Hegel’s India and Sri Aurobindo's view of the West

Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self By: Peter Heehs

Protestant diaries replaced the Catholic confessional, but secular diaries such as Pepys's may reveal yet more about the self. After Richardson, novels competed with diaries and memoirs as vehicles of self-expression, though memoirs survived and continue to thrive, while the diary has found a new incarnation in the personal blog. 

What is the Meaning of "Integral"? Jack Crittenden     

Wilber's approach appears to have provided a coherent vision that seamlessly weaves together truth-claims from such fields as physics and biology; the eco-sciences; chaos theory and the systems sciences; medicine, neurophysiology, biochemistry; art, poetry, and aesthetics in general; developmental psychology and a spectrum of psychotherapeutic endeavors, from Freud to Jung to Kegan; the great spiritual theorists from Plato and Plotinus in the West to Shankara and Nagarjuna in the East; the modernists from Descartes and Locke to Kant; the Idealists from Schelling to Hegel; the postmodernists from Foucault and Derrida to Taylor and Habermas; the major hermeneutic tradition, Dilthey to Heidegger to Gadamer; the social systems theorists from Comte and Marx to Parsons and Luhmann; the contemplative and mystical schools of the great meditative traditions, East and West, in the world's major religious traditions. And all of that is just a sampling! Jack Crittenden Author, Democracy's Midwife integralinstitute.org [3:23 pm]

Walsh reviews Wilber's Sex, Ecology, Spirituality - CogWeb - The Spirit of Evolution by Roger Walsh - An overview of Ken Wilber's book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Shambhala, 1995). Roger Walsh (MD) is a Professor of Psychiatry, Philosophy and Anthropology, Department of Psychiatry & Human Behavior, University of California College of Medicine, Irvine.

Periodically there arose spectacular individuals--St. Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Dame Julian, St. Teresa, the Rhineland mystics and more--in whom transcendence triumphed over institutional barriers and who thereby faced themselves and the Church with the difficult and dangerous task of reconciling conventional mythology with transconventional realization. However, despite the profound insights of such mystics, the power of conventional myth (for example, Church dogma) largely reigned supreme until the rise of modernity and the empirical scientific outlook during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Joshua Ramey - The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual ... Description. 

Gilles Deleuze drew on a vast array of source material, from philosophy and psychoanalysis to science and art. Yet scholars have largely neglected one of the intellectual currents underlying his work: Western esotericism, specifically the lineage of hermetic thought that extends from Late Antiquity into the Renaissance through the work of figures such as Iamblichus, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. In this book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Deleuze's ethics, metaphysics, and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this hermetic tradition.

Mind and Cosmos:  Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False - Amazon.com

Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. 

Sample Chapter for Aravamudan, S.: Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language - Srinivas Aravamudan Book Description -  Endorsements - Table of Contents - This file is also available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format Introduction

When it begins to accommodate multiple registers and innovations, Guru English expands into a free-floating literary discourse that can tolerate a high degree of ambivalence. At this point, if I may invoke Michel Foucault, the range of the discourse makes visible characteristics that are not directly linguistic but also institutional and practice-oriented, and contextual to the deployment and manipulation of language as a material phenomenon with corresponding effects within social networks of power…

Writing to a positivist friend, Jogen Ghosh, in the late nineteenth century, the Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chatterjee asserted, "anyone who wishes to address all Hindus must of necessity write in English." Bankim's most famous novel of religious atavism, Anandamath [Abbey of bliss], ends with the proposition that "imbued with a knowledge of objective sciences by English education, our people will be able to comprehend subjective truths." The point made by Bankim's conclusion, even if a hopeful stretch given empirical realities, was that the English language would, as a means of international access and especially scientific technocracy, objectively create the conditions where pan-Indian cultural unity could be discovered as a kind of remaindered essence. This adoption of English as a via negativa to the literary discourse of "subjective truths" is quite different from other plausible choices, such as Persian, which in Bankim's context had greater historical precedent as the language of Mughal bureaucracy and government, or Sanskrit, the sacerdotal language of the Brahman-dominated religious and cultural elites of the Hindu majority. We now find that there is an anomalous afterlife to Bankim's recommendation that he may not have anticipated: the circulation of Hinduism through English was probably an early alternative means--and continues to be an important vehicle--for the religious discourse of middle-class urban Hindus in search of their "subjective truths." The global transmission of Hindu and Buddhist thought eventually led to the rise of the self-proclaimed ethno-religious nationalist as well as the detached and Asian-influenced cosmopolitan. It might be worth considering the most provocative version of Bankim's thesis, that the use of English was indispensable to the defining of Hinduism as a universalist "spirituality" at the outset. This new articulation of spirituality cohered around several general assumptions brought to it by colonial discourses and practices, even as it undoubtedly made good use of preexisting practices and doctrines. This necessarily modern presentation of ancient practices explains the constitutive contradiction of Hinduism's national and cosmopolitan roles far more effectively than various empirical accounts that map the contingent coming together of a number of loosely related practices and identities under the pressure of British colonial rule…

The first chapter explores the impact of the orientalists and the resultant reaction-formation of a number of indigenous voices with diasporic appeal, including Brahmos such as Rammohun Roy and Keshub Chunder Sen, Vedantists such as Vivekananda, and yoga exponents such as Yogananda. These figures are neoclassical in that they reinvent continuous tradition under the sign of the advent of modernity. Through some of these individual cases, I narrate the existence of the discourse of Guru English from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It is indeed moot whether neoclassicism of this sort can ultimately be separated very carefully from Romantic nationalism.

More through a principle of convenience and slightly different philosophical emphasis rather than that of radical separation from the figures treated in the first, the second chapter examines the parallel implication of Guru English into a literary form of late colonial Romanticism. Writers such as Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Rudyard Kipling, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sri Aurobindo are shown to contribute richly to this enterprise, one that participates in the Janus-faced project of Romantic nationalism. Looking back atavistically, Romantic nationalism also generates a wholly modern idiom that is produced prosthetically. These important early figures are but the very beginning of a whole range of Indian and foreign romanticists and romanticizers of the subcontinent's religious wealth. The eternal rediscovery of Indian spiritual and religious mysteries continues unabated, whether in travelogues, tourist brochures, pulp fiction and media, or even occasionally in religious anthropology.

Yoga Journal - Jul 1975 - Page 3 Vol. 1, No. 3 - Magazine - Full view And it was for this purpose that he was sent to the United States in 1951 by his Guru, Hegel’s India:  the prophet of Integral Yoga. It was at this time that he, along with his dedicated wife Bina Pani, established the Cultural Integration Fellowship ...

The Other Tale of Indian Modernity: Savita Singh by Pratilipi Blog

Hindi poet and feminist scholar Savita Singh's reading of Ashis Nandy's version of Sri Aurobindo's life in his book Intimate Enemy is a classical, scholarly refutation of Nandy's critique of modernity and in a way suggests that ... 

Publications - Aakash Singh - LUISS Guido Carli FORTHCOMING BOOKS 

Hegel’s India: Texts and Commentary (complete manuscript [ms.] under review at SUNY Press, NY). Co-edited with R. Mohapatra. 

Intercultural understanding vis-à-vis Small-circle care

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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