Sri
Aurobindo: A Contemporary Reader Sachidananda Mohanty -
2012 - Preview - I
believe that Peter Heehs is right in his analysis and observations. While the
intersection of religion and nationalism remains an unresolved issue and Heehs
has not ventured 'to set forth in
systematic form', his own
vision of Sri Aurobindo's
views—he does it elsewhere—his point about the existing prejudice and misunderstanding
against Sri Aurobindo is a valid
one. What I propose to do next is to underline key aspects of Sri
Aurobindo's social vision that make him a front-ranking thinker of contemporary
culture.
Aurobindo's Philosophy of Brahman - Page 132 - Stephen H. Phillips - 1986 - Preview - I
think that the case for the interpretation that his overriding motive is
empiricist is a good one. My chief reason for identifying this additional
affinity is, as before, to try to comprehend his positions as fully as
possible, ...
While mystic experience does stand out not only justificationally but
in his idea of the nature of divine life, Aurobindo's stress is on
a continuity, mutual value, and mutual reality obtaining between the
mystical and and our more ordinary ...
An Indian Sceptic – Philosophy of Daya Krishna from from Centre Right India by Koenraad Elst - Dec
28, 2012. Daya Krishna (1924-2007) had been a member of the
Changers’ Club, the debating circle of friends at Delhi University, featuring
the later journalist Girilal Jain, economists Ram Swarup and Raj Krishna and
historian Sita Ram Goel.
Daya Krishna wisely avoids pronouncing on
the difficult question of their absolute chronology… Briefly, Daya Krishna was
a Hindu philosopher who knew his classics very well, and who took a questioning
position. He was not a secularist, the kind who know next to nothing of their
tradition yet condemn it out of hand anyway. But he was not a believer either,
aware as he was of the contradiction between the common beliefs about Vedic
literature and what the Vedas themselves say.
One of the defining sentences in the various analyses of
post-Independence Hindu revivalism, which is also original is this: Hindus have
been playing the game by the rules set by their enemies. [Ed: Paraphrased] Elst
wrote this in his masterful Decolonizing
the Hindu Mind in 2001. More than a decade ago. As we see, very little
has changed since then. If anything, it’s gotten worse in several respects… The Intellectuals: The widely
travelled, well-read, and smart ones. The ones who (rightly) want to change the
narrative, who point out the inherent bias in our discourse about India and
Hinduism.
A Day in the Life of a Sikh Prejudice: Pukhraj Singh DECEMBER 29, 2012 from Kafila Guest post by PUKHRAJ SINGH
“The very ink with which history is written,” allegorised Mark Twain,
“is merely fluid prejudice.” By that rationale, religion can often be the quill
which defaces the truth with its broad strokes, perverting history than
promulgating it. And like the bastard child of these perversions, a few
counter-narratives manage to wade through the tides of public opinion, carrying
the dim outline of the ossified ideas that led to its tragic pursuit. But one
has to have the right kind of eyes, says Hunter S. Thompson, to “see the
high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Why Zizek doesn’t have a political program from An und für sich by Adam Kotsko
From Less Than Nothing, pp. 1007-1009 (yes, I’ve finished
the thing):
“Faced with the demands of the protestors, intellectuals are
definitely not in the position of the subjects supposed to know: they cannot
operationalize these demands, or translate them into proposals for precise and
realistic measures. With the fall of twentieth-century communism, they forever
forfeited the role of the vanguard which knows the laws of history and can
guide the innocents along its path. The people, however, also do not have
access to the requisite knowledge–the “people” as a new figure of the subject
supposed to know is a myth of the Party which claims to act on its behalf…
There is no Subject who knows, and neither intellectuals nor ordinary
people are that subject. Is this a deadlock then: a blind man leading the
blind, or, more precisely, each of them assuming that the other is not blind?
No, because their respective ignoance is not symmetrical: it is the people who
have the answers, they just do not know the questions to which they have (or,
rather, are) the answer….
Claude Levi-Strauss wrote that the prohibition of
incest is not a question, an enigma, but an answer to a question that we do not
know. We should treat the demands of the Wall Street protests in a similar way:
intellectuals should not primarily take them as demands, questions, for which
they should produce clear answers, programs about what to do. They are answers,
and intellectuals should propose the questions to which they are answers. The
situation is like that in psychoanalysis, where the patient knows the answer
(his symptoms are such answers) but does not know what they are the answers to,
and the analyst has to formulate the questions. Only through such patient work
will a program emerge.”
(title unknown) by enowning
In Al Jazeera, Santiago Zabala on the thinker of our age.
[His ability to fuse together Martin Heidegger's "fundamental
ontology", Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" and Naomi Klein's
"shock doctrine" in order to undermine our liberal and tolerant
democratic structures is a practice few intellectuals are capable of.]
A Must Read New Book on Friedrich Hayek from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin
Kennedy
Eamonn Butler: “Friedrich Hayek: the ideas and influence of the
libertarian economist”
It is in his accounts of why markets flourish naturally that Hayek is
most persuasive, and Butler
is at his best in showing the importance of this side of Hayek’s
work. This means discussing socialism, which at first glance is a
debate about a past that is now over. However, lessons from the endemic
failures of socialism are in excellent contrast to the superior results of
market capitalism, and Butler
develops the contrast clearly, highlighting the untold damage done by the
rising tide of deliberate rule changes that eventually clog the operations of
markets, restraining them from their full potential.
Socialism is a mistaken response to how societies evolve and
work. The “battle lines” may have changed from what they were
in the 19th century when socialism was an untried idea, but
having been tried and failed in the 20thcentury, the central problem
remains today: how does a central agency manage a complex economy? Socialism
necessarily means dispensing with an existing market capitalism, which whatever
else is regarded as dispensable, the visible success of markets that grew
within the margins of the millennia-old human experiences since our ancestors
left the forest and plains to become shepherds and farmers 10,000 years ago,
suggests that markets are dispensed with at an enormous cost.
We can
contrast the experience of China
and Britain since the 15th century;
China ’s
government deliberately ended foreign trade despite its massive technological
lead. Meanwhile individuals in Britain
continued trading and eventually re-discovered the ‘lost’ technologies of China which led
to the spread of local markets, science and unheard of new
technologies. Market capitalism flourishes under conditions of
constitutional liberty more than totalitarian socialism can flourish by
destroying markets. Gavin Kennedy Emeritus Professor, Edinburgh Business
School , Heriot-Watt University
