the difference between samsara and nirvana. This later rejection could be based on Nagarjuna’s newly coined notion of the “emptiness,” “zeroness” or “voidness” (sunyata) of all things.

The Knowledge of the Inconscience from Sri Aurobindo Studies

Sri Aurobindo points out that the Inconscience carries within itself a type of Knowledge by Identity, but it is dark and functions as an automatic perfection of the action of energy…

We need only gaze at the perfect ordering and incredibly precise action of atoms and energy, creating and forming material forms, of solar systems, galaxies and the universe with an order and mathematical sequencing that clearly is a work of involved knowledge; not to speak of the diversity of life and the web of life, the inter-relations between all the beings that live together in one eco-sphere and bio-sphere here in this microcosm we call the earth, to see that there is clearly an action of involved knowledge at work here, not “self-aware” in the sense of what we describe in the superconscient planes of awareness, but clearly under strict control of a master intelligence.

Sin, cos, & tan

2010-11-02T11:16:00.000+05:30

Notes Towards an Object-Oriented Literary Criticism from Larval Subjects

As is familiar by now, object-oriented ontologists argue that objects are withdrawn both from one another andfrom themselves. Within my onticological framework, this points is expressed in the claim that objects are split-objects, divided by the domain of their virtual proper being and their local manifestations. Virtual proper being refers to the potentials or powers of an object which are never actualized as such, while local manifestation refers to the actualized properties of an object manifested under certain conditions.

In my current local manifestation, for example, my skin is rather pale. By contrast, during the summer, my skin becomes dark. In the latter instance, this is because I am spending a good deal of time outdoors and therefore my skin color changes as a result of sunlight. If I am able to change in these ways, then this must be because my body possesses a virtual dimension, a dimension of potencies or powers, that enables it to manifest itself in a variety of ways. These differing manifestations will be in part due to internal dynamics of an object, but also its exo-relations to other objects. I call the field of these exo-relations a “regime of attraction” because it plays a role in what qualities an object actualizes in the world. In the case of my tan, for example, the regime of attraction involves the sun among other things.

What is Unseen from Cafe Hayek by Don Boudreaux

Each American, as both consumer and producer, is connected to hundreds of millions of other persons across the nation and the globe in a web of commercial relationships so vast, intricate, and nuanced that it is impossible to trace out and quantify in detail how changes in one part of this web affect other parts of the web.

Moreover, changes within this global web of commercial relationships are incessant, with changes in consumers’ demands for imports being simply one among a gazillion changes that occur each year. […]

It bears repeating again and again: there is nothing economically special about international trade as compared to intranational trade – save, of course, for the sorry fact that politicians and rent-seeking producers find it easy to demagogue for their own greedy, narrow purposes.

Philosophy needs to critically engage the traditions outside of Europe

2010-10-27T12:54:00.000+05:30

Eagle's Eye: Mind your mind Central Chronicle Tuesday, October 26, 2010 H Infant Vinoth

According to Sri Aurobindo: spiritual mind is that, which in its fullness aware of the self, reflecting the divine in oneself and awakening to high knowledge. And super-mind according to him is, to achieve the state of Sachidananda, the power of self-awareness and world awareness.

Christianity and its others from The Immanent Frame by Peter van der Veer

Philosophy has never been able to completely shed its roots in Christian theology, despite the deeply anti-metaphysical project of analytical philosophy. What is called continental philosophy continues to be heavily invested in theological thought, as the work of Teilhard de Chardin and Jean-Luc Marion (or, in the Jewish tradition, that of Levinas and Derrida) testifies. However, it is the global challenge of Islamism that has forced deeply secular philosophers, like Jürgen Habermas, to at least partly engage their Eurocentrism. The secular project in the West has been so successful that Christian philosophers like Charles Taylor think that they live in a secular age. The fact, however, remains, that the majority of humanity lives in the Global South and is not secular, although secularism as a political project can be found everywhere. At this juncture in world history, philosophy needs to critically engage not only the traditions of Europe but also those outside of Europe. This has hardly happened, and therefore it is anthropology rather than Western philosophy that continues to be the disciplinary site of that engagement.

By far the greatest problem for the anthropological study of Christianity today is that it is not part of a comparative endeavor that examines the interaction of religious movements and projects in different regions of the world. In South, South-East, and East Asia, we find extraordinary competition between different religious movements: Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and others. Also, within these religions this competition is intense—for example, between Shi’as and Sunnis, or between Protestants and Catholics. Since Christian missions were the first modern endeavors of their type in the world, many of their tactics and strategies have provided models for other religious movements. Education, health care, and social welfare are the fields in which these movements are competing with each other, often without much presence of the state. In refugee camps in Asia, one finds also a heated competition for the souls of the displaced.

An element that needs careful consideration in the study of religious networks and competition between religious movements is the issue of religious freedom. The U.S. in particular is at the forefront of attempts to enlarge the space for Christian missionary activity in countries that limit possibilities for proselytization. It brings the issue up during trade negotiations, like those around entry to the WTO. While one can sympathize with efforts to make the exercise of religious practice and belief more free in countries that have long faced suppression of religion, the fact that there are close connections between such clamors for religious freedom, American evangelism, and American politics makes it into a highly contested issue. Perhaps the anxieties surrounding Saudi Arabian support for Wahhabi mosques in Europe can be referred to for a better understanding of the anxieties that surround U.S. supported Christian evangelism in Asia.

on Buddhism, objects, Zizek, Morton, etc. from immanence by ai

I've been meaning to catch up on the discussions over Buddhism and objects/relations, Slavoj Zizek's critique of "Western Buddhism," and related topics, which have been continuing on Tim Morton's Ecology Without Nature, Jeffrey Bell's Aberrant Monism, Skholiast's Speculum Criticum Traditionis, and elsewhere. I haven't quite caught up, but here are a few quick notes on some of what's been said... 1) Michael at Archive Fire rightfully points to the virtues of Jeffrey Bell's lucidly articulated point that...