Pages

May 30, 2017

Giordano Bruno, Bruno Latour, and Bruno Marchal

Dear Bruno,

I'm not competent to comment on all that you say here, but can understand to some extent the weight of your problems and, may be, their possible dystopian repercussions.

Since you mentioned transhumanists, I'm pasting four extracts below for added perspectives. Your namesakes, - Giordano Bruno and Bruno Latour, - are important players in this emerging scenario, incidentally.

Thanks,
Tusar
May 30, 2017

Extracts:
1. "In short, for Śāntideva, the world actually is incomplete and lacking, and we misunderstand it if we don’t see this lack – a lack at least partially expressed in the notion of non-self. For ibn Sīnā it’s just that the world would be incomplete without God. But since he takes God to exist, for him the world is complete; it is as it should be. The similarity between the two is that we don’t adequately understand the world, it is incomplete in intelligibility, without the key idea of God or non-self."
Posted on 28 May 2017 by Amod Lele

2. "People of scientisic leanings are usually the first to notice that Husserl is playing this game. And since the game is directly at odds with their own program for bringing consciousness back into the natural world, they quickly become angry and dismissive toward Husserl. They see him as an idealist and as nothing more than an idealist... For Badiou really isn’t an innovator at all on this point, while Husserl is the biggest innovator of it in nearly 200 years, and arguably in the entire history of philosophy." comment on the Rorty quip from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)
The unity of objects, for Husserl, is in those objects themselves, not in a human subject that bundles or counts them. 

3. "Joshua Ramey - The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual ... (2012) Description: Gilles Deleuze drew on a vast array of source material, from philosophy and psychoanalysis to science and art. Yet scholars have largely neglected one of the intellectual currents underlying his work: Western esotericism, specifically the lineage of hermetic thought that extends from Late Antiquity into the Renaissance through the work of figures such as Iamblichus, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. In this book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Deleuze's ethics, metaphysics, and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this hermetic tradition."

4. "Following Bruno Latour, there have been articulations of the empirical as compositional, or, in Donna Haraway’s (2015, 161) terms, as the “compost” of emerging worlds. Matter has a heartbeat. In what Karen Barad (2003, 817) calls “the process of mattering,” things come to matter in both senses of the term. Life is deliteralized in a robust realism of energetic surfaces, qualities, and remainders that withdraw from phenomenological and representational efforts at reduction and paraphrase (see Harman 2011, 2012). Categories are at best an oblique mode of access to the generativity of singularities taking place (Harman 2008)." by Kathleen Stewart , Issue 32.2, May 2017
...

Dear Mohapatra,

I am aware with Sri Aurobindo and his philosophy as propounded by him as a consequence of his spiritual experiences. Fundamental Reality in Sri Aurobindo philosophy is the realm of pure consciousness and it has nothing to do with the physicality of the physicists whether in the non-quantum or quantum or PQM forms of Jack Sarfatti as being discussed under this forum

Vinod Sehgal
May 30, 2017
...
Dear Vinod

I'd like to draw your attention to an extract from The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo:

"Subdivide the visible aggregate or the formal atom into essential atoms, break it up into the most infinitesimal dust of being, we shall still, because of the nature of the Mind and Life that formed them, arrive at some utmost atomic existence, unstable perhaps but always reconstituting itself in the eternal flux of force, phenomenally, and not at a mere unatomic extension incapable of contents."

You can take a look at the whole chapter at:

Thanks,

Tusar
May 30, 2017
...

Dear Tusar,

Thanks for your e-mail. I have very high respect but very limited knowledge about Sri Aurobindo. Last year on our trip to south India we visited Aurobindo ashram and we found it very nice peaceful place. I am interested in relating physics to the non sensory world which our sages talk about. But I have never met anyone who has experience about Samadhi, astral body etc. I have not even talked to anyone who has met anyone with such experiences. I have been in U.S. since 1960 and of course it is not practical matter to go to India and search for such people! 

In our visit to the ashram, I inquired if there are such people around. No one could point me to one. Similar thing happened in our visit to Raman Ashram. At both places they said just meditate. You will get your answers! That may be very well true. I can also read about such experiences in books, but that is not very satisfactory from a scientific point of view. Anyway, do you think Sri Aurobindo had such experiences about Samadhi and astral body etc.? I would like to hear about your opinion on these matters.

Best Regards.

Kaashyap
May 29, 2017
...

Dear Prof. K

I don't think I have met anyone with yogic powers or experiences and feel it's good that you didn't find anyone in India. Sri Aurobindo has written extensively on various subjects and they are now freely available online at:


My request to you is to read a page or two at random, even if it doesn't interest you or you don't understand. I can assure you that it'd be very rewarding in terms of self-enrichment over a year or so.

Thanks,
Tusar
May 29, 2017
...

No comments:

Post a Comment