Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West

Rethinking secularism: Open thread: the power of religion in the public sphere posted by Ruth Braunstein and David Kyuman Kim Four of the world’s leading public intellectuals came together yesterday in the historic Great Hall at Cooper Union to discuss “Rethinking Secularism.”

In an electrifying symposium convened by the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, the Social Science Research Council and the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University, Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West gave powerful accounts of religion in the public sphere. The Immanent Frame invites you to respond to the symposium presentations by submitting comments in the space below.

As Craig Calhoun summarized in his closing remarks, the four speakers addressed in different ways the problem of the secular. For Taylor and Habermas, this is centrally the challenge of inhabiting a common world without universally shared absolutes, and of respecting the past while maintaining openness to the future. Butler emphasized the need to start from alterity and the recognition of non-belonging. West added the centrality of poetry, prophecy and empathy for suffering.

Habermas launched the discussion by challenging the meaning of “the political” as it has been inherited from the tradition of political theology and argued that a “democratic process is also a learning process.” This plea for democratic life undergirds his call to engage the voices and values of religious citizens in public deliberation. “This proposal includes complementary burdens on both sides,” Habermas explained. “Religious citizens who regard themselves as loyal members of a constitutional democracy must accept the translation proviso as the price to be paid for the neutrality of the state authority toward competing worldviews. For secular citizens, this same ethics of citizenship entails the duty of reciprocal accountability toward all citizens. Reciprocity in this sense also entails not dismissing religious utterances as mere nonsense in the public sphere.” Ultimately, he argued, “This proposal achieves the liberal goal of ensuring that all legally enforceable decisions can be formulated and justified in a universally accessible language without having to restrict the polyphonic diversity of public voices at its very source.”

Taylor made a strong case for maintaining this “polyphonic diversity” within a secular public sphere, while suggesting that secularism is not really about religion: “We think that secularism (or laïcité) has to do with the relation of the state and religion; whereas in fact it has to do with the (correct) response of the democratic state to diversity.” An argument justified by reference to Marx or Kant, he suggested, is no more universal than one justified by reference to scripture. Drawing on his experiences negotiating cultural diversity in Quebec, Taylor argued that citizens must engage in a good faith effort to shape political institutions that do not simply “remain true to hallowed tradition,” but rather, “maximize the basic goals of liberty and equality between basic beliefs.”

Butler took on the centrality of difference and alterity, in concert with equality. She underscored the multiplicity of Jewish values and experiences and offered a courageous critique of Israeli state violence. Working with and against concepts of exile and diaspora, Butler introduced the concept of “co-habitation.” Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Edward Said and Walter Benjamin, she argued, “it is not only that we may not choose with whom to co-habit, but that we must actively preserve the non-chosen character of inclusive and plural co-habitation: we not only live with those we never chose and to whom we may feel no social sense of belonging, but we are also obligated to preserve those lives and the plurality of which they form a part.” In regard to the Jewish experience, she urged people to maintain a critical remembrance and to “reanimate certain ideals of co-habitation as the ethical basis for a public critique of those forms of state violence that seek to produce and maintain the Jewish character of the state through the radical disenfranchisement and decimation of its minority, through occupation, assault, or legal restriction. These are attacks on a subjugated minority, but they are also attacks on co-habitation.”

Finally, West gave a rousing talk imploring those gathered to recognize suffering in the world and to muster the courage to bear witness to the catastrophic. He spoke of the indispensability of prophetic politics for the expansion of empathy and imagination, and asked the audience to imagine a public discourse that spurs “righteous indignation against injustice, not just anger at persons.” His call to engage in prophetic citizenship directed hearts and minds to the conflict in the Middle East, the financial scandals of Wall Street and the unfulfilled promise of the Obama administration.

Each of these powerful speakers advanced an understanding of politics as making a world in common, but always in relation to historically constituted diversity and connections, including competing claims to and refusals of universality. The symposium as a whole, Calhoun concluded, addressed the common question, how do societies establish systems of mutual belonging, recognition and care? The Immanent Frame welcomes your comments, in the hopes of extending this critical conversation beyond the event itself. Open thread: the power of religion in the public sphere from The Immanent Frame by Ruth Braunstein

(title unknown) from For The Turnstiles by DGA

Jung favored therapy-by-fantasy, or rather mythmaking, to paint with a very broad brush.) The point is that one heals up and moves on by means of making meaning, or even self-fashioning, and this is a practice predicated on belief. You come to believe it, so you can live it.

Where do these stories come from? Maybe a collective unconscious; maybe a political unconscious (more plausible); maybe the spectacle (very plausible). They come from without; they come from the past; they come with all manner of strings attached, which may not be entirely liberatory. Identification is tricky in that it can bind one to a narrative that leads in unexpected, sometimes unwelcome, places. [...]

People want to believe in something, and they believe whatever pleases them. This is why Jung is so easy to popularize, and why Buddhist practice is so easily abused by those looking for something to believe in (recall that it is possible to do useful work without it being meaningful or even "believing" anything in particular about it; it may be entirely impossible to cultivate a useful attitude of trust and commitment without a certain hermeneutic of suspicion, a refusal of the metaphysic of belief.) So, you can imagine which way it goes when Jungians attempt to popularize Buddhism.

The Brain, The Senses and Beyond
from Sri Aurobindo Studies by sriaurobindostudies

Some philosophers and researchers have discussed the existence of a noosphere, a “mental belt” around the world that carries the vibrations of thought just as there are other electro-magnetic belts. Psychologists such as C. G. Jung talk about a collective unconscious that contains the archetypal vibrational patterns that all humanity shares and responds to, on a subconscious level. Others, such as Sri Aurobindo, report levels above the mental range that we currently inhabit, and call this a supra-mental level of consciousness.

So it becomes clear that we are not bound or limited by the habitual mental patterns or the limitations of the physical senses and this becomes the jumping off place for profound changes in the way we see, interpret and respond to the opportunities of life.
reference: Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Chapter 10, Conscious Force
For more information on Sri Aurobindo visit our website at www.Aurobindo.net
For Sri Aurobindo’s books, visit the US publisher Lotus Press Website

Santayana's message is clear: The epistemological project that Russell's Problems epitomizes is diseased

George Santayana - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Santayana's main philosophical work consists of The Sense of Beauty (1896), his first book-length monograph and perhaps the first major work on aesthetics written in the United States; The Life of Reason five volumes, 1905–6), the high point of his Harvard career; Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923); and The Realms of Being (4 vols., 1927–40). Although Santayana was not a pragmatist in the mold of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, or John Dewey, The Life of Reason arguably is the first extended treatment of pragmatism ever penned.

Like many of the classical pragmatists, and because he was also well-versed in evolutionary theory, Santayana was committed to a naturalist metaphysics, in which human cognition, cultural practices, and social institutions have evolved so as to harmonize with the conditions present in their environment. Their value may then be adjudged by the extent to which they facilitate human happiness. The alternate title to The Life of Reason, "the Phases of Human Progress", is indicative of this metaphysical stance.

Santayana was an early adherent of epiphenomenalism, but also admired the classical materialism of Democritus and Lucretius (of the three authors on whom he wrote in Three Philosophical Poets, Santayana speaks most favorably of Lucretius). He held Spinoza's writings in high regard, without subscribing to the latter's rationalism or pantheism.

Although an atheist, he held a fairly benign view of religion in contrast to thinkers like Bertrand Russell who held that religion was harmful in addition to being false. His views on religion are outlined in his books Reason in Religion, The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, and Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. Santayana described himself as an "aesthetic Catholic", and spent the last decade of his life at the Convent of the Blue Nuns of the Little Company of Mary on the Celian (Caelius) Hill at 6 Via Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome, cared for by the Irish sisters there.

***

George Santayana (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The move from Harvard marked not only a geographical shift but a philosophical one as well. Henry Levinson in Santayana, Pragmatism, and the Spiritual Life provides a well-balanced account of this gradual but distinctive move from the Harvard philosophical mentality. Leaving Harvard also meant that Santayana abandoned the view of a philosopher as a public, philosophical statesman and of language as being representative. This philosophical turn placed makes him a forerunner of many issues in the next two centuries. Removing himself, literally and philosophically, from the American scene, Santayana increasingly came to believe that the “brimstone” sensibility of pragmatism was wrong-headed (Character and Opinion in the United States, 53).

A major aspect of this sensibility was the view that philosophers must be engaged fundamentally in social and cultural policy formulation, and if they are not, they are not pulling their civic weight. In this fashion, Santayana believes the pragmatists came to belie “the genuinely expressive, poetic, meditative, and festive character of their vocation” (Levinson,165). A condition that James took seriously in his “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” suggesting that the world of practical responsibility fosters a blindness to multiplural ways of living that can only be escaped by catching sight of “the world of impersonal worths as such” — “only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolent loafer or tramp can afford so sympathetic an occupation” (James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals, 141). Interestingly, America's imperialistic actions toward the Philippines during the Spanish-American War sparked James' remarks; this was a war that had a much deeper ancestral and historical aspect for Santayana and led to his poem, “Young Sammy's First Wild Oats.” Whether connected or not, Santayana later came to identify himself as an intellectual vagabond or tramp, not isolated in the specific perspectives of an ideology, hosted by the world, and devoted to spiritual disciplines that “appear irresponsible to philosophers hoping to command representative or some otherwise privileged authority at the center of society” (Levinson, 167).

Building on his naturalism, institutional pragmatism, social realism, and poetic religion, Santayana on leaving Harvard moves even farther from the role of philosophical statesman by removing the representative authority of language from the quest for a comprehensive synthesis, by narrowing the line between literature and philosophy (as he had earlier done between religion and poetry), and by wrestling more with the influence of James than of Emerson. Santayana's stay in Oxford during the Great War led to his famous counter to Wilson's war to end all wars: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” (Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, 102)

Santayana's message is clear: The epistemological project that Russell's Problems epitomizes is diseased. The renewed quest to establish unmediated Knowledge of Reality simply leads to “intellectual cramp” (Soliloquies, 216). Philosophy has itself become spiritually disordered by blinding its practitioners from their traditional and proper task, which is to celebrate the good life. If the spiritual disciplines of philosophy are to thrive, philosophers have to take off the bandages of epistemology and metaphysics altogether, accept the finite and fallible status of their knowledge claims, and get on with confessing their belief in the things that make life worth living (Levinson, 204). Leaving Harvard and America enabled Santayana to develop his naturalism.

4. Naturalism
Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) introduces Santayana's mature naturalism. In summary, he maintains that knowledge and belief are not the result of reasoning. They are inescapable beliefs essential for action. Epistemological foundationalism is a futile approach to knowledge. A more promising approach is to discern the underlying belief structures assumed in animal action and imposed by natural circumstances. The foundations for this approach are rooted in Aristotle's concept of activity and the pragmatic approach to action and knowledge. Explanations of natural events are the proper purview of scientists, while explications of the meaning and value of action may be the proper sphere of historians and philosophers. Even so, both scientific explanations and philosophical explications are based in the natural world. Meaning and value are generated by the interaction of our physical makeup, which Santayana calls “psyche,” and our material environment.

Santayana's critique of epistemological foundationalism is as unique as his heritage. With Spanish irony, he structures his argument after Descartes' Meditations but arrives at an anti-foundationalist conclusion. Drawing attention to what is given in an instant of awareness (the smallest conceivable moment of consciousness), he maintains that any knowledge or recognition found in such an instant would have to be characterized by a concept (or “essence” to use Santayana's term). Concepts cannot be limited to particular instances; rather the particular object is seen as an instance of the concept (essence). Thus, pursuing doubt to its ultimate end, one is confined by the “solipsism of the present moment.” That is, in a single instant of awareness there can be no knowledge or belief, since both require concepts not bounded by a moment of awareness. Hence, the ultimate end of doubt, an instance of awareness, is empty. It is the vacant awareness of a given without a basis for belief, knowledge or action. Santayana concludes that if one attempts to find the bedrock of certainty, one may rest his claim only after he has, at least theoretically, recognized that knowledge is composed of instances of awareness that in themselves do not contain the prerequisites for knowledge, e.g., concepts, universals, or essences. That both skepticism and proofs against skepticism lead nowhere is precisely Santayana's point.

Philosophy must begin in medias res (in the middle of things), in action itself, where there is an instinctive and arational belief in the natural world: “animal faith.” For Santayana, animal faith is the arational basis for any knowledge claims. It is the nether world of biological order operating through our physical, non-conscious being generating beliefs that are “radically incapable of proof” (Scepticism, 35).

Habermas proposes a diversification of the very procedures of reason

The philosopher-citizen
from The Immanent Frame by Charles Taylor
Jürgen Habermas is one of the most prominent philosophers on the global scene of the last half century. His work is of an impressive range and depth. It would be impossible to sum it up in a short essay, but I shall try to single out three facets of his extraordinary achievement which help throw light on his deserved fame and influence.

Jürgen Habermas is known in the world of analytic philosophy primarily as a moral and political philosopher. He has striven against a slide which has often seemed plausible and tempting for modern thinkers, that towards a certain relativism or subjectivism in morals. The difficulty of establishing firm ethical conclusions in the midst of vigorous debate among rival doctrines, particularly when these disputes are contrasted to those among natural scientists can all too easily push us to the conclusion that there is no fact of the matter here, that ethical doctrines are not a matter of knowledge, but only of emotional reaction or subjective projection, that the issues here are not cognitive.

Habermas from the very beginning set his face against these non-cognitivist views. There can be ethical knowledge. But he wished also to break with a long-hallowed notion of what this knowledge must consist in, that which we find in the traditions which go back to Plato and Aristotle. According to these, ethical knowledge has for its object human nature, or the nature of things. In other words, it is grounded in some normative picture of what humans are like, or else of their place in the universe. According to Habermas, it was the discredit of these “metaphysical” views which gave colour to non-cognitivism in the first place. In order to refute subjectivism, morality needs another kind of rational basis.

The alternative route which he explored was that which makes the rationality of ethical conclusions a function of the rationality of the deliberation which produces them. A deliberation is rational if it meets certain formal requirements. This is, of course, the route which was pioneered by Kant. But Habermas made a revolutionary change in this tradition. Whereas for Kant the principal criterion of a rational and therefore defensible deliberation was that it was sought universalizable maxims, for Habermas the very notion of deliberation is transformed. Following Kant a lone reasoner can work out what maxims can be the objects of a universal will. But Habermas introduces the dialogical dimension. The ultimately acceptable norms are those which can pass the test of acceptance by all those who would be affected by them.

In other words, for Habermas, ethical deliberation is primarily social, dialogical; it is worked out between agents. Of course, in a secondary way, we can and often do deliberate on our own, but the shape of our ethical world is dialogically elaborated, and this conditions all our moral thinking, even when we want to rebel against the morality of our community.

In proposing this transformed model of ethical reasoning, Habermas was articulating two profound changes in the consciousness of the later 20th Century, one philosophical, the other in our political culture. The philosophical change was the dialogical turn itself, which we see in a host of places: in the critique of monological Cartesian foundationalism by figures like Wittgenstein and the phenomenological writers, in the sociological literature which began to stress the dialogical nature of identity-formation, as we see with George Herbert Mead. One could prolong the list almost indefinitely.

The second big change, in the political culture, also gave a new importance to dialogue. The political identities of democratic societies were no longer seen as defined once and for all by some founding principles or acts. The combined impact of feminism, of multiculturalism, of the battles over identity and recognition, of the gay movement, and so on, brought to the fore how much traditional modes of understanding were based on silent exclusion of minorities. Redefining, renegotiating the political contract came to be seen as an important, often urgent task; and this could only be carried out dialogically.

Habermas’s philosophical articulation of the dialogical turn was not the only one. There are rival attempts which many (including this writer) would find more convincing, but his was an extremely important and influential one, and this is one of the sources of his deserved prominence.

Moreover, Habermas’s dialogical moral theory was much broader and deeper than that of most analytical philosophers, because it has been worked out against a background of social thought, and above all of a theory of the development of modernity. In this respect, that is, in the scope of his interests, he is more of a “continental” philosopher, for all of his affinities with certain analytical thinkers. This is the second important aspect which I would like to take up.

Drawing on the work of Weber, Habermas sees modernity as having brought about a transformation in our understanding of reason. There have been a number of formulations of this idea in his work, but I’ll deal here with the one he offered in his immensely influential Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns of 1981. For Plato and much of the Western tradition, reason is a single faculty or power which can strive to define not only the True, but also the Good and the Beautiful. That is, the same reason can establish the shape of all the important dimensions of human life: establishing what really is, deciding what we ought to do, and determining what is truly beautiful. We might speak of the scientific, the moral and the aesthetic dimensions of human life.

What Habermas proposes in the place of this is not, as we have seen, a restriction of reason to the scientific domain, and a relegation of morals and aesthetics to the arbitration of emotion or subjective taste. Rather it is a diversification of the very procedures of reason. Scientific reason tries to map the real; but moral reason, as we saw above doesn’t try to map some other domain, say, of human nature. Rather the whole notion of rationality here doesn’t rely on the idea that valid ethical norms correspond to some domain of fact. Rather the justified conclusion is designated as such by its emerging from a certain form of dialogical deliberation. Being right here has a quite different shape than it does in the factual or scientific domain. And an analogous point is made for the aesthetic sphere.

For Habermas a key feature of modernity is this differentiation of spheres, whereby rational validity ceases to mean a single thing, and to have a similar shape in the different domains. This is the shift which underlies the use of the term “post-metaphysical” applied to ethics and political theory, and which occurs frequently in Habermas’s writings. The morally justified acts or norms are no longer such because they correspond to or correctly map some metaphysical reality.

It is clear that we have here not simply a moral theory but a theory of history, and indeed, a philosophical anthropology of uncommon scope and depth, and this has been another contributing factor to Habermas’ global reputation.

But these two factors would not have had the impact that they have were it not for a third feature: that Jürgen Habermas is an exemplary public intellectual. He has never been content simply with writing, teaching, and discussing philosophy. Unremittingly and with great courage he has intervened in the important debates of our time, for instance in the Historikerstreit within Germany, and more recently in issues to do with the “war on terror,” as well as the future of Europe. One might almost say that theory and practice are organically linked in the thought of Habermas: as a theorist of democracy and of open, undistorted communication, he cannot but intervene when these crucial vales are suppressed or denied, without being untrue to himself.

Or in any case, that is the way he lives his philosophy, with a kind of passionate integrity. And it is this courageous and consistent stance which has made a deep impression on thinkers and citizens, not only in Germany, not only in Europe, but world-wide.

In our time, we can almost fear that the public intellectual is an endangered species. On the one hand, the role can be trivialized by the proliferation of collective petitions for fashionable causes which it is very easy to sign. On the other, in the making of policy the intellectual is often replaced by the expert, master of some narrow field, who is rarely asked to decide on the use to be made of his expertise. In this world, Jürgen Habermas stands out as a shining example of the philosopher-citizen, two roles indissolubly linked in a figure of great depth and integrity. We, in democratic countries and beyond, are all in his debt, and that more than anything else accounts for his unparalleled prominence. He is an inspiration to us all.

A version of this text originally appeared in German earlier this year, in honor of Jürgen Habermas’s eightieth birthday. Later this week, Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor will join Judith Butler and Cornel West for a dialogue on the “power of religion in the public sphere,” in an event cosponsored by the SSRC, New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge, and Stony Brook University.—ed.

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There is a tendency in Aurobindo's writings to assume there is but one right answer

(title unknown) from For The Turnstiles by DGA

For my Aurobindian critics:

It may be worthwhile to review just what my claims regarding Aurobindo Ghose's project and its consequences may be, as there seems to be substantial confusion and huffington-puffington about the matter. So:

My position is that Aurobindo is a writer of significance, a major cultural figure, who is sadly under-read by those who are not his disciples. This significance is partly due to Aurobindo's historical position; his works (prose and verse) are a remarkable archive of an important moment in world history. It is also a consequence of Aurobindo's achievement as a wordsmith. The poems are worth reading as poems. Agree or disagree with any of his claims and Aurobindo remains a literary figure worthy of careful study and consideration, much like Shelley and other poets he respected. I am not saying that Aurobindo's poems should be read because they present some kind of spiritual punch. They may or may not; that is a separate question, a theological rather than a critical one. Similarly, I am not saying Aurobindo's poems should be read because Aurobindo was a particular kind of person, good or bad; that is a separate question, a biographical one, that only becomes critical when it relates to the fashioning of the poet's voice (or the use of the poem itself as a vehicle for self-fashioning). Aurobindo may have been the greatest man ever to have lived, or he may not have been. I do not make any claims regarding that. (Who would, and why?) Similarly in most respects for Aurobindo's prose writings.

As with any significant writer, Aurobindo's oeuvre is problematic. This claim is not some kind of personal slander or rhetorical "attack." It is a rather obvious fact: the man wrote for many different kinds of audiences, with many different kinds of purpose, over a long period of time, and in multiple languages. On this ground alone, Aurobindo's body of work presents a degree of complexity beyond that of, say, P.B. Shelley (who died young and only wrote in English). It means that Aurobindo may have said X at one time, and Y at another time. It means that the details of his life may lead one to conclude he took position A, even as his writings suggest a sympathy with positions B or C. Sometimes contradictory claims are possible about Aurobindo, as with any other significant writer: he was at once committed to Indian independence, even as his writings on culture and aesthetics reveal a deep investment in English imperial ideologies. It is true that both these positions are authentically Aurobindian, and that both contradict, and that this is perfectly fine. Both positions can be true without doing violence to Aurobindo's legacy. On the contrary: to insist that only one is true and not the other is to do precisely that kind of violence. There is more than one right answer, and room for substantial disagreement.

I would like to suggest that there is a tendency in Aurobindo's writings (and in the least competent of the criticism I have received in response to my own speculations on Aurobindo) to assume there is but one right answer, an Absolute to which one can and should aspire. Take Aurobindo's comments on "quantitative meter," for instance. In a practical way, it assumes one acceptable value for any given English vowel, one acceptable stress-syllable for any given English word. It assumes, in short, a privileged English dialect as normative and acceptable, and given the context, as spiritualized. (Does this not seem symptomatic for a postcolonial writer?) Does it not seem a bit absurd to insist that all aspiring poets endure the discipline of mastering the One Correct Voice, which happens to be good old RP? Is a simple pluralism not a bit more democratic at least, and a bit more reasonable, than pursuing this jihad of the one right interpretation of the great master's vision of the one true faith?

To reiterate: This is not personal. It is historical. I am not interested in evaluating Aurobindo's person positively or negatively (who cares about such things?), although the public persona he fashions for himself through his writings is of course fair game (as part and parcel of his literary, rhetorical, political projects), just as one would for any significant literary or cultural figure. I will continue to treat Aurobindo just as I would treat Spenser, Milton, or Blake, as a name attached to a cluster of artifacts representative of a particular time and place, and with a particular set of functions. Further, I am not in the business of evaluating gurus or spiritual paths. Have I made it that far up the bridge to total freedom, to evaluate the suitability of this or that "realizer," to sell related gimmicks, in short to be a fraud? Obviously not! That is a task reserved for the most subtle and spiritual of minds, and clearly beyond my ken. I have made it clear from the beginning that my analysis of the political and cultural consequences of Aurobindo's philosophical and poetic positions have no necessary bearing on the viability of Aurobindian Integral Yoga as a spiritual path. Believe what you want; practice what pleases you. Do you really imagine I care what kind of yoga you practice? Do I even know you?

Second, I argue that Aurobindo's project is a product of its time and place, its particular history. It arose not as some kind of divine intervention but due to a particular matrix of causes and conditions, just like everything else. Of course, among those causes was Aurobindo's remarkable creativity and productivity. As before, there is more than one cultural matrix in which Aurobindo arose. It is true that he trained intensively in certain yogic traditions. (The practice he promotes most closely resembles Shaktism to me, for what it is worth.) It is also true that his formative years were spent in London during a blossoming of neo-Hegelianism, and this period of intellectual history is clearly traceable in certain of Aurobindo's positions, particularly his view of evolution and time. There may be an Indic precedent for this. I do not deny this possibility. Given the breadth and depth of Indic philosophy, only a fool would deny that someone, somewhere, had this thought and recorded it in an Indic language. I do not claim that Aurobindian thought as such is not Indic, or that any of his particular claims do not have an Indic antecendent. My claim instead is that the most plausible antecedent for Aurobindian evolution is the intersection of perennialism and neo-Hegelian idealism that dominated English pedagogy during Aurobindo's formative years, as I have shown particularly in the micropolitics paper. The political and cultural consequences of this kind of Providentialism are evident in Aurobindo's work and carry over into Wilber's. Those consequences are deeply problematic. That is my claim. Does this reflect poorly on Aurobindo as a person or as a guru? I do not know; I do not make any claims on the matter, nor should any reasonable person be expected to care what I think about someone's spiritual status, to state the obvious once more.

Now, what is my purpose in all this? Why do I insist on regarding Aurobindo as a foundational figure in what we now think of as integral theory and integral culture? This is a fair question, particularly since Aurobindo as near as I can tell never asked to be anyone's influence in founding any string of commodities. There is no evidence that Aurobindo personally requested Ken Wilber to reinvent his legacy for him. Allow me first to explain my position by analogy. Did Shakespeare ask to be made some kind of spiritual figure, as he was made not only in Aurobindo's taxonomy (see The Future Poetry), but also in other "spiritual" treatments of culture of similar vintage, such as Beryl Pogson's post-Gurdjieffian treatise, In The East my Pleasure Lies? (yes, quoting Cleopatra in the title) There is no evidence that Shakespeare thought of himself as a realized being, but he came to be regarded as one at a particular time by certain writers, and for particular reasons (reasons that should be carefully examined by the way). Did St. John of Patmos personally request his Apocalypse be interpreted in precisely the way the latter-day pretender David Khoresh chose to interpret it on his compound near Waco, Texas? There is no evidence for this, in fact there is little evidence on the historical identity of the author of the Apocalypse, but it happened: Khoresh cited the Apocalypse as a particular kind of authority, a particular kind of antecedent. My point is that one has no control over one's legacy. People, many of them hopelessly incompetent, read your stuff and talk about your ideas, like it or not. Aurobindo is not immune from this. It is a historical fact that Wilber and others have interpreted Aurobindo in particular ways, have borrowed wholesale major concepts from Aurobindo's work (certain of which Aurobindo in my view had himself borrowed from others), and put them forward in particular terms. This cannot be undone, and it is not my responsibility. My position is that if one wants to understand how "integral theory" works, with an eye toward transforming it into something of practical use for authentic transformation, one needs to examine the methodology and assumptions that underlie it. Many of those assumptions are said to have originated in Aurobindo; Aurobindo is a claimed antecedent, certainly among the most important, arguably the most important. Therefore, a careful examination of Aurobindo's project is warranted in this context. It may be that Wilber and others are mistaken in their interpretation and appropriation of Aurobindo. You are welcome to take this issue up with them.

One may object: to some my work seems to shed a negative light on Aurobindo's person, his project, his canon; for the sake of fairness or "balance," why do I not also emphasize Aurobindo's positive contributions and his importance? Interesting question. As I have suggested, the critical comments I have made regarding Aurobindo, and the moments in which I have cited and quoted things that Aurobindo wrote and published under his own name that in hindsight make him seem like a product of his own time, are intended to show that integral theory as such is a problematic venture, and that those problems need not be repeated. To repeat: my point is not to celebrate or denigrate Aurobindo for Aurobindo's sake. "Aurobindo" as such is not the object of my analysis; this is not an exercise in Aurobindo Studies. I am citing Aurobindo as a representative specimen in an archive that someone else constructed (the "canon" of integral studies, a topic for later). My purpose is not to make "positive" or "negative" value judgments about Aurobindo that need to be balanced against each other. Does one need to do this in citing Milton or Shakespeare? No, for the obvious reason: simply in citing Milton or Shakespeare, one is assuming or even asserting the importance of that archive. Again, to repeat: by citing Aurobindo, I implicitly or explicitly claim that Aurobindo is important enough to be cited in this context. If one is concerned that Aurobindo is not represented properly or fairly or in a balanced way in academic discourse (I am such a one), spend some time in the Aurobindian archive, develop a worthwhile question, do your research, and publish your findings.

A final thought: is there anyone willing to claim that Aurobindo's project is not problematic in its political and cultural overtones, or that it is not a product of its postcolonial milieu in a rather obvious way? Can anyone disprove these claims? If so, on the basis of what evidence and by what kind of reasoning?

Similarly, can anyone demonstrate that integral theory as such is not problematic, inclusive of its borrowings from Aurobindo? I mean demonstrate this, not dogmatically declare it "unproblematic" and move on with the rest of the "integral" sales pitch.

What attitudes are and how they can be affected

Attitudes and Attitude Change Thoughts, Feelings, and Opinions

Humans are naturally opinionated. We form likes and dislikes almost from the moment we first gain consciousness. Our stances on issues and our attitudes about things are directly linked to our innermost thoughts and feelings. In modern society we are constantly bombarded by advertisements and entertainment which works hard to influence or change these thoughts and feelings. This is the art of attitude change, and it is important to understand what attitudes are and how they can be affected. Contents Introduction Attitude Bases Attitude Change Persuasive Communications Playing to Emotions Resisting Persuasive Communications Attitude Influencing Behavior Advertising Conclusion

We are manipulated by 'priming' and suggestion - Reinventing marketing: Alan Mitchell explores how to predict irrational consumer behaviour - Marketing news - Marketing magazine:

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Sri Aurobindo is more than his works, prose or poetry, including perhaps his Savitri

Savitri: the Light of the Supreme Home Mirror of Tomorrow

Main Page Previous: The birth of the Avatar Avatar and Grace by RY Deshpande on Thu 08 Oct 2009 04:30 AM IST Permanent Link Cosmos The word ‘Avatar’ appears only twice in The Life Divine. In either case the context is different—it is not vis-à-vis Avatar as an Incarnation of the Divine. This absence of the concept of Divine Incarnation in Sri Aurobindo's very major work cannot be taken as he not recognising the necessity of Avatarhood in the evolutionary process. We have also another interesting situation: the word ‘Grace’ does not appear even once in The Life Divine. But in Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga the fruit of realization without the Divine Grace is inconceivable. In this connection, let us first read a couple of passages from his little masterpiece, The Mother: There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our endeavor,—a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and—a supreme Grace from above that answers. For the grace of the Divine Mother is the sanction of the Supreme and now or tomorrow its effect is sure, a thing decreed, inevitable and irresistible. The supramental change is the thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness; for its upward ascent is not ended and mind is not its last summit. But the change may arrive, take form and endure, there is needed the call from below with a will to recognise and not deny the Light when it comes, and there is needed the sanction of the Supreme from above. The power that mediates between the sanction and the call is the presence and power of the Divine Mother. The Mother's power and not any human endeavour and tapasya can alone rend the lid and tear the covering and shape the vessel and bring down into this world of obscurity and falsehood and death and suffering Truth and Light and Life divine and the immortal's Ananda. What this situation, of the absence of 'Grace' and 'Avatar' in its deeper occult connotation, means is that, Sri Aurobindo is more than his works, prose or poetry, including perhaps his Savitri. And didn’t he say, apropos of his Arya-writing, that had he continued it, not for seven but seventy years, still his knowledge would not have been exhausted? In The Life Divine he has taken a certain stand to present a certain point of view for a certain type of the soul-need, which does not make it sole or absolute or exclusive in every sense. This is true in other works also. The question is, of one’s perceptions, perceptions which can be different for different individuals and in different contexts. When this is recognised, there should not be any necessity of thrusting one viewpoint on the other, which will be fallacious, fundamentalist, un-Aurobindonian. Eschewing it is broadening, even globalising, one’s consciousness for a greater spiritual progress.

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Man's meddling with nature is a dangerous game

Re: A Life Of Its Own: Where Will Synthetic Biology Lead Us? by Michael Specter (The New Yorker)

by rakesh on Sun 27 Sep 2009 08:54 PM PDT Profile Permanent Link

Complexity cannot be always understood by reduction to each cell functioning. We know that from the futility of reduction in complex systems. Yes, there are technologies to transplant organs and drugs to help avoid body rejection but its success is not high. Probably the future of technologies will help to transplant organs that are ill functioning like the liver,kidney, lungs but what about the brain? Our knowledge of the brain with all its complexity is bleak and what about mental diseases. Can technologies and synthetic cells help in this field are some questions that need to be pondered.

Definitely biotechnology helps but our understanding of the cell and complex body systems has been exaggerated in this article.

What does yoga of the cells mean? I am thinking it is the ability of the body to regenerate itself without dying forever. Can the body do it without the help of external technologies is the question. I am guessing that in the yoga of the cells the brain has an important part in controlling the body cell machinery. Even in normal yoga of the mind, you can experience the brain cell activation and clearing of the clogged passages in the lungs and other organs. Hence, the necessity of the future technologies to understand the brain which is a very complex organ without which the whole project of synthetic cells cannot be applied to the brain, probably organ transplant is the next viable thing to do but nothing more than that.
I think there is a long way to go to understand the brain. We are only scratching the surface.

Just like the reductionist understanding of the drugs on the body without taking the whole body into consideration the new technologies might make the same mistake in synthetic cell utilities. The body is the product of millions of years of evolution and man in his hubris wants to create organisms whose survival needs external nature which has been slowly exterminated by massive environmental pollution. In one hand, he wants to create new species and with the other he is killing the existing species on earth.

What about genetically engineered bland food we eat? No one knows its effects on the body on the long term. There are many many questions and man's meddling with nature is a dangerous game.

I hope we use the technologies to clean our earth and make it a happy place for the future generations. As of now man has failed in his utilizing technology project. I hope we learn our lesson and save mother earth of the impending peril.

Re Where Will Synthetic Biology Lead Us? constructing and Aurobindian response
rakesh

Yes, I agree that in the vision of Sri Aurobindo and integral yoga, the use of external technology for the betterment of the body is not a problematic idea. In fact, technology is itself the exploration of laws of nature. There cannot be two natures. There is only one nature. If science can give us more siddhis to the body, why not use it in the development of future body? It all makes perfect sense and we are already using it and will use it in the future. At the same time our vision of nature which is predominantly reductionist should change or we fall into the danger of using new technologies in a limited way. No matter how much technology may change our body we will still need external nature to provide us with food, water and air.
If we do not preserve environment we are only fooling ourselves till the end and our accomplishments and nobel prizes will not help when external nature as been destroyed.

I would guess that Sri Aurobindo who as a mystic and would see only the one everywhere would not have a problem in using technology if it helps substituting the deficiencies of the body. But we need to critically analyze if technology is really helping and to what extent now.

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Agape and Eros: the two fundamental motive forces of all human action and structures of thought

More than ever before, Germany today needs its Schiller, despite the Zeitgeist which is apparently aimed in the other direction. Just now, we need the beneficent effect which ensues from occupying ourselves with his image of man, and never before was it so urgent, that we rise up to his high ideals. The German classics, but especially Schiller's poetry and philosophy, are the soul of the German nation, and if we awaken them to new life today, then all of the laws of the universe speak in favor of a new, magnificent Renaissance issuing from them.

It is only at such extraordinary moments that a person realizes, that it is not the things of the mind which move history, but rather the emotions underlying thinking, which determine both the method of thinking, as well as the objects thought about. In this respect, the two emotions of Agape and Eros may be considered to be the two fundamental motive forces of all human action and structures of thought. It is either the love of humanity, Agape, which inspires an epoch as its general orientation, or it is self-deification, Eros, with all of the emotions which issue from it, which dominates the spirit of an era. And if one looks back, it may easily be established, that all progress in the history of humanity always depended upon the action, often of a single person, moved by Agape, regardless of whether this "action" was a cultural, political, or religious work. As soon as the work of this individual has begun to take effect upon his contemporaries, or even upon many successive generations, we see that the moral character of the people was improved. And, vice- versa, it was often the influence of a single person, whose self- love was displayed as a model by those wielding power, who cast the human species back into barbaric conditions once more.

Of all thinkers who ever expressed themselves in the German language, Friedrich Schiller is the one, out of whose work there speaks the most grand and most beautiful love of humanity, indeed, in whose work and life there is nothing to be found, which were not determined by the passionate desire to ennoble the character of people. Schiller is the poet of Agape, in the most primordial sense of the word. Schiller was uniquely capable of combining the interests of virtue stylistically, and in the most playful way, with poetry, so that, although establishing the highest of ideals in the process, naturalness was never violated in the representation. No other poet has been capable of portraying man in greater beauty, nor has any other been in more perfect agreement with the most existential truths of Christian- humanist philosophy. Schiller was able to portray the things most sacred to man, at once with the same inner necessity and freedom, as Raphael with his Madonnas. He was the genius who knew how to draw other persons aloft to his own heights. [...]

Goethe, Poet of Eros: Goethe is the perfect example of an extraordinarily gifted person, who had the talent to become a genius, but who lacked the moral strength to realize this potential. What stood in his way was, quite simply, his vanity. The beauty of many of his lyric poems is incontestable, but what source does this beauty draw on? It was love, but not in the sense of Agape, but of Eros. According to Goethe's view, informed by his study of antiquity, Eros was the heavenly, productive power of life, the drive for pleasure and pain, to whose impulses one must at once surrender, as if to a higher authority. [...]

Goethe himself commented on Eros as the driving force of all action in an explication of the poem First and Last Words. Orphic, and wrote to explain the strophe titled Eros:
"By this notion everything one might possibly conceive of is comprehended, from the most quiet inclination to the most passionate frenzy; here, there join together the individual Daimon and the seducing Tyche; the person seems to be obeying only himself, allowing sway to his own desires, pandering to his own instincts, and yet there are fortuitous elements which intercede, extraneous things which divert him from his way; he believes he has grabbed hold of something, yet he is the one captured; he believes he was won, yet he is already lost."

For Goethe, the demonic in a person was his inborn character, which is his fate, and which he must necessarily obey. If one investigates the deeper layers of Goethe's character, one discovers that Eros, "pandering to his instincts," "up to passionate frenzy," and the demonic, are closely connected — Eros is the emotion corresponding to the satanic.
Schiller perceived this character trait of Goethe's very precisely, and often spoke about it... SCHILLER INSTITUTE Poetry and Agape: Reflections onSchiller and Goethe By Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Chairman, Schiller Institute(1988) Related Articles

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Following Goethe, Spengler made a contrast between history (becoming) and nature (what has become). The counterpart of longing, of the desire to move forward that is becoming, is the dread of having become, of finality or death; and this pair together drive cultural creativity.

‘Life, perpetually fulfilling itself as an element of becoming, is what we call ‘the present’, and it possesses that mysterious property of ‘direction’, which men have tried to rationalize by means of the enigmatic word ‘time’.’ [...] Mediation and memory in the theory of money via The Memory Bank by keith on 9/10/09 Money as mediation 2:21 PM