From Auroville to Esalen: Yoga of ideas, meetings, and presentation

The Symbol Dawn: A video presentation from Mirror of Tomorrow by Govind Nishar

The accompanying paintings are by Huta who did these directly under the guidance of the Mother. The recitation of the text is in Narad’s (Richard Eggenberger’s) voice. The creation of the video is by Tuhin Chowdhury. This is a beta-version and is being made as an offering to the Mother on her birthday, 21 February [...] Heal with her bliss the tired breast of earth from Savitri 

Shall pour the nectar of a sorrowless life

Around her from her lucid heart of love,

Heal with her bliss the tired breast of earth

And cast like a happy snare felicity.

Discussion # 56258 from Auroville Radio

Maybe the discussion's number it's wrong, but the point it's that Auroville is piling up much more meetings and presentation than facts and actions. It seems that the further we go in the development harder it gets to take decisions and act consequently. This may sound slightly negative but was the feeling expressed of some of the participants at the meeting. The frustration reflects the little progress Auroville has achieved recently. Maybe it's time to act?

Comment on Cosmology by Sandeep

Don’t worry if you don’t understand whats written on this page. Whether the Gods exist or not is of no relevance to the novice. As you develop deeper understanding of your inner movements, you will begin to understand everything else. Spiritual development is like an growing and ascending spiral, which starts from a bright point and gradually envelopes and illumines the surrounding areas.

In the beginning, one must focus on psychology (how should I live?) rather than ontology (what exists out there?). You have to read literature which motivates you to live better, which awakens introspection as well as the Atman within. If you have an affinity for Sri Aurobindo, start reading his works such as Savitri, Essays on the Gita, Life Divine, Synthesis of Yoga or the Letters on Yoga. It may take a few readings to grasp his texts but keep trying because its worth it.

The Hypnotic Text from Larval Subjects

The problem is that this strategy seems to exchange one form of power and domination for another.  In the first instance, we’re in the thrall of dominant codes that typify our identities and reduce us to good consumers.  In the latter instance, however, we seem to become hypnotized by the text and thereby enslaved.  Like the cult follower that believes that the leader contains a mysterious amalga or objet a around which our desire comes to pulsate, the enigmatic and elusive text comes to capture our desire and enslave us.

I began by looking for a point of resistance to the dominant codes structuring communicative capitalism.  I turned to this thinker or that to find technologies of resistance at the level of the semiotic.  Yet now I find that I’m trapped in the enigma or the elusiveness of that theorist’s writing.  My goal begins to change.  Where before it was strategies of resistance, now it’s understanding the theorist.  Hours and years are now spent deciphering Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, Adorno, Hegel, and so on.  “They must,” I reason, “know what they’re saying, they must have a secret behind all of this, and I only fail because I haven’t read enough, haven’t done enough work tracking down their references, haven’t followed their lines of thought carefully enough!” Paradoxically, then, such texts tend to produce university discourses.  The product of identification with a hypnotic text is a divided subject ($) that has become caught within the thrall of the master-figure (S1), becoming their servant by endlessly doing commentary on their work.  The old goal disappears– though to be sure, it’s still given lip service –and the new goal becomes a life devoted to understanding Heidegger, Hegel, Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, and so on.  Of course, there’s no end to this project insofar as it belongs to the nature of objet a to slip away. 

Oh don’t get me wrong.  I’m not suggesting that any of these thinkers should be rejected on the grounds of style.  I’ve certainly gained much by becoming hypnotized by all the thinkers I’ve listed here.  I do, however, think that style can be a form of power– sometimes hypnotizing us like the cult leader, at other times functioning as a shibboleth for privileged communities –and that it’s not clear that conceptual work, clearly expressed, can’t be a more effective strategy against communicative capitalism.  Indeed, another danger that arises out of the enigmatic text is that it becomes mere noise for the broader society, having little to no effect outside the halls of the academies.  I will suggest– perhaps imprudently –that such texts seem to suggest a somewhat poor regard to readers.  To publish a text is to invite others to read.  Those who read give their time.  In a world saturated by information as ours is today, it seems somehow wrong to entrap others in your text when they wish to learn from you and give portions of their life over to you.

Life Undead and Resurrected from An und für sich by joshua ramey

If there is one theme in The Hermetic Deleuze:  Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal that I think causes the most ambivalence for myself, and for contemporary philosophy, it is the possibility, today, of conceiving thought—any thought, whether hermetic or rationalist—as some kind of affirmation of life.  My overwhelming impression of much of contemporary continental and post-continental reflection is that it is conditioned by an almost paralyzing combination of dread, horror, and malaise over the ongoing ecological holocaust (and its twin, economic endgame) through which we are currently “living,” if one could even call it that.  The most difficult thing I continue to try to come to terms with, in my own life and work, is what it means to engage in thought and spiritual discipline as some kind of intensified relation to “nature” when “nature” has become something like absolute contingency, incarnate…

We might focus here by a return to Christian Kerslake’s question in response to my first response, to Dan Barber:  what is a specifically hermetic incarnationalism?   I agree with Christian that something like tantric sciences, focusing on the body, breath, chakras, and extremely local/animist divinities is somehow closer to Deleuze’s own thinking than perhaps any other spiritual tradition.  And yet Deleuze receives his spiritual sciences mediated through a line of Western estoericisms that both incorporate and struggle against Christian theology…

It is interesting that the great critics of Christianity Deleuze admired (and in many ways I count my allegiance to them)—Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Artaud, Bataille—could not but admire the figure of Christ as Love… Most of hermetic mysticism and practice, including alchemy, theosophy, and the Western adoption of tantrism, yoga, and meditation, all seems to be carried out under the sign of Joachim de Fiore’s “Age of the Holy Spirit,” an era in which there is a mesmerizing, uncanny, and ultimately nondual relationship between humanity and divinity (In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze makes tantalizing reference to Fiore, as well as to Vico, in his attempt to explain the relation of the syntheses of time to historical repetition.  He is basically critical, but then as Kerslake has shown, later finds his way to an oblique affirmation of Toynbee’s universal history with its repetition of 22 essential archetypal phases, corresponding to the 22 major arcana of the Tarot).  This is a very different perspective, it seems to me, than the Feuerbachian-cum-death of God point of view that points to the total disenchantment of the world…

Here is an alchemical legend:  the issue (offspring) of Adam is the issue (product) of resurrection.  Hermeticism is the Western version of bodily esotericism.  Yes, Deleuze’s thought is in many ways closer to Tantrism.  I “force” the issue of Hermeticism strategically as a way of locating Western philosophy within a specific impasse between reason and spirit.  But that impasse “is” in some sense the problem of the body (or to use the older term, nature, or the one we are now learning to use, ecology).  That is what is really the limit of Descartes’s “ordeal”: the specific deliverances of what the body might be are forsaken in the name of what the body appears to be, to the mind.  It’s almost as if there is simply a mind-mind problem in Descartes, and as if he never reaches the level of the body—the subtle, alchemical body, the body of the chakras, kunadalini, and the mercurial body of Adam Kadmon.  The specific role that Hermes plays in alchemy is the role of the “mercurial” element, the moist, flowing element that “revives” matter from its slumber.  Mercury is the element of resurrection, and Hermes is a psychopomp… Why resurrection?   The problem of spirituality today is the problem of survival.  This is why, although I have been to Esalen and tasted its nearly supernatural bounties of health and healing, I can only peruse its catalogue and its denizens with a rueful eye.   

(title unknown) from enowning In-der-Blog-sein

The Anti-Modernist on the problem of objective philosophizing. 

“The theoretical conceals its own concealing, or rather, that it is wholly ignorant to the fact that it forces all of experience into categorical classifications through the creation of an impression that rigorous and detached observation of entities as present-to-hand is the only way to access truth.”

Want to but a tablet-cum-laptop By Mihir Patkar, TNN Feb 20, 2013,

The Lenovo Ideapad Yoga is quite innovative with its ability to flip back its screen by a full 360 degrees, letting you use it as a tablet. In this mode, its keyboard becomes the back plate of the tablet - and although disabled, it can be a bit distracting because you can still feel the play of the keys when you hold it like a slate. Also, the Yoga is quite heavy to be used as a truly portable tablet. Besides, it is extremely hard to read its reflective display in direct sunlight…

So for the money you would spend on the IdeaPad Yoga (86,000 approx) or the XPS 12 (93,000 approx), we would instead recommend you buy a good ultrabook for around 50,000 (such as the Lenovo IdeaPad U310, Dell Inspiron 14z or Samsung NP530U4C) and a highend tablet (Apple iPad, iPad Mini or Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1); these will give you more bang for your buck - at least for the moment.

The aim should be understanding of being and the world

Communication practicum from Auroville Radio by contact@aurovilleradio.org (Herman) Jan 17, 2013

This has been the fifth year running that communication and political science students from the American University of Paris have been coming to Auroville for their undergraduate practicum. Also for the past few years they have been joined by students from Linneaus University in Sweden. Auroville provides a perfect platform for the students with all the different projects and activities they can get involved in. To round of their 2-3 week visit they all gave a presentation of the work they have been doing in Auroville.

Lalit on Queens University & CEPT  from Auroville Radio by contact@aurovilleradio.org (Andrea) Jan 16, 2013

Auroville Integral Sustainability Institute shares the experience of hosting 2 different groups of visiting planning students from Queens University, Canada & CEPT, Ahmedabad - ‘It was very enriching for all’, says Lalit, Programme coordinator. Auroville being an inspiring & interdisciplinary learning field provided very conducive environment to experience a different way of life which gave them a very real life glimpse of integral life & sense of purpose.

“The Party” from Larval Subjects Jan 17, 2013

Among Heideggerians, for example, Heidegger research becomes an end in itself, whereas the aim should be understanding of being and the world.  Among the democratic party, perpetuation of the democratic party becomes an end in itself, rather than representing the interests of the people.  The first question we need to ask of any form of organization– and this is why we need anarcho-communism as a regulative ideal –is that of how we can insure that parties, groups, and organizations remain “complex, adaptive systems”, rather than becoming ends in themselves and machines of alienation.  How can we organize in a way that remains responsive to the alien and singular?

The second problem with group structures is of greater concern and has darker implications.  As I have argued for a number of years now, group identification has the structure of masculine sexuality (the left side of the diagram to the right).  I will not rehearse the intricacies of Lacan’s graph of sexuation here (readers who are curious can consult chapter 6 of The Democracy of Objects or my article “The Other Face of God“, .pdf)… Such was Zizek’s conclusion regarding the function of the symbolic figure of the Jew in anti-semitism.  Anti-semitism has nothing to do with real Jews, but is instead a fantasy structure designed to explain why the organic and harmonious communities dreamed of by conservative ideologies fail (today the figure of the Jew has been replaced by leftists and Middle Easterners).   

Most Overrated Philosopher Of The 20th Century Science 2.0 By Massimo Pigliucci January 16th 2013 Reprinted from Rationally Speaking, January 11, 2013 Willard van Orman Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Bertrand Russell, &

Martin Heidegger, a major practitioner of the phenomenological and existentialist approaches in philosophy, buddy of the Nazi (the well! what the well!), and a top competitor with Derrida for most obscure philosophical writer of the 20th century. He talked a lot about Being (and Time).

Eric Schliesser Introduces Foucault from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy

Eric Schliesser follows last week’s ‘Philo of Economics’ with this week’s on “Foucault and the Invisible Hand”. Eric refers to Michel Foucault's treatment of Smith in “The Birth of Biopolitics”. While commenting on Smith's use of "invisible hand" in the Wealth of Nations (hereafter WN), Foucault insists that Smith is committed to the claim that:

“Everyone must be uncertain with regard to the collective outcome if this positive collective outcome is really to be expected. Being in the dark and the blindness of all the economic agents are absolutely necessary. The collective good must not be an objective... Invisibility is not just a fact arising from the imperfect nature of human intelligence which prevents people from realizing that there is a hand behind them which arranges or connects everything that each individual does on their own account. Invisibility is absolutely indispensable. It is an invisibility which means that no economic agent should or can pursue the collective good” (Foucault 2008: 279-80).

Comment

I am not going to comment on Foucault’s general reasoning on Adam Smith’s use of the IH metaphor in this post.  His reasoning tends to be obscure. To argue that “human intelligence prevents people from realizing that there is a hand behind them which arranges or connects everything that each individual does on their own account” is a strange way of putting it. The “hand behind them which arranges or connects everything that each individual does on their own account” is either saying that “human intelligence” stops them fantasising about an IH that actually exists or prevents them fantasising about one that does not exist.  That is what makes philosophy such a tormented subject; it’s never really clear as to what they mean except by engaging in constant “deep thinking”. Those excellent teacher’s of philosophy (such as Eric Schliesser) are unfazed by textual ambiguity and are among the brightest and best of social scientists.  They are always stimulating when listened to in conversation or in seminars and stretch their student’s critical faculties…

I suggest Hayek’s defiant conjecture (Fatal Conceit) that knowing every action of 7 billion of people about matching possible choices among billions of products and services (36 billion choices in New York alone each minute of the day – only a few dozen choices for gatherer-hunter upper Amazonian tribes) is well beyond human comprehension or understanding, let alone practical even in a Providential fantasy of the imagination. Surely it is an extreme theological idea, even as a figure of speech. A Must Read New Book on Friedrich Hayek Eamonn Butler: “Friedrich Hayek: the ideas and influence of the libertarian economist”

The limits of Karl Polanyi’s anti-market approach in the struggle for economic democracy from The Memory Bank by Keith Hart Jan 16, 2013

I am a fully paid-up member of the Karl Polanyi fan club. In the past few years I have published, with my collaborators, a collection of essays on the significance of The Great Transformation for understanding our times (Blanc 2011, Holmes 2012) and have made him a canonical figure for my versions of economic anthropology, the human economy and the history of money. I have also published two short biographical articles on him. I have contributed in this way to the recent outpouring of new work on Polanyi to which this book is a significant addition. I am a believer, but some believers also have doubts. I still have reservations about a Polanyian strategy for achieving economic democracy and these are linked to his historical vision of “market society”.  Theories are good for some things and not for others and, in my view, the plural economy would be best served by a plural approach to theory and politics. But first let me summarise what I most value personally in what I have learned from Polanyi.

Most anthropologists take their lead from the academic work done by Polanyi and his collaborators at Columbia University after the war… Polanyi falls within this anti-market camp since he acknowledged Aristotle as his master and considered “the self-regulating market’s” contradictions to have been the principal cause of the twentieth-century’s horrors. A less apocalyptic version of socialism in the tradition of Saint-Simon acknowledges the social damage done by unfettered markets (what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction”), but would not wish to do away with the wealth they produce… John Maynard Keynes produced the most impressive synthesis of liberalism and social democracy in the last century. Much recent writing on Polanyi would place him within this tendency rather than as a card-carrying anti-marketeer. He did recognize a role for the market and lined up with those who sought institutional means to correct capitalism’s ills… In either case, the post-war turn to social democracy or “embedded liberalism” – the apogee of national capitalism – was hardly anticipated by The Great Transformation. We should not repeat this error when we draw inspiration from Polanyi in the struggle for economic democracy today.   

09. Narad’s reading of The Mother on Savitri from Savitri 17 Jan 2013

Regarding a passage in Savitri in which Sri Aurobindo describes the universe as a play between He and She. "This whole wide world is only he and she," He, the Supreme in love with her, her servitor; She, the creative Force.

As one too great for him he worships her; … This whole wide world is only he and she. 

What a marvellous work! He goes into a completely different region, so much above thought! It's constant vision, it isn't something thought out—with thought everything becomes flat, hollow, empty, empty, just like a leaf; while this is full, the full content is there, alive.

A critique of the book "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" by Peter Heehs

To begin with, any successor must be someone who will swear personal loyalty to Manoj Das Gupta as against Sri Aurobindo. Some of the names being ...

Disciples - Sri Aurobindo Ashram - E-Library - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Heredity and environment cook uniqueness of each individual

The Interaction of the Individual Soul, Heredity and Environment from Sri Aurobindo Studies 

We are born into the world as children of our parents, carrying with us a physical heritage from our ancestors which is called heredity. These traits are passed along in the DNA transmitted from the parents, and combined according to the dominant or recessive characteristics of the particular genetic interactions. This process therefore provides a basis for the continuity of the physical framework of our lives from generation to generation. The ability for genetic material to combine and create new combinations through the contribution of the two parents provides an enormous potential capability for individuation and new development in the newly born child.

This process of heredity, however, is not the sole factor in determining our lives. Once born into the world, we interact with an environment consisting of both the world at large, and the other beings with whom we interact. We are both influenced, and in our turn, influence the development of the community of life and existence and its development. We are part of the community and partake of the time-spirit within which we are born and live, carried along by the currents of that tremendous collective energy, but also doing our part to try to shape and move that collective existence.

While there is a debate about whether heredity or environment is more important in the development of the human being, and there are strong proponents of each view, it is clear that both are part of the legacy of the past, and the force of the present within which we have to take up our lives and become who we are meant to be. These two factors on their own however are not the whole story, although they provide us a clue. When we recognize that the very process helps to ensure “uniqueness” of each individual, we can see that the physical process supports the concept of the individual soul born into life.

Patterns of the Present - Georges Van Vrekhem 

Patterns of the Present is a profound and inspiring account of the present situation of mankind and the world it lives in. On the threshold of the new millennium, countless pages have been written on the meaning of our world and its possible development. The conclusion in most cases was depressing – man would become an automaton in a sci-fi world. The author puts the present situation of humanity in the perspective of the evolutionary vision of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. The result is a positive interpretation of the global situation. The meaning of history, the globalization of our planet, the values represented by East and West, their meeting and reciprocal fertilization, the future evolution of mankind – all these topics and more are presented here in a fresh, often surprising, perspective. Contents:
1. The Big Picture
2. The Avataric Field
3. East and West
4. Reason on Trial
5. Science, Scientism, Modern Technology
6. The Supramental “Catastrophe”
7. The Future of Humanity

Preparing for the Miraculous - Georges Van Vrekhem 

The Belgian writer Georges Van Vrekhem explores these and other timeless questions in the light of Sri Aurobindos evolutionary concept and casts a refreshing new look on issues that have been the lasting preoccupation of seekers throughout the ages. This book contains the edited versions of eleven talks that Georges Van Vrekhem gave in Auroville in 2010 and 2011:
* Adam Kadmon and the Evolution
* The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Thought
* Preparing for the Miraculous
* What Arjuna Saw: the Dark Side of the Force
* 2012 and 1956: Doomsday?
* Being Human and the Copernican Evolution
* Bridges across the Afterlife
* Sri Aurobindo's Descent into Death
* Sri Aurobindo and the Big Bang
* Theodicy: "Nature Makes no Mistakes"
* The Kalki Avatar.

American Philosophy and Rudolf Steiner, ed. By Robert McDermott

I mentioned this text, American Philosophy and Rudolf Steiner, edited by my advisor Robert McDermott, a few months back. It has since been published. …

About the Author Robert McDermott, Ph.D., is president emeritus and chair of the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). His publications include Radhakrishnan (1970); The Essential Aurobindo (1974, 1987); The Essential Steiner (1984); (with Rudolf Steiner) The Bhagavad Gita and the West (2009); The New Essential Steiner (2009) and Six Pillars: Introductions to the Works of Sri Aurobindo (2012). He has also published on William James, Josiah Royce, M. K. Gandhi, the evolution of consciousness, and American thought.

Book Description American philosophy may have taken a wrong turn in the mid-twentieth century, when pragmatism gave way to a tradition of analytical philosophy that eschewed metaphysics as inherently meaningless and focused on the coherence or incoherence of linguistic structures. Nonetheless, many new sites of potential dialogue exist between Steiner and American philosophy.

Style « Larval Subjects 25 Apr 2008 – Hopefully I have enough “cred” to inveigh against “difficult books” (I am, after all, mired in the work of figures such as Deleuze, Lacan, Hegel, etc., who are the worst of the worst), but I have increasingly found myself suspicious of the “difficult work”… I wonder if terribly dense styles such as we find in figures like Deleuze, Lacan, Hegel, Derrida, etc., etc., etc., aren’t a form of intellectual terrorism… I’ve spent my fair amount of time defensively defending the writing style of figures such as Lacan, Derrida, Heidegger, Deleuze, etc., etc., etc. What I realize is that what I was defending was not their style but the value of their concepts and arguments despite their style. 12:19 PM - 4:22 PM

Alethetics from Larval Subjects Every great philosopher proposes a frame, a new window through which to encounter the world… We no less frame selections of the world than we are seized by selections of the world.  7:07 PM

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 thelibertarian economist”

Hayek’s life and legacy testify to the lasting power of ideas over the fleeting influence of individual politicians who, because they misunderstand the dynamics of human societies, normally promote the wrong ideas. Radicals of Left and Right believe they can change society by capturing the legislature to correct what they regard as society’s systemic errors. Hayek noted, sardonically, that if designed changes tried to change the world, we cannot be sure that the outcome would please either its designers or those affected by their changes.

Patient's symptoms are answers in search of questions

The Hindu: NATIONAL TAMIL NADU: Coimbatore today December 30, 2012 RELIGION

Sri Aurobindo Devotees: Prayers, Sasibalika Vidya Mandir, R.S. Puram, 9.30 a.m.; Annai Meditation Centre, Kovaipudur, 4 p.m.

The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo - Page 257 - V. P. Varma - 1990 - Preview - More editions Aurobindo is critical of a world state and favours a world union. There are three possible institutional means to effectuate the scheme of the unity of mankind. There can be a centralized unitarian world state but Aurobindo rejects this suggestion ...

Comment on Sravana Manana and Nidhidhyasana by Sandeep Dec 29, 2012

In the book “Consciousness, Indian Psychology and Yoga”, there is a chapter where Matthijs Cornelissen says the hard problem arises because Western psychology is inverted in its thinking. It sees this world as real and hence has to figure why the brain works; whereas Indian psychology which sees this world as a projection can explain better why the brain creates images. Comment on Sravana Manana and Nidhidhyasana Here is the excerpt from the article by Matthijs: 

(David) Chalmers' formulation of the hard problem-and of the correlation between the brain and consciousness are typical examples of our unwarranted, and often unconscious collective tendency to think that even if consciousness is irreducible, it is somehow still “less fundamental” than matter. The recent philosophical debate on the nature of consciousness is to a considerable degree dominated by such materialist presuppositions…. (Kireet Joshi, Matthijs Cornelissen (ed). Consciousness, Indian Psychology and Yoga , New Delhi, Motilal Banarsidas, 2004. pp 16-17)

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):

“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.” 

Slavoj Zizek and the role of the philosopher Santiago Zabala Al Jazeera, 25 Dec 2012

In order to respond, as Edward Said once said, the intellectual has to be "an outsider, living in self-imposed exile, and on the margins of society", that is, free from academic, religious and political establishments; otherwise, he or she will simply submit to the inevitability of events.

If Slavoj Zizek perfectly fits Said's description, it is not because he is unemployed, in exile, and at the margins of society, but rather because he writes as if he were. His theoretical books, political positions and public appearances are a disruption not only of the common academic style, but also of the idea of the philosopher or intellectual as someone to be idealised and deferred to…

While many believe that globalisation made the Slovenian philosopher more popular than John Dewey, Herbert Marcuse, or Jurgen Habermas, it was actually his ability to disrupt our neoliberal democratic surety through the same events that characterise it…

Today, whether we like him or not, Zizek is, as the Observer points out, "what Jacques Derrida was to the 80s", that is, the thinker of our age. While Derrida's intellectual operation focused on "deconstructing" our linguistic frames of reference, Zizek instead "disrupts" our ideological structures, the underside of acceptable philosophical, religious and political discourses. 1:57 PM

Slavoj Zizek: I am not the world's hippest philosopher! Salon - SUNDAY, DEC 30, 2012 01:30 AM IST ‎The coolest and most influential leftist in Europe tells Salon he battles depression -- and those who worship him BY KATIE ENGELHART

Almost 25 years ago, philosopher Slavoj Žižek broke through the intellectual cul-de-sac of Slovenian academia — making his mark on the English-speaking world with “The Sublime Object of Ideology” (1989), a wily fusing of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Frankfurt School idealism, and reflections on the 1979 blockbuster horror flick “Alien.”

Today, he’s everywhere. The notoriously unkempt “radical leftist” philosophe has become the unlikeliest of celebrities: a cult icon and spiritual guide for Europe’s lethargic left…

Žižek: I really hate all of this politically correct, cultural studies bullshit. If you mention the phrase “postcolonialism,” I say, “Fuck it!” Postcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals… I also have a bit of megalomania. I almost conceive of myself as a Christ figure.

Hayek, Zizek, Heehs and Elst

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.

The Enduring Relevance of Koenraad Elst from The Rediscovery of India by Sandeep B.

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 19^th century when socialism was an untried idea, but having been tried and failed in the 20^thcentury, 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 15^th 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

Generosity, reciprocity, capacity, intimacy, nastiness, and torture

Reciprocity and Bargaining from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy

JAMES MADEIROS (3 DECEMBER) posts on Sociology Degree Programs HERE “Reciprocity: Society’s Invisible Hand”

“The most common (and commonly defended) positions regarding personal choice revolve around free will and fate, but these two stances exclude one of the most powerful predictors of human action and interaction: societal influence. This is especially true when it comes to the concept of the “rule of reciprocation,” which defines the invisible hand that pushes us to give back when others give to us. This pressure is most acutely felt when people fail to reciprocate and are then saddled with guilt that makes them feel uncomfortable – a feeling that is avoided by reciprocation.”

Comment: The problem with some versions of sociology is its proclivity for making things up (as happens with some exponents of economics!).  Relating reciprocation uniquely to society’s pressure on individuals and calling it “the invisible hand” is that it fails the evidence test from the widespread behaviour exhibited among some, but not all, pairs of primates (see Robin Dunbar, “Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language”).

Similarly, among humans reciprocity is practised, but not unanimously. Reciprocity is a powerful behavioural exchange habit that predates by hundreds of millennia its appearance among modern humans. Reciprocity, where the implied exchange may be separated by time delays, pre-dates the relatively more recent exchange behaviour practised in human bargaining – where the implied exchange is immediate and rarely occurs among primates (and some bats) practising reciprocity. 

Hence the attempt by James Madeiros to make Sociology Degree Programs appear authoritative, complete with its own ‘invisible hand’ of society,  exposes its shallowness.  

Neuroscience: Under Attack from Posthuman Destinies by abdul lateef Dec 4, 2012 

A team of British scientists recently analyzed nearly 3,000 neuroscientific articles published in the British press between 2000 and 2010 and found that the media regularly distorts and embellishes the findings of scientific studies. Writing in the journal Neuron, the researchers concluded that “logically irrelevant neuroscience information imbues an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility.” Another way of saying this is that bogus science gives vague, undisciplined thinking the look of seriousness and truth.

Arachnology: Having a mate for dinner - The Economist

AMONG spiders, the female of the species really is more deadly than the male. ... suitors, post copula, in a manner that Hannibal Lecter might have admired. Male Spiders Let Mates Eat Them for Kids' Sake - Sexual ... 23 Dec 2011 – Female orb-web spiders that eat their tiny male mates after copulation, called sexual cannibalism, have more, larger babies that survive longer ... Male spiders castrate themselves during sex to avoid being eaten ... 2 Feb 2012 – Biologists have identified a new sex technique used by certain spiders, called "remote copulation", where the males castrate themselves during ...

Is it all in the micro? from Cafe Hayek by Russ Roberts Dec 4, 2012 

Casey Mulligan in this week’s EconTalk argues that the generosity of the safety net deepened the recession and slowed the recovery. I don’t believe all of his analysis but it sure is provocative. And he might be right.

Invest in Sound Economics from Cafe Hayek by Don Boudreaux Dec 4, 2012 

2012 was for Russ and me filled (as recent years have been) with accusations that we write what we write, say what we say, teach what we teach, and blog what we blog only because we’re intellectual mercenaries… 

For nearly nine years now we’ve posted material at the Cafe almost daily (and, on most days, several times).  As I noted last year, during that time we’ve avoided adding any advertising links – despite increasingly frequent solicitations for us to add such links.  So, truly, neither Russ nor I receives any monetary payment for our work here as Cafe Hayek’s ‘blogeristas.’  While our blogging does have intellectual rewards, it is, for us, a true labor of love – one that we will continue to perform for the foreseeable future.

Rights based Left Liberalism has queered the pitch from Offstumped - Commentary on Indian Politics 

So what we have here is the BJP mostly reacting to the Congress’ left liberal “rights based agenda”, riding on its bandwagon in states where it is in power while being mostly clueless on the long term strategic implications of this “rights based left liberal law making”.

The Vedanta episode highlights how these Rights based  laws like the FRA have effected a long term strategic advantage to the Congress… The BJP on account of its intellectual vaccum and myopia has shot itself in the foot by contributing unwittingly to this Left Liberal strategic shift in favor of the Congress. What is worse the BJP still does not see a need to chart a fundamentally different course Legislatively or Politically to challenge the Congress.

Indian heritage? from Love of All Wisdom - Dec 3, 2012

But then, there are also places where my visits to India have impeded my understanding. It took me far too long to see the integrity orientation of classical Indian philosophy, because I had spent too long understanding classical India through the lens of my modern experiences. What I had seen in modern India was what Louis Dumont and Max Weber saw: tightly knit communities where family counts more than individual preferences, contrasted to the individualism of the modern Western world where I grew up. Now, no doubt much or even most of classical Indian society fit this description just as well, in practice. What didn’t fit it was the theory, the ideas: the Jains, the Buddhists, the Yogins, the Advaitins sought to separate themselves from this communal world and transcend it. They were not individualists in the Western sense, but individualists they were. And I might have had an easier time of seeing that if I had been confronted with their ideas before encountering the modern Indian world.

Moreover, it was never my intention to limit my studies to India. As Jeffery Long said last week: “My main interest, whatever the historical genealogy of my access to these teachings, is in whether they are true.” I do think the historical provenance of various ideas has an important bearing on our understanding of them and their truth, but it is the truth that I seek.

The Internet  from Larval Subjects . by larvalsubjects Dec 4, 2012

I started this blog on a lark back in 2006… Late one night I created the blog “Larval Subjects”, and wrote my first post on the relationship between Deleuze and Lacan.  The blog became one of my most fulfilling modes of intellectual engagement.  Perhaps that’s pathetic, but I don’t care.

Why did I start the blog?  I started basically because I was in a place of loneliness and despair… At a time where I felt as if I had failed academically because I was only a lowly community college professor and had not achieved a tenure track position, this was a way of overcoming my despair and simply taking delight in thinking and discussing. And finally the blogosphere has exposed me to theoretical orientations that I would have never encountered on my own… There’s not a day in which I don’t consider shutting down this blog and withdrawing from all online participation.  I dread opening my email.  I dread opening the comments on this blog.  Sometimes I go days without looking at either.  I’m shell shocked.  These three examples are only one of many.  You don’t see the emails I delete, nor the emails I receive.  At this point I seldom even respond to emails unless I can actually trace the person who sent it.  So what’s my point?  My point is that when you talk about the nastiness of the blogosphere you might be ignorant of the context. 

The impunity of unborn Mights was hers from Savitri Dec 4, 2012 

Torture has been consistently prohibited in international human rights and humanitarian law for more than half a century and has been condemned in a number of international conventions. The prohibition is absolute and no exceptions, including situations of public emergency and war, may be evoked to legitimise the use of torture. Despite this, torture and other forms of ill treatment is still a predominant and widespread occurrence and continues to be practiced in over 100 countries.

International law obliges states to investigate allegations of torture and to punish those responsible. It also requires that victims of acts of torture obtain reparation and have an enforceable remedy to fair and adequate compensation, restitution of their rights and as full a rehabilitation as possible. Nevertheless, torturers are seldom brought to court and torture survivors rarely receive any kind of redress as compensation for their suffering.

Evolution and the Meaning of Life from Sri Aurobindo Studies 

Sri Aurobindo summarizes the discussion about involution and evolution with the following: “Therefore all this evolution is a growing of the Self in material nature to the conscious possession of its own spi9ritual being.”

The material forms that we see around us are not dead or inanimate, but are rather densely packed forms of energy, organized in such a way as to hold tremendous power and consciousness within the apparent immobility. The consciousness that creates the universe is thus involved in these material forms, and they become the basis for the evolution, the systematic unfolding of the powers of existence and consciousness held tightly within the forms of matter.

At the end of the evolutionary process we find: “the spirit holding Nature conscious in himself, complete by his completeness, liberated by his liberation, perfected in his perfection, crowns the evolution.”

This makes the process of birth and death part of a larger cycle of systematic unfolding of this consciousness of the spirit taking birth as a conscious form in Matter. “To grow in knowledge, in power, in delight, love and oneness, towards the infinite light, capacity and bliss of spiritual existence, to universalise ourselves till we are one with all being, and to exceed constantly our present limited self till it opens fully to the transcendence in which the universal lives and to base upon it all our becoming, that is the full evolution of what now lies darkly wrapped or works half evolved in Nature.” Sri Aurobindo, Rebirth and Karma, Section I, Chapter 7, Involution and Evolution, pp. 66-67

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.