Sri Aurobindo proffered a complex and sophisticated developmental theory

There is no such thing as a monoculture from The Immanent Frame by Justin Neuman

For Arendt, the ability to act, to introduce something new and unexpected into the world, can only arise in a condition of pluralism. In a famous passage at the beginning of The Human Condition, Arendt describes the human condition as one of plurality owing “to the fact that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world…this plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life.” By linking action to freedom and freedom to plurality Arendt means to emphasize that the capacity to introduce novelty into the world depends upon a quality of openness antithetical to a monoculture. On a practical level, as we adopt increasingly flexible and, as Amartya Sen calls them, “robustly plural” senses of our own identity based on multiple, overlapping, and shifting modes of belonging, the purely hypothetical nature of a religious monoculture becomes increasingly apparent.

(title unknown) from enowning William Koch reads Zizek's "Hegel versus Heidegger".

“It seems right that Hegel needs to be rethought and made more fully applicable to our historical moment, but this rethinking need not masquerade as a claim that Hegel really meant to speak (or indeed did speak) other than he did. Students of Marx have done very well to admit that Marx's thought faced certain failures and needs to be rethought and reformulated. Students of Heidegger should do the same. We need not cover up or deny inconsistencies or deny that we are continuing, rather than simply explaining, the work of the thinkers we engage with.”

Thill - February 13th, 2012 on 2:37 am - I think that Aurobindo who proffered a complex and sophisticated developmental theory would reject the notion that the “pre” and the “trans” levels of development are strikingly similar.

In Aurobindo’s somewhat Hegelian logic of development, although the achievements of previous stages are assimilated and integrated, in varying degrees, into the subsequent higher stages, any aberrations or deformations at the “pre” or lower stages will have to be overcome before the transition to the “trans” or higher stages can be securely made. Thus, in Aurobindo’s theory of development, The latter “trans” stages or levels have specific qualitatively higher features which clearly distinguish them from the lower, “pre” stages.

Isn’t it like saying that the work of a composer who has mastered the basic principles of harmony in the art of musical composition and gone beyond them will be strongly similar to the work of a beginner in composition who is yet to master those principles of harmony?

Although I would acknowledge that the musical freedom exhibited by a master who has assimilated and transcended the confines of basic principles of harmony may occasionally resemble that of a person who is yet to master those principles, it is extremely unlikely that there will be any great and consistent similarities between the two.

Religion is an ineradicable aspect of human nature

Robert N. Bellah: The Big History of Religion in Human Evolution. Footnotes to Plato

I just returned from a lecture by the sociologist of religion Robert Bellah. He was invited to speak about his book Religion in Human Evolution (2011) by the Dominican University of California. The University has just started a program in Big History, which concerns not only the study of human culture (east, west, and indigenous), but the history of life on earth and of matter and energy in the universe. Bellah spoke to an audience of perhaps 400 people not primarily about religion, but about science. …

Matthew David Segall says: February 10, 2012 at 9:48 am

I don’t think his point is to say that everything is religion so much as to argue that religion is an ineradicable aspect of human nature. We are animals that ritually orient ourselves to the transcendent through symbolism of different kinds. We are embedded in story and narrative at every turn, and “theory,” rather than a radical break out of story into the clear light of truth, is more like a form of “mythospeculation,” a way of telling the story of stories.

Bellah spent most of his talk trying to walk the tightrope between cosmic optimism (e.g., Teilhard, Berry, etc.) and cosmic pessimism (Monod, Dawkins, etc.). The optimists, he says, read too much Christian providentialism into the cosmos, while the pessimists see the cosmos only in terms of the fall. The bit about carbon being Christ-like is not a comparison Bellah made–he went to great pains to respect the difference between theoretical science and the various sorts of religious and/or symbolic responses we might have to it (“the universe is cold and indifferent and only human have a chance to rebel against it!” -Dawkins; “The human is a creative flowering of the dynamics of the universe itself, and so all our culture and religion should be universe-referent” -Berry).

Flat? I’m not sure. I think part of what he is trying to do with his new book is challenge the secularist assumption that religion is just bad science, that is it primarily a set of theoretical claims that one believes or disbelieves. He wants to root religion in something deeper than belief. He roots it in practices, in play and ritual, especially those rituals that are widespread socially. This makes it seem like something inescapable, though of course we might not want to say that Super Bowl Sunday, just because it is highly ritualized, is therefore a religious event. Or would we?

Matthew David Segall says: February 10, 2012 at 12:38 pm

Bellah wasn’t equating cosmic pessimism with science. Brian Swimme’s cosmology (also in attendance at the lecture) is an example of how the scientific evidence can be read in a different way, not exactly secular, but not religious, either.

As for turning religious categories into arche-concepts, I would probably want to argue that this is an appropriate move in some cases. The death-rebirth mystery, for example, seems to be a widespread motif present in all the world’s religious and indigenous traditions. It seems to be a fundamental concept in all religions. Such religious expressions have their roots deep in human nature, reflecting real aspects of our existential situation, so its no surprise that, despite claims of secularity and modernity, we see the same arche-concepts cropping up again and again.

Dawkins is probably not the best example to use to argue that not everyone needs Christian narratives. Here is the systems biologist Brian Goodwin writing about Dawkins:

“To give a very brief summary of the way he presents neo-Darwinism in The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype, let me mention four points he makes: (1) Organisms are constructed by groups of genes, whose goal is to leave more copies of themselves; (2) this gives rise to the metaphor of the hereditary material being basically selfish; (3) this intrinsically selfish quality of the hereditary material is reflected in competitive interactions between organisms, which result in survival of fitter variants generated by the more successful genes. (4) Then you get the point that organisms are constantly trying to get better, fitter, and — in a mathematical, geometrical metaphor — always trying to climb peaks in fitness landscapes.

The most interesting point emerged at the end of The Selfish Gene, where Richard said that human beings, alone amongst all the species, can escape from their selfish inheritance and become genuinely altruistic, through educational effort. I suddenly realized that this set of four points was a transformation of four very familiar principles of Christian fundamentalism, which go like this; (1) Humanity is born in sin; (2) we have a selfish inheritance; (3) humanity is therefore condemned to a life of conflict and perpetual toil; (4) but there is salvation.

What Richard has done is to make absolutely clear that Darwinism is a kind of transformation of Christian theology. It is a heresy, because Darwin puts the vital force for evolution into matter, but everything else remains much as it was. I suspect that Richard was at one stage fairly religious, and that he then underwent a kind of conversion to Darwinism, and he feels fervently that people ought to embrace this as a way of life.”

Matthew David Segall says: February 10, 2012 at 10:01 am Hey Zayin,

Yes you’re right to point to Bellah’s insistance on different but overlapping realities. I think the word “power” is perhaps misleading. I think of Christ’s power not in terms of creative force or might, but in terms of love. Eros (which can be both attractive and repulsive, both creative and destructive) is operative at all levels, from microcosmic electromagnetism, to macrocosmic gravitation, to mesocosmic human compassion. But it seems that the symbolism surrounding Christ is trying to point to an outpouring of love unmatched at any other level.

Tusar N. Mohapatra  -  11:14 AM  -  Re: Nature's Plans? Hidden?

Obviously every rule has an exception. There is a frog in Australia which delivers its babies through its mouth. Nature goes with what(ever) works. But still,