Blogs as an aleatory encounter, a chance encounter, with the outside and the non-philosopher

Dan Says: September 19, 2007 at 12:55 am
In response to “sixfoot’s” question: “Should the job be left to artists, novelists, and filmmakers?” I would say “Yes!” but I do not think this is a prospective idea only. I think that continental philosophy has demonstrated again and again — in both form and content — exactly the notion that its philosophical “revelations” are not just directed at or akin to artistic endeavors but are, in Nietzsche sense, always already artistic.

However, I do not think this makes things any easier any more than complex physical phenomena make it easy to understand physical complexity theory though it may be more palatable to some. Still, I think this request/demand may be ideologically informed. You do not, I suspect, make the same requests of easy lucidity of those in set theory or genetics: you expect their expertise to have a methodology and nomenclature which is largely inaccessible to the novice. You do not — I expect — dream that “Mr. Wizard” is giving you the full story or will appear on a doctoral exam. So why do you make the demand here?

I think the request is prejudicial in at least two ways: it implies that language or the human sciences are not rocket science so it devalues as is popular the demands of these disciplines and it upholds an Aristotelian concepts of lucidity, taxonomy, and structure which are not the paradigms of the field you wish to examine. Anyone who has been in theory for long is used to taking such questions while watching the deference and reverential submission paid the natural sciences. This can get quite old. However, I will try to make a practical observation. Theory is at the end of a very long and twisted intersection of various roads. Unlike the sciences which have a deductive mother and an experimental method of simulation as a father, theory is filled with vestiges and contradictions that make a hard nexus harder.

Further, I would say that “common sense” or ideological norms make what is done in theory abhorrent and “self evidently” non-sensible. So, to expect that this latest set of tangles in the web could or should be intelligible quickly seems not just unlikely but as impossible as acquiring a culture — not just a language — in an equivalently short time. I will admit that the pre-socratics still challenge me, but if I wanted a better sense of Deleuze, I might start there and use – a little later – someone like Benson Mates on Stoic logic: he’s pretty lucid and this alternative logic gets one closer – I think at least – to the D&G project but then I am pretty dumb and ignorant.

larvalsubjects Says: September 19, 2007 at 1:38 am
Sixfoot, thanks for the comment. I think you raise a number of extremely difficult questions. I do not know that my comments about academia are obligatory remarks in the world of theory. For myself, at least, I experience these as extremely personal questions pertaining to the meaning of my academic work. Often I find myself losing my resolve, and feeling as if it is all meaningless. What could be the purpose of engaging in arcane academic questions that only seem address to other academics. I wrote about this a long while back, here:

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2006/09/12/philosophical-despair/

I sympathize with a number of Dan’s observations regarding the nature of specialized language; though, perhaps, would add that I suspect the reason people feel frustrated with academic jargon in philosophy, political theory, ethics, etc., is not simply the result of the hard science/soft theory distinction, but the way in which these subjects deal with issues that are of collective or general concern to everyone. A person doesn’t feel alienated if they can’t find there way into set theory or category theory or quantum mechanics, but in the case of vital subjects that pertain to how we should live, how the social should be organized, what we can hope for, etc., it is very easy to feel that theorists that work on these questions are denying those outside these fields entrance to something that rightfully belongs to everyone.

When I complain about academic specialization, in part, I am complaining about questions and issues that no longer seem directed to the world, but seem to be creations of a discipline that has become isolated from the world and generated its own “puzzles” or riddles to entertain itself. I say this cautiously, because I think these forms of engagement can also be productive in their own right. However, in my own ongoing philosophical development, I have also found again and again that I need to perform a sort of “archeology” of philosophical thought, where I trace concepts and questions back to living social and political contexts that might have motivated them and gotten these philosophers all worked up. This is the difference between approaching, say, Plato’s Theatetus and saying it asks the question “what is knowledge?” (a very abstract question that can be posed independent of context, trans-historically), and asking “why did Plato and the Greeks get all worked up by the question ‘what is knowledge?’ what problem were they living that necessitated these questions? what was the crises that precipitated these conceptual compositions?” In this way I find a little bit of life in philosophy, where before I experienced none (or experienced dead academic amusements or games).

I do believe that philosophy somehow needs to communicate with its outside or become open to “our historical moment”. I do not think this is primarily an issue of clear language, but rather of grappling with a field of problems present in the historical moment. Nonetheless, I do think there’s a powerful lesson in the form of Plato’s dialogues. Socrates had to be prepared to talk to anyone, anywhere in a constant renewal of philosophy regardless of whether the interlocutor is herself a philosopher. I believe the blogs go part of the way towards renewing this conception of philosophy as an aleatory encounter, a chance encounter, with the outside and the non-philosopher, and that as a result philosophy becomes something other than what it has been under the book system. Whether that tendency will follow through and whether it will produce interesting results is another question entirely.

Derrida decried “Eurocentrism” and “Masculinism” but never came out with a real philosophy of his own

Why should the West Monopolize and Hijack Philosophy?
V.S. Gopalakrishnan September 17, 2007 Join Chowk

Tags: Philosophy , philosophers , West , East , Oriental , books Article Interact

Why is the West abandoning Philosophy? The trouble with western books on philosophy is that they seldom cover Oriental philosophies. Like “God is dead” of Nietzsche, philosophy is nearly dead in the west. The real wealth in this area still lies in the ever-lasting eastern thoughts, which any book on philosophy should ignore only at its own peril.

The west has reached a stage now where the study of philosophy or evolution of philosophical thinking has come to be regarded as unimportant or irrelevant. Modern technocracy in the west has banished philosophy beyond the back-burner. A historical tragedy is that the philosophers of the west have been only men, and there is not a single woman to be reckoned with. In India, female philosophers Gargi and Maitreyi are mentioned in the Upanishads, and Shankaracharya is said to have debated with the female philosopher Udhaya Bharati.

“The unexamined life is not worth living”, said Socrates. There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in philosophy, said Shakespeare, a non-philosopher. So, how can anybody bury philosophy at this stage of history? It has to be an endless quest, and with the evolution of man’s thinking leading to incredible discoveries and inventions in the last two centuries, there is every reason for humanity to discover more of itself in various facets, most particularly the purpose and meaning of life and existence. Man has discovered that there are several universes and there are twelve dimensions and not four (space and time). Man has found that an atom is like a universe with moving sub-atomic particles. These things are reviving our faith in some original creator. Why then is the west giving up philosophy?

It is perhaps better to give up philosophy than develop inane so-called philosophical ideas, as has happened in the west in the twentieth century. Ludwig Wittgenstein preoccupied himself with LANGUAGE and MEANING, and later admitted that his philosophy was meaningless. John Dewey and other American “pragmatists” espoused the great thought that the search for truth and reality is pointless, and what is useful to man is the only truth! For William James, a significant idea is that which has “cash value”! For Jean-Francois Lyotard, there is no meaning in asking the big questions, and only small things matter! Jacques Derrida, whose lecture the reviewer had attended, decried “Eurocentrism” and “Masculinism” but never came out with a real philosophy of his own. He simply recommended the “deconstruction” of the quest to understand cosmos and human history, whatever that means!

Similarly, we can perhaps ignore the so-called philosophies of Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno of the last century. Foucault, himself a playboy, had some kind of a “philosophical” obsession with the underdogs namely the insane, the criminals and homosexuals. Adorno had a very narrow philosophy, that of just condemning modernity and the “cultural industries” (pop, media, advertising etc).

Martin Heidegger alone perhaps made some philosophical sense in the last century. He complained that the modern mechanical and technological world has given rise to the abandonment of the search of true “Being”. To him, questions such as awareness of death and of man’s finitude in the universe were of great importance.

Philosophers have been divided into four categories, namely, metaphysical philosophers, epistemological philosophers, social and political philosophers, and ethical philosophers. Down the ages one finds very little of metaphysical philosophy from the west. This is the real philosophy that deals with the really big questions relating to human existence. On the other hand there is an endless array of social and political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, Hegel, Karl Marx and many others. They have very little metaphysics to contribute.

It is high time that the west realized that true philosophy essentially consists in metaphysics. Social philosophy, political philosophy etc are mere appendages. A great book on metaphysical philosophies of the west and the east should be the founding course on this subject (philosophy).

Eastern philosophies have the big concepts of and enquiries after the soul, reincarnation, transmigration, God, attaining oneness with God etc. apart from the concepts of morality and ethics. It is interesting to note that down the ages some western philosophers also had notions in these areas. Pythagoras believed in human soul and reincarnation. Plato believed in the human soul. Plotinus and other neoplatonists examined the liberation of the human soul and the union with the divine “One”. That reminds you of the Hindu Advaita. Augustine of Hippo wrote great books (“The Confessions” and “City of God”) and laboured to justify God. Thomas Aquinas wrote eight million words (Summa Theologica) to ‘prove’ the existence of God. For Descartes, the human mind was the soul. He believed in the existence of God. George Berkeley also believed in God. For Immanuel Kant, the reason has a limit and that is saying a lot of metaphysical things!

A study of a philosopher’s thoughts should go hand in hand, wherever possible, with a study of his life. Buddhism studied without a study of Buddha’s life would be somewhat meaningless. To fully understand Taoism, one should know about the life of Lao Tze. To understand Islam, the Koran and the Hadith, one should know the Prophet’s life story along with at least the immediate history of Islam after the Prophet’s passing away in 632 A.D.

Some western philosophers’ life stories give us amusing insights. Empedocles who theorized that cosmos was made of four elements jumped into the volcano Etna in order to prove his theory! We know that Socrates was condemned with the charge of “impiety” and given death sentence. Many may not know that Socrates fought in the Athenian army. Descartes fought in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Nietzsche was insane in the last ten years of his life. Wittgenstein was a school teacher for some time and was thrown out for beating children. Heidegger was a pucca Nazi and remained so even after the defeat of the Nazis. Bertrand Russell was jailed as a conscientious objector during the World War I. So much for our study of philosophy!

Also by V.S. Gopalakrishnan Review of the Book: FREAKONOMICS The Corporation That Changed The World Medical Lessons from the Death of a Poet Similar Articles The Apology of Socrates Jabran chaudry Animism and Mythology Khuram Rafique A Free Being M. K Afzal The Impact of the Greek Philosophers on Modern Education zainab siddique The world of the Wise Lord Nazar Khan Copyright © 1997 - 2007 chowk.com.

The reader of Plato joins Socrates in inquiry, as Sancho Panza joined Don Quixote

The Tragedy of Socrates Silika Mohapatra

Sophocles makes Oedipus the protagonist and hero and uses the elegance of the folk tradition to amplify the tragic essence of folk tale. Upon the birth of Oedipus Laius, his father is warned by the Delphic oracle that he will be slain by his son. Having thus been abandoned by his family and adopted by another king, rumors of his real origin disturb Oedipus later in life. He goes to the Delphi where he is told that he will kill his father and marry his mother. The name Oedipus is usually accepted to mean “swollenfoot”, indicating the wound-scar that results from the manner of the infant’s exposure and that serves as mark of recognition of personal identity in the play, but it could equally mean “He who learned his roots”, the man who knew himself.

It is striking that Plato in The Apology seems to cast Socrates as an Oedipus, a master of life as his name indicates, who reasonably accepts his condemnation to death. Socrates, the hero protagonist of the dramatic manifestation of justice in The Republic uses his own trial, as he has used his whole life, to inquire and to find the answer to the riddle of the Delphic Oracle which had said that he was the wisest man in Greece. This man, who is Socrates, supposedly kills his father— the city— by charming the youth away from conventional citizenship to superior aims of the state, and marries his mother— the laws— which have nourished and protected him in his mission. There is a different content in the Platonic riddle of Socrates but the character and the plot are remarkably similar.

The reader of Plato joins Socrates in inquiry, as Sancho Panza joined Don Quixote for adventures of the mind. The Platonic dialogues present an incorrigible urge to question things that have been taken for granted, the supposed adversary being conventional morality. Socrates in all his honesty was convinced of his own moral righteousness. He says in The Apology:

“And therefore, Athenians, I say, whether you acquit me or not, I shall not change my way of life; no, not if I have to die for it many times” (stanza XVII).

The question that arises before us is whether Socrates was in fact guilty of the crimes charged against him. The answer however appears rather misty and ambiguous. If we seek to resolve this peculiar complexity, we may have to look at three different hypothetical situations that can be ascribed to the textual presentation:

1. Socrates has done wrong but believes that he has done right. (Here the idea of right would be that which is conventionally right and Socrates has done wrong in so far as he has neglected it.)
2. Socrates has done right but Athenians who put him to death believe he has done wrong. (This might point at some higher principle of morality. In so far as Socrates was rationally convinced that he is right, he was not morally at fault. Athenians however working within confines of conventional morality believed he was wrong. This points at a kind of conflict of principles.)
3. Socrates has done right and Athenians who put him to death know so, but put him to death for extra moral/legal reasons. (For e.g., they might have wanted to get rid of Socrates, who had humiliated them in public by demonstrating their ignorance.)

Any exploration of the problem involved will then seek to capture the justifications that buttress the three perspectives presented here. Socrates is quoting Sophocles when he says in The Apology that the unexamined life is no life at all for man. In discussing philosophy in the agora (marketplace) where the youth were his constant companions, Socrates examined persons who thought they were wise when they were not wise. In doing so he completely shook the conventional understanding of ideas like justice, courage, love, knowledge, etc. But whether in doing so he was ‘misleading’ and ‘corrupting’ them, remains unresolved. Posted by Silika at 7:52 PM Sunday, August 05, 2007 Permalink Chiaroscuro The Melting Pot Silika Mohapatra

Schleiermacher rejects the idea of particular relations between God and different individuals

Matthias Gockel, Barth and Schleiermacher on the Doctrine of Election: A Systematic-Theological Comparison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 229 pp. (review copy courtesy of Oxford UP – and there is also an online edition) Friday, 6 July 2007

Schleiermacher rejects the idea of particular relations between God and different individuals, in order to move beyond particularistic accounts of individual redemption and to emphasise the “divine unity and the unity of the world” (p. 101). Schleiermacher thus regards reprobation as only a temporary passing over. In spite of such temporary reprobation, all unbelievers remain predestined to salvation: “God sees all human beings, not only the believers, in Christ” (p. 102).

Barth’s early revision of the doctrine of election, Gockel argues, is strikingly similar to this Schleiermacherian account. In Romans, Barth emphasises the dialectical unity of God’s decree: “God’s reprobation (of the elect) and God’s election (of the reprobate)” are “one and the same in God” (p. 118). There is a real duality here of judgment and grace, but it is the duality of God’s unified action, an action which affects all human beings alike. It is thus impossible to conceive of the church and the world as “two separate groups of persons” (p. 125). This revised model of double predestination is developed further in Barth’s Göttingen Dogmatics. Here, Barth emphasises the teleological ordering of election and reprobation. God judges in order to be gracious – the way of predestination leads us “through damnation, even through hell, to salvation and life” (p. 156).

In both Romans and the Göttingen Dogmatics, then, Barth has developed what Gockel calls a “Schleiermacherian reconstruction” of the doctrine of election. For both Barth and Schleiermacher, the divine decree is to be understood in the context of the historical decision between faith and unbelief; for both of them, election articulates the sheer initiative of the divine act; and for both of them, there is a teleological movement in time from reprobation to election. Above all, both theologians focus not on “individual predestined human beings” but on “the predestining God” (p. 157). Surprisingly, then, Gockel argues that it is “precisely the anthropocentric outlook of traditional views” which motivated not only Barth’s revision of election, but also Schleiermacher’s (p. 12).

Barth did, however, revise the doctrine of election a second time, and it is this decisive “christological revision” that is developed so expansively in CD II/2. Now Barth comes to think of God’s twofold decision of election and reprobation as a decision about Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is reprobated for the sake of election. And, crucially, the divine decree “is not made in an abstract eternity” prior to Jesus Christ, but “precisely in the life of Jesus” (pp. 163-64). Jesus Christ is both subject and object of election: the Logos is identified with Jesus of Nazareth (p. 203)...

Gockel’s reading of Barth thus leads him to support Bruce McCormack’s controversial interpretation: “the idea of the immanent trinity depends on the concept of predestination” (p. 177). There is no difference between God’s decision in time and God’s decision in eternity – they are precisely the same event in Jesus Christ himself. And Gockel observes that Paul Molnar’s critique of McCormack – resting as it does on a strict separation between God’s being-in-himself and his being-for-us, i.e., between triunity and election – represents “the very opposite of what Barth intended” (p. 180)... Labels: book reviews, doctrine of God, election, Karl Barth, Schleiermacher posted by Ben Myers at 6:30 PM

Philosophy says: that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards

cynic librarian Says: September 8, 2007 at 12:27 am
Kierkegaard is not so much opposed to immanence as he is to a monistic tendency in all philosophizing–from Plato to Hegel and beyond–that would dissolve the tyranscendence-immanence dialectic in favor of one over the other.
Since we do become, we exist, we can’t stop that flow of time and reach any transcendent point above time. Still, we are moving towards some point, a telos. The issue is that humans, in Kierkegaard’s understanding, are essentially dualities, infinitude-finistude, possibility-necessity, etc.
Hegel wanted to dissolve the duality and rise above existence–as an existing being. This for Kierkegaard is impossible.
The situation is such that the transcendent–the infinite–transects immanence at various points in human existence. For Kierkegaard, these points often come in terms of crises, what psychologists might call identity crises, though the identity here has a transcendent resting place.
Tom (Grundlegung) Says: September 8, 2007 at 3:41 pm
As for the movement from sense-certainty to perception, I take it that the object of Hegel’s attack is a certain inadequate conception of individuality. So, I think that Hegel presupposes that we do have knowledge of individuals but that this is only explicable given a certain approach to individuality — one that rejects the implicit notion that we can know objects divorced from grasping their (universal) properties. The relation between a thing and its properties is dialectical (insofar as both universality and particularity are essential moments of individuality) and as such I fail to see that universality gets privileged in Hegel’s account of empirical knowledge. If it is at this level that Kierkegaard’s objection is targeted then his route seems a more dangerous prospect insofar as it seems to me to ultimately risk a degeneration into a Jacobi-like position with the attendant obfuscations of haecceity, faith and pure immediacy. Against this, I see Hegel fighting the good anti-mystical fight (not to mention providing a better metaphysical account of the structure of the object).
Of course, there is a sense in which universality does get privileged in Hegel’s account of experience, and at which accusations of hyper-rationalism are more warranted, but this is at the level of Erfahrung — the kind of experience that the Phenomenology as a whole deals with, concerning the proper ordering of logical categories in our encounters with ourselves, others and the world at large. This is to be distinguished from our ordinary perception and coping-in-the-world though, although the more explicitly epistemological topics in the early stages of the Phenomenology can make this a little tricky.
cynic librarian Says: September 9, 2007 at 6:36 am
Kierkegaard has no ontology of the thing per se. While Heidegger fleshed out the ramifications of Kierkegaard’s existence communication, he also abstracted it in ways that Kierkegaard would have disagreed with profoundly. For Kierkegaard, the type of immediacy that refers only to the sense-perception is perhaps not even possible in a human being, only animals. In this he may be following Aristotle.
On the other hand, a life of immediacy, wherein a person related only to sensations and the life of the senses via imagination is positioned in what Kierkegaard calls the aesthetic sphere. It is a non-ethical state of life that lives momentarily and without purpose. The step into ethics and morality occurs when the aesthete experiences a despair so great that s/he seeks to reconstruct him/herself in relationship to others.
Despair is a state within which a distance between social norms and the life of the senses can be put into focus. The individual finds a psychological distance between him/herself and their environment. In some ways, this mirros Hegel’s dialectical insights. But for Kierkegaard there is no aufhebung–there is a leap, a qualitative shift that requires will and passion, as well as intellectual insight.
Tom (Grundlegung) Says: September 10, 2007 at 10:36 am
Thanks for that cynic librarian.
I have some reservations when you draw a contrast between Hegel and Kierkegaard, saying, “for Kierkegaard there is no aufhebung–there is a leap, a qualitative shift that requires will and passion, as well as intellectual insight.” Perhaps that would do as a description of Kierkegaard’s conception of some of the differences between himself and Hegel, but it seems to ignore aspects of Hegel’s avowed position (although Kierkegaard might demur when it comes to how the project actually plays out).

The problem is that Hegel explicitly calls his phenomenological project a ‘path of despair’. I think J.M. Bernstein is correct when he takes this as a sign of the ‘erotic’ dimension to the phenomenological project — the way in which it is no good for us to be disinterested observers of the intellectual trials of consciousness, rather we must also be thoroughly emotionally invested, with our desires being bound up with those of each mode of consciousness and each form of the world that Hegel treats. Thus, I think Hegel would agree that it is not enough to achieve an intellectual insight and so it is crucial to be passionately engaged too.

Even the Kierkegaardian motif of the leap is reflected in many accounts of Hegel, where we cannot be ’sure’ of subsequent stages of consciousness before entering them — that the grand march of reason towards absolute knowing is only discernable retrospectively. For this very reason, that as experienced, the uncertainty hanging over the journey of consciousness would bring this erotic dimension along with it. ‘It is quite true what philosophy says: that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards.’ one might say. (Obviously the rest of that passage — “Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with the thought that temporal life can never properly be understood precisely because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt the position: backwards.” — is also relevant here too as to whether we can reach the standpoint of absolute knowing. But I think the original point stands nevertheless.)
cynic librarian Says: September 11, 2007 at 12:53 am
Tom, Thanks. There’s a lot to the notion that Kierkegaard often draws too many contrasts between what he perceives as Hegel’s position and his own. He takes the Danish Hegelians’ writings as those of Hegel, which might not be true all the time.
The idea that life can be lived backwards is a position that Kierkegaard associates with Plato and many others of the monistic tradition he’s out to demolish. While he gives a lot of credit to the Platonic system, he’s more amenable to the anti-systematic approach of Socrates.
The presupposition of living backwards is that the answer is somehow already given, we just need to find it–back there, in the origins, in prehistory, or perhaps in something given bio-psychologically. Why Kierkegaard thinks that Hegel buys into this way of looking at the answers to life is that he puts so much emphasis on starting and ending the system. Where you start will determine where you end. It also seems true that Hegel’s evolutionary process is geared so finely with the historical that it is in that process itself that resolution will come.
Kierkegaard’s also very critical of the idea that you can write a “system” that explains where it’s going and where it’ll end while you are a simple, existing human being. You can’t get outside of time, as it appears Hegel often gives the impression you can.
Despair: no doubt Hegel understood this in terms that Kierkegaard would find amenable. Yet, again, the emphasis is one where Hegel finds the resolution to despair. Kierkegaard would see the despair as ongoing and never resolvable in this life, at least. Hegel does give the impression that once the historical process ends, then there will be no more unhappy consciousness. Or do I draw the wrong conclusions here?
As far as the “erotic” is concerned–well, that’s something that a quasi-Platonist like Kierkegaard would find is prejudiced toward the physical. He might point out that there are many forms of love and passion for the Other, not just the erotic.
Tom (Grundlegung) Says: September 11, 2007 at 11:57 am
One thing that Hegel wants to avoid is a philosophical account that appeals to the notion of an endless striving (like Fichte’s restless ego, ever propelled towards the ‘ought’ but never finally reaching it either). In keeping with this, I think that the problem of despair is resolvable for Hegel, that we can more-or-less overcome our alienation from ourselves, others and the world at large, so long as we comport ourselves in the right way with the support of the right surroundings. (Some readers of Hegel, like Zizek, would probably disagree with this.) As such, for him a temporal solution is possible, but this is one that must be fought for and is not simply a matter of the historical process coming to an end. It is not as if there is some momentous ‘end of history’ that could somehow be a substitute for a position outside of time, being some sort of halfway house between the temporal and divine — an aevium intersecting both the saeculum and the nunc stans. Partly, the solution will include a historically cultivated realisation that we cannot escape history — a realisation that, theoretically, we will only be at home in the world given a rejection of extra-temporal transcendence, and the production of an ‘erotic’ sensibility that stops yearning for such transcendent relations. (’Erotic’ as I think Bernstein wants to use it, and certainly as I do, is meant only to pick out the dimension of desire, rather than anything especially sexual.) So, in a sense, Kierkegaard and Hegel seem to agree that there is no getting outside of time so far as lived human existence goes; but they take rather different conclusions from this.
As for the criticism that Hegel’s project is guilty of some sort of onto-genetic fallacy, where the answer to problems is already present in their origins, that depends on how the role of history is conceived within Hegel’s system. I think often too much weight has been placed on a certain understanding of Hegel as thoroughly historicist. However, the ‘evolutionary process’, as you put it, is not merely, or even mostly, historical: Hegel tracks conceptual movements, ones that have their own distinctive ‘logic’ (i.e. set of norms and relations). They ought to be situated and treated with reference to their historical instantiation (including our passionate investment in them), but are not exhausted by their empirical conditions — that is, the way they happen to have arisen historically. When taken this way, the criticism about uncovering their ‘origins’ seems weakened. That is, if the question of origins is a conceptual question as well as a historical one, the sense in which the answers are somehow implausibly preset loses some of its worrying character. For undertaking a conceptual analysis of those categories in some sense instantiated in the world as well as employed in approaches to the world that leave us alienated would seems an eminently sensible approach in working out why such problems arise and what is to be done about them. The sense in which the solution is always-already there in the genesis of the problem takes on a rather different tenor here which strikes me as less perniciously mechanical and implausible.
cynic librarian Says: September 12, 2007 at 5:52 am
Tom, Your comments deserve much more attention than I am at present able to give them. Please accept my sincere apologies (and regrets) for this. I will try to get to them on the morrow.
In the meantime, I wish to suggest that Hegel does not see philosophy in any other way than as science. There’s little love of any kind involved. Since I am no Hegel scholar, I must rely on others to point this out. Merold Westphal (who says there’s no reason at all to see Kierkegaard as “simply” anti-Hegelian), for example, quotes the following in his essay on Hegel and Kierkegaard:
The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth. To help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title “love of knowledge” and be actual knowledge — that is what I have set myself to do. … To show that now is the time for philosophy to be raised to the status of a Science would therefore be the only true justification of any effort that has the aim, for to do so would demonstrate the necessity of the aim, would indeed at the same time be the accomplishing of it. (Westphal, “Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard,” pp. 101-102)
It is this notion of system, according to Westphal that Kierkegaard found so disturbing about Hegel and his followers.
Many scholars have shown significant affinities between Hegel and Kierkegaard, if only negatively, ie, as background for Kierkegaard to forumulate his own thought. I must admit that for some time I was influenced by Hegel’s aesthetic theory as well as his philosophy of history. I acquired some of this via secondary sources, mostly Milosz and Marx, though I did read Hegel unsystematically and “creatively.” But I never acquired a systematic knowledge of his works that a concentrated study brings.
cynic librarian Says: September 13, 2007 at 11:51 pm
Tom, I don’t think that the question about where we start in philosophical analysis of the kind undertaken by Hegel involves that fallacy. I do believe that Kierkegaard is correct when he sees Hegel seeking the answer to questions in terms of a retrospective instead of an open future. This involves the notion that humans somehow contain the answer in themselves.
As far as fallacies go, I haven’t worked out the details of this analysis yet, but there are strong similarities between many of Kierkegaard’s arguments against Hegel’s theory of motion and Schopenhauer’s accusation that Hegel commits a fallacia non causae ut causa or “fallacy based on a cause that is not a cause.”
In essence this form of fallacy conflates the definition of a thing and the proof of its existence, “the ground of knowledge with causality.” Quoting Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (I, 13), Schopenhauer writes
knowing and demonstrating that a thing exists is very different from knowing and proving why it exists. (Schopenhauer, World As Will and Representation, v. 1, p. 11)
In numerous places, Kierkegaard discusses what he calls Hegel’s “category mistake” when it comes to mixing existential and logical categories. But like I said, I haven’t worked out the fine points of this yet.

The most “radical” and polemical forms of theory are being co-opted by capital

September 11, 2007 Sensation and Sensibility: Deleuze’s Aesthetic Metaphysics Posted by larvalsubjects under Deleuze

I suppose I shouldn’t post these things on a blog. But why publish anything anymore? Where there are no encounters and where there is no possibility of dialogue save the occasional inquiry I receive in email, what could the possible value of publication be?

Perhaps one aim of academic writing today should be the destruction of the privilege surrounding the academic apparatus, its journals, its conferences, its books; all of which produce isolated islands and foster specialization, staving off any encounter with the non-specialist and fostering a form of writing aimed only at the specialist. Of course, I say all this as a rationalization for my own anxieties and idiosyncracies...

larvalsubjects Says: September 12, 2007 at 1:33 am At any rate, I think this is a perpetual danger for political critique. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with EGS: http://www.egs.edu/
At the EGS you get to do your graduate work with some of the foremost theorists alive today (Badiou, Agamben, Zizek, DeLanda, Butler, etc). They offer a masters and phd in communications, though certainly of a highly unique sort. Sociologically, one of the most interesting things about EGS is that a high number of the graduates go into fields like network and cable news, advertising, various forms of media production, etc. In short, here we have a case where the most “radical” and polemical forms of theory are being co-opted by capital and put to very different ends. Does that mean the tool itself is inherently tainted? A scalpel can be used to heal or kill.

Transculturality is found at the individual microlevel too: most of us are cultural hybrids

Transculturality - the puzzling form of cultures today Wolfgang Welsch
Appeared in: California Sociologist, 17 & 18 (1994/1995) pp. 19-39.

The concept of transculturality suggests a new conceptualization of culture differing from classical monocultures and the more recent conceptions of interculturality and multiculturality.

The traditional description of cultures as islands or spheres is descriptively wrong, because cultures today are characterized internally by a pluralization of identities and externally through border-crossing contours. Furthermore, this traditional concept, which emphasizes homogeneity and delineation, is normatively dangerous in structurally suppressing differences and encouraging separatism and violent conflicts. The concepts of interculturality und multiculturalism tackle some of these ills, but their basic flaw remains the presupposition of cultures as homogeneous islands or enclosed spheres.

The concept of transculturality seeks conversely to articulate today's cultural constitution, one characterized by intertwinement, and to elicit the requisite conceptional and normative consequences. Furthermore, transculturality is found at the individual microlevel too: most of us are cultural hybrids. Transculturality aims for cultures with the ability to link and undergo transition whilst avoiding the threat of homogenization or uniformization. Cultural diversity arises in a new mode as a transcultural blend rather than a juxtaposition of clearly delineated cultures.

While it is currently assumed that we are going global and are, by doing this, uniformizing more and more, the concept of transculturality calls this line of thinking into question. The tendency towards transculturality does not mean that our cultural formation is becoming the same all over the world. On the contrary, processes of globalization and becoming transcultural imply a great variety of differentiation. Even if everyone uses the same media, it does not follow that she or he is making the same use of these media. And new media in particular offer considerable opportunities for variation, selection, and specification. Cultural webs woven from the same sources can differ greatly and be quite specific and even individualistic. Therefore, the process we are witnessing is simultaneously a process of unification and differentiation. Document date 29 Oct 2000 Home Curriculum vitae Research areas&Current projects Publication List Online Texts&Publication abstracts Department of Philosophy Contact

These products, or end results, are also productive

Marx begins Capital with a chapter on commodities...Marx starts from these forms of “givenness”, and then gradually unfolds other, more complex, categories - trying to make the case that the possibility for these more complex categories is already presupposed by the initial forms of “givenness” with which he begins. The strategic intention here is complex. Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: Reflections on the “Greatest Difficulty” from Roughtheory.org by N Pepperell

On one level - and over the course of Capital as a whole - Marx will suggest that the initial, apparently simple and “primitive” categories with which he begins, themselves could not exist - would not be “given” - without the whole complex social structure that Marx proceeds to analyse in the rest of the text. These simple initial categories, from which Marx appears to “deduce” more complex categories in the opening sections of Capital, are thus gradually revealed over the course of the argument to be products or end results of a process of historical development, rather than decontextualised and ahistorical starting points of Marx’s analysis. These products, however, are also productive: the results of this historical process provide the materials (”subjective” and “objective” - practical) to point beyond the process that produced them.

Which brings us to the other strategic intention of this mode of argument: Marx is trying to engage in an immanent social critique - and therefore needs to show that capitalism, in reproducing itself, also generates potentials that can react back on this process of reproduction and therefore ground the potential for transformative practice and critique...

As we will see when we reach the section on commodity fetishism, Marx will suggest that the very notion of a “material world” must be understood as a product of human practice - not in the sense that all of nature can be reduced to a human construction, but in the sense that the intuitive gestalt of “materialism” - of “matter” - of a natural world that exists independently of human cultural and social determinations - is the distinctive cultural and social determination that our society projects onto “nature” (or, more accurately, is the determinate way in which we enact our interactions with nature in collective practice). Marx will try to argue that we do this, of course. But, more importantly (since many theorists will “declare” the notion of “materialism” to be a cultural construct - will assert this position as an “abstract negation” or ungrounded stance), Marx will try to show how we do this. It is this that makes his account a determinate negation of materialism.

[Citational note: Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Capital are taken from the text of Chapter 1, Section 1 available at the Marxist Internet Archive; all quotes from Hegel’s Phenomenology are from the online text here.]

Philosophy, as a search for the transcendental ground of mundaneity, began to make sense

J.N. Mohanty From Between Two Worlds, East and West: An Autobiography,

Oxford, 2002, 224pp, $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 0195648358.

Earlier in my youth, I spun on a spinning wheel—following the Mahatma’s example—and used only hand-spun and hand-woven clothes, practiced vegetarianism, walked, if not on bare feet, with a locally made pair of sandals, said, when possible, the evening prayers for all major religions, read and memorized large parts of the Bhagavadgita, washed my own dishes after meals (this was not usually done in middle-class families in India), and tried to cultivate a spirit of empathy with nature and my fellow villagers. It was a way of life—where religion, social activism, and ethical spirit merged together. After finishing high school, I was spending the summer in the village, translating Tagore’s poems (originally in Bengali) into Oriya, when I decided to learn tilling the land with a bullock-drawn plough, as was the practice then (and also now). It was hard work, but I wanted to experience what work in the field meant. (17)...

Our task was to translate [a hymn] into German, point out and resolve problems in translations, identify grammatical problems, and solve them with the help of Panini as well as other Vedic grammars. “Never use,” he warned us, “any existing translations, never use Sayana’s commentary (for, he said, Sayana is closer to us in time than to the Vedic period); use dictionaries, especially nirukta and grammar books, and prepare your own translations and report.” And when you presented yours in the class, Waldschmidt would critique you, question you at every step, and tear your arduous work to pieces. He once said to the class, “My goal is to train you in such a way that given a fragment of a manuscript, you can make something of it, date, build a reasonable hypothesis about its style, internal and external cross-references, produce a translation, and raise a host of questions.” And in all this, he remained a philologist—an excellent one at that—with no interest in the value and validity of the ideas, concepts, or philosophies in the texts. That was German Indology at its best. (44)...

This was more due to “homesickness” and boredom than due to the love for and understanding of that culture. If I look at it with the eyes of young children who were growing up, in high schools or in colleges, “Indian culture,” for their parents, meant a certain taste in food, music (mostly film songs), Bhajan (religious songs), and certain religious rituals. A young person is said to be “Americanized” if he prefers to eat hamburgers, prefers Western music, and does not understand the Bahjan or puja [religious rituals]. For many parents, cultivating Indian culture, including religious ceremonies, was meant for en-culturing the children, and the latter need this so that they, when they grew up, do not marry American girls (or boys). “Understanding” the culture was of no concern to anyone, for no one understood all that, in any case. This perhaps explains why the children in the beginning accompanied their parents to feasts and festivals, but eventually gave up. (81, but cf. 101)...

Once I clearly and unambiguously rejected belief in God, the idea of spirituality, despite its equivocations and ambiguities, became more interesting. Philosophy, as a search for the transcendental ground of mundaneity, began to make sense. I also attempted to recover the sense of religiosity that was important for me. Religiosity now meant to me a sensitivity to the irreducible sacredness of things; the sacredness of life; sacredness of humanity; and the sacredness of nature; the moral responsibility to preserve life, nature and humankind, to let humans flourish and develop to their best ability—in brief, using Whitehead’s expression, “world-loyalty.” (120)

Americans are increasingly indifferent to the truth-value of discourse

I’m McLovin It: Sexuality in the Age of Advertising from The Kugelmass Episodes

by Joseph Kugelmass (x-posted to The Valve)

Or, on the other hand, I could side with conservative philosophers like Harry G. Frankfurt, who argued in On Bullshit that Americans are increasingly indifferent to the truth-value of discourse; inevitably, he would see seducers and rules-mongers as a monkey wrench gang that wants words and signifying acts to have power independent of the world, of the way things “really are.” But this betrays my own feeling that we do, in fact, inhabit fictions, and that the value of those fictions is determined in large part by our happiness, rather than by their fidelity to a vast and impersonal truth.

Instead, I will end by suggesting that the intertwined phenomena of individuality and intimacy are both vastly expensive fictions: expensive in time, and rich in failure. In the truest sense of the term, they are luxuries. Luhmann considered it “impossible to specify how selflessness and an orientation to the other person might become embedded in a broader and deeper understanding of exchange.”

It isn’t enough to hold the line against seduction, or chicanery, or the irrational: the game is flawed. There is a chicken-and-egg problem here. I don’t see how we can embrace the larger fictions of selflessness and devotion without greater security, equality, and leisure, things one person cannot have at another’s expense. Nor do I see how, without that, we can hope to supplant the stingy, stagey drama of contemporary sexuality with something finer — as Yeats expressed it, with something wrought of high laughter, loveliness, and ease.

When Jesus and the prophets criticized the Pharisees, they were doing the same thing as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud

That idea, he says, comes from St. Anselm, the 11th century philosopher who described religious philosophy as “faith seeking understanding.” By Janet Sassi Fordham home page

Through his research and analysis, Westphal has found that a wide range of ideas put forth by continental philosophers can be applied to religious life. “Some of them were not religious people themselves,” he says, “and some of them were antireligious people, like Marx, Nietzsche and Freud—to whom I found myself strangely but strongly drawn.” The three philosophers, in fact, were not only atheists; they were suspicious of, and hostile toward, Christianity, seeing it as self-serving.

Yet Westphal believes that Christians can glean something important from them. “What Marx, Nietzsche and Freud argued is that motivations are often not terribly honorable and, therefore, we hide them from ourselves behind religion,” he says. “When they offer this kind of critique, they describe something that happens all too often in religious life, something that is a betrayal of religion. But I argue that it’s not the whole story.”

For Westphal, the reality of Christianity is more complicated. Christians can interpret their religion for good motivations as well as for bad. American slave owners justified the system of human bondage, Westphal says, by arguing that God made blacks inferior to whites. But it is also true, he says, that abolitionists used a religiously based argument that blacks were equal to whites in God’s kingdom.

Westphal’s insights resulted in a book, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (Fordham University Press, 1998), and includes a chapter on “Atheism for Lent.” This incongruous idea has been the focus of many of his lectures throughout the country.

“When Jesus and the prophets criticized the Pharisees, they were doing the same thing as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud,” Westphal says. “In the spirit of Jesus and the prophets, Christian believers might learn from Marx, Nietzsche and Freud’s kind of critique . . . through a self-examination to try to purge their distortions of the religion. That’s a Lenten exercise: self-examination leading to repentance. So my suggestion is just as Christians might read Jesus and the prophets as a Lenten exercise, they might also read these secular prophets.”

Westphal has been at work on his 10th book, Lévinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue, which will be published next year by the Indiana University Press. It is a collection of eight essays about Emmanuel Lévinas and Søren Kierkegaard, and it deals, in part, with the Enlightenment belief that human reason is an adequate foundation for moral and religious life. Both Lévinas and Kierkegaard argued that the belief that human reason was a good foundation for moral and religious life was mistaken, and Westphal tends to agree.

“In the 20th century, faith in that belief has become increasingly shaken, partly because of the world wars, partly because of the Holocaust, and partly for reasons internal to philosophical discourse,” he says. “People have begun to worry if ethical values have any force.

“I think my understanding of my faith, and of God and who I am in relationship to God, has evolved and developed over time,” Westphal says. “But it’s been a fairly smooth evolution. I’ve never had a crisis of faith, and I consider myself very fortunate.” More Top Stories in this issue: Return to In Focus: Faculty and Research index Return to Inside Fordham home page

Personal relationship between the two Gandhis of Saurashtra

The Systems of Indian Philosophy Author - Shri V. R. Gandhi Edited By - Dr. K. K. Dixit

SOMETHING ABOUT LATE SHRI V. R. GANDHI `The Systems of Indian Philosophy' is published here for the first time. It contains lectures which late V. R. Gandhi delivered before American audience of the common people, while he was on his journey to attend the World Congress of Religions held for the first time in the United States of American in 1893 A.D... The third thing which is noteworthy is his association with Mahatma Gandhiji.

The manuscript of the work, written in the author's own handwriting, remained unknown for very long. And fortunately it was discovered just in his centenary year. It is really a matter of happy co-incidence that Dr. K. K. Dixit, who himself is a sincere student of Indian and Western philosophy as well as a proficient scholar of ancient Indian language-Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, etc., has carefully edited the present work. It is an outstanding characteristic of Dr. Dixit that whatever he writes, he writes after mature consideration, without any partiality or exaggeration.

Dr. Dixit has written an elaborate introduction to this work. Any sensible enquirer, who sincerely tries to understand 0it, will find no difficulty in properly evaluating these lectures. When I think on this line I feel that there remains nothing particular for me to write. But because I hold Gandhi in high esteem and because I have good faith in Shri Mahavira Jaina Vidyalaya, the Institute which publishes the present work, I am inspired to say few words...

We know that according to Gautama's theory there is nothing permanent in man, that every particle mental, spiritual or physical, perishes every moment and new aggregates come into existence by reason of the influence left by teh 9 ) or action of the former aggregates. Everything is momentary, and if a man leads a perfectly holy life he would not collect new ( ) which will lead him into new hbirth; and therefore the aggregates of which he is composed come to an end without the new aggregates coming into existence. So although Gautama might not have said in so many words that the future state after ( ) is a state of annihilation, still the natural conclusion is that the state must be that of total annihilation. In an article in the Lucifer of march 1874, Mr. G. R. Meads tries to save buddhism from the charge of propounding a theory of annihilation and quotes a passage by Col. Olcott sanctioned by the High Priest of Ceylon. he says that although soul according to Buddhism is impermanent and changeable, still there is in man the permanent part called spirit. He says, "Buddhism does not deny the imperishable nature of an ultimate spiritual reality in man, of a ture transcendental subject, of an immortal changeless self." Now this self or transcendental subject has been know in all Indian philosophy by the name of ( ) or ( ). With reference to Brahma, Gautama Has distinctly said in Tevijjia Sutta that the talk of the Brahmins about that Brahma is foolish talk and that there existed no such state as Braham. With reference to ( ), I have already quoted Gautama as saying that it is heresy to to say that there is any such thing as ( ). Soul and spirit, ( ) and Brahma, are all identical in Indian philosophies and an attempt to put into the mouth of Gautama views which he never maintained is fruitless attempt.

Not a jejune relationship of one thing to another

Books coming soon from Ignatius Press by Carl Olson

The Order of Things Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.

James Schall, the well-known author and professor at Georgetown University, inquires about the differing orders found in the cosmos, the human mind, the city, the human corpus, and seeks to reflect on the unity of these orders.

In a world in which the presence of mind and order are denied, presumably in the name of science, in favor of chance explanations of why things are as they are, it is surprising to find that, in area after area that is open to the human mind, we find a persistent order revealed. At first sight, this recurrence can be explained by chance occurrence, but after a point, the sense that behind things outside of our theories there is, in fact, an order. This order can be traced in the various areas that are open to the human mind. Aquinas had said that the order within the cosmos pointed to an order outside of it, since the cosmos cannot be the cause of its own internal order.

Philosophers have long inquired about the curious fact that the order of things implies not only a jejune relationship of one thing to another, but a hint that the universe is created in a certain abundance. Why is the universe, and the things within it, not only ordered but, within the order and above it, a beautiful order? Not only is there an order in things but the human mind seems attuned to this order as something it delights in discovering. This relationship implies that there is some correspondence between mind and reality almost as if they were intended to go with one another. The Order of Things explores these questions. It relies on common sense and the experience available to everyone. It concludes that it requires more credulity to disbelieve in order than to experience it. Finally, it wonders that if there is a source of order, what it is like? In this sense, it is not surprising that the revelation of the Godhead is itself in terms of an inner order of Persons. from Insight Scoop The Ignatius Press Blog

The only evidence for consciousness in and by itself is its own self-experience

Re: Understanding Thoughts of Sri Aurobindo by Srikanth

on Sat 08 Sep 2007 03:15 PM PDT Profile Permanent Link

Wonderful book review! Substantial, focussed, and synthesizing!

• Debashish, does Kireet Joshi say anything about how exactly genetic alterations/mutations or physical changes in DNA affect "consciousness"?
• For that matter does anyone?
• What might be the physical basis for the connection?
• True - mutations are the basis of several diseases - but is "consciousness" regulated or influenced by specific or groups of genes as well?
• Can we at least speculate as to how sensory awareness and mental capacities of an organism distinguish themselves from "consciousness" at the genetic level.

Scientists are very close, I think, to understanding the functions of various genes individually and in association with others, but I am not so sure that they can make the distinction, at least not yet.

Reply by Debashish on Mon 10 Sep 2007 08:43 AM PDT Profile Permanent Link No, Kireet Joshi does not comment directly on the relationship between genetic mutations and consciousness except to point out that this question is one that remains unaddressed by biological evolutionary theories, which consider evolution purely in terms of form and function. But quite evidently, nature demonstrates an evolution of consciousness as well, which is why philosophers such as Bergson, Whitehead or Sri Aurobbindo who address this question, cannot be dismissed.

Regarding speculation on the relation between the two, clearly the complexity of form and function is related to the expression of consciousness, but consciousness has an independent basis which is self-evident. By "self-evident" I mean the only evidence for consciousness in and by itself is its own self-experience. The self-evident knowledge of consciousness is primordially non-dual darshana, then the objectification of direct vision of self-experience, pratyaksha, then intuition and finally faith. Science has proceeded by shutting the avenues of this form of direct knowledge and rests entirely on external evidence for "proofs." Hence the question of consciousness cannot be adequately answered by it. Only a science of consciousness can answer the question regarding the true relation between evolution of consciousness and form, such for example, as Mother's discovery of the mind of the cells. DB

Quantum physics provides a stronger case than Hume

Michael Prescott's Blog Occasional thoughts by the bestselling author of nine suspense novels

The Midas touch
Stephen E. Braude's new book, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations, isn’t even out yet, but a blogger named Jason Kuznicki has already taken aim at it, on the basis of an excerpt that appears on the publisher's Web site.
The tone of Kuznicki's review is captured by its title: "University of Chicago Press: Why Are You Publishing This Nonsense?" Skeptics are always sure they know what is or is not nonsense. Kuznicki is no exception...

As part of his post, Kuznicki refers to a positive review of Braude's book in the journal Antimatters. Here we find some other misinterpretations and one glaring omission. Kuznicki begins his assault on the Antimatters reviewer, whom he does not name, with this broadside:

Contrary to what one reviewer of this book wrote, science isn’t a myth.

But the reviewer never says that science is a myth. (Click here for the review; PDF file) Here is what he does say:

Braude dispels a widespread myth: that parapsychological data derived from formal experimentation are necessarily superior to data from outside the lab.

Which is hardly the same thing as calling science a myth. It's a recognition of the obvious fact that some perfectly valid data can be gathered outside the laboratory. This is true of many sciences. Try studying the migratory patterns of birds without leaving the lab.
Kuznicki then goes on to quote a longer passage from the Antimatters review. (Because it isn't clearly identified, on my first reading I thought it was a quote from Braude's book, but it's not.) He prefaces the quotation with the caveat that "the following critique of mainstream science — in favor of parapsychology — is wrong from start to finish."
Again, though, it seems as if Kuznicki has misunderstood the passage. The passage he cites is not a "critique of mainstream science — in favor of parapsychology." It is a simple acknowledgment of a blind spot shared by both mainstream science and parapsychology – namely, that neither has so far developed a satisfactory explanation of how matter interacts with matter. As the Antimatters reviewer notes, there are algorithms in physics that successfully predict such interactions, but the algorithms don't explain the mechanism. The mechanism itself remains mysterious – just as the mechanisms of psi are mysterious.
Bafflingly, Kuznicki jumps in to announce that "mechanism is conspicuously absent in most accounts of parapsychological phenomena, too." Of course it is. That is precisely the point of the quoted passage, as even the most casual reading ought to make clear. "In its place," he continues, "we get not the modest silence of the scientific method, but a noisy insistence that no one can possibly explain these things." Wrong again. Parapsychologists do not say that the mechanism cannot possibly be explained, only that it is unknown at present. (Some of them have made tentative stabs at a theoretical explanation, though not, I think, with much success so far.)
So much for the misinterpretations. How about the glaring omission? It concerns the Antimatters reviewer himself, who remains anonymous throughout all of this fulmination. Why does he go unnamed?
Well, maybe because he is Ulrich Mohrhoff, a famed quantum physicist and the originator of the influential Pondicherry interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Now, it's a safe bet that most readers, gauging the scientific expertise of an unknown blogger against that of a leading quantum physicist, would put their money on the physicist. Which is perhaps why Mohrhoff must be made a nameless unperson. If he were identified, Kuznicki's conclusions would suddenly look a lot less authoritative.
Kuznicki's review is a sadly typical product of the skeptical mindset. Rather than grappling with the evidence as presented, it omits the most salient facts and casts derision on the resulting straw-man case. Like much skeptical material, it exhibits what we might regard as a reverse Midas touch - turning the potential gold of exciting new discoveries into the worthless dross of preconceived, half-digested banalities.
The review does have one positive feature, though: it reminds us that Dr. Braude's book will be coming out soon – on October 1, in fact. Reserve your copy now! September 11, 2007 in Books Permalink

Just to say thanks, Micheal.
P.S. It seems our paradogmatist has missed a delightful excerpt from The Gold Leaf Lady in AntiMatters: a chapter on astrology! (http://tinyurl.com/29wo8j) Posted by: Ulrich Mohrhoff September 12, 2007 at 12:08 AM

Another P.S. This time the URL (my name) points to a copy of this post at my blog, with some comments. Warm regards, Ulrich Posted by: Ulrich Mohrhoff September 12, 2007 at 04:36 AM

"As the Antimatters reviewer notes, there are algorithms in physics that successfully predict such interactions, but the algorithms don't explain the mechanism. The mechanism itself remains mysterious – just as the mechanisms of psi are mysterious."
Why is this a controversial point? Anybody who has read David Hume is aware of this. Posted by: Ben September 12, 2007 at 12:37 PM

Ben: Hume notwithstanding, in classical physics the fact that processes are just transmogrified algorithms could be overlooked. In quantum physics the same sleight of hand simply does not work. Quantum physics provides a stronger case than Hume. Posted by: Ulrich Mohrhoff September 12, 2007 at 07:18 PM

From Averroës to Cusanus to finally Shelling

The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion: by Richard Kearney, Chapters 4-5.
by James R. Getz Jr., a Doctoral Candidate at Brandeis University.

In his conclusion "Poetics of the Possible God" Kearney ties two general premises of the book together. The first is his attempt to retrieve an alternate hermeneutic of the possible; and the second is the concept of Godplay in this possibility.
First, Kearney looks at various philosophers from Averroës to Cusanus to finally Shelling in an attempt to explain the possible in a way that allows for the eschatological hope of the possible. Kearney sees "the divine Creator transfiguring our being into a can-be", a being capable of creating and recreating anew meanings in our world, without determining the actual content of our creating or doing the actual creating for us." (p.102). This openness of God is revealed in a new hermeneutical understanding of the trinity, "The Father might thus be re-envisages as the loving-possible which transfigures the Son and Spirit and is transfigured by them in turn." (p. 106)
This inner Trinitarian transfiguration plays finally into Kearney?s understanding of Godplay. God and humanity are in an eschatological play of possibility, the possibility of the Kingdom never fully possessed. The Trinity is understood in the Eastern Church as a sacred dance or perichoresis. Kearney holds that this dance is the God-play into which the Triune invites humanity to partake. Posted by geoff holsclaw Permalink

Spinoza went furthest in thinking ontological immanence

September 7, 2007 Philosophy and Immanence Posted by larvalsubjects under Doxa , Intersubjectivity , Antagonism , Immanence , Grounds , Difference , Communication , Ethics , Epistemology , Politics

Take, for example, Plato’s Meno and Phaedo. It will be recalled that Plato famously argues that learning is recollection. That is, to learn is not to acquire new information from the outside given to us by a teacher– elsewhere Socrates will refer to himself as a midwife of knowledge, i.e., he does not bestow or give knowledge but only asks questions that allow a person to recollect knowledge they already have –but rather to learn is to recollect an unconscious, innate knowledge.

Every beginning philosophy student is baffled by Plato’s theory of learning. Indeed, it is likely that a number of Plato scholars are themselves baffled by Plato’s theory of recollection (as can be seen in the way that it is quickly swept under the rug as but a moment in Plato’s thought). However, as soon as we situate Plato’s theory in terms of the problem of immanence, its motivation suddenly becomes clear. Recall that for Plato, knowledge is not a knowledge of this or that particular thing, but a knowledge of forms, essences, or universals. The problem is that we nowhere encounter forms in sensible experience. This comes out clearly in the Phaedo, when Socrates is discussing the Identical. We never see anything identical in the world. All things differ in some respect or another.

Consequently, the story goes, we could not have learned about the identical from experience. Yet we have knowledge of the identical. As Socrates reasons– almost as a proto-Kantian –we could never recognize two things as being the same if we did not first (a priori) know the form of the Identical. Knowledge of the form precedes knowledge of any particulars.

• So 1) we have the concept of the Identical,
• and 2) we did not learn this from experience.

The grammar of philosophy stipulates that we cannot appeal to authority (”because I said so!”) or revelation as a ground for knowledge. Consequently, we must account for this knowledge in some other ways. The theory of recollection or innate ideas! What marvelous conceptual gymnastics to maintain immanence! What magnificent conceptual creations!

We can see the history of philosophy as a series of attempts to preserve or think immanence. Some of these attempts are more successful than others. Some are more interesting than others. If Deleuze and Guattari are led to describe Spinoza as the “Christ of philosophers”, then this isn’t because Spinoza was a prophet or divine, but because Spinoza went furthest in thinking ontological immanence, or a way of explaining the world that relied on no intervention from anything outside the world, history, or nature (certainly this claim can be disputed). The history of philosophy will therefore be a history of strategies for thinking immanence.

• Empiricism would be one strategy (whatever is immanent to sensation).
• Rationalism will be another (whatever is immanent to reason).
• Transcendental idealism will be yet another, and
• phenomenology yet another.

Each of these strategies generates its own unique problems– like Plato’s problem of learning arising out of the immanence of the forms to thought and their absence to experience –and it would be possible to write a “cartography” of the history of philosophy that charted the problems that emerged as a result of particular drawings of immanence and the conceptual gymnastics and inventions that result as a function of these problems.

"Without prejudice"

15. Conclusion: Linking the Humanities ( "Contents"/title page.)
Chapter 15 of Experiencing the Humanities by Richard Jewell

Phenomenology was first developed by early-twentieth century German philosopher Edmund Husserl, and what arguably constitutes a religious version of it was developed by Martin Buber in his book I and Thou. Phenomenology suggests that the most basic experience common to human beings is composed of three basic parts: our own consciousness or awareness, the contents of our consciousness--everything that is "out there" for us to sense; and our memories, thoughts, and reflections about what we have seen and done. A fourth and equally important basic element is that we discover, early in life as children, that there are other "consciousnesses"--other beings--outside of ourselves who seem to be just like us. They have a consciousness like we do, and they have experiences and memories like we do.

According to phenomenology, the most important attitude we can have for viewing these basics of life is to start by being "without prejudice." "Without prejudice" means that in our most basic views or understandings--the part of ourselves we consider the most central to our self identity--we set aside a part of our time each day or week and simply watch the flux of life--observe what we see and hear, observe what we think and feel, and even observe our observing--without yet making decisions about it. After we have made a number of unprejudiced observations about life--what Husserl calls a "scientific" method of viewing life--we can then begin to fit its parts together with fewer prejudgments and more accuracy. Nonreligious phenomenologists such as Husserl claim that by using this process of pure observation, we will have a much clearer and stronger understanding of our and other lives. Religious phenomenologists such as Buber say that this process of pure observation will lead us back to essentially the same religious foundation we have developed, but with a much clearer sense of what our belief means and what it can do.

It is just such a phenomenological attitude--one of pure "scientific" observation--that can help us unite the disciplines of the humanities. One of the most important themes common to the humanities disciplines is that of oserving and understanding human life and meaning. A purer phenomenological stance regarding human experience can help us see how and what the humanities mean to so many different types of people.

Process Theory: A third field theory that has gained some followers is that of process philosophy and psychology. This theory is a mixture of principles from philosophy, society and culture, history, and methods used in the arts. They state that the world and human beings always are processing life.

Some of the proponents of process types of theories include philosophers such as British-American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, American pragmatists John Dewey and William James, French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and the French philosopher of time, Henri Bergson, South American educational theorist Paolo Freire, theologians Martin Buber (Jewish) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Protestant), psychologists such as Jewish German Victor Frankl and Briton R.D. Laing, and many others.

The theory of process states, in its many forms, that everything is in a state of flux and movement. This includes human institutions--all thinking, belief, and action. Whole parts of history, movements of philosophy, social and cultural events, and schools and styles in art all are a constantly intertwining, intermixing series of actions, reactions, and more reactions.

And within this intermixing flux, there is movement. Some of the movement is backward, some forward; but in general we move forward in the very process of trying out more things, reacting to old things, and synthesizing new things.

Any two things that seem opposite will help us discover a better way of dealing with both things, both issues, as we try to choose which one is best. Then, once we have chosen, other opposites come along, and we must rethink our way through these new opposites--learning something from both sides of the coin, both issues, both sides--as we try to reach a new conclusion or choice.

Nietzsche, like Rousseau, praised the natural, the instinctive, against the enlightened and civilized and traditional

Courage Style Aristocracy

Michael Walker undertakes a reckoning with Nietzsche

I shall start in good religious tone, as befits this subject, with a confession, and a dramatic one at that. My first reading of Nietzsche, when I was at university, fatally determined the course my life was to take. I was not to take the normal career to be expected of one of my background and education. I voluntarily entered a kind of bohemian pilgrimage for twenty years, and, to coin a phrase apt for this essay, my tragedy was born of the spirit of Nietzsche’s music. Reading Nietzsche-first Beyond Good and Evil, later Thus Spoke Zarathustra and then Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo - in the Penguin classic editions, depressed and exhilarated me. In the latter edition I had written in a poor hand, "M Esdaile Walker ’74 Courage, Style aristocratic" which last three words indeed could be used to summarise the most important qualities in Nietzsche’s view, of human life.

It seemed impossible to me after reading Nietzsche, to take seriously the course of career, success and well-being in a world teeming with the "last man" predicted in Also sprach Zarathustra and marked by the facile acceptance of the now Godless world as it is. The future should not be separated from the past. Thoughtless careers for money, petty fame and security were ambitions I disdained, as Nietzsche disdained them and inspired me to disdain them. Nietzsche was and is for me and despite his own disdain for the movement to which we give the name, a thorough romantic. To an extent, this magazine has been conceived and continued in Nietzsche’s shadow. To be a romantic is to be "half in love with easeful death" and in the spirits of the past.. Now, nel mezzo cammin di nostra vita, it is time for my reckoning with Friedrich Nietzsche.

Summarised, Nietzsche is associated with a number of key radical philosophical positions. These positions are frequently extreme. They provoke and because they provoke, compel the reader to take a stand, to answer Nietzsche with either a yea or nay. God was dead and along with God the metaphysics of good and evil which Christian theology had constructed around the concept "God"- Inequality and hierarchy belonged to the natural order of the cosmos and was ordered through the exercise of the will. The superior human is right to crush the inferior. The justification of life is found in aesthetics, in art. Man is only justified in life in his highest types. The highest level of culture was reached by the Ancient Hellenes and their twin Gods of form and intoxication, Apollo and Dionysus. Evil is necessary to the vitality of life.

A new man is coming whom Nietzsche dubbed the Übermensch, (superman, overman, higher man) who will give the earth a new meaning and create new values. Nietzsche, like de Sade, whom in some ways he resembles, poses the reality of radical positions and invites us to accept them if we are not afraid of where the truth will take us. Time is not linear but circular. Life consists in becoming through a striving of the will to conquer, so that conquering and life are indistinguishable. War forges great men. Women are the enemies of human progress because by their nature they make peace with pertaining reality and prefer security to seeking to change an existing order. Style is more important in human life than happiness...

The opposition to Platonism is the basis of Nietzsche’s phenomenology; the opposition to Christianity leads to the Übermensch; opposition to Kant’s categorical imperative and English utilitarianism leads to an aristocratic imperative, in the assertion that the purpose of human development is the raising of humanity in its highest types; his opposition to conservatism leads to his exaltation of the creative force of the destructive will; his opposition to religious eschatology leads to his discovery of the ring of eternal recurrence. His opposition to nationalism leads to his imperialism, with Napoleon as the ideal, who willed the unity of Europe. Napoleon saw in the emerging world of capitalism "something like a personal enemy" he was "organized violence of the first order", the "contrary of Rousseau". Out of opposition springs affirmation and by the by one more paradox: this resembles Hegel or Marx’s dialectic.

Much of Nietzsche’s writing can be understood as violent rejection and reaction, and principally to four figures, namely Plato, St. Paul, Rousseau and Hegel. The basis of Nietzsche’s rejection of metaphysics is an attack on Plato and the notion that our world is a shadow world, our existence corruptible contrasted with an incorruptible after-life. St. Paul, not Christ, was the person Nietzsche held personally responsible for turning Christianity into an instrument of Sklavenmoral. Hegel believed that history is a rational story which is moving inexorably onwards to a prescribed, pre-scripted end. Nietzsche insisted that this was an illusion. Finally, Nietzsche rejected Rousseau, whom he regarded as a hateful post-Christian moralist, with his belief that civilization was responsible for social evils. But once again there is a contradiction: Nietzsche, like Rousseau, praised the natural, the instinctive, against the enlightened and civilized and traditional. [The remainder of this essay is available in the print version.] Return to home