[Rough Draft] Worldly Religion in Whitehead and Deleuze: On the
Possibility of a Secular Divinity from Footnotes to Plato by Matthew David Segall Dec
17, 2012
The
purpose of this essay is to unpack Deleuze’s and Whitehead’s philosophical
contributions to the task of re-thinking religion in a post-everything (perhaps
even post-apocalyptic) world no longer certain of its own secularity. “The
secularization of the concept of God’s functions …
Stengers’
contrasts Deleuze’s celebration of unhinged creativity with Whitehead’s
tremendous respect for history and continual emphasis upon the importance of
acquiring new habits in a way that is sensitive to the habitat they depend
upon. “Each task of creation,” writes Whitehead, “is a social effort, employing
the whole universe.” While Hallward’s claim may or may not be justified,
Stengers’ modest Whiteheadian corrective to Deleuze’s penchant for skinny
dipping in the Acheron allows us to receive much insight and inspiration from
the latter without forgetting the perhaps more mature imperative of the former
regarding the true responsibility of the philosopher: “…[to] seek the evidence
for that conception of the universe which is the justification for the ideals
characterizing the civilized phases of human society.”
[Grant,
Iain Hamilton. Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (London : Continuum, 2006). Hallward, Peter.
Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London : Verso Books, 2006). Ramey, Joshua.
The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal (London : Duke University Press, 2012). Stengers,
Isabelle. Thinking With Whitehead (Cambridge : Harvard University
Buddhists and “Hindus” against traditional family values from Love of All Wisdom by Amod Lele Dec 17, 2012
Patrick
Olivelle’s remarkable The Āśrama System, examining the classical dharmasūtra texts,
established that the “four āśramas” – celibate student,
householder, forest-dweller and renouncer – were originally conceived not as
stages, but as choices, alternatives. It was only in a later stage
of Indian thought – a stage that sought to diminish the importance of free
choice – that it was claimed that one should renounce the world only after
having children. This compromise was an attempt to bring the kind of
renunciation pioneered by the Jains and Buddhists back into the fold of Vedic
familial tradition. But it ran counter to the strong undercurrent – praised by
the Buddha and remaining in Indian society to this day – where people would never start
families, renouncing from the beginning of adulthood or even earlier, and where
they were strongly praised for doing so…
The
integrity orientation of traditional Indian thought is not the same as that of
modern thought, certainly, but in many respects the two are closer to each
other than they are to the familial worlds of premodern Judaism or
Confucianism. (Even Christianity is far less intrinsically oriented toward
“family values” than is often supposed… There is plenty that may be said in
favour of the family life. But let us not pretend that premodern traditions
agreed on its worth.
Sri
Aurobindo’s approach is consistent in that he always seeks for the larger
synthesis that reconciles apparently irreconcilable opposites into complementary poles or aspects of one continuum. He is able to provide us a
clue to the reconciliation of karma and freedom… Once we acknowledge that there
is something within the individual being that can exercise free choice, even if
we, for the moment, limit that free choice to participation and
non-participation in the cosmic action, we are able to escape the bonds of
Karma and the impulsion towards a strict predetermined universal unfolding
which would otherwise force itself upon us.
We
may also go further, of course, and suppose that if we have the freedom to participate or not, and are thus able to establish some part of us which is
independent of the law of Karma, the chain of cause and effect in action, then
it may also be possible to find the standpoint within ourselves where the
choice of participation or non-participation itself is no longer restricting
our freedom. In such an instance we would find that “freedom” and “Karma” are
actually able to exist side by side, each fulfilling its role and purpose.
There
is joy and power, there is interminable happiness, the logic of infinite
intelligence and the magic of changing eternity grow clear to his sense of
deeper cognition. The things that have remained unknown all this long come into
view. Immense realities take shape as realised accomplishments, as even the
nameless formless God takes birth and accepts a deathless body and a divine
name. He sees in the depths of the original Void the Desire surging up for
expression. The ignorant march of dolorous Time from Savitri Dec 17, 2012
Théon used to say that this
defeatist state (the result of which is death), this destructive power, was
born with the Vital’s infusion into Matter. The rock, the stone, that is, the
most exclusively material, isn’t defeatist. The beginning of destruction came
with the beginning of the entry of the vital force: with water – water, air,
all that moves. All that begins to move brings along the power of destruction.
Invocation 36 INVOCATION is
published by Savitri
Bhavan in Auroville - The
English of Savitri (5) Book One, Canto One, lines 253-342 by Shraddhavan
Inertia
is a basic principle of matter – matter doesn’t move until something gives it a
push. So the life-force, the lifeparts, when we are asleep, share that inertia
of matter, they are ‘released into forgetfulness’. Surely at no point in her
waking day does Savitri forget about the coming loss of Satyavan. But when she
falls into deep sleep, the life-parts of the body, the brain, they are set free
from that memory, they are able to forget. So the life is resting – ‘repose’
means ‘rest’, either as a verb, or as a noun. Here it is a verb. It is
unconscious, on the very edge, the verge of mental consciousness. The life is
resting, ‘prone’ – lying flat, as we do when we sleep, and it is just as
‘obtuse and tranquil’ as material objects such as stones and stars are.
‘Obtuse’ – we meet this word in mathematics, in geometry: where two lines or
planes meet at an angle which is more than 90 degrees it is said to be
‘obtuse’, as opposed to an acute angle, which is less than 90 degrees. The
acute angle looks sharp, an obtuse angle looks blunt. We use both of these words
psychologically: someone who is acute is considered sharp, bright, intelligent;
but if a person has difficulty in understanding things quickly, we may say that
they are ‘obtuse’ – stupid. But at the same time, such people are not easily
disturbed or upset, so they may seem relatively tranquil, peaceful. A stone may
lie peacefully in the same place, unmoving for centuries, the stars always seem
the same to us, following their courses unmoved, unchanging.
[Rough Draft] Worldly Religion in Whitehead and Deleuze: On the
Possibility of a Secular Divinity from Footnotes to Plato by Matthew David Segall Dec
17, 2012
After
the Christian-Platonic initiation, the world is transfigured into a problematic
network of occult icons whose meaning can only be uncovered intuitively by
the mental magic of talismanic thinking. Ideas are traced into appearances as
signs, moments of discontinuity in extensive physical time-space out of which
the intensive oddity of self-reference emerges. These recursive oddities unfold
themselves into the physical plane, erupting as problematic forces requiring of
the flesh-hewn mind not new representations of a supposedly extra-bodily world,
but self-immolation through constant death and resurrection. Thinking is a violent
act, always killing the neurons which support it, “making the brain a set of
little deaths that puts constant death within us.” [66 Deleuze
and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 216; Curiously, Christian
esotericist Rudolf Steiner says almost the same thing: “The chief
characteristic of ordinary thinking is that each single act of thinking injures
the nervous system, and above all, the brain; it destroys something in the
brain. Every thought means that a minute process of destruction takes place in
the cells of the brain. For this reason sleep is necessary for us, in order
that this process of destruction may be made good; during sleep we restore what
during the day was destroyed in our nervous system by thinking. What we are
consciously aware of in an ordinary thought is in reality the process of
destruction that is taking place in our nervous system” (Lecture: 1st May, 1913]
I
was actually asking if your "Savitri Era Religious Fraternity" post
was a joke, which it clearly is not. Why did you delete the near-entirety of my
so-deplorably anonymously-posted quote? Does it hit too close to home for you?
I very well understand the necessary variations in the at-large applicability
of so many of the passages in Sri Aurobindo's Letters, but when perfectly
reasonable adherence to the more clearly relevant of the Guru's
"outdated" old words can be disdainfully and bloviatingly reduced to
mere "dogma" or "nostalgia", I suppose anything goes, ye
Chosen One. Your starkly Guru-unsubstantiated religion-founding/disseminating
effort is ultimately your own misguided postmodern prerogative … Nor
will I ever match the godlike measure of your "growth" in the arena
of deluded, self-satisfied mental-gymnastic pointlessness. Au revoir. Kian 8:48 PM, December 16, 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment