Savitri, Occult, OOO, and the Invisible Hand

6.2. The World Does Not Exist - MLibrary Digital Collections The Democracy of Objects by Levi R. Bryant - 2011

Here we might think of monumental intellects such as Donna Haraway and Katherine Hayles, the work of McLuhan, Kittler, Ong, and Stiegler, the later work of Deleuze and Guattari, the thought of Latour and Stengers, …  that ranges freely over the “experience” of nonhuman entities, plumbing the worlds of other entities without being obliged to relate everything back to the human. Graham Harman's universe is a universe populated by circuses and clowns, vampires, unnamed monsters, fire and cotton, and a host of other frightening and delightful carnivalesque entities that erupt across his pages like so many apparitions that simultaneously withdraw and capture us with their inherent fascination and allure.

Jane Bennett's universe is inhabited by the vital forces of abandoned bottle caps, dead rats, trash heaps undergoing various forms of bio-chemical decomposition, and a host of other objects. Ian Bogost is currently writing his Alien Phenomenology, which promises to bring us into the subterranean experience of all sorts of other entities such as computer software we scarcely notice in our day to day existence. Donna Haraway's universe is pervaded with wolves, microbes, lab reports and articles, various types of primates, plants, and all sorts of laboratory equipment. Karen Barad's universe is populated by all sorts of particles, instruments and waves.

Can act in his acts, infest his thought and life: Savitri: the Light of the Supreme Nov 19, 2012 – The Titan and the Fury and the Djinn

Lie bound in the subconscient's cavern pit

And the Beast grovels in his antre den:

Dire mutterings rise and murmur in their drowse.

While man works out the dreams of God in the life of the world, he is himself just a small creature in the works of Nature, a thinking caricature of a mysterious puzzling Force. It is she who reveals in him what is present in her, her glories and her deep puzzling darknesses. It is not only the gods who live in his house; there also dwell occult shadows and tenebrous powers. He harbours dangerous powers in his house, the Titan and the Fury and the Djinn. These are dreadful beings, the ancient immortal giants of incredible strength. The first generation of the Titans existed long before the younger gods arrived on the scene,—the Olympians came later.

This could perhaps correspond to the beings who were present before the Gods awoke with which Savitri opens. There are in us also Furies, distorted goddesses of vengeance, of murder, who would punish every crime this little creature might commit unknowingly, punish with no excuse of ignorance; such are the powers that inhabit the subconscious. The three Furies or Infernal Goddesses described in Greek mythology are: goddesses of vengeance: Tisiphone (Avenger of Murder), Megaera (the Jealous) and Alecto (constant Anger). They are also called the Daughters of the Night. Another name for them is the Erinyes. Without mercy, the Furies would penalize all crimes, including the breaking of the rules, penalize considering all the aspects of the society. They would strike the offenders with madness and never stop following the criminals. The Erinyes are similar to if not the same as the Poinai (Retaliations), Arai (Curses), Praxidikai (Exacters of Justice) and Maniai (Madnesses). They are depicted as ugly, winged women with hair, arms and waists entwined with poisonous serpents. They wield whips and are clothed either in the long black robes of mourners, or the short-length skirts and boots of huntress maidens. [From the Internet]

There are five different types of Djinn who are responsible for illness and mishaps, of man and the cosmos. Genie is made famous in the insightful tales of the Arabian Nights. When a brass lamp is rubbed three times a genie will appear and he will grant three wishes for having freed him from the lamp. Solomon the Wise shut them in a lamp which he threw in the sea, that they would never come out. There is the monstrous vital being seated in us, hid in the subconscient den; he remains there groveling all the while, with face downward and the body prostrate, taking pleasure in mean and harsh things. There are powers rising in fierce opposition to the authorities. These act in the acts of man, these control his thought and his life.

D.A.M. , Mainly Red from Auroville Radio by contact@aurovilleradio.org (Clara, Andrea)

In today's news we are featuring short interview with Professor Kostel talking on D.A.M., which is India's first Design, Arts, Music carnival. The festival revolves around the concept of nourishing creativity and it will be held at Ganesh Thottam near Auroville, at the end of the canyon road in green belt. 

Comment on Reading and writing books in a dream by donsalmon Jan 19, 2013

I don’t understand. When Sri Aurobindo spends more than 100 pages of The Life Divine refuting Shankara’s view, I don’t see how that’s any different from what Sandeep is doing here.

Comment on Reading and writing books in a dream by Sandeep Jan 20, 2013

Many people may attain Self-realization but their experiences may diverge after that. In this vast universe, you might penetrate into zones of consciousness that no one has reached before. Take for instance the ascent-descent of consciousness: Ramana Maharshi consistently denied Sri Aurobindo’s claims on the topic, and yet other people do have such experiences indicating that they are possible. I think Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had richer experiences which enabled them to decipher the interconnection between the different worlds.

Shankara probably only had previsions of the future (mental dreams) which made him conclude that the occult worlds are illusory. He may also have been influenced by the nihilistic Buddhist sects which were popular in his time. Had Shankara walked about in his dreams, he might have reconsidered his views on their illusory nature. The “real” nature of the occult worlds can be derived from several (subjective but repeatable) experiences: We are not debating an assumption here but the differences which arise because people do not have the same spiritual experiences. Comment by Sandeep Jan 21, 2013 The study of mystical experiences yields insights which need to be discussed.

Moral Acts Create Primarily Moral Karma from Sri Aurobindo Studies Jan 20, 2013

One of the confusions that tends to permeate the discussion about the law of Karma is the implication that because one is morally or ethically good, that one should therefore have physical pleasure or well-being. Sri Aurobindo exposes this confusion and points out that each type of action has its result primarily within its own sphere, and only secondarily will have effects of a different nature.

The direct impact of moral or ethical action is thus primarily in the field of moral and ethical result, with tangential and secondary effects in other forms of energy possible, but not necessarily supremely powerful in those other fields. Modern research shows, for instance, that strong emotions, such as love or hatred, release various biochemical reactions, such as stimulating hormones, which can indeed impact the physical body and its ultimate health, positively or negatively as the case may be, but such effects may be offset or overcome by specific direct actions taken to support physical health and well-being or not.

Manifesto for a human economy from The Memory Bank by Keith Hart Jan 20, 2013

Ronald Coase won a Nobel prize in economics for inventing the idea of transaction costs in his famous paper “The nature of the firm” (1937). He has just announced his desire, with Ning Wang, to found a new journal called “Man and the economy”. Their manifesto, “Saving economics from the economists”, was published in the Harvard Business Review for December 2012…

We can’t arrive instantly at a view of the whole, but we can engage more concretely with the world that lies beyond the familiar institutions that immediately secure our rights and interests. According to Mauss and Polanyi (especially, but all the founders of modern social theory too), the chief way of achieving social extension has always been through markets and money in a variety of forms.

Training In Smith's Theory of Bargaining from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy Jan 19, 2013

Those who learn that bargaining, for instance, is about mediating their self-interest with the self-interests of others to achieve some degree of their own self-interests.

In practise, as the Red-Blue game illustrates, the “propensity to exchange” identified by Smith in Wealth Of Nations is not a well understood process across the population, which Smith clearly identified as the ‘If-Then’ conditional proposition (WN I.ii: 25-6). By recognising Smith’s ‘If-Then’ proposition it is easily understood and practised in the real world.

Once again, neoclassical Max U economics approaches bargaining by wrongly formulating it as confrontational problem (see modern economics on bargaining since the 1930s around themes like Zeuthen’s ‘economic warfare’, Hicks on ‘strikes’, Cross and others on ‘conflict’, even actual warfare, through to the 1980s.

Yet Adam Smith set it out in both Moral Sentiments and Wealth Of Nations in the 18th century in his two great, but mostly unread, books.  Hence, my particular sadness, at people libelling Smith with a self-interest theory that he never held.

'Anonymous' is Wrong; Try Again? from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy Jan 19, 2013

Smith’s writing on self-interest does not conform to the Maximum Utility models of neoclassical economics.  Smith notes scores of cases where individuals pursuing their self-interests undermine the self-interests of others. In fact, Smith’s ideas on the “pursuit” of self-interests are quite the opposite of the views asserted in “Raising the Invisible Hand” at the head of the above statement. [I have no views on the politics expressed by "anonymous", as I only comment on political views expressed in the country or about the country where I vote, i.e., Scotland.]

Sri Aurobindo always seeks for the larger synthesis

[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 Press, 2011).]

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. 

Are Karma and Freedom Incompatible? from Sri Aurobindo Studies 

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.

In a gold moment’s blaze from Savitri Dec 17, 2012

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]

Kian Joke, dogma, and nostalgia - 2:32 PM, December 16, 2012

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

Inchoate and unequal Integralism: We have to grapple with much larger frameworks

A Brief Note on Incorporeal Machines from Larval Subjects Dec 6, 2012

One of the major innovations of Onto-Cartography is the introduction of incorporeal machines.  While incorporeal machines were already implicit in my treatment of Luhmann in The Democracy of Objects, I wanted to make this more explicit in Onto-Cartography so as to account for how a machine-oriented ontology might think about signs, discourses, narratives, etc.  I draw the concept of incorporeal machines from Deleuze and Guattari’s account of expression and content in “The Geology of Morals” and ”Postulates of Linguistic” chapters of A Thousand Plateaus (they also discuss it in Kafka, and Deleuze uses it to organize his reading of Foucault in Foucault).  Drawn from Hjelmslev’s glossematics, but significantly reworked to articulate a general, ontological schema, Deleuze and Guattari are careful to argue that the planes of content and expression are independent, autonomous, and heterogeneous, functioning according to different principles.  In other words, content cannot be equated with the “signified” and expression with the “signifier”.  Both signifier and signified are variants of expression.  They don’t belong to the plane of content at all.

Under Deleuze and Guattari’s account, the plane of content is composed entirely of bodies– what I call corporeal machines –affecting and being affected by one another.  The relationship of a smith to his hammer and anvil, for example, belong to the plane of content.  The way in which the interaction of these three machines affect one another differs from the way in which signifiers affect bodies.  The perpetual hammering on the metal of the anvil produces corporeal changes in the smith’s body.  His muscle structure, bone structure, and way of holding himself change over time.  This is not the result of expression or signs… Part of the aim of onto-cartography is to map these complex relations, to draw virtual maps of potential alternatives to existing assemblages, and to trace the imbrications of these planes in social systems.

Speculative Realism + Potential  - by Paul J. Ennis WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2012

The charge of correlationism is one that will surely be addressed more and more; even if it is done with a wave of the hand. But on the fringe speculative realism remains. However, what I now see happening, just a little, is that speculative realists no longer need to justify themselves in the base sense. They are less defensive and the forthcoming work I have been lucky enough to read, usually in my capacity with Zero, displays a confidence that is different than what came before.

Wilber and Aurobindo: A reply to Joe Perez, Alan Kazlev integralworld.net [M. Alan Kazlev - kheper.net - For Integral World he has written two series of essays on integral philosophy: Towards a Larger View of Integral (4 Parts) and Integral Esotericism (8 Parts).]

In keeping with academic convention, I use surname as mode of address in this essay – e.g. “Wilber”, “Perez”. I make an exception with “Sri Aurobindo” because that is the name he requested to be addressed as (as opposed to just “Aurobindo”)… It is true that Wilber established the current Integral movement, lifting the word from Sri Aurobindo and Jean Gebser, who each independently defined it… It is true that Wilber identifies higher levels of consciousness beyond Turquoise/Integral, and that he associates them with Sri Aurobindo's ascending ladder of realisation as described by the latter in The Life Divine. However, Wilber's interpretation of Sri Aurobindo here and elsewhere is deeply flawed, as Brant Cortright (Psychotherapy and Spirit: Theory and Practice in Transpersonal Psychotherapy, SUNY 1997, p78), Rod Hemsell ("Ken Wilber and Sri Aurobindo: A Critical Perspective") and I (“Ken Wilber and Sri Aurobindo” - and “An Aurobindonian vision”) have all shown… In “An Aurobindonian vision” I have also shown how Wilber's spiritual stages are actually based on those of his former guru Adi Da. Because he simplistically considers all spiritual states part of the same linear series, he claims in his tables correlating different systems (see The Atman Project and Integral Psychology) that Da's “Seventh Stage” and Sri Aurobindo's “Supermind” are the same…

But the unfortunate fact remains that the whole Aurobindonian tradition has been and is being seriously misinterpreted – I don't think bastardised is too strong a word - by well-meaning but ignorant advocates of Integralism, attempting to remold Sri Aurobindo's teachings as a simplistic metaphysical precursor to AQAL.

There can be little doubt that the root of this problem lies with Wilber's own misunderstanding of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual philosophy. As Rod Hemsell has shown, this is apparent even in the earlier phases of his work (Atman Project – Wilber II). Wilber himself is certainly not to be blamed for this, as there is so much knowledge in the world today that it is simply not possible for one human being, no matter how intelligent or how competent a speed reader, to understand the whole world (see “Insufficient Study and Contemplation results in Superficial Understanding of Specialized Knowledge”). And to properly understand Sri Aurobindo and The Mother's Yoga requires tremendous sincerity and aspiration, not just a brief skim reading. The reading itself has to be a meditation, the pages returned to time after time. Just as with any authentic spiritual tradition.

Wilber's error here was then compounded through the memetic (sensu Dawkins) dispersal of his well-meaning misinterpretations, through his own work and that of others who have been influenced by him. As a result, more people are adopting a false version of what Sri Aurobindo taught and achieved. That he is, so Wilber informs us, a “theorist” (someone who spent forty years in intense practical yoga was a theorist?).  

The Starting Point For a Review of the Principles of Karma from Sri Aurobindo Studies 

As with all human understanding, humanity has approached the law of karma from our own very limited starting point. We try to essentially bring it down to a personal level and create some kind of ethical rulebook around its operation, or else relate the universal forces to us through some kind of inexorable process that appears to function under certain laws or rules, but directly interacts with our own lives and the decisions we make and the actions we take.

The Buddhist enunciation of the universal law of karma was clearly a breakthrough in terms of treating it as a universal action. In the West, the widening understanding of the vast scope and intelligent activity of the universe has systematically broadened our appreciation for the action of the Forces that are shaping the entire universal action, including, but certainly not limited to our individual lives.

Essentially we are coming to a point in time where we begin to understand that the Creation does not revolve around our own world or our own individuality, and that while we have our role to play, and our own unique value, it is with much larger frameworks and universal laws that we have to grapple to truly begin to understand. Thus, the law of karma includes our own actions, but not as some kind of directed ethical or moral reward or retribution, but as an instance of the universal laws of action, the patterns of energy.

This turns into a much less simplistic model than most of us have entertained to date, and Sri Aurobindo takes up the question with the view toward systematically reviewing it from all angles and aspects to provide a comprehensive basis for understanding. Because we tend to look at things first from the basis of the material world and material energy, we may want to start this review at the point where our vision naturally first engages the issue:

“It may be as well then to start from the physical base in approaching this question of Karma, though we may find at last that it is from the other end of being, from its spiritual summit rather than its material support that we must look in order to catch its whole significance–and to fix also the limits of its significance.” Sri Aurobindo, Rebirth and Karma, Section I, Chapter 8, Karma, pp. 68-69

Intentionality and consciousness implicit in Matter

Ananda Coomaraswamy: A Gentle Introduction from Centre Right India by Sandeep Balakrishna Nov 29, 2012

The period that roughly began in the latter half of the 19^th Century and lasted till about the 1960s in India is truly a Golden Age in many respects. It was the era that spawned both an upheaval, and a revival of the highest order. The revival was cultural and spiritual, which transformed India and helped an enormous mass of Indians rediscover their own selves. This revival formed the moral, ethical, spiritual, and philosophical foundations for the Indian freedom struggle against the British. In today’s parlance, it is what is today known as Hindu revivalism.

A galaxy of extremely accomplished people who began this process should rightly be regarded as the true progenitors of the freedom struggle. As with pretty much everything that India should rightly feel proud of, the Nehruvian state has long discarded these heroes. Perhaps a Swami Vivekananda and an Aurobindo Ghosh happen to be the exceptions to this Nehruvian phenomenon.

Ananda K Coomaraswamy happens to be one such forgotten hero, a true intellectual warrior who waged a fierce war against motivated attempts by missionaries and the West to distort and vilify Hinduism and its various facets. It is a cruel testimony to the kind of depths that we’ve plumbed because most Indians haven’t even heard the name of this giant…

Pretty prophetic and starkly accurate especially when we note that the most successful failed B.A was Jawaharlal Nehru who spawned an ecosystem which is dominated by the likes of the anchors of today’s English news channels. The price India has paid for perpetuating the Macaulayite education system is staggering. It has resulted in a continuing erosion of national and cultural identity. Most of urban India today has been reduced to a Wasteland inhabited by fabulous imitators of imported Western ideologies… This is the kind of insight, forthrightness, and honesty that characterizes everything he’s written, and that which today’s scholarship lacks. 

Justice and reconciliation from The Immanent Frame by Colleen Murphy Nov 30, 2012

Histories of violence and injustice leave marks of damage, despair, and pain. The central question Daniel Philpott considers in his book Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation is: “What does justice consist of in the wake of its massive despoliation?” The answer, Philpott argues, is political reconciliation. At first glance, this answer seems odd… The justice of reconciliation is not primarily the justice of desert (as in retributive justice or what Philpott calls balance retributivism) or justice as fairness (as in Rawls’s theory of distributive justice).

The justice of political reconciliation prioritizes the repairing of relationships and evaluates the justice of an action on the basis of what will achieve the repair that injustice creates; it is not fundamentally about responding to individuals and their actions in a manner that is in some sense fitting or due. Indeed, rather than resonating with the justice of retributivism and distributive justice articulated and defended by secularists and prevalent within liberal democratic communities, part of Philpott’s task is to problematize and challenge these notions. Of course all traditions, including secular liberal traditions, have their critics. Restorative justice is a secular movement, and it is to this understanding of justice that Philpott appeals when demonstrating that justice as reconciliation can become the subject of an overlapping consensus that includes secularists. However, restorative justice remains a somewhat minority view, and thus only a minority of secularists are likely to be included in the consensus Philpott envisions.

Cosmopolitical Theology: Violence, Value, and the Push for a Planetary People from Footnotes to Plato by Matthew David Segall Nov 30, 2012

This is a talk I gave back in September for my colleagues at CIIS during our annual retreat to Esalen in Big Sur, CA.

Yeah, “seeming closeness”, as in “they ain’t really all that close”: Or, Harman does it again from An und für sich by Anthony Paul Smith Nov 29, 2012

Alright, so those of us who haven’t been hoodwinked by Latour litanies or a form of Husserlian phenomenology presented in a pedantic form are kind of used to these occasional passive aggressive bullying outbursts from Harman. The bullying rhetoric from OOOers of various stripes functions in the same way each time, beginning with some proclamation of good intention followed incredibly insulting remarks before then putting the onus of the bullying on the one subjected to the bullying by claiming that it is in fact they who scream at them…

But when I use the untrademarked version of speculative realism I am thinking more of the general thrust of this movement towards realism, engagement with the sciences, materialism, so not Harmanian OOO in any specific sense. Nor am I thinking there is some filial relation. To my mind non-philosophy is a living project, not a historical one, and so my claim, understood by I think readers without weird label protecting agendas, is that Laruelle’s realist theory sure looks a lot like other realist theories in Continental philosophy. Harman is very fond of claiming that only he and de Landa were calling themselves realists back in the 90′s. The truth is that the early Laruelle as early as Principe de minorité was calling himself a realist and exploring a form of thought that would be neither correlatioinist nor absolutist (the main difference between his work and Meillassoux’s). 

Tweets 2h - Levi Bryant ‏@onticologist 4) This allows me to bring in all sorts of Lacan, Marx, Baudrillard, etc., without reducing objects. 2h 3) I've been able to develop a much more robust place for semiotic machines vis a vis their account of incorporeal transformation. 2h 2) Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's account of content and expression, 2h 1) Just hit the 150pg mark in Onto-Cartography. I'm currently working on a section chapter 5.2 entitled "Content and Expression".

Surrealism & Automatic Writing: The politics of destroying language Death and Taxes - ‎Nov 28, 2012‎ By DJ Pangburn 

Back in the 1930s, a French psychoanalyst and philosopher by the name of Jacques Lacan began his life’s work—an attempt to create the framework by which the human psyche could be analyzed within modern civilization. Such was his influence that Lacanian thought not only left a mark on the field of psychoanalysis but found integration in Marxist thought, most notably with Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek. Like many 19th and 20th century thinkers, Lacan was particularly influenced by George Wilhelm Fredrik Hegel. After failing a physical to enter the French army, Lacan took to studying psychoanalysis. By 1934 Lacan had published “On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality.” The work did not cause much of a ripple, except in Parisian Surrealist circles.

The psychoanalytical umbilicus between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Surrealism is fairly-well established. A young Lacan published work in the Surrealist review Minotaur, and associated with Andre Breton and the radically-influential novelist and philosopher Georges Bataille(author of “The Story of the Eye”). Lacan, inspired by the Surrealists and their automatic writing, went on to create work that inspired philosophers like Gilles Deleuze (“Capitalism and Schizophrenia, co-written with Felix Guatarri), Foucault (especially his panoptic disciplinary consciousness) and Baudrillard (simulated reality); whose work in turn has helped us better understand the modern, media-driven political world in which we live.

It is true that the Surrealists, only a few years after coalescing, abandoned the idea of pure automatic writing, with Breton, Bataille, Louis Aragon and Phillipe Souppault, amongst others, writing critical Surrealist novels. But the efforts in automatism were vital. Language, ossified by the upper classes and imposed on all throughout history, needed to be liberated by “pure psychic automatism.” Breton may have been the “high priest of Surrealism,” ex-communicating members for trivial transgressions, but he was right about language.

At this moment, I, the writer, and you, the reader, are partaking at a banquet of language that we did not create—a system superimposed on our consciousness. The raw material of our minds is rendered by the symbolic aspect of language, and there is no escaping it; unless one takes psychedelics, descends into madness, attains a hightened non-symbolic spiritual state, or disrupts the historical, psychological superstructure of language.

Forsaking Futurity and a Call for Feminist Theologies: A Response to Gender & the Studio, Part Three from An und für sich by Brandy Daniels Nov 29, 2012

Abstract: Rather than delve into the potential theo-logic of a Butlerian “constructivist” account of gender, this blog post proposes that we pause, and instead question the discursive operations undergirding the very idea of “the future of systematic theology.” 

Originally, I wanted to outline a bit of a Butlerian “constructivist” account of gender and examine the theological overlay/import, to lay out what I see as a potential alternative to a “Christianly gendered” theology… In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler is quite clear that the socially-constructed self does not eliminate agency or norms, or even the need for norms. The “problem is not with universality,” she explains, “but with an operation of universality that fails to be responsive to cultural particularity and fails to undergo a reformulation of itself in response to the social and cultural conditions it includes within its scope of applicability” (6). The task, rather,  is to acknowledge and interrogate norms, to recognize the ways norms function to constitute oneself in relation with the other. This is what seems to be eschewed in many conversations that assume essentialist gender claims—i.e. the assumed connection between feminism and receptivity.

As I say in an earlier footnote, for a critique of gender—and sexual—essentialism—I highly recommend Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. What Butler does is this text is demonstrate how discourse shapes reality in terms of producing (gendered) subjectivities, and that this has oppressive and violent consequences. 

Matter Is a Form of Spirit from Sri Aurobindo Studies Nov 30, 2012

The deeper modern science goes in exploring Matter, the closer it comes to an understanding that there is a spiritual self-conscious being that manifests itself in the universe, and that Matter is a form of Spirit. First, the scientists recognized that Matter is Energy. Then further research yielded the understanding that Energy is Consciousness. When we look at modern physics, quantum theory, string theory and other cutting-edge theories, we find scientists now recognizing more and more clearly the intentionality and the consciousness implicit in the world of Matter. Matter is not dead, inanimate and simply dense “stuff”. It is actually alive with energy; in fact, so much energy that releasing it can create enormous power as we see in atom bombs and nuclear power plants!

What is missing when we see Matter as “inanimate” is simply that we do not have the ability to see and understand the packed intensity and density of Matter. Just as we now recognize an electro-magnetic spectrum that includes waves that are both above and below our threshold of perception, there are expressions of energy and consciousness both above and below our ability to perceive them.

The Ultimate Foundation Of A True Sociology from ANTIDOTE by Sauvik von Chakraverti SATURDAY, 9 JUNE 2012

This, then, is the “constant” – the Individual Mind. This is the “epistemological foundation” of this New Science. This approach was inaugurated by Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School of Economics, in the 1880s and, after him, fully developed by Ludwig von Mises during the 20^th century.

It was Mises, in the first 100 pages of his Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, who first outlined the constant features of the trading human mind, features common to us all - and these he termed "mental categories" that are embedded within the mind's "logical structure." Mises took a very different view of this mind, a view that distinguished him from John Locke and many other philosophers, who believed that the mind was a tabula rasaupon which experience wrote its own story. “No,” said Mises, preferring to cite Leibniz, who said, “there is nothing in the intellect that has not been previously in the senses – except the intellect itself.”

In other words, the logical structure of the human mind comes as a “given” to us – given, that is, before any experience. Indeed, without it, we would not know how to “categorise” experiences. We would not know how to "grasp the meaning" of the "concepts" these mental categories represent. There would be no difference between us and the animals – had it not been for our very human reason.

For example, Capital is one such category Mises listed, and along with this he listed Income. These are to be found in the minds of any nomadic herdsman who "counts his sheep" and, while he may sell of consume some, makes sure that the size of his herd does not diminish: that is, he is careful not to "consume capital." His natural "good sense" makes him "accumulate capital."

Review of the Economic Ideas of Ander Chydenius Perhaps Anticipating Adam Smith from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy Nov 29, 2012 "Anticipating The Wealth of Nations: The Selected Works of Anders Chydenius (1729-1803)" Published by EH.Net (November 2012) Maren Jonasson and Pertti Hyttinen, editors, Anticipating The Wealth of Nations: The Selected Works of Anders Chydenius (1729-1803). Translated from the original by Peter C. Hogg. London: Routledge, 2012.

Ethics and an edifice of falsity, fantasy, and indeterminacy

Why India Is Not A Secular State - Omar Khalidi Outlook 29 Jan 2009 – With the Republic Day just gone by, it is time to ask: But is India really a secular state? I do not think so…

Official functions of the government whether at the central or state levels often commence with Hindu ceremonies of lighting lamps, breaking coconuts, and recitation of slokas. There is no disapproval to the fact that functions of central and state ministries of education begin with Sarasvati vandana.

India is not secular wichaar.com 6 Feb 2009 – It is easier now to understand the fallacy of Dr. Omar Khalidi's argument, such as it is, in his essay Why India Is Not A Secular State…

When the French writer Andre Malraux asked Jawaharlal Nehru in 1958 about his "greatest difficulty since Independence" then Nehru replied, "Creating a just state by just means". He then added: "Perhaps, too, creating a secular state in a religious country." Indian state is a work in progress but the foundations are right. The champions of modern Indian state fought hard to create a secular democratic state.

Spirituality and Ethics in Management - Page 214 - Google Books Result - Laszlo Zsolnai - 2011 - Laszlo Zsolnai, Business Ethics Center, Budapest University of Economic Sciences - Taking Spirituality Seriously: Misuse of Spirituality

As spirituality is becoming popular there is certain danger of its being misinterpreted and misused in business and management. Chakraborty warns that there is a tendency to treat spirituality as yet another means or tool to further the dominant objective and measurable goals of business. We can observe that spirituality is sometimes treated as either a new fad for professionals to rake in some money or a means to improve competitive strength for higher market share and bottom line figures.

Bouckaert clearly explains the problem. He states that rational economic theory tells us that ethics is needed as a resource to temper opportunism and distrust because of uncertainty and asymmetric information. Therefore ethics might make economic sense by reducing transaction costs, promoting profitable cooperative behavior and creating a competitive advantage. This rational argument does not challenge the economic logic; it only introduces ethics into the web of instrumental rationality. The rational argument for business ethics results in a paradox.

larvalsubjects Says: April 25, 2008 at 1:31 pm

The issue isn’t one of rejecting these figures because of their style as Nussbaum did in the case of Butler, nor is it one of rejecting these thinkers at all, but rather of identifying a different sort of power at work in these texts that often is quite at odds with the explicit aims of the texts. This point seems to be getting lost in a number of the responses, no doubt because us continentalists– especially if we’re from the United States –are especially sensitive to this issue because we’ve suffered so many difficulties professionally in relation to Anglo-American philosophy having to defend the value of these thinkers. We know (or many of us think), for example, that there is something of tremendous value in Lacan’s work, yet the very first thing we encounter again and again in discussions with others about someone like Lacan, is curt dismissals of that work based on style alone. We thus find ourselves in the position of having to do all sorts of defensive legwork defending the purpose and importance of both the text and its stylistic decisions before we can even begin to discuss the conceptual issues.

What I’m proposing is that these stylistic practices have their own dynamic of power that is often at odds with the express aim of these practices. In A Thousand Plateaus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari contrast root-books and rhizome-books in the introduction to the work. Root-books are centralized, “paranoid” (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of the word), and presided over by an author-function that works much like a sovereign. Rhizome-books, by contrast, lack any centralizations, can be read in a variety of different ways, and connected to anything we might like. at 6:59 PM

The Lectern: 'Rene Leys' Victor Segalen 10 Oct 2011 [In this entrancing story of spiritual adventure, a Westerner in Peking seeks the mystery at the heart of the Forbidden City. ... Google Books]

Then, Segalen has his third epiphany, that every tale told to him by Leys in fact originated as a suggestion from Segalen himself, in his obsession with the Kuang Hsu Emperor, in his questions to the lad in their lessons and conversations, and his quest to gain entry into the Within, the Forbidden City. Leys took these questions and suggestions from Segalen, and built up from them an edifice of falsity and fantasy and fed it back to Segalen: ...from the very moment of our first meeting...Everything I said, he did. …

At this point the reader is reminded of the kind of narrative strategies used by Italo Calvino in If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. But whereas Calvino was exploring the psychology of reading, here the narratives games have an important philosophical function, which is to examine the different cultural attitudes towards indeterminacy itself.

The West, we can simply say, regards indeterminacy as problematic. The Western mind, trained in the precision of Aristotelian scientism and the Socratic syllogism, seeks to resolve indeterminacy into an either-or, or at least, tries to establish a clear boundary between component or antithetical elements of an entity. This is reflected in Indo-European, inflected languages, whose driving force is in the direction of disambiguation.

The East, on the other hand, is much more comfortable with indeterminacy, with vagueness. Chinese characters embody several ideas and the distinctions between them are not sought; the Chinese language, with its lack of distinction between nouns and verbs, lack of pronoun use and so on, is much more capable of sustaining ambiguity. Indeed we can go further and say the whole language and culture privileges indeterminacy, and that the search for clarification, for disambiguation, is not its main direction. For the Chinese, the process of clarification carries with it the inherent danger of creating false distinctions where none exist in nature, of the false imposition of mind on matter, of the name obscuring the thing, of a wrong seeing.

The Western mind seeks either-or distinctions; the Chinese mind is unperturbed by dwelling in a state of what Keats called 'negative capability'…The circular, anticipatory structure of the novel, and the fact that Rene Leys is a European lad ensures that the dialogue between West and East happens in the mind of the reader, not only on the page…

The mystery of the ways in which the fictional story of Rene Leys anticipates the real story of Sir Edmund Backhouse only deepens when we learn that in his memoir, Decadence Mandchoue, which has only this year been published, Backhouse, also like Rene Leys, claimed to have been the secret lover of his Empress Dowager (old Buddha), and to have had intimate knowledge of the workings of the Manchu Dynasty. VS died in 1919, however, and knew nothing of Backhouse's disgrace. POSTED BY MURR AT 11:55 AM MONDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2011

Seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires

The Body Electric: Extending Soul into Cyberspace Posted by Andrew Neuendorf on November 12, 2012

I think Bostock would have an unlikely ally in Walt Whitman, no Luddite, who celebrated the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable  in his poem “Passage to India,” which is largely about the unfinished journey of Columbus. Whitman writes about this journey symbolically (not from a historical perspective, which would reveal Columbus’ mission to Christianize and enslave the indigenous West) as an attempt to unite East and West by bringing Europe and India together to begin a global civilization. (Columbus’s journey is also Edgar Morin’s historical starting point for the beginning of the planetary era in his book Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future, which I’ve written about recently here)…

The work of uniting the world is still in progress, but whether the means consist of ships, cables, or the internet, technology always provides the backbone. In “Song of Myself,” we encounter Whitman’s version of extension, his body taking flight and touring the nation. However, he is not disembodied. His journey is concrete and rooted to the land… His flight is rooted in the American landscape, in the vast extension of the material world, the expanses of nature on the continent…

Camille Paglia argues in her 2000 Salon article The North American Intellectual Tradition, that a kind of earthy, visionary pragmatism is the dominant philosophy on this side of the Atlantic. She argues against the continental philosophers (such as Heidegger, Derrida, and Lacan) whose works are too dry, abstract, and jargon-laden to appeal to the American sensibility. Instead of the disembodied mind, she embraces the body:

“My argument is that the North American intellectuals, typified by McLuhan, Fiedler and Brown, achieved a new fusion of ideas — a sensory pragmatism or engagement with concrete experience, rooted in the body, and at the same time a visionary celebration of artistic metaspace — that is, the fictive realm of art, fantasy and belief projected by great poetry and prefiguring our own cyberspace.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Time of Useful Consciousness: Excerpts Interview & Review by abdul lateef Posthuman Destinies - Science, Culture, Integral Yoga NOVEMBER 18, 2012

We always like to return to Whitman one of the poets with whom Sri Aurobindo’s concludes his Future Poetry.  Fittingly Ferlinghetti on his journey to the West concludes by invoking Whitman whose oracular voice echoes through the bohemians and the beats from the east village to north beach, it is here given over in what will surely be one of last great exhalations from a founding member of that generation (al)

Fichte and Romantic Self-Assertion The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library THE ASSAULT ON THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

Fichte is the figure who betrayed the rationalist and ultimately libertarian and even democratic ideals of Kant, and the harmless, benevolent, decent, populist ideals of Herder, who thought that there were many flowers in the garden and that they need not struggle with each other at all.

The person who foresaw where this was going to lead was the poet Heinrich Heine, who in a very famous passage said, warning the French, I think after 1830, not to down their weapons, not to disarm, because of the fearful danger from their neighbours: ‘Kantians will appear who will … ruthlessly with sword and axe hack through the foundations of our European life … Armed Fichteans will come, whose fanatical wills neither fear nor interest can touch.’ 26 And who shall say that he was altogether mistaken? Page 30 FICHTE AND ROMANTIC SELF The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2005 11:33 AM

Tweet 13h - Steven Shaviro ‏@shaviro I accept the parts of Deleuze that stem from Bergson, Spinoza, Leibniz, & Kant, but reject the parts that stem from Nietzsche & Hume.

On the Universality of Culture by larvalsubjects

What I’m trying to think– along with many others –is multiple causation or how a variety of different causes interact with one another from both the plane of expression and the plane of content.  My gripe with a theorist like Lacan, for example, is not that he’s wrong in pointing out that the signifier– another example of an incorporeal machine –plays an important causal role in human subjectivity and social assemblages.  My gripe lies in the way in which he tends to treat language as a “primary modeling system” for everything else– “the universe is the flower of rhetoric” –treating it as structuring an unformatted matter (everything else), without exploring the causal contributions (“difference contributions”) made by non-signifying entities.  It’s not that Lacan is wrong, but that he is not sufficiently thinking in terms of overdetermination.  This is why much in Guattari’s work represents a significant advance over Lacan.  So basically, without sharing her thesis that culture is universal, I’m on the same page as Aprell…

The mark of the universality of culture in the anthropocene thus does not lie in the universal reign of the signifier structuring everything– cultural narratives and signifiers structure very little in Antarctica –but rather lies in the universal effects of contemporary technology and capitalist modes of production that have managed to transform the fabric of the planet at the atmospheric, chemical, and biological level no matter how remote the region.  In this respect, the anthropocene does not entail the erasure of the biological, chemical, or geological, but rather the emergence of a new dominant actant that every other actant must contend with.

The Prince of This World: Thinking the Devil in Light of Agamben’s Kingdom and the Glory  from An und für sich by Adam Kotsko

From this perspective, The Kingdom and the Glory represents a crucial turning point in Agamben’s project, deepening his account of Western theologico-political structures by beginning to work out how the logic of sovereignty is deployed and transformed in order to penetrate the fine-grained textures of everyday life. In place of the easily delimitable “state of exception” where the sovereign suspends the law in order to save it, we are directed toward the workaday realities of flexible management.

Though it is perhaps surprising that he derives this logic from the Christian theological tradition, it appears in retrospect that many of his key points were more or less hiding in plain sight. For instance, who could deny, after reading Agamben’s account, that Adam Smith’s infamous “invisible hand” is modelled on theological accounts of divine providence? 

Revisiting Integral Humanism from Centre Right India by Kesava

It is a bit of a mystery why Panditji called his theory Integral Humanism in English. Not many of his articles really concentrate on “humanist” aspect. On the contrary they concentrate more on “national character” and the role of “individual character” in it… Deendayal Upadhyaya Institute has been doing some fabulous ground work, especially with the Chitrakoot project. However, unfortunately, there has not been much of intellectual activity from the institute… We need to reestablish The Integral Approach as the core of the right in India.  

The Soul and Subhuman Existence  from Sri Aurobindo Studies 

In ancient times, the world was invested with spirit everywhere, in all things. Sri Aurobindo describes it thus: “Ancient belief…saw a soul, a living godhead everywhere in the animate and in the inanimate and nothing was to its view void of a spiritual existence.”

The development of the logical mind and its focus on dividing, classifying and simplifying through trenchant separation rejected this view of life. It does not mean, however, that this is the final answer to the question. Sri Aurobindo describes a process of development that is one unified continuum, and this implies that soul exists, in some form, not only in the human and the animal existence, but even in the earlier, more primitive forms of life…

Further work with crystals and minerals has even begun to uncover the responsiveness that Sri Aurobindo has posited in the world of material forms. One consciousness, one existence, in a unity that spans from the most inconscient Matter to the heights of Spirit, implies that there is a continuum and our attempt to divide and classify and separate is an artificial mental construct but not an essential underlying Reality of the manifested universe. We find that the ancient view of inclusion has more ultimate truth in it that the modern view of fragmentation.