A step in evolution which would raise man to a higher and larger consciousness

The Avataric Work: Towards the Intermediate Race
by RY Deshpande on Tue 02 Dec 2008 08:52 PM IST Permanent Link Cosmos

In 1616 Galileo maintained that Faith and Reason, Fides et Ratio, can never contradict each other; for holding such a view he had to suffer and pay a heavy price. Marx loudly proclaimed that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed class”, and a whole section of the society fell prey to its logic. True, creedal religion is a monstrosity and “excessive legalism of the Roman Catholic Church” is anti-spiritual; same is the story with other forms of orthodoxy and fundamentalism, classical or modern, even with scientific and materialistic philosophies with all their stubbornness and arrogance, their irrational denials. With the least hesitation all such retrograde impositions must be removed, dismissed at once. Jean-Paul Sartre’s is a godless universe and he tells us that in such a universe the only meaning or purpose of life is to set the goals for oneself and achieve them. But then these existential notions or ideas make the universe a stopped-up system, closing on itself, without the occurrence of further openings or prospects.

But there are also noble and elevating thoughts and feelings and deeds in various branches of human activity, with its conquests and triumphs which must be duly acknowledged. There is the religio-mystical experience of seeing God in the world and the world in God. There is the fine perception that “Logos is the blueprint and exemplar of the created universe.” Indeed, Jalalu’d-din Rumi, the thirteenth century Persian Sufi poet, has the intuition of a unique dawn breaking in our skies, of the happy naissance to new-shape our life:

… to-night this world is heavy and in travail,
Striving to give birth to an eternal world.

In the possibility of such a birth here is the wonderful perception of a genuine mystic. Yet the question is:

• will that eternal world’s birth occur at all? And how will it happen?
• Or is it just a small vulnerable imagination, feeble, flickering, a longing and an anticipation of a dreamy poet to escape sorrow and suffering that to-night characterise heaviness and anguish of this transient world?
• And then will this to-night’s struggling world by itself, by its own effort, its own propulsion, bring about a world of undecaying and deathless happiness?

Even granting for a moment that in its deepest secrecy there is something remarkable, something truly magnificent, yet a misgiving remains whether this to-night’s world with its own endeavour, by its own labour and struggle can give rise to the eternal world.

• Is it in a position to assert itself against all opposition?
• Can man play any pivotal role in this respect and, if he can, will he? Is he capable to do this at all? ...

In spite of his diffidence and refusal and opposition, in spite of his dumbness, man’s hope and longing and aspiration lead him on to nobler heights, to bluer and brighter skies, to the gold-hued empyrean. The psychic flame within him continues to burn, and leap. His spirit climbs the ascending slopes of heaven. He crosses the Upanishadic gates of the sun to live in immortality of the Self. He certainly has an inkling that this creation’s bliss is in truth, as much as its truth is in bliss. There is even the revelation that God’s glory shines throughout the universe.

“Dante informs us that he has been to paradise, and has seen things so extraordinary that he cannot possibly hope to tell about them. Nevertheless, he determines to make this final song his crowning achievement as a poet, and he calls on the Muses for inspiration as he focuses on his journey heavenward. At noon on the spring equinox, Dante, still in the Earthly Paradise, sees Beatrice gazing into the sun, and he imitates her gaze. In so doing, he becomes aware of an extraordinary brightness, as though God had placed in the heavens a second sun, and feels himself being ‘transhumanised’ in preparation for his experience of Paradise. He then finds himself soaring heavenward through God’s grace, although he is uncertain whether it is his soul or his corporeal self that rises. As Dante and Beatrice pass out of the earth’s atmosphere into a sphere of fire that lies above it, Dante hears the music of the spheres. This music fills him with wonderment and perplexity, but before he can question Beatrice about it, she explains to him the teleological order of the universe, and how it is only natural that, having been purified, he should now rise heavenward.”

Time and desire; sovereignty and democracy

On difficulty: psychoanalysis and deconstruction
from The Joyful Knowing by I'm Mike Johnduff,
In Troubling Confessions and elsewhere, Peter Brooks explains psychoanalysis as a method or technology for producing "difficult" truth. That is, it is a technique for producing confessional statements of truth but which gain their status of truth by way of the technique's placing a stamp of difficulty or complexity on them: what emerges from the analysand in psychoanalysis is not simple, is not...

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Badiou and Materialism Again from Larval Subjects. by larvalsubjects
The brilliant new blog, Splintering Bone Ashes, has a very nice response to my brief post critizing Badiou (someday I hope to return to it and develop the other three criticisms!)... I think SPA is right on the mark in emphasizing that Badiou is referring to the discourse of being qua being rather than being in itself (a point repeated by Nate in his own response to my post). I do think, however, that there is a common shift in Badiou from statements about being qua being in maths to statements about existence that remains problematic in terms of my distinction between being and existence or the “whatness” and the “thatness” of being. This is not unlike a move sometimes found among Lacanians regarding sexuation, where it is constantly emphasized that persons of either biological gender can fall on either side of the graph of sexuation, while constantly nonetheless assimilating biological women to the feminine side and biological men to the masculine side (cf. Žižek’s recent remarks about homosexuality).

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New Book: Radical Atheism from Continental Philosophy by Farhang Erfani
Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)
Description from the publisher’s website:
Radical Atheism presents a profound new reading of the influential French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Against the prevalent notion that there was an ethical or religious “turn” in Derrida’s thinking, Hägglund argues that a radical atheism informs Derrida’s work from beginning to end. Proceeding from Derrida’s insight into the constitution of time, Hägglund demonstrates how Derrida rethinks the condition of identity, ethics, religion, and political emancipation in accordance with the logic of radical atheism. Hägglund challenges other major interpreters of Derrida’s work and offers a compelling account of Derrida’s thinking on life and death, good and evil, self and other. Furthermore, Hägglund does not only explicate Derrida’s position but also develops his arguments, fortifies his logic, and pursues its implications. The result is a groundbreaking deconstruction of the perennial philosophical themes of time and desire as well as pressing contemporary issues of sovereignty and democracy.

Nietzsche’s pessimism in contrast with Dostoevsky’s optimism

Part II: Alyosha and Zarathustra on Com-passion and a Genuine Embodied Life
[Click here for part I] from Per Caritatem by Cynthia R. Nielsen

We see the manifestations of Nietzsche’s pessimism in contrast with Dostoevsky’s optimism in their widely divergent views of love, compassion and pity. Operating out of a hermeneutic of suspicion, Zarathustra views the Christian teaching of love thy neighbor as inauthentic-a mere mask for self-aggrandizement due to a lack of self-love. In criticism of the teaching, Zarathustra proclaims:

You crowd around your neighbor and have fine words for it. But I say unto you: your love of the neighbor is your bad love of yourselves. You flee to your neighbor from yourselves and would like to make a virtue out of that: but I see through your “selflessness.”[1]

From one perspective, Zarathustra can be seen as challenging Christians to examine their motives and to question themselves as to why they serve, help and spend time with others...

Throughout Nietzsche’s narrative Zarathustra engages in a polemic against any worldview or system of thought that he deems dualistic, that is, one which sets an other-worldly world over against this world. In his critique, Zarathustra rails against both Platonism and Christianity, claiming that both exalt a realm completely separate from our present world, a realm in which all things embodied have no place. The Christian, of course, would want to stress the differences between Platonism traditionally understood and the historic Christian faith.

For example, in Orthodox Christianity, given the centrality of the Incarnation and its emphasis on sacramental life and reality, one could establish a strong argument to the contrary, viz., that embodied living is essential to the Christian in this life. Even so, the Christian ought to pay close attention to Zarathustra’s (and Nietzsche’s) critique of Platonic dualism, being alert to the ways in which such dualistic, dis-emobodied thinking has infected or has the potential to infect its own teachings.

Though we find common ground between Zarathustra and the Christian faith on the importance of valuing physical creation in all its manifestations, or as Zarathustra puts it, remaining “faithful to the earth,” each arrives at this conclusion from completely different motivations.[3] [1] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 172. [2] The Brothers Karamazov, p. 36. [3] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 125. [Cf. Comparing Nietzsche's call for the Overman with that announced by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother 1:16 PM ]

Derrida always privileges the derelict, subordinate while Nancy seems to be favoring the more "authentic"

“The Prehistory of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Deconstruction of Christianity”
from An und für sich by Adam Kotsko
At this point, though, there seems to be a divergence from Derrida, insofar as Derrida always privileges the derelict, subordinate item in a given pair (writing over speech, most famously), while Nancy seems to be favoring the more "authentic" item.

Writing in the Western world in 1983, however, Nancy is in an environment where authentic "community," in the form of international communism, has long since turned out to be a nightmare and "society," for all its faults, seems to be the only live option remaining: "all ventures adopting a communitarian opposition to ‘real communism’ have by now run their course or been abandoned, but everything continues along its way as though, beyond these ventures, it were no longer even a question of thinking about community."5

Nancy’s next step is to argue that liberal democracy and the totalitarian danger of communism are two sides of the same coin. First, both of them share in the same overarching "metaphysics of the absolute," which centers on some principle supposedly exempt from all relationality, making both dangerous and destructive. Second, the absolute principle of both, what makes them both so destructive, is, paradoxically, humanity. That is to say, the problem with communism was that it was too humanistic, meaning in this case too centered around the concept of species-being, which for Marx was a matter of "human beings defined as producers (one might even add: human beings defined at all), and fundamentally as the producers of their own essence in the form of their labor or their work."6

This emphasis on the human as the ultimate authority, no longer reliant on any form of transcendence for meaning, leads to the quest for an "absolute immanence of man to man—a humanism—and of community to community—a communism."7

Again, within the modern Western frame, this insistence on immanence seems to be a good thing, but Nancy complicates this valuation by claiming that in fact "what we have called ‘totalitarianism’ … might be better named ‘immanentism.’"

What distinguishes "immanentism" is its continual production of the human essence, setting humanity to work in order to produce humanity as a work. Where communism sought to produce this human essence on a collective level, liberal democracy turns to the individual—but both take the human essence to be "the absolutely detached for-itself, taken as origin and as certainty." Modern experience show us, however, that "the individual can be the origin and the certainty of nothing but its own death." The individual attempts to achieve immortality through its "works," but this "operative immortality remains its own alienation and renders its death still more strange than the irremediable strangeness that it already ‘is.’"8

The implication here—brought out perhaps more clearly in the liberal version—is that "immanentism" involves some kind of working, necessarily unsuccessful, in order to avoid death. At best, this produces alienation, but at its worst it can produce a furious working-out of death, as in fascism. What we need to think instead, therefore, is a community not centered on the absoluteness of some essence, human or otherwise. Acknowledging the necessary link between "essence" and "working" or "producing" within the immanent frame that he believes we cannot go back behind, Nancy proposes that we attempt to think a community that would be désœuvré, which literally means "unworked," or as the translator has it "inoperative."

Additionally, in everyday usage, désœuvré has reference to unemployment or idleness; a "lazy rascal" is a voyou désœuvré. (Whatever might happen to the value of work or humanism, then, it seems that this new form of community would share with communism at least its anticapitalism.)

Communism is the privileged example of what one might call the "bad" form of community, one focused on the working-out of the human essence, but Nancy seems to think that Christianity has a certain privileged status when it comes to the link between community and the avoidance of death. Fully teasing out Nancy’s largely implicit view of Christianity here is probably not necessary for the present purposes, but it is clear that Nancy sees the divinization of humanity in Christ as Christianity’s key strategy for avoiding death. And it is in fact this question of death that comes to preoccupy Nancy for most of the essay, as he attempts to work out another relationship between death and community, in critical dialogue with Georges Bataille. The alternative that emerges is the abandonment of any attempt to give "meaning" to death—making of death a kind of work—and instead acknowledging it as the limit to which the finite community is constitutively exposed.

5 Nancy, Inoperative Community, 2-3.
6 Nancy, Inoperative Community, 2. Nancy italicizes "defined"; I italicize "work."
7 Nancy, Inoperative Community, 2.
8 Nancy, Inoperative Community, 3.

Comparing Nietzsche's call for the Overman with that announced by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Living Laboratories of the Life Divine by Debashish Banerji
from Science, Culture and Integral Yoga™ by Debashish

• What is the post-human destiny to which we are called as humans in contemporary times?

In this transcript of a talk given for the AUM conference in Los Angeles in 2003, Debashish Banerji compares Nietzsche's call for the Overman with that announced by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to point to the similarities and differences.

• How can we pick our way through the maze of choices held up at this end-time of human becoming?
• Is it by remaining complacent or by using our wills or by surrender to a greater force than ours?
• And if so, what force - the vitalism of an unconscious Nature-force, the deceptive "universality" of the world market or an unpredictable future which calls our arduous attention?

These and similar questions are posed and discussed in this article.

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A Fractal-model for Change by Pravir Malik
from Mirror of Tomorrow by RY Deshpande

The power to change things lies within us. Presented here are parts of a theory on how shifts in oneself can have profound shifts in corporations, markets, systems, and the world. It has been said - "Become the change you wish to see in the World". But the elaboration of how this is true may remain a mystery.

The theory of organization introduced here indicates a fractal reality in which an idea, a person, a team, a corporation, a market, a system, progressively more complex constructs, are concretely connected by virtue of common and linked patterns that animates each of these separate levels. Hence the power to positively change progressively more complex and in many cases removed arenas of life, such even as Climate Change, by making corresponding changes in one’s personal space becomes more real...

Political ontology of Confucius and Aristotle merge into a vision where the family only takes precedence due to its capacity for fostering virtue

Fractal Ontology refracting theory: politics, cybernetics, philosophy
Family contra the State: Problematizing Aristotle and Confucius
“..for the relationship between people and government is the most pervasive ideal relationship upon which commerce between teacher and pupil, lord and servants, father and family, general and soldier, master and apprentice have unconsciously been modeled.”—Friedrich Nietzsche.

For centuries, the history of philosophy has explored the general opposition set up between Occidental and Oriental philosophy, especially concerning their respective “origins.” Generally speaking, it has been assumed that Western and Eastern philosophies differ over the metaphysical question of the constitution of the (conditions of possibility of the) universe, ending with the antinomy of a decision concerning Being/Nothingness (Plato vs. Lao-Tzu, both of whom subordinate becoming either to the movement of the idea or the non-activity of the Dao). In the same sense, Aristotle’s political ontology has been argued to end up in another binary opposition with that of Confucius: it is asserted that the former makes the state primary to the family, whereas for the latter this formula must be inverted. Instead, these reflections will attempt to illustrate that the opposition of these philosophical decisions should be shown to be inadequately founded and that a more clarified reading can show that this opposition is both untenable and capable of exemplifying that the problem has not yet been sufficiently determined.

In order to construct a contextual problematic, i.e. one determined by other conditions already present in both philosophies, we should resituate the problem elsewhere before addressing the opposition between family and state. For example, one of the primary conditions for Aristotle in the Politics is that of equality. In book V especially, the problem of equality most especially addresses the ways in which the rich and the poor can be considered to be unequal or disproportionate. These distinctions gain their importance because they define the different ways in which democracies and oligarchies quantify the quality in equality. It could be easy to oppose Confucius to this characterization:

Zigong said: “What do you think of the saying:’ Poor but not inferior; rich but not superior’?” The Master replied: “Not bad, but not as good as: ‘Poor but enjoying the way; rich but loving ritual propriety.’”E2

What Zigong says to the master appears to be the solution to the Aristotelian riddle or problematic concerning the status of the rich and the poor: it is not that they should be considered equal, but that they should not be considered unequal. By inverting the perspective on the relation, Zigong seems to have resolved the oppositions in an almost Hegelian way. But the master answers something that actually resonates with a more fundamental requirement of Aristotle, one that is even more primary than the family (for both philosophers): namely, the question of the perpetuation of noble actions or ritual propriety (li).

Although it could be argued that the perspective of the state dominates the Politics, it is extremely symptomatic that Aristotle obsesses over characterizing the virtues and vices pertaining to individuals, even if it is only through generalized forms, especially in relation to virtuous persons (whom Confucius would call junzi, or “exemplary persons”). It is in this sense that Aristotle also founds his political ontology on the various types of individuals, differentiating them according to vice and virtue, and, more commonly according to the problematic of equality, according to wealth. When Confucius quotes: “Exemplary persons help out the needy; they do not make the rich richerE3,”

Aristotle tries to take this one step further (even if it demonstrates his own prejudices of supporting the middle way). In order to regulate inequality of wealth, Aristotle advocates self-moderation for the rich: “The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the nobler sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more; that is to say, they must be kept down, but not ill-treated.”E4 Although the last part of this statement seems contrary to the Confucian path, it should be noted that both philosophers would subordinate this question of class and wealth to something more primary than the state, which is the perpetuation of noble actions or ritual propriety (ends) which are actualized through the ideal of the family (means).

While it could be argued that Aristotle makes the state primordial in the sense that he argues it precedes the individual like the whole precedes its parts, it can be demonstrated that Aristotle makes the family primary in order to perpetuate a higher goal, namely that of noble actions or precisely li.

Anthropology, Phenomenology, Design, and Culture

Toward a Science of Consciousness
Investigating Inner Experience
June 11-14, 2009
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design
Hong Kong, China

Researchers and scholars throughout the sciences, humanities and arts are invited to the 15th international interdisciplinary scientific conference on consciousness. The Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference will be held in Hong Kong from June 11th to 14th, 2009. Plan now to attend and join in the dialogue. Abstracts are due Feb 1, 2009. Abstracts presented at the conference will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.

The event is part of a larger Asia Consciousness Festival that will include workshops, cultural events, and other Conferences on topics such as cognitive informatics, and artificial general intelligence that are scheduled in June.

Areas Include: Philosophy, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Media and Psychology, Physical and Biological Sciences, Anthropology, Phenomenology, Design, and Culture. Main Themes Program Committee Submission Program Registration Hotels Social Sponsors Supporting Organizations Contact Copyright © 2008 The Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design

An alternative to Continental approaches dominated by correlationism or philosophies of access and various forms of social constructivism

New Book: French Interpretations of Heidegger from Continental Philosophy by Farhang Erfani
Edited by Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew, French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception
From the publisher’s site:

French Interpretations of Heidegger undertakes a philosophical engagement with the work of the most significant and creative figures involved in the reception of Heidegger in France. The essays address those thinkers who have been influenced by Heidegger’s thought and have interpreted it in remarkable ways, including Levinas, Beaufret, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Irigaray, Zarader, Greisch, and Dastur. The volume explores the extraordinary impact that Heidegger’s thought has had on contemporary French philosophy, including such movements as existentialism, deconstruction, feminist theory, post-structuralism, and hermeneutics, and illustrates its impact on the American continental scene as well. Click here for Table of Contents

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Post-Identity Politics? Posted by larvalsubjects under Ideology, Politics, Potential, Religion, resentiment [11] Comments November 8, 2008

In particular, I have a paper coming out with the IJZS on Lacan’s discourse of the capitalist and the three discourses that follow from this discourse as it relates to contemporary Continental political theory that I’m particularly proud of and which I hope goes some of the way towards shifting certain features of political debates surrounding Lacanian inspired political thought. Currently I am putting together an edited collection with Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman that draws together works that are inspired by realist orientations in contemporary philosophy and that will feature contributions from Alain Badiou, Jane Bennett, Ray Brassier, Manuel DeLanda, Ian Hamilton Grant, Peter Hallward, Graham Harman, Adrian Johnston, Bruno Latour, Catherine Malabou, Quentin Meillassoux, Nicole Pepperell, John Protevi, Isabelle Stengers, Alberto Toscano, Slavoj Žižek and perhaps Martin Hagglund. Our desire is to draw together work that offers an alternative to Continental approaches dominated by correlationism or philosophies of access and various forms of social constructivism. Between teaching and working on these projects, I have been exceedingly busy...

In the interim I’ve being going over old and beloved ground, rereading Lucretius, Leibniz, and Spinoza, while also reading a good deal of history, Marx, and Marxist works. I find myself filled with horror at Leibniz’s universe, comforted only by Voltaire’s great work of ideology critique, Candide, while being filled with joy and a sense of empowerment by Lucretius and blessed Spinoza.

After 201 years Hegel's Phenomenology is still ground-breaking

(title unknown) from Continental Philosophy by Farhang Erfani
A review of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide (Cambridge Critical Guides) by Dean Moyar (Editor), Michael Quante (Editor) Reviewed by Jeffrey Church, Duke University

Few texts in the history of thought are as difficult and yet as exciting as Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. In the 201 years since its publication, the Phenomenology has had a broad influence on diverse fields of thought, including philosophy, sociology, theology, political science, and literary theory...

The three authors -- Heidemann, Fulda, and Horstmann -- agree on the basic outline of Hegel's project. Hegel's project establishes what Horstmann calls a "new paradigm in epistemology" (49) by responding to the problem of skepticism besetting previous theories. For Hegel, skepticism has revealed the inadequacy of foundationalism, the attempt to find a self-evident or self-grounding principle that bridges the apparently impassable gulf between subject and object. Hegel's response to this problem is to reject the foundationalist project and adopt what Heidemann calls Hegel's "methodological anti-individualism" -- his "holism." What brings together subject and object, for Hegel, is a self-reflecting system of normative thought that transcends each individual or particular consciousness (8). Though these three authors broadly agree as to what Hegel's phenomenological project is, they offer different perspectives on how Hegel justifies this project.

Heidemann emphasizes the historical development of these "shapes of consciousness", and how each shape creates foundational norms that govern the relationship between subject and object. Hegel justifies the final position in the history of self-consciousness, "Absolute Knowledge," by showing how history necessarily leads to Absolute Knowledge, and Absolute Knowledge supplies an epistemic system that is not internally contradictory. However, Heidemann argues, Hegel's method of justification is circular -- for "the standpoint of philosophical truth is a constitutive element needed to make sense of" the history of self-consciousness, yet this history is supposed to itself justify the final standpoint (18). While Heidemann argues that Hegel cannot escape from this problem of circularity, Fulda and Horstmann argue that Hegel's position can be salvaged.

For Fulda, the Phenomenology is best seen as a "work in progress" (28), rather than as a completed edifice of knowledge. As such, though later moments in the history of self-consciousness may solve or answer problems plaguing previous moments, no moment provides an absolutely self-justified endpoint at which point Spirit can finally come to rest. Horstmann takes a different tack in offering a highly interesting and original account of what he calls Hegel's "transcendentalistic" form of argument. Hegel's form of argument is an advance over Kant's "transcendental" argument, which dogmatically takes a particular configuration of subject and object for granted (in what Kant calls "experience"). For Hegel, the very notions of subject and object and their relationship are open to question. His "negative transcendental argument" discerns what the conditions for the possibility of cognition as such are -- and after running through a series of failed attempts to render cognition possible, Hegel shows that only his own position makes sense of cognition (52). ***

Reading Hegel: The Introductions by
G.W.F. Hegel (edited and introduced by Aakash Singh and Rimina Mohapatra)
►re.press 2008

Deleuze in the light of Kant; Foucault against Habermas and Derrida; Berlin refused to build a system

Politics of the Virtual Author: Levi R Bryant 1 Source: Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Volume 9, Number 3, December 2004 , pp. 333-348(16) Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Abstract:

This article examines the possibility of political change through the examination of ontological concepts pertaining to the social as drawn from the thought of Lacan and Deleuze. Distinguishing between the virtual and the actual, I argue that a politics of the actual, which is premised on conflicts between social groups, fails to produce real social change by leaving the virtual social structure organizing relationships between these groups intact. By contrast, a politics of the virtual makes these structures the direct object of its struggle, and seeks to determine the void underlying social relations as the place where real change is possible. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2004) 9, 333–348. doi:10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100024

Learn about Deleuze the right way, not the easy way, July 15, 2008
By Justin Evans (Chicago, USA) - See all my reviews Many, many silly things have been written by and about Gilles Deleuze; by comparison Bryant's book stands out as a beacon of sense, clarity, youth truth beauty and all the other great things there are. Just buy it.

If you need to be further convinced: he reads Deleuze in the light of Kant, rather than as a Nietzschean 'everything-is-power-and-we-must- fight-the-forces-of-ressentiment' type. He takes the philosophy of difference given in 'Difference and Repetition' and 'The Logic of Sense' to be an answer to the problem of the Kantian passivity of reception. For Deleuze, Kant gives up on the critical project by not asking what makes the given of receptivity possible. Although Kant shows the transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience (being the conceptual determination of intuitions) he doesn't show the transcendental conditions for *real* experience: to do so would be to give the conditions for intuitions, or receptivity. Deleuze's answer to this question, what allows the given to be given, is Difference, which is located in a constellation of terms: Idea, structure, problems and so on. Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Topics in Historical Philosophy) 8:53 AM

Revising Foucault: The History and Critique of Modernity from Continental Philosophy by Farhang Erfani
Colin Koopman University of California, Santa Cruz
PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL CRITICISM, Forthcoming Abstract:

I propose a major reassessment of Foucault’s philosophico-historical account of the basic problems of modernity. I revise our understanding of Foucault by countering the misinterpretations proffered by influential European critics such as Habermas and Derrida. Central to Foucault’s account of modern was his work on two crucial concept pairs: freedom/power and reason/madness. I argue against the view of Habermas and Derrida that Foucault understood modern power and reason as straightforwardly opposed to modern freedom and madness. I show that Foucault held a much more complex view of these pairs, a view encapsulated in his term “reciprocal incompatibility.” By revising our interpretation of Foucault’s work on modernity in this way, we open the way to much more effective deployments of his critical apparatus. Keywords: Foucault, Habermas, Derrida, Modernity, Discipline Link

Russian Thinkers from Thoughts, Books, and Philosophy by jhbowden

Berlin was a genius– many of his most insightful and penetrating writings are taken from unscripted lectures. Not only did Berlin refuse to build a system, he refused to be an unsystematic logic-chopper. Berlin did not believe in dissolving the eternal questions man must always confront. If anything, the eternal dilemmas of human condition constitute who we are; they have no resolution. Being educated means knowing the questions for all of the answers; only then can we act wisely with integrity. Berlin’s thought isn’t a stand-alone readymade of Marcel Duchamp; his philosophy reveals itself in his discussion of others.

But first one must learn how to look at the world rationally

Grundlegung A philosophy blog Philosophy as Bildung October 21, 2008

In a recent post, I claimed that we ought to defend a form of philosophical humanism. By this, I meant that we should confront a certain embarrassment concerning the human. One variety of such embarrassment is expressed in strident naturalism about philosophical explanation. Naturalisms of this sort seek to shift the locus of philosophical explanation, whether ontological or justificatory, to something more fundamental than the considerations given in everyday practices of explanation. For example, here I have in mind efforts to bring cognitive science to bear on moral psychology. Within many such debates, the ‘folk psychology’ possessed by normal agents is contrasted with the results of the modern psychological sciences, laden with the outcome of brain scans and other neurological research. The suggestion is that philosophy of mind ought to take off from these cutting edge results, which present us with the most accurate accounts of the mind available, rather than the messy self-understanding of ordinary agents which, although useful in practical situations, is often shot with delusions, simplification and convenient fictions. My reservations are not primarily directed at the cognitive sciences per se (and certainly not all forms of naturalism), only the thought that philosophical explanation must start from this point instead of the more familiar understanding of ourselves expressed in ordinary discourse. This is the conviction that, when it comes to philosophy, what we say when we chat with our friends, say, or the way that Sophocles characterises shame, leaves nothing out. In part, this conviction is founded upon a different way of approaching the tasks of philosophy.

If philosophy is to provide us with a maximally coherent account of how the world is, being a handmaiden to the sciences which works upon the more abstract and conceptual difficulties which they throw up, then the idea that it ought to accept the same reductive and naturalistic approach to explanation is much more palatable. That sort of activity may very well be a precondition of achieving the invaluable insights provided by science. Yet, I don’t think that attempts to reframe in this context traditional philosophical problems, concerning knowledge or practical deliberation, for example, are at all illuminating. This is because these problems are, predominantly, troubling in a different way to scientific problems. Once again, Wittgenstein expresses this idea well. In a heading of the ‘Big Typescript’, he writes: “DIFFICULTY OF PHILOSOPHY NOT THE INTELLECTUAL DIFFICULTY OF THE SCIENCES, BUT THE DIFFICULTY OF A CHANGE OF ATTITUDE. RESISTANCES OF THE WILL MUST BE OVERCOME.” He then goes to say, “Work on philosophy is – as work in architecture frequently is – actually more of a //a kind of// work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On the way one sees things. (And what one demands of them.)” (PO: 162-3) Without wanting to overgeneralise from these remarks, I think we can see within them a kind of schematic for philosophy. I shall now go on to say a little about how I propose we should think about philosophy, or at least one its central currents, and which connects this Wittgensteinian view with some which may seem like natural adversaries to it.

What might it mean to say that work on philosophy is work on oneself? Helpful here is a German term, important for understanding post-Kantian idealism, namely, Bildung. It can be translated variously as education, nurture, development, formation or culture. Such elasticity of meanings might serve to shroud rather than reveal the idea it seeks to capture though. In the Hegelian usage which I prefer, it can be taken to name a process of self-cultivation through which, in a struggle to understand who they are, someone achieves a more liberated mode of relating to themselves and therewith the world as a whole. This need not imply anything spooky is going on, nor that some imposing idealist apparatus is called upon. Instead, we might consider the sort of thing that happens in a Bildungsroman; the independence of maturity is achieved through the resolution of conflicts over the protagonist’s self-identity. Thought of in this way, we can contrast Bildung, qua self-directed process, with other ways of being developed or formed. As Allen Wood puts it, “the entire process of Bildung is fundamentally an inner or self-directed activity, never merely a process of conditioning through environmental stimuli, or the accumulation of information presented by experience.” (‘Hegel on Education’, p.4)

It is with this sort of understanding of Bildung in mind that I suggest we take up Wittgenstein’s idea that work on philosophy is work on oneself. Philosophy, practiced aright, does not seek to give us theories built upon our experience of the world (though it by no means operates independently of such experience), but nor does it counsel simply following the inclinations which we form just as inhabitants of the natural world. Instead, at least for the most part, it is about achieving a certain practical orientation towards ourselves, our fellows and the rest of the world. This practical orientation consists in both intellectual and affective sensitivity, and so it might be said to concern a way (or our ways) of seeing. Again, we might say that philosophy, so conceived, is irreducibly aesthetic, insofar as we adopt a broad understanding of the aesthetic. So characterised, the conception of philosophy I have outlined may seem either hopelessly broad and vague or intolerably strange and idiosyncratic. To make it more determinate, I shall point to two examples of what I take to be philosophy practiced in this vein. I’ve chosen to pick out Hegel and Nussbaum, though it may equally have been Aristotle, Adorno, Wittgenstein, McDowell, Anscombe or Marx.

Take Hegel to begin with. What we find in the Phenomenology is an analysis of a procession of forms of consciousness and forms of the world which are outgrowths of ordinary ways of looking at the world. The use (or embodiment) of the fundamental logical categories of particularity, universality and individuality within these forms shows them to be unstable, since none of them can overcome the difficulties of reconciling subject and object. Hegel’s aim is to lead us along a ‘pathway of despair’ (and therefore an intellectually and emotionally transformative narrative) which shows us how to recognise and begin to avoid these instabilities. The result is absolute knowing; not a megalomaniacal claim to comprehensive or divine knowledge, but a standpoint — a place from where to see the world — from where we can overcome the gulf between subject and object, as previously expressed as problems bridging mind and world, intention and action, inner and outer, and so on. Thus, the groundwork is laid for the task of re-cognising the phenomena previously encountered in our ordinary ways of seeing the world, critically reappraising and adjusting these ways of seeing such that we can come to an unalienated or homely (heimlich) relation to our world. Ultimately, for Hegel, philosophy is concerned with examining the concept, understanding the rational basis of things, and this redounds upon the rational being doing the examining, setting them free from the mere positivity of phenomena — being brutely confronted with them in their contingency, rather than grasping how they do and indeed must relate to oneself. But first one must learn how to look at the world rationally, where this is a long and difficult process fraught with as many practical and affective problems as cognitive ones, and which does not issue in a theory of everything but a mode of facing the world: not simply a set of propositions, but a practical way to confront it.

Nussbaum’s work is altogether more modest and it is undertaken in a rather different spirit. Nevertheless, there are important similarities which I would like to try and draw out. Again, there is a kind of aesthetic thread to be picked up — one that consists in cultivating a variety of perception, not in any empiricist or intuitionist sense but rather as a sensitivity to the world which takes the form of a kind of practical knowledge or phronesis. We see this method deployed brilliantly in The Fragility of Goodness. In it, Nussbaum undertakes a forensic analysis of the details of Greek philosophy and tragedy which she brings to bear upon questions of moral luck, tragic conflict and practical deliberation. What makes the book so great as philosophy, rather than simply historical scholarship, is how it manages to draw so much sustenance from the literature it considers whilst putting its ideas to work in providing vivid ‘reminders’ and ‘objects of comparison’ (to resort to Wittgesteinian terminology) with which to illuminate our ethical lives. Its approach to literature is deeply philosophical; and conversely too, with its philosophical proclivities being similarly literary. This is another example of what I have been calling philosophical humanism: a confidence in the narratives we tell about ourselves and what matters to us. Of course, we need (and ought) not take all these stories at face value, but an underlying trust in our ability to capture the fundamentals of life in the mainstays of human activity is on display here. Art, whether individually or collectively, can be contextualised and historicised, subjected to evolutionary adaptionist explanation, Ideologiekritik, and so on, but none of these things can explain it away as a whole such that it loses its respectability as a philosophical resource. Artistic activity retains its legitimacy as a tool for providing genuine, first-rate knowledge of truths about value, the mind, action, emotion — about human life in general — and insofar as it does, we must again question the rush to those reductionist accounts predicated upon an uneasiness with the merely human. Posted in Alienation, Ethics, Hegel, Literature, Methodology, Nussbaum, Wittgenstein 4 comments

Good post. by YH October 21, 2008 at 6:22 am

An afterthought though. Might your phrase ‘work on oneself’ be a little misleading? I say that because I’m sure you’d want to capture the element of inter-subjectivity in both Geist and Bildung. It is after all others or an other who is/are the typical prompt of an individual’s change in viewpoint. Of course one often reads alone, but even reading is an inter-subjective business, interaction with the words of others sedimented in tradition. I like to think Wittgenstein (of the Phil Inv at least) would agree with this too.
Tangentially, this is why Habermas is surely wrong to see Hegel’s Absolute Knowing as having fallen back on a model of the individual mind and to have lost the achievements of Geist construed inter-subjectively. Absolute Knowing is, after all, internally related to mutual recognition, i.e. the free interaction of human beings beyond a condition of alienation. by YH October 21, 2008 at 10:00 am

Yes, this seems right. I have no particular attachment to the phrase ‘work on oneself’, especially if it is taken to exclude dialogical, traditional, cultural or environmental pressures as the impetus to philosophical development. In fact, this extends to thought in general, which is always a matter of both the spontaneous activity of agents and their receptivity to the non-subjective conditions which they find themselves in; and sociality obviously has an integral role here. The intersubjectivity of Geist points to the unavoidable influence that others have in prompting individuals to cognitive-cum-emotional activity and in shaping the horizons within which such activity takes place. Philosophy is, of course, no exception to this. by Tom (Grundlegung) October 21, 2008 at 2:45 pm

I was wondering what you made of a thought that’s been floating around here recently. I suspect that you might agree, and I think I do too. In the context of discussions of ‘experimental philosophy’ people often say that, for example, experiments that point to the effects of the environment on intuitions should lead to scepticism about those judgments. But as these cases are set up the problems alleged will apply to all judgments. So we get a kind of global scepticism. This looks like a reductio of the experimentalist’s position.
If I read your post right you have a different sort of reason for rejecting some sorts of experimental philosophy, because it’s anti-humanist. But this other line of thought looks like it’s coming from a similar motivation. by Tom October 22, 2008 at 1:11 pm

In Process Thought, Whitehead describes God as All-Compassion

Against Natural Theology by cjsmith Indistinct Union
These are some scattered thoughts arising in relation to a paper I’m working on for a class in Process Theology.

Alfred North Whitehead godfather of Process Thought argued for a God within his overall cosmological system. Fairly unique contribution relative to modern era philosophers in that regard. So Process Thought is deeply imbued with a Natural Theological strain. David Ray Griffin one of the godsons (I suppose) of Process Theology wrote a classic text arguing for a new Christian natural theology.
Natural Theology is the belief that arguments at the level of reason alone can be proferred to prove the existence of God. Usually these arguments grow from a study/interpretation of the natural world.
One of the classic arguments in this regard is Thomas Aquinas’ Argument from Necessity.
Observing that every being in nature requires another being for its existence (i.e. everybody has ‘rent[s] in the universe) Aquinas argued that therefore the entire universe was (in the parlance) contingent. And therefore the universe itself required a being to bring about its existence. Namely God.
The problem with this theory is the extrapolation from individual cases to the universal. Just because all beings in the universe require a cause does not mean the universe is the same as individual beings. Aquinas to his credit did leave open the possibility that the Universe was eternal (though intriguingly for the purposes of my argument he believed the universe had a beginning in time because the Church said so–i.e. it was an article of faith).
He argued that the Universe could not have existed (true) and therefore there must have been a Necessary Being to get the universe going (wrong). Or rather why would that being be Necessary and not simply another in a causal chain? [Aquinas has to assert without evidence that an infinite causal chain can not be--but why is that automatically the case?]. The argument only functions if you can prove that there is no infinite causal chain. But you can’t prove there is no infinite causal chain without proving a Necessary Being (i.e. the difference between causing to be and causing to exist I would argue is already a theological distinction which assumes that which it is supposed to prove) but you can’t prove the Necessary Being without proving there is no infinite causal chain which in turn you can’t prove without proving a Necessary Being which you can’t prove without proving no infinite causal chain, which you can’t…..and you see the circularity.
Later came the classic argument from design–that the Universe was like a watch and therefore just as a watch required a watchmaker so the Universe requires a designer. Of course the idea that the universe is like a watch is a human construct and metaphor. It’s a human interpretation. It’s an interpretation btw of a well educated, Western European in the modern period (like William Paley who wrote this in the 19th century) because watch making was considered a high art and technology in his day.
What both of these arguments are getting at and what I think can be established through science and philosophy is that there is Eros or a potential for Emergence in the Universe (see footnote26). But that is nowhere near the same as proving the existence of a God.
The question of a god/God is always part of a religious tradition. It is always part and parcel of the intersubjective, linguistic reality in which we are formed. Natural theology being a 3rd person “ITS” view of things, forgets the inter-subjective construction of reality and believes there is a way to get to The Objective Truth once and for all. [Classic modernist fallacy].
How that this shakes out in practice is something along what the lines of Derrida describes as the absent shaping the present. In Process Thought, Whitehead describes God as All-Compassion (Love). But why would be the case? In a certain strand of Buddhism, for example, there is the concept of the alaya vijnana (the so-called Store House Consciousness). Which is also elsewhere called the Causal Consciousness. The store house ’stores’ all the memories of the Kosmos in a way very similar to how Whitehead’s Process God is the one who integrates all reality into itself and re-members it. (Everything is redeemed through the Divine’s Memory).
Now of course the Process view has an evolutionary twist that the store house lacks–since evolution was not understood in the intersubjective when the notion arose in Buddhism. But notice in the Store House concept is no necessary description of Love per se. Because that is a construct built out of the Biblical heritage.

Which is exactly my point–back to Derrida for a second. The absent is theology and the intersubjective. [Whitehead's philosophy is only partially intersubjective not fully so]. Because Whitehead, as the son of an Anglican clergyman, grew up in the Anglican tradition of Holiness/Beauty of God, this has to be background for his philosophy. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it just means the idea that this provable from the exterior world or from interior (individual-subjective only) reflection is way off base. Published in: Christianity Hermeneutics Integral Religion philosophy theology on October 15, 2008 at 8:17 am Tags: Alfred North Whitehead, Jacques Derrida, Process Theology

One Comment Leave a comment. On October 15, 2008 at 9:28 am MD Said:
As usual, you leave out all that which complicates your little theories and so-called scattered thoughts (thinking to myself, and your “scattered thoughts” differs from your actual thinking, how?)
The argument using Reason for the existence of God requires one grapple with more than you demonstrate above (and more than you have ever demonstrated, given your fly-by thinking, pathetic routine):
1) what it means to “make” versus “bringing about the conditions for making” 2) what it means to be a contingent being (the consequences of that fact), a conclusion that appears to be opinion but is actually truth akin to 1+1=2 3) what it means to define God in entirely negative terms (i.e., the theological consequences of that entirely correct approach) 4) the percept space (not the concept space) that emerges when one devote meditation to these questions, and to the consequences of God defined in this way
(the importance of point 4, in case you can’t read well, is that it renders your Wilberian “ITS” enterprise moot)
I might add the point that the fact that you introduce Derrida to this mix is not only laughable, but further indication of how in the tank you are for postmodernist word-games, and how bottom line unseriously you take these matters, and the meditative tradition within Christianity that blew over the simpleton ideas of Derrida and the like long before he was miraculously made into a human being by some non-human, necessary being of which we know nothing.

We just behave as though people were free, and therefore responsible. It is an article of faith, not of logic

Thoughts, Books, and Philosophy The Critical Synopses of J.H. Bowden Home About Freedom and Its Betrayal Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) Further reading: David Stove, On Enlightenment This entry was posted on October 5, 2008 at 4:46 pm and is filed under philosophy, politics. Tagged: Isaiah Berlin. 5:04 PM

Freedom and Its Betrayal presented six portraits of thinkers, five progressives and one conservative, who opposed human liberty. Berlin skillfully identified each philosopher’s central vision of life, that is, life as it should be. The selected progressives– Helvetius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, and Saint-Simon, each begin by championing human liberty, only to end with a principle or system opposing it. The token conservative, Maistre, consistently opposed liberty.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) believed that liberty is the recognition of necessity. Like the Oracle from The Matrix, we’ve already made the choice; we only need to understand why we made it. Hegel’s philosophy resembles the music of Beethoven– an organic, self-animating totality, a living system of developing intensity uncontrollably driving toward a ringing, predetermined end. Hegel believed understanding something involved knowing its ultimate purpose, its uniting completion. History itself is a story of human creation, human imagination, human wills, and human intentions. Describing all of this in terms of mind-independent particles on an x-y-z grid was unintelligible to Hegel– we cannot even understand a flower in this manner, for function is important. Hegel’s reality at basis resembles what humans do and feel, for his universe itself is the self-development of the world spirit. If one doesn’t grasp the pattern, one doesn’t understand. Development proceeds by the dialectic; I dare not call it a mechanism. This progressive cosmos develops by a dynamism of clashing forces. Conflict is the symptom of health, evolution, growth, the flowing of life. Since the pattern is more fundamental than the individual, it follows that the Absolute’s march through the universe takes place through the vehicle of the state. The wish to be is the wish to be rational, and what is rational is what triumphs– the collective. This has led critics, including Berlin, to assert that Hegel worshiped power, and power alone.

Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) saw himself as the messiah of the new, progressive age. Berlin portrayed Saint-Simon’s mind as a choatic mind buzzing with confusion and chaos, brilliance alternating with nonsense. Saint-Simon wanted to liberate mankind by forging a world federation resembling something akin to Star Trek. Unlike like the utilitarians, Saint-Simon’s imagination did not take abstract and relational forms, but worked through the concrete and the situational in the spirit of the later pragmatists. Saint-Simon introduced a technological interpretation of human history; the superstructure of our culture is determined by the technological possibilities of the economic base. He was also responsible for introducing the idea of defining social entities in terms of a civilization’s means of production. Saint-Simon’s world allowed the best to reach the top based on merit, and it also, through Councils of Newton, would construct a centralized industrial plan benefiting everyone, including society’s lowest members. Saint-Simon had the mind of an engineer– nothing is stable, nothing is absolute, everything evolves, and the innovative is always the best. Saint-Simon, like modern progressives, was also an elitist; he honestly stated that good government excludes self-government. The masses can never know this, so activists for change must also build a double morality, a set of rules for radicals.

Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), the Voltaire of conservatism, literally preached darkness and mystery. Maistre found only bloodshed and suffering in human history, not peace and harmony. Order can only be achieved by the threat of pain, via punishment or war. Maistre looked directly at man, and found no noble savages, only savages everywhere, creatures innately vicious, wicked, and cowardly. Central to Maistre’s pessimistic philosophy is the idea that rationalist notions do not work. Whatever is irrational survives; whatever is rational perishes. With the experience of the French Revolution, Maistre found it absolutely imprudent to destroy diversity in the name of equality. If man is constituted by instinct, superstition, and prejudice– the beliefs and habits of the centuries tested by experience– one opens the gates of hell by purifying man, or even attempting to liberate him. The irrational mist of contingent mysteries that constitute Maistre’s universe cannot be integrated into any natural purpose. Man must return to obedience and subjection; authority and power are intimations of the divine. Criticism, questioning, and science were all signs of malice. The same spirit of Maistre’s stoic and relativist philosophy flowed through the mindset of the 19th century Russian Tsars.

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Isiah Berlin was not in the first league of philosophers. He was not sufficiently inventive or dogmatic...These essays are a perfect introduction to Berlin and his life-long preoccupation: the "problem" of the Enlightenment...

In Liberty (Oxford, £12.99), a newly reprinted and augmented version of his 1969 Four Essays on Liberty, he agonises on another piece of Enlightenment fall-out. If man is a part of nature, then his thoughts and actions are "determined". In which case, what can liberty consist in? Berlin lamely says that lots of people who insist that man is determined (eg the Marxists) go on to exhort people to this or that (revolution, say) as though they were free to choose. He could more simply have said: we just behave as though people were free, and therefore responsible. It is an article of faith, not of logic. By Richard D North The perils of idealism Monday, 29 July 2002 Home > Arts & Entertainment > Books > Reviews > Freedom and Its Betrayal: six enemies of human liberty, by Isaiah Berlin

The power of sportive self-entanglement in the flux of becoming

Space, Time and Eternity DR. HARIDAS CHAUDHURI SRI AUROBINDO MANDIR ANNUAL No. 9 15th August, 1950 ON THE OCCASION OF THE 78th BIRTHDAY OF SRI AUROBINDO SRI AUROBINDO PATHAMANDIR CALCUTTA

TIME AS THE SUPREME CREATIVE PRINCIPLE

While Spinoza holds that all material objects are modes of space or extension, Bergson contends that all the objects of our experience are deposits of the movement of time. For Spinoza, space is something basic, it is some sort of stuff, a view from which, as we shall see later on, Alexander takes his clue, though space conceived as a stuff is undoubtedly in his opinion an attribute of one infinite substance. For Bergson it is time which is funda- mental, and all phenomena are precipitated within the flux of time. Time is not only objectively and independently real, it is the one ultimately real creative principle. And this time, the essence of which is duration and free creation, is to be conceived as absolutely free from spatiality. Bergson agrees with Gentile that reciprocal exclusion of the elements of the manifold is of the essence of space. Space which is thus envisaged as a principle of reci- procal exclusion is a shadow of the intellect; it is said to be correlative to our thought which is weighted with geometry. Bergson disagrees with Gentile with regard to the nature of multiplicity. While, according to Gentile,, all objective multiplicity is necessarily mutually exclusive and spatial, according to Bergson, there may be non-spatial multiplicity. Time is, in Bergson's view, an interfused and interpenetrating multiplicity involved in one creative urge; it is an indivisible creative act or movement. It is our intellectual habit of employing spatial metaphors that prevents an undistorted vision of the nature of time. That same habit is responsible for our conception of physical space-time or of equable and homogeneous mathematical time. The intellect, by virtue of its cinematographic mechanism, finds it practically necessary or useful to take static snapshot views of the continuous mobility of time. These immobile snapshots are then placed in juxtaposition in space...

THE EPOCHAL THEORY OF TIME

Like Russell, Whitehead also subscribes to the relational theory of space and time. According to Whitehead, the fundamental fact is the passing of nature, its development, its creative advance. "Actual entities", "actual occasions", or "events", which are involved in the creative advance of Nature, are also extensive one in relation to another. Time and space ori- ginate as abstractions from these two basic facts, namely, the passage of events and the extension of events over each other. Space, however, differen- tiates itself from time, in Whitehead's opinion, at a somewhat developed stage of the abstractive process. Space and time are not, of course, abstrac- tions in the sense that they do not express real facts for us. When White- head calls them abstractions, he means to assert that there are no spatial facts or temporal facts or even spatio-temporal facts apart from physical nature. Space and time are, in his opinion, merely ways of expressing cettain truths about the relations between events. Moreover, what we mean by space or time under one set of circumstances is not what we mean by space or time under another set of circumstances. The fundamental and more general scheme of relations of which space and time are speciali- sations is what Whitehead calls "the extensive continuum". This extensive continuum is not a fact prior to the world; it is the first determination of order that is, of real potentiality arising out of the genral character of the world...

SPACE AND TIME AS RELATIVE, BUT NOT RELATIONAL

Professor Alexander, who is in dead earnest with the reality of space and time, repudiates the relational theory as expounded by Russell and White- head. Space and time are v/ithout doubt relative to each other, but still, in his opinion, they can hardly be treated as relational schemes abstracted from a concrete stuff of sense-data or actual occasions of experience. Nor is space-time a form of matter, as Einstein suggests. Alexander is emphatic in his assertion that space-time is the fundamental stuff of all things; it is, in his picturesque pharaseology, "the matrix of all existence and the nurse of all becoming." Space-Time is the fundamental stuff, not of course in the traditional sense of substance, but in so far as it is the world in its simplest form of expression; it is the primordial form of existence within which all empirical things are differentiated as finite complexes of motion. An empirical thing, say an orange or even a patch of colour, not only occu- pies a definite portion of space-time, but is itself extended and enduring. Space-time may be said to penetrate into its very essence and being. So, the question is forced into our mind. What would be the relation between the spatio-temporal essence of a thing and the portion of space-time which it externally occupies? A very embarrassing question this! Alexander holds that the relation between space-time and empirical existents is not, to be sure, an external one. Taking his clue from Spinoza, he maintains that all material objects are modes of space or extension, or, to be more accurate and in keeping with modern ways of thinking, they are spatio-tem- poral configurations differentiated by some empirical emergent quality...

In McTaggart's philosophy we find that a serious attempt is made to demonstrate the synthetic character of space and time as both subjective and objective. He calls them phenomena bene fundata in as much as they are not mere phenomena in Kant's sense of the term, but are such phenomena as correspond to some indisputable features of ultimate reality. Space is cha- racterised by co-existence of a plurality of reciprocally exclusive parts and by infinite divisibility of these parts. Now, the features of co-existence, reciprocal exclusion, and infinite divisibility are ultimately real, because according to McTaggart reality consists of an impersonal unity of a plurality self-subsistent spiritual substances or selves, which are mutually exclusive in respect of their existence. The nature of each of these self-subsistent selves is infinitely divisible, the terms in the process of such division being perceptions of other selves and their perceptions. What is erroneous or illusory about space is its appearance as an attribute of matter or as locus of the existence of matter. McTaggart advances an array of close-knit arguments to demonstrate the unreality of matter...

SPACE-TIME AS SELF-EXTENSION OF THE SPIRIT

It should be abundantly clear from the foregoing discussion that according to the Integral Idealism of Sri Aurobindo the fundamental reality of space-time is spiritual self-extension of ultimate reality. Reality is, in its original status and intrinsic nature, the spaceless and timeless Spirit. Space and time are the same Reality self-extended to contain the deployment of what is within it. Now, the self-extension of the infinite and eternal Spirit must be infinite and eternal too. So it may be said that the fundamental truth of space is the infinity of the Infinite, whereas the fundamental truth of time is the eternity of the Eternal. This doctrine of the spiritual essence of space-time would not in the least be affected by the diversity of interpre- tation that might be placed upon the spacific relationship between space and time. The spiritual theory of space and time may primarily be under- stood to mean that Space is Brahman as self-extended status, and Time is Brahman as self-extended movement. This implies that Space is a static extension *n which all things stand or move together in a fixed order, and Time is a mobile extension which is measured by movement and flux of events. But such a construction would be based upon our prima facie inaccurate impressions about space and time. The truth perhaps is that Space is Brahman as self-extended for the holding together of forms and objects, and Time is Brahman as self-extended for the deployment of the movement of self-power carrying forms and objects. Such a view would make Space and Time not two different kinds of self-extension, but two inseparable aspects of one and the same self-extension of the cosmic Eternal.

Bradley has drawn the attention of the philosophic world to the existence of different spaces and different times. In addition to one all-embracing physical space, there are different dream-spaces, imaginary spaces, and the conceptual space that functions as the habitat of our different concepts. Similarly, in addition to one all-embracing physical time there are dream times and the imaginary times that belong to our different stories. The commonsense method of understanding this multiplicity of different spaces and different times is to affirm the reality of physical space and physical time alone, and to relegate the rest of it to the realm of pure illusion. Prof. Alexander, a neo-realist that he is, cannot but accord reality to mental spaces and mental times, but he takes considerable pains to show that the latter have spatio-temporal connection with, and consequently fall within, the one all-emcompassing physical Space-Time. Mr. Bradley maintains that mental spaces do no doubt possess a type of reality of their own, but still they cannot be said to have any spatial connection with the physical space which is as much a product of ideal construction as they themselves are. In his judgment, the different kinds of space, physical and mental, can be united in the Absolute only in some sort of non-spatial unity. Simi- larly, mental times such as belong to dreams and stories cannot be said to have any temporal connection with the physical time which is as much an ideal construction as the former. So, the different kinds of time, physical and mental, can be united in the Absolute only in some sort of non-temporal unity.

Integral Idealism holds that different spaces and different times which are relative to different states of consciousness do surely enjoy each a spacific type of reality of its own. But, according to Integral Idealism, the fundamental truth and essential basis of the wide diversity of spaces and times is neither one physical space-time as Alexander holds, nor one mys- terious all-engulfing Whole that swallows them up beyond recognition as Bradley suggests, but the self-extension of the creative Spirit. All times and spaces are, as Sri Auiobindo puts it, "renderings of a fundamental spiritual reality of Time-Space." ...

As Sri Aurobindo testifies 'out mind can move in its own space in such a way as to effectuate a movement also in space of Matter or act upon something distant in space of Matter!- But behind this mental extension, there is a stil! higher kind of extenson, a pure spiritual space, which contains within itself the secret essence of phy- sical space. A man can step back into this higher kind of extension by a mighty effort of concentration. From pure spiritual space which is revealed to the inward eye of the soul time seems to drop away, as there is no perception of any change or movement there. It is this timeless spiritual extension which manifests itself in the shape of the subjective mind-field at the level of the pure mind, and in the shape of the objective field of senseperception at the level of the sense-mind. Similarly, by drawing back from the physical time by inward spiritual movement, it is possible to have an increasing insight into the essence of the temporal. Just as the ultimate truth about the nature of space is the infinity of the Infinite, so also the ultimate truth about the nature of time is the eternity of the Eternal.

We, human beings, involved as we are in the movement of time, are tied down to the passing moment in respect of immediate experience. Moving along with the movement of time, we can lay hold only of very tiny temporal fragments that go to constitute our ever-shifting specious present. The past and the future alike are to us but ideal constructions. But though we cannot directly perceive the past and the future, we construct the time- process in our imagination as a beginningless and endless series, as an eternal movement, flow or stream. Now, critical reflection can never reconcile itself to such a beginningless and endless movement of time. The infinite time-process, which is for us an ideal construction, must also be capable of being directly experienced in order that it may be said to be concretely real.

Royce suggests that just as a definite length of time, however small, the specious present that contains a rearward and forward-looking end, is immediately given to the finite span of human consciousness, similarly the whole time-process with its three periods of past, present and future, must be immediately present in a flash of intuition to the "Eternal Now" or the infinite span of consciousness of the Absolute.

Royce maintains that it is utter folly to denounce the infinite time-process as a "bad infinite". Even when considered as a conceptual construction, the time-series, properly understood, is quite self-coherent and satisfactory to the intellect. Modern mathematics has amply demonstrated that the concept of the serial infinite is quite intelligible as a self-imaging or self-representative system (as a "kette"). It is present at a stroke to our thought by means of its defining concept. But in order that the time-process may gain concrete reality, it must also have a place, in Royce's opinion, in some all-inclusive immediate expe- rience. It must be present indeed as a "totum simul" to the infinite span of consciousness of the Divine. "The eternal insight", as Royce puts it, "observes the whole of time and all that happens therein, and is eternal only by virtue of the fact that it does know the whole of time".

But the infinite order of time is not only concretely real as an object of immediate consciousness of God, it is not simply a totum simul., it is also, as Pringle Pattison points out, a singificant whole embraced in the Divine Consciousness which at the same time transcends it. It is significant as a teleological scheme, the successive moments of time being different stages in the progressive realisation of the Divine Will or Purpose. It is to this fact of being sustained by the Divine Will that the infinite process of time owes its unity and continuity. If, however, we are to follow the indications of spiritual experience, we cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that there is also an aspect of conscious- ness, a poise of being of the Spirit, to which the category of time is simply inapplicable. The Spirit in its supracosmic transcendence is characterised by timeless eternity. In respect of its immediate status or self-absorbed essentiality, the Absolute is without any development of consciousness in movement or happening. But since supra-cosmic transcendence, cosmic universality, and intnv-cosmic individuality are, in the view of Integral Idealism, only different poises of being of the same Supreme Spirit, so timelessness, totum simul, and time-movement, are but different statuses or positions taken by consciousness with regard to the same Eternal Reality. While Bradley's conception of eternity as the transmuted essence of time is true of the Spirit in its self-absorption, Royce's view of eternity as a totum simul or as the whole-consciousness of an infinite succession is true of the Spirit in its cosmic universality or dynamic creativity, and the ordinary view of eternity as an endless march of time is true of the Spirit in its individual entanglement in the creative flux.

It must not be supposed that the different presentations of the Eternal as described above are incapable of existing together, so that they are only successive phases either in our apprehension of reality or in the gradual self-alienation of reality itself. It must not, for example, be supposed that when the timeless experience of the Absolute is attained, the embracing consciousness of time as a totum simul or the simultaneous integrality of Time as well as the advancing consciousness of the time-movement must forthwith melt away like vanishing mist. It must not also be supposed that God cannot at the same time have an aspect of timeless experience and an aspect of inclusive consciousness of the entire time-process. Timelessness, eternal now, and endless succession are in fact the same Eternity in its different forms relative to the different poises of being of the Spirit. They form a simultaneous multiplicity of self-presentations of the same Reality; they correspond to different powers of self-awareness of the Supreme, the power of status and non-manifestation, the power of self-effectuating action, and the power of sportive self-entanglement in the flux of becoming. God in His unmanifest essentiality is eneffably non- temporal; God in His self-manifestting creativity is inclusive of the temporal; and God in His self-alienated embodiment moves long with the movement of the temporal.