Ethics and an edifice of falsity, fantasy, and indeterminacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McTaggart: atheistic mysticism; Nussbaum: philosophical humanism

McTaggart's philosophy of religion was a kind of atheistic mysticism by Kris McDaniel krmcdani@syr.edu

Although McTaggart was an atheist from a very early age, he was certainly a religious person, at least on his own definition of “religion”. In chapter 1 of Some Dogmas of Religion, McTaggart defined “religion” as “an emotion that rests on a conviction of harmony between ourselves and the universe at large.” According to McTaggart, a necessary condition on judging that there is harmony between the universe at large and ourselves is that one judge that the universe is good on the whole (Some Dogmas of Religion, section 11)…

McTaggart was a mystic. McTaggart held that there are two essential characteristics of mysticism. (These two characteristics are articulated in his article “Mysticism”, which is reprinted in Philosophical Studies.) First, mysticism requires the recognition of a unity of the universe that is greater than that recognized by ordinary experience or by science. The universe might be highly unified without it being the case that the apparently numerically distinct parts of the universe are actually identical. According to McTaggart, Hegel believed in a mystic unity although he did not believe that this unity amounted to numerical identity. On McTaggart's interpretation, Hegel identified God as a community of finite spirits. McTaggart's own view was substantially the same, although he did not label the community of spirits “God”.

A second essential characteristic of mysticism is the view that it is possible to be conscious of this unity in a way different from that of ordinary discursive thought. We can be conscious of abstract truths or of spiritual reality directly in a matter akin to sense perception. McTaggart calls this consciousness “mystic intuition”, and that of which it is a recognition “mystic unity”. Mystic unity is more fundamental than mystic intuition. The existence of mystic intuition implies the existence of mystic unity, but the clearly the converse does not hold. The universe might be highly unified without anyone recognizing that it is so.

From a very early age, McTaggart had what he took to be mystical experiences. These experiences presented the world as being fundamentally unified by the relation of love. Reality as it appeared to him in these experiences consisted fundamentally of immaterial spirits who stand in the relation of love to one another. These experiences provided him with great comfort, but he believed that the fact that he had them did not provide others with a reason to believe in the unity he took them to reveal.^[13] Philosophical argument was needed to supply others with a reason. Copyright © 2009 

Space, Time and Eternity DR. HARIDAS CHAUDHURI SRI AUROBINDO MANDIR ANNUAL No. 9 15th August, 1950 ON THE OCCASION OF THE 78th BIRTHDAY OF SRI AUROBINDO SRI AUROBINDO PATHAMANDIR CALCUTTA

In McTaggart's philosophy we find that a serious attempt is made to demonstrate the synthetic character of space and time as both subjective and objective. He calls them phenomena bene fundata in as much as they are not mere phenomena in Kant's sense of the term, but are such phenomena as correspond to some indisputable features of ultimate reality. Space is characterised by co-existence of a plurality of reciprocally exclusive parts and by infinite divisibility of these parts. Now, the features of co-existence, reciprocal exclusion, and infinite divisibility are ultimately real, because according to McTaggart reality consists of an impersonal unity of a plurality self-subsistent spiritual substances or selves, which are mutually exclusive in respect of their existence. The nature of each of these self-subsistent selves is infinitely divisible, the terms in the process of such division being perceptions of other selves and their perceptions. What is erroneous or illusory about space is its appearance as an attribute of matter or as locus of the existence of matter. McTaggart advances an array of close-knit arguments to demonstrate the unreality of matter...

SPACE-TIME AS SELF-EXTENSION OF THE SPIRIT

It should be abundantly clear from the foregoing discussion that according to the Integral Idealism of Sri Aurobindo the fundamental reality of space-time is spiritual self-extension of ultimate reality. Reality is, in its original status and intrinsic nature, the spaceless and timeless Spirit. Space and time are the same Reality self-extended to contain the deployment of what is within it. Now, the self-extension of the infinite and eternal Spirit must be infinite and eternal too. So it may be said that the fundamental truth of space is the infinity of the Infinite, whereas the fundamental truth of time is the eternity of the Eternal…

While Bradley's conception of eternity as the transmuted essence of time is true of the Spirit in its self-absorption, Royce's view of eternity as a totum simul or as the whole-consciousness of an infinite succession is true of the Spirit in its cosmic universality or dynamic creativity, and the ordinary view of eternity as an endless march of time is true of the Spirit in its individual entanglement in the creative flux. 10:19 AM

Against Natural Theology by cjsmith Indistinct Union These are some scattered thoughts arising in relation to a paper I’m working on for a class in Process Theology.

Alfred North Whitehead godfather of Process Thought argued for a God within his overall cosmological system. Fairly unique contribution relative to modern era philosophers in that regard. So Process Thought is deeply imbued with a Natural Theological strain. 4:38 AM

Grundlegung A philosophy blog Philosophy as Bildung October 21, 2008

Nussbaum undertakes a forensic analysis of the details of Greek philosophy and tragedy which she brings to bear upon questions of moral luck, tragic conflict and practical deliberation. What makes the book so great as philosophy, rather than simply historical scholarship, is how it manages to draw so much sustenance from the literature it considers whilst putting its ideas to work in providing vivid ‘reminders’ and ‘objects of comparison’ (to resort to Wittgesteinian terminology) with which to illuminate our ethical lives. Its approach to literature is deeply philosophical; and conversely too, with its philosophical proclivities being similarly literary. This is another example of what I have been calling philosophical humanism: a confidence in the narratives we tell about ourselves and what matters to us.  5:09 PM 

Sri Aurobindo, Adorno, Levinas, and Laruelle

The Indian Condition from Centre Right India by Jaideep Prabhu: A version of this post was published on Niti Central on November 05, 2012.

It is remarkable how entrenched statism – and to a slightly lesser extent, socialism – are in the Indian psyche… Call it fate, or blame the vagaries of history, but around the time of the Enlightenment and the subsequent Industrious and Industrial revolutions, India underwent significant de-industrialisation and was ultimately colonised… The cost of missing an intellectual upheaval has been incalculable… There is no liberal tradition, based on individualism and liberty, in India… The institutional breakdown initiated by Indira Gandhi has taken a severe toll on the Indian political landscape. So what is the solution? I do not have one. 

हम हैं Anonymous! from Centre Right India by Jaideep Prabhu

Personally, I am deeply suspicious of anonymity, but personal dislike is not strong enough a reason to mandate disclosure. If dislikes were the yardstick, I’d also do away with poverty, socialism, war, and bigots. Sadly, it is not so. For all the “principled” opposition to anonymity, let it be noted – there is no such principle.

The Preferential Moment from philosophy autobiography by Jeff Meyerhoff

If the preference for an idea, the liking or disliking, strikes first, and the reasoning that justifies it follows, then learning more about the ingredients and mechanics of preference tells us about belief… This focus on the preferential moment, our liking or disliking, our desires, is unusual. It runs contrary to the main thrust of post-Enlightenment reason and science. But its role in believing the ideas we adopt as our own is, I’m arguing, necessary. If necessary we should know more about it. 

levinas book in the works from plastic bodies 

I’m working on a brief book on Levinas’s aesthetics that will also include some examination of his contributions to speculative metaphysics, philosophical ecology, race theory, and philosophy of art. The book will present what I’m calling the “darker side” of Levinas and is aimed at readers who would like an approach to Levinas that largely avoids redundant discussion of the face, the Other, and all the usual catchphrases… He’s a rich and, I think, dark thinker who deserves a more complex and diverse body of scholarship. At the end of the day I just think that there’s a lot more that can be done with him.

Underpants Gnomes: A Critique of the Academic Left from Larval Subjects 

How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him?  Who are these things for?  We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world.  To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics.  Again, who are these things for?  Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? …

Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2.  We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail.  How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals?  We live on a planet of 6 billion people.  These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption.  That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc.

What are your proposals?  How will you meet these problems?  How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure?  Marx and Lenin had proposals.  Do you?  Have you even explored the cartography of the problem?  Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization.  Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles?  Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri & Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement).   At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically.  Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists.  We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell.  Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle.

Networks from Larval Subjects 

A centralized network is what we now critique as “transcendent”.  It was always a network, never a genuine transcendence (as in the case of Plato or theism), and never fully successful.  These networks were the medieval “great chains of being”, the Oedipus, patriarchy, and more recently systems of party politics or the Stalinist state-form.  They were machines that required all other nodes in an assemble to pass through one point:  God, the king, the father, the dictator, the president, or the party.  They were always a network.  At the other end of the spectrum we see anarchy or what communism should be.  Communism and anarchy are synonyms.  Sadly neither has ever been realized except at small scales.  This is the dream of all genuine politics:  a network without hubs…

A politics either aims to reinforce the power of a hub (reaction, authoritarianism, traditionalism), to demolish or produce new hubs (revolution), or to abolish hubs altogether in the name of forming a distributed network (anarcho-communism).  There’s really not much more to be said.  

A Tale of Two Scholarly Debates on Adam Smith from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy - A Response to Claude Hillinger’s “Adam Smith’s Argument For the Existence of An ‘Invisible hand’” Gavin Kennedy (Emeritus Professor, Edinburgh Business School, Edinburgh)

Smith’s assertion was confined to a modest quantitative arithmetical change in “annual revenue and employment”.  It concludes with comments on Claude Hillinger’s interesting, though ultimately flawed, version of Adam Smith’s supposed argument for the existence of an “invisible hand”.

Of transcendence from Love of All Wisdom by Amod Lele

Last time I discussed the relationship between the concepts of Ascent and of transcendence… A key feature of any kind of transcendence, it seems to me, is dissatisfaction: something appears wrong with that which one is trying to transcend. In Nussbaum’s transcendence-by-descent, one is dissatisfied with one’s own weaknesses and flaws. In an Ascent, one is in some sense dissatisfied with the whole world. But what if one is dissatisfied with the whole world in a way that motivates one not to step outside the world, but to changeit?

Such a formulation immediately calls to mind Karl Marx, whose gravestone reads “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Such a view is at the heart of radicalism; it is directly opposed to any form of literal conservatism, where the point is to keep the world more or less as it is. But Marx is hardly alone in holding such radicalism. Modernism itself is radical: the celebration of the modern is a celebration of change, a break with the past.

But what I’ve repeatedly been noticing lately is the similarity between a Marxian radicalism or modernism, on one hand, and Ascent traditions on the other. Both aim for a transcendence of the world – because both hate the real world as it happens to be.

Comparison of Rebirth With Other Theories of Existence from Sri Aurobindo Studies 

To the mind limited by the scope of our daily existence and understanding, rebirth is one among any number of theories, but not something settled. Sri Aurobindo points out that even from the viewpoint of the mental perspective, which weighs possibilities and probabilities, but cannot come to any certain conclusions, the theory of rebirth explains the facts of our existence at least as well as the other theories being entertained… The crux of the issue is whether the human being is a static creation fixed forever in its place, or an evolutionary being with dynamic potential to develop beyond the level of consciousness we currently are able to manifest. Rebirth provides a mechanism for dynamic development, which is not required in a static universe.