Bruno, Herder, Humboldt

Giordano Bruno: Cause, Principle and Unity And Essays on Magic Series: Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy Giordano Bruno
Edited by Richard J. Blackwell St Louis University, Missouri Robert de Lucca Duke University, North Carolina Introduction by Alfonso Ingegno Università degli Studi, Florence

Giordano Bruno’s notorious public death in 1600, at the hands of the Inquisition in Rome, marked the transition from Renaissance philosophy to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. In his philosophical works he addressed such delicate issues as the role of Christ as mediator and the distinction, in human beings, between soul and matter. This volume presents new translations of Cause, Principle and Unity, in which he challenges Aristotelian accounts of causality and spells out the implications of Copernicanism for a new theory of an infinite universe, and of two essays on magic, On Magic and A General Account of Bonding, in which he interprets earlier theories about magical events in the light of the unusual powers of natural phenomena. • A new translation of the texts • Extensive introduction • First ever translation into English of the essays on magic

Herder: Philosophical Writings Series: Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy
Johann Gottfried von Herder Edited and translated by Michael N. Forster University of Chicago

Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) is one of the most important German philosophers of the eighteenth century, who had enormous influence on later thinkers such as Hegel, Schleiermacher and Nietzsche. His wide-ranging ideas were formative in the development of linguistics, hermeneutics, anthropology and bible scholarship, and even today they retain their vitality and relevance to an extraordinary degree.

This volume presents a translation of Herder’s most important and characteristic philosophical writings (some of which have never before been translated) in his areas of central interest, including philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of history and political philosophy, as well as his general philosophical program. An introduction sets the writings in their historical context and examines their philosophical achievement. • Herder is a very influential philosopher across a range of disciplines • Forster is the leading expert on Herder • Some of the texts included are translated into English for the first time

Humboldt: On Language
On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species 2nd Edition Series: Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy Wilhelm von Humboldt Edited by Michael Losonsky Colorado State University Translated by Peter Heath

Wilhelm von Humboldt’s classic study of human language was first published in 1836, as a general introduction to his three-volume treatise on the Kawi language of Java. It is the final statement of his lifelong study of the nature of language, exploring its universal structures and its relation to mind and culture. Empirically wide-ranging - Humboldt goes far beyond the Indo-European family of languages - it remains one of the most interesting and important attempts to draw philosophical conclusions from comparative linguistics. This volume presents a translation by Peter Heath, together with an introduction by Michael Losonsky that places Humboldt’s work in its historical context and discusses its relevance to contemporary work in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology. • New edition of a classic work on language • Will be of interest to linguists and cognitive scientists as well as philosophers • New introduction and useful notes on further reading

Why should philosophy be concerned with certainty?

Hamann: Writings on Philosophy and Language Series: Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy Edited by Kenneth Haynes First published 2007 Brown University, Rhode Island. Note on the text, translation, and annotation:

All Hamann’s writings after his rediscovery of his Christian faith are densely allusive to the Bible... Many of Hamann’s essays react to the precise wording of another piece of writing... In general, I have avoided the temptation to simplify Hamann’s words... In addition, it has meant preserving the multilingual aspect of Hamann’s writing. Hamann believed that speaking a language, like having a body, was a fundamental aspect of human finitude. To present his writings in a seamless web of a single language would have betrayed both his practice and his convictions. 10:54 AM

Hamann and philosophy
Hamann’s own philosophy has sometimes been called fideist or irrationalist. In particular, older scholarship often represented him as a member of a German Counter-Enlightenment, along with Herder, Jacobi, and sometimes Justus Möser, figures supposed to be united in rejecting the claims of reason and the methods of science.12 However, as historians have become skeptical about the utility of the phrase “The Enlightenment,” the claims of “The Counter-Enlightenment” to a coherent program have come to seem even more exiguous.13

Hamann is perhaps the figure most uncompromisingly at odds with the Enlightenment, but even he has been described as radicalizing, rather than rejecting, the Enlightenment.14 Moreover, Hamann could be as absolute in his criticism of Herder or Jacobi as he was in dissenting from Kant or Mendelssohn, as demonstrated by his three essays translated below on Herder’s treatise on the origin of language (The Last Will and Testament of the Knight of the Rose-Cross, Philological Ideas and Doubts, and To the Solomon of Prussia).

The fundamental divide between Hamann and Jacobi makes clear how inadequate it is to regard Hamann as a philosopher of irrationalism or an advocate of faith opposed to reason. In David Hume on Faith, or Idealism or Realism: A Dialogue (1787), Jacobi defended himself against the charge of irrationalism by invoking Hume to insist on the necessary primacy of faith (or belief, as the same word in German, Glaube, can mean either). In a letter to Jacobi written from April 27 to May 3, 1787,15 Hamann is relentless in attacking what he takes to be Jacobi’s errors – reducing being to a property or an object rather than understanding it as the general relation in which we are enmeshed prior to cognitive acts; taking faith as a self-evident part of human experience but then attempting to defend it by arguments from Spinoza and Hume; distinguishing faith from reason and realism from idealism although those distinctions have no basis in experience.

The irrationalist or fideist philosopher attempts to close the gulf (or, as Lessing called it, the “ugly broad ditch”) that has opened up between faith and reason, while the rationalist or skeptic philosopher is intent on preserving the distance between them, but both recognize the gulf.

For Hamann, on the other hand, “it is pure idealism to separate faith and sensation from thought”16 no special faculty for faith should be imputed, which could then be found in opposition to the faculty of reason. Jacobi, from Hamann’s perspective, has been betrayed by his initial jargon into investing metaphysical wraiths with real substance. It makes no sense to isolate certain features from reality, combine them into a larger abstraction, and then attempt to infer reality from that abstraction. Jacobi’s faith then becomes a desperate way out of “the impossible situation of having to retrieve existence in general out of thought in general”17 instead of a routine and ordinary part of daily existence.

Occasionally Western thinkers have launched linguistic critiques of philosophy (as done by Valla, Lichtenberg, Maimon, Mauthner, and Wittgenstein),18 and it is possible to see Hamann as such a figure. Yet he rarely engages with the details and implications of a specific vocabulary and is not interested to offer improvements or think through the consequences of an alternative vocabulary. For the most part Hamann prefers to offer a metacritique instead, that is, he seeks to isolate what he considers to be the proton pseudos, the initial and fundamental error, of a philosopher. He does so by using exaggeration and grotesque parody to render foolish what he takes to be the initial impulse behind a philosophical problem.

In the case of Kant, for example, Hamann believes that what motivates the Critique of Pure Reason is no more than prejudice in favor of mathematics and a predilection for purity. Mathematics may yield certainty, but to favor it relegates human reason to a position inferior to the “infallible and unerring instinct of insects” (p. 211). Why should philosophy be concerned with certainty?

This linguistic assault on philosophy is carried out in Hamann’s distinctive style of parody. Hamann believes that philosophy deals with unreal problems created by the misapplication of language (“language is the centerpoint of reason’s misunderstanding with itself,” p. 211); his object, therefore, is not to refute a philosophical position but to expose and make ridiculous its pretensions. In this sense, his “metacritique” may have more in common with Aristophanes’ mockery of Socrates than with philosophical texts.

It is possible, of course, to imagine fuller rebuttals of Kant and Mendelssohn and others along the lines which Hamann has sketched, by tracing more precisely and systematically the philosophical implications of what he saw as the impurities of human existence – that we speak a language we did not invent, inherit a history we did not make, and live in a body we did not create – and such rebuttals would soon be offered, and these would, in their turn, be subject to further refutations and restatements. However, Hamann always refrained from doing so.

Should Hamann then be considered a philosopher at all? He scarcely develops his suggestive remarks about reason, language, sociability, and history, and nowhere does he demonstrate a talent for consecutive logical thought. However, rather than take him as a confused precursor of philosophical themes and arguments to come, it does more justice to him to respect his antagonism to philosophical abstraction and argumentation. Jacobi, who introduced the term “nihilism” into the European languages, found skepticism19 philosophically threatening and attempted to rebut it. Hamann had no such anxiety; skepticism did not present worrisome arguments that needed to be rebutted.

Hamann, after all, was not tempted to find first principles on which to ground knowledge with certainty, nor did faith and reason collide in his understanding. Since he did not see himself as confronted by philosophical difficulties, he was not tempted to find a way out of them, for example by making covert appeals to unavowed philosophies, as in giving to common sense an epistemological status it cannot easily bear, or in appealing to the authority of everyday experience that is taken to be incipiently or inherently philosophical, or in making a leap of faith. It is often difficult, especially when confronted with matters of great import, to refrain from making or implying philosophical statements, and Hamann is an unexcelled guide to this therapy.

Faith has need of reason as much as reason has need of faith

Home · Your account · Current issue · Archives · Subscriptions · Calendar · Classifieds · Newsletters · Gallery · NYR Books Volume 40, Number 19 · November 18, 1993 'The Magus of the North'
By James C. O'Flaherty, Reply by Isaiah Berlin
In response to The Magus of the North (October 21, 1993) To the Editors:

One must be grateful to Isaiah Berlin for his insightful article, "The Magus of the North" [NYR, October 21]. It will do much to rescue Johann Georg Hamann from the unfortunate obscurity to which he has generally been relegated. However, it is a pity that Berlin has chosen to ignore the radical revision that Hamann's relation to the eighteenth century Enlightenment has undergone in recent years. The consensus today among Hamann-scholars is that he too was, to a great extent, a child of the Enlightenment, and certainly no obscurantist enemy of that movement. Oswald Bayer, the Tübingen theologian and leading Hamann-scholar, recently published a book on that thinker subtitled "Hamann as Radical Enlightener."[*] But it is not simply Hamann-specialists who have recognized that he was no irrationalist. Years ago the great Marxist scholar Georg Lukács in his landmark work, The Destruction of Reason, rejected the notion that Hamann was an irrationalist. In his view Hamann was no "destroyer" of reason.

The question of Hamann's admittedly complex relationship to the Enlightenment really turns on his conception of reason. It was no less a person than his friendly adversary, Immanuel Kant, who contrasted his own mode of reasoning with that of Hamann, describing the latter as "intuitive reason" ("anschauende Vernunft"). Berlin is aware of this fact. Moreover, on May 24, 1991, when his book on Hamann, from which the present article is an excerpt, was in preparation, he wrote to me:

"I am sure that you are right that Hamann wanted reason to be of two kinds — the kind that Schelling and Hegel talked about afterwards, and the kind that the French philosophes spoke of."

It is true that both Schelling's and Hegel's modes of reasoning differ from that of the philosophes, but the important fact is that each employs reason in the service of his particular metaphysics. Despite Hamann's frequent and vehement attacks on (discursive) reason, it is possible to specify what he considered to be the legitimate use of reason, and why he could say: "Faith has need of reason as much as reason has need of faith."

A person who feels the need, as Hamann did, to appeal to Bacon, Locke, and especially Hume in establishing his epistemology cannot be considered an irrationalist. The genuine romantics felt no such need. Berlin does concede that Hamann was not a "heaven-storming" irrationalist, but he does not specify how his "irrationalism" differs from that of the heaven-stormers. Berlin has the right, of course, to opt for the older view championed by Rudolf Unger in his monumental work on Hamann, Hamann und die Aufklärung (1911), but his readers would be better served by being alerted, even in footnotes, to the fact that contemporary scholarship demurs on the charge of irrationalism against "the Magus of the North." For it was precisely his conception of reason that allowed him to become the great critic, or "metacritic," of religion, morals, and aesthetics that Berlin recognizes him to be.

One should not conclude from the foregoing remarks that I do not appreciate Berlin's otherwise brilliant and instructive treatment of Hamann's thought. For he has amply demonstrated that "Hamann repays study" and that "he is one of the few wholly original critics of modern times." Further, Berlin's (characteristically) illuminating comparison of his subject's thought with that of the most disparate thinkers affords in this case a greater insight into Hamann's position in the history of ideas. James C. O'Flaherty Professor Emeritus of German Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Notes [*] Zeitgenosse im Widerspruch: J.G. Hamann als radikaler Aufklärer (Munich-Zürich: Piper, 1988).

Isaiah Berlin replies: Professor O'Flaherty is one of the most distinguished living students of Hamann's thought, and, as my friend and editor Dr. Henry Hardy wrote in his preface to my book, we are both most grateful to him for the generous help he has given us in preparing my text for publication. I am only too glad to reiterate my thanks to him, but I must point out that, as Dr. Hardy also made clear in his preface, there are issues on which we are not in agreement.

In the letter from which Professor O'Flaherty quotes I also stated that the notion of "intuitive reason" of which he speaks is not one that I understand. Intuition and intuitive understanding are conceptions which I believe I do understand, and which I have indeed discussed; but "intuitive reason," whether in Hamann (as interpreted by Professor O'Flaherty) or Jacobi, in Schelling or Fichte or, apparently, Lukács, is opaque to me.

To call Hamann an anti-rationalist is to say that he attacked the methods by which the great rationalists of the seventeenth century, and their descendants and critics in the French Enlightenment (and after them such rational thinkers as Bentham, Mill, William James, Moore, Russell, and the great majority of English-speaking philosophers of our time), stated, analyzed, and sought to justify their views, and by which they criticized those of their opponents. It is this that makes the fact that Hamann is the first and most vehement opponent of the French Enlightenment and its descendants a phenomenon of historical importance.

It may be that my failure to identify the faculty of intuitive reason (a term not used, Professor O'Flaherty seems to say in his book Johann Georg Hamann, by Hamann himself) is due to some deficiency in my intellect or imagination: but it seems that Kant suffered equally from this fault. The phrase cited by Professor O'Flaherty occurs in a letter to Hamann in which Kant asks for his help in interpreting a dark passage in Hamann's disciple Herder, but begs him to reply "in human language, if possible; for I, poor mortal, am not at all organized to understand the divine language of intuitive reason" (as translated by Professor O'Flaherty in the same book). Nor am I so organized.

The best of all modern historians of ideas, A.O. Lovejoy, is plainly equally puzzled by this peculiar conception of reason in his book The Reason, The Understanding, and Time. On this issue I am happy to ally myself with Kant, Mill, Lovejoy, and the admirable scholar Rudolf Unger, whose work on Hamann, no matter what the modern interpreters referred to by Professor O'Flaherty may say, seems to me (may he forgive me) entirely convincing.

Genealogies of ideological orientations

Frank Visser's Integral World: ideological genealogies
from Science, Culture and Integral Yoga™ by Rich

There is an extended essay on Integral World on a topic which began as a short article here on SCIY. The article was on ideological orientations of theories and practices which claim the title integral. The article on integral world goes into much greater depth exploring the genealogies of ideological orientations. The link is here: http://www.integralworld.net/carlson.html

Origins of Modern Irrationalism

Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder
Author: Isaiah BerlinSee more titles by Isaiah Berlin

From the Publisher
Isaiah Berlin was deeply admired during his life, but his full contribution was perhaps underestimated because of his preference for the long essay form. The efforts of Henry Hardy to edit Berlin''s work and reintroduce it to a broad, eager readership have gone far to remedy this. Now, Princeton is pleased to return to print, under one cover, Berlin''s essays on Vico, Hamann, and Herder. These essays on three relatively uncelebrated thinkers are not marginal ruminations, but rather among Berlin'' …+ read moreIsaiah Berlin was deeply admired during his life, but his full contribution was perhaps underestimated because of his preference for the long essay form. The efforts of Henry Hardy to edit Berlin''s work and reintroduce it to a broad, eager readership have gone far to remedy this. Now, Princeton is pleased to return to print, under one cover, Berlin''s essays on Vico, Hamann, and Herder. These essays on three relatively uncelebrated thinkers are not marginal ruminations, but rather among Berlin''s most important studies in the history of ideas. They are integral to his central project: the critical recovery of the ideas of the Counter-Enlightenment and the explanation of its appeal and consequences--both positive and (often) tragic.

Giambattista Vico was the anachronistic and impoverished Neapolitan philosopher sometimes credited with founding the human sciences. He opposed Enlightenment methods as cold and fallacious. J. G. Hamann was a pious, cranky dilettante in a peripheral German city. But he was brilliant enough to gain the audience of Kant, Goethe, and Moses Mendelssohn. In Hamann''s chaotic and long-ignored writings, Berlin finds the first strong attack on Enlightenment rationalism and a wholly original source of the coming swell of romanticism. Johann Gottfried Herder, the progenitor of populism and European nationalism, rejected universalism and rationalism but championed cultural pluralism.Individually, these fascinating intellectual biographies reveal Berlin''s own great intelligence, learning, and generosity, as well as the passionate genius of his subjects. Together, they constitute an arresting interpretation of romanticism''s precursors. In Hamann''s railings and the more considered writings of Vico and Herder, Berlin finds critics of the Enlightenment worthy of our careful attention. But he identifies much that is misguided in their rejection of universal values, rationalism, and science. With his customary emphasis on the frightening power of ideas, Berlin traces much of the next centuries'' irrationalism and suffering to the historicism and particularism they advocated. What Berlin has to say about these long-dead thinkers--in appreciation and dissent--is remarkably timely in a day when Enlightenment beliefs are being challenged not just by academics but by politicians and by powerful nationalist and fundamentalist movements.The study of J. G. Hamann was originally published under the title The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism. The essays on Vico and Herder were originally published as Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. Both are out of print.- read less

From the Jacket
"Isaiah Berlin''s main preoccupation throughout his productive life was understand the nature of the modern reaction against the Enlightenment. These essays on Vico, Herder, and Hamann belong with his other profound and influential studies of the leading figures of what he called the Counter-Enlightenment. But they are also crucial for anyone hoping to understand Berlin''s own analysis of modern life and politics, which has received increasing attention in recent years. Anyone interested in …+ read more"Isaiah Berlin''s main preoccupation throughout his productive life was understand the nature of the modern reaction against the Enlightenment. These essays on Vico, Herder, and Hamann belong with his other profound and influential studies of the leading figures of what he called the Counter-Enlightenment. But they are also crucial for anyone hoping to understand Berlin''s own analysis of modern life and politics, which has received increasing attention in recent years. Anyone interested in Berlin or those he studied will find this an essential volume."--Mark Lilla, University of Chicago"Isaiah Berlin is among the finest intellectual historians of recent decades. Yet his position is somewhat peculiar: for while he is clearly a scholar of enormous erudition, the characteristic style of his work is closer to that of brilliant conversation than of conventional historical scholarship. His works on Vico, Herder, and Hamann deal with thinkers who were at odds with main currents of the Enlightenment. For anyone with a historical sense, the recrudescence of so many of the characteristic notions of the ''Counter-Enlightenment'' under the rubric of ''postmodernism'' is striking. The recovery of these ideas is all the more effective for being a critical one: Berlin reminds his readers of some of the unfortunate historical consequences of the ideas in question."--Jerry Z. Muller, Catholic University of America- read less

About the Author
Isaiah Berlin was, until his death in 1997, a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was renowned as an essayist and as the author of many books, among them "Karl Marx, Four Essays on Liberty, Russian Thinkers, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind," and from Princeton, "Concepts and Categories, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas," and "Three Critics of the Enlightenment". Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College …+ read moreIsaiah Berlin was, until his death in 1997, a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was renowned as an essayist and as the author of many books, among them "Karl Marx, Four Essays on Liberty, Russian Thinkers, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind," and from Princeton, "Concepts and Categories, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas," and "Three Critics of the Enlightenment". Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlin''s literary trustees. He has edited several other volumes by Berlin, and is currently preparing Berlin''s letters and remaining unpublished writings for publication.

Hamann was a champion of one side of the Enlightenment, albeit a severe critic of its other, extremely rationalistic, side

"The Magus of the North" in THREE CRITICS, Oct 13 2000 By James C. O'Flaherty (Winston-Salem, North Carolina United States) - See all my reviews This review is from: Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (Paperback)

My review is limited to the study of Johann Georg Hamann in the present volume, and the three star rating applies to it alone. Combining Isaiah Berlin's books on Vico, Hamann and Herder under one cover was a felicitous idea of Berlin's editor and literary executor Henry Hardy. The position which these thinkers share: their anti-Cartesianism, their emphasis on history, tradition, language and mythology may now be seen through the considerably different lenses they employ.

I feel compelled, however, to register a caveat. When the present Hamann study appeared in book form in 1993, I expressed my reservations about it in a letter to the "New York Review of Books," to which Berlin replied. I lamented the fact that he had ignored modern Hamann scholarship, and had clung to the interpretation of Hamann as an irrationalist, especially that espoused by Rudolf Unger in his 1911 book, "Hamann und die Aufklaerung," ignoring modern discussions of the "dialectic of the Enlightenment." Specialists in the field now consider Unger's interpretation outdated, and see Hamann as a champion of one side of the Enlightenment, albeit a severe critic of its other, extremely rationalistic, side.

The question of Hamann's relation to the Enlightenment turns on the conception of reason. I have maintained that Hamann employed a mode of reason distinct from that of the rationalistic Enlighteners as well as from that of his friendly adversary, Kant. In order to designate that mode, I adopted a term once used by Kant in referring to Hamann's thought, i.e., "intuitive reason," or, in the original German, "anschauende Vernunft." I accepted the term as an apt one for Hamann's mode of thought, however Kant felt about it.

Further, I have demonstrated how it can be linguistically distinguished from the traditional logico-mathematical mode of thought in my book "The Quarrel of Reason with Itself" (1988), and elsewhere. It is one which Berlin rightly sees as akin to Dilthey's "verstehen," which Berlin also rejects.

He lists a group of philosophers whose conception of reason matches his own: Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill, Franz von Brentano, William James, Bertrand Russell and the "Vienna Circle." Most of these thinkers are about as far removed from any kind of "verstehen" as possible.

Who then, besides Hamann, may be said to have employed what I have called "intuitive reason"? The prime examples are the great epistemological heirs of Hamann: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe belongs here because of his refusal to analyze the "Urphaenomen." Hence, his anti-Newtonian stance. Nietzsche, especially in "Zarathustra," which I have analyzed closely from the standpoint of intuitive reason in "Nietzsche and the Judaeo-Christian Tradition" (1985).

Having stated my reservations concerning Berlin's interpretation of Hamann, I must say, however, that we can be grateful that he has helped mightily to rescue that German philosopher from the obscurity to which he has been unjustly relegated by those who remain under the spell of the strictly rationalistic wing of the Enlightenment. Berlin, in spite of his basic lack of empathy with Hamann, not only recognized his importance, but was always fascinated by him. He was an early and enthusiastic subscriber to "The Hamann News-Letter," which I edited and published in the early 195O's and 196O's. Further, his correspondence with me regarding Hamann over a period of three and a half decades shows an unflagging interest in the man who both attracted and repelled him.

In a letter to me of June 25,1972, he wrote: "My passion for Hamann is undiminished." Not too surprisingly, there are certain passages in the present book in which Berlin seems, unwittingly, to move toward a certain degree of empathy, hence to a kind of "verstehen." But such passages are few, and many others are unjustly harsh. Nevertheless, for all its shortcomings, Berlin's study of Hamann is valuable for introducing the reader, especially the anglophone reader, to the historically important pre-Romantic figure, known as "The Magus of the North," without whom the development of German Romanticism would be unthinkable, and whose insights increasingly bear fruit today, especially in theology and philosophy. As Berlin has said: "Hamann repays study."

(Addition to my already posted review), Feb 4 2001 By James C. O'Flaherty (Winston-Salem, North Carolina United States) - See all my reviews This review is from: Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (Paperback)

Following that dictum, I might point out that, especially in two areas of contemporary concern, Hamann's thought is highly relevant: Oswald Bayer has shown in Autoritaet und Kritik (1991) that Hamann's hermeneutics -- antedating by two centuries Derrida's reflections on intertextuality -- provides the basis for a devastating critique of deconstruction by subverting the French thinker's concept of the "center," and demonstrating where the true center ("Mitte") is to be located. Further, there is presently a lively discussion among scholars of Hamann's critique of Kant's famous essay: "What is Enlightenment"? Berlin's present study would have done more justice to Hamann's thought by discussing such developments as these and others, which were available during his lifetime.

The expert sacrifices the collective interest while scholarship is also about discussion

Countermemory Sunday, August 3, 2008 "Not less, but more theory:" Jameson and pragmatism

Fredric Jameson has an excellent article in the Spring (2008) issue of Critical Inquiry which I just got around to reading, and it makes a lot of points that I have been trying to orient myself towards accepting here on this blog. While the article "How Not to Historicize Theory" responds mainly to Ian Hunter, its concerns actually never leave that of Jameson's continuing task: trying to extend the theses advanced in his work on postmodernism and utopia into the most pressing concerns of theory at this moment. This culminates in an amazing look at Bourdieu and a clear-headed rebuttal of the impetus behind pragmatism (which is anything but pragmatic).

If I have been hard here occasionally on people like Spivak and deconstruction, on the one hand, and, on the other, people like Jerome McGann or Stanley Fish and historicism (and the people don't exactly have a direct relationship to the movements here--as I will explain), it is because they all end up arguing from within theory for less of it, a position that Jameson shows here to be quite wrongheaded. This position is not wrongheaded because it is contradictory or hypocritical, as I have (I now see somewhat mistakenly) put it. It is wrongheaded because it makes theoretical endeavors attempt to do away with the types of conversation that theory valuably has started.

In other words, this position is pragmatic, if not nihilistic. Now, I don't mean that pragmatism is nihilistic--far from it (I think its one of the most idealistic discourses). I mean that pragmatism--which can be summed up crudely as an effort to find and work within limits, to refine discourse by disabusing its pretensions to truth as correctness--too quickly gets confused with a nihilistic bent which is not pragmatic that nevertheless underwrites pragmatism's efforts.

To be a bit clearer: what is desired by people like Spivak or Fish is, at the same time, to set an effective limit for discourse beyond which it is fanciful and has no relation to forceful, meaningful activity (including its own), and to somehow counteract the tendency in theoretical discourse to extend itself out into those fanciful areas. The first effort is pragmatic, the second is nihilistic.

And while it is not necessary at all that the second effort occurs at the same time as the first--Rorty is a good example of someone who rigorously keeps the two separate--it usually, in the area of theory, does. It is no mistake that all these recent conferences on "The Death of Queer Theory" or "The Death of Post-Colonialism," in seeking primarily to limit a discourse healthily cannot do so except by talking about its being over with, its being ineffective--and not in the sense of being simply inaccurate, but somehow not even worth anyone's letting it exist anymore.

Jameson distinguishes between these two well I think by calling this pragmatism conspiracy theory, and this nihilism cynical reason. The two have a methodological commonality, which is a hermeneutics of suspicion: they think that the effort of interpreting actions or documents or whatever boils down to looking for the pretension to truth at work. This pretension is what gets limited by conspiracy theory or taken away to be killed off by cynical reason. The threat that makes these people and these discourses do this, as Jameson makes clear, is historicity, or what he calls historicizing.

This should be rigorously distinguished from historicism, which tends to be in Jameson's eyes (but does not have to be, like deconstruction) one of those pragmatic conspiracy theories. When a discourse becomes capable of having its conversation recede into the past, and has to confront the fact that it has contributed to the larger structures of the institutions and fields that constitute the position from which it speaks--that is, when it begins to have to take into account how it ensures for itself the right to a discourse, it becomes very skeptical as to whether it can still remain pure.

What is problematic for both historicism and deconstruction is that their purity was ensured by their anti-intellectual stance--that is, their critique of the continuous and homogenous narratives and knowledges that dominated their discipline before they arrived.

Historicism's solution to this is to generally fall back upon the disciplinary framework itself--which usually makes it appear less cynical or nihilistic than it is--while deconstruction's solution is to insist more and more on the rigor of its method or the radical nature of its politics--which is the same thing as falling back upon the disciplinary framework.

Now, this isn't as simple as merely claiming that these discourses are getting a taste of their own medicine--which is to say, that they are confronting the fact that they as discourses only have impetus because they are founded on what they oppose. It is showing that faced with a contradiction, both these discourses don't think that expanding their theoretical practice more and more would produce anything worthwhile--namely, a collective discussion.

In short, Jameson's claim is that both these positions have the effect of advocating a sort of resurgence of the individual intellectual, the scholar-hero, the expert. Now, there is nothing wrong with being an expert, except that in the effort to diligently become one, the expert or hero sacrifices the collective interest, the fact that scholarship is also about discussion. That is, what is advocated by these positions is that each of us recede back into our own projects and confront each other when we are done with them, which is, in Jameson's view (and I agree with him wholly here), precisely what is not needed in scholarship that will have to confront the 21st century and its demands. What we need is some sense that we are all speaking, as a discipline, some similar language.

What both of these discourses--and mostly these people at the front of them (we should be sensitive to the fact that at this level there are so many exceptions to anything anyone says that the generalizations are usually always unfair--though I don't think this renders them illegitimate, precisely for the reasons I'm outlining now)--what both of these discourses advocate is stepping back into our own private vocabulary. And this is what is really confusing about them as positions and what makes them more than just instances of hypocrisy or self-hating or getting-a-taste-of-one's-own-medicine. For these discourses started out closer to the pragmatism of conspiracy theory. As such, they usually took the form of identifying large collective interests at work in individual decisions or in the determination of the individual. What this allowed was some sense that there were larger forces at play in all our actions.

Thus, there was a hope at least that one could work at the level of this larger collective interest to make things better. The exposure of a collective interest was made in the spirit of changing collective interest. What happens in the sort of cynical use of pragmatism is that we think that we can critique these collective interests by ourselves. Indeed, these acts of exposure (deconstruction, historicism) were, it is now clear to us, not themselves disinterested. So why not face up to the fact that the best work we can do is going to be on the level of individual interest, dictated by the demands of the profession we have now--alas--shaped in our direction?

This is what Jameson is describing in his conclusion:

Insofar as conspiracy theory celebrates... collective dynamic and seeks to replace the categories of individual agency with collective ones, it marks the first imperfect step in that direction. Cynical reason, meanwhile, while seeming to strip acts and events of their appearance of disinterestedness, might well pave the way for some ultimate awareness of collective self-interest as such. - "How Not to Historicize Theory," Critical Inquiry, Spring 2008, 582.

This is not a happy prospect. It describes a crisis. For we should not have to recede back into our own individual works of scholarship in order to see that, in the end, what we really need is some sense of collectivity. This is why we need more theory, precisely in the time in which theory itself is being historicized. We can discuss, together, the historicization, which would give us a sense of where we are. The idea that theory is confused is probably a myth still perpetuated by cynics: it has an immense vocabulary to deal with all sorts of novel ideas--and

• if there is confusion, why can't it be discussed?
• Or at least, why not risk that this is the case?

We have to dispel, perhaps, first and foremost the idea that theory is muddled. That it is not rigorous, that it is not a legitimate way to think about things. It presupposes precisely that we are all speaking languages no one else can understand. Or at least these misunderstandings, this muddledness itself, would not be able to take place collectively and prove to be useful. The time of wondering whether theory is legitimate or rigorous--of finding ways of making it seem so--has been long over with.

To dispel this myth that we're muddled and to rid ourselves of this fear of becoming muddled seems actually more in the spirit of pragmatism, in fact, as well as in the spirit of anti-professionalization--one that does not take up at the same time a crass anti-intellectualism or a discourse against the university itself or indeed the (very) beneficial aspects of professionalization. It would be in fact, as Jameson says, more of a rebellion of professionalization against the commodification of knowledge that the sciences have suffered and yet continued to collude with--that is, the joining of research to R&D departments of businesses--and, which, in the future, will surely pose a threat to all intellectual life at the university whatsoever (who will look justified then?).

Ultimately, what is not needed is the idea that theory is done with and we now need to wait for the next new approach research and writing that will unify us. The unification must be brought about by us--and probably is easier to accomplish than everyone thinks since, actually, most of us are already on the same page. Posted by Mike Johnduff What is written about: Critical theory, Fish, Jameson, Rorty, Spivak 1 comment

Birth of the Divine in man is the supreme consummation towards which the march of human civilisation has been proceeding

All Forums >> [Forums] >> Grateful Living Practice >> Creative Nisus (Evolutionary Drive)...
bernie Super Member Posts: 169 Joined: 11/22/2007 From: TX Status: offline

The strucure of our society is more determined by our internal nature than is a determinant thereof. So the right course would be to proceed from within outwards, and not to begin at the wrong end. What is primarily and most essentially needed is a total conversion of man's being and consciousness, a root and branch transformation of his internal nature. This can be accomplished only by bringing into overt operation a superior power of consciousness, by invoking that dynamic principle of Truth-consciousness of which mind is only a subordinate instrumentation, and by making that principle a permanent ingredient of the evolving earth-consciousness...

The total Space-Time, which is the matrix of all existence and the nurse of all becoming, is, from the beginning, impregnated with a creative nisus towards the production of higher and higher unique and emergent qualities...Man is sure to evolve into Superman or a higher order of being, just as the animal evolved into man, or as the plant evolved into the animal...

...it should be remembered that man is a self-conscious being, gifted with the power of freely controlling his actions in accordance with his own ideals....Sri Aurobindo is firm in his conviction that the birth of the Divine in man is the supreme consummation towards which the march of human civilisation has been proceeding through the ages. Man has the power within him to rise above the limitations of his ego-centric nature, and to enter into into conscious co-operation with the Divine Power which secretly guides the process of evolution. As a consequence, man can himself be the vehicle for the full self-revelation of the Divine.

- (Prof. Haridas Chaudhuri [Aurobindo's maximum exponent], Sri Aurobindo: Prophet of Life Divine)

The reduction of all facts to mathematical knowledge is a form of "conceit"

Vico argues, modern education suffers unnecessarily from ignoring the ars topica (art of topics) which encourage the use of imagination and memory in organizing speech into eloquent persuasion. The result, Vico argues, is an undue attention to the "geometrical method" modeled on the discipline of physics (DN, 21ff.), and an emphasis on abstract philosophical criticism over poetry. This undermines the importance of exposition, persuasion, and pleasure in learning; it "benumbs...[the] imagination and stupefies...[the] memory" (DN, 42), both of which are central to learning, complex reasoning, and the discovery of truth. Combining the methods of both Ancients and Moderns, Vico argues that education should aim ideally at cultivating the "total life of the body politic" (DN, 36): students "should be taught the totality of the sciences and arts, and their intellectual powers should be developed to the full" so that they "would become exact in science, clever in practical matters, fluent in eloquence, imaginative in understanding poetry or painting, and strong in memorizing what they have learned in their legal studies" (DN, 19).

This defense of humanistic education is expanded in the Orations, directed "to the flower and stock of well-born young manhood,"[5] where Vico makes a case for modern humanistic education and focuses on a certain kind of "practical wisdom" or prudentia which the human mind, with the appropriate discipline and diligence, is able to attain. This theme is continued in De Antiquissima, where Vico traces the consequences of his insight that language can be treated as a source of historical knowledge. Many words of the Latin language, Vico observes, appear to be "derived from some inward learning rather than from the vernacular usage of the people."[6] Treated as a repository of the past, Latin might be investigated as a way of "seek[ing] out the ancient wisdom of the Italians from the very wisdom of their words."(DA, 40)...

The reduction of all facts to the ostensibly paradigmatic form of mathematical knowledge is a form of "conceit," Vico maintains, which arises from the fact that "man makes himself the measure of all things" (Element I, §120, p.60) and that "whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand" (Element II, §122, p.60). Recognizing this limitation, Vico argues, is at once to grasp that phenomena can only be known via their origins, or per caussas (through causes). For "Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat" (Element CVI, §314, p.92), he says, and it is one "great labor of...Science to recover...[the] grounds of truth-truth which, with the passage of years and the changes in language and customs, has come down to us enveloped in falsehood" (Element XVI, §150, pp.64-5)...

The text of The New Science then constitutes Vico's attempt to develop a method which itself comes to be in the course of applying it to human experience, and this takes the form of a history of civil society and its development through the progress of war and peace, law, social order, commerce, and government. "Thus our Science," Vico says near the beginning of the work, "comes to be at once a history of the ideas, the customs, the deeds of mankind. From these three we shall derive the principles of the history of human nature, which we shall show to be the principles of universal history, which principles it seems hitherto to have lacked" ("Poetic Wisdom," §368, p.112). Accomplishing this task involves tracing human society back to its origins in order to reveal a common human nature and a genetic, universal pattern through which all nations run. Vico sees this common nature reflected in language, conceived as a store-house of customs, in which the wisdom of successive ages accumulates and is presupposed in the form of a sensus communis or "mental dictionary" by subsequent generations.

Vico defines this common sense as "judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, and entire nation, or the entire human race" (Element XII, §145, pp.63-4). It is also available to the philosopher who, by deciphering and thus recovering its content, can discover an "ideal eternal history traversed in time by the histories of all nations" (Proposition XLII, §114, p.57).The result of this, in Vico's view, is to appreciate history as at once "ideal"-since it is never perfectly actualized-and "eternal," because it reflects the presence of a divine order or Providence guiding the development of human institutions. Nations need not develop at the same pace-less developed ones can and do coexist with those in a more advanced phase-but they all pass through the same distinct stages (cursi): the ages of gods, heroes, and men.

Other Internet Resources Giambattista Vico Home Page
Institute for Vico Studies (Philip Verene, Emory University; Alexander Bertland, Hastings College)
Vico's Scienzia Nova (at the Giambattista Vico Home Page)
Related Entries a priori justification and knowledge Aristotle Bacon, Francis Descartes, René Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Heidegger, Martin Hume, David idealism Kant, Immanuel Plato Ricoeur, Paul Scottish Philosophy: in the 18th Century Spinoza, Baruch
Copyright © 2008 by Timothy Costelloe <tmcost@wm.edu>
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vico/

One book I found helpful was 'The Life Divine' by Sri Aurobindo

Andy Moss Loyal user 230 Posts Posted: Jul 22, 2008 2:55pm

-Does the brain 'create' consciousness? (little c) or does it just 'filter' Consciousness? (big C)

-Is honey sweet? Can the tongue taste? Can sweetness only arise from a unity of honey and tongue? What is the name of this unity?

-Does the passage of time pass from future to present to past or in the other direction? (Are both these statements flawed and if so why?)

The question always arises from an experience of 'unsatisfactoriness' and the answer always resides in the 'transpersonal' experience. I have long given up trying to seek reassurance in the answers. However one book I found helpful was 'The Life Divine' by Sri Aurobindo.

With best wishes Andy.

Hammer defends Hegel, claiming that Habermas misses much important detail from the notion of immanent critique

Draft Review of Hammer’s ‘German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives’ from Grundlegung by Tom July 17, 2008 Comments, whether stylistic or substantive, very welcome!
Espen Hammer (ed.): German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives, London, Routledge, 2007, pp. 339. £18.99 pbk. ISBN 0-415-37305-0.

Stern defends a realist interpretation of Hegel’s ethics. In doing so, he argues that far from rendering our ethical actions heteronomous, ethical realism is a condition upon autonomous actions which prevents them being arbitrary undertakings. Thus, he formulates a challenge to readings of Hegel like Pippin’s. This is underscored by a convincing attempt to show that, despite Hegel’s indisputable focus on freedom, he forcefully rejects the legislative conception of morality that makes the Kantian notion of autonomy an attractive way of understanding freedom. Fred Rush also tries to show that the idea of self-legislation is a poor gloss on Hegel’s conception of freedom since Rush thinks (arguably wrongly) that it implies that values are “produced in decisional judgement.” (p.103) Rush believes that this undermines the process of value-acquisition because requiring reflection upon values before their acquisition renders them alien to agents and may fail to capture the content of thick ethical concepts like piety and shame. He suggests that a more Hegelian notion of freedom is inhabiting, and knowing oneself to inhabit, a functional role within a rationally ordered socio-historical structure.

In a polemical piece, Frederick Beiser takes considerably broader aim at the last half-century of Anglophone scholarship on the German idealists. His verdict is scathing, claiming that its aim has been to “emasculate, domesticate and sanitize [German idealism], to make it weak, safe and clean for home consumption.” (p.70) Again, non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel come under attack. Alongside these, Beiser also criticises Strawson’s influential interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism and the Rawlsian tradition of neo-Kantian constructivism. Given the breadth of his targets, Beiser inevitably sacrifices much of the rich detail present in his meticulous studies of the German idealists and romantics. So, whilst his warnings about the ahistorical and reconstructive approach of many contemporary interpreters are germane (and still far from being sufficiently heeded), specialists will find little new support for them here.

Closer to Beiser’s preferred historical methodology is Manfred Frank’s brief but careful examination of the sources of Novalis’ conception of philosophy as ‘infinite striving.’ Philosophy’s task is supposedly infinite since it both requires an absolute foundation to avoid a regress of explanations yet cannot discursively grasp and justify such a foundation, which is only available to us non-discursively through aesthetic experience. Frank thinks that this early German romantic idea provides an instructive contrast with German idealism (for which foundations are within cognitive reach), which he claims “traces the structures of reality back to the products of the mind or - conversely - derives them from the assumed evidence of a subject.” (p.292) However, this trades upon a highly contentious subjectivist or mentalist interpretation of the German idealists which, arguably, ill-befits Kant and Fichte, let alone Schelling and Hegel.

Paul Franks’ paper also takes it cue from a lesser-known figure, namely, Salomon Maimon. It pursues Maimon’s claim that Kant’s response to Humean skepticism is question-begging since it fails to rule out a naturalist explanation of our use of concepts coupled with an error theory regarding their justification. Maimon believed that this sort of sceptical naturalist is locked in a stand-off with the transcendental philosopher, and that both approaches should be embraced whereby each can check the pretensions of the other. Illuminatingly, Franks suggests that Quine’s response to Carnap cannot avoid begging the question in favour of his physicalist brand of methodological naturalism and, when seen aright, his arguments actually support Maimon’s two-pronged approach. The desire to renegotiate this unstable truce between naturalism and transcendental philosophy is, he urges, a useful frame for understanding many post-Quinean developments, including the recent turn to German idealism of Brandom and McDowell.

A further cluster of issues is raised by Paul Redding, Andrew Bowie and Richard Eldridge, who examine the nature and role of reason, especially as it relates to freedom and judgement. Redding analyses Hegel’s critique of Fichte’s account of the role of conscience in moral judgement. This critique, he suggests, casts doubt on Brandom’s expressivist and rationalist interpretation of Hegel’s pragmatics of judgement. Redding thinks that Brandom is too narrowly focused on the legalistic category of ‘entitlement’, which occludes the richer ethical vocabulary of who one should be rather than merely what one is entitled to do. This places Hegel closer to the romantics, whereas Bowie begins from an interpretation of Hegel that contrasts his conception of reason with a romantic one. For Bowie, the idealist conception of reason risks overemphasising its active and self-determining dimension. He thinks that this focus on free self-determination creates difficulties for the idealist in accounting for expressive activities, such as mimetic practices like art, which are not best captured through an idiom of reason-giving and taking normative stances. Eldridge’s paper develops the Kantian notion of judgement as the free undertaking of a rule-governed responsibility, and like Bowie he considers the interplay of this idea with the checks upon it, such as the fact that judgements are world-responsive and collectively formed. Ultimately, they both suggest that art, or at least a distinctively aesthetic discourse, may be best placed to stage and thereby help us get a grip upon the tensions between freedom and our given circumstances.

Finally, Espen Hammer’s contribution examines Habermas’ relation to Hegel. Habermas finds a precursor to his own communicative conception of rationality in Hegel’s early writings, but he deplores the metaphysical ‘absolute subject’ that Hegel supposedly introduces in the Phenomenology. Hammer defends Hegel, claiming that Habermas misses much important detail from the notion of immanent critique that he extracts from Hegel, and tries to show that a metaphysical absolute subject is not a mandatory component of profitable readings of the Phenomenology. Furthermore, he goes on to demonstrate that Hegel presents a challenge to Habermas’ Kantian theory of formal pragmatics. Hammer also provides a useful introductory chapter, emphasising the theme of naturalism, which heads an altogether worthy book.

Posted in Autonomy, Brandom, Ethics, Habermas, Hegel, Idealism, Kant, Metaphysics, Methodology, Normativity, Self-legislation Tagged Beiser, Fichte, Novalis, Pinkard, Pippin, Stern

The Life Divine, a tome packed full of gems sparkling in the realms of yoga, the Vedas, the Gita, and layers of Indian thought

Cheri Block Sabraw - Notes from Around the Block EDUCATIONAL COMMENTARY AND INSIGHTS FOR PARENTS, STUDENTS, AND TEACHERS Tuesday, July 15, 2008

It Is as It Is
Several summers ago, my husband Ron took a course on one book written by Indian writer and philosopher Sri Aurobindo entitled The Life Divine, a tome packed full of gems sparkling in the realms of yoga, the Vedas, the Gita, and layers of Indian thought.

After this massive delving into Indian spirituality at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Ron boarded the plane and came home. I picked him up at the airport and we waited for his luggage. The luggage didn’t come.

The old Ron would have begun a pointed discourse on what is wrong with the airline industry and how he would solve the problem of baggage handling incompetence.

Instead of subjecting me to his diatribe of pressured speech, he simply stated, “Cheri, it is as it is.”

Since that time, whenever I am railing against the frustrations of modern society and all of its warts, Ron always says, “It is as it is.”

While such a statement is inherently true, it can be highly annoying to hear.

The seat I have reserved for the opera is behind someone with big hair. (It is as it is.)

The red bell pepper I need for my recipe has bugs in it. (It is as it is.)

The Labrador Retriever puppy that I chose is allergic to everything on our property. (It is as it is.)

OK. I GET IT!!!

So, when is this transcendent statement irrelevant? (With due respect to Mr. Aurobindo)

A trip to the local Raley’s Supermarket might serve as an illustration.

I enter the supermarket and promptly slip on water by the Floral Department (It is as it is.) Luckily, Wanda, a Raley’s employee, helps me up. Reaching into my purse, I snag my newly manicured thumbnail on my wallet’s zipper and pull my nail off. Ouch!! (It is as it is.) I then take out my grocery list. My cholesterol is high, so although (It is as it is), it doesn’t have to be, so I shall buy rice cakes, carrots, and sugarless, flavorless, fat-free ice cream. I run into my nephew Cornelius in the wine aisle and catch him stealthily sneaking to the check stand with a bottle of Zinfandel. One problem: he is only 14. (It is as it is) but it doesn’t have to be, so I call his father on my cell phone. My brother says that I need to mind my own business. (It is as it is.)

There you have it. What we can’t control, we need to accept. If what we can control needs changing, we should make an effort. Posted by Cheri Block Sabraw at 3:04 PM Labels: Virtues Cheri Block Sabraw has been teaching for 36 years... You can contact her at DirectorSabraw@MillCreekAcademy.com

Despite Nietzsche’s initiating the post-modern turn, his cosmology retains a Newtonian view of space and time

INTEGRAL REVIEW June 2008 Vol. 4, No. 1 Integral Time and the Varieties of Post-Mortem Survival Sean M. Kelly

And so I begin with Nietzsche, whose theory of eternal recurrence he considered the central insight of his life’s work, and indeed of the age that he helped to inaugurate. Though his relationship to Christianity is complex, there is no doubt that Nietzsche rejected the traditional Christian view of personal immortality, which he saw as arising out of a hatred of, and revulsion from, life. The belief in any form of after-life was to him an expression of anti-life, a flight from nature and becoming to a lying fantasy of individual imperishability. Having absorbed the full impact of the modern project of disenchantment that began (however unintentionally) with Copernicus, Nietzsche was compelled to reject the possibility of any kind of transcendent "beyond." What, then, could constitute the ground of value? What is capable of granting meaning and value to our individual endeavors and to life as a whole? His answer was: Life or the cosmos itself—beyond which is nothing—in the form of self-conscious and therefore liberated Will-to-Power.

Earlier in the century, Schopenhauer (1966) had articulated his vision of an infinite though blind and unconscious Will as the ontological ground of reality—a vision in keeping both with the darker side of the later Romantic movement and with a certain reading of Buddhism. The suffering caused by the impossibility of satisfying the Will’s boundless craving could only be countered, according to Schopenhauer, through a systematic negation of the Will in the form of a sublimation of the life-impulse (particularly, through esthetic contemplation). This vision was transformative for Nietzsche. He soon rejected Schopenhauer’s pessimism, however. And while he retained the centrality of the Will, he came to see the life-impulse—with which, for Schopenhauer, the Will was more or less identified—as itself a manifestation of the Will-to-Power, that is, the drive of every being to extend or magnify its proper domain or sphere ofinfluence.

3 Kant’s understanding of the inner sense and its relation to time, though influential in the subsequent history of philosophy, is anything but crystal clear. The key statements from the Critique of Pure Reason are as follows: "By means of outer sense, a property of our mind, we represent to ourselves objects as outside us, and all without exception in space" (1929, p. 67). "Inner sense, by means of which the mind intuits itself or its inner state, yields indeed no intuition of the soul itself as an object; but there is nevertheless a determinate form [namely, time] in which alone the intuition of inner states is possible, and everything which belongs to inner determinations is therefore represented in relations of time. Time cannot be outwardly intuited, any more than space can be intuited as something in us" (p. 67). As I understand it, the basic idea seems to be that, experience as such—"the mind [which] intuits itself or its inner state"—necessarily involves the fact of succession (what James will later call the "stream of consciousness"), and so the form of time. There is also, to my mind, the mysterious role of the will which Schopenhauer (1966), in his revisioning of Kant, considered the true noumenon and which, as I suggest later in this paper, might play a crucial part in the manifestation of time.

According to Nietzsche, this drive is as manifest in the life-affirming worldview of classical paganism as in the life-denying spirit of late-antiquity and historical Christianity. Ignorance of the nature of life—and indeed, of all human striving, however idealistic or spiritual—as an expression of the Will-to-Power constitutes a form of bondage. The bondage is doubly oppressive in the case of the world-deniers, whose illusory "beyond" serves not only, as Marx would put it, as the opium of the people, but as a vampiristic drain on life’s nobler impulses and possibilities for authentic happiness.

By contrast, the liberated, because self-conscious, Will is portrayed as manifesting an unconditional blessing or affirmation of life, of what was, is, and shall be—an unqualified and joyfully uttered "Yes!" to the whole causal nexus, the entire sequence of moments within which the present is embedded. This blessing is a radically free act, which at the same time is yoked to an awareness of a universal and inexorable fatalism (a yoking which Nietzsche expresses with the phrase, amor fati, the love of fate). That this awareness does not lead to a sense of oppression or despair, but instead is, or can be, accompanied by a boundless joy, is the result of his insight into the nature of time as eternal recurrence, an insight which he nevertheless characterizes as "The greatest weight."

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence--even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. (Nietzsche, 1974, p. 273)

The more general idea of recurrence is of course ancient and wide-spread (see Cairns, 1962), beginning with what might be described as a naturalistic cyclism (e.g., most indigenous cultures, ancient Taoism) inspired by the repeating pattern of the seasons and the periodicity of the sun, moon, and stars. Next, and presupposing the latter, there is an ideal-formal cyclism (Plato, Aristotle, Shankara) which sees the natural or cosmic cycles as embodiments of subtler archetypal patterns. Then there is the stronger form of the belief in eternal recurrence, which involves not only seasonal patterns or ideal types, but every last detail of the cycle of becoming.

This strong view of recurrence, which Nietzsche adopted, is in fact very close to that of the ancient Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Epicureans, and especially the latter two, since they too were materialists.4 Though I suspect there are unknown sources in Nietzsche’s own immediate experience, a feeling for which we can glean from the passage above, he also articulated aversion of the Epicurean argument based on the assumption of a finite set of possible material orformal combinations in a temporally infinite universe.

4 According to Nemenius, the Stoics believed that "in stated periods of time a conflagration (ekpyrosis) and destruction of things will be accomplished, and once more there will be a restitution of the cosmos as it was in the very beginning. And when the stars move in the same way as before, each thing which occurred in the previous period will without variation be brought to pass again. For again there will exist Socrates and Plato and every man, with the same friends and fellow citizens, and he will suffer the same fate and will meet with the same experiences and undertake the same deeds…And there will be a complete restoration of the whole, not only once but many times, or rather interminably, and the same things will be restored without end." (Nemenius, as quoted in Cairns, 1962, pp, 220-221)

If the world may be thought of as a certain definite quantity of force and as a certain definite number of centers of force--and every other representation remains indefinite and therefore useless--it follows that, in the great dice game of existence, it must pass through a calculable number of combinations. In infinite time, every possible combination would at some time or another be realized; more: it would be realized an infinite number of times.

And since between every combination and its next recurrence all other possible combinations would have to take place, and each of these combinations conditions the entire sequence of combinations in the same series, a circular movement of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated: the world as a circular movement that has already repeated itself infinitely often and plays its game ad infinitum. (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 549)

No one, of course, is swayed by such an argument who is not already predisposed to the worldview it is meant to prove. I, for one, do not find it convincing, though I do find it sometimes compelling and can appreciate the elegance of its logical structure. And while my rejection of eternal recurrence, at least as formulated by Nietzsche, is doubtless grounded in infra-rational, and perhaps also supra-rational, promptings, I also object to the doctrine on logical and phenomenological grounds. Phenomenologically, if each life, each moment, and ultimately the entire history of the cosmos, is one instance of an infinite series of (factually or ontologically) identical instances, then the experience of each instance would also be identical.

There would be no way, empirically speaking, of telling one apart from any other in the series. Logically, according to Leibniz’s Law or the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, we are driven to the conclusion that, in fact, there can only be one of each given instance, whether a moment, a life, or the history of the cosmos as a whole. Still, there is something behind Nietzsche’s insight, something in the quality of the experience as the demon whispers in his ear with the moonlight between the trees, that resists the application of Leibniz’s Law. It is the sense that, though he could not believe in a redeeming afterlife, nothing of value in this life is ever lost—for, as Nietzsche’s (1969, p. 333) Zarathustra proclaims, "all joy wants eternity —/ Wants deep, wants deep eternity." The moment, however, must not only be simply preserved in the manner of a dried flower or even a particularly vivid memory, but must somehow sur-vive, blessed as it flies, in Eternity’s sunrise.5

The best illustration I can think of at this point to express what I am trying to get at comes from a dream I used to have periodically. I would discover a secret room in my family’s house, filled with all kinds of objects from my childhood. Among these was a stack of the most amazing kind of photographs. Seen from the corner of the eye, as it were, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but as soon as I focused my attention on one, the scene would come to life. I remember one in particular, where I am splashing happily in the shallow, sun-sparkled water at the lake where we used to spend our summer vacation. It is perhaps a five to ten second scene, almost like a video clip. As long as you attend to it, it is "playing." Not in the manner of a loop tape, however—and here the analogy breaks down—since nothing in the scene is repeated. Not the eternal recurrence of the same, in other words, but the scene as somehow eternally occurring.

5 Blake’s lines in "Eternity" run: "He who binds himself to a joy/Does the winged life destroy:/But he who kisses the joy as it flies/Lives in eternity’s sunrise" (1988, p. 56).

Journey to Platonia
Despite Nietzsche’s prominent role in initiating the post-modern turn, his cosmology retains a more or less Newtonian view of space and time, in the sense that they are conceived of distinctly as infinite container and continuous forward flow, respectively (the circular character of the eternal return involves the patterns or configurations of matter rather than the temporal flow itself). All of this changes with the new physics. The dominant tendency, with respect to time, has been to consider it in some fundamental sense an illusion, "even if a stubborn one," as Einstein said (referring to the distinction between past, present, and future).

"Since Einstein," Paul Davies notes, "physicists have generally rejected the notion that events ‘happen,’ as opposed to merely exist in the four-dimensional spacetime continuum" (1995, p. 253). The germs of this tendency are actually already hidden in Newton, Descartes, and Galileo with the formal geometrification of nature and has its roots in the Parmenidian/Pythagorean/Platonic stream of the Western philosophical tradition and its preoccupation with the geometrical and mathematical ideals of stasis and symmetry.

Julian Barbour has recently produced a fascinating and substantial argument for the dominant post-Einsteinian view—or perhaps, more accurately, for an original direction that is consistent with this view—in his book, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics. At the core of the argument is an extension of Machian mechanics, which is to say, a vision which does away with space and time as the "ultimate arena" of matter and instead conceives of motion and inertia purely in terms of differences between relative configurations of the totality of objects which constitute the universe.

Sean M. Kelly, Ph.D. is Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He has published numerous articles on Jung, Hegel, transpersonal theory, and the new science and is the author of Individuation and the Absolute: Hegel, Jung, and the Path toward Wholeness (Paulist Press, 1993). Sean is also co-editor, with Donald Rothberg, of Ken Wilber in Dialogue: Conversations with Leading Transpersonal Thinkers (Quest Books, 1998) and co-translator, with Roger Lapointe, of French thinker Edgar Morin's book, Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium (Hampton Press, 1999). Along with his academic work, Sean has trained intensively in the Chinese internal arts (taiji, bagua, and xingyi) and has been teaching taiji since 1990. Email: skelly@ciis.edu [5:30 PM, 10:18 AM]

The error is to make an unbridgeable gulf between God and man, Brahman and the world

Mind can conceive with precision divisions as real; it can conceive a synthetic totality or the finite extending itself indefinitely; it can grasp aggregates of divided things and the samenesses underlying them; but the ultimate unity and absolute infinity are to its conscience of things abstract notions and unseizable quantities, not something that is real to its grasp, much less something that is alone real. Here is therefore the very opposite term to the unitarian consciousness; we have, confronting the essential and indivisible unity, an essential multiplicity which cannot arrive at unity without abolishing itself and in the very act confessing that it could never really have existed. Yet it was; for it is this that has found unity and abolished itself. And again we have a reductio ad absurdum repeating the violent paradox which seeks to convince thought by stunning it and the irreconciled and irreconcilable antithesis.

The difficulty, in its lower term, disappears if we realise that Mind is only a preparatory form of our consciousness. Mind is an instrument of analysis and synthesis, but not of essential knowledge. Its function is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown Thing in itself and call this measurement or delimitation of it the whole, and again to analyse the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects. It is only the parts and accidents that the Mind can see definitely and, after its own fashion, know. Of the whole its only definite idea is an assemblage of parts or a totality of properties and accidents. The whole not seen as a part of something else or in its own parts, properties and accidents is to the mind no more than a vague perception; only when it is analysed and put by itself as a separate constituted object, a totality in a larger totality, can Mind say to itself, “This now I know.”

And really it does not know. It knows only its own analysis of the object and the idea it has formed of it by a synthesis of the separate parts and properties that it has seen. There its characteristic power, its sure function ceases, and if we would have a greater, a profounder and a real knowledge,—a knowledge and not an intense but formless sentiment such as comes sometimes to certain deep but inarticulate parts of our mentality,—Mind has to make room for another consciousness which will fulfil Mind by transcending it or reverse and so rectify its operations after leaping beyond it: the summit of mental knowledge is only a vaulting-board from which that leap can be taken. The utmost mission of Mind is to train our obscure consciousness which has emerged out of the dark prison of Matter, to enlighten its blind instincts, random intuitions, vague perceptions till it shall become capable of this greater light and this higher ascension. Mind is a passage, not a culmination... [Page-127]

The first business of Mind is to render “discrete”, to make fissures much more than to discern, and so it has made this paralysing fissure between thought and reality. But in Supermind all being is consciousness, all consciousness is of being, and the idea, a pregnant vibration of consciousness, is equally a vibration of being pregnant of itself; it is an initial coming out, in creative self-knowledge, of that which lay concentrated in uncreative self-awareness. It comes out as Idea that is a reality, and it is that reality of the Idea which evolves itself, always by its own power and consciousness of itself, always self-conscious, always self-developing by the will inherent in the Idea, always self-realising by the knowledge ingrained in its every impulsion. This is the truth of all creation, of all evolution.

In Supermind being, consciousness of knowledge and consciousness of will are not divided as they seem to be in our mental operations; they are a trinity, one movement with three effective aspects. Each has its own effect. Being gives the effect of substance, consciousness the effect of knowledge, of the self-guiding and shaping idea, of comprehension and apprehension; will gives the effect of self-fulfilling force. But the idea is only the light of the reality illumining itself; it is not mental thought nor imagination, but effective self-awareness. It is Real-Idea.

In Supermind knowledge in the Idea is not divorced from will in the Idea, but one with it—just as it is not different from being or substance, but is one with the being, luminous power of the substance. As the power of burning light is not different from the substance of the fire, so the power of the Idea is not different from the substance of the Being which works itself out in the Idea and its development... [Page-129] Location: Home > E-Library > Works Of Sri Aurobindo > English > The Life Divine Volume-18 > The Supermind As Creator [6:41 PM]