Foundations of Indian Culture: the Veda, the Upanishads, & the Gita

Volume 14		Vedic and Philological Studies (TO BE PUBLISHED) Writings on the Veda and philology, and translations of Vedic hymns to gods other than Agni not published during Sri Aurobin do's lifetime. The material includes (1) drafts for The Secret of the Veda, (2) translations (simple translations and analytical and discursive ones) of hymns to gods other than Agni, (3) notes on the Veda, (4) essays and notes on philology, and (5) some texts that Sri Aurobindo called "Writings in Different Languages". Most of this material was written between 1912 and 1914 and is published here for the first time in a book.
Volume 15		PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 The Secret of the Veda Essays on the Rig Veda and its mystic symbolism, with transla tions of selected hymns. These writings on and translations of the Rig Veda were published in the monthly review Arya between 1914 and 1920. Most of them appeared there under three headings: The Secret of the Veda, "Selected Hymns" and "Hymns of the Atris". Other translations that did not appear under any of these headings make up the final part of the volume.	2.12MB
Volume 16		Hymns to the Mystic Fire (TO BE PUBLISHED) All translations of Vedic hymns to Agni; and related writings. The material includes all the contents of Hymns to the Mystic Fire(translations of hymns to Agni from the Rig Veda, with a Foreword by Sri Aurobindo) as well as translations of many other hymns to Agni, some of which are published here for the first time.
Volume 17		PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 Upanishads-I : Isha Upanishad Translations of and commentaries on the Isha Upanishad. The volume is divided into two parts: (1) Sri Aurobindo’s final translation and analysis of the Isha Upanishad. This small work contains his definitive interpretation of the Upanishad. It is the only writing in this volume published during his lifetime; (2) ten incomplete commentaries on the Isha. Ranging from a few pages to more than a hundred, these commentaries show the devel opment of his interpretation of this Upanishad from around 1900 to the middle of 1914.	1.82MB
Volume 18		PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 Upanishads-II : Kena and Other Upanishads Translations of and commentaries on Upanishads other than the Isha Upanishad. The volume is divided into two parts: (1) translations of and commentaries on the Kena, Katha and Mundaka Upanishads and some "Readings in the Taittiriya Upanishad"; (2) early translations of the Prashna, Mandukya, Aitareya and Taittariya Upanishads; incom plete translations of and commentaries on other Upanishads and Vedantic texts; and incomplete and fragmentary writings on the Upanishads and Vedanta in general. The writings in the first part were published by Sir Aurobindo during his lifetime; those in the second part were transcribed from his manuscripts after his passing.	1.36MB
Volume 19		PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 Essays on the Gita Essays on the philosophy and method of self-discipline presented in the Bhagavad Gita. These essays were first published in the monthly review Arya be tween 1916 and 1920 and revised in the 1920s by Sri Aurobindo for publication as a book.	1.91MB
Volume 20		PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 The Renaissance in India with A Defence of Indian Culture Essays on the value of Indian civilisation and culture. This volume consists of three series of essays and one single essay: (1) "The Renaissance in India", (2) "Indian Culture and External Influence", (3) "Is India Civilised?" and (4) "Defence of Indian Culture". They were first published in the monthly review Arya between 1918 and 1921. In 1953, they first appeared in a book under the title The Foundations of Indian Culture.	2.50MB

Agency is always a human-nonhuman collective

On the call from outside from The Immanent Frame by Jane Bennett

In Akeel Bilgrami’s contribution to Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, “enchantment” refers to the historical belief that God or his divine expression is accessible to the everyday world of “matter and nature and human community and perception.”

In the wake of Schiller’s critique of Kantian morality as too disembodied (echoed in Foucault’s work on ethical ascesis), I understand ethics as requiring both  principled beliefs (and duties) and also a set of  moods, sensibilities, and bodily comportments hospitable to carrying them out.  My contention is that the intensity of the compound mood of enchantment (wonder/disturbance) could serve as one impetus to ethical action, insofar as it contributes the energy or motive force needed to render human bodies capable of jumping the gap between mere conviction that a course of action is good and the actual doing of the deed.  What Spinoza called the “joyful” affects are needed to energize a body called upon—by habit, sympathy, or reason—to love, forgive, treat with compassion or minimized harm to (an ontologically diverse range of) others.    In short, I think that, under the right circumstances, the mood of enchantment, which entails the experience of the outside as making a call, can be an important part of ethics.

Bilgrami, too, is interested in the ethical implications of enchantment. He begins with the intriguing claim that the call from outside serves as the very condition of possibility of human will and therefore agency: to desire to have or to do something is to experience that thing or activity as “desirable rather than as desired,” as, in other words, a response to an external call.   What is more, the very experience of ourselves as moral subjects depends upon this experience of a world of outside objects: “in the very moment and act of perceiving values without, we also perceive ourselves within, as subjects rather than as objects.  The experience of value without and agency within are not two different and independent experiences.” In short, “it is only because the world itself contains desirabilities (or values) that we perceive that our agency really gets triggered or activated.  The very possibility of agency therefore assumes an evaluatively enchanted world.”

Based as it is upon an assertion of the constitutive interdependence of the notions of subject and object, this argument makes good sense.  But it also reveals the extent to which Bilgrami and I have different views of human agency—what composes it, how it is activated and sustained.  I think that human agency is best conceived as the effect of a perspicuous configuration of human and nonhuman forces.  When humans act, they do not exercise exclusively human powers, but express and inflect the powers of a variety of “foreign” bodies internal to them, including bacteria in the human gut, heavy metals absorbed into flesh, words and sounds from human and nonhuman cultures, etc.  There is a difference between these nonhuman actants and a human (compound) individual, but neither considered alone has real agency.  The locus of agency is always a human-nonhuman collective.

The Subject of Being from Silika Mohapatra

Even though Aristotle is driven towards concretion in both (a) asking the question “What is being” in terms of “What is primary being”, and (b) in offering an exhaustive categorial determination of all things in the world, he seems to fall short of the step that would yield fuller concretion. In fact, it is implausible to hold that any claims to the concretion of being can bypass or underestimate the ‘who’ of the question of being.

The question of meaning of Being cannot be isolated from the one who interrogates. In the act of asking the question: ‘What is being?’ Aristotle seems to gloss over the fact that Being is an issue for the one who asks that question. To lay it out in another way, in merely keeping to the ontical-categorial framework, Aristotle devalues the ontological priority of the question.

It is to address this skew that Heidegger’s Dasein steps into the picture. In asking the question of meaning of Being, rather than simply ‘What is Being’, Heidegger creates the need for Dasein itself and retrieves the quest for being. Dasein is that ‘being which is concerned in its being about its being’ (Heidegger: Being and Time). Da is a German word referring to place, though it also has a temporal aspect to it – ‘there/here, at this time’. Sein, on the other hand means ‘to be’ or ‘to exist’. This renders Dasein a meaning of ‘existing-there-or-here-then’. The essence of Dasein lies in its existence and not in its substance.

In his ontological framework laid out in Categories, with great emphasis, Aristotle attempts to distinguish substance from subject and yet his subject appears most substance-like, without any subjectivity. Aristotle’s main complaint against his predecessors is the absence of logical clarity of terms in their systems, but he himself doesn’t clarify what he means by a ‘subject’ and how it is to be properly distinguished from a substance, even in situations which appear to demand an explicit articulation. It is interesting that Aristotle uses multiple instances of ‘a man’ to illustrate his discussion of being in Categories, Physics and Metaphysics. But he uses it as a mere substantive ‘man’ and not as a subjective ‘man’. A particular entity like a man, the locus of primary being for Aristotle could satisfactorily be replaced by a particular table or a clay pot and is therefore dramatically different from the Dasein of Heidegger. This is because even though Dasein can be conceived of as merely ontical like a clay pot, the fact that it has the possibility to be concerned with whether its being is merely ontical (or not) is an issue for it, is certainly ontological in character.

Cognition, computation, & music

The Primacy of Grammar - Nirmalangshu Mukherji - 2010 - 296 pages - Preview A proposal that the biolinguistic approach to human languages may have identified, beyond the study of language, a specific structure of the human mind.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"It is a sign of maturity for any given field that a philosopher should reflect on its foundations. When the philosopher understands the field in its technical minutiae, it is a privilege, even a contribution. Moreover, given its approach and scope, a work like Mukherji’s should reach a wide audience beyond linguistics, which is vital for the dissemination of the biolinguistics project that he elegantly introduces." —Juan Uriagereka, Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland

"This wide-ranging monograph provides a masterly and lucid overview of Chomsky’s ‘biolinguistics’ enterprise and builds on it to offer a novel account of the nature of the human faculty of language. The core of that faculty is our tacit knowledge of grammar, the unique domain where the methodology of the hard sciences has been fruitfully applied to human cognition. In a tightly argued and challenging discussion, Mukherji goes on to suggest that there is a single computational system (essentially Chomsky’s C_HL—the computational system of human language) underlying all of language, music, mathematics and logic (the ‘hominid set’). He defends this speculative thesis with insightful discussion of music, both Indian and Western, and ends with the striking suggestion that C_HL is the unique computational system in nature. Mukherji’s work is likely to trigger admiration and outrage in equal measure. It is an elegant achievement." —Neil Smith, Department of Linguistics, University College London

Product Description

The contemporary discipline of biolinguistics is beginning to have the feel of scientific inquiry. Biolinguistics—especially the work of Noam Chomsky—suggests that the design of language may be "perfect": language is an optimal solution to conditions of sound and meaning. What is the scope of this inquiry? Which aspect of nature does this science investigate? What is its relation to the rest of science? What notions of language and mind are under investigation? This book is a study of such foundational questions. Exploring Chomsky's claims, Nirmalangshu Mukherji argues that the significance of biolinguistic inquiry extends beyond the domain of language.

Biolinguistics is primarily concerned with grammars that represent just the computational aspects of the mind/brain. This restriction to grammars, Mukherji argues, opens the possibility that the computational system of human language may be involved in each cognitive system that requires similar computational resources. Deploying analytical argumentation and empirical evidence, Mukherji suggests that a computational system of language consisting of very specific principles and operations is likely to be involved in each articulatory symbol system—such as music—that manifests unboundedness. In that sense, the biolinguistics approach may have identified, after thousands of years of inquiry, a specific structure of the human mind.

A Bradford Book About the Author

Nirmalangshu Mukherji is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Delhi.

Enormous, illusory, powerful, and spectral presences as the “defining” features of the human condition

I hope you like circles from The Immanent Frame by Kerry Mitchell

I want to begin my contribution to this discussion on the politics of spirituality by highlighting the tension-fraught relationship between theoretical self-reflexivity and empirical study. […]

Further, I would suggest that this ethos of autology resonates with certain political traditions that embed self-sufficient self-service into their conceptual armature, notably the liberal democratic one. Freedom and the self. Individuals that choose their own way, breaking away from tradition. Spiritual and not religious. It is in this sense that circular definitions of spirituality and more linear, “objective” studies of spirituality in the world can come together. If one admits the nebulous swirl of self-grounding groundlessness as a feature of the world and not simply a feature of (misguided) analysis, then one may come closer to understanding the social construction of spirituality and the role that spirituality can play in the formation of the polis.

I take as my foundation an interest in and commitment to understanding religiosity in its more unconscious, habitual, automatic, instinctive, and just plain unclear dimensions. I start here not only because of the implausibility of the image of the human as a theoretically transparent, self-aware, self-possessing entity (who believes that or ever did?), but because equally implausible, or at least incomplete, is the characterization of knowledge through terms of transparency, awareness, and possession. If one instead follows the lead of, among others, Herman Melville in his suggestion of the enormous, illusory, powerful, and spectral presences as the “defining” features of the current human condition, then an interest in religion will not look to its clearest dimensions but to its vagueness. And this has driven my interest in spirituality. […]

In another piece I treated the techniques for managing spiritual experience in national parks. Here I turn to the self-reflections of park visitors on their spiritual experience, focusing particularly on the implications of that experience for their relationship to the collectivities of community, nation, and state. […] Hints of the influence of management on spirituality can be seen in references to the atmosphere of the parks. One respondent said, “I just feel that national parks are just such a beautiful example of God’s handiwork and God’s creation. […] The state works most powerfully in the parks through absences: through managing space in such a way as to remove or minimize polluting stimuli, including its own speech (interpretive panels and ranger talks obey a strict principle of economy, of not getting “in the way”). In those absences and silences, circles form. Perceptions of the environment, however intensively managed that environment may in fact be, turn into experiences of nature, self, and god. The political dimension of such experience is largely unspoken. But in its particular embodied characteristics, such experience is structurally dependent on a certain exercise of state power. In this way the politics of spirituality may have little to do with thoughts about elections or particular government officials. But it has much to do with creating a space for significant governmental presence in both personal and collective life.

(title unknown) from enowning 

Steven B. Smith reviews the Faye book for the Claremont Review of Books.

“In his single-mindedness to convict Heidegger, Faye overlooks the fact that Heidegger's life work was focused almost single-mindedly on one problem, the problem of Being. Our forgetfulness of this problem—this fundamental problem—is what he regarded as the root of modern nihilism. ForHeidegger, everything turned on a recovery of the problem of Being, without which life would become increasingly shallow, forgetful, and meaningless. He posed the question—if not perhaps with the greatest clarity, certainly with the greatest depth—who has responsibility for Being? At its best, his work is a call for a renewed sense of responsibility. It is the merit of Faye's book that he shows us how Heidegger, who did nothing but preach responsibility for Being, abnegated this responsibility because he did nothing but think of Being.”

Roy Bhaskar, Stengers, Haraway, Hayles, Luhmann, Protevi, and Toscano

Mark Fisher on Deconstruction from Larval Subjects 

Are we restricted to Derrida, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Husserl, Levinas, Lacan, etc., or are we able to treat thinkers like Lewontin, Oyama, Stephen J. Gould, Luhmann, and so on as key thinkers.

An interesting feature of speculative realism and other new trends in philosophy is that they all propose a new canon. While Badiou is not a speculative realist, we nonetheless see him proposing to treat Cantor and Sartre’s later thought (largely ignored and passe today) as key references. Graham recommends Zubiri, Gasset, Latour, and Suarez as key points of reference. Meillassoux resurrects Hume (never popular or revered in continental circles outside of Deleuzians). Brassier champions the Churchlands and Laruelle. Morton makes Darwin a key point of reference. Bogost draws attention to thinkers like McLuhan and Wolfram. I hope to have made some small contribution by introducing Roy Bhaskar, Stengers, Haraway, Hayles, Luhmann, the developmental systems theorists (along with Protevi and Toscano), and a number of biological theorists. Changes in the canon are also changes in patterns of thought and in what it is possible to say and think.

Minotaurs from Larval Subjects

Additionally, it’s my view that a number of Continental texts are designed as labyrinths such that they are rhetorically put together in precisely such a way as to trap the reader and provide no means of moving on. A good deal of Hegel is like this. Derrida is certainly like this. Lacan is like this. Much of Luhmann is like this. Deleuze is like this. (Note that I’ve cited four thinkers here who are huge influences in my own thought). These texts are put together in vague, elliptical, allusive, and polysemous ways so as to prevent the reader from pinning them down. In the case of Hume, Kant, Descartes, and Spinoza, I can readily pin down the claims they’re making and their arguments for these claims. In the case of the above listed thinkers, by contrast, I become a slave to the text, forced into an infinite labor of interpretation that never ends. Shouldn’t there be a point where we can move on?

Catholicism, conservatism, and antihumanist politics from The Immanent Frame by Simon During

Rarely do I learn more from a scholarly book than I have from Stefanos Geroulanos’s An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. Geroulanos’s central thesis is compelling but simple: French antihumanism, in its theoretical mode, was based on a radicalized “negative anthropology,” i.e., the idea that man is a negating animal, as articulated in a widespread rejection of neo-Kantianism, first by Heidegger and then passed on to French thinkers like Bataille and Blanchot, largely via Alexandre Kojève and his “end of history” argument. Instead of the homo absconditus that Ernst Bloch was to locate in Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann’s “Protestant anthropology,” we have here a “last man,” heir to those “negations” of the world named freedom, history, and individuality, whose historical realization reveals that humanness is ultimately based upon a relation to death. And to the degree that this antihumanism continues to order thinkers like de Man, Derrida, and Foucault, it has also shaped many Anglophone intellectuals of my generation. Geroulanos tells a story that thus illuminates us too. […]

Hulme, Maurras, and Eliot’s antihumanism is important because it takes us to the border where atheist antihumanism, in its search for an institutional base, meets orthodox and reactionary Catholic antihumanism. Little illuminates the difficulties of occupying this border more than Action Française’s highly charged relation to Catholicism, which, despite the breadth of the movement’s support among French Catholics, would culminate in its formal prohibition by Pius XI in 1926 (the same year, interestingly, that Carl Schmitt broke with the Church). And I think it likely that the antihumanism that develops in and out of Heidegger and Kojève, and which Geroulanos illuminates so well, is also, at certain moments, shaped at this border.

One remembers, in particular, Maurice Blanchot. As a young man, he had been a radical, sometimes terror-embracing ultra-rightist in Action Française’s slipstream. But, as Geroulanos shows, he receded into post-Kojèvean antihumanism from about 1942 (in a world where the institutional barriers to secular nonhumanisms were breaking down). But, while a “negation of God,” Blanchot’s thought is famously hard to call irreligious. Let’s say that it is as if Blanchot chooses the other side of Pascal’s wager: he makes a bet against God, a bet that the world is not just immanent and Godless but “catastrophic.” That’s a wager that can’t pay out—it’s staked in a kind of madness—except insofar as it rescues you, if not exactly from atheism, then from mundaneity. At this point, maybe “atheist antihumanism” can be conceived of as positioned against ordinary social being, and belongs in that sense to the right, even where (as was the case for Blanchot in the 1960s) its sponsors join the radical left. At the very least, it is where the world is judged catastrophic in terms that Maurras and Racine and Pascal, those conservative nonhumanists, share.

Foundational text for contemporary Indian political thought

Indian Political Thought: A Reader Edited by Aakash Singh, Silika Mohapatra (London & New York: Routledge, 2010). 

In our time of globalization, people in the West are increasingly looking beyond the limits of the West for insights and teachings. It is very important and fascinating to find out what is happening today in India in terms of political philosophy. This Reader is timely and very much needed as there is simply no comparable text available...it is in fact a 'who's who' in contemporary Indian political thought.  -- Fred Dallmayr (Notre Dame, USA)

A significant attempt to construct a foundational text for contemporary Indian political thought, this volume meets a deeply felt need. -- Shashi Tharoor (former Under-Secretary General for the United Nations) 

Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars - Fred Dallmayr - 2010 - 231 pages - Preview
He also revisits the work of Gandhi as an example of integral pluralism in practice. Novel in its insights and accessible in tone, Integral Pluralism promotes the peaceful coexistence of different cultures.

The Promise of Democracy: Political Agency and Transformation - Page 234 -Fred R. Dallmayr - 2010 - 254 pages - Preview
anamnestic 'capitalization' and the amnesic exposure to what would no longer be identifiable at all.” Unfortunately, the distinction between the unexpected advent and the absolutely ...

Comparative Political Theory: An Introduction - Fred Dallmayr - 2010 - 292 pages
This book is meant as an introduction to a new field of scholarly inquiry, a subfield of political science called "comparative political theory."

My bond with tradition is not broken

another shining example of trumpery from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman) Jul 27, 2010 

Quantum theory is less than 100 years old, so perhaps it’s not quite in a position yet to consign the libraries of the millennia to the ranks of naive village superstition. Especially not when QED founder Richard Feynman said that “no one understands quantum theory,” and I’m aware of nothing since his death to have changed that reality.

Philosophy and religion: essays in interpretation Jarava Lal Mehta, Indian Council of ... - 1990 - 292 pages J.L. Mehta on Heidegger, hermeneutics, and Indian tradition - Page 4

My life-work has been too intimately visited by modern secular winds for me to be able to take unquestioningly for granted my inherited modes of thought and living. But I am also unable, because my bond with tradition is not broken, to take the modern present as normative or as giving me a right to sit in judgement on those traditional norms which still reach down to me with magisterial authority. 6:17 PM

Consciousness and Its Transformation - Introduction Integral psychotherapy: personal encounters, Soumitra Basu, Matthijs Cornelissen (Ed.) (2001)

My problem is that my training as an analyst does not suffice to unlock the riddle of existence. While I believe that the Freudian subconscious is the source of our atavistic and biological drives, I cannot also ignore the mystic’s description of the superconscious as the source of our highly evolved impulses. This means that one suffers not only from repression of one’s biological drives but also can suffer from suppression of the sublime. (Reddy, 1988)

This also means that to increase my repertory of counselling skills, I need a framework of reference where the subconscious and the superconscious are both accommodated in their proper places. This pursuit leads me to a search for a model of Integral Psychotherapy. A model of integral psychotherapy needs to be preceded by a model of integral psychology which is a paradigm of psychology that emerges from a consciousness perspective. 

The Annual Ananda Coomaraswamy Memorial Oration Series

At the same time I should like to emphasis that I have never built up a philosophy of my own or wished to establish a new school of thought. Perhaps the greatest thing I have learnt is never to think for myself; I fully agree with Andre Gide that "Toutes choses sont dites deja", and what I have sought is to understand what has been said, while taking no account of the "inferior philosophers". Holding with Heraclitus that the Word is common to all, and that Wisdom is to know the Will whereby all things are steered, I am convinced with Jeremias that the human cultures in all their apparent diversity are but the dialects of one and the same language of the spirit, that there is a "common universe of discourse" transcending the differences of tongues". After dinner speech on the occasion of his 70th birthday 1947,  Boston

Inability to control one's circumstances with the precision one seeks

Choosing not to disbelieve : City : Santosh Desai : TOI Blogs 25 Jul 2010

Increasing our interest lies in the outcome, and the process is seen to be a technical detail of interest only to the practitioner of the craft. Science becomes craft, belief becomes expectation, and outcomes become products one can shop for. … We implicitly embrace a position of disembodied empiricism … The overriding interest is in oneself, not in the means adopted. …

Sandwiched between an overwhelming regard for oneself and an inability to control one's circumstances with the precision one seeks, we are looking for newer technologies of the self. New age beliefs may or may not be science but they certainly in technologies in that they seek to manipulate the world around us in order to give us outcomes we desire. … Santosh Desai is a leading ad professional.

(title unknown) from enowning 

As a scientist, I am fairly satisfied with science's explanations for raindrops, but find science's explanation for humans' concerns unsatisfying, or just missing entirely. If I consider science's description of object-object interactions, and then add OOO, I don't see where OOO improves my understanding. It and correlationism sound like metaphysics. 

a fairly standard Heideggerian response from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

Yes, this is the standard continental attitude. The natural sciences are doing fine already with the non-human world, so let’s hole up in an inner phenomenal sphere that science cannot touch. It’s a fairly reactive move, and ripe for assault by cognitive science. If you take the position Enowning is taking, you’re consigning yourself to a permanent defensive war against the encroachments of neuroscience.

response to Mormon Metaphysics from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

If there is one theme running throughout my work, it’s that philosophy must be universal. It must be capable of accounting for purely physical interactions just as it accounts for the mind.

Hence, the object-oriented standpoint. What exists in all spheres of the cosmos –physical, mental, fictional, etc.– are objects with qualities. Yes, many people assault this very point, but they can be dealt with case by case as they appear. In fact, I think dumping on objects is the standard “radical” gesture throughout philosophy, but I’ve already written about that in some forthcoming pieces. As for why a metaphysics of objects is needed, see any of my books.

The standard continental attitude sees a division of labor, where science gets the rocks and dirt while philosophy gets the people. Philosophy has nothing to add about rocks and dirt, while science will never understand people. But this is wrong on both counts. Cognitive science and neuroscience most likely will be able to revolutionize our understanding of how the mind works. If you get defensive about that (Mormon Metaphysics is not, but many continentalists are) it simply means that you’ve painted yourself into a corner by limiting philosophy to one supposedly extra-scientific space: human mentality. But there’s no reason to believe it’s extra-scientific, and that’s what the scientistic camp has right.

In one sense, everything is amenable to scientific treatment. But in another sense, nothing is (since the object is precisely what resists all attempts at adequate modelling, and since no layer of objects can be the privileged explainer of any other). And you need both hands to play the piano.

another disingenuous trope often found in scientism from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

Scientistic philosophy loves to claim that mainstream philosophers restrict themselves to the commensensical and the intuitively plausible, while observing that brave natural science has shown many initially counterintutive things to be true. (And my sarcasm here is directed against scientism, not science: the latter has indeed heroically shown many counterintuitive things to be true. Scientism, by contrast, is the parasite trying to live on borrowed glory from its big brother.)

Wolf Singer’s ethics panel from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

The old settlement was this: the sciences talk about the world itself, and the humanities talk about the castle of culture and meaning. Already a rotten settlement. But since the castle of culture and meaning will now be taken over by neuroscience as well, either by finding “minimally sufficient neural correlates” for everything we do, or by a bit of “there are good evolutionary reasons for why we enjoy symphonies,” the humanities get to become professional ethics consultants. I’m telling you, philosophy made a giant mistake by ever agreeing to restrict itself to the castle of culture and meaning. We have to get out there and deal with the stones, trees, dust, and sunlight, or we are going to end up as Wolf Singer’s ethics panel. 

Dream State as Gateway to the Subconscious Impulses by sriaurobindostudies

Sri Aurobindo explains: “When we sleep and the surface physical part of us, which is in its first origin here an output from the Inconscient, relapses towards the originating inconscience, it enters into this subconscious element, ...

Hartmann, like Sri Aurobindo, adopts a valuational standpoint

Eutopia: The Gnostic Land of Prester John - Page 64 Alan Jacobs - 2010 - 128 pages
We also think highly of the Indian poets Tagore and Aurobindo. Of course we study the best translations of the mystical poets from ... attention Dives inward, with breath and thought retention, Searching for the source of 'phantom me'. ...

The Alchemy Of Leadership - Page 71 Srinivas Pandit - 2009 - 160 pages
... unmistakable conclusion in his book, What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America, that integral practice is now the only viable mode for human transformation. In his work Murphy drew on the pioneering insights of Aurobindo. To prove the point further I will ... Exemplary CEOs: insights on organisational transformation - Page 397 Shrinivas Pandit - 2005 - 468 pages

Science, Spirituality and the Modernization of India - Page 99 Makarand Paranjape - 2009 - 296 pages
Alluding to this outside influence, Sri Aurobindo says: It (European influence) has compelled the (Indian) national mind to view everything from a new, searching and critical standpoint, and even those who seek to preserve the present ...

Altered Destinations: Self, Society, and Nation in India - Page 121 Makarand Paranjape - 2009 - 214 pages
The process of mending is also one of minding, like searching for and splicing together the scattered threads of a cloth that has been torn or ... Gandhi, like SriAurobindo, taught us how to turn our disadvantages to our advantages. ...

The Yoga Party: Philosophical Writings - Page 73 Douglas E. Frame - 2009 - 206 pages
But suffice it to say that even Aurobindo in all his wisdom would not hold any belief as most important but only useful in understanding a larger truth. It's with this attitude that I will approach my work searching for the larger truth ...

Spirituality and Business: Exploring Possibilities for a New ... - Page 30 Sharda Shirley Nandram, Margot Esther Borden - 2009 - 263 pages
According to Sri Aurobindo, “Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other ... In his view, in order to grow, one should focus on searching for the inner force to ...

Sri Aurobindo - A Contemporary Reader Sachidananda Mohanty, Aurobindo Ghose - 2008 - 180 pages
Only it will be vigilant to illuminate them so that they may grow into the light and law of the spirit, not by suppression and restriction, but by a self-searching, self-controlled expansion and a many-sided finding of their greatest, ...

The lives of Sri Aurobindo Peter Heehs - 2008 - 496 pages
books.google.com The Rainbow bridge: a comparative study of Tagore and Sri Aurobindo Goutam Ghosal - 2007 - 235 pages books.google.com

Understanding thoughts of Sri Aurobindo Indrani Sanyal, Krishna Roy, Jadavpur ... - 2007 - 317 pages
Sri Aurobindo noted that a considerable amount of work had already been done in the clearing away of misconceptions about Indian art by Havell and Coomaraswamy and others, but he felt that a "more general and searching consideration of ...

Science and the Indian tradition: when Einstein met Tagore - Page 22 David L. Gosling - 2007 - 186 pages
His conviction that true knowledge is to be found by searching for unity in diversity was expressed at a time when different branches of ... and inspired Jagadish Chandra Bose and his scientific colleagues in their research. Aurobindo ...

Glimpses of Devāyaṇa: a short synopsis of the third epic of India Hajārī, Amitā Nathavāṇī - 2007 - 337 pages
As Sri Aurobindo has so well said in his Savitri, A gas belched out from some invisible Fire Of its dense rings were ... Manu went searching for her in the water and applied his creative will on her. As a result, she created soil in the ...

Jouissance as Ananda: Indian Philosophy, Feminist Theory, and ... - Page 217 Ashmita Khasnabish - 2006 - 239 pages
At the above phase, however, they are searching for it, and in their search they ascend to a higher plane of consciousness, just like Satyavan and Savitri (the characters in Sri Aurobindo's the Savitri). But, in order to really find the ...

Affective communities: anticolonial thought, Fin-De-Siècle ... - Page 125 Leela Gandhi - 2006 - 254 pages
It is to the terms of such amenability that we must now turn, searching for the discursive components in the ... of the collaborative transformation of subjectivity to which the Mother and Sri Aurobindo devoted themselves from 1914, ...

Letting be: Fred Dallmayr's cosmopolitical vision Stephen Frederick Schneck - 2006 - 382 pages
In this way, instrumental reason traps us into searching for ways to satisfy our personal gratifications and blinds us to other, richer possibilities, something thatAurobindo thinks that critical ...

Philosophy of Education - Page 222 S.S. Chandra, S.S. Chandra & Rajendra Kumar Sharma - 2006 - 256 pages
In his philosophy of education, as in his metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy and social philosophy, Sri Aurobindo searches after the principle of harmony in the individual, community and humanity and aims at its realisation ... Education in Emerging Indian Society - Page 338 Y.k.singh

Jeffrey John Kripal, Glenn W. Shuck - 2005 - 323 pages
... historic and contemporary appeal to Americans searching for something to enrich their spiritual experience. ... Aurobindo ...

Reflections and mobilizations: dialogues with movements and ... - Page 267 Ananta Kumar Giri - 2005 - 436 pages
A School for the Subject: The Vision and Experiments of Integral Education Almost all over the world at present, as people are becoming more and more aware of the gods that have failed them, the heroic in them is searching for ...

Nationalism, religion, and beyond: writings on politics, society, ... Aurobindo Ghose, Peter Heehs - 2005 - 364 pages
We have now throughout the world a search, an attempt on various lines to discover some principle of significant form in Art which shall escape from the obvious and external and combine delight with profundity, the power of a more ...

Dharma and development: the future of survival Makarand R. Paranjape, Samvad India - 2005 - 329 pages
and the Mother who were searching for an alternative in education and also for a more meaningful field for embodying ... This has helped many more people to readAurobindo and the Mother in their mothertongue and has contributed to the ...

Concept of truth in science and religion - Page 216 K. D. Gangrade, L. S. Kothari, Ajit Ram Verma - 2005 - 228 pages
It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of ... We are grateful to Shri SN Johar for providing accommodation at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram to a large number of participants. ...

A sociable God: toward a new understanding of religion - Page 100 Ken Wilber - 2005 - 172 pages
Hegel, for instance, or Aurobindo. In this sense, religion is actually a term for the transformative drive in general. The religious impulse here means, not searching for meaning, integration, mana or value on a given level (which is ...

Bengalis: The People, Their History and Culture - Page 13 S.N. Das - 2002 - 284 pages
In other words, Sri Aurobindo searches the identity of India in terms of her spiritual heritage and thus in the history of Bengali ideas he occupies his place as a prophet of spiritual nationalism. The spiritual view of Indian history ... The Bengali intellectual tradition: from Rammohun Ray to ... Amal Kumar Mukhopadhyay - 1979 - 288 pages

Socialist perspective Council for Political Studies - 1978
Sri Aurobindo searches for the true nature of man in the divine Infinite Being. He has discovered a gulf of unconsciousness in between the Infinite Brahma and the human being. By an imaginary inner power of Brahma (The Supreme God) he ...

Modern Indian thought: a philosophical survey Vishwanath S. Naravane, Indian Council for ... - 1964 - 310 pages
Hegel, like Aurobindo, seeks to preserve both unity and difference; but he identifies the Absolute with the human consciousness, and he has no conception of Divine Grace. Plato, like Aurobindo, searches for a Supermind; but his demiurge creates more difficulties than it can solve. Hartmann, like Aurobindo, adopts a valuational standpoint; but he creates a dichotomy between value and disvalue. ...