Scientific "knowledge", is hunter-gatherer behaviour

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "A Common Word makes no apologies for the violence ...":

The National Review and uncommon knowledge!! What a hoot!!

Despite and contary to their oft-times stated "religious" posturing they are all 100% fully paid up true believers in the scientific materialist "world"-view. The only kind of knowledge that the barbarians at the NR promotes is the knowledge that promotes and enables the drive to total power and control at the root of the entire Western "cultural" project---and always has. The search for "knowledge", especially scientific "knowledge", is hunter-gatherer behaviour, based on the ancient pre-"civilized" brain. Posted by Anonymous to Savitri Era Open Forum at 10:22 AM, March 17, 2008

Resentment amongst Indian psychologists over Havan led to boycott of the conference

Umesh Mathur Home About Contact Psychology and Spirituality

One of the most unreported events of this year was the Psychology and Spirituality conference organized by the Association of Transpersonal Psychology. I think almost 200 well known psychologists attended the conference. Many of them were trained by Indian spiritual masters and were the advocates of Indian spirituality as a tool for managing the mind and its wayward ways.
An interesting twist was that the organizers had organized a havan on the opening day. This led to a lot of resentment amongst Indian psychologists who decided to boycott the conference. Some senior psychologists like Dr. Sudhir Kakkar were of course present.
Towards the end of the conference, there was a battle royale amongst the conference organizers on the one hand and the boycotting groups representative on the other and even though hesitant at the beginning, the organizers jumped into the fray with full force with accusation and counter accusation flowing freely like poisoned darts flying around in the Habitat Center conference hall.
Dr. Kapila Vatsayan, the chief guest exited the proceedings silently while the battle was on. It was heartening to note that amongst the foreign psychologists, a large number of followers were the followers of Shri Aurobindo and The Mother of Pondicherry.

The grand architect of Auroville, Dr. Kirit Joshi was there in full spiritual splendour. He is the one who played a key role in realizing the dreams of Sri Aurobindo and seeing it through the maze of bureaucracy. It was a unique experiment initiated by Mrs. Indira Gandhi and one which seems to have paid extremely rich dividends in terms of its impact on the national and international scene.
It was also a major breakthrough for Shruti who has been silently working since many years on the Indian cultural scenario with her expertise in Mantras. She has a powerful voice richly resonant and communicates extremely strong vibrations. She specializes in the power of healing through sound and with years, her projection and power of healing sound is continually on the rise. This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 11:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized... leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

To hear oneself speak in the first and third person at the same time about oneself

Joyous Inquiry philosophy, literature, art, and other things i'm up to and working on, in cambridge, california, new york, princeton, and wherever else i may be
Friday, March 14, 2008 The body of Jean-Luc Nancy performs

Nancy's magnificent essay "Corpus," in The Birth To Presence, would do much for anyone trying to link a more phenomenological tradition of thought about the body and embodiment, culminating in the reflections of Merleau-Ponty that seem today to be gaining in popularity (and will be gaining even more, with the upcoming publication of Sean Kelly's new translation of The Phenomenology of Perception), to those reflections on embodiment that have perhaps more recently arisen (though, through Foucault, one could say that their origins are the same) in work on performativity. Nancy essentially could be said to--like Derrida--take the theses of the latter tradition and elaborate them in the language of the former--though perhaps with more intent than Derrida to elaborate, rather than focus on the resistances or misreadings this elaboration would also constitute. In short, Nancy makes the performative body thinkable in terms not of performativity but of the body "itself:" that task which Judith Butler attempts so nobly and rigorously within terms of performativity (and power) in Bodies that Matter.
Merleau-Ponty held that the body was a basic disposition or structure of intentionality constituting a particular point of view. This has the effect of reversing the oldest conception of the body in the way Nancy describes:
...one had to dispense with the body, with the very idea of the body. The body was born in Plato's cave, or rather it was conceived and shaped in the form of the cave: as a prison or tomb of the soul, and the body first was thought from the inside, as buried darkness into which light only penetrates in the form of reflections, and reality only in the form of shadows. This body is seen from the inside, as in the common but anguishing fantasy of seeing the mother's body from the inside, as in the fantasy of inhabiting one's own belly, without father or mother, before any father and bother, before all sex and all reproduction, and of getting hold of oneself there, as a nocturnal eye open to a world of chains and simulacra. This body is first and interiority dedicated to images, and to the knowledge of images; it is the "inside" of representation, and at the same time the representation of that "inside." -"Corpus," The Birth to Presence, 191-2

Merleau-Ponty shows that the body itself must, prior to being this inside, create this insideness. In other words, it must be outside its inside, ek-statically, as an interface with the world that juts out into it. The body is outside, for Merleau-Ponty (for some merits of this view and the amazingness of Merleau-Ponty more generally, see one of my earlier posts on him).
But can this body itself be viewed by itself? It is here that the question of performativity would come up: one would be viewing one's own body from the outside. The difficulty of this for Merleau-Ponty is that viewing as such requires that the body precisely be unable to view itself. It turns back on itself, but can never quite slip out of its own grip on itself to fully, coherently, see itself. This would require it remove itself from its bodily, embodied perspective (to the third-person perspective that he says science studies), which Merleau-Ponty holds to be impossible. And it would have to do this precisely without overshooting itself or viewing itself past or beyond or outside itself. This is really the crux of the problem, and why the impossibility is there in the first place. Merleau-Ponty thinks intentionality can only be unidirectional, fundamentally, because (this is ultimately a Heideggerian claim which Merleau-Ponty does not make well in The Phenomenology of Perception; precisely because he is not trying to run into the problems Heidegger encountered in expanding and refuting Husserl's "Internal Time-Consciousness" essay; in other words, he sticks close to Husserl against Heidegger to be more Heideggerian than Heidegger) the body is temporal and finite. It temporalizes itself, or bursts forward towards the world temporally from... the inside. Or rather, an outside that can only gain coherence by equally being the most inside of insides. By being outside, by structuring the Platonic inside, Merleau-Ponty is really positing just an inside that is prior to the inside. At least in The Phenomenology of Perception. He moves beyond this in his later work, most notably The Visible and the Invisible. Of course this view might be the only one that makes sense to some people, most notably those just discovering Merleau-Ponty and using him to counter representationalist theories of perception and action either phenomenologically or in computational models (cf. Dreyfus, Taylor, Kelly, even Davidson etc.).
But it cannot account for performativity. This is probably why, despite the affinity that one might think resides between Butler and Merleau-Ponty in their concern for the bodily (and that some unthinking critics looking for new theoretical combinations have mistakenly asserted exists in their statements about the body), Butler does not engage him.

Merleau-Ponty holds an interesting and somewhat controversial (though, upon some reflection, completely intuitive) view regarding the objects that our body intends towards: they can be viewed (or, in general, related or intended to) from all angles. This means that when I am outside and my body sees a house across the street, I am seeing the back of the house as well as the side "facing" me. Why? Because my intention must already be relating beyond what is represented to the general presence of the house which my body recognizes. The house is part of a field of action or intention that could include me going behind the house: thus my body (perhaps more dimly) can be said to perceive the "back" of the house when I perceive its "front."
The question Nancy is asking, then, would be about how the body itself could be viewed like this. And viewed like this while also remaining that body that is viewing. In other words, how can the body view (we are using vision, because it is the easiest example) itself? This is the question of performance: the body must somehow remain itself at the same time as it performs or makes viewable (to this very body and to others--and we should note that we are only loosely using "viewable" here as a synonym for performance: we mean viewable only in the sense that the body is "viewing" or "seeing," not that performance has to do with mere exhibition as such) this self. To use a different sense: it would be like trying to hear oneself speak in the first and third person at the same time about oneself. And another (and this is a famous example): it would be like trying to touch oneself touching (take one arm and with a finger touch the other, trying to be touched in the second arm and feel the touching in the finger of the first arm at the same time).
Nancy claims throughout "Corpus" that this is precisely what the body does--and, we must add, thoroughly fails to do. At the point at which the body would see itself (and see all of itself, every angle of itself, like the house), it would precisely be failing to see itself: not because it is really still "inside" itself in being beyond itself and thus misses itself, but exactly for the reason that it does not miss itself and sees itself. It actually does hear itself speak in the first and third person, and this is why it becomes, as it were, deaf to itself. Or, with the example of touch, it touches itself touching and yet touches as itself: it touches itself and is touched by itself. Because this means it is no longer an "itself:" the body is external to itself, then, but not because it is beyond itself by virtue of some intention. It is because this "itself" is ("itself") an externality. In other words, it is "shared out of itself," partes extra partes:
...here, at the body, there is the sense of touch, the touch of the thing, which touches "itself" without an "itself" where it can get at itself, and which is touched and moved in this unbound sense of touch, and so separated from itself, shared out of itself. -"Corpus," 203

The body would have to be some residue of both itself moving outward from inside (towards what the inner considered outer, that is, the outside that is related to in terms of the inside, thus when what is taken to exist or matter is only "insides") and coming back inside from the outside (towards what the outer considered inner, that is, the inside when what is taken to exist or have sense is only "outsides") at the same time. It would not be a membrane or an interface, however, that had consistency as a point by itself. Rather, it would be the trace of both inside and outside, first and third person, as they made their respective movements (holding that only insides and outsides, respectively, had sense) into their opposites. It would not exist at that point at which it would perform itself: this would have only the consistency of a performance. Thinking this point is the hardest because it lacks any density whatsoever, but, as I said, Nancy will help both those who think of performance to think phenomenologically and those who think of phenomenology performatively. Posted by Mike at 7:39 PM What is written about: Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy

There seems to be a tendency to adopt top-down models of causality when thinking about social phenomena

Home About Larval Subjects . March 12, 2008
Chemistry, Cooking, and Non-Linear Causality Posted by larvalsubjects under Abstraction, Assemblages, Immanence, Overdetermination, Populations, Rough Theory, problems

N.Pepperell of Rough Theory has been kind enough to plug my recent post “Social Assemblages and Agency“. A while back I wrote a rather whimsical post entitled “Of Cooking, Mixtures, and Milieus“. While the post might have been whimsical in tone– drawing on anecdotes from cooking and examples from Seinfeld –the point I was trying to make was a serious one about the nature of causality in relation to social formation. That is, there seems to be a tendency to adopt top-down models of causality when thinking about social phenomena, such that we are led to think one cause hegemonically dominating the social space. Whether we posit signifiers as determining social relations, the sovereign as determining social relations (a recent turn I find particularly irritating as, following Spinoza and Hegel, there is no such thing as a sovereign that doesn’t draw his power from the consent of the multitudes), language, structure, or more recently the biological, we posit a unilateral causality where one term serves as the explanation for the rest. This, of course, is the essence of metaphysics: to treat a part of the whole as explaining the whole.

Casting about for metaphors to interrupt this pattern of thought, I seized on cooking and chemistry:
If cooking is instructive for the social theorist, then this is because cooking teaches us to think in terms of mixtures, processes, intensive transformations, intensities, and irreversible processes. Tomato, garlic, cumin, and olive oil are not the same after they are mixed and heated. Rather, a qualitative transformation takes place…

In cooking or chemistry there is no one thing that causes the rest. Rather, we instead have to think relations of feedback and interaction where all the elements or ingredients interact. This entails that there will not be a “one size fits all” sort of explanation for social phenomena. Rather, following Freud, we might instead talk of “overdetermination”. Of course, this approach to thinking the social and political will cause some to recoil as the complexity of our object is vastly complicated. Social and political philosophers strike me as liking simple answers and schematizations of their objects (I think actual social scientists often fare much better and are much less reductive). On the other hand, an approach that emphasizes interaction at multiple levels, multiple levels of non-linear causation, and complexity might also undermine some of the pessimism (that sometimes seems almost celebratory in tone) that sometimes seems to haunt social and political philosophy (the all or nothing attitude that asks empty questions like “how do we overcome capitalism” and then finds itself impotent when it comes to doing anything at all). That is, such a view might allow us to diagnose false problems that result from overly schematic and simplified conceptions of the social. At any rate, N.Pepperell has recently written a couple of very nice posts on Diane Elson’s work, who appears to be thinking in a similar groove (here and here). Well worth the read!

This is a text everyone interested in philosophy should read

Joyous Inquiry philosophy, literature, art, and other things i'm up to and working on, in cambridge, california, new york, princeton, and wherever else i may be
Tuesday, March 11, 2008 Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl's Phenomenology

Here is what I think is an absolutely crucial, unbelievably (unbelievably!) brilliant text of Sartre's, in full, explaining and popularizing phenomenology. I'll make some remarks afterwards. In the meantime, hopefully this will get the text out there more, and help to save both it and Sartre from their current under-appreciated stature. At the very least, it still remains one of the most (if not the most) clear introductions to intentionality in Husserl, in my mind. This is a text everyone interested in philosophy should read. Who else could have explained its merits as a restoration of the horror and charm to things? Or the deficiency of other accounts which it corrects as the solipsism of a child kissing his own shoulder? Who else could have made you feel the operation of this idea within our everyday practices, precisely because of its theoretical sophistication, so viscerally that when we indeed think it, we react even bodily--becoming entranced, disgusted, or even dizzy with near-rapture? Who else, except Sartre?!

"Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology" From The Phenomenology Reader, ed. Dermont Moran and Timothy Mooney (London, Routledge, 2002). Found online in Thomas Sheehan's notes for his Sartre course at Stanford. A translation (by Joseph P. Fell) of “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l'intentionnalité,” in Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947)...Posted by Mike at 8:32 PM What is written about: Husserl, Sartre

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The Matter with Form from Roughtheory.org by N Pepperell

Sinthome’s post also resonates with the recent discussion of Diane Elson’s work (here and here), in which I was exploring Elson’s take on the concept of “determination” in Marx’s work. Much as Sinthome mines concepts used to think evolution, Elson deploys metaphors from chemistry to try to move beyond thinking of structure as something that subsists separately to, and exists in an external causal relationship with, what is structured.
All of these discussions remind me again of one of my favourite characterisations of Marx’s work, from Paul Lafargue’s Reminiscences of Marx:
He saw not only the surface, but what lay beneath it. He examined all the constituent parts in their mutual action and reaction; he isolated each of those parts and traced the history of its development. Then he went on from the thing to its surroundings and observed the reaction of one upon the other. He traced the origin of the object, the changes, evolutions and revolutions it went through, and proceeded finally to its remotest effects. He did not see a thing singly, in itself and for itself, separate from its surroundings: he saw a highly complicated world in continual motion.
His intention was to disclose the whole of that world in its manifold and continually varying action and reaction.

Compare with Sinthome’s lovely description of:
capitalism as a heterogeneous multiplicity with a variety of different levels, often at odds with itself, spinning off in a variety of different directions, calling for nuanced and local analyses and strategies

Derrida supplements Nietzsche's essay with Patočka's

THE SERMON ON MOUNT MORIAH: FAITH AND THE SECRET IN THE GIFT OF DEATH
ADAM KOTSKO Chicago Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois, USA
The Heythrop Journal Volume 49 Issue 1 Page 44-61, January 2008

Abstract
This essay is an investigation of three attempts to think faith. I find my starting place in Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death,1 one of the most important treatments of Christianity in Derrida's later thought, which was increasingly insistent in its engagement with religious questions up until his death in 2004. This reading of The Gift of Death will focus particularly on the question of secrecy and its relationship with faith, leading necessarily to an account of Derrida's reading of two of his primary references in this text: the second essay of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals2 and Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling.3 Rather than simply rendering a judgment on Derrida's reading, I will endeavor to read these texts together, extending (or expanding upon) Derrida's reading while questioning some of the positive formulations he makes in his own name – all the while remaining attentive to the gambles involved in thinking faith.

For Nietzsche, there is suffering and difficulty involved in historical existence, but seemingly the decision is not problematic in itself. One may say that everything is a bit too calculable, and indeed, calculation is the very condition of possibility of responsibility:
Man himself must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is to be able to stand security for his own future, which is what one who promises does!12
Later on, discussing the origin of the feeling of debt or guilt [Schuld], Nietzsche declares:
Setting prices, determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging – these preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a certain sense they constitute thinking as such: here it was that the oldest kind of astuteness developed; here likewise, we may suppose, did human pride, the feeling of superiority in relation to other animals, have its first beginnings.13
Even in the end of his essay, where he shows some hesitation at the prospect of proposing a positive ideal, Nietzsche is still using the language of cost:
But have you ever asked yourselves sufficiently how much the erection of every ideal on earth has cost? How much reality has to be misunderstood and slandered, how many lies have had to be sanctified, how many consciences disturbed, how much ‘God’ sacrificed every time?14
Similarly, too, where Nietzsche extols the power of forgetting, Derrida asserts that ‘history never effaces what it buries’, using Patočka to read the history of responsibility as ‘a secret history of kept secrets’15 – introducing a higher degree of complexity and of moral gravity to the Nietzschean account, which, while certainly not ‘progressive’ in the usual sense, is in many ways simply ‘successive’.
One might say, then, that Derrida supplements Nietzsche's essay with Patočka's. This becomes most clear in the following dense and crucial passage, in which Derrida contrasts Nietzsche's avowedly anti-Christian genealogy with the terms drawn from Patočka's avowedly Christian (quasi)genealogy, challenging in turn each of the key concepts of Nietzsche's account of the history of responsibility:
History can be neither a decidable object nor a totality capable of being mastered, precisely because it is tied to responsibility, to faith, and to the gift. To responsibility in the experience of absolute decisions made outside of knowledge or given norms, made therefore through the very ordeal of the undecidable; to religious faith through a form of involvement with the other that is a venture into absolute risk, beyond knowledge and certainty; to the gift and to the gift of death [au don de la mort] that puts me into relation with the transcendence of the other, with God as a goodness forgetful of itself – and that gives me what it gives me through a new experience of death.16 ...

In Kierkegaard's hands, the God of Abraham becomes ‘the one who decides, without revealing his reasons, to demand of Abraham that most cruel, impossible, and untenable gesture: to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice’.27 Kierkegaard's reading of Abraham's sacrifice, then, provides Derrida with the occasion to interrogate further the relationship between responsibility and secrecy with which he began The Gift of Death – and to clarify the difference between a Patočkan (but no longer merely Patočkan) secrecy and a Nietzschean forgetting.
On this point, Derrida shifts the emphasis of Kierkegaard's reading, while maintaining Kierkegaard's insistence that the test is ultimately a matter of keeping the secret, even as the secret remains properly incommunicable. Yet whereas for Kierkegaard the incommunicability of the secret is grounded in the transcendence of the God-relationship, for Derrida, it is perhaps a more straightforward matter:
[Abraham] must keep the secret (that is his duty), but it is also a secret that he must keep as a double necessity because in the end he can't but keep it: he doesn't know it, he is unaware of its ultimate rhyme and reason. He is sworn to secrecy because he is in secret.28
That is, Abraham hasn't been entrusted with that information. He can tell others of his plan to sacrifice Isaac, but not of God's reason for the command, because God has not communicated that reason.29 Here the question is not, as with Nietzsche, one of a forgetting that serves as a productive force – rather, the motivating force in this situation is a fact that was never known, at least not by the human participants.
In making this seemingly obvious move, however, Derrida opens up the possibility that Kierkegaard has not fully grappled with the aporetic relationship between responsibility and knowledge: a responsible decision must not be taken outside of knowledge, but if a decision is made simply out of knowledge, then it is ‘the technical deployment of a cognitive apparatus, the simple mechanistic deployment of a theorem’30 – in other words, it is not a decision at all, still less a responsible decision. Kierkegaard certainly insists on the paradoxical character of Abraham's situation, and yet from a ‘God's eye view,’ insofar as he is dealing with the God whom Derrida finds alike in Paul and in Kierkegaard, Abraham is in perfect conformity with God's command, which serves as a trump card rendering all of Abraham's other concerns finally irrelevant. Kierkegaard of course insists that such a ‘God's eye view’ is inaccessible to the subject as existing, and yet for Kierkegaard there is a ‘God's eye view’ – that is, ‘Existence itself is a system – for God, but it cannot be a system for any existing spirit’.31 The quest of (at least) the Danish Hegelians to complete ‘the system’ is not only impossible given the status of the human subject as existing – it is also an attempt at usurping the place that rightfully belongs to God alone.
Yet if we already cannot, where is the necessity of saying that we must not? This question reflects a tension that is at play throughout Kierkegaard's work. For instance, in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard systematically removes the authority of Scripture, creed, baptism, and church as decisive grounds for adherence to Christianity,32 reinforcing his assertion in Philosophical Fragments that ‘[t]here is no follower at second hand,’ which is to say:
The first and the latest generation are essentially alike, except that the latter generation has the occasion in the report of the contemporary generation, whereas the contemporary generation has the occasion in its immediate contemporaneity and therefore owes no generation anything.33

This ‘occasion,’ however, remains indispensable for Kierkegaard. One might even say that in his radical insistence on the subjective character of Christianity, he still manages to sneak the objective in, as it were, through the back door. For instance, in the Postscript, he rejects the idea of an ‘Archimedean point’ from which one must make the leap of faith;34 rather, the leap is made from where one is standing, and one always lands back on the ground...

For Nietzsche, the preachers of morality are the preachers of death, those who look forward to death – yet one could see them as just the opposite, as the deniers of death, those for whom death will open onto an even better version of this world (better, notably, in that the adherents of this teaching will hold all the power). They anthropomorphize God as an existing entity who, in Derrida's words, ‘would be endowed with attributes such as paternity and the power to penetrate secrets, to see the invisible, to see in me better than I, to be more powerful and more intimate with me than myself ’.62 Here Derrida repeats Nietzsche's move of positioning God as the outer limit of reflectivity: ‘God is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior’63 – that is, I am the Father who sees in secret. What is more, the Father who sees in secret is me: ‘God is in me, he is the absolute "me" or "self ", he is that structure of invisible interiority that is called, in Kierkegaard's sense, subjectivity’.64

***

Application of Black Swan to Theology from Zaadz: ~C4Chaos' Blog
(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)

My problem with Theology (and other theories and beliefs that are not supported with data and experiential knowledge) is that it starts from grand abstract assertions (i.e. existence of God) and then looks for logical proofs as confirmations of axioms. It's exclusively a top-down approach. Historically, "applications" of skewed theological constructs (i.e. the Holy Trinity, purgatory, proofs of God) dumbed down the masses, justified holy wars, all the while deifying the powerful bishops and kings.
In short, Theology falls for the traps of confirmation bias, silent evidence, narrative fallacy and ludic fallacy.
But Theology is not all bad. It's good exercise as far as philosophy and logic go. Similar to philosophy, it could generate insights into the mystery of one's existence. The problem is when these insights are conflated, used as conceptual social models and believed (and taught) as literal "truths." Theology, without practice and empiricism, is only storytelling. Some are good stories that teach us wisdom. But most are just pure bunk. Most theologians and priests are simply too arrogant to utter the phrase, "I don't know." They replace it with "only God knows" and gullible people fall for it.

Symbolism of flowers and Vedic sacrifice

Reviews Written by David Frawley (Santa Fe, NM)

Vedic Deities by M.P. Pandit Edition: Paperback Price: $7.95 from $4.54
The Inner Meaning of the Vedic Deities, May 5, 2007

The deities of the Vedas are a subject of much confusion and misinterpretation and are often reduced to little more than a primitive nature worship. This remarkable book takes a radically different approach and reveals the inner, mystic, spiritual and yogic meaning of many of the most important Vedic deities. It offers the reader an inner vision not only of the Vedic deities but of the Vedic Yoga, which they personify. As one who has researched the Vedic deities for many years, I find it very helpful for giving us a sense of what the Vedas and their great seers were all about.

Specifically, the book addresses the role of the Mother Goddess, who is often ignored in academic studies of the Vedas, and the Sun God, the Vedic symbol of the higher Divine Light. The author M.P. Pandit notes that it is not just the number of hymns to the different Vedic deities that should be used to measure their importance, but the functions that they perform. Pandit follows the views of his guru, the great Yogi Sri Aurobindo, in unfolding the spiritual meaning of the Vedic sacrifice.

Wisdom of the Veda by M.P. Pandit Edition: Paperback Price: $7.95 from $4.25
The Inner Vision of the Vedas, May 5, 2007

This short and concise volume consists of important selected verses from the Rig Veda, India's oldest spiritual and mystical text. Each verse is explained clearly and consistently according to its yogic implications and the unfoldment of higher consciousness. As such, the book is an excellent introduction to the Vedas for those who are interested in the inner meaning of the Vedic teachings and their continued relevance to the spiritual life.

Having waded through the difficult scholarly renderings of the Vedas out there myself over many years of Vedic study, it is helpful to see the Vedic vision presented so simply and directly. M.P. Pandit, one of modern India's most important writers on all aspects of Yoga, brings his depth of experience as well as that of his guru, Sri Aurobindo, into the book. The Wisdom of the Vedas is bound to afford the reader a much better appreciation of the Vedic mind and world-view.

Vedic Symbolism by Aurobindo Edition: Paperback Price: $9.95 from $4.95
Keys to the Vedic Yoga, May 5, 2007

Vedic Symbolism is an important compendium of the main terms and primary ideas behind the Rig Veda, India's oldest teaching and the source book for all Vedic and Vedantic knowledge. The book contains translations from several important Vedic hymns as well. Vedic Symbolism is especially valuable for those seeking to explore the older Vedic Yoga and its understanding of the powers of the cosmic mind. As a Vedic scholar of many years myself, I find it to be a good reference work to keep close at hand.

The book is based upon the work of Sri Aurobindo, one of modern India's greatest Yogis, who examined the Vedas in great detail in his many published writings. M.P. Pandit, one of his chief disciples, has compiled key information from Aurobindo's approach, presenting the essence of Sri Aurobindo's Vedic views in this particular work. Will definitely provide you a deeper vision of the Vedas.

Flowers & Their Messages, US Edition by The Mother Edition: Paperback from $10.68
The Yogic Meaning of Flowers, May 5, 2007

Flowers are messengers and teachers from the higher worlds of astral light, beauty and devotion. They reflect the soul's stirrings in physical matter and provide us a window to realms of vision far beyond this mortal travail. Each flower inspires our soul in a certain way and directs us to higher knowledge, experience and realization. Flowers and Their Messages unfolds the spiritual secrets of many of the world's most important flowers, both of temperate and tropical regions. As a practitioner in the field of yogic and Ayurvedic healing, I find the book particularly helpful for showing us how flowers work on the mind and soul.

The author, Mother Mira of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram was one of the most remarkable women teachers of the twentieth century. No other western woman residing in India has ever received the degree of adulation and respect that she gained, to whom even Indira Gandhi came for guidance. Mother Mira was the spiritual partner of Sri Aurobindo, one of the towering figures of modern India's spiritual renaissance, and carried on his mission through the Sri Aurobindo Ashram that she directed.

The Mother, as she is called, was an accomplished yogini, mystic and occultist. This book reflects not only her understanding of plants but of the psychic realms to which they are connected. It contains drawings, pictures and relevant quotes from Sri Aurobindo. It is not just a book about flowers but shows how flowers symbolize the unfoldment of the Divine consciousness within us. It shows us how to read the Divine language of form and color, not only in flowers but in the unfoldment of our own inner being.

The Derrida of poetry, the Derrida of lines

In the controversy between Agamben and Derrida, Agamben dismisses the trace on favour of a messianic idea of prose wherein the divisions between poetry and prose, singular and general, would disappear and a language would come into place, a being in language, that existed beyond difference. His criticism of Derrida being that the arche-trace disallows any way out of differentiation.
Yet, in fact, Derrida's conception of writing is just such an idea of prose. For in Derrida's writing while the role of differance is essential, he never ending oscillation between the trait and the re-trait, fist as Gaston explains, erases the difference between time and space as it is both time and space, and, as I hope to have shown, the overall effect is that differentiation between poetry and prose becomes simply a rhythm, mostly prose, sometimes poetry.
This being the case Derrida's writing is Agamben's idea of prose. Which might explain Agamben's odd blindspot in reading the trace in Derrida and his regular attacks on the one thinker who, in fact, is in almost complete agreement with him on all other issues.
Posted by William Watkin at 12:38 PM Saturday, March 01, 2008 Links to this post Labels: Agamben, Derrida

Badiou's criticisms of Derrida are, as are all such criticisms, poorly judged based on a representation of his work which is simplistic and misleading. Yet his criticism of the reliance of post-Heideggerian philosophers on a certain rhetoric of late Romantic defeat and melancholy is a point well made.
Not that Derrida cannot also be a funny and affirmative philosopher, but there is an over-reliance on the derelict topographies of melancholia and loss. Spectres, prosopopeia and the like are extremely attractive tropes in Derrida's work but perhaps Badiou is right and they suck him into a Romantic discourse of ending and remnants which disallows a reading of him in an affirmative mode.
For me there must be two simultaneous readings of Derrida.
The first is a meta-philosophical reading. Derrida the philosopher of the trace. A reduction of Derridean singularities to a singular contribution to the theory of the trace as a mobile space-time nexus as Sean Gaston describes it.
The second is quite the opposite, a lapidary, occasional, singular Derrida where one reads the moments of his work as moments, without ever succumbing to summary and generalisation. The Derrida of poetry, the Derrida of lines, numerical Derrida, Derrida and animals.
Thus my reading of Derrida will be a set based on only one multiple, and at the same time a set which includes all multiples.
Derrida must be read as a proper name. As both singular, and as multiple, one and the many.
Negotiating a reading of Derrida against the grain, undermining Romantic rhetoric, that exists in the paradox of the proper name as both singular (Derrida of the trace) and multiple (the encyclopedic Derrida) strikes me as the only post-Derridean way to read Derrida that is neither ridiculously dismissive (Badiou, Agamben, Habermas) or mere hagiographic commentary.
Posted by William Watkin at 12:33 PM Thursday, February 28, 2008 Reading Derrida william watkin's blog

Sri Aurobindo was systematically perfecting the body’s ability to sustain a more and more intense and continuous physical Ananda

The Yoga of Self-Perfection and the Triple Transformation, by Richard Hartz posted by Debashish on Mon 13 Aug 2007 04:06 PM PDT Permanent Link Undreamed Ecstasy

Bhukti is literally “enjoyment”. In the Yoga of self-perfection it refers, of course, to a more exalted type of enjoyment than what is usually meant by that word. Sri Aurobindo explains:

A really perfect enjoyment of existence can only come when what we enjoy is not the world in itself or for itself, but God in the world, when it is not things, but the Ananda of the spirit in things that forms the real, essential object of our enjoying and things only as form and symbol of the spirit, waves of the ocean of Ananda.[53]

It may be objected that this kind of rarefied enjoyment would not satisfy the demand of the vital being for tangible pleasures. Sri Aurobindo maintained, on the contrary, that what we call pleasure is no more than a faint and evanescent shadow of the real thing. Our half-conscious nature cannot fulfil its own seeking for enjoyment unless it undergoes a spiritual transformation:

Life... seeks for pleasure, happiness, bliss; but the infrarational forms of these things are stricken with imperfection, fragmentariness, impermanence and the impact of their opposites. Moreover infrarational life still bears some stamp of the Inconscient in an underlying insensitiveness, a dullness of fibre, a weakness of vibratory response,—it cannot attain to true happiness or bliss and what it can obtain of pleasure it cannot support for long or bear or keep any extreme intensity of these things. Only the spirit has the secret of an unmixed and abiding happiness or ecstasy, is capable of a firm tenseness of vibrant response to it, can achieve and justify a spiritual pleasure or joy of life as one form of the infinite and universal delight of being.[54]

Sri Aurobindo added this passage to the chapter entitled “The Suprarational Ultimate of Life” when he revised The Human Cycle around 1937. Almost two decades earlier he had dealt with the same question in expounding the Yoga of self-perfection. In The Synthesis of Yoga, he clarified what he meant by the “capacity for enjoyment”, bhoga-sāmarthya, that is to be developed by the Prana or vital force:

The enjoyment it will have will be in the essence a spiritual bliss, but one which takes up into itself and transforms the mental, emotional, dynamic, vital and physical joy; it must have therefore an integral capacity for these things and must not by incapacity or fatigue or inability to bear great intensities fail the spirit, mind, heart, will and body.[55]

The vital being’s capacity for enjoyment depends on a power that has to be developed in the body “to hold whatever force is brought into it by the spirit and to contain its action without spilling and wasting it or itself getting cracked”. This general “faculty of holding”, termed dhārana-śakti or dhārana-sāmarthya, is considered “the most important siddhi or perfection of the body”,[56] since it is required for a higher working of all the other parts of the being. It is especially necessary if the bhoga-sāmarthya of the life-force is to be imparted to the physical consciousness, creating there a “capacity for bliss” such as is attributed in Savitri to Aswapati at a certain stage in his ascension:

His earth, dowered with celestial competence, Harboured a power that needed now no more To cross the closed customs-line of mind and flesh And smuggle godhead into humanity. It shrank no more from the supreme demandOf an untired capacity for bliss....[57]

Many entries in the Record of Yoga show that Sri Aurobindo was systematically perfecting the body’s ability to sustain a more and more intense and continuous physical Ananda. What he ascribed to Aswapati was evidently his own experience. In cultivating such experiences, his Yoga of self-perfection seems to part company with almost all spiritual disciplines in the Indian tradition except Tantra. But in its methods it also differs widely from Tantra of either the right-hand or the left-hand path. Sri Aurobindo made his relation to Tantra clear when he affirmed that this Yoga “starts from the method of Vedanta to arrive at the aim of the Tantra.”[58] It attempts to achieve “a spiritualising and illumination of the whole physical consciousness and a divinising of the law of the body.” But “the reliance is on the power of the higher being to change the lower existence” and “a working is chosen mainly from above downward and not the opposite way”.[59]

Hegel argues that Kant has inappropriately exceptionalised his four cosmological antinomies as such antinomies can be multiplied

Science of Logic Reading Group: Not Adding Up from Roughtheory.org by N Pepperell

Hegel starts by recognising Kant’s importance for dissolving an older metaphysics, and thus opening the path to a new philosophy. This recognition is promptly tempered by Hegel’s observation that Kant’s approach is “imperfect” in both its methods and its results. Hegel treats Kant’s antinomies as possessing a rational core that needs to be extracted from its form of presentation. His concern, as always with Kant, is that the approach is intrinsically dogmatic - that it presupposes that cognition possesses characteristics that have not been established (and, specifically, that it presupposes what it claims to prove) - and that the approach restricts reason, predeciding that it “should not soar beyond sensuous perception and should take the world of appearance, the phenomenal world, as it is” (407, 428). In the process of demonstrating these arguments, this remark also casts some light on Hegel understands his own method.
Hegel begins by suggesting that Kant has inappropriately exceptionalised his four cosmological antinomies, not recognising that such antinomies can be found at the heart of any Notion. Hegel argues “as many antinomies could be constructed as there are Notions” (408). Kant compounds this mistake by not locating the antinomies he does identify in the Notions themselves, but rather in a concrete, “applied” form in which such antinomies cannot be explored in their purity, but rather become intrinsically caught up in other determinations extrinsic to the Notion (409). Further, although Kant on one level recognises that these antinomies are not simply illusions, but contradictions that reason necessarily confronts, his attempt to resolve these contradictions contravenes this insight by treating the contradiction as fundamentally something subjective, something residing in the “transcendental ideality of the world of perception” (410).
These problems can only be overcome, Hegel argues, by grasping the antinomies as “two opposed determinations which belong necessarily to one and the same Notion” (410). Such an approach recognises the validity of each determination - but only as sublated within their Notion. By contrast, Kant’s approach is one-sided - it attempts to take up each determination in isolation from the other - to assert the validity of each dogmatically. Hegel’s description of Kant’s method here is not kind:

…this simple categorical, or strictly speaking assertoric statement is wrapped up in a false, twisted scaffolding of reasoning which is intended to produce a semblance of proof and to conceal and disguise the merely assertoric character of the statement… (411)

Hegel proceeds to illustrate his point by examining how the antinomy of continuity and discreteness arises in Kant’s argument relating to the infinite divisibility of matter. Much of the subsequent discussion consists of an argument that the way in which Kant frames his discussion of this problem, already assumes what it sets out to prove, and is therefore a tautological statement, rather than the proof it purports to be. Hegel wields an interesting and somewhat expansive concept of tautology here.
Hegel begins with Kant’s statement that every composite substance in the world is comprised of the simple (the atom) (412). Hegel notes that, by substance in the world, Kant intends substances as sensuously perceived, and that this substance is taken to be indifferent to the existence of the antinomy itself. Hegel argues that the very definition of a composite is that of something externally put together from things other than itself. The “other” of the composite, however, is the simple. Therefore it is tautological to say the composite consists of the simple - we know nothing more by this statement, than we already knew by simply examining the term “composite” (413). In Hegel’s (sarcastic) words:

To ask of what something consists is to ask for an indication of something else, the compounding of which constitutes the said something. If ink is said to consist simply of ink, the meaning of the inquiry after the something else of which it consists has been missed and the question is not answered but only repeated. (413)

Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God?

No God But God from Vox Nova by blackadderiv Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God? The answer to the question is controversial. Most Muslims answer yes, following a passage in the Koran that appears to say that both groups do worship the same God. Many Christians, on the other hand, vigorously dispute this claim...

What’s in a Name?
As philosophers ranging from Saul Kripke to Linda Richman have noted, there is a great deal of difference between names and descriptions. Names are what Kripke calls “rigid designators.” They pick out a particular person or thing or kind of thing, and refer always to that thing, regardless of what other attributes the person, thing, or kind of thing may have. Descriptions, by contrast, refer to particular attributes and may apply to a person, thing, or kind of thing at one time but not another. “George W. Bush”, for example, is a name; “President of the United States”, by contrast, is a description. “Holy Roman Empire” is a name; “a holy, Roman empire” is a description.

Most people, I take it, tend to assume without reflection that “God” is a name like “John” or “Steve” or “Sally.” For the scholastics, however, “God” was not a name, but a description, meaning something along the lines of “supreme being,” or, to use St. Anselm’s more precise terminology, “that than which no greater can be conceived.”Whether the claim “Muslims and Christians worship the same God” is true will depend on whether “God” is understood as being a name (e.g. the being who appeared to Moses in the burning bush, etc., or the being who revealed himself to Muhammad in the dessert, etc.) or as a description (e.g. “the supreme being”).

If God is taken to be a name, then the claim will be true de dicto when made by Muslims (who believe that the same being revealed himself to Moses and to Muhammad), false de dicto when made by most non-Muslims (who don’t believe the same being revealed himself to Moses and Muhammad), and false de re (on the supposition that Islam is not the true religion). On the other hand, if “God” is taken to be a description, then the claim would be true de re (since Muslims and Christians both believe in a supreme being, and there is in fact only one such being), and while whether the claim was true de dicto would vary from person to person, the claim would seem to only be false de dicto for someone who was confused or mistaken about the issue.

Personally I am inclined to think that St. Anselm is right, and that the word “God” is not a name like Jesus or Shiva. To use an admittedly very weird example, if it turned out that Jesus was actually a time traveler who used his advanced technology to perform the miracles depicted in the Gospels, we would not say that there was no Jesus but that Jesus was actually a time traveler. But if it turned out that all of the actions and words attributed to God in the Scriptures were actually the words and actions of this time traveler, we would not say that God was actually a time traveler. We would say that there was no God (or, at least, that it wasn’t really God who did all of these things).

As such, I have no problem with saying that Muslims worship the same God as Christians, or that Hindus worship this same God, or that any group that worships a supreme being worship the same God as do Christians. But I recognize that someone might take a different view on this, and so I cannot say that the “same God” question is as open and shut as I had previously supposed. Thoughts? This entry was posted on February 20, 2008 at 11:33 pm and is filed under Blackadder, Islam, Philosophy, Theology. Home About the Contributors About Vox Nova No God But God 11:23 AM

Marx, who condemned exploitation, was himself, the great exploiter of people

Deadly Architects: An Interview with Donald De Marco and Benjamin Wiker, authors of Architects of the Culture of Death Part 2 Part 1 [5:44 PM]

IgnatiusInsight.com: Schopenhauer sought to escape Nature, Nietzsche believed that the Christian God is evil, and Ayn Rand believed that only a select few will be able to be individuals. Would it be accurate to say that all of these are variations on ancient gnostic themes? Do modern atheistic systems reflect a sort of secular gnosticism?

Donald De Marco: I think they do. In the absence of any belief in God, a passionate person will create a caricature of God. We must give credit to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Rand for being both passionate and creative. Unfortunately, what they worshipped, very much like the gnostics of old, did not transcend themselves. And this explains a great deal about why these three were so bitterly unhappy. They were pursuing an illusion, but with great passion and force. I cannot begin to understand the intensity of their frustrations, because an illusion offers us not nourishment and leaves our passionate quest unsatisfied. They were continually disappointed by their own convictions. It was as if they tried to quench their thirst by consuming more salt. This is not a formula for peace.

IgnatiusInsight.com: Darwin and Darwinian evolution have been, of course, very controversial for many decades. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions and incorrect notions about Darwin and his beliefs that exist today? How seriously is Darwinian evolution taken today in the scientific community?

Benjamin Wiker: I think there are two very serious misconceptions about Darwinism today. First, that Darwinism is a well-established theory, with no considerable intellectual difficulties. The second, one more directly related to Architects, concerns the essential moral implications of Darwinism. Generally, historians and scientists alike have tried to distance Darwin’s biology from the eugenics movement—an understandable move, given the ugliness of the eugenic programs of Nazi Germany. If we read Darwin, however, we find that he himself understood eugenics to be the obvious inference from his biological theory of evolution through natural selection. Natural weeds out the unfit; so should we, or at least keep the unfit from breeding. Further, he also understood quite clearly that his evolutionary account of morality, which destroyed the permanency of human nature, provided the most radical moral relativism possible. As for the scientific community, it generally accepts Darwinism without question, which means that it generally hasn’t studied the theoretical and evidential problems facing Darwinism. Happily, more and more scientists have found the courage to look at Darwinism with a clearer, more critical eye.

IgnatiusInsight.com: How did Marx exploit the religious impulses of his followers and how did he distort Christian doctrine for his own anti-Christian ends?

De Marco: Marxism is a kind of religion and as such, appeals to our religious instincts. Marx speaks of paradise (but on earth), total justice for all (but in the distant future), and doing away with sin (though the sinners are the capitalists). In this regard, Marx is drawing on people's religious instincts. But he does not offer a way of love, and therefore, omits that which is most important to religion. Rather, he appeals to our weaknesses: our pride, envy, anger, and hope. Marx, who condemned exploitation, was himself, the great exploiter of people. He appealed to our pride in telling us that we are not sinners, to our envy for the riches that others possessed, to our anger against the ruling class, and to our hope for a Utopia on earth. Marx is a False Messiah who offers a religion that draws upon our religious impulse, but is poisoned by the addition of deadly sins.

IgnatiusInsight.com: How is it that people such Margaret Mead, Margaret Sanger, and Alfred Kinsey, all of whom were sexual deviants and inveterate liars, continue to enjoy a high level of respect, at least in popular culture? Is this simply due to lack of knowledge, an unwillingness to assess the data truthfully, or a purposeful distortion for ideological ends?

Wiker: All of the above! We do find that, for example, Planned Parenthood "fails" to present the facts about Margaret Sanger’s private life, and her truly strange and pernicious views about sexuality and eugenics. The same goes for Kinsey. His work is always presented by the sex education establishment as the very epitome of disinterested scientific research. But on the other end, sad to say, I think a large number of people have come to accept the same goals that Mead, Sanger, and Kinsey sought to establish, so that their "ideology" appears inviting rather than distorted.

IgnatiusInsight.com: You note that John Paul II describes Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the "Masters of Suspicion." What does he mean by that and why did he pinpoint those particular men?

De Marco: John Paul borrows the phrase "Masters of Suspicion" from Paul Ricoeur, a prominent philosopher at the University of Paris. We begin to understand the meaning of this simple yet telling phrase when we realize that Marx, NIetzsche, and Freud depict man in such a way that that by following their lead, our lives would become self-contradictory. Freud wanted to free the sexual instinct from the constraints of the super-ego; Marx urged a revolution against the ruling class so that people could satisfy their desired for material poassessions; Nietzsche advocated the emergence of the "superman," too proud to be held back by moral conventions. Freud appealed to "lust," Marx to "envy," Nietzsche to "pride." By following the path of vice, we put our heart at odds with itself. Therefore, we should be most suspicious of advice that so utterly untrustworhy in the practical order, since it leads the heart of man to implode upon itself. There is a striking correlation between these Masters of Suspicion and the First Letter of St. John (15-16) which warns against the "lust of the flesh" (Freud), "lust of the eyes" (Marx), and the "pride of life" (Nietzsche).

IgnatiusInsight.com: Many of the architects of the Culture of Death were raised in homes where Unitarianism, Episcopalianism, or some form of Congregationalism was practiced. What influence, if any, did this religious background have on people such as Darwin, Kinsey, Mead, and others?

Wiker: For Darwin, his family’s Unitarianism certainly helped to lead him to take more seriously the claims of materialism in general and evolution in particular. (We note here, that contrary to the popular account, theories of evolution arose long before Darwin—in fact, we find them in ancient Greek and Roman Epicurean thought. In the first half of the 19th century, decades before Darwin released his version of evolution, evolutionary theory was associated with the radical left.) Interestingly enough, Darwin’s wife was a more conservative Unitarian, and feared for her husband’s soul all their married life.

Donald De Marco, Ph.D., is a Professor of Philosophy at St. Jerome's College in Ontario. He is also the author of several books, including The Heart of Virtue. Benjamin Wiker, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in Science and Theology at Franciscan University and a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute, focusing on Intelligent Design. He has contrbuted to various Catholic publications and writes regularly for Crisis magazine, and is the author of Moral Darwinism (InterVarsity). Visit him online at www.benjaminwiker.com.

Architects of the Culture of Deathby Donald De Marco and Benjamin Wiker The “Culture of Death” has become a popular phrase, and is much bandied about in academic circles. Yet, for most people, its meaning remains vague and remote. DeMarco and Wiker have given the Culture of Death high definition and frightening immediacy. They have exposed its roots by introducing its “architects.” In a scholarly, yet reader-friendly delineation of the mindsets of twenty-three influential thinkers, such as Ayn Rand, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alfred Kinsey, Margaret Sanger, Jack Kevorkian, and Peter Singer, they make clear the aberrant thought and malevolent intentions that have shaped the Culture of Death.Still, this is not a book without hope. If the Culture of Death rests on a fragmented view of the person and an eclipse of God, hope for the “Culture of Life” rests on an understanding and restoration of the human being as a person, and the rediscovery of a benevolent God. The “Personalism” of John Paul II is an illuminating thread that runs through Architects, serving as a hopeful antidote. “An action-packed, riveting and educational exposé that reveals little-known facts that are shocking and incredible. You will not want to put this book down...” — Judie Brown, President, American Life League

Marion boldly climbed beyond the irrational nonsense of Phenomenology and Existentialism

A second return to metaphysics
Fred Hutchison February 15, 2008 (Letter to the editor of First Things magazine) The book review God Returns to French Philosophy describes the French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion trying to do the hard way what the scholastics and neoscholastics did the easy way.

The scholastics established metaphysics in the West as a basis for rationality and morality. Descartes, Kant, Husserl and Heidegger progressively deconstructed metaphysics. During the Victorian era, there was a return to metaphysics through neoscholastic philosophy. Marion tried to start with our present nihilism and painfully climb back up the mountain from which the West had fallen — as a second return to metaphysics.

The scholastics from Saint Anselm (11th century) to Saint Thomas Aquinas (13th century), started with the Trinity as a given. God is one being with three particular persons — which indicates that universals need not contradict particulars. This realization enabled the Trinitarian scholastic philosophers to solve the problem of universals and particulars — a problem which stumped the Greek philosophers and the philosophers of every other civilization.

Peter Abelard debated with Anselm's disciples and rejected the independent reality of universals while his debating opponents upheld universals. Anselm's disciples embraced the Trinity while Abelard rejected the Trinity of the three persons. Although Abelard was the most brilliant debater of his day, his lack of a Trinitarian foundation caused him to founder on the same issue which stumped the Greeks.

The solution of Aquinas was that: 1) universals independently exist, 2) universals subsist in particulars — giving particulars their essence and meaning, and 3) each particular has eccentric "accidents" so that particulars are something more than the emanation or precipitation of universals, as the Neoplatonists thought.

This solution explains why Western men were able to believe that the body and blood of Christ mysteriously indwells the eccentric particulars of sacramental bread and wine. It also explains why Western men prior to 1750 were uniquely rational, uniquely moral in intention, and uniquely able to express transcendent aspirations in the particulars of art, music, literature and craftsmanship.

The fall from Mount Metaphysics

As touched upon by the book review, Descartes started with the consciousness of his mind instead of starting with the Trinity. He focused upon rational abstractions which were cut off from the particulars of the world around us. Descartes, as a premier mathematician, gloried in dry, abstract conceptions.

Kant came along and effectively said: "Things are really out there but we cannot get at them because reality is hidden within the particular things. Our senses can only inform us of superficial appearances but can tell us nothing of the underlying realities. Therefore, we are limited to what our inner mental abstractions can do with the superficial messages of our senses. We are cut off from reality. Therefore metaphysical speculations are futile."

Husserl said, "If we are cut off from reality, never mind Kant's abstractions. Let us sit all day staring at superficial particular material things which are available to our senses." Then Heidegger said, "Away with Kant's abstractions and Husserl's mindless gazing at material objects. Let us deal with the exterior world with the "intentionality" of our wills. Heidegger brought us Existentialism which is indifferent to universals and rationality and is nihilistic in its implications.

Climbing the icy slopes

Beginning in the valley of nihilism, Dr. Marion boldly climbed beyond the irrational nonsense of Phenomenology and Existentialism. Then he had trouble with the icy slopes of Kant — as we all do. The core his the problem was the question: "Do I have access to the reality of things? Can I look past the surface appearance of particular things and see the essence — what Kant called the numina? Can I do what Kant tells me that I can't do? Can I do what was never contemplated by Descartes' introverted abstract rationalism?

Dr. Marion got more than he expected. He was overwhelmed by the external presence of things — the "saturated phenomena" of his personal experience. These phenomena were overwhelmingly radiant with glory. The experiences were a "shock" and were "destabilizing" and "bedazzling" to the unsuspecting philosopher. Dr. Marian, you wouldn't be talking about a spiritual revelation, or would you?

The phenomena was saturated with what, Dr. Marion? Saturated with Kant's numina? Saturated with Aquinas' essences? Saturated with universals? Saturated with the glory of God? You would not be sneaking back to metaphysics — or would you Dr. Marion? I thought metaphysics and revelation was taboo for a respectable French philosopher.

Sneaking back to metaphysics

As we watch Dr. Marion approach the summit of Mount Metaphysics the air gets thick with entertaining irony. One must smile as one observes Dr. Marion wrestling with deeply ambiguous feelings as he makes his first halting and timorous steps towards St. Thomas Aquinas who sits on the summit. Dr. Marion flinched, fled in horror and published a critique of Aquinas — which he later retracted.

Finally we see the humbled Frenchman, battered and bruised by his long climb out of the valley of nihilism and bedazzled and disoriented by the light of revelation of high altitudes — as he turns once more to the summit. We see him slip sheepishly into the lap of Saint Thomas where he embraces the metaphysics of scholasticism. Our eyes mist over with relief and joy.

Marion had to do it the hard way because he is a tidy-minded Frenchman who was carefully educated by the French academy to scoff at revelation and metaphysics. But against all odds he made it to the summit.

Previous articles by Fred Hutchison: Is conservatism in crisis?
Modernism's war against the past: Freud, James, Dewey, and the conservative reaction in the early twentieth century
A gathering of angels
Abstinence only plus condoms is a contradiction
Looking for a man of principle
The one world cult, Darwin, and Einstein
The babe in the womb is a personClick here for more articles

The supreme difficulty is to de-suture philosophy from its poetic condition

The Swerve around P: Literary Theory after Interpretation Jeffrey T. Nealon Pennsylvania State University jxn8@psu.edu

While Badiou's work is becoming well-known in North America--the Chronicle of Higher Education recently tagged him as a potential "next big thing" in the theory world, surely the kiss of death (see Byrne)--a brief discussion of some of his thought is relevant in this context. Against the thematics of the twilight of philosophy, and against all messianisms, Badiou calls for thinking's revitalization, primarily through an emphasis on what he calls a "positive," non-sacramental relation to infinity--a relation that, for Badiou, is on display most forcefully in the axiomatic thrust of mathematics. In returning to what he sees as the Greek origins of philosophy--he goes so far as to call his thinking a "Platonism of the multiple" (Manifesto 103)--Badiou locates four "conditions of philosophy": "the matheme, the poem, political invention, and love" (35). Western philosophy is said to have begun in Greece with these four topics (science, literature, politics, desire), and for Badiou "the lack of a single one gives rise to [philosophy's] dissipation" (35), which isn't to say its end. Philosophical thinking is in danger whenever it becomes tied too closely and exclusively to one of its four-fold conditions.

The danger, for Badiou, is "handing over the whole of thought to one generic procedure . . . . I call this type of situation a suture. Philosophy is placed in suspension every time it presents itself as being sutured to one of its conditions" (61). So, for example, Marxism has often been too sutured to the political condition--here Badiou even implicates his own earlier Maoism (76)--while analytic philosophy has on the whole sutured itself too closely to the scientism of the matheme. "Philosophy," in its simplest definition, is for Badiou "de-suturation" (67), the interruption of an exclusive thought-suture to either politics, science, love, or the literary. Hence, Badiou calls his a "subtractive" thinking, one that subtracts itself from constrictive sutures, to reconnect with the multiple.

The most totalizing suture of recent philosophical times, Badiou writes polemically, is not the political or the scientific-mathematical, or even privatized "love," but the poetic, the literary suture. As he insists, today "it so happens that the main stake, the supreme difficulty, is to de-suture philosophy from its poetic condition" (67). Badiou rather cannily chooses Heidegger as his main foil in this argument. Even Heidegger's staunchest proponents would agree that the literary is in fact the ground of his thinking; he has relatively little compelling to say about politics, mathematics, or love for that matter--or, more precisely, anything compelling that he might have to say about those topics would have to run through the poetic, as this suture is the ontological ground of the space of possibility in Heidegger's thinking. Anything that emerges does so in Heidegger through the structure of the literary opening, that privileged path to the meaning of Being.

Of course, my two exemplary accounts of the literary's demise (Tompkins's and Badiou's) do not map seamlessly onto one another, for a whole host of disciplinary, historical, and geographical reasons. Most obviously, one might point out that the lion's share of American literary theory (or most continental philosophy, for that matter) isn't or never was so Heideggerian as Badiou's account would seem to suggest. However, much of the "big theory" era in literature departments did, I think, share the bond that both Badiou and Tompkins point out: the questions of "meaning" or interpretation as the ultimate horizon of inquiry. This hermeneutic thrust was prominently on display in virtually all big theory in literature departments, even in the polemically new historicist work of people like the boundary 2 New Americanists, as well as in much of the early new historicist work in English literature (think here of a great book like Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy, which deploys its historical materialist mix of religion, ideology, and power primarily to produce startling new readings of Renaissance tragedies).

Likewise, however anti-Heideggerian much Tel Quel thinking may have been, it did nonetheless protect the horizon of hermeneutics (the literary suture) as the royal road to larger philosophical and cultural questions. Like Tompkins's call for literary criticism to reconnect to a non-hermeneutic tradition, then, Badiou's critique of the poetic suture in philosophy is less a spring-green avant gardism (calling for a radical new direction in thought), than it is an attempt to return critique to a series of other questions, ones not treated well within the poetic idiom. As Badiou writes, "Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant or Hegel might have been mathematicians, historians, or physicists; if there is one thing they were not, it was poets" (70)... Removing the stitches from philosophy.The most totalizingfrom enowning by enowning Removing the stitches from philosophy.

Never was such a reckoning of matter made

The Physical Transformation—a Marvellous Attempt
by RY Deshpande on Fri 15 Feb 2008 06:47 AM PST Permanent Link

Never was in the spiritual history such a reckoning of matter made, such a significant place given to the likelihood of a superconscient manifestation based on the physical. It appears that the “secret aim of evolution” had remained altogether unrecognized in the scheme of past things.

But the process is not a single-stranded process, of conventional or linear growth, running from lower stadia to higher stadia, from one unseen end to the other far-off invisible end. There is in fact a problem, a problem that has arisen in a most unexpected way, a peculiar problem that had no roots in life proper. It has arisen because of the higher entering into the formidable lower, life making matter its field of expression. Life accepts this material circumstance but pays price for it...

On the soul of man is laid the gloom of discomforting humiliation and sadness and despair, of incapacity and transience, of helpless mortality. Such is the legacy handed over to the physical body, perishable, full of darkness, that darkness getting renewed only by gloomier and denser darkness, the body bound to the chain of Fate and Time. Does not this leaden norm then mean that there has to be a more responsive spiritual solution, that there has to be a greater action?

When the yogi probes deep into these aspects, he discovers that the solution lies only in seeing the basic rationale buried in the cavernous Inconscience. Meaningful and blissful glorious life in matter could become possible only if the cause of decay, disintegration and death can be eliminated. Sri Aurobindo in his epic Savitri describes how the divine Shakti took birth here in the mortal world, condescended to pass through its portals to vanquish the destroyer of the soul of the suffering creature. She accomplished the task, paved the path to make earthly life charged with the splendour of consciousness that is always in the awareness of the Truth. Her own divine birth was in response to the “world’s desire” which was lifted to the bright pinnacle of this creation and from where, like the answering grace, she consented to come into this mortality.

Sri Aurobindo’s own determined yoga-tapasya was to invoke that perfect, that surefire power by which the physical nature could be handled victoriously. This was one mission of the Avatarhood which he by first establishing the supramental light and force in his own person splendidly and successfully carried through. At the time of his passing away he gave to the Mother, as a parting gift, what he called the Mind of Light, the physical’s mind receiving the Supramental, something that had never happened in the long and zigzagging spiritual history of the world. From this point onward, with the Mind of Light operating in the evolutionary process, a new beginning was made. It marked the beginning of the Shakti Yoga and it is that which the Mother carried forward...

The difficulties of the physical are not only disquieting and daunting; they are insurmountable when the clue is absent. In ancient times Rishi Agastya suffered the horror of Inconscience and abandoned the attempt to spiritualise the body-consciousness proper. The right clue was not available. A slow preparatory evolution taking care of every aspect and every detail was needed. But now, on the rapid wings, the spirit can majestically go ahead to give a divine dimension, a divine amplitude to the attempt.

That is not to say that the process is facile, that the flight is effortless and unconstrained, without obstacles. Actually, the fight against the ancient Adversary is grim and strenuous of which we have the least idea. Sri Aurobindo mentions of the silent desperate brink on which the Mother would have to stand without help, stand alone while dealing with Death and Night, with the Spirit of Negation opposing God’s entry into this world... Keywords: Transformation, SriAurobindo, Spirituality, Mother, Mantra, IntegralYoga Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

Speech perception system and vocal production in humans have been specially adapted for language

Shared Symbolic Storage Embodied Evolutionary-Developmental Computational Cognitive Neuroscience and other Stuff Thursday, February 14, 2008 Four Stone Hearth
By the way, the 34th Editition of the Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Carnnival is out over at Our Cultural World. Go check it out!P.S. Carnivàle also happens to be a really cool TV-Series. You should check it out, too. Posted by Michael at 15:18 0 comments Labels: Misc.

Language Evolution IV: HCF + PJ + FHC + JP =/= ♥
As could be expected, the framework established by HCF led to much criticism from proponents of what HCF called hypothesis 2. Thus, in 2005, Pinker and Jackendoff (PJ) responded to HCF by asking: “The faculty of language: what’s special about it?”

The controversy led to further discussion in the same year when Fitch, Hauser and Chomsky (FHC) defended their viewpoint in “The evolution of the language faculty: Clarifications and implications” and Jackendoff and Pinker renewed their disagreement debating “The nature of the language faculty and its implications for the evolution of language“.

PJ’s first critique mainly focuses on the “recursion-only claim” of HCF, because they feel that there is more that is special to language. Furthermore, they question that recursion evolved as an exaptation (Pinker/Jackendoff 2005: 205). They especially defend the “Speech is Special” (SiS) hypothesis posed by Alvin Liberman and others, which was rejected by HFC (Pinker/Jackendoff 2005: 206), because it seems that the speech perception system and vocal production in humans have been specially adapted for language (Pinker/Jackendoff 2005: 206-209), and not for vocal imitation or size exaggeration as HCF suggested (Pinker/Jackendoff 2005: 209f.)...

Thus, Pinker and Jackendoff’s framing of questions about language evolution would be of little scientific value (Fitch/Hauser/Chomsky 2005: 185f.) JP contradict this statement. In their view, current adaptation, "what the trait was selected for in the species being considered”, poses one of the biologically most interesting questions about a trait and can be addressed empirically by reverse-engineering or functional analysis, which is able to “shed light on its likely evolutionary history.” (Jackendoff/Pinker 2005: 212-214).

The debate regarding recursion heated up once again when Gentner et al. (2006) claimed to have found recursion-abilities in starlings, and Perruchet & Rey criticized Fitch and Hauser’s original experiment that established the inability of monekys to master “phrase structure grammars” (Fitch & Hauser 2004). Regarding the ability of recursion in starlings, these two posts are especially interesting. First this one by Mark Liberman, and the other, where David Beaver regards the recursion-abilities of starlings which in the respect of center-embedded grammars actually seem to be better than ours, and comes to the ironical conclusion that “we have firm and amazing evidence for a biologically unique language module. The trouble is, starlings have it, and we don't.” Other excellent post from the Language Log about HCF's claims can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

References: Hauser, Marc D., Noam Chomsky and W. Tecumseh Fitch 2002. “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” In: Science 298, 1569-1579. Fitch, W. Tecumseh and Marc. D Hauser. 2004. “Computational Constraints on Syntactic Processing in a Nonhuman Primate” In: Science 303: 377-380 Fitch, W. Tecumseh, Marc D. Hauser and Noam Chomsky 2005. “The Evolution of the Language Faculty: Clarifications and Implications.” In: Cognition 97, 179-210. Jackendoff, Ray & Steven Pinker 2005. “The Nature of the Language Faculty and its Implications for Evolution of Language (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky).” In: Cognition 97, 211-225. Pinker, Steven & Ray Jackendoff 2005. “The Faculty of Language: What’s Special about it?” In: Cognition 95, 201-236. Posted by Michael at 11:44 0 comments Labels: Language Evolution, Recursion