An
Author Attracts Unlikely Allies By Jennifer Schuessler: February 6,
2013
Mr. Nagel’s depiction of a universe “gradually waking up” through the
emergence of consciousness can sound oddly mystical — the atheist analytic
philosopher’s version of “spiritual, not religious.” And even some readers who
admire Mr. Nagel’s philosophical boldness see a very fuzzy line between his
natural teleology and the creator God of theists like the Christian
philosopher Alvin Plantinga (who reviewed Mr. Nagel’s book
favorably in The New Republic, throwing more red meat to
his detractors). In his conclusion Mr. Nagel declares that the present
“right-thinking consensus” on evolution “will come to seem laughable in a
generation or two.” …
“Mind and Cosmos,” weighing in at 128 closely argued pages, is hardly
a barn-burning polemic. But in his cool style Mr. Nagel extends his ideas about
consciousness into a sweeping critique of the modern scientific worldview,
which he calls a “heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense.” Consciousness,
meaning and moral value, he argues, aren’t just incidental features of life on
earth, but fundamental aspects of the universe. Instead of random evolution Mr.
Nagel sees the unfolding of a “cosmic predisposition.” Such ideas are anathema
to modern evolutionary theorists. Mr. Nagel calls for an entirely new kind of
science, one based on what he calls “natural teleology” — a tendency for the
universe to produce certain outcomes, like consciousness, but without any help
from a Godlike agent.
The Hermetic Deleuze very deliberately positions Deleuze in the
Renaissance (221). From this the consequence: Deleuzian ontology is an ontology
of sign, a ‘being in signs’. Via Foucault, Ramey envisages ‘a vital
transcription of immanence as an open set of enigmatic yet adequate signs’
(89), vectors for the mind to think that unthought intensity in which ‘life’
consists. While Ramey is quick to point out a Spinozan ambivalence that
continues to haunt Deleuze on language, the intensification of ‘a language of
intense, intuitive, and spiritual apprehensions’ (7) is still for Ramey’s
Deleuze the task of thinking. But nothing is set in stone: the identification
of success in this regard is only possible in an a posteriori, ‘improvisatory’
manner (30), for Deleuze is very much a pragmatist: what matters
are configurations of signs that work.
It is here that a perspective on Deleuze as well as a Deleuzian
perspective opens up – and this becomes clearer by taking a step back to consider
the operation of which semiosis is a subset: mediation, or the
articulation of mediators that are able to incarnate the intensity of the
thought-unthought in a sustained, healthy manner. Here is the moment in the
book where Ramey points most clearly to a post- and even anti-Deleuzian
philosophy of mediators, as a response to Goodchild’s criticisms (which push
him furthest).
In the Kena Upanishad, the
seer describes the various physical forces, the force of fire, the force of
wind and their characteristic power of action. Fire is the force that burns all
created things. Wind is the force that moves all created things. Agni, the God
of Fire, replied when asked about his power: “Even all this I could burn, all
that is upon the earth.”
We have an intuitive sense of a moral law existing in the Universe,
and this provides us a clue that there is such a component in the
manifestation; however, it operates under what Sri Aurobindo elsewhere calls
“the logic of the Infinite” and is not limited by the circumscribed human view
that we try to overlay on the universe.
Everywhere we turn we find that the creation is far more complex,
inter-related and consisting of symbiotic parts and movements, than anything
that our human mind can create. We cannot therefore hope to judge the creation
in its entirety using that limited consciousness. Physical Energy and Moral Retribution from Sri Aurobindo Studies
Having excluded the possibility that physical energy consciously
conducts a policy of reward and punishment, there is still the possibility that
physical energy carries out such a policy directed or guided by some conscious
intelligence above or beyond that utilizes it. Sri Aurobindo describes what
this would imply: “If a law of moral punishment is imposed through the action
of her physical forces, it must be by a Will from above her or a Force acting
unknown to her in her inconscient bosom.”
The implications of this approach however are that we then create a
vision of deity that would be more terrible than the worst human rulers we
could imagine, as Sri Aurobindo explains: “But such a Will could not be itself
that of a moral Being ethical after the conceptions of man,–unless indeed it
resembled man in his most coldly pitiless and savage moral reason or unreason.
For its action involves terrors of punishment that would be abhorred as
atrocities in an all-powerful human ruler and could not be other than monstrous
in a moral Divine Ruler. A personal God so acting would be a Jehovah-Moloch, a
merciless and unrighteous demander of righteousness and mercy.”
The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo: The Two Negations: The
Refusal of the Ascetic from The Tao of Wealth by Sreekanth
The complete Truth accepts the consciousness that exists beyond the
world as true and wants to bring down the same consciousness to matter. It
wants to assert as the Vedas say – All this is Brahman. As we go upwards to
meet the Divine, we need to bring the Divine down into the physical world and
make it also Divine. For doing this one has to expand his consciousness to
become the Divine consciousness and once one has done that he will realize that
the universe is both eternal and the universe exists in and for his
consciousness. This is because his consciousness is now the Divine and the
Divine is everything.
The IH Metaphor Describes the Cause Not Its Unintentional
Consequences from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy
Smith was clear that humans are social beings, living in their
societies with other human beings. Each individual has self-interests but
though this condition is widely reported, the essential Smithian condition is
that individuals pursuing their own self-interests must take account of the
other humans with whom they transact, even communicate.
Given the human propensity to exchange one object, or understandable
sentence, with other humans, it is a basic requirement that in doing so they
transact and communicate in an acceptable manner to each other. The
basic requirement if individual self-interests are to be mutually realised is
by the mutual mediation of the self-interests of each pair of humans.
This requirement for mutuality is universal and repeated across all
human cultures. We achieve our self-interests (food, clothing, and
shelter) by mutual mediation to reconcile the different self-interests of
ourselves and other people… He said nothing about the IH in Book I, where he
gave the “butcher, brewer, baker” example.
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