Adam Smith defends the soundness of ordinary human being’s judgments

Savitri Reading & Flute Recital from Auroville Radio by contact@aurovilleradio.org (Amanda)

On the occasion of the Mother's Birthday, an evening performance was held at the Matrimandir amphitheater. Passages were read from Savitri "Book of the Divine Mother" and "The Book of Birth and Quest", accompanied by the flute and tanpura. 

The joy of giving from Auroville Radio by contact@aurovilleradio.org (Annie)

21st of February  important day in Auroville's life, FoodLink takes a gift economy's aspect to celebrate this day. Based on the joy of giving, food shopping is an exchange. Farmers bring their productions, vegetable, fruits, milk .... and people pay the price that they can afford. A different way to estimate value of goods, in a typically Aurovilian way of living. This happened in "Pour Tous" next to solar kitchen, finishing at 3 pm. 

The Mother remembered on her birth anniversary - The Hindu

10,000 visitors thronged the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Over 10,000 visitors are expected to have crossed the portals of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, to have a ...

Birth anniversary of the Mother celebrated - The New Indian Express

A mass meditation was held at Sri Aurobindo Ashram to mark the 135th birth anniversary of the Mother here on Thursday. Devotees from the country as well as...

Talk - Matter – Man’s Last spiritual Frontier at Sri Aurobindo Complex ... Feb 21 2013 04:30 PM Sri Aurobindo Complex Trust 21 Feb, 2013. 'Mother's birth anniversary', talk on 'Matter - man's last spiritual frontier' by Bhaskara Reddy.

MOTHER´S BIRTHDAY AT AUROBINDO (Colonel Nirmal Mahajan, EME, Retd) 21 Feb, was Mother’s 135th birthday

It was celebrated with all the fervor, enthusiasm at the Aurobindo Ashram, Rajpur Road. The Prayer hall was packed to capacity with the devotees who had come to pay homage to Mother. Madhu Anjali, energetic Vice Chairperson of Aurbindo Ashram, had splendidly decked up the whole place with marigold flowers. Flurry of white flowers at the entrance add to the ambiance of Ashram. As always, as per the tradition, the program started with meditation and reading of a page of epic, “Savitri” (written by Sri Aurobindo). Later Kiran Sood, Principal of M.K.P (PG) Collage, gave a thought provoking talk on Mother, which the knowledgeable audience heard in pin drop silence. Kiran is a regular speaker and has in-depth knowledge of spiritual matters…

Special message received from Pondicherry was distributed to all. It read, “There is a sacred fire that burns in the heart and envelops the whole being; it is Agni, who illumines and purifies all. I kindle that fire in you each time that you ask me for some progress; but it destroys nothing but falsehood and obscurity.” The Mother

20 boys and girls of Jaswant Modern School sang few melodious Bhajans, befitting the auspicious occasion, in the presence of their principal Meenakashi Ganhotra. Every one in the vast gathering appreciated chorus singing especially “ Om Namo Shivai” in crescendo. In the end Devi Wahi, chairperson of Aurbindo, profusely thanked Kiran Sood and principal, students of Jaswant Modern School. She also informed the devotees that on 24 Feb, Promila Mahajan will give lecture on “Meditation” at 10:30 AM.  All are welcome. The function was attended by large devotees of Dehradun including Gen Agarwal, Thapar, Mohan Sachdev, Narang , Bansal, Sethi , Mehta , Mahajan and many more. Community lunch was served to one and all. It was indeed a memorable day at Aurobindo Ashram.

The Development of the Concept of Moral and Ethical Law from Sri Aurobindo Studies 

As the human mind develops beyond its first focus on purely vital success and fulfillment, we see the next stage as the attempt to abstract out of the life experience some basic principles or rules which get framed into the concept of “right”, which became in the ancient Indian philosophy, the concept known as “Dharma”. We see here a more characteristically mental framework developing an independence from the needs for vital success in life, and a corresponding attempt to control life based on these abstract principles…

We see here a real transition from the non-moral law of the vital world, and the first mental developments focused on supporting and achieving success in the world of life and action, to a more purely mental framework that seeks to modify life, and impose itself regardless of the vital desires and fulfillments. Of course, this starts out as a mixed action still highly colored by the desires, demands and needs of the vital being of man, and thus, the ideals and goals set in this initial stage are very much vital goals.

Vernadsky, Noosphere and Vivekananda from Centre Right India by Aravindan Neelakandan

The term noosphere was originally coined by Teilhard de Chardin the Jesuit anthropologist. However it was Vernadsky integrated the emergence of noosphere with the evolutionary history of the planet… His book ‘The Biosphere’ was published in Russian in 1926 and in French in 1929. With 150 pages and unassuming cover, the book’s importance was not understood fully outside a small minority of inter-disciplinary scientists dealing with eco-systems… In 1960, in the centennial year of the publication of ‘Origin of Species’, Sir Julian Huxley coined the term ‘psycho-social evolution’ to characterize the nature of evolution after the advent of humans. Huxley also strongly felt the need for a psychosocial science for guiding this post-biological evolution…

But what makes Vivekananda more relevant to the study of noosphere is the way he shuns the pseudo-science of social Darwinism. This is a remarkable stand because at that time the most of the Western world was under the sway of Herbert Spencer – applying the ‘survival of the fittest’ to human societies, justifying enslaving of non-western societies, colonial exploitation, racism and elimination of mentally challenged individuals in the name of the science of eugenics… He saw in evolution an underlying unity of all life rejecting spontaneous creation with an external factor like God and he also inferred that with the advent of human mind and unity of humanity, a new phase in evolution has commenced… In fact Vernadsky seeing mind as an important factor in planetary geo-bio evolution gets a premonition in Vivekananda’s thought, though in a much larger canvas… Vernadsky in his last days was deeply attracted by the works of Swami Vivekananda. And this year sees the 150th birth anniversary of both Swami Vivekananda and Vernadsky. 

Adam Smith’s Moral and Political Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

A central thread running through his work is an unusually strong commitment to the soundness of the ordinary human being’s judgments, and a concern to fend off attempts, by philosophers and policy-makers, to replace those judgments with the supposedly better “systems” invented by intellectuals… Perhaps taking a cue from David Hume’s skepticism about the capacity of philosophy to replace the judgments of common life, Smith is suspicious of philosophy as conducted from a foundationalist standpoint, outside the modes of thought and practice it examines. Instead, he maps common life from within, correcting it where necessary with its own tools rather than trying either to justify or to criticize it from an external standpoint. He aims indeed to break down the distinction between theoretical and ordinary thought. This intellectual project is not unconnected with his political interest in guaranteeing to ordinary individuals the “natural liberty” to act in accordance with their own judgments.

From My Notebook no.8: Karl Polanyi on Adam Smithfrom Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy

Polanyi suffers from ideological blindness.  He has a political point of view that denies the very evidence he quotes!  

Remembering Arumuga Navalar from Centre Right India by Pulitheva Tamizhmannan

There are other equally great figures who are less famous, but who deserve to be known and remembered. Among them is Arumuga Navalar (1822 – 1879) who is regarded as the “father” of modern day Tamil prose and an architect of Hindu destiny in Eelam (Sri Lanka) is the most prominent member…

The school he established was modeled along the lines of the Protestant school he had studied in since he felt that the traditional Tamil schools were inadequate for facing the missionary onslaught which he saw as shiva’s way of chastising the Tamils and awakening them to their own heritage… By 1850 he had managed to set up the printing press and began publishing religious texts and texts like Bala Patam (Children’s Lessons) for the Shaiva school children… To put it simply, Arumuga Navalar created an awakening among the Sri Lankan Tamils and set the standards for modern day Tamil prose; what Swami Dayananda and his Arya Samaj had achieved in North India in stemming conversions, Arumuga Navalar achieved in Eelam.

Zanjeer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 1973 Hindi film

At a time, when India was suffering from corruption, low economic growth etc, and the common man was left with frustration and anger over the system, Hindi Cinema turned violent and aggressive. Reflecting the anger of the masses, Amitabh Bachchan became the new hero, who had the courage to fight against the wrong and maintaining moral values at the same time… Reflective of "the tumultuous politics of the early 70s" in India, Deewaar (1975 film) was a ground-breaking work. It was one of a few films which established Bachchan as the "angry young man" of Bollywood cinema. ~ How do movies affect yoga practice?

Professor's opacity as a productive principle

Comment on Sri Aurobindo on Nationalism by Sandeep February 4, 2013

The Uttarpara speech was made after deep God-realization, although it has been misinterpreted and appropriated for sectarian purposes by those who do not understand the universality of Sanatana Dharma. I don’t think he ever rejected the speech, because the same theme is repeated in the “five dreams” message he gave when India became free in 1947.

Jabberwock: Divine savages and “real” truth 17 Oct 2011 [Did a shorter version of this for my Sunday Guardian books column]

There is no such thing as an “objective” reader or reviewer – our feelings about a book are shaped by many things working in conjunction: personal experiences, biases, genetic makeup, level of engagement with a subject, and so on. The best a reviewer can do is to admit the necessary subjectivity of his perspective and then tackle a book as honestly as possible.

The Other Tale of Indian Modernity: Savita Singh by Pratilipi Blog January 30, 2013

As an interpreter invariably does while understanding the truth, I too do not presume that the entire truth lies in the text itself. For, after the truth has been communicated to the readers, and some clarity has been brought to the text compared to its previous reading, the truth still remains. Truth perhaps is a remainder. In the light of this position on ...

Teaching, ISA’s, and the Pedagogy of Alienation from Larval Subjects January 30, 2008 

It was Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx who taught us that the subject is split or barred, and that our relationship to ourselves is characterized by a fundamental meconaissance. In the Freudo-Nietzschean constellation, this split is between the conscious ego that takes itself to be the one calling the shots, and those acephalous unconscious desires or that unconscious will of which we are but an effect. It is this unconscious desire or will that is calling the shots, not the sovereign ego. In the case of Marx, this split nature of the subject is located in the way we are caught up in social relations that exceed our conscious intentionality, functioning as determinants of our action…

Hume begins with an obvious “common sense” thesis about how we come to know– “all knowledge originates in sensations” –yet in holding fast to this thesis he unsettles all our common sense about knowledge and the world. Husserl begins with an obvious thesis– “look at the things themselves!” –yet in executing this project he unsettles our assumptions about what it is to experience the world and objects, opening a vast domain that continues to challenge central assumptions in cognitive science, psychology, the social sciences, etc. 5:27 am

Great Moments in the Classroom from Larval Subjects January 31, 2008 Students shuffling out of the classroom after a discussion of Platonic realism and the possibility of transcendent, objective values independent of culture, history, and individual determination.

STUDENT: “This class is impossible.”
ME (Alarmed): “Why?”
STUDENT: “We come in here thinking we understand the world and now we discover that everything we think might be mistaken.”

larvalsubjects Says: February 2, 2008 at 4:33 pm

I think what was most important in the comment was the statement that “everything we think might be mistaken”. That is, the conditional. The world becoming questionable or mysterious is a condition, I think, for practicing philosophy. In the philosophy classroom– especially at the introductory level –I believe the production of this space of the question is the most important and significant thing to be accomplished. That is, the teaching of philosophy shouldn’t be about demonstrating a particular doctrine, nor is it simply about acquainting students with a variety of different philosophical positions (though that’s important), but is rather about opening the space of questionability as such.

larvalsubjects Says: February 3, 2008 at 8:47 pm

I go back and forth on the question of whether anything should be pushed in the classroom. In part I think about Socrates and how you can never pin down what his position might be or if he even has one. In part I think about the nature of the analyst’s position in the analytic setting, where the analyst sets his own desire to the side so that the analysand might discover his or her own desire. It seems to me that this opacity of the professors own positions can function as a sort of productive principle where the students progressively discover their own thought as they try to figure out what it is that the professor thinks or wants. I guess in my own teaching I try to advocate fully for whatever material it is I’m teaching. One moment I’ll be vigorously defending Kierkegaard or Augustine, only to shift to Lucretius or Nietzsche. I’ll bring critical tools to bear on one tradition from another tradition, and so on. I can’t decide whether there’s a principle behind this or not. I would like to think that part of the aim is to undermine attachments to the professor as “master”. Here I always think back to Deleuze’s remark that “the best teachers are never those who say ‘do as I do’ (representation), but who invite to ‘do with me’”.

Delusion of rational choice or Deleuzian solutions

Rahul laments mediocrity - N K Singh, General Secretary, Broadcast ... The Sunday Indian

It is important to reflect on Sri Aurobindo, who once said referring to the average politician, “He does not represent the soul of a people or its aspirations. What he does usually represent is all the average pettiness, selfishness, egoism, self-deception that is about him as well as a great deal of mental incompetence and moral conventionality, timidity and pretence.’’

Great jurist Nani Palkhivala in his book Our Constitution Defaced and Defiled says, “At present the main infirmity of democracy is that the only job for which one needs no training or qualification whatsoever is the job of governing and legislating. Election mostly throws either mediocrity or extremism into power”. Well said.

Vivekananda's take on gold, business, and consumerism – Business Economics Jayanta Sarkar on Jan 30, 2013 

Sri Aurobindo is one of them who saw through the veil. He wrote, “The affirmation of a divine life upon earth and an immortal sense in mortal existence  can have no base  unless we recognize not only  eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this bodily mansion, the wearer of this mutable robe, but accept Matter of which it is made, as a fit and noble material out of which He weaves  constantly His garbs, builds recurrently the unending series of His mansions.” (The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1990). In other words, what is important is how one looks at it.

Reasoning Preferred to Rational Theorising from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy

Adam Smith’s advocacy of the philosophy of Natural Liberty was quite different from laissez-faire (words he never mentioned). Natural Liberty, as expressed by Smith, equalised the rights of all participants in commercial society, employers, labourers and consumers.  This does not prevent modern economists from associating laissez-faire with Adam Smith’s name, a habit that goes right back to the early 19^th century and continues into the 21st. Many, I find, conflate laissez-faire to mean both freedom for employers and governments.  The lobbying of government is big business and by big business in many countries

Rand’s assertion that her “moral theory of self-interest is derived from man’ s nature as a rational being and end in himself” sits comfortably with neo-classical theories of ‘rational’ beings (who ‘Max U’ in everything).  That belief in rational Homo economicus is unfounded.   Humans are capable of reasoning (not the same as having a common rational faculty) because their individual ability to reason is not the same as all of us arriving at the same answers or choices. Jails are full of the victims of their own ‘rational’ choices given their desperate or opportunistic circumstances and many more prisons would be required if judicial processes were applied for the rational choices of those in government who intentionally or unintentionally inflict misery on their innocent victims. Our behaviour in different circumstances may be considered individually to be reasoned, given our individual perceptions of specific situations, but there is no reason to believe our individual actions from our perceptions of the circumstances are subject to a universal rationality.  Humans in human societies are not like that.  We do not all rationally act in accordance with some theory of rational choice.

It is in this area that I parted company with Ludwig von Mises in his 1966  “Human Action: a treatise on economics” – a very large tome I read some years back – in which he derives everything that follows in his book from a rigorous logic of the consequences of proposition. 

I prefer Smith’s approach of studying what happened since some humans left the forest and then as a minority, at first, moved to shepherding and farming.  Another minority  (“at last”) moved from country life to live in towns, inevitably and indubitably, creating (“at last”) commercial society that first processed food and raw materials from the country in traded exchange for processed food and later in exchange for manufactured goods. It was that historical development of traded exchange that laid the basis for the creation of capital that led to commercial development.  Those that remained in the forest, or in shepherding or farming, mostly remained there for millennia.  There is nothing ordained about what humans do, nor is there a particular direction by which they pass their lifetimes, as their archaeological remains testify.

Smith did not require the conversion of everybody to new morality or to a universal conformity to logic.  In fact he wrote of humans as they were.  He made no predictions about the future  (except about the future of the former British colonies in North America becoming the wealthiest economy in the world by around 1875).  Instead he studied the past to understand within the limitations of knowledge the present; we might be better doing the same.  

*The Great Deformation* from Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen

On money and macro, I am more persuaded by Friedman, Irving Fisher, early Keynes, David Hume, and Scott Sumner, among others. 

On the Occasion of the Ordeal: A Response from Joshua Ramey to Dan Barber’s “Experimental Life and Ordeal’s Necessity” from An und für sich by Joshua Ramey

First I would like to say how grateful I am for the opportunity to respond to these comments about The Hermetic Deleuze.  Those of us who are able to write academic books, and there are many of you following this blog who write those books, know that it is, in the end, a solitary and even an isolating affair, and that even with publication the chances that one’s work will be noticed or responded to are slim.  In this age of increasing destitution and de-investment in higher education, blogs like this one are becoming more and more important as places for those of us compelled by these thoughts can meet and take our chances together.  Each of the writers who have agreed to respond to my book are people whose work I deeply admire, and the opportunity to continue to think with them, and with those of you who read and respond to that thinking, is an extraordinary occasion in my life. 

To speak of the occasion, as Dan does in his beautiful and deeply thought piece, I want to affirm, first of all, that absolutely, there is a connection between reading and ritual, reading and mantra.  There is an occasionalism to reading… So what interested me, the more I read Deleuze, were his attention to various procedures, from the modernist work of art to the psychedelic experiment, that seemed to have a common goal of “absolute immanence.” … I have very little interest in championing Deleuzian “solutions” to contemporary “problems,” any more than I have in inviting people to fold their contemporary desires for life back into some perennial or archaic hermeticism.  Everything remains to be reinvented.  I am much more interested in how Deleuze’s problems are still our problems, and how yes, I think that there are hints and rumors of future possible “solutions” to those problems, but perhaps the problems have already become unrecognizable, on strictly Deleuzian “terms.”  But if one looks at his own “metaphilosophical” comments, I think he would agree that such a situation defines philosophy, as such.

Braudel, Broadie, Bede Griffiths and the transformation of the body

Review of an "Agreeable Connexion" from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy

Alexander Brodie. 2012. “Agreeable Connexions: Scottish Enlightenment links with France”. Edinburgh: John Donald, Birlinn Ltd.

This is a most agreeable book for scholars and those interested in the Scottish Enlightenment from which so much of the modern world evolved… Broadie’s thesis is that what became known as the Scottish Enlightenment has its roots in a long history of connections between Scottish intellectuals from the medieval period onwards, primarily with their French opposite numbers, despite their different theological traditions, particularly after the Reformation (largely inspired from Luther’s Germany).  Enlightened thinkers thought for themselves; unenlightened thinkers were tied to the unchanging thoughts of past, mainly theological, authorities. Where there is argument and debate without political repression, or at least passivity, Enlightenment may follow.  Brodie’s account of this background is enlightening itself…

In summary, I consider Alexander Broadie has established his thesis that the centuries long links between France and Scotland were foundational in what became the Scottish Enlightenment in the unpromising circumstances of each country, one dominated by an all embracing rigid Calvinism and the other by a monolithic Catholic Church, yet feeding each other intellectually in the prelude of the transformation of one world to another.  

Why OOO? from Larval Subjects Nov 13, 2012

First there was my encounter with DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy and A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, both of which brought non-signifying differences and material processes to the fore and led me to read Deleuze in a very different way.  I was spitting mad and simultaneously fascinated when I encountered these books.  Was he really arguing that ocean currents and wind patterns (non-diacritical, a-signifying differences) played a key role in where European and American cities developed?  Preposterous!  But he got me reading the historian Braudel and his dry as dirt yet magnificent Capitalism and Civilization. 

Most Valuable Books of 2009 from Larval Subjects Dec 2, 2009

And in the background of all this was the material history of Ferdinand Braudel in the three volumes of Capitalism and Civilization. Braudel’s three volumes have been my nightly bedtime reading for the last few months. Let Harman have his Gibbon, I’ll take my Braudel. If reading Braudel has been such a transformative experience, then this is because he draws attention away from familiar territory revolving around signs, ideologies, texts, norms, and concepts, investigating instead infrastructures throughout history such as the presence or absence of roads, the epidemiology of diseases, diets, trade routes, clothing, forms of energy, etc., etc., etc.. You leave these works with an entirely new set of glasses, seeing the world and why the world is the way it is in an entirely different light. Suddenly things you were focused on in your social and political thought seem to become less important as a consequence of the rather minor role they play in social organization, while a whole host of other urgent questions come to the fore. 

A Higher Soul Nature and Law of Karma « Sri Aurobindo Studies

While it is the first formulation of human motivation, the force of desire, attraction towards what is pleasant and avoidance of what is unpleasant, is not the sole...

At the Feet of The Mother: The Integral Yoga and Traditional Paths

at Hall of Harmony, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, India. ... So Sri Aurobindo says that perhaps they will find God outside life but will not find the Divine in ...

Inspirational & Religious 2013: Savitri and The Yoga of the Cells Sri Aurobindo (Author), The Mother (Author), RY Deshpande (Editor)

The body was not ready to hold the charge of luminous immortality in it. It had remained an unbaked vessel, atapta tanu. The cells of the body had not awakened yet to the reality that is seated deep within them. The problem of the inconscient nature had yet to be tackled.

Sri Aurobindo’s concern was chiefly this. It was a twofold effort, of invoking and bringing down the dynamism of the supreme Truth on the earthly plane, and preparing the unregenerate inconscient material nature to receive it for its unhampered action. The spiritual and occult-yogic tapasya carried out together by him and the Mother saw that this was done. That opened up new doors, bright doors of the physical, for the entry of the Infinite's dimensions in the earth-possibilities. Presently it has made its manifestation an accomplished fact, here in the physical’s subtle. 

SABDA - A Follower of Christ and a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo — Dr. Anand Reddy

A FOLLOWER OF CHRIST AND A DISCIPLE OF SRI AUROBINDO — CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN BEDE GRIFFITHS AND K. D. SETHNA (AMAL KIRAN)

So too, Griffiths tries to subsume Sri Aurobindo in Christianity:

      ‘To me it is important because I think that the transformation of the body is an essential element in Christian doctrine. The physical transformation which took place in Mary was seen as related to the physical transformation of the body of Christ in the resurrection, and this again as foreshadowing the physical transformation of man and the universe. This is where I find Aurobindo’s insistence on the transformation of matter and the body so significant’. (p.44)

      ‘I cannot resist the conviction that Jesus did exactly what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were attempting to do’. (p.72)

      ‘The resurrection of Christ is a physical event, which has effected all humanity and the whole creation. If this is not the same as the belief of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother it is extraordinarily close to their idea of the Supramental manifestation’. (p.86)

     Amal Kiran, in a note of tender mercies, replies: ‘What a diminution of his (Sri Aurobindo’s) colossal stature, his Herculean labour, to understand him as having come just to confirm Christianity and to establish a person more firmly in it! If he and the Mother have nothing really momentously new to give us, since everything was there in the Christian vision, all of us who are striving to live up to their teaching and example are misguided fools who could do much better to get baptized and join hands with the priests and nuns of Pondicherry’. (p.93)

     And in a stronger vein he argues: ‘Lastly, after postulating an evolution over millions of years following in man’s progressive spiritual history through the aspiring mind towards a Supramental which is still in the future, is it logical or reasonable or consistent to affirm that all evolution was summed up to thousand years ago in one man who did not exemplify an evolutionary transformation in his life-time but is alleged to have acquired a divinized body after his death?’ (p.61)

Rooting for the revival of a grand tree - The Hindu

The tree is an 82-year-old Peltophorum pterocarpum that stands next to Sri Aurobindo's Samadi, which was named 'Service Tree' by the Mother. Through the ..

Intercultural understanding vis-à-vis Small-circle care

International Conference on Atisha and Cultural Renaissance  Venue: 11, Man Singh Road, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi-110011. Date: 16th to 18th January, 2013 - ‘Atisa Dipankar Srijnana and Cultural Renaissance’ Atisha is the last outstanding Indian scholar who went abroad for the cause, in the 11th century. Home, Silver Jubilee Celebration

The Self and Its Other: Philosophical Essays: J. N. Mohanty

J.N. Mohanty is Professor of Philosophy, Temple University, Philadelphia and Woodruff Professor of Philosophy and Asian Studies, Emory University, Georgia. Book Description Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (January 4, 2001)

In Self and Other, J. N. Mohanty addresses contemporary questions of post-modernism without abandoning his fundamental stand on phenomenological method. The essays in this volume reveal a shift from an over-emphasis on identity in classical metaphysical thinking to an emphasis on differences without falling into the fogginess of post-modernism.

Writing the Self  [Paperback] Peter Heehs (Author) Book Description Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic Publication Date: April 11, 2013

The self has a history. In the West, the idea of the soul entered Christianity with the Church Fathers, notably Augustine. During the Renaissance the idea of the individual attained preeminence, as in the works of Montaigne. In the seventeenth century, philosophers such as Descartes formulated notions of selfhood that did not require a divine foundation; in the next century, Hume grew skeptical of the self's very existence. Ideas of the self have changed markedly since the Romantic period and most scholars today regard it as at best a mental construct. First-person genres such as diaries and memoirs have provided an outlet for self-expression. Protestant diaries replaced the Catholic confessional, but secular diaries such as Pepys's may reveal yet more about the self. After Richardson, novels competed with diaries and memoirs as vehicles of self-expression, though memoirs survived and continue to thrive, while the diary has found a new incarnation in the personal blog. Writing the Self narrates the intertwined histories of the self and of self-expression through first-person literature. About the Author

Peter Heehs is an independent scholar based in India. He has written or edited nine books and published more than fifty articles. Articles in Professional Journals and Books

2011. “The Kabbalah, the Philosophie Cosmique, and the Integral Yoga: A Study in Cross-Cultural Influence”. Aries 11:2 (September): 219-247 (Pdf file available here).

2010. “Introduction”. In P. Vir Gupta, C. Mueller, and C. Samil, Golconde: The Introduction of Modernism in India. Bangalore: Inform.

2009. “Revolutionary Terrorism in British Bengal”. In E. Boehmer and S. Morton, eds., Terror and the Postcolonial. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

2008. “Sri Aurobindo and Hinduism”. Published online in AntiMatters 2.2 (April).

2007. “Nationalism”. In S. Mittal and G. Thursby, eds., Studying Hinduism: Concepts and Methods. New York: Routledge.

2006. “Introduction: Appropriation as a Marketing Strategy”, written as guest editor of Postcolonial Studies 9 (June): 113–19.

2006. “The Uses of Sri Aurobindo: Mascot, Whipping-Boy or What?”. Postcolonial Studies 9 (June): 151–64.

2006. “Yoga/Yogi”. Keywords in South Asian Studies. Published online by Centre of South Asian Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

2004. “Ghose, Aurobindo.” In The New Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2003. “ ‘The Centre of the Religious Life of the World’: Spiritual Universalism and Cultural Nationalism in the Work of Sri Aurobindo.” In Antony Copley, ed., Hinduism, Public and Private: Reform, Hindutva, Gender, Sampraday. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

2003. “Shades of Orientalism: Paradoxes and Problems in Indian Historiography”. History and Theory, vol. 42, no. 2: 169–95. Reprinted in Gwilym Beckerlegge, ed., Colonialism, Modernity and Religious Identities. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 239-74.

1994. “Myth, History and Theory.” History and Theory, vol. 33, no. 1, 1–19. Reprinted in Robert Segal, ed., Myth (New York: Routledge, 2007).

Peter Heehs - Shades of Orientalism: Paradoxes & Problems in ... [published in History and Theory 42 (May 2003), pp.169-195]

Another habit of European scholars that got Aurobindo’s hackles up was their tendency to trace Indian achievements back to European, usually Greek, predecessors. Where Greek influence was evident, as in the Gandharan school of sculpture, he condemned the work as inferior to “pure” Indian styles. Europe’s literary criteria too were not applicable to India. Albrecht Weber’s idea that the original Mahabharata consisted only of the battle chapters was a case of “arguing from Homer.” It was, he insisted, “not from European scholars that we must expect a solution of the Mahabharata problem,” since “they have no qualifications for the task except a power of indefatigable research and collocation. . . . It [p.178>] is from Hindu [i.e. Indian] scholarship renovated & instructed by contact with European that the attempt must come.”[34] …

Chakrabarty’s project is one of the most sophisticated attempts to arrive at an Indian, or let us say a not-exclusively-European way of looking at Indian history, but he builds on foundations that were laid a hundred years ago. Many of his predecessors exhibit great subtlety of thought and are not hobbled, like him, by an excessive reliance on (European) figures like Heidegger and Marx who, taken at [p.192>] face value, seem to offer little support to his thesis. I examine briefly one branch of this lineage, the nationalists of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengal.

Any survey of this style must begin with Bankim Chandra Chatterji, who, suggestively in his novels and explicitly in his essays, challenged the right of Europeans to dictate the terms of the colonial encounter… Chatterji, Tagore, Pal and Aurobindo were all modern in outlook and education, but they all used religious concepts in their writings… Writers like Chatterji, Tagore and Aurobindo laid stress on India’s distinctiveness because it seemed threatened by absorption into a universalized Europe. But they were also internationalists who knew and respected Europe and worked for intercultural understanding.[110] Their defenders and detractors lay stress on their essentialism, but they themselves went beyond it, contesting the validity of Eurocentrism without promoting an equally imperfect Indocentrism.

The Myth of Universal Love By STEPHEN T. ASMA January 5, 2013 328 Comments

One of the more deeply engrained assumptions of Western liberalism is that we humans can indefinitely increase our capacity to care for others, that we can, with the right effort and dedication, extend our care to wider and wider circles until we envelop the whole species within our ethical regard. It is an inspiring thought. But I’m rather doubtful… 

Two of the leading liberal social theorists, Jeremy Rifkin and Peter Singer, think we can overcome factional bias and eventually become one giant tribe. They have different prescriptions for arriving at ethical utopia. Singer, who is perhaps the world’s best known utilitarian philosopher, argues in his book “The Expanding Circle” that the relative neocortical sophistication of humans allows us to rationally broaden our ethical duty beyond the “tribe” — to an equal and impartial concern for all human beings…

One of the architects of utilitarian ethics, and a forerunner of Singer’s logic, was William Godwin (1756-1836), who formulated a famous thought experiment… Godwin argues that the utilitarian principle (the greatest good for the greatest number) requires you to save the archbishop rather than your mother. He asks, “What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’ that should justify us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth?”[2] Singer has famously pushed the logic further, arguing that we should do everything within our power to help strangers meet their basic needs, even if it severely compromises our kin’s happiness…

Jeremy Rifkin voices a popular view in his recent book “The Empathic Civilization” that we can feel care and empathy for the whole human species if we just try hard enough.  This view has the advantage over Singer’s metric view, in that it locates moral conviction in the heart rather than the rational head. But it fails for another reason. I submit that care or empathy is a very limited resource. But it is Rifkin’s quixotic view that empathy is an almost limitless reserve. He sketches a progressive, ever widening evolution of empathy…

The world of Singer’s utilitarianism and Rifkin’s one-tribism is a world of bare minimums, with care spread thinly to cover per capita needs. But in favoritism (like a love relation) people can get way more than they deserve. It’s an abundance of affection and benefits. In a real circle of favorites, one needs to accept help gracefully. We must accept, without cynicism, the fact that some of our family and friends give to us for our own sake (our own flourishing) and not for their eventual selfish gain. However animalistic were the evolutionary origins of giving (and however vigorous the furtive selfish genes), the human heart, neocortex and culture have all united to eventually create true altruism. Gratitude is a necessary response in a sincere circle of favorites. Finally, my case for small-circle care dovetails nicely with the commonly agreed upon crucial ingredient in human happiness, namely, strong social bonds…

These are not digital Facebook friends nor are they needy faraway strangers, but robust proximate relationships that you can count on one or two hands — and these bonds are created and sustained by the very finite resource of emotional care that I’ve outlined. As Graham Greene reminds us, “one can’t love humanity, one can only love people.” Stephen T. Asma is a fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture at Columbia College Chicago, and author of, most recently, “Against Fairness.” FOOTNOTES [1] See Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations (Harvard University Press, 1981). [2] See William Godwin’s 1798 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, Vol. I (Toronto University Press, 1946) NYTimes.com

We have to be very discriminating about Paul Richard

Tweets 9h - Sathya Anand ‏@SathyaSher SR Goel noted that org like ISKCON, RKM, Aurobindo Ashram etc have termed themselves as 'universal', rather than as Hindu organizations.

Swami Vivekananda, Indian Culture and the charge of Male Chauvinism from Centre Right India by Aravindan Neelakandan Jan 4, 2013

Now for a few years the ‘Mount road Mao’ has been waging a war against Swami Vivekananda the fountainhead of Vedantic humanism and Indian nationalism. Thus a few years back we have in ‘Frontline’, which comes from the house of ‘The Hindu’, Meera Nanda attacking Swami Vivekananda, accusing him Sri Aurobindo and even Nehru of ‘their cardinal sin’ which according to her was that they ‘tried to appropriate for Hinduism’ modern scientific thought (Meera Nanda, ‘Postmodernism, Hindu nationalism and `Vedic science’, Frontline, January 03-06 2004).

Continuing this ‘spit and run’ method of attack, the mother dinosaur ‘Mount road Mao’ itself published another article by Meera Nanda titled ‘Calling India’s freethinkers’ (‘The Hindu’, 22-May-2004). In this article the ‘apologists associated with the Ramakrishna Mission and Aurobindo Ashram’ were accused of promoting an ‘occult’ dogma that has ‘deeply Hindu and Aryan supremacist overtones’. One can read ‘Breaking India’ for an elaborate analysis of the emptiness of Meera Nanda’s accusations against Swami Viveakannda as well as Indian cultural discourse on the synthesis of science and spirituality.

The Foundations of Psychological Theory in the Veda from Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore 

Upon study of the Vedic horse, Sri Aurobindo concluded that go and aṣva represent two companion ideas of Light and Energy, (Consciousness and Force). In fact for the Vedic and Vedantic mind these are the twin aspect of all activities of existence. Thus the entire yajña or Vedic sacrifice, with all its limbs need to be understood this way. - C. Krishnamurthy (chamathu2003@yahoo.co.uk)

Comment on What is wrong with promiscuity? by Sandeep Dec 31, 2012

I am afraid any kind of spiritual utopia is an idealistic fantasy. You have to recognize that souls are in different stages of evolution and process the same stimuli differently according to their temperament.

What seems abhorrent to you is always going to be perfectly acceptable to someone else. The human mind has the singular ability to argue successfully for any cause, and there will even be people who will be convinced and buy those arguments. Consequently, there will always be people who will have unrestrained sex with multiple partners, social and religious fetters notwithstanding.

The only thing we can do is to put out information based on our growing spiritual knowledge and hope for the best. Like-minded individuals will agree with you but those who haven’t reach that spiritual understanding will argue with you. People move in and out of various social circles driven by their changing ideals.

Comment on An autobiographical short story by the Mother Mirra Alfassa by Sandeep Dec 31, 2012

Yes, it is your Indian upbringing which causes you (and many other Indians whose minds are steeped in a long religious tradition) to shrink from her “immoral conduct”. When you transcend that abhorrent feeling, you will discover the treasure-house of wisdom that she has left behind. It took me some time as well to understand her life so let me see if I can explain.

Firstly, you have to realize that one’s spiritual destiny is not revealed all at once. Spiritual growth occurs in phases and in the mean time, one continues living an ordinary life. And in this ordinary life, one can make poor choices as well in marriage and finances. At some point, there is a sudden rupture/awakening after which a new and more spiritual life begins – what they call “dwijanma” or second birth in India.

Comment on An autobiographical short story by the Mother Mirra Alfassa by mike Jan 3, 2013

Yes, Sandeep, I see what you mean and that Mother had no intention of marrying him, but ‘his family affairs’ forced it. But, where his book is concerned, I think we have to be very discriminating – he was the ‘emanation of Falsehood’ after all.

Tusar N. Mohapatra - 1:49 PM, January 03, 2013

Ned used to blog as spiritofnow initially. She was writing about her personal concerns occasionally referring to The Mother & Sri Aurobindo before she formally launched The Stumbling Mystic with more or less similar content and style.

Ned (Nehdia Sameen) passed away on June 15, 2012. http://rainbowther.blogspot.in/search?q=ned

GLBT Hindus - Gender/Sexuality 21 May 2007 by spiritofnow

Two posts I wrote that I'd like some feedback on (warning -- both are kind of long): Beyond the Gender Binary - Homoscepticism and Homophobia

Thanks! Edit: A newer post I made recently: Islam and Homosexuality. Let me know what you all think. Posted on May. 22nd, 2007 at 01:47 am 5 comments 

spiritofnow Posted on May. 22nd, 2007 04:25 pm (UTC) Link Parent Thread Hey there! You know I have gotten in touch with many people from the communities associated with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in the United States and also some from India -- the community seems very broadminded and liberal and I have really been pleasantly surprised by how inclusive they are.

With all the cult-like stuff happening in the world today, it's nice to find a community which is so open and gentle.

The Mother by the way came out of the elite socialist and feminist circles of her time, prior to her undergoing her occult training. So she has a very nuanced perspective on gender and related issues.

spiritofnow Posted on May. 27th, 2007 03:24 am (UTC) Link ParentThread Hi there -- yep, I know what you mean about having books in your hands!

There are many reasons why I like these two teachers so much, but one of the main reasons is their remarkable lack of religious or mythical distortion. Both were raised as staunch atheists (which they were very grateful for) and that gives them an intellectual clarity and freedom that you don't see in spiritual teachers very often. Sri Aurobindo's main source of inspiration are the Vedic scriptures, but being a highly original modern-day synthesizer he frequently reinterprets them and/or criticizes them. Both these teachers were opposed to religion and on their own insistence what they represent is a certain consciousness, not any sort of fixed or dogmatic intellectual system. It has annoyed me to see Sri Aurobindo associated with the Hindu right in the writings of some secular Marxist Indians -- because he is clearly anything but right-wing. (Politically he was a spiritual anarchist.) Also, Sri Aurobindo is one of the few teachers who seriously engages with science, and incorporates evolution into his larger cosmic teleology.

Aurobindo and Mirra are those rare teachers who engage with everything and make it a point to reject nothing (and encourage us to do the same). They really are the gurus of gurus.

spiritofnow Posted on May. 22nd, 2007 04:47 pm (UTC) Link Parent Thread By the way most of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra's works can be found online here. 

The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind - Page 67 - David Kopf - 1979 - Preview - More editions It should also be pointed out that many of the humanists before them who championed science — Dutt, Vidyasagar, and Seal — were themselves not scientists as such. So pervasive were certain aspects of scientism in nineteenth-century Bengal that Brahmos often justified their rational religion in the name of science.

Quotation of the Day… from Cafe Hayek by Don Boudreaux

… is from page 69 of Nicholas Phillipson’s 2010 biography of Adam Smith, Adam Smith; here, Phillipson is describing the philosophy of David Hume – a philosophy that Smith built upon and advanced: “It was a theory that was built on the belief that the progress of society depended on the efforts of individuals to better their lot, rather than on radical exercises in political engineering.”

Arvind Kejriwal's New Party on Sri Aurobindo’s Siddhi Day

Best Wishes to Kejriwal by Tusar N. Mohapatra

Tweets 16m Savitri Era Party ‏@SavitriEraParty Our last hope & prayer 12 hours before founding of @ArvindKejriwal7's New Party & First NC meeting: Sri Aurobindo's Five Dreams #SiddhiDay 40m - @ArvindKejriwal7 It's hoped that Sri Aurobindo's ideals finds a mention in New Party's guiding principles tomorrow. Best Wishes. #SiddhiDay  View conversation 1h - @kirankhurana Good sign as 24 November is celebrated as Sri Aurobindo’s #SiddhiDay all over the world.  View conversation

5h Yoga is quest for Truth, Good, and Beauty and conquest over Death. Sri Aurobindo synthesizes the sacred and the secular http://savitriera.blogspot.in/2012/09/sri-aurobindo-synthesises-sacred-and.html …

5h Sri Aurobindo gives a collective element to spiritual quest. (24 November is celebrated as Sri Aurobindo’s Siddhi Day) http://selforum.blogspot.com/2012/11/sri-aurobindo-gives-collective-element.html …

16h The Mother & Sri Aurobindo have enjoined upon the people of India & persons of Indian origin to carry their message to all corners of world.

17h The Mother & Sri Aurobindo secured a synthesis of two world cultures aimed towards a mankind of light and might, of concord and sublimity.

22 Nov The Mother & Sri Aurobindo infuse a thought revolution http://savitriera.blogspot.in/2012/11/the-mother-sri-aurobindo-infuse-thought.html … Happy harmony of Vedic vision and Evolution http://selforum.blogspot.in/2012/11/happy-harmony-of-vedic-vision-and.html … Posted by Tusar N. Mohapatra at 11:18 PM Friday, November 23, 2012 Location: Shipra Riviera, Indirapuram, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, India

Sri Aurobindo, Bergson, Levinas, Ricoeur - Taking Spirituality Seriously Laszlo Zsolnai Business Ethics Center Budapest University of Economic Sciences

S.K. Chakraborty adds that spirit and spirituality mean acceptance of the principle that all beings, especially human beings, are, in essence, something superior to, more unconditioned and permanent than the “body-life-mind” combination. The faltering, clumsy, purblind, unstable body-life-mind triad is an unjust and erroneous framework from the ontological viewpoint…

Chakraborty further argues that spirituality cannot be asked to prove its credentials before the tribunal of economic growth, enterprise bottom line, shareholder value and the like. Rather, it is technology, economics, business and their cohorts that must pass the test of Spirituality. Spirituality has to be the remedy for the growing malignancy in our material affairs. 6:25 PM Tuesday, January 24, 2006

18 Nov 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.

Neat People vs. Sloppy People By Suzanne Britt

Anonymous 7:21 AM, October 29, 2012 This essay isn't literal. Britt is using sarcastic humor and hyperboles to get a point across. The people who get mad at this essay aren't neat people. They are people who don't get sarcasm. Educate yourself with sarcasm, people. It's hilarious humor if you get it.