Chief concern of Sri Aurobindo's drama is to establish order

Sociology, Ideology and Utopia: Socio-Political Philosophy of East ... - Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya - 1997 - Preview - More editions Yet this work is a sustained plea for improvable understanding between the East and the West and the transcultural value orientation of different cultures." Page 40 At this point of his argument Sri Aurobindo shifts his focus of attention from epistemology to ontology. Scientific reason, he concedes, has its need not only in practical life but also in the religious sphere of life. When religious forms or systems...

Journal of Shivaji University: Humanities - Volume 33 - Page 20 - Shivaji University - 1998 - Far from it, on the line of the ancient Indian epics Sri Aurobindo shifts the problem of evil into a conflict between ideal forces. There is evil, there is only a degree of ignorance with which all human characters are infected. The aim of human life ...

Globalization & culture: global mélange - Page 29 - Jan Nederveen Pieterse - 2009 - Preview - More editions The shift from Judaism to Christianity, from the Old to the New Testament, opening the door of the gospel to the ... Thus, according to the Indian philosopher and yogi Sri Aurobindo, “Collective life diffusing itself in too vast spaces seems to ...

Dattatreya Ramachandra Bendre (Ambikatanayadatta) - Page 72 - G. S. Amur, Sahitya Akademi - 1995 - Preview - More editions Bendre had a great deal in common with Walt Whitman, the American poet whom Sri Aurobindo admired. He does not share the Romantic poet's agony born out of his separation from vision or his nostalgia for lost insight and innocence.

Towards eternity; Sri Aurobindo birth centenary volume, 15th ... - Page 89 - Aurobindo Ghose, V. Madhusudan Reddy - 1973 - Aurobindo Ghose, V. Madhusudan Reddy ... The intrinsic view of Art involved in a study of the uniqueness of each medium of expression, such as Lessing elaborated and a comparative study of world literature also opened up new vistas.

Sri Aurobindo: a biography and a history - Volume 2 - Page 900 - K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar - 1972 - Here Sri Aurobindo elaborates the difference between sculpture and painting, as Lessing had done earlier in his contrastive study of Laocoon in ... ibid., p. 268. the python's coils by the poet and the sculptor respectively: 900 SRI AUROBINDO.

On the Mother: the chronicle of a manifestation and ministry - Page 703 - K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (Pondicherry, India) - 1994 - It was Lessing who first drew a meaningful distinction between fluid poetic description and the static art of sculpture, but ...

Sri Aurobindo and his contemporary thinkers - Page 254 - Indrani Sanyal, Krishna Roy, Jadavpur University - 2007 - However, it may be safely said that the historic classification of art begun by Lessing, Winckelmann and systematized by Hegel had some abiding influence on the thoughts of Dr Seal, as is ... 

Journal of social research - Volume 22 - Page 5 - Council of Social and Cultural Research, Bihar, Ranchi University. Dept. of Anthropology - 1979 -... humanism, Sri Aurobindo discussed at length the cosmic evolution. His thoughts are based on higher levels of spiritual consciousness (Srivastava : 1968). Rabindranath Tagore through his writings reflected on the problems of rural India at...

Prabuddha bharata: or Awakened India - Volume 84 - Page 293 1979 - ... to be confused with the apparent polytheism of nature-worship and mechanical ritualism and caste-system lacking the larger and deeper ethics of a spiritual humanism. Sri Aurobindo approaches the Vedas with a pronounced mystic spirit, ...

Hinduism with a human face - Page 50 - Madhuri Sondhi - 1990 - There is an ecumenical movement within Hinduism today which is utilising the emotional content of the Hindu psyche to educate Hindu society for humanism. Sri Aurobindo saw in his Yoga the justification of the "cosmic labour towards love ...

Hinduism's human face - Page 65 - M. L. Sondhi - 2002 - There is an ecumenical movement within Hinduism today which is utilising the emotional content of the Hindu psyche to educate Hindu society for humanism. Sri Aurobindo saw in his Yoga the justification of the "cosmic labour towards love ...

Organiser - Volume 30 - Page 45 1978 - If Gandhiji attempted to establish the oneness of mankind in terms of nonviolence and talked of establishing a sort of spiritual humanism, Sri Aurobindo discussed at length the cosmic evolution. His thoughts are based on higher levels of ...

Secularism and materialism in modern India - Page 90 - Brij Gopal Tiwari - 1964 - Debendranath Tagore, Dayananda, Rablndra Nath Tagore and others, declares his opposition to Mayavada and, like Lokmanya Tilak, he seeks to refute Sankara's Monism and thus to promote "Spiritual Pragmatism." Sri Aurobindo, indeed, is metaphysically, ...

Jayashankar Prasad: His Mind and Art - Page 10 - Nagendra - 1989 - Preview - More editions Rejecting the old traditional and ritualistic form of religion, Gandhi, Aurobindo and Tagore advocated for religion based on morality, spiritualism, truth, unity in ... 

Tamil Literature - Page 66 - Kamil Zvelebil - 1974 - Preview - More editions Bharati's romantic-mystical visions of Aryan gods were inspired by his own translations of a few Rgvedic hymns (on the instigation of Sri Aurobindo, who also in 1912 induced him to translate the Bhagavadgita into Tamil). These poems are of ...

Aurobindo's Philosophy of Brahman - Page 132 - Stephen H. Phillips - 1986 - Preview - Page 134 Furthermore, what must be considered his major work, the epic Savitri, may be seen as a typically Romantic attempt to ... Aurobindo, whether directly — he no doubt read much of the Bible — or indirectly through Romantic reworkings of ...

Sri Aurobindo - Page 148 - Jesse Roarke - 1973 - To say that there is some spiritual inspiration in the English Romantic poetry (as there is not, incidentally, according to Sri Aurobindo, in the Romantic poetry of the continent), is not to say that there was much if any genuine spiritual experience ...

Myth in Indian drama - Page 123 - R. G. Joshi - 1994 - The chief concern of Sri Aurobindo's drama is to establish order in the disorder of this world. The order, thus established, must be in tune with the cosmic order which he finds embedded, as it were, in myths and legends. Even the love-affair of ...

Perspectives on Sri Aurobindo's poetry, plays, and criticism - Page 99 - Amrita Paresh Patel, Jaydipsinh Dodiya - 2002 - Full view - More editions But, though we admit that Sri Aurobindo was influenced by the Victorians writing in the fashion of the Elizabethans and included Elizabethan romantic themes in his plays, he did not indulge in his plays the free flights of imagination and was ...

The Political Thought of Aurobindo (Encyclopaedia of Eminent Thinkers) - Page 44 - K. S. Bharathi - 1998 - Preview Democracy, socialism and pacifism are to a great extent the by-products of, or at least vitally inspired by, the inward presence of the idea of humanism. Aurobindo thinks there have been four consequences of the individualistic democratic ideal ...

The structure of Indian thought - Page 242 - Ramakant A. Sinari - 1984 - ... the English-educated Indians who came under the influence of Ramakrishna's and Vivekananda's mysticism and spiritualistic humanism, Aurobindo Ghose rose to an unbelievable height of eminence as a yogi, a philosopher and a patriot.

Prāci-jyotī: digest of Indological studies - Volume 9 - Page 312 - Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra University. Institute of Indic Studies - 1973 - Although these thinkers also have their roots in the Upanisadic philosophy, yet Tagore has interpreted the same ancient wisdom from the point of view of humanism, Aurobindo from evolutionary point and Gandhi from the point of socialism.  

Philosophy East & West - Volume 3 - Page 179 - Project Muse - 1953 - This may be called a higher humanism, and it is certainly fundamentally different from the Comte-Mill brand of humanism. (Sri Aurobindo has called his standpoint that of "a spiritual religion of humanity" in his book The Ideal of Human Unity.) ...

The Visva-Bharati journal of philosophy - Volume 30, Issue 2 - Page A-17 - Visva-Bharati. Centre of Advanced Studies in Philosophy - 1994 - But it may be asked as to why it should be considered as a form of humanism? Sri Aurobindo's religion is not away from human considerations. It is not anti-human. He has a specific view about the reality of life and living. This view, from the...

Indian philosophical annual - Volume 8 - Page 88 - University of Madras. Centre of Advanced Study in Philosophy - 1976 - His is spiritual humanism. Sri Aurobindo's central contention is that the present state of man's reason and intellect is a product of evolution in ignorance. It has to be divinised, we must rise higher. He does not condemn the intellect as the mere ...

Bulletin - Volume 46 - Page 84 - Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (Pondicherry, India) - 1994 - ... an incident in its passage from a semi-primitive temperament surviving in a fairly advanced outward civilisation to a brighter intellectualism and humanism.... Sri Aurobindo 'The Deliverer' was based on the foregoing words of Sri Aurobindo.

Quest for truth: a felicitation volume in honour of Prof. S. P. Kanal - Page 414 - Satewan Parsram Kanal, Kewal Krishan Mittal - 1976 - Sri Aurobindo's concept of spiritual religion of humanity, as the subsequent discussions will show, is a significant attempt for crossing over the opposition between classical religion and modern naturalistic humanism. Sri Aurobindo, in his ...

Indian journal of physical anthropology and human genetics - Volume 5 - Page 93 - Ethnographic and Folk-Culture Society (Uttar Pradesh, India) - 1979 - If Gandhiji attempted to establish the oneness of mankind in terms of nonviolence and talked of establishing a sort of spiritual humanism, Sri Aurobindo discussed at length the cosmic evolution. His thoughts are based on higher levels of ... Eastern anthropologist - Volume 32 - Page 133 1979 Ideas and Trends in World Anthropology - Page 6 - Charles Frantz - 1981 - Preview

Whitman, Wittgenstein, Whitehead, and Sri Aurobindo

The Hindu : NATIONAL  TAMIL NADU : MADURAI TODAY December 22, 2012

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

Letter to the Ashram Trustees – by Nanjappa from Critique of The Lives 

Is ‘historical research’ the be all of Sri Aurobindo’s teaching or sadhana? Sri Aurobindo’s yoga is surely no easy matter, nor is it for the average person… His association with the Ashram is what confers some credibility to his highly prejudiced and totally distorted views… But the Peter Heehs episode is entirely different. It seeks to spread scandal in the guise of research studies, aiming to undermine the very basis of the Aurobindonian movement.

An Introduction to Sri Aurobindo's Metaphysical Cosmology: Part I ... - ericweiss.com 9 Jun 2006 June 9, 2006 I. Introduction A. It is my intention in this paper to give a brief introduction to my interpretation of Sri Aurobindo’s metaphysical system. The ideas presented here are very close to those of Sri Aurobindo, but they are not identical. In particular, my treatment of the category of Being is very influenced by my studies of Alfred North Whitehead… 12:52 PM - The Long Trajectory: The Metaphysics of Reincarnation and Life ... - Page 286 - Eric M. Weiss - 2012 - Preview It is these three terms that describe the metaphysical ultimates in Sri Aurobindo's system. Let us consider them one by one: Sat: Being In the metaphysical cosmology that grows out of transpersonal process metaphysics, “being,” or sat, ...

The Body Electric: Extending Soul into Cyberspace Posted by Andrew Neuendorf on November 12, 2012

I think Bostock would have an unlikely ally in Walt Whitman, no Luddite, who celebrated the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable  in his poem “Passage to India,” which is largely about the unfinished journey of Columbus. Whitman writes about this journey symbolically (not from a historical perspective, which would reveal Columbus’ mission to Christianize and enslave the indigenous West) as an attempt to unite East and West by bringing Europe and India together to begin a global civilization. (Columbus’s journey is also Edgar Morin’s historical starting point for the beginning of the planetary era in his book Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future, which I’ve written about recently here)… 5:41 PM

Free ALL Your Minds From The Hobbesian Nightmare from ANTIDOTE by Sauvik von Chakraverti Dec 22, 2012

Leviathan FELL FLAT as far as Englishmen in that Cromwellian Age were concerned – which is why it was John Locke’s Two Treatises on Civil Government (1690) that earned its author the reputation of a “prophet” – and went on to inspire Whiggism, the colonists of America, and the first “covenanted civil servants” of the Honourable East India Company as well.

“Where there is no Property there is no Justice,” wrote Locke. While Hobbes painted “statelessness” – what he called the “State of Nature” – in the most lurid prose: “A War Of Each Against All.” Adding that statelessness, or the State of Nature, would result in lives that are all “nasty, poore, brutish, and short.” In socialist India, we do have this Leviathan of a centralized State – but we have no Property – we have no Justice – and the lives of over half the residents of the Capital City itself are “nasty, poore, brutish and short”!

The Politics of God By MARK LILLA The Times Magazine: August 19, 2007
After centuries of strife, the West has learned to separate religion and politics — to establish the legitimacy of its leaders without referring to divine command. Next Page » Mark Lilla is professor of the humanities at Columbia University. This essay is adapted from his book “The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West,” which will be published next month. 7:15 PM

Christians addled by apocalyptic dreams hunted and killed Christians with a maniacal fury they had once reserved for Muslims, Jews and heretics. It was madness. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes tried to find a way out of this labyrinth. Traditionally, political theology had interpreted a set of revealed divine commands and applied them to social life. In his great treatise “Leviathan” (1651), Hobbes simply ignored the substance of those commands and talked instead about how and why human beings believed God revealed them. He did the most revolutionary thing a thinker can ever do — he changed the subject, from God and his commands to man and his beliefs. If we do that, Hobbes reasoned, we can begin to understand why religious convictions so often lead to political conflicts and then perhaps find a way to contain the potential for violence. The contemporary crisis in Western Christendom created an audience for Hobbes and his ideas. 

The ideal of human unity - Page 338 - Sri Aurobindo - 1999 - Preview - More editions One of the foremost Indian philosophers of the twentieth century, Sri Aurobindo was also a political activist, a mystic, a spiritual leader and a poet. Between 1927 and 1950, Sri Aurobindo remained in seclusion while perfecting a new kind of ...

Ontology of consciousness: percipient action - Page 400 - Helmut Wautischer - 2008 - In the first half of the twentieth century, Aurobindo built a still wider synthesis, encompassing not only what he felt was the essence of the Indian tradition but also what he considered the best that the Western civilization was in the process of ...

Knowledge, freedom, and language: an interwoven fabrics of man, ... - Page 189 - Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya - 1989 - At about the same time, in the second decade of this century, Aurobindo in India (1914-1919) and Wittgenstein in Europe (1913-1921) addressed themselves to, one might say, essentially similar problems of knowledge and language. At least ...

Going against the flow: an exercise in ethical syncretism - Page 238 - Alan M. Laibelman - 2004 - Preview - More editions It is in vain to talk of the interest of the community without understanding what is the interest of the individual."41 In the twentieth century, Aurobindo extended Bentham’s admission into a definitive expression of political and social propriety, ...

Martin Heidegger: Critical Assessments - Volume 2 - Page 7 - Christopher E. Macann - 1992 - Preview - More editions But whereas Heidegger (however marginally) was for a while involved with one of the more lamentable regimes of the century, Sri Aurobindo spent a significant portion of his life actively engaged in contesting (verbally) the British occupation ...

Exploring Wild Law: The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence - Page 132 - Peter Burdon, Peter Burdon (ed.) - 2011 - Preview There have been many philosophies that are based on process, including Heraclites of Ancient Greece and Lao Tzu of China and in the twentieth century Sri Aurobindo in India, and Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin of France. Among...

Sri Aurobindo came to me: reminiscences - Page ix - Dilip Kumar Roy - 1964 - For I fully agree with a modern appraiser who whites after referring to prophets "from Kierkegaard down to Buber" that "while men of their calibre may be expected in every century, Sri Aurobindo is an event over which Divine Providence is a ...

Christianity: Dogmatic Faith & Gnostic Vivifying Knowledge: The ... - Page 92 - George Heart - 2005 - Preview One of the greatest Esoteric philosophers of the twentieth century, Sri Aurobindo has devoted highly elaborated works to describe what he called the Supramental Realm in which will live the man of the coming Golden Age.

East West Poetics at Work: Papers Presented at the Seminar on ... - Page 160 - C. D. Narasimhaiah - 1994 - Preview - More editions

The poetry of Dryden and the poetry of 18th century, Sri Aurobindo maintained, came from the surface mental level, though earlier he felt like Arnold, that it was the poetry of the 'Age of prose and reason'. Browning and the Victorians wrote ...

Oh Calcutta - Volume 4 - Page 10 - 1974 - That is achievement enough for a single century." Aurobindo Bankim Chandra Chatterjee is the creator cf the Bengali novel — a pioneer among pioneers. He heralded an era in literature. He created and ushered in a golden age of which Sarat...

Vande Mataram: the song perennial - Page 38 - Amarendra Laxman Gadgil - 1978 - For Bankim chandra, Aurobindo played brilliantly the same role in the first part of this century. Aurobindo has called Bankim a Seer and a Sage. The atomic force compressed in the song and what miracles it would work in future could only be ...

The Sociology of Indian Politics - Page 300 - R. Motwani, R.D. Sakxena - 2002 - Preview All of India's leading political thinkers have followed Vivekananda's conceptualization of politics and power. The first to accept him was also the most systematic political philosopher of this century — Sri Aurobindo Ghose. Among Aurobindo's ... Encyclopaedia of Sociology of Politics - Page 300 K. Motwani, R.D. Saksena - 2002 - Preview 

Gandhi marg - Volume 20 - Page 139 - Gandhi Peace Foundation (New Delhi, India) - 1998 - Vivekananda's discussion of individual freedom and social responsibility was continued and enlarged not only by Gandhi but by other Indian theorists early in this century. Aurobindo Ghose and Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932) conceptualized ...

"Of Many Heroes": An Indian Essay in Literary Historiography - Page 82 - G. N. Devy - 1998 - Preview - More editions In this sense, Sri Aurobindo was the first original historiographer of Indian literature during the twentieth century. Sri Aurobindo argued in his passionate defence of Indian culture that though temporarily occluded, it was not an entirely atrophied ...

Race and Racialization: Essential Readings - Page 108 - Tania Das Gupta - 2007 - Preview Hindu discussions about Aryan origins are probably best represented in the speeches and writings of the nationalist activist and spiritualist Aurobindo Ghose during the early part of this century. Aurobindo, a spiritual source of emulation for...

History Of Ancient India (portraits Of A Nation), 1/e - Page 107 - Kapur, Kamlesh - 2010 - Preview - More editions In the beginning of the last century, Aurobindo Ghosh, another noted philosopher said, "The racial identification of supposed Aryans and non- Aryans was just a conjecture supported by other conjectures... a myth of philologists." After studying...

Culture and Customs of India - Page 29 - Carol Henderson Garcia, Carol E. Henderson - 2002 - Preview - More editions In the twentieth century, Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) established an influential religious center in Pondicherry. A concept of selflessness linked to a search for inner awareness energized many who called for social change. In the 1980s and ...

Religion, Conflict and Reconciliation: Multifaith Ideals and Realities - Page 48 - Jerald D. Gort, Henry Jansen, H. M. Vroom - 2002 - Preview - More editions From the late nineteenth century onwards, Sri Aurobindo was active in political journalism and in behind-the-scenes organization of the first stirrings of Indian revolutionary nationalism. In the first decade of the twentieth century Aurobindo had ...

The persistence of religion: an essay on Tantrism and Sri ... - Page 79 - Kees W. Bolle - 1971 - Preview - More editions Although the struggle for independence was never a merely political issue for Indian leaders, particularly in the early years of our century, Aurobindo found ways and traditional, religious terms in which to voice the desire for independence that ... Studies in the History of Religions - Page 79 - 1956 - Preview - More editions

Indian Wisdom and International Peace: From the Vedas & Lord ... - Page 33 - R N. Vyas, Vyas R N - 1987 - Preview The religion of humanity was put forth for the first time in the West in 18th century. Aurobindo calls it "the manasa putra of the rationalist thinkers who brought it forward as a substitute for the formal spiritualism of ecclesiastical Christianity.

General elections in India: electoral politics, electoral reforms, ... - Page 173 - M. L. Ahuja - 2005 - As a revolutionary nationalist writing in the first decade of the 20th century, Aurobindo welcomed pan-Islamism and the rise of a separate Muslim self-consciousness. He saw it as a sign of the vitality of nationalism and as part of the process of ...

Managing the global: globalization, employment and quality of life - Page 146 - Donald McLean Lamberton, Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research - 2002 - Preview - More editions D.P. Chattopaclhyaya (1988 and 1997) has competently dwelt on the subject, after the Indian savant of the 20th century, Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo 1972), and has stressed that the Indian ideal encompasses both the physical and the mental ...

Dante and Sri Aurobindo: a comparative study of The divine comedy ... - Page 33 - Prema Nandakumar - 1981 - Hence Savitri came to be written, not in Bengali or Sanskrit, but in English. In a poetic career extending over half a century, Sri Aurobindo had experimented with a variety of literary forms in English: essays, skits, poetic dramas, lyrics, sonnets...

Śrī Madhva's teachings in his own words - Page 23 - B. N. Krishnamurti Sharma - 1979 - In the present century, Aurobindo Ghosh has gone the farthest in trying to plumb the depths of mystic interpretation of Vedic hymns. Madhva's influence on these two great modern representatives of the Arsa tradition of Vedic interpretation ...

Page 115 - Preview Thanks to the insight and inspirations of Dayananda at the close of the Nineteenth Century, followed by spiritual experiences of another great savant of the present century, Sri Aurobindo, there has been a complete metamorphosis of our thinking and evaluation of the Vedic texts.

Ancestral Voices: Reflections on Vedic, Classical and Bhakti Poetry - Page 8 - Ramesh Chandra Shah - 2006 - Preview - More editions Vedic literature gives an emphatic and unambiguous answer to this question when it declares that 'infinity alone can satisfy man' ('Bhumd vaisukham ndlpe sukhamasti — Ch.U.7). In our own century, Sri Aurobindo, under Dayananda's ...

Seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires

The Body Electric: Extending Soul into Cyberspace Posted by Andrew Neuendorf on November 12, 2012

I think Bostock would have an unlikely ally in Walt Whitman, no Luddite, who celebrated the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable  in his poem “Passage to India,” which is largely about the unfinished journey of Columbus. Whitman writes about this journey symbolically (not from a historical perspective, which would reveal Columbus’ mission to Christianize and enslave the indigenous West) as an attempt to unite East and West by bringing Europe and India together to begin a global civilization. (Columbus’s journey is also Edgar Morin’s historical starting point for the beginning of the planetary era in his book Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future, which I’ve written about recently here)…

The work of uniting the world is still in progress, but whether the means consist of ships, cables, or the internet, technology always provides the backbone. In “Song of Myself,” we encounter Whitman’s version of extension, his body taking flight and touring the nation. However, he is not disembodied. His journey is concrete and rooted to the land… His flight is rooted in the American landscape, in the vast extension of the material world, the expanses of nature on the continent…

Camille Paglia argues in her 2000 Salon article The North American Intellectual Tradition, that a kind of earthy, visionary pragmatism is the dominant philosophy on this side of the Atlantic. She argues against the continental philosophers (such as Heidegger, Derrida, and Lacan) whose works are too dry, abstract, and jargon-laden to appeal to the American sensibility. Instead of the disembodied mind, she embraces the body:

“My argument is that the North American intellectuals, typified by McLuhan, Fiedler and Brown, achieved a new fusion of ideas — a sensory pragmatism or engagement with concrete experience, rooted in the body, and at the same time a visionary celebration of artistic metaspace — that is, the fictive realm of art, fantasy and belief projected by great poetry and prefiguring our own cyberspace.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Time of Useful Consciousness: Excerpts Interview & Review by abdul lateef Posthuman Destinies - Science, Culture, Integral Yoga NOVEMBER 18, 2012

We always like to return to Whitman one of the poets with whom Sri Aurobindo’s concludes his Future Poetry.  Fittingly Ferlinghetti on his journey to the West concludes by invoking Whitman whose oracular voice echoes through the bohemians and the beats from the east village to north beach, it is here given over in what will surely be one of last great exhalations from a founding member of that generation (al)

Fichte and Romantic Self-Assertion The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library THE ASSAULT ON THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

Fichte is the figure who betrayed the rationalist and ultimately libertarian and even democratic ideals of Kant, and the harmless, benevolent, decent, populist ideals of Herder, who thought that there were many flowers in the garden and that they need not struggle with each other at all.

The person who foresaw where this was going to lead was the poet Heinrich Heine, who in a very famous passage said, warning the French, I think after 1830, not to down their weapons, not to disarm, because of the fearful danger from their neighbours: ‘Kantians will appear who will … ruthlessly with sword and axe hack through the foundations of our European life … Armed Fichteans will come, whose fanatical wills neither fear nor interest can touch.’ 26 And who shall say that he was altogether mistaken? Page 30 FICHTE AND ROMANTIC SELF The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2005 11:33 AM

Tweet 13h - Steven Shaviro ‏@shaviro I accept the parts of Deleuze that stem from Bergson, Spinoza, Leibniz, & Kant, but reject the parts that stem from Nietzsche & Hume.

On the Universality of Culture by larvalsubjects

What I’m trying to think– along with many others –is multiple causation or how a variety of different causes interact with one another from both the plane of expression and the plane of content.  My gripe with a theorist like Lacan, for example, is not that he’s wrong in pointing out that the signifier– another example of an incorporeal machine –plays an important causal role in human subjectivity and social assemblages.  My gripe lies in the way in which he tends to treat language as a “primary modeling system” for everything else– “the universe is the flower of rhetoric” –treating it as structuring an unformatted matter (everything else), without exploring the causal contributions (“difference contributions”) made by non-signifying entities.  It’s not that Lacan is wrong, but that he is not sufficiently thinking in terms of overdetermination.  This is why much in Guattari’s work represents a significant advance over Lacan.  So basically, without sharing her thesis that culture is universal, I’m on the same page as Aprell…

The mark of the universality of culture in the anthropocene thus does not lie in the universal reign of the signifier structuring everything– cultural narratives and signifiers structure very little in Antarctica –but rather lies in the universal effects of contemporary technology and capitalist modes of production that have managed to transform the fabric of the planet at the atmospheric, chemical, and biological level no matter how remote the region.  In this respect, the anthropocene does not entail the erasure of the biological, chemical, or geological, but rather the emergence of a new dominant actant that every other actant must contend with.

The Prince of This World: Thinking the Devil in Light of Agamben’s Kingdom and the Glory  from An und für sich by Adam Kotsko

From this perspective, The Kingdom and the Glory represents a crucial turning point in Agamben’s project, deepening his account of Western theologico-political structures by beginning to work out how the logic of sovereignty is deployed and transformed in order to penetrate the fine-grained textures of everyday life. In place of the easily delimitable “state of exception” where the sovereign suspends the law in order to save it, we are directed toward the workaday realities of flexible management.

Though it is perhaps surprising that he derives this logic from the Christian theological tradition, it appears in retrospect that many of his key points were more or less hiding in plain sight. For instance, who could deny, after reading Agamben’s account, that Adam Smith’s infamous “invisible hand” is modelled on theological accounts of divine providence? 

Revisiting Integral Humanism from Centre Right India by Kesava

It is a bit of a mystery why Panditji called his theory Integral Humanism in English. Not many of his articles really concentrate on “humanist” aspect. On the contrary they concentrate more on “national character” and the role of “individual character” in it… Deendayal Upadhyaya Institute has been doing some fabulous ground work, especially with the Chitrakoot project. However, unfortunately, there has not been much of intellectual activity from the institute… We need to reestablish The Integral Approach as the core of the right in India.  

The Soul and Subhuman Existence  from Sri Aurobindo Studies 

In ancient times, the world was invested with spirit everywhere, in all things. Sri Aurobindo describes it thus: “Ancient belief…saw a soul, a living godhead everywhere in the animate and in the inanimate and nothing was to its view void of a spiritual existence.”

The development of the logical mind and its focus on dividing, classifying and simplifying through trenchant separation rejected this view of life. It does not mean, however, that this is the final answer to the question. Sri Aurobindo describes a process of development that is one unified continuum, and this implies that soul exists, in some form, not only in the human and the animal existence, but even in the earlier, more primitive forms of life…

Further work with crystals and minerals has even begun to uncover the responsiveness that Sri Aurobindo has posited in the world of material forms. One consciousness, one existence, in a unity that spans from the most inconscient Matter to the heights of Spirit, implies that there is a continuum and our attempt to divide and classify and separate is an artificial mental construct but not an essential underlying Reality of the manifested universe. We find that the ancient view of inclusion has more ultimate truth in it that the modern view of fragmentation.