Sri Aurobindo does affirm the intellectual path as also a way to the Divine

Re: Goodbye To All That: Nature and the Future Body in Sri Aurobindo
by Rich on Tue 29 Apr 2008 10:29 AM PDT Profile Permanent Link

But I certainly would not throw out the Critical baby with the Intellectual bathwater. Because all to often those claiming to have grown into the higher consciousness, are merely skirting the parameters of astral worlds (e.g. inner vital mental). In fact I would not trust anyone claiming to be in the "higher consciousness" because to make such a claim would IMO be oxymoronic to being in that higher state.

Therefore this particular critique to me smacks of the IY invective accusing one of mentalizing, which is an invective that fails absolutely, and which I have deconstructed in other places. The fact is if you read the Synthesis of Yoga Sri Aurobindo does affirm the intellectual path as also a way to the Divine.

I do think that these sorts of stylistic practices are things best not continued

traxus4420 Says: April 27, 2008 at 3:18 pm
“That is, if truth has collapsed, if there’s no longer a world “out there” that could be an arbiter of different claims about that world, what is left but to talk about texts about the world rather than the world itself?”
i agree that this is a conclusion that could be drawn from reading this type of writing (and material from other humanities departments like literature that rely on the continental tradition for their conceptual/metaphysical framework), and my usual response has been the same. but lately i’ve been thinking, these people (people like us) may read the news with a high degree of suspicion, but it’s not likely to be metaphysical suspicion, i.e. “fools! talking about this fantastical ‘world out there’ again!”
that is, i think there may be something of the useful fiction to this collapse of truth theory. it’s professionally and institutionally useful because it’s not rigorously articulated or maintained, just assumed in order to do certain kinds of writing and thinking. it can be drawn on when needed.
this is why brassier’s book can cause a stir, when it’s core claims are really just the logical extension of commonsense attitudes about science (that it describes things that exist independently of human consciousness).
re: the originality/genius issue, isn’t there a kind of disavowal going on here? we’ve learned from the geniuses themselves that the genius-phallus doesn’t exist, and continue to act as if it did. i think it’s a mistake to blame the problem on institutional factors insofar as they’re conceived as purely external impositions, nothing do with our own activity. this is what blogs are good for, we really can write whatever we want.
traxus4420 Says: April 27, 2008 at 3:24 pm
“really can write whatever we want”
and become accustomed to it, such that the absurdity of more institutionally accepted techniques and styles becomes impossible to ignore (or partake in).
larvalsubjects Says: April 27, 2008 at 3:33 pm
And should you decide to respond again, maybe you could find a way to be more condescending. “The book had to be written”? It’s not as if I picked up a book by Hegel or Deleuze yesterday and am suddenly suffering shock at what I’m encountering. I’ve studied these figures for going on twenty years now and have made exactly the arguments about style in defense of these thinkers you and others are making throughout the thread. In other words, yes, yes, yes, I’m familiar with these arguments. I also know that a number of Deleuze’s works are exceptionally clear, as are some of Hegel’s and much of Adorno. This suggests that something is going on.
Something is amiss when days, sometimes months are eaten up trying to figure out just what claim if any someone is making. Shouldn’t we minimally be entitled to know a person’s claims if they’re asking for an investment of our time, which is our life, and which is connected to our labor? I’ve been willing to make a sacrifice of my time and life and trudge through these stylistic fogs because I believe these thinkers articulate things that are extremely valuable and are therefore worth the trouble. But I do not believe that things have to be this way and I do think that a rather insidious form of power and set of interpellative devices does accompany these types of stylistics. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from all these thinkers, but I’m sorry I’m just not buying the arguments about the necessity of these styles. I would never suggest that these thinkers should be ignored or dismissed, but I do think that these sorts of stylistic practices are things best not continued, and I do think that many things that are very important and dear to me at the level of the social and political and clinical practice in psychotherapy have been set back, in part, decades because of stylistic self-indulgence. I also think it’s absurd to suggest that what Hegel or Adorno or Derrida or Deleuze or Lacan is trying to think is any more complex than what Freud or Spinoza or Darwin or Marx or Foucault or Husserl or Burke or Badiou was trying to think. In short, I think a number of these thinkers have a rather misguided idea of the relationship between a certain sort of style and the content of their philosophy. Judging by the some of the responses to this post and the quickness with which people have trotted out standard form/content arguments taught to every first year philosophy student studying Heidegger or various post-structuralist thinkers, all the while ignoring what the post argued about the transferential effects of this style, you would think I’d shot someone. I certainly must have hit a nerve or symptom, which, I suspect, is a function of the very thing I was thematizing in the original post.
Dominic Says: April 27, 2008 at 6:01 pm
a rather misguided idea
A different idea, to be sure.
I seem to remember that Geoffrey Bennington’s book on/with Derrida explicitly raised the question of whether Bennington could rewrite Derrida in a way that neutralised the stylistic driftwork whilst preserving the concepts - with Derrida’s “Circonfession” running along the bottom margin doing its best to upset the applecart. I wouldn’t say that the gambit represented by Derrida’s “horizontal vertigo” fails exactly, but it might be useful to see it as a move in a game (against a neutralising, systematising antagonist) in which there is always a counter-move.
Recently I’ve been entertaining the conceit that some of the fuzzier notions in de Man might have been more clearly expressible in mathematical terms. There’s more than one way to seduce the reader away from the colloquial (that is, away from “folk” psychology, politics, economics, literary appreciation etc.). Badiou opts for mathematics as the ultimate seduction: the mind “subjectivating” a proof is as far as can be from the mind captivated by opinion.
I think it’s correct to see stylistic “difficulty” as having a relationship to seduction, captivation, transference and so on; but one should perhaps at the same time see this seduction as intrinsic to thinking, to the transmission of a thought. If thinking is to be opposed to opinion, to the circulation of received ideas, then the comforts of opinion must be overcome through the pleasure-pain of seduction. Textual “style” is just one of the possible strategies in the seducer’s repertoire.
On this point, permit me to quote what is already no doubt very well known, from Badiou’s “Philosophy as Biography”: “The question of love is necessarily at the heart of philosophy, because it governs the question of its power, the question of its address to its public, the question of its seductive strength”.
larvalsubjects Says: April 27, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Dominic, I know that in my own case I might as well not read a text at all if I am not in a state of transference or seduced by that text. It’s as if nothing will stick or provoke thought unless I already encounter the text as containing something. I forget all of the text. It seems that learning in general necessarily requires some sort of transference. The question, perhaps, is whether or not a textual strategy actively promotes the dissolution of the transference. Time will tell with Badiou, I think. Already we’ve seen a good deal of philosophical innovation from Brassier and Meillassoux, who I understand to be deeply influenced by Badiou, though independent thinkers in their own right. Is there perhaps something in Badiou’s textual strategy that encourages this? Perhaps something to do with the emphasis on the mathematical as opposed to the interpretive? I don’t know.
Dominic Says: April 27, 2008 at 7:34 pm
I have been reading the same mathematical text now - Robert Goldblatt’s introduction to topos theory - for several months, albeit mostly for half an hour at a time on the train to and from work. The language of the text doesn’t seduce me at all; moreover, I find it very difficult to keep even the most basic constructions in my mind, and when more complex constructions are introduced I am almost always sent scurrying back to the earliest chapters of the book to refresh my memory.
Nevertheless, over time, some of it has started to sink in and I have begun to gain confidence in reasoning about categories, attempting the exercises and succeeding with some of them. As is often the way with mathematical texts, it seems that the exercises are key: one must rehearse the concepts, apply them, make use of them oneself, otherwise they will not “stick”.
So I suppose it might be the case that the mathematical emphasis in Badiou encourages a sort of “use it or lose it” approach where you have to see what you can do with Badiou’s notions for yourself. But is the relationship between Meillassoux and Badiou so much different from that between, say, DeLanda and Deleuze?
parodycenter Says: April 27, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Badiou opts for mathematics as the ultimate seduction: the mind “subjectivating” a proof is as far as can be from the mind captivated by opinion.
Dominique getting off on mathematics is so nerdy that it inevitably leads to a certain form of subjectivation more commonly known as a hand job. I think you better stick to your musical performances, darling, because they’re really great!
Roughtheory.org » Conversations on Textual Strategy Says: April 27, 2008 at 11:11 pm
[...] but I thought I would belatedly post a pointer to an energetic discussion still unfolding over at Larval Subjects on the question of the necessity of “difficult writing” in certain kinds of [...]

Freud seemed working out exceedingly complex material in beautiful prose

Articulating Positions (Updated) from Roughtheory.org by N Pepperell
In the throes of writing over the weekend, but I wanted to put up a quick pointer to a post from Carl at Dead Voles, who is reflecting on the conversation Daniel and I had here, over the meaning of some of the terms I used when trying to contrast Lukács and Marx...I’m conscious that the nature of this kind of theory asks quite a lot from readers’ patience, I struggle a great deal over how to minimise this problem when I write, and I’m always somewhat sympathetic to others’ frustrations over why I can’t say what I mean more concisely. In any event, Carl’s post manages to transpose what I often experience as a personal frustration, onto the more general terrain of the difficulties of communication across two broad approaches to philosophy:
The conversation between N. Pepperell and Daniel strikes me as a classic sort of contrast between two very different ways of thinking about things, which I’ve tried to capture in my title for this post by hijacking Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as a rough analogy. Daniel is an excellent philosopher, and he is oriented toward position. N. Pepperell is also a outstanding philosopher, oriented toward movement. The uncertainty principle tells us that we can know either position or movement, but not both.
This is a lovely framing for Carl’s analysis, which I’m almost tempted to quote here in full - instead, I’ll point readers to the original.
Carl’s observations reminded me of another recent discussion of the issue of communicating across broad approaches to philosophy - the conversation sparked by Roman Altshuler’s Do Continental Philosophers Have Arguments?, to which I responded in this post. The focus wasn’t quite the same (I was concentrating on the issue of “embedding”, rather than “refutation”, as a form of critique), but there are still interesting points of contact between the two sets of reflections.
Just a quick update that Daniel has responded over at Dead Voles...

Identifying with your captor from An und für sich by Adam
I have some reservations about the recent Larval Subjects post about “difficult” books, but I think that, in part, it points toward a real phenomenon — one that I call “academic Stockholm Syndrome.” We’ve all seen it before: an academic invests great energy and undergoes profound suffering in the attempt to grasp a particularly difficult thinker and, upon succeeding, spends the rest of his or her career thoroughly identified with that thinker.
The most prominent victim is undoubtedly Zizek, who was taken hostage by both Lacan and Hegel, but even Sinthome himself appears to have a very difficult case, with his combination of Deleuze and Lacan.

Possibly related posts: More Thoughts Worth Preserving and Repeating
The Plain Truth, Please! 47 Responses to “Style”
Floyd Says: April 25, 2008 at 4:28 am
If I understand you correctly, you are alleging that the style of, Derrida for example, not only adds nothing to the ‘content’ of his thought, but actually obscures it? If so, I can’t reconcile that with your point about “subverting the metaphysics of presence”. I have always read Derrida at least to completely depend on what you seem to consider as ‘mere style’ to articulate his thinking. Far from being a coincidence, isn’t it evident throughout all of these thinkers that there is a profound struggle to find words that are true to these concepts? I am quite surprised to hear you arguing otherwise–I thought this was widely accepted in continental philosophy. On the other hand, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, since there seems to be almost no regard given for even the possibility of serious ontological force of hermeneutics.
On the other side, I am highly suspicious of contemporary physics and mathematics in their more speculative forms. Sure their ideas might be clearly stated, but to my admittedly amateur scientific sensibilities, I am confused about their material significance. That is, while coherent within a clearly defined (as opposed to differential) terminological structure, involving all sorts of fancy flights of calculative intelligence, I see no compelling connection to lived world. Although one physicist at Northwestern did curtly tell me quantum physics was “the reason why my VCR worked” when asked for a basic response to Einstein’s old objection. My touchstone for this is the Nussbaum-Butler “debate”, where, accused by the former of precisely the politically charged obscurantism you seem to be invoking here, Butler responded (paraphrasing) ‘clarity has its own things to obscure’.
larvalsubjects Says: April 25, 2008 at 4:31 am
Yes, I’ve made the arguments quite often myself in the past. Perhaps you missed my point about how they enact another form of power and identification?
larvalsubjects Says: April 25, 2008 at 4:32 am
That is, I’ve made the argument you make in your first paragraph quite often in the past.
larvalsubjects Says: April 25, 2008 at 4:39 am
And I confess, I do think of it is a lot of unnecessary stylistics. I’ve spent years, for instance, working on Lacan, having worked through nearly all his seminars now. Most of that work on Lacan, has been despite his style. I understand his points about what happened with Freud and the need to enact the unconscious as a sort of pedagogical device. However, despite Lacan’s heroic efforts to avoid the fate of Freud among his followers, I can’t say that anything different has happened with Lacanian communities. In some respects its been worse, generating the worse sort of hagiography in explicit contrast to his teachings. I simply don’t accept that talking well about the unconscious entails enacting the play of the unconscious. The same point would follow mutatis mutandis for a thinker like Derrida.
Mikhail Emelianov Says: April 25, 2008 at 4:48 am
I’m not sure if I am reading you correctly, but are you assuming that the ‘difficult’ style is a result of intentional act of obscuring the simple? “Intellectual terrorism” implies that for example Derrida writes a first draft which is clear and simple and then in order to achieve a certain goal, he complicates it with strange style. Does complexity come from an intentional stylistic strategy or is it a result of trying to express complex thoughts?
larvalsubjects Says: April 25, 2008 at 4:54 am
I do think there has been an intentional development of style among certain continental thinkers that isn’t simply a function of the complexity of their thought. Here I have in mind especially Hegel, Adorno, Lacan, Heidegger, and Derrida where there was also a great meditation on style and the relationship between style and content. I would not make the claim that there was first a draft that was simple and then one that was complex, which would be absurd. However, I think it’s equally absurd to claim that somehow Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Zizek, or Simondon aren’t complex which accounts for the greater degree of accessibility in their work.
larvalsubjects Says: April 25, 2008 at 4:56 am
Which isn’t, of course, to say that Marx or Kant, or Merleau-Ponty are easy or clear as day. I’d certainly concede that complexity of a matter makes for difficulties in expression, but Freud seemed working out exceedingly complex material in beautiful prose.
Naxos Says: April 25, 2008 at 7:26 am
“I confess that I harbor some resentment of the hours of my life penetrating a text, navigating the stylistic gymnastics of some thinker, to grasp a concept that is really rather simple and which could have been articulated far more directly.”
I kind of lament what you are saying here. I think that you are not considering the fact that the resentment you identify its just an evidence that you have sucesfully incorporated the knowlegde that is implicated in the text, and the sign -or the synthom if you like- that you have hopefully embodied the point of view that is registered in those “stylistic gymnastics” too. This allows u to think and not only to reproduce the implications of the concepts you are willing to clear. Remember that when you embody those concept you will never forget them, they will be part of your experienced composites.
The resentment you are reffering to is not about the time you spent reading the book, is about a confrontation you have inside and that is related to the author and the books that you have considered as a “must read”. I can understand the resentment you have in the case of the authors that u have read and that do not compose with the singularities you are, but if your idea of reading philo its not mererly academical, you have to admit that its not an obligation to read authors such like Nietzsche or Deleuze -which philosophy confronts with Kant or Hegel´s point of view- if you think that your philosophical path is rather kantian or hegelian.
Well, this is just what I sincererly think about what you have written, I must say that it took me quite a good lapse of time to express it, since I am not an english native speaker. I cannot be able to sustain a debate with you about this, althought i can try or at least read about your concerns, but i just wanted to let u know that your denying the labour that exercises thought itself, and that gives u the chance to activate the way you think. May be Kant, Hegel or Heidegger and Derrida wont help too much about it, because they were in fact pretty mistagoges, but Nietzsche, Deleuze, Foucault Spinoza gave everything they had, even with their stylistic gymanastics.
ok, please forgive my so broken english and cheers

The inexorable self-exceeding of the human, initiated by Nietzsche, to which Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida and Sri Aurobindo, all belong

Re: Death Reckoning in the Thinking of Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida by Joshua Schuster (Other Voices) Debashish Sat 26 Apr 2008 09:50 PM PDT Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

A truly beautiful essay - linking Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida to the primordiality of our Age of historicism - the enlightenment of Being as Non-being, of Non-Being as the impossible possibility of Being.

• The announcement of the death of God in Nietzsche at once lights up the stage where man has been preparing his entry as the subject-object of knowledge and simultaneously discloses his death, always-already accomplished, in the Superman. But the shadows of titanic hyper-biologism which loom in the Nietzschean silhouette are progressively deconstructed in his descendants.
• In Heidegger, the anti-humanism is already also the contemplation of the most intimate selfhood of the human, the unsharable experience of death as the undoing of the person which makes the personal possible.
• In Foucault, the conditions of knowledge in each episteme, leading to modernity as the limit condition for the possibility of knowledge in the knowledge of the human, reaches its point of undoing in the hour of its triumph. The intimate selfhood of otherness becomes the intimate otherness of the non-human, superman as the unforeseeable generation of hybrid possibility appearing at the horizon of human dissolution into its constituents.
• In Derrida, the limit condition of the age leads to the intimate otherness of death, not here the selfhood of Heidegger, but the otherness of selfhood and the Selfhood of the Other, all Others and the radically Other, the infinite Unknowable. In Derrida, it is further the threshold, not as in Foucault, of the end of man, but of the ends of man, true heterogeneity, the origin of the miracle of freedom and creativity.

Re: At the ends of Man: Sri Aurobindo and Michel Foucault Debashish Sun 27 Apr 2008 12:33 AM PDT Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

Thanks, Rich, for this timely contextualization of the ends of the human in postmodern thinking as in Sri Aurobindo. Whitehead is known to have said that all of western philosophy can be seen as a series of footnotes on Plato. But in our age, it may be more correct to say that all of (post)modern thinking is a series of footnotes on Nietzsche. These footnotes may also be called post-metaphysical. Continuing in the same vein, someone has also suggested that the future may be known of as the era of Integral Philosophy, characterized by a series of footnotes on Sri Aurobindo. To me, this is certainly no compliment; I'd rather that dubious distinction rested with Ken Wilber. Your comparative contextualization provides a welcome corrective by reminding readers of the genealogy of thinking at the margins of modernity and the inexorable self-exceeding of the human, initiated by Nietzsche, to which Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida and Sri Aurobindo, all, in their own ways, belong.

Modernity ends with the dissolution of man. What this means in terms of thought, practice and experience, may be quite different to all these thinkers, but perhaps there is something to be learnt from all of them. For followers of Sri Aurobindo, it is first and foremost important to realize the civilizational matrix within which his urgent deconstruction of man and reconstitution of the superman belongs. Without this historical perspective and its collective social consequences, the Integral Yoga becomes just another cult of navel-gazing, happily segregated from the rest of the world in preserves of privilege, though mouthing onto-theologies of a predicted and predictable future.

One may say that among the central strands of post-Nietzschean posthumanist/poststructuralist thinking is a refusal to assimilate the future to a foundational teleology and contrast this to Sri Aurobindo's teleology of the symbolic-typal-conventional-individual-subjective-spiritual temporal sequence, but the historicism of post-Enlightenment modernity in Nietzsche and his forbears needs also to be more carefully studied before divesting their thinking of teleology. It is true that Foucault expresses most persistently the constructed nature of "truth" based on historical epistemes, but even this awareness of the demythologization of icons in the twilight of the gods has within it its own teleology of the appearance of man at the end of the history of representations and of his dissolution into the undefinable horizon of unassimilable experimental posthumanities. It is not difficult to construe this as a transition from the age of individualism to a subjective age, while by the same token, making sure to qualify this terminology as a thinking at the edge of human possibility, the unpredicatable l'avenir of the Mother as of Jacques Derrida.

With this caveat, the enterprise of supermanhood becomes more easily aligned with the ceaseless disciplined practice of an openness to the Other, the Other in oneself, the other in "others" and to the radically Other, "god, if you will" in Derrida's language. This refusal of comfortable familiarity, whether in the acceptance of a stable identity of self or in the easy stereotyping of Sri Aurobindo and/or The Mother is also a legacy of this "tradition" of thinking, a clarity quickly lost sight of in what you astutely nominate as theocracies.

But the darshanic phenomenology of Sri Aurobindo and the psychic intuition of oneness in difference are legacies of a cultural practice unavailable to Nietzsche and his followers, a trans-cultural possibility western postmodernism would be enriched in embracing in the era of globalization which also this episteme of the end of history has made possible.

The oncoming Truth is imminent and so powerful that it will smash to pieces all that is traditional and old

The Need for Preparation — PRAPATTI In Mother’s Light - Nov-04.pdf

The present moment of the earth that we are living in , seems to be more auspicious than inauspicious, benevolent, propitious, and the harbinger of the Truth to be manifested. Sri Aurobindo has called this the ‘Hour of God’. In this hour the Divine Himself takes the form of man and moves among them, His Immortal Glorious Light engulfs humanity raising them upwards trying to transform them. The Mother very recently has given a message: ‘The Light of Truth is brooding over the world to permeate and mould its future.’ Today, the whole world is overcast with the Light of Truth. This will penetrate and build future of the earth. The oncoming Truth is imminent and so powerful that it will smash to pieces all that is traditional and old as if creating a vacuum in its place. But all those who are conscious let them hold on to this Truth with a strong belief and faith in their life, and try to establish this in their worldly lives alert and actively. That is why Mother is asking "Are you ready?"

Then what does this ‘ready’ mean? Instead of elaborating on this I just want to cite a few examples. There is no preparation, no endeavour however great sufficient enough to receive the Grace of the Divine. But this very effort of man, his determination, aspiration are the means through which the Grace descends and is able to establish itself in the personal as well as the collective life. When Light, Knowledge, Power and Ananda descend from above if the individual is not conscious, if the body has not prepared itself to give the opportunity to hold them, then the grace recedes back. The Truth and Light descend according to their own rules and so if the proper conditions are not fulfilled and the base has not been prepared, then they once again return back.

Truth will only establish itself according to the laws of Truth it cannot establish itself where there is baseness, darkness, ugliness, and mire. For this importance has been laid on repeated effort, attempt and alertness on the part of the individual thereby making himself prepared to hold the Truth. Those who really want to lead a life guided by the Light and Force of the Truth, make their lives fearless and joyful then they must follow certain principles in their everyday lives. It is very easy to proclaim oneself a Bhakta and a Devotee; but to really live a life which is pure, untainted, full of fire, aspiring carrying oneself forward is something different. The three great touchstones in the path of sadhana aspiration, surrender, and rejection should become a necessity. This has been elaborately discussed in the first part of "Yoga and Sadhana" and "Sri Aurobindo-Lokasahitya" by Babaji Maharaj. The sadhak has to form the habit to read these books daily and follow them with a strong will.

First and foremost one must make it a habit to meditate everyday at least for 20 to 30 minutes. Along with Aspiration, Surrender and Rejection Meditation also helps the individual in the sadhana. Through meditation one is able to calm the agitated, perturbed and disturbing mind for sometime. One can achieve concentration. Of course some claim that the moment they sit down to meditate the thoughts begin to run here and there. In the first stage of meditation waves of thoughts disturb the mind but through a strong will and by calling upon the divine force, meditation becomes deep and quiet and one can experience the force working upon the different parts of the body But one requires a strong determination, habit and a relentless effort to continue. It is utterly essential that each sadhak carries this out seriously. Babaji Maharaj in his book "To the members of Sri Aurobindo Study Circle" has clearly explained an easy way and also how to meditate.

Secondly it is essential to read all works of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo on Yoga and Sadhana. These books reveal the extraordinary full of divine knowledge spiritual renderings. In the present age which is full of books that preach and sermonize these books are not merely books or yoga literature, but hidden within them is a spiritual force, Truth, Light, and Vision. These scriptures will greatly help the sadhaks in moulding their lives integrally. The intellectuals, writers, poets, the litterateur, the learned,the common man, teachers and students can benefit largely by reading these books. All those who have plunged themselves in this sunlit path of integral yoga must fall into the habit to read them at least for half an hour

Thirdly it is most important to carry out every work with the feeling of surrender. Surrender is the sole basis of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga; for it is only through surrender that the Divine force descends upon the human body takes the responsibility of the sadhak and enables the transformation of the body. What is difficult to achieve through mantra, tantra, vows, pranayam and worldly wise ways can easily be gained simply through surrender. Sadhana without surrender has no meaning in Sri Aurobindo’s yoga. One must not only surrender oneself but also what one is and has at the feet of the Divine. The more one Surrenders oneself to the Divine the more one gets closer to the Divine and feels the presence of the Divine. The method of surrender has been elaborately and briefly described in the books "Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga Sadhana" and "To the members of Sri Aurobindo Study Circle" by Babaji Maharaj.

Fourth in this worldly path the only way one can receive Divine Grace is through satsang. If one neglects these satsangs then neither can one make any progress nor be ardent in sadhana. Each Study Circle is infact a Satsang group.

If one can abide by these conditions strictly and at the same time keep one’s aspiration, inner faith, and certitude living then the sadhak is able to establish a strong relationship with the Mother. If we merely voice our thoughts that we are the Mother’s children, so the Mother must protect us from all the evils of this world then we are making baseless and futile demands. It is essential that we must do some certain work for The Mother as Her children. This attitude should not be superficial, meaningless and a passing thought but should arise from the depths/core of the inner being. The moment we truly feel that we are the children of the Mother, then we realise that the work we were anxious to do has been easily accomplished. It is not the human being but the Divine who first descends towards man and upholds him; because man is ignorant and stupid. "He who chooses the Infinite has been chosen by the Infinite."

Meaning of the text change with the changing circumstances of the reader

Zuckert on Gadamer on Strauss
from Per Caritatem by Cynthia R. Nielsen
I came across this delightful little passage in Catherine H. Zuckert’s article, “Hermeneutics in Practice: Gadamer on Ancient Philosophy.” Anyone who has done graduate work at UD (and who is not a Straussian) will appreciate this.

Gadamer made the difference between what he means by reading a text in its own terms and Leo Strauss’s insistence that we “understand an author as he understood himself” clear in TM [Truth and Method] 535 when he objected:

“[Strauss] seems to consider it possible to understand what one does not understand oneself but what someone else understands, and to understand only in the way that the other person himself understood. And he also seems to think that if a person says something, he has necessarily and fully understood ‘himself’ in the process.”

Gadamer argues, on the contrary, that

“[w]hen we try to understand a text, we do not try to transpose ourselves into the author’s mind but …into the perspective within which he has formed his views” [TM 292].

That is, we first have to try to understand the author in his own historical context. However,

“[j]ust as the events of history do not in general manifest any agreement with the subjective ideas of the person who stands and acts within history, so the sense of a text in general reaches far beyond what its author originally intended” [TM 372].

According to Gadamer, we need to engage in a dialogue with the text and that means we must ask it or its authors questions. Those questions change, however, with the changing circumstances of the reader. So do the answers, therefore, and the meaning of the text” (Zuckert, “Hermeneutics in Practice,” pp. 221-22, n. 4)

Lacanian theory did not concern itself with ontological statuses

16 April 2008 18:03 Reply [Herr Iosity] M/21 NYC, New York, US

Lacanian theory did not concern itself with ontological statuses - as he would have argued, every approach towards a psychodynamic ontology bridges dangerously into a ontic reductionism. Take the utmost extreme example - Brain neuroscience. With the biological model of psychology, the subject is all but absent, and the mind is a reductionist machine of 'meaningless' interactions.

So, as such, Lacan restricted himself to a more 'Hegelian' approach towards the mind, speaking almost transcendentally, restricting himself to a stance of subjectivity. It is often the biggest subject of quibble his critics have with him, but likewise, perhaps the greatest strength in his philosophy.

So, I feel it is not so much that Hofstadter has 'revealed truths' that Lacan missed out on, so much as one cannot speak of these 'truths' within the frame of Lacanian theory by means of its very approach to psychodynamics. Lacan is far to Hegelian, I guess you could say.

Coincidentially, this is the very 'gap' in Hofstadter's theory that I am mentioning. It is not one limited to him, so much as it is the irreducible gap between the non-subjective psychological models (Neuroscience, behavioralism, Psychometrics) and the subjective models (Psychodynamics [the 'Hegelian' models, so to speak]). MySpace Forums » Religion & Philosophy » Philosophy » Douglass Hofstadter and Ken Wilbur

Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, and current “transhumanist” projects, are comforting, even self-congratulatory, myths

Shriek from The Pinocchio Theory by Steven Shaviro
“We shouldn’t become accustomed to anything anymore. We are beginning to live in our own future, and it should feel strange” (p. 309). Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek: An Afterword is a lovely rendition of the world’s — which is to say, the future’s — strangeness, and of the ways that people strive either to come to terms with it, or to evade and deny it — and of how people get affected by it, in unforeseen and often unpleasant ways, regardless of their attempts either to embrace it or escape it. VanderMeer’s work, like that of China Mieville and K J Bishop, can be classified under the rubric of the New Weird —

Two refrains haunt the novel, repeated throughout its length like leitmotives. One is: there’s no way out, you are going to die. The other is, enigmatically, “there may be a way” (see p. 325). The latter is not a promise of immortality or transcendence; it is rather a giving way, a giving in to metamorphosis, a becoming (not superhuman, but) less-than-human or inhuman. (Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, and current “transhumanist” projects, are comforting, even self-congratulatory, myths: they pretend that a becoming-other, a becoming-inhuman, really means staying the way we are, only better. VanderMeer allows us, or forces us, to see beyond these puerile fantasies; this is one of the many virtues of his book).

Biologists tell us that fungi are neither animals nor plants; they constitute a separate kingdom of life. They stand outside our customary plant/animal binary. They can reproduce both sexually and asexually; but their sexual reproduction involves multiple sexes, rather than the polarized two that we tend to take for granted. They can survive for long periods as spores, suddenly bursting into life when conditions are favorable; since they are not photosynthetic, they come in an array of strange colors unlike the green of plants. For all these reasons, they are uncanny. Shriek is fantasy/horror, rather than science fiction; but it taps into this uncanniness, explores some of its many odd shapes, and creates a powerful fable of what I can only call the materiality of metamorphosis. By this I mean that metamorphosis is not shorn of wonder, but that is rather stripped of its superhuman pretensions, whether these be “rational” or “mythical” ones.

If the 20th century was a time of both mystification (in the fascist exaltation of myth) and demystification (in the humanist exploration of the powers and limits of rationalization), then VanderMeer’s 21st century text refuses both of these gestures. It opposes both the exaltation of myth and unreason, and the exaltation of rationality and demystification. It opposes both Jung and Freud, both myth and science, both the Dionysian and the Apollonian. It gives us, not an ethics of existence, but an aesthetics. While I was reading Shriek, it infiltrated my dreams, something that novels almost never do to me. I would wake up with vague premonitions of fungal extrusions and excresences.

Panpsychism might become a drug that causes us to forget trying to nail down what an experience is and how it relates to the physical

Toward a Science of Consciousness (TUCSON 2008): Conf. Review
from Zaadz: Anands blog
I just returned from Tucson, AZ from attending the 2008 edition of the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference.

First, panpsychism is no longer crazy - it's the norm. (I'll wait for you to pick yourself up off the floor.) Following in the footsteps of James, Fechner, Whitehead, Griffin, Sprigge, Chalmers, Seager, Rosenberg and Strawson, a triumphalist note of sorts was struck especially by Skrbina. Stubenberg contrasted panpsychism and neutral monism in a nice talk. What is starting to worry me - especially since I'm going post-panpsychist - is that panpsychism might become a drug that causes us to forget trying to nail down what an experience is and how it relates to the physical. If we blithely accept that experiences run all the way down, this could happen. Thankfully, the problem of awareness will, in all likelihood rear up in protest and we'll have a whole new argument on awareness thresholds, the emergence of awareness, the impossibility of the emergence of awareness, blah, blah, blah.

A plenary session on "Libet and the timing of conscious experience" was very illuminating. There's now a lot of evidence suggesting that conscious awareness of intention is behind the times. To put it crudely, our brains make up their minds about what to do before we become aware of its intention. (Sorry for being so Cartesian.) Please see this Wired article for more on this fascinating finding.

The "Sex and Consciousness" plenary focused on altered states and peak experiences during sex. Jenny Wade summarized the findings from her recent book "Transcendent Sex." The upshot is that you and your partner could be having a satori-like peak experience triggered by sex and you may not be sharing that with each other. What was especially amusing was Wade narrating the story of a woman who had a peak experience while having the same, boring (sorry, sorry) sex with her husband for the umpteenth time. She was waiting for it to get over and then BAM! - altered state.

When Wolf Singer started to give his talk on synchronization of oscillatory neural responses (gamma synchrony), I thought I'd be bored out of my mind (ouch). And I was. Neural synchrony doesn't really solve any problem. The computational neuroscientists are quick to tell you that the brain is really a high-dimensional spike producing chaotic dynamical system and that any reference to relaxation oscillations to solve a "binding problem" is pretty neanderthal. But Singer redeemed himself. When asked what was going on in deep meditative states he opined "I think they [the meditators] have found a way of being in an Aah Ha! state all the time" [inexact quote] essentially without needing an Einstein-like scientific discovery to generate the flash of insight that presumably produces that state.

The best session of the conference was on "Brain Imaging and Mind Reading." Adrian Owen demonstrated that a few vegetative subjects were capable of performing mental imagery tasks which could be detected by fMRI! [Umm, this means that they aren't really vegetative subjects.] This to me was the Wow paper of the conference even though I hate fMRI with a passion since it's a glorified heatsink detector.

There must be some other way of understanding each other

Relevance Theory (II): Mutuality
from Shared Symbolic Storage by Michael

Basically, in order to communicate perfectly, we would have to know everything the other knows, and also that he knows that we know, and vice versa. But ultimately, this leads to an infinite regress, because we would have to check for every possible assumption someone could have. (A knows that o, B knows that A knows that p, A knows that B knows that A knows that p, and so on)

“Knowledge of this infinitely regressive sort was first identified by Lewis (1969) as common knowledge, and by Schiffer (1972) as mutual knowledge.' The argument is that if the hearer is to be sure of recovering the correct interpretation, the one intended by the speaker, every item of contextual information used in interpreting the utterance must be not only known by the speaker and hearer, but mutually known.” (18)

Because we can’t check for every single assumption implicit in an utterance there is never any guarantee that we might understand each other. To cut a long story short, basically this means that there must be some other way of understanding each other, which doesn’t presuppose that we assume that the others has knowledge of this and that sort, and that the other assumes that we have certain knowledge of some sort or other. The question would be which principles we actually use in understanding each other.

Platonic Ideas, Kantian categories, Hegelian notions, or Jungian archetypes

Fark Yaraları = Scars of Différance
easy find:
Agamben
Blanchot
Bourdieu
Deleuze
Derrida
Gadamer
Heidegger
Husserl
Jean-Luc Nancy
Kant
Lacan
Lacoue-Labarthe
Levinas
MADE IN ISTANBUL
Wittgenstein
▼ 2008 (131)
▼ March (42)

Deleuze Books Online

Sri Aurobindo ranked: 835; Immanuel Kant: 1135

15 entries tagged: philosopher
Plato currently ranked: 70
Socrates currently ranked: 71
Mel Brooks currently ranked: 76
Aristotle currently ranked: 78
Saint Augustine currently ranked: 195
Voltaire currently ranked: 210
Bertrand Russell currently ranked: 599
Jean-Jacques Rousseau currently ranked: 642
Niccolo Machiavelli currently ranked: 700
Pliny the Elder currently ranked: 746
Lucretius currently ranked: 749
Confucius currently ranked: 761
Sri Aurobindo currently ranked: 835
Immanuel Kant currently ranked: 1135
Richard Rorty currently ranked: 1608
Back to Home Sri Aurobindo's Home Page Previous Guy Random Guy Next Guy +36 835
Sri Aurobindo
jungandrife
Scholar, poet, mystic, philosopher
Developed integral yoga to further evolution
Supermind & unconscious: two ends of the spectrum
Comments(1) Stats Wikipedia Shop Aurobindo
Men-At-Arms Mancrush Tags scholar poet mystic philosopher sri aurobindo

Exceedingly subtle, variations on the dead face, presumably because Aurovilianus needs to harvest all his or her energy for higher matters

Home > Journals & Media > Journals > Auroville Today > Current issue > The Auroville look
Current issue Archive copies Auroville Experience March 2008
The Auroville look
- Alan
One thing sadly neglected in the celebration of 40 years of Auroville's achievements is the Auroville look. This is all the more surprising since the Auroville look is much remarked upon by visitors. Many claim they have never seen anything like it anywhere else, which is hardly surprising as it is the unique product of 40 years of intensive evolution.
The Auroville look, or rather looks, is the distinctive way in which members of the species Aurovilianus aspirans communicate, or refuse to communicate, with other members of the species. It is essentially non-verbal and consists of a finely calibrated series of facial expressions coupled with extremely subtle movements of the head. These can signify an astonishingly wide range of meanings.
Let's begin with the one that is best known – the dead face. This consists of doing absolutely nothing, of looking at, or rather through, another Aurovilianus as if he she didn't exist. This is a very difficult look to achieve as it requires extreme self-control. Imagine. You have known somebody for almost 40 years, you may even have been in a close relationship, but at some time something unforgivable has happened – he or she burned your toast once too often or snuck in ahead of you in the Center Kitchen queue in 1978 – and now this individual is standing in front of you, obviously wanting to talk. So what do you do? You gaze ahead, not betraying, by even the faintest change of expression, that you are aware that this blot upon humanity is standing just two feet away.
When this is done well it can be devastating. Recipients of a superb dead face begin to wonder if they are, in fact, still there, and often surreptitiously pinch themselves. Because, who knows, Auroville is a funny old place and they may be having yet another of those out-of-body experiences.
The other Auroville looks are subtle, sometimes exceedingly subtle, variations on the dead face, presumably because Aurovilianus needs to harvest all his or her energy for higher matters. A particularly disconcerting variation of the dead face is the dead smile. In this case, you notice someone is smiling at you and, what the hell, you gather up all your resources and prepare to smile back. But on closer inspection you notice that the wearer of the smile has gone missing – they're not at home. In fact, some of these dead smilers have not been home for many years....
The subtlest variation of the dead face, the minimalis, involves a miniscule inclination of the head to one side all the while rigidly retaining a blank expression. This gesture, if one can call it that, can signify a number of things. It can include, “Hey, I thought you'd died years ago,” or “I've just come from a riot in Kuilapalayam”, or “Do you really want to buy that? It's full of aflatoxins.”
Skilled practitioners can even utilise the minimalis when approaching each other on motorcycles at a combined speed of 160 kilometres an hour. In this instance the look may signify “There's a serious accident ahead”, or “Watch out, there's another idiot driving on the wrong side of the road.”
The modified minimalis, a slightly increased inclination of the head that is held a split second longer, is reserved for more serious matters. “Are you playing tennis tonight?”, “I see you've got a new bike”, “Surf's up”.
Very occasionally a really flamboyant Aurovilian may, on meeting another, briefly touch their heart centre with their right hand. This gesture, however, is falling out of fashion not only because of the extraordinary energy that needs to be expended but also because of its ambiguity. Because while it may mean, “I'm overwhelmed to see you”, increasingly it may also signify, “I'm having problems with my pacemaker”.
The Auroville look is not easily mastered. In this sense, it is a good indication of how long someone has lived in Auroville. Newcomers tend to smile and fling their arms around each other at the slightest excuse. After ten years or so, the smile fades to a faint rictus and the arms find more useful applications, like carrying gas bottles. However, it is only after 25 years of rigorous yoga that the facial muscles acquire the necessary degree of rigidity to enable the Auroville look to be held in all weathers and situations.
So isn't it time that we offered this extraordinary achievement to a world sated with melodrama and sensationalism? For, clearly, this is the look the world needs.
Home > Journals & Media > Journals > Auroville Today > The Auroville look
Current issue Archive copies The Auroville Experience

The body itself might acquire new means and ranges of communication with other bodies

Goodbye To All That: nature and the future body in Sri Aurobindo
by Rich on Fri 04 Apr 2008 02:08 PM PDT PermanentLink Goodbye To All That (Nature and the Future Body in Sri Aurobindo) Richard Carlson

Today we live in the epoch which annunciates the totalization of the panopticon (Foucault 1977). The human gazes now looks out upon every terrestrial millimeter. We are all already enfolded digitally in a planetary Global Positioning System. There is no where left to hide from the eye of the satellite. On some occult electronic planes we only exist as virtual coordinates in cyberspace, we are all now networked in a collective etheric web (noosphere?) of human consciousness.

At the time Sri Aurobindo was constructing his view of the individual, natutre, and the future body there had not yet been a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous culture of information science, in which identities fracture under the infomatics of domination (Harraway 1991), in which natural boundaries are penetrated by streamed capitalism in its quest for twenty percent returns on investment. Ours is an age in which not only the bio-sphere but our genetics are colonialized by techno-science, in which cultures are grafted on to vivisections in the global economy into explotive new hybridities.

In an era in which machine is inserted into flesh, in which natural and artifical boundaries permeate one another and protean adaptations of personality are required for our travel through the multi-dimensional topologies of cyber space, both nature and nature must be re-imagined. We all must take up the liminal existence of a nomad who moves freely from identities to affinities, from boarders to coalitions, from reality to virtuality.

The question we began with was whether it is still possible at present to conceive of certain individuals who through the practice of integral yoga will evolve the future bodies of the superman, which as Sri Aurobindo envisions: “must continue the already developed evolutionary form”, and be “a continuation from the type Nature has all along been developing, a continuity from the human to the divine body, no breaking away to something unrecognisable but a high sequel to what has already been achieved and in part perfected, or must we revision what we conceive of today as natural? Does nature mean the same thing in the first years of the new mellenium as it did in the first years in the last century of the old millenium?

Has our immersion in ubiquitous technological environments that discipline our bodies at exponential speeds already defined a discontinuity in our future physiology? Will this discontinuity render our bodies of the future unrecognizable when viewed from a perspective of biological evolution, as Sri Aurobindo describes it: our already developed evolutionary form? Or is such a perspective, while it may have been appropriate at the time it was conceived, in light of the evolution of culture over the past century something which we now must consider naïve and to which we must say “good bye to all that”?
........
This is the first part of a longer meditation on the future bodies. I have entitled this section “Goodbye To All That” which is the title of Robert Graves autobiography in which he recounts his experiences in the trenches in WWI. What he is saying goodbye to is the passing of an era: of the naive, carefree, class based culture of Edwardian England, which did not survive the war. Sri Aurobindo wrote the passages referenced here at about the time the Edwardian era ended and the great war began. Because our views and valorization of nature are cultural constructions to appreciate why Sri Aurobindo extrapolates a certain form of naturalism into the future body we must first excavate his conceptions of “what is natural”.
The context of his writing referenced here on evolution and the future body seems to flow naturally out of a post-romantic protestant view of Nature he must have been exposed to growing up in England which lived on well into Edwardian era. To the British upper classes it was a view of nature as pristine, which they enjoyed in well manicured English country gardens, not yet smeared with the blood of the trenches. Above all nature was clearly distinct from the machinery given to us by culture.
In forming his view of nature Sri Aurobindo took account of Ruskin's and Carlyle's critique of industrialism. This view of nature was certainly valuable for sacramentalizing nature at a time when the Industrial Revolution was rapidly desecrating it. Today however, the interpenetration of nature by information technologies and genetic engineering has added enough complexity to what it means to be natural/human that we can no longer escape environments which are increasingly mediated by technology. Electricity undergirds much of our phenomenological experience of the world, bio-technology sustains our physical presence in it. In such a brave new world the continuity of the already developed evolutionary form with all its biological naturalism seems to be a reality to which we have already said goodbye.
But, what is important for us in Sri Aurbindo vision of the future body is not necessarily that its a post-romantic construction, but rather that it is also informed by the darshanic discourse and yogic practices of India. It is his analysis of nature as prakriti and the way he conceives the epistemology of its knower purusha, which I would argue is most useful to us now and serve utilitarian ends in illumining a way forward for a bio/info-ethics of the future.
I will post the guiding abstract next, this work should not be thought of as reaching toward any certain ends, which is to say what this all will become at its end is far from certain. Therefore I welcome all comments, collaboration, quips or quotes..
References:
Aurobindo, S. The Life Divine , Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press (1949/1972)
Aurobindo, S. The Supramental Manifestation , Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press (19491972)
Baudrillard, J Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, (1994)
De Chardin, T. The Phenomena of Man, : New York, McGraw Hill (1955)
Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish,New York, Vintage Books (1977)
Hayles, N.K My Mother was a Computer, Chicago, University of Chicago Press (2006)
Harraway, D. A Cyborg Manifesto, New York, Routledge, Chapman, Hall, Inc, (1991)
Kroker, A, The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism Toronto, University of Toronto Press (2004)
McLuhan M Understanding Media, New York: McGraw Hill (1964)
Pollen, M, In Defense of Food, New York, Penguin Press (2008)
Posted to: Main Page CONSCIOUSNESS DESIGN EVOLUTION FUTURISM .. Science fiction .. Supramentalization SRI AUROBINDO Post a comment

The psychic, spiritual and supramental transformation

SRI AUROBINDO CENTRE FOR CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES
saccs ipi integral yoga themes authors events links
Texts by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on Integral Yoga and Integral Psychology

Texts by Sri Aurobindo Texts by the Mother Compilations

Texts by Sri Aurobindo
The Human Aspiration This is the first chapter of The Life Divine. It highlights the close link between the urge for progress in the individual and the large movement of the evolution of consciousness in Nature.
The Hour of God A short essay on the very special moment of time we are living in now.
What is Consciousness? A few short quotes on the nature of consciousness.
The Riddle of This World A letter about pain and suffering and their role in the evolution of consciousness.
Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Method of Sadhana A letter explaining the difference between Sri Aurobindo's yoga and other paths.
The Object of Integral Yoga A selection from Sri Aurobindo's Letters on Yoga, dealing with the different reasons why people can take up Yoga.
Aspiration and Grace The first three chapters of Sri Aurobindo's booklet The Mother, dealing with three core-elements of yoga: aspiration, rejection and surrender.
The Triple Transformation One of the most important chapters of The Life Divine, explaining the basic processes involved in the psychic, spiritual and supramental transformation.
The Renaissance in India Four essays dealing with the awakening of India and its role in the future of mankind.
The Doctrine of the Mystics An essay on the secret meaning of the Rig Veda
Narad's Reply A passage from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri about the problem of pain.
Return to Top

Texts by the Mother
The Science of Living A passage from the Mother in which she explains that on the quality of our aim depends the quality of our life.
What is the Psychic Being? A short explanation of the divine element in us.
To Dwell in the Psychic A text by the Mother on the experience of living in the psychic being.
Remember and Offer How to make every aspect of life part of one's yoga?
The Spiritual Evolution A short explanation of the nature of the supramental realisation.
Return to Top

Compilations from the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
Yoga and Consciousness: An Integral Perspective This booklet was brought out on the occassion of the National Conference on Indian Psychology, Yoga and Consciousness, held at Pondicherry from the 10th to the 13th of December, 2004.
Foundations of Indian Psychology
Svabhava: Self and Personality
Chitta and Chittavritti: Pathways to Knowledge
Rasa and Bhava: Experience, Emotion, and Motivation
Yoga, Health and Healing
Shiksha: Education
Loka Sangraha: Social Issues
The Integral Psychology of the Future

Integral Psychology This booklet was brought out on the occassion of the National Conference on Yoga and Indian Approaches to Psychology, held at Pondicherry from September 29th to October 1st, 2002.
The Vision of Integral Psychology
Psychology and Yoga
Vedic Knowledge
Yoga and Society
Psychology as the Science of Consciousness
What is Psychology?
What is Consciousness?
The Ongoing Evolution of Consciousness
The Graded Worlds
Being Human
A First Look Inside
Physical, Vital, Mental-- Outer and Inner
The Centre of Identfication
Parts and Planes of the Being
Development
Human Development
Integral Yoga and Other Paths
The Science of Living
The Path

Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Marx, Hegel,

Some notes on Lévi-Strauss from The Joyful Knowing by Mike
Here are just some notes on various quotes from Lévi-Strauss' oft-read essays "Structural Analysis in Linguistics and Anthropology," in Structural Anthropology, which I myself was rereading. I should note that one probably should not read this particular essay without having ready at hand both Of Grammatology and Between Men.In our haste to apply the methods of linguistic analysis, we must not...

Lacan against Derrida from The Joyful Knowing by Mike
I realize I've been pitting these two thinkers against each other here constantly, but only to, in the end, constantly elaborate the Derridian criticism of Lacan and not the other way around. This is not due to any prejudices I have against Lacan and in favor of Derrida (though I do have some against Lacanians) so much as it is my taking longer to come to grips with the scope of Derrida's...

Notes on Marx from The Joyful Knowing by Mike
Here's some quick notes about where I am going in all my Marx, Hegel, Feuerbach posts:Why marx turns specifically to the economy (at least in his early writings):because it is hegelian nature (what is outside dialectic, i.e. [perhaps, this isn't right exactly if taken strictly] what is outside reappropriation into the movement of becoming of being and nothingness--i.e. it is brute being,...

Derrida, Foucault, structuralism from The Joyful Knowing by Mike
One probably needs to conceptually sketch the various ways Derrida and Foucault reacted to and incorporated structuralism, in order to think the two together, or probably even have both latent there in one mind at all--the differences between them being so extreme. One cannot do this, however, with a monolithic understanding of structuralism. Nevertheless, some ways of entry into this task can...

Hegel and idealism I: The case of Kant from Grundlegung by Tom (Grundlegung)
Hegel’s idealism is a tricky issue to get a handle on. In this post, I’ll try to lay the ground for a short series that picks up on one strand running through it, relating Hegel’s idealism to Kant’s, as I have done in brief previously. This will be only a very partial picture, sidelining a consideration of the important influence of the idealisms of contemporaries like Fichte and Schelling, and those of the ancients like Plato and Aristotle. Nevertheless, I do not think it simplifies the picture too much. We can start, then, by considering Kant...

An Introduction to the Psychological Thought of Sri Aurobindo

Books › "Sri Aurobindo"
1. The Mind Of Light by Sri Aurobindo (Hardcover - Mar 3, 2006)
Buy new: $35.95 $27.32 21 Used & new from $19.81
2. The Hidden Forces Of life by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother (Paperback - Jan 1, 1995)
Buy new: $11.00 3 Used & new from $7.40
3. Looking from Within: A Seeker's Guide to Attitudes for Mastery and Inner Growth by Sri Aurobindo, Aurobindo Sri, and The Mother (Paperback - Jul 1, 1995)
Buy new: $11.00 7 Used & new from $4.93
4. The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo (Hardcover - Dec 1, 2006)
Buy new: $39.00 3 Used & new from $38.00
5. Living Within: The Yoga Approach to Psychological Health and Growth by Sri Aurobindo, Aurobindo Sri, The Mother, and A.S. Dalal (Paperback - Feb 1, 1994)
Buy new: $11.00 7 Used & new from $4.91
6. Powers Within by Mirra Alfassa, Aurobindo Sri, The Mother, and A.S. Dalal (Paperback - Feb 1, 1999)
Buy new: $11.00 4 Used & new from $8.96
7. A Greater Psychology : An Introduction to the Psychological Thought of Sri Aurobindo by Ken Wilber, Sri Aurobindo, and A. S. Dalal (Hardcover - Jan 15, 2001) - Bargain Price
7 Used & new from $28.65

8. Savitri: A Legend & A Symbol - New U.S.Edition by Sri Aurobindo (Paperback - Jan 1, 1995)
Buy new: $24.95 $18.96 15 Used & new from $15.75
9. Essays On The Gita by Sri Aurobindo (Hardcover - Jul 25, 2007)
Buy new: $46.95 $35.68 7 Used & new from $15.00
10. Future Evolution of Man US Edition by Sri Aurobindo and P.B. Saint-Hilaire (Paperback - Jan 7, 2003) Buy new: $8.95 26 Used & new from $4.25
11. Practical Guide to Integral Yoga by Sri Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo, and The Mother (Paperback - Dec 1998)
12. Rebirth and Karma by Aurobindo and Sri Aurobindo (Paperback - Nov 1, 1991)
Buy new: $9.95 20 Used & new from $5.00