Latour, Laruelle, Lovecraft, and Sri Aurobindo

Beyond the human Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi 20-23 February 2014

This trajectory is found in the overman of Friedrich Nietzsche, the supramental being of the Indian yogi-philosopher Sri Aurobindo, or as more recently contextualized by Gilles Deleuze through the“superfold,” the result of the folding into the human subject of the rhizomatic triplicity of genetic code, information technology, and a language at the borders of signification… The conference is organized by

• Makarand Paranjape, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
• Debashish Banerji, University of Philosophical Research, Los Angeles
• Richard Carlson, Pacific Weather, Port Angeles, WA.

Call for papers: If you have thoughts on any of these areas and would like to participate in the conference, please send us a resume and an abstract of your talk. Our email address is beyondthehuman2014@gmail.com. The submission deadline is August 15, 2013. Those whose abstracts are selected will be notified.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (in India) from Centre Right India by Ibn-al-Dunya

Use those GRE words you memorised – they were made for such occasions! Everything is a discourse and a narrative; do not be afraid to embed yourself in the dasein of the moment. See what I did back there? Use words from foreign languages strategically when explaining key points and your logic fails. It is unlikely that anyone in your audience speaks that language, and if they do, words like dasein, ding-an-sich, or eudaimonia. Not only will you appear scholarly, but you will be aided by two things: 1. even if someone does know these terms, they are ambiguous enough to merit an entirely different debate, allowing you to skirt the original issue, and 2. actual scholars also use such terms when talking to each other, lending legitimacy to the practice… Assuming you speak two or three Indian languages and the Queen’s English, Western organisations will be grateful for your expertise on that blasted subcontinent. 

Bruno Latour’s Gifford Lectures from Ediburgh are now all online from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

Latour is not only one of the world’s most important living intellectuals. He is also perhaps the most polarizing author within Speculative Realist circles (maybe only Laruelle is equally polarizing). Some of us are in awe of Latour’s breakthroughs, while others in SR circles treat him (with what I myself regard as an almost grotesque lack of intellectual taste and foresight) as a sophist and a relativist hack. I’m as confident in my bet on Latour’s long-term importance as I am on just about anything, and this despite serious disagreements with some of his ontology, as I outlined in Prince of Networks.

the difference between my Lovecraft book and my earlier Lovecraftarticle from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

In the article, I was very hard on the “Kantian” or noumenal reading of Lovecraft and defended a Husserlian reading of Lovecraft that I also linked with cubism in the arts. The difference is that while writing the book, I decided that both strands are operative in Lovecraft. There are two completely different major stylistic devices at work in Lovecraft. One of them is the allusion to the unutterable, and I no longer have any objection to relating that to Kant. The other is the one I was championing exclusively in my article, in which Lovecraft claims to be describing something literally but piles up such a ridiculous number of incompatible descriptions that the bond between the objects and its qualities, while not withdrawn into a noumenal realm, explicitly becomes an operative principle over and above its list of qualities. This is what is most typical of Husserl, who’s as anti-noumenal as it gets but is still a philosopher of objects over and above their qualities. It’ll all be clear when you finally see the book.

There’s an introductory section, then I analyze 100 individual passages (not plot summaries, but short passages) from eight of the key stories, then conclude with some further thoughts. Work on the book only increased my sense of Lovecraft’s greatness as a stylist. I’m well aware of the objections that he overwrites his prose and overloads it with adjectives, but rules like this are always beside the point. You can do just about anything as a writer as long as you know how to handle it. At most there is some unevenness in Lovecraft as a stylist, as often happens with amateurs in any field who are isolated from mainstream critical feedback.

Comment on Sri Aurobindo’s prose style – by Goutam Ghosal by RJ from Comments for IYSATM by RJ - Mar 4, 2013

I recently read a quote about writer HP Lovecraft that seemed applicable to Sri Aurobindo’s prose style as well… (Lovecraft was, IMO, a brilliant writer from a purely literary perspective, though obviously nowhere near Sri Aurobindo in any sense. I don’t mean to compare them in any other way than to point out that that comment is insightful.) Of course, even if one is able to get “past” his style and understand him “intellectually” (like a student of English literature might), one will not understand anything if the consciousness is not ready. kkk

Love, Death, and the Sub-Creative Imagination in J. R. R. Tolkien from Footnotes to Plato by Matthew David Segall

The chief import of Tolkien’s Art, as I understand it, is that its example invites us to step into our own roles as cosmic artisans, just at that moment in world history when so much seems headed for disaster… There is also a spiritual side to the strange logic underlying Tolkien’s sub-creative vocation. He says of all his “stuff” that it is “fundamentally concerned with the problem of the relation of Art (and Sub-creation) and Primary Reality” (xiii). Primary Reality is the world of daily life, of biological struggle, and, eventually, of death. The sub-creator, in bringing forth a Secondary Reality (made not of solid matter, but of story and myth), expresses a desire which not only has no ordinary biological function, but which indeed usually finds itself at strife with these functions (xiii). Despite its spiritual motives, the sub-creative desire “is at once wedded to a passionate love of the real primary world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it” (xiii). Death, even ifimaginary, is no less real for all that. We human sub-creators have, again, two paths open to us upon encountering it.

Creating a Cohesive Worldview (Part One: Either/Or) By Joran Slane Oppelt

Haridas Chaudhuri writes in The Evolution of Integral Consciousness, “One devious root of war-mindedness is the dualistic logic of the arrogant intellect – the logic of either/or. Dualistic logic says: Either communism or democracy, either socialism or capitalism, is the ultimate truth, and thus creates an irreconcilable opposition between them, diving the world into two warring camps sworn to destroy each other.” Integral Church ~ Religion 2.0: The Formation of the Integral Church By Joran Slane Oppelt

It is a seed that was planted when I discovered the work of Arthur Koestler and Ken Wilber and that sprouted when I realized that their life’s work was a continuation of those who came before them — Socrates, Sri Aurobindo, William James, Aldous Huxley. Continue reading

Tusar N. Mohapatra March 4, 2013 at 1:35 pm

Sri Aurobindo’s notion of human unity doesn’t envisage any antagonistic prospect between India and Europe. Relying upon some stray quote to build a sound economic scenario is therefore anomalous. [TNM55] Reply ~ As Europe goes down, we need to be prepared for consequences 

Elst errs

The Hindu : NATIONAL TAMIL NADU : MADURAI TODAY

Sri Aurobindo Society: Meeting on 'The yoga of Savitri reading,' 3 Lajapathi Roy Road, Chinna Chokkikulam, 4 p.m.

The Current Notions of the Law of Karma from Sri Aurobindo Studies 

As the mental force begins to make itself felt and tries to develop a law or rule of life, it starts out with the demands, needs, desires and fears of the dynamic life force as the primary controlling factor with which it has to grapple. Rather than being able to impose, therefore, a reasoned moral and ethical code, it resorts to attempts to modify and upgrade the vital impetus through offering a system of rewards and punishments, a “carrot and a stick”, for following the basic lines set forth in the moral doctrines. On close examination it can be seen that even the goals set forth at this point are mostly driven by the vital drive for success, achievement and prosperity and the fear of loss, suffering and pain.

It is thus at this point that the most common ideas about the law of Karma appear and take center stage. The moral principle, the ethical ideal is tied to the concept that the “good” will achieve worldly success; or if not worldly success, then at least a success in a life hereafter. The influence of the vital power is clearly seen in the fact that “right” has to be tied to “success” in order to be something to be attempted.

It Takes a Cosmos to Raise a Smile from One Cʘsmos by Gagdad Bob

While on the subject of I, AM, and the link between the two, I'd like to discuss Scruton's The Face of God. It's a short book, containing the published version of his Gifford Lectures of 2010.

If you're not familiar with them, the Gifford Lectures were the brainchild of the Scottish Lord Gifford (1820-1887), established and endowed for the purpose of promoting and propagating "the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term -- in other words, the knowledge of God." The quality of these lectures is often quite high, and draws big brains from many disciplines, and thus comports well with our own multi-undisciplinary approach.

Among others, I've read those by Royce, Gilson, James, Eddington, Heisenberg, Dawson, Toynbee, Barbour, Dyson, Eccles, Polkinghorne, Rolston, Taylor, and, of course Jaki, Polanyi and Whitehead, all of whom are recurring characters on the One Cosmos blog. Again, these are folks who are attempting to think across disciplines, so many of them are pione'er-do-well Raccoons.

Yoga and Hinduism from Centre Right India by Koenraad Elst

I am currently finishing a booklet for the greater public on the external enemies of Hinduism. It will make me very popular among Hindus. But next, I want to write a similar booklet about the internal enemies of Hinduism, or is other words: what is wrong with the Hindus so that e.g. they cannot settle the Kashmir dispute or the constitutional/legal discrimination of the Hindus in spite of being a democratic majority? This should make me a few friends among the secularists, but I think the enmity on that side in already too entrenched; but it will certainly make me many enemies among Hindus. They don’t like a Westerner criticizing them, though I have most of these criticisms from Hindus themselves. At any rate, if Hindus don’t make a systematic diagnosis of the problem, someone else has to do it. And the current (sentimental and confused) Hindu bhakti notion of “God” is certainly a big part of the problem.

Macaulay's children & the rest - Gautam Adhikari TOI - 22 February 2013,

Enter Mamata Banerjee. And Narendra Modi. And Mulayam Singh Yadav. In short, all those political players who proudly display an almost Macaulay-like disdain towards Indians who use English as their main language of communication. And they are confident, to the point of arrogance in many cases, in adopting styles of political, social and cultural behaviour that is alien to Macaulay`s cherished western norms and practice… So, here`s a question: As democracy deepens, must we in fact expect an onset of decline in the very republican norms embedded in the Constitution that upholds the idea of India? 

Hobbes’s critique of the European Union from An und für sich by Adam Kotsko

It seems to me that Hobbes’s critique of the RCC is essentially that it undermines the sovereignty of individual nations without having the strength to form a larger over-arching sovereignty of its own (the latter part being more implicit in his argument) — so in essence, it simply sows the seeds of discord and division by muddying the waters of whether Catholics should be loyal to their local sovereign or the pope. I wonder if Hobbes might view the European Union, and particularly the Monetary Union, in a similar light. To become part of the EU and especially the Eurozone, nations must give up sovereignty over their currency, which is one of the most important tools for managing a modern economy, and they are also significantly constrained in their fiscal policy. Even worse, the measures dictated are often very unpopular with local populations, prompting protest and perhaps eventually revolt. Yet the EU itself has even less popular legitimacy than local governments, and its own ability to project power is very limited… Hence it seems to me that Hobbes’s hypothetical diagnosis has a lot of truth to it. 

The very young Marx from Love of All Wisdom by Amod Lele - Feb 18, 2013

Because throughout his life, Marx was, in a word, a materialist. Not in the modern pejorative sense (“he who dies with the most toys wins”) nor the negative philosophical sense, in which ideas and mind are treated as somehow unreal. Rather, for Marx it was always the case that matter matters. The physical world sets the terms on which we human beings can exist, and so to understand human life both as it is and as it should be, we must understand that physical world. Marx lived at a time when the modern scientific revolution was hitting full steam (and that is not only a metaphor). The discoveries of Charles Darwin, above all, were an inspiration to Marx’s inspiration. Friedrich Engels said at Marx’s funeral that Marx had done for human history what Darwin had done for organic nature. For it was Darwin who made it intellectually feasible to explain the biological world without reference to a god. The gods are just as distant in Epicurus’s explanations; he can look like a precursor of Darwin. And so it was to Epicurus that Marx turned as an inspiration for his still-developing atheist Hegelianism. 

Obtaining other tools of perception

Integral Humanism and the BJP from Centre Right India by Pulakesh Upadhyaya Dec 8, 2012

Integral Humanism is one of the core ideologies on the basis of which the Jana Sangh and subsequently the BJP were founded… Most members in the BJP suffer from ideological haziness, and many of its stands have tended to depend on plain anti-Congressism and not on any of the foundational principles… The BJP is passing through a phase where it requires serious introspection, otherwise it does not take very long for political parties to break up and reach political oblivion. It has already shot itself in the foot by discarding ideologues and well-wishers, paying lip-service to icons who built the Jana Sangh; the only way it can kill itself is by losing whatever remains of its ideology.

Jean Gebser: Cartographer of Consciousness EnlightenNext: by Gary Lachman January 26, 2011 at 12:57 pm 8 comments

Gebser’s magnum opus, The Ever-Present Origin (first published in Germany in 1949 but not translated into English until 1984) is an immense, six-hundred-page exploration into an insight—a “lightning-like inspiration” as he called it—that first came to Gebser in Spain in 1931. This insight, that a new kind of consciousness was beginning to appear in the West, came to Gebser through his study of poetry, particularly that of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. As Gebser unraveled it, he soon saw that evidence for this new consciousness could be found in developments in science too. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more Gebser discovered signs of this new consciousness in practically all aspects of Western culture.

For the next eighteen years, he gathered and organized his thoughts on what he called an impending “mutation” in consciousness, the most immediate manifestation of which was what he called the breakdown of the “mental-rational structure” of consciousness, the dominant “scientistic” rationalist reductive paradigm that has held sway over the West for the last few centuries. In 1949, when the first part of The Ever-Present Origin appeared—to be followed soon after by the second—Gebser had marshaled some of the most convincing arguments that a shift in Western consciousness was indeed taking place, and that its consequences would be felt by people of his and the following generations…

Speaking to a younger generation of readers eager to know more about different forms of consciousness and familiar with the work of Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin (two other thinkers concerned with the evolution of consciousness), in a preface to a new edition of The Ever-Present Origin, Gebser wrote that “the principal subject of the book, proceeding from man’s altered relationship to time, is the new consciousness, and to this those of the younger generation are keenly attuned.”

Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen - Page 281 - Gary Lachman - 2008 - Preview - More editions Lachman's critique of occult politicians like Annie Besant, Emanuel Swedenborg, Nicholas Roerich, René Guénon, Julius Evola, Rudolf Steiner, Mircea Eliade, C. G. Jung, and Aleister Crowley shows that politics is as swayed by the occult now as it ever was. 

Amazon.com: Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century Edward Kelly (Author), Emily Williams Kelly (Author)

The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms… The authors further show that these rogue phenomena are more readily accommodated by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter' theory of mind/brain relations advanced over a century ago by a largely forgotten genius, F.W.H. Myers, and developed further by his friend and colleague William James. This theory, moreover, ratifies the commonsense conception of human beings as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with leading-edge physics and neuroscience. 

Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Philosophy of Mind) by Andy Clark (Dec 31, 2010)

Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind.

Think of the Body October 22, 2005 by Tusar N. Mohapatra Review of Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity: Ian Burkitt

Growing interest in the consciousness studies is forcing the skeptics to look at it afresh, for it no longer belongs to the New-Ager's domain, alone. This book is a commendable compendium of path-breaking ideas reconstituting our conception of subjectivity. While post-modern sentiments amply spice the text, what should not be missed is the emphasis on body-mind continuum, which runs as an undercurrent, throughout the work.

Comparing Roger Penrose and Sri Aurobindo on the Mind from Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother by Sandeep Dec 8, 2012

In the last chapter of his book “The Emperor’s New Mind”, Roger Penrose draws on his scientific career to offer insights into the spontaneous, aesthetic and non-algorithmic nature of mathematical insight, the non-verbal thought process of the scientist, and other topics related to what he calls the “physics of the mind”. Many of his remarks chime quite well with corresponding observations made by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on the nature of the thought process, as we see in this article.

The Universal Law of Cause and Effect from Sri Aurobindo Studies 

Scientists have developed what they call “laws” of physics. These laws of physics describe the action of material energy, the laws of “cause and effect” in the physical universe. Similarly, we find other applications of the action of cause and effect. We observe that what occurs today is the result of energy expended and directed yesterday; and similarly, today’s action creates tomorrow’s result. The entire system of life in Western civilisation is based on the principles of cause and effect development. Sri Aurobindo makes it clear that this action of “cause and effect” is the fundamental essence of what is known in the East as the “law of Karma”…

Sri Aurobindo makes it clear that in a universe that functions under the kind of strict laws that we see everywhere at work, the idea that it is developed by Chance is incomprehensible. The reason for this mistake is contained as a seed in the first error, in that we attempt to explain things of a different order by an understanding based in the physical world, whereas our expanding insight is now beginning to show us that we need other forms of knowledge and other tools of perception when we begin to explore realms beyond the purely physical world.

Integral Yoga and Psychoanalysis - III On Love — Miranda Vannucci Publisher: Miranda Vannucci, Italy Binding: Soft Cover Pages: 151 Price: Rs 600

The third book in a series suggesting possible points of contact between the disciplines of psychotherapy and the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, this volume addresses, from a psychological point of view, certain aspects of love. Chapters cover such subjects as the acceptance of the self, the confusion between sexuality and the sentiments of love, maternal love and unconditional love, the awareness and purification of the vital, the union of two beings, forms of love such as friendship, fraternity, and solidarity, and love as one of the universal forces. Numerous extracts from the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are used to elaborate the author’s premise.

Geography, culture, and evolutionary goal of nature

Why OOO? from Larval Subjects Nov 13, 2012 

Later there would be encounters with the “poor-man’s” Braudel in the work of theorists such as Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, who would thoroughly demolish biological and cultural racisms through their analysis of geography or the material features of the environment in which people lived, as well as other historians like William McNiell.  I add cultural racism, because text-based/signifier-based theorists are thoroughly unable to explain why certain cultures rose to prominence in the world without appealing to something “superior” in the signifying-systems of those cultures that rose to dominance.  We see it, for example, in Zizek’s claim that there’s something superior in the European, Christian legacy that gave them dominance.  Theorists like Diamond, McNiell, and Braudel are thoroughly able to demolish this cultural racism, this idea that there was something “special” about the Greeks, by analyzing geography, the prevalence of domesticatible animals and plants, available metals, growing seasons, etc.  For them it wasn’t the culture, but the geography; and this based on the axiom that peoples always make maximal use of the resources available to them because, well, folks are smart wherever they live.

Greed, Self-Interest, and the Extended Order of Voluntary Transactions from Cafe Hayek by Don Boudreaux Nov 12, 2012

What F.A. Hayek called the extended market order is one such greater good that has emerged as the unintended by-product of what are mostly self-interested actions by individuals within free, private-property markets… The key is freedom – free entry into, and exit from, markets; freedom of prices to adjust to supply and demand conditions; freedom of consumers to spend their money as they judge best; and freedom from excessively burdensome regulations and taxation, as well as from threats to the security of private property rights.

The invisible hand is both a valuable metaphor and a valid notion.  There is, of course, no real see-through hand guiding human actions.  But the idea that each of us is led, as we pursue our own self-interests within free private-property markets (and, more generally, through a rich assortment of voluntary arrangements), unintentionally to promote a larger and beneficial end, is unquestionably correct.

Comment on The Freedom of the Integral Yoga by August Timmermans by R from Comments for Posthuman Destinies by R Nov 13, 2012 

Read with James, Bergson, Whitehead and others of the time it is clear how valuable his contribution is to early 20th century metaphysics but it’s become a minefield today to tread there because there are all kinds of knots and snares one can get caught up in nowadays with metaphysics – usually in a reification, like our auro-jihadi friends – whose misplaced concreteness – is threatening to others because they mistake their ideology for reality…. 

Rebirth and the Ladder of Spiritual Evolution from Sri Aurobindo Studies 

The necessity of rebirth hinges on the ultimate meaning of the manifestation of the universe. If it is random chance, or purely mechanical machinery, there is no necessity of rebirth. If, on the other hand, there is a conscious Will and Purpose to the universe, and the human being is part of that purpose and carrying out an evolutionary role, then rebirth becomes a centerpiece of the process…

If we find that man is therefore a “transitional being”, as Sri Aurobindo has described elsewhere, then we can explore the “ladder of evolution” both with respect to the prior steps of the ascent of consciousness out of involvement in Matter, through the progressive development of Life, and the subsequent stages of expression of Mind, as well as the future stages beyond our current mental development into what Sri Aurobindo describes as the “supramental” ranges of consciousness. 

Descartes, Bergson, Freud, Myers, & James

[Stumblingmystic September 10, 2010 at 11:52 am I can vouch for that memory chapter in Irreducible Mind being a fantastic philosophical critique of the Western reductionistic understanding of memory!]

[Henri Bergson (1859–1941) Since its publication in 1896, Matter and Memory has attracted considerable attention (see, for example, Deleuze 1956). In the Preface that he wrote in 1910, Bergson says that Matter and Memory “is frankly dualistic,” since it “affirms both the reality of matter and the reality of spirit” (Matter and Memory, p. 9). Copyright © 2011 by Leonard Lawlor lul19@psu.edu Valentine Moulard; substantive revision Tue Jul 12, 2011 SEP]

[Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy 3.2 Sensation and Perception; substantive revision Fri Oct 12, 2012 SEP

The Sanskrit term most commonly associated with sensory activity, indriya (‘sensation’ or ‘power’), is found in the Rg Veda (I, 55; II, 16), a collection of hymns dealing with various religio-philosophical topics central to the Brahmanical tradition. Here the senses are likened to lesser deities acting on behalf of Indra, the king of the gods, as messengers to the lower realms. As manifestations of Indra's specific powers, the senses thus understood correspond to his capacity for knowledge (buddhīndriya) and action (karmendriya).

This early mythological narrative in which lesser deities are the agencies of sensory activity in humans bears some structural similarity to Descartes’ account in his Treatise of Man and Passions of the Soul of the animal spirits which flowing from the pineal gland control the activity of sensation, imagination, as well as bodily movements.]

[Sigmund Freud The unconscious - From Wikipedia

The concept of the unconscious was central to Freud's account of the mind. Freud believed that while poets and thinkers had long known of the existence of the unconscious, he had ensured that it received scientific recognition in the field of psychology. However, the concept made an informal appearance in Freud's writings. It was first introduced in connection with the phenomenon of repression, to explain what happens to ideas that are repressed; Freud stated explicitly that the concept of the unconscious was based on the theory of repression. He postulated a cycle in which ideas are repressed, but remain in the mind, removed from consciousness yet operative, then reappear in consciousness under certain circumstances.]

[William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) Instincts From Wikipedia 

Like Sigmund Freud, James was influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. At the core of James' theory of psychology, as defined in Principles of Psychology (1890), was a system of "instincts." James wrote that humans had many instincts, even more than other animals. These instincts, he said, could be overridden by experience and by each other, as many of the instincts were actually in conflict with each other. In the 1920s, however, psychology turned away from evolutionary theory and embraced radical behaviorism.]