A culture of dispassionate consideration and mechanisms of dialog

The arduous and disciplined thinking of a Heidegger, Foucault or Derrida walks perpetually at the edges of human possibility, testing the limits of language. In many ways, therefore, this thinking leads up to Sri Aurobindo. To think this civilizational linkage is part of its creative invitation. To believe that some "academic explanation" has exhausted its meaning is immediately to falsify its leading. It is in its historical place in the thinking of the human location and trajectory that it is "more evolved" than what has gone before it, whether humanism, metaphysics or religion; it is in the discipline of its own perpetual re-invention, which rests in the ceaseless re-invention of the human, that is its alignment with the cusp of the future. DB Re: The Evolution of Discourse and The Lives of Sri Aurobindo Debashish Sat 06 Dec 2008 02:38 AM PST

Much of the richness of a good academy comes from the radical differences of opinion which can be fielded impartially within it. Unless one is claiming supramental omniscience, human knowledge is all of the nature of interpretation and the expansion of such knowledge towards integrality can be much facilitated through confrontation with difference. What is required here is not so much sentiments such as "basic courtesy," but a culture of dispassionate consideration and mechanisms of dialog. Ananda Reddy's institution may, in fact, have served just such a role, were he not so eager to sit on the throne of judgement. Re: A Cultural Misunderstanding Debashish Tue 27 Jan 2009 10:15 AM PST

Well said, Mr. Sane! An effort in this direction, to create a culture of dialog and social forums for conducting these, is the need of the hour. But all this presupposes the acknowledgment of personal finitude, the openness to the other and the willingness to aim for integrality, as you point out. Re: Yoga, religion, and fundamentalism in the Integral Yoga Community by Lynda Lester Debashish Tue 27 Jan 2009 07:21 PM PST

This strident antipathy to Freud (and Marcuse) is consistent with prevailing opinion in academia

Of sterile flowers, poisonous weeds and a political smokescreen By Alex Steiner and Frank Brenner On Jan. 6, the WSWS carried yet another polemic against us, the second one in a week. This one came with a purple prose title, “Adam Haig responds to Alex Steiner’s burst of outrage”.[1]

There was no “burst of outrage” in what we wrote... Second, Haig’s riposte is not only overheated in its language but also murky in its logic... Haig is indeed claiming – falsely – that we are attempting “to revise, if not replace, modern Marxism … with the pseudo-Marxist Frankfurt School.” As for our real position – i.e. that “not all the work of the Frankfurt School and Marcuse is ‘worthless’” – Haig simply dodges the issue with an “even if”, just as he dodged it before with his remark about it being “beside the point.”

Haig then tries to seal his argument with a quote from Brenner: “Marxism in the 21st century is neither conceivable nor viable without assimilating the best insights of these thinkers.” But this only reiterates our position: we are not for revising Marxism but for “assimilating the best insights” of the critical theorists to it. (And the latter, by the way, includes not just Marcuse but towering intellectual figures of the last century like Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukacs.) Indeed, we are for Marxism “assimilating the best insights” from every field – science, philosophy, culture etc. Any other position amounts to a hopeless dogmatism that is totally alien to the outlook of the great classical Marxists. Read in context, it is clear that this is just what Brenner’s remark was meant to say.[5]

Incidentally, in this same passage, Brenner characterizes critical theory in terms of Lenin’s famous description of philosophical idealism as “a sterile flower” but one “that grows on the living tree … of human knowledge.” This rather jars with the claim that we are trying to “revise, if not replace” Marxism with critical theory.

In any case, Haig sets out to prove that there is very little worth assimilating from his chosen target, Marcuse, whom he summarily characterizes as “a reactionary neo-Marxist.” For Haig, Marcuse is much less “a sterile flower” than a poisonous weed, and in his first opus Haig hunts down a page-worth of quotes to prove that a key work of Marcuse’s, Eros and Civilization, “adds nothing to scientific thought or socialist theory” and that it constitutes “libidinal fairy tales.”

This kind of quotation-hunting is an intellectually dishonest way of proving whatever one wants to prove. Using the same method, one could show that Hegel, for example, was a hopeless reactionary – a supporter of the Prussian state, a god-believer and spinner of metaphysical “fairy tales”. And one could then take Marx to task for his “eclecticism” in assimilating any ideas from such a figure (as, indeed, Eduard Bernstein, Max Eastman and many others did).

Haig is nothing if not ambitious: having set out to demolish Marcuse, he is also eager to do battle with Freud. We are told that psychoanalysis “is not an experimental or quantitative field”, that Freud’s “methodology” is an “ahistorical subjective idealist orientation,” and then (somewhat inconsistently) that “Freudian individual psychoanalysis was based on mechanical materialism” and that it was a form of “biological determinism”.[6]

While these objections shed little light on psychoanalysis (we will soon be posting some material that addresses these issues), this strident antipathy to Freud (and Marcuse) is consistent with prevailing opinion in academia. Here it is worth noting Haig’s background in “literary and cultural studies”, since probably no academic field has been more imbued by postmodernism than this one.[7] The postmodernist rejection of ‘metanarratives’ applies as much to Freud as it does to Marx. And just as relevant here is the postmodernist hostility to utopianism.[8] It isn’t a huge stretch to see in the contemptuous way Haig dismisses Marcuse’s “libidinal fairy tales” – which is to say, Marcuse’s efforts to envision a non-repressive civilization free of the stranglehold of alienated labor – the lingering influence of his academic studies.

There is much more we could comment on (for example, Haig completely misrepresents Trotsky’s argument in Results and Prospects which was aimed against the kind of “shallow moralizing” that calls for a “moral awakening” of the working class before it can come to socialist consciousness – a position that is held not by us but by David Walsh of the WSWS editorial board.[9])

And we could also point out that despite his eagerness to hit back at our brief note, Haig manages to ignore one of the three points that we made (and indeed the one we spent the most space on) – which is that when his original essay was first posted on the WSWS, it had hyperlinks to the documents of ours that he was quoting, but several hours later those hyperlinks were removed and replaced by a deliberately vague reference to “Permanent Revolution”, not even indicating whether this was a book, a journal or a website. There is no reasonable explanation for this except that the WSWS editorial board did not want WSWS readers to have direct access to our material so that they could judge for themselves the validity of Haig’s arguments. While Haig gets very indignant over our brief note, he has no comment on – and therefore, one has to assume, no objection to – this obvious bit of intellectual bad faith. [10]

But let us go back to something we raised earlier – the willingness of the WSWS editorial board to post this second statement of Haig’s. Veteran members of that board like North or Walsh would have readily recognized this statement for what it is – an overheated expression of writer’s pique by someone relatively new to polemical debate – and in the normal course of things would probably have advised against rushing into (electronic) print.

But clearly the normal course of things doesn’t apply when it comes to the polemical dispute with Steiner and Brenner. Back in October, North launched his smear campaign against Steiner, with help from Ann and Chris Talbot; now Haig has been pressed into service for the same basic political agenda – which is to divert the discussion away from the criticisms we made of the IC leadership’s political line.

According to Haig, we are wrong in claiming that North’s series against Steiner is a smear campaign: “This is not demonization, but a well-grounded assessment of their [i.e. Steiner and Brenner’s] theoretical and political conceptions.” But a central part of our “political conceptions” is our critique of the IC leadership’s politics: how can North (or the Talbots) have provided “a well-grounded assessment” when they never said a single word about any of these criticisms?

Rejecting the philosophy of human access means rejecting Kant’s privileging of epistemology

Object-Oriented Philosophy from The Pinocchio Theory by Steven Shaviro

On his marvelous new blog, on which he manages to write more in a day than I do here in a month, and with consistent brilliance, Graham Harman makes a concession (or, I should probably rather say, a restatement) that I had been hoping to hear from him for a long time:
It’s not a matter of forgetting Kant’s exclusion from the in-itself. It’s a matter of questioning why he gives humans a monopoly on such exclusion. In a sense, I’m trying to let rocks, stones, armies, and Exxon join in the fun of being excluded from the in-itself. A sort of Kantianism for inanimate objects.

This is pretty close to one of the major theses of my own forthcoming book on Whitehead:
Whitehead rejects correlationism and anthropocentrism precisely by extending Kant’s analysis of conditions of possibility, and of the generative role of time, to all entities in the universe, rather than confining them to the privileged realm of human beings, or of rational minds. (p. 79)

Throughout his books, Harman rightly praises Whitehead for rejecting what Harman calls “the philosophy of human access,” that is to say, the philosophy that gives a privileged position to human subjectivity or to human understanding, as if the world’s very existence depended upon our ability to know it. Rejecting the philosophy of human access means, among other things, rejecting Kant’s privileging of epistemology. As Whitehead puts it, since the 18th century, and especially since Kant, “the question, What do we know?, has been transformed into the question, What can we know?” (PR 74). [...]

Now, when Heidegger (followed by Derrida) attacks metaphysical and scientific thought for its reduction of the reality of things to mere presence, what he misses is the Kantian sense in which any such reduction is also a positive construction: it is a new event, a creation, a transformation or a “translation.” (I am thinking here of what Levi Bryant calls “Latour’s Principle”: “there is no transportation without translation.” Harman’s own book on Latour is coming soon). Heidegger’s critique of presence might be summarized as the idea that translation is always a betrayal of that which is ostensibly being translated.

But Kant’s conception of constructive functioning maintains that translation is the creation of something new: a successful translation (which for Heidegger is impossible) is not a perfectly faithful reproduction of the original, but precisely (to cite the terms of Latour’s Principle in inverse order) an act of transportation, a carrying-across which, in the process, thereby makes something new. From this point of view, both Whitehead and Latour give us a Kantianism without privileging human access, a Kantianism for all entities. And seeing the constructive work of relays and transportations/translations in this manner releases us from the desperate recourse (though, of course, Harman does not see it this way) to positing a universe of occult substances that can only communicate vicariously.

There is no transportation that does not involve translation

The Hegemonic Fallacy from Larval Subjects

As I learned last night, electricity is a very powerful entity that produces many differences. My entire life, the life of my neighbors, and the life of many gadgets that inhabit the world was suspended in a variety of ways by a power outage that lasted hours. However, the recognition that an entire constellation of processes depends on electricity is very different from the reduction of the entities belonging to this network to electricity. All of these other entities have an autonomy from electricity even while entering into relations with the power line enabling all sorts of activities within these act-ualities.

This is entirely different than a Kantian making all objects, in the form of appearances or phenomena, depend on mind, or Leibniz’s God sustaining all monads. In the first case we have an assemblage where act-ualities equally contribute those differences that are within their power to contribute, while in the latter case we have one entity contributing all the difference (Leibniz’s and Spinoza’s God), or nearly all the difference (Kant’s mind). Indeed, in Kant the in-itself contributes no discernible difference or no difference that could intelligibly be talked about. Yet if any of this is to be thought at all, it is above all necessary to overcome the Epistemic and Ontological Fallacies. The first, as articulated by Bhaskar, consists in

“…the view that statements about being can be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge; i.e. that ontological questions can always be transposed into epistemological terms” (A Realist Theory of Science, 36).

By contrast, the Ontological Fallacy consists in the view that Being and Thinking are identical. It is only when these fallacies are overcome that it becomes possible to consistently think both the Ontic and Ontological Principles.

Six primary areas of the integral paradigm

University of Human Unity SEMINAR programme for Spring 2009
Unity Pavilion ::: 9:30 AM

Toward an Integral Learning Paradigm: The Psychology of Social Development

Since Sri Aurobindo wrote the book that was originally titled The Psychology of Social Development (now The Human Cycle), the field of developmental psychology, and related disciplines in anthropology and sociology, have pursued an understanding of human beings and societies based on patterns of development from the archaic and magical to the mythical and rational structures of thought and behavior in Gebserian terms. Important references include authors such as Howard Gardner, Ken Wilber, Abraham Maslow, Jean Gebser, and the recent field of Spiral Dynamics.

In this course we will explore Auroville’s development in such developmental terms, with reference to six primary areas of the integral paradigm: social, linguistic, architectural and artistic, philosophical, psychological, and ecological/economical. Anyone interested in participating in such an exploration, either making presentations or participating in the follow up discussions, is invited to attend.

Place: Unity Pavilion Date and time: Every Saturday morning from Jan 17 to April 4, 9:30 – 12:00. We also warmly invite all the participants of last year's seminars on the different approaches to knowledge, to the planning session of the University of Human Unity for these seminars. Place: Unity Pavilion, Date and time: Saturday, January 10th at 9.30 AM.
posted by vladimir

The best proof of that comes not from Freud but from Trotsky

Psychoanalysis and the "empty place" of psychology within Marxism By Frank Brenner It is my aim in this paper to show that a familiarity with the basic concepts and major discoveries of Freud’s psychoanalysis can be of great value to Marxists... 11:45 AM

Trotsky on the autonomy of the psyche
To approach the mind as an autonomous phenomenon is the necessary starting point of a materialist psychology. The best proof of that, in fact, comes not from Freud but from Trotsky. His remarks on this subject are contained in some notebooks from the mid-1930s which were discovered only relatively recently in the Trotsky archives at Harvard University and published in 1986.9 The relevant passages are from a discussion about the interrelationship of consciousness and nature and it will be useful here to present Trotsky’s train of thought in some detail. Trotsky is arguing that this interrelationship needs to be understood "as an independent realm with its own regularities." This is because: "The dialectic of consciousness is not ... a reflection of the dialectic of nature, but is a result of the lively interaction between consciousness and nature and - in addition - a method of cognition, issuing from this interaction."10

Before this statement is misread as a lapse into idealism, it is necessary to emphasize that Trotsky’s point is about the dialectic of consciousness, i.e. about the process rather than the content of thought. Indeed, a few paragraphs later when he invokes one of his favorite analogies – "Consciousness acts like a camera" – it is perfectly obvious that he holds to the materialist viewpoint that thought reflects reality. But how does that reflection take place? – that is the issue Trotsky was trying to get at. The process at work in the mind (like the process at work in the camera) isn’t identical to the process of the reality it is reflecting. To argue otherwise isn’t materialism but rather Hegelian idealism: "Since cognition is not identical with the world (in spite of Hegel’s idealistic postulation), dialectical cognition is not identical with the dialectic of nature."

The camera analogy demonstrates this point: still photography "tears from nature ‘moments’ [while] the ties and transitions among them are lost"; motion pictures are more like nature in their "uninterruptedness," but the latter is an illusion created by "exploit[ing] the eye’s imperfection," i.e. by stringing together separate moments (or shots) with breaks between them too short for the retina to register. [...]

Kautsky’s ‘social instinct’
Marxists are forced to live in enemy territory; a gap in theory can therefore constitute a breach in their ideological defenses. The Freudo-Marxists claimed that this was the case with psychology: for lack of an adequate theory, Marxists were often led "to inject a private, purely idealistic psychology in this empty place,"19 Indeed, this is just what Marxists would expect to happen once we accept the basic premise. Examples of this are most often to be found in those writings where Marxists have, as it were, left the beaten track by trying to tackle matters such as ethics, art, sexuality, family relationships, etc.: sooner or later one reaches the limits of historical materialism as a theoretical guide in these matters and then the only available recourse is to start improvising a psychology, which almost always means smuggling in an idealist one.

Fromm mentioned one of Kautsky’s works as an example of this tendency and it is well worth considering here. The book is called Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History and it was published in 1906, which is to say, long before Kautsky’s apostasy from Marxism. Indeed, Kautsky’s strengths are evident in the book’s early chapters as he provides a broad historical overview of the development of ethical conceptions that takes in the ancient world, the Christian church, the Enlightenment and Kant. The latter was of particular importance to Kautsky since his purpose in writing the book was to counter the growing influence of neo-Kantianism inside the socialist movement. The Kantian conception of ethics was an ahistorical one based on the famous "categorical imperative," a philosophical restatement of the old Christian precept – do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Kautsky was easily able to demolish Kant’s claim that this imperative was derived from pure reason and that it had nothing to do with historical reality; in fact, it represented a protest against feudal society, the ethical counterpart of the political ideals of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.20

But when Kautsky tried to put forward a materialist alternative to Kant, he quickly got into trouble. He postulated the existence of a "social instinct" with some rather extraordinary properties: "In the first place naturally comes altruism, self sacrifice for the whole. Then bravery in the defence of common interests; fidelity to the community; submission to the will of society; then obedience and discipline; truthfulness to society whose security is endangered or whose energies are wasted when they are misled in any way by false signals. Finally ambition, the sensibility to the praise and blame of society. These all are social impulses which we find expressed already among animal societies, many of them in a high degree."21 These impulses, as he went on to say, are "nothing but the highest virtues, they sum up the entire moral code." Moreover, even conscience was rooted in instinct: "We have no reason to assume that conscience is confined to man."22 The "social instinct" provided Kautsky with his ultimate refutation of Kant: "What appeared to Kant as the creation of a higher world of spirits, is a product of the animal world ... An animal impulse and nothing else is the moral law."23 [...]

Kant had taken the Christian ‘golden rule’ and turned it into an ahistorical "imperative"; Kautsky took his ‘virtues’ – essentially a belief that man is naturally good – and similarly turned them into an ahistorical "social instinct." Thus, the latter was little more than a categorical imperative by another name. It also had similar historical roots, i.e. Rousseau and the bourgeois democratic revolution. And it also had the fatal flaw of all ahistorical conceptions of morality: it was incapable of explaining how people born with virtuous instincts end up in a vice-ridden world. Kautsky knew he had a problem here and tried to extricate himself from it later in the book by drawing a distinction between the social instinct and "moral codes," i.e. the particular forms of morality, which were entirely subject to historical change. But this historical factor had no discernible bearing on the ahistorical ‘core’ of morality, i.e. the social instinct, which remained "that element of human morality which, if not independent of time and space is yet older than the changing social relations ... [it] is just that which human morality has in common with the animal."

Prithwindra Mukherjee has been awarded Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters

ARTICLE 3: Are appointed to the rank of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres:

Mr Mukherjee Prithwindra, writer, musicologist

Prithwindra Mukherjee - Encyclopedia > Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres
A Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, sometimes called a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (in English, Knight [of the Order] of Arts and Letters) is a distinction awarded by the Minister of Culture of France in recognition of outstanding achievement in the arts.
French recipients must be at least 30 years old, must respect French civil law, and must have "significantly contributed to the enrichment of the French cultural inheritance", according to French government guidelines. Recipients from outside France may be allowed into the Order "without condition of age". Higher ranks in the Order are Officier (Officer) and Commandeur (Commander).
Anglophone recipients include William Faulkner, James Joyce, Jackson Pollock, David Bowie, Allen Ginsberg, John Coolidge Adams, Leonardo DiCaprio, Lisa Appignanesi, and Michael Cimino.

Marx’s ideas about a sequence of modes of production in history are at best sketchy

Marxism and economic anthropology
from The Memory Bank by keith
An ‘anthropology’ is any systematic study of humanity as a whole. The modern academic discipline has its origins in the democratic revolutions and rationalist philosophy of the eighteenth century.

The question then was how the arbitrary inequality of the Old Regime might be replaced by an equal society founded on what all people have in common, their human nature. It was thus a revolutionary critique of the premise of inequality and a source of constructive proposals for a more equal future. Such a future was thought to be analogous to the kinship organization that preceded societies based on the state and class division and that could still be observed among contemporary savages. This framework for thinking about social development was retained and elaborated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But it is no longer the leading anthropological paradigm, having been replaced by an ethnographic relativism that is more compatible with a world society fragmented into nation-states.

Marx was a political economist, to be sure; but he also developed a coherent view of the place of capitalism in human history as a whole. For this reason, I consider Karl Marx to have been the greatest economic anthropologist of all time.

Marxism was shaped by the tradition I call the ‘anthropology of unequal society’ and became its most sustained source of development. Rousseau’s example inspired Morgan and Engels a century later; while Wolf and Goody have brought the tradition up-to-date. The most influential marriage of Marxism and anthropology was the French school that flourished in the 1960s and 70s. So this essay will have three parts: the economic anthropology of Karl Marx; a sketch of the anthropology of unequal society; and French structuralist Marxism.
The economic anthropology of Karl Marx
According to Marx, the history of precapitalist economies can reveal elements of the basic categories of economic life – value, labour, land, capital etc. – but only modern capitalism makes of them a coherent, objective system of commoditized social relations. Economy now takes on a general subjective dimension that was previously confined to the unsystematic calculations of merchants. Economy is first of all production, that is, all material activity and one side of an economic process that also includes distribution, exchange and consumption. Its definition is always coloured by the dominant mode of production. Thus for us productive labour is whatever produces value for capital. The commodity is abstract social labour: its highest form is capital. Only one commodity can add to value and that is labour, hence the historic significance of the entry of capital into the organization of production. When the market becomes the main means of social reproduction, the combination of money capital and wage labour under conditions of juridical freedom revolutionizes accumulation and productivity.
In the extraordinary passage of Grundrisse known as ‘The precapitalist economic formations’, Marx lays out a vision of human history in which capitalism is seen as the final dissolvent of those forms of society linking us to an evolutionary past that we share with the animals:
The original conditions of production cannot initially be themselves produced. What requires explanation is not the unity of living and active human beings with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolism with nature; nor is this the result of a historic process. What we must explain is the separation of these inorganic conditions of human existence from this active existence, a separation which is only fully completed in the relationship between wage labour and capital (Grundrisse, p. 489).
In making that break, capitalism is the enabling force for the emergence of a human society fully emancipated from primitive dependence on nature. It is, of course, not that society, but its midwife. Human evolution before capitalism is marked by two processes: the individuation of the original animal herd and the separation of social life from its original matrix, the earth as laboratory.

Marx’s ideas about a sequence of modes of production in history are at best sketchy, despite subsequent efforts to generate a formal scheme out of his occasional references to Asiatic (Oriental/Slavonic), ancient, Germanic, feudal and similar precapitalist modes. The economic determination of precapitalist social forms is always indirect. Marx’s method was rather to trace out the logic of the tendency of world history, using idealized examples. Indeed he makes it clear in Grundrisse that the historical explanation of particular cases must draw on an ad hoc series of ecological, political and other variables. He never resolved this split between philosophical speculation and empirical analysis. Class plays a minor role in his economic anthropology. The Communist Manifesto explicitly points to the plurality and confusion of classes, estates and orders in precapitalist societies. Only when commercial logic penetrates the bulk of production does class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat become dominant. Even then, this is more of a potential dualism, a tendency, than historical actuality, since residual classes often play a significant part in the movement of capitalist societies.
Marx’s anthropology is a special theory of industrial capitalism which conceives of the modern epoch as a turning point in world history. It is not a case study of western society. Rather industrial capitalism has set in train a series of events which must bring the rest of the world under its contradictory logic. It is not ethnocentric to deny non-western societies their autonomous evolution; history has already done that. For Marx then, economic anthropology is a set of analytical constructs of the capitalist mode of production, modified by awareness of the world that preceded and lies outside capitalism. Some (e.g. Lange) consider Marx’s greatness to lie in the fine historical sense that he and Engels brought to their study of Victorian capitalism; others (e.g. Althusser) see Capital as a positive text that escaped from the dialectical historicism and subjectivity of the earlier economic writings. However that may be, neither the subsequent Marxist tradition nor academic anthropologists have ever come close to matching Marx’s vision of human history as a whole.

The anthropology of unequal society
The most impressive achievement of Marxist synthesis in late twentieth-century anthropology is Eric Wolf’s Europe and the Peoples without History (1982). Against the prevailing norm of producing narrowly circumscribed ethnographies as standalone examples, Wolf places a wide range of anthropological knowledge within a comprehensive history of western capitalist expansion and local response. Rather than adopt the tainted conceptual vocabulary of precapitalist states (Asiatic, feudal etc), he coins a new term for societies organized by a ‘tributary’ mode of production. Jack Goody has produced a series of volumes comparing Africa and Eurasia, insisting that claims of Western exceptionalism in respect of Asia are false. Goody’s vision of world history was drawn from the Marxist prehistorian Gordon Childe’s materialist synthesis of the two great turning points — the ‘neolithic or agricultural revolution’ of 10,000 years ago (which Africa participated in) and the ‘urban revolution’ of 5,000 years ago (which it did not). The industrial revolution marked the third definitive stage in the history of human production and society. Childe got his basic framework from L.H. Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) which some have seen as the origin of modern anthropology. Morgan’s achievement was to draw on the contemporary ethnography of groups like the Iroquois to illuminate the ancient Mediterranean origins of western civilization. At the same time he identified what are still considered to be the principal stages of social evolution (bands, tribes and states). His work was made more widely accessible by Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), drawing on Marx’s extensive notes on Morgan’s book. But all of them got the basic framework from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1754).

Rousseau’s essay deserves to be seen as the first great work of modern anthropology. He was not concerned with individual variations in natural endowments, but with the artificial inequalities of wealth, honour and the capacity to command obedience that came from social convention. In order to construct a model of human equality, he imagined a pre-social state of nature, a sort of hominid phase of human evolution in which men were solitary, but healthy, happy and above all free. This freedom was metaphysical, anarchic and personal: original human beings had free will, they were not subject to rules of any kind and they had no superiors. At some point humanity made the transition to what Rousseau calls ‘nascent society’, a prolonged period whose economic base can be summarized as hunter-gathering with huts. Why leave the state of nature at all? He speculates that disasters and economic shortage must have been involved.
The rot set in with the invention of agriculture or, as Rousseau puts it, of wheat and iron. Cultivation of the land led to incipient property institutions whose culmination awaited the development of political society. The formation of a civil order (the state) was preceded by a Hobbesian condition, a war of all against all marked by the absence of law. He believed that this new social contract to abide by the law was probably arrived at by consensus, but it was a fraudulent one in that the rich thereby gained legal sanction for transmitting unequal property rights in perpetuity. From this inauspicious beginning, political society then usually moved, via a series of revolutions, through three stages:
The establishment of law and the right of property was the first stage, the institution of magistrates the second and the transformation of legitimate into arbitrary power the third and last stage. Thus the status of rich and poor was authorized by the first epoch, that of strong and weak by the second and by the third that of master and slave, which is the last degree of inequality and the stage to which all the others finally lead, until new revolutions dissolve the government altogether and bring it back to legitimacy. (p. 131).
One-man-rule closes the circle in that all individuals become equal again because they are now subjects with no law but the will of the master. For Rousseau, the growth of inequality was just one aspect of human alienation in civil society. We need to return from division of labour and dependence on the opinion of others to subjective self-sufficiency. His subversive parable ends with a ringing indictment of economic inequality which could well serve as a warning to our world:
It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined… that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities (p. 137).

Marx and Engels made fertile use of this precedent in their own critique of the state and capitalism, while Morgan’s legacy as Rousseau’s principal successor in modern anthropology has persisted in the twentieth century. In the postwar period, teams at Michigan and Columbia, including White, Wolf, Sahlins, Service and Harris, took the economic and political basis for the development of class society as their chief focus. But Claude Lévi-Strauss tried to redo Morgan in a single book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949).
The aim of Elementary Structures was to revisit Morgan’s three-stage theory of social evolution, drawing on a new and impressive canvas, ‘the Siberia-Assam axis’ and all points southeast to the Australian desert. Lévi-Strauss took as his motor of development the forms of marriage exchange and the logic of exogamy. The ‘restricted reciprocity’ of egalitarian bands gave way to the unstable hierarchies of ‘generalized reciprocity’ typical of Burmese tribes. The stratified states of the region turned inwards to the reproduction of class differences through endogamy and the negation of social reciprocity. The argument is bold, but its scope is regional, not global. In any case, its author later abandoned the project in favour of a ‘structuralist’ approach to studying the human mind through stories. > 11:15 AM

Searching for some kind of wholeness beyond the brokenness of the world and the radical diversity of competing identities

Adam Seligman offered a completely different strategy for moving forward. In his extensive work with vastly different communities, Seligman noted that they never look for commonalities between participants but instead focus on finding ways to live with one another despite their radical differences. The search for commonalities too often turns tragic because it assumes commonalities where none in fact exist. As Seligman said, “Assuming commonality usually means assuming that you are like me.” Difference, said Seligman, implies brokenness. The groups that we call fundamentalist are usually searching for some kind of wholeness beyond the brokenness of the world and thus the radical diversity of competing identities. Rather than discovering some common core on which to build relationships, Seligman suggested, we need instead the stoicism to live within a fractured and broken world.

Seligman suggested that one way to help move discussions between differing groups forward is to distinguish three levels of meaning. Following Charles Sanders Peirce and Roy Rappaport, Seligman described low-level meaning as meaning that is simply based on making distinctions. This kind of meaning allows us to make basic statements such as “the cat is on the mat,” statements about which most can generally agree. This low-level meaning corresponds to the domain of the economic in human affairs because economics is based upon making distinctions, the division of labor, and so forth. A good economic transaction creates difference in the mode of profit. This low-level meaning is also, like economics, the realm of inequality. Mid-level meaning is, by contrast, based upon analogy and metaphor. A mid-level meaning statement might be “my love is like a red, red rose.” It issues in the realm of values and so primarily connects us to the domain of the political. It is a realm of empathy and trust, a shared community of faith. Mid-level meaning engages us in the subjunctive, the power to imagine “what if?” Finally, high-level meaning is based upon the perception of unity, necessity, oneness and so forth. This is the domain of the sacred and it issues in the great creedal statements of the religions: “Hear, O Israel…”, for example, or “There is no God but God…” High-level meaning engages us in the re-aggregation of the world, the restoration of brokenness, the realm of religion and mysticism.

These diverse levels of meaning interact with one another but, Seligman maintained, they need their own autonomy. Problems result when one domain attempts to legislate for another, as for example when traditional societies attempted to use high-level meanings to re-organize the low-level realm (e.g. in Catholic casuistry or, more recently, Soviet era communism). At other times, mid-level political strategies might attempt to re-organize high-level meanings as for example, Seligman suggested, when people attempt to force democratic reforms (women reading the Torah, gay bishops, etc.) on to the structures of high-level meaning. These border-crossings provoke distress-the downward imposition of high-level meaning is one way to describe fundamentalism, while the upward imposition of mid-level meanings might be called revolutionary.

This schematic gives us a kind of map for producing livable arrangements. By respecting the meaning levels, Seligman suggested, the contentious parties are more likely to come to some measure of accord. In response to Seligman’s presentation, Landau pointed out that his experience was that debate and rational arguments tended to fail when engaged in the peacemaking process. This may be because debate fails to engage the question of metaphor, of the imagination, the mid-level that is the domain of the political. If we take Seligman’s schematic seriously, then political solutions to the problems of the mid-East do not require debate so much as they require re-imagination and the activation of empathy, trust, and the heart. Summary for the September 10-14, 2006 Symposium on Jewish Fundamentalism Hosted by Esalen’s Center for Theory and Research (CTR) 11:38 AM 12:15 PM

To utter a mantra is to invoke the Deity signified by it

Highways Of God - Pandit, M.P. Keywords: PHILOSOPHY. PSYCHOLOGY; Philosophy of mind Downloads: 149. MANTRA Q: What is a Bija Mantra? Can it be effective even when it is not received from, a competent Guru ?

A: All manifestation is through Sound, Sabda- Brahman. Bija-Mantra is seed sound. It may consist of a syllable or a number of syllables. The sound or dhvani produced by the utterance of the syllable (or syllables) is, in the Mantra Sastra, the equivalent in human speech, the vaikhan expression, of the original subtle sound-vibration which is produced by the movement of the forces (of Consciousness) while manifesting a thing. That subtle sound, matrkd, is the true Name of the thing manifested and to repeat it is to call the thing into awareness, into active being. This is the main principle of the Mantra.

Thus the manifestation of a Devata which is an emanation, a self-formulation of the Supreme Godhead, is accompanied by a characteristic sound. This mdtrkd is the sound-form of that Deity. This sound-value rendered in terms of human speech is the Mantra, the sound-body of the Devata on the human level. When this sound is uttered the vibrations that go forth are the very vibrations that were active when the Devata first manifested and consequently they urge the same manifestation again. Hence it is that to utter a mantra is to invoke the Deity signified by it.

It goes without saying that the evocation, to be effective, must carry the power, the consciousness with which the original sound-vibrations were instinct. With- out it the Mantra is a dead word. The Mantra-caitanya must be awakened and made active. And that only a Guru, one who has already realised and holds in him-self something of the dynamics of the Mantra, can do. 1 When such a one communicates the Mantra to another, he not only speaks the Word, but also transmits in his very utterance the caitanya, the life-power of the Mantra^ so that when the recipient repeats it, it is a Word which is loaded with its innate power-charge that is released into action. 1

Theoretically it is of course possible for one to energise and enliven a Mantra by his own tapasya. It is also possible to receive the living Mantra directly from a Higher Source, as has happened at times. What is important and indispensable is that the Mantra must vibrate with the power that underlies its manifestation.

Sitting at Sri Aurobindo’s feet to hear him

All Life is Yoga

• by Aju Mukhopadhyay
  In an age when the purport of spirituality
  has been lightened, mixed with sensuousness and frivolity
  I feel like sitting at Sri Aurobindo’s feet to hear him:
  ‘The delight of spirit is ever new,
  the forms of beauty it takes innumerable,
  its godhead ever young and the taste of delight, rasa,
  of the infinite eternal and inexhaustible.’
  ‘Spirituality cannot be called upon
  to deal with life by non-spiritual method . . .
  always failed and will continue to fail . . .
  for ‘The spiritual evolution of Nature
  is still in process and incomplete, . . . only beginning . . . .
  ‘Any premature attempt at a large scale spiritual life
  is exposed to vitiation . . . .
  the individual must be preoccupied with . . . changing
  his mind and life into conformity
  with the truth of the spirit’-
  While all this are mined
  out of his golden treasure of The Life Divine,
  I venture to go into his more pungent
  but luscious words found in a letter-
  
  ‘The supramental can only make
  the best conditions for anybody
  who can open up to it . . . .
  But it could not dispense with the necessity of sadhana.
  If it did, the logical consequence would be that
  the whole earth, men, dogs and worms
  would suddenly wake up
  to find themselves supramental.
  There would be no need of an Ashram or of Yoga.’
  
  ‘An Asram means’, he wrote,
  ‘the house or houses of a teacher
  or the Master of spiritual philosophy
  in which he receives and lodges those
  who come to him for the teaching and practice . . . .
  it is only what has been indicated above
  and nothing more.’
  And, no Ashram without the Gurus, he wrote to clear the point.
  
  About the institutions he wrote in The Human Cycle-
  ‘The existence of institutions is sufficient
  to abrogate the need of insisting on the spirit
  that made the institutions.
  But spirituality is . . . nothing
  if it is not lived inwardly and if the outward life
  does not flow out of this inward living.’
  
  ‘All life is yoga’- Yes he wrote.
  But without squandering its meaning,
  following Sri Aurobindo we may say
  All life of a Yogi is Yoga-
  not that of an ordinary man, dog or worm.
  © Aju Mukhopadhyay, 2008

The discourse of the critical theorist endlessly repeats without limit

International Journal of Žižek Studies: Vol 2, No 4 (2008) from Larval Subjects . by larvalsubjects - ISSN 1751- 8229 Volume Two, Number Four Žižek’s New Universe of Discourse: Politics and the Discourse of the Capitalist Levi R. Bryant - Collin College, Texas, USA. Truth punches a hole in knowledge. ~J. Lacan

Like the other discourses, the discourse of the critical theorist is characterized by both in impossibility and an impotence. On the one hand, the relationship between objet a and the master-signifier is characterized by impossibility insofar as no master-signifier is ever adequate to naming objet a. A remainder always returns that exceeds the organizing aims of the mastersignifier.

Here it will be noted that this impossibility perfectly captures Žižek’s gloss on the discourse of the analyst, underlining the manner in which objet a or the Real and the mastersignifier are separated from one another. On the other hand, the lower level of the formula is characterized by impotence insofar as ideology (S2) perpetually fails in containing or mastering the divided subject, but also insofar as the pursuit of revolutionary knowledge aimed at by this discourse never completely responds to the subject’s lack. As a result, the discourse of the critical theorist endlessly repeats without limit. Paraphrasing Beckett, the discourse of critical theory is characterized by the impossibility of going on, the necessity of going on, and the will to go on.

7. Conclusion
Throughout this paper I have attempted to show that the difference between Žižek and Lacan is to be situated not at the level of content, but of form. Where Lacan’s thought engages the universe of mastery and the discourses that inhabit that universe, a structure can be discerned throughout Žižek’s thought that engages a very different universe of discourse. Although Žižek does not explore all dimensions of this universe in depth, his work can be seen as a cartography of this new universe, both uncovering the mechanisms by which it functions and devising strategies for engaging with this universe with the aim of promoting emancipation by providing us with a language through which we might become capable of articulating our unfreedom. The structure of the discourses that can be discerned at work in Žižek’s thought reveals a very precise analysis of the structural organization of our historical present. However, these discourses also go well beyond Žižek, revealing a common ground among many very different forms of critical engagement, while also allowing us to discern the role that the unconscious and the real play within this new universe of discourse.

Appendix: A Brief Summary of Lacan’s Structuralist Theory of Discourse Lacan developed his theory of discourse between the years of 1969 and 1973, between Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge. Unlike other theories of discourse, the focus is not on the content of discourse, but rather on the structural relation between the speaker of the discourse and the addressee of the discourse, such that 1) something is produced in the discourse, and 2) the discourse is always constitutively incomplete by virtue of the role that the unconscious plays in the discourse. As Alxendre Leupin nicely puts it,

What is a discourse? It is a formalizable structure that positions itself in between language and speech. It can subsist without being spoken by an individual (as in the case of an institution), but it is not the whole of a language: it inscribes itself in language as a fundamental relationship. Located between the generality of a given language and the speech act of an individual or the extreme singularity of each human subject, discourses define social groups (Leupin 2004: 68).

A discourse is thus not so much what a speech act is about, but is rather a particular form or structure taken by social relations, between institutions and other institutions, groups and other groups, institutions or groups and individuals, individuals and groups or institutions, and individuals and institutions. As a consequence, speech acts that are about very different things can embody one and the same structure of social relations. For example, workers might overturn the owners of the means of production, but institute a social order that has precisely the same structure, with masters commanding other workers so as to procure enjoyment. This seems to have occurred in Soviet socialism where the mode of production remained the same even though those in charge changed. [...]

It is noteworthy that despite Baurdrillard’s own claims here and elsewhere that symbolic-value spells the ruin of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, the addition of symbolic-value does not destroy Marx’s understanding of the commodity. Marx very clearly argues that "needs" are not simply biological needs, but are also socially and historically produced needs, i.e., needs that are produced or manufactured. As Marx observes on the very first page of Capital, "The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference" (Marx 1990: 125, my italics). 9:09 AM

Sri Aurobindo gave an unambiguous message to internal and external forces beyond the limits of time

OPED Saturday, November 22, 2008 Pioneer.com 'God cannot be jailed' Rakesh Sinha

Though Aurobindo and his youthful followers suffered great hardship throughout the trial, they effectively converted the occasion into the first ever public display of patriotism

The emerging challenge before the nation on the economics front is how to decouple the Indian share markets from the sinking ones in the West. But, a far bigger and decisive challenge confronting the collective conscious is how to decolonise the Indian mind , trapped as it is by the shackles foreign notions. Indian 'secularism' is one of the dominant ideologies for the past 60 years. It is a borrowed social policy, without any relevance in India. Post-independent.

However, the essence of India has remained uncorrupted. The spiritual core of India has withstood invasions through ten centuries. It resisted the persecutions of the Mughals and the allurement to 'westernise' offered by Macaulayism. Except for a 'courtier class', the rest of the country paid no heed to anti-Indian intellectual trends. India's ancient culture is uncontrollable and unpredictable. It has ensured India's rebirth through many ravages.

This struggle has been a civilisational one. On the centenary of the Alipore Bomb Case, it is important to understand how the sight of 35 iologically motivated boys cheerfully embracing harsh imprisonment and courting death changed the course of the freedom struggle. The spiritual underpinnings of this came from Vedanta thought. Swami Vivekananda, Sister Nivedita and Aurobindo Ghose motivated a whole generation to venerate the Motherland as a Goddess and fearlessly play with fire to defend India's honour. The 'Mother' (Bharat), was depicted as 'humiliated' and therefore it became the duty of the son to defend give her back her honour even if it meant dying for it.

Sri Aurobindo distinctly defined the contours of Indian culture and nationalism. To him, the nation was "not a piece of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a fiction of mind. It is a mighty shakti, composed of the shaktis of all the millions of units that make up the nation ..the shakti we call the India." The West derives the definition of a nation and its rise and fall with expressions over land and people, i.e. language, commerce, physical boundary, etc. It defines religion in terms of a divisive category of the people, which triggered off a ceaseless competition for acquiring superiority . Islam and Christianity, the dominant religions of the West, are essentially majoritarian ideologies. They tolerate non-believers only on their terms. Of course, in situations where they are in a minority, they demand (and in the case of India, extract) special treatment. But overall, they target global minorities with the help of their international networks. Obvious examples of this are 'global jihad' and the Vatican's call to make Asia (read India) fully Christian in the third Millennium of Christ.

Aurobindo said that nationalism "survives in the strength of God". It is not possible to crush nationalism, whatever the weapon brought against it. Nationalism cannot die and is hence immortal because it is another form of God. The message that the bunch of brave boys sent out from the courtroom in Alipore 100 years back this month is: "God cannot be killed, God cannot be sent to jail".

Aurobindo gave an unambiguous message to internal and external forces beyond the limits of time. He said: "This Hindu nation was born with the sanatan dharma, with it (India) moves and with it (India) grows. When the sanatan dharma declines, then the nation declines."

It is also a kind of madness. Aurobindo admitted to this when he said:

" My third madness is that other people look upon the country as an inert piece of matter, a stretch of fields and meadows, forests and rivers. To me She is the Mother. I adore Her, worship Her. What will the son do when he sees a Rakshasa sitting on the breast of his mother and sucking her blood? Will he quietly have his meal or will he rush to deliver his mother from that grasp? I know I have the strength to redeem this fallen race. It is not physical strength, it is the strength of knowledge… This feeling is not new, I was born with it and it is in my marrow. God has sent me to this world to accomplish this great mission."

Viewed in hindsight, few men would have been more unlikely to turn nationalistic than Aurobindo. His childhood was spent in England and he was totally Anglicized. He was sent to England at the age of seven and stayed there for 14 years. But England could not colonise his soul. His life story is one of continual growth up the ladder of ideological leadership of the evolving nationalism of 20th century India. Subash Chandra Bose considered him a pillar of the nationalist discourse in India. Dr K B Hedgewar , the founder of the RSS, went Pondicherry before the Nagpur session of the Congress in 1920 to convince him to rejoin politics. But he refused because after the Alipore case, he became convinced India's spiritual path is the true path.

Deshabandhu Chitaranjan Das, the famous barrister who represented him in the Alipore Bomb case, said that Aurobindo's voice should not go unheard even by the British. "My appeal to you is this, that long after the controversy will be hushed in silence, long after this turmoil, the agitation will have ceased, long after he is dead and gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity. Long after he is dead and gone, his words will be echoed and re-echoed, not only in India but across distant seas and lands. Therefore, I say that the man in his position is not only standing before the bar of this Court, but before the bar of the High Court of History." --The writer is an Academician and Hony. Director, India Policy Foundation. The Search Results are given below using word ALIPORE BOMB CASE 'God cannot be jailed' 22 November, 2008 The bomb that shook an Empire 22 November, 2008 100 years of righteous terror 22 November, 2008 Politics of reaching out 11 October, 2008 Alipore bomb case to be exhibited at SC museum 12 May, 2006 11:16 AM

We need to strengthen the academic/intellectual side of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre for Education

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH > UNIVERSITY OF HYDERABAD > HYDERABAD 500 046, (A.P.) INDIA > Dr. Sachidananda Mohanty
Professor and Head, 17 September 2008
The Trustees of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry 605 002
Sub: Peter Heehs’ book: The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, Columbia
University Press, 2008... What are the lessons?

First, we need to strengthen the academic/intellectual side of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre for Education. We must fashion out a way of intellectual training of the young students and critics that fits into Sri Aurobindo’s injunction about the office and limitation of Reason, expounded in Human Cycle and elsewhere. The Mind, Sri Aurobindo says, most emphatically, has to be developed as an instrument, and open itself to higher Truths of Life. If we do not do this, we cannot blame others who are not attuned to this approach, from taking over and filling the void, as it has regrettably happened now. In this regard, we must be prepared to take the help of the ex-students of the Ashram who have had considerable training in this regard in the outside world. We must remember that either we move forward or go backward. There is no third alternative.

Clearly, as spirituality enjoins upon us, the best way of living within in our context, is to immerse ourselves in the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. While dogma and religiosity are to be shunned at all costs, we must internalize the Aurobindonian view of life which alone can safeguard us against aberrations and pitfalls. When a sufficiently large number of a community practise an ethical and spiritual life (ethics is not a bad word), then they would generate a force that alone can act as an effective antidote to darkness and ignorance.

Conclusion: Clarity of vision leads to a clarity of action. Those that are at the helms of affairs of a community must have a larger vision and discharge their responsibilities without fear and favor. The Sri Aurobindo Ashram was founded upon spiritual Realizations. As ordinary mortals, we can at least have conviction in the basic Truth of the Founders!
Is this too much to expect!
Sachidananda Mohanty

About Saaba > For the Prosecution of Peter

Dignity and justice for all of us

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(other language versions Human Rights Day 10 December 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
Adopted and proclaimed by General Assembly resolution 217 A (III) of 10 December 1948
On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the full text of which appears in the following pages. Following this historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and "to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories."

On 10 December, Human Rights Day, the Secretary-General launched a year-long campaign in which all parts of the United Nations family are taking part in the lead up to the 60th birthday of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) on Human Rights Day 2008.

With more than 360 language versions to help them, UN organizations around the globe are using the year to focus on helping people everywhere to learn about their human rights. The UDHR was the first international recognition that all human beings have fundamental rights and freedoms and it continues to be a living and relevant document today.

The theme of the campaign, “Dignity and justice for all of us,” reinforces the vision of the Declaration as a commitment to universal dignity and justice and not something that should be viewed as a luxury or a wish-list.

When complex systems evolve over time the paths they take is contingent on historical accidents

An Evolutionist Speaks Out About Economists' Pretensions About Science
from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy
Massimo Pigliucci, professor in the departments of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook, NY, contributes an important piece of work in the Blog, Rationallyspeakingout.org (‘a site devoted to positive scepticism') (HERE):

“Economics learns a thing or two from evolutionary biology”

“Economics is supposed to be a solid discipline, founded on complex mathematical models (and we all know math is really, really difficult). They even give Nobel prizes to economists, for crying out loud! And yet, economics has always had to fight off the same reputation of being a “soft” science that has plagued sociology, psychology, and to some extent even some of the biological sciences, like ecology and evolutionary biology. Indeed, like practitioners in those other fields of inquiry, some economists admit of being guilty of “physics envy,” that is, of using the physical sciences as the model for what their field ought to be like. Turns out even the assumption that a good science should be modeled on physics is “flawed,” to use Greenspan’s apt phrase.

“A recent article by Chelsea Wald in Science (12 December 2008) puts things in perspective by asking how it is possible that so many smart people in the financial sector made irrational decisions over a period of years, despite clear data showing there was a problem, and eventually leading to a worldwide economic crisis that is at the least poking at, if not shaking, the foundations of capitalism itself. Part of the answer is to be found in the persistent idea in economics that “markets” work because people are rational agents who act in their own self-interest and have perfect, instantaneous access to relevant information about the businesses they are considering investing in. Economists are not stupid, and they know very well that perfect rationality, complete information and instant access are all light years away from the reality of how markets operate. And in fact recent models have relaxed these assumptions to some extent. But it is so much more tractable to model things that way! After all, physicists do it too: remember those problems in Physics 101 that started “consider a spherical cow…”?

“Perhaps not surprisingly, there is another science that has been inspiring economists for some time now: evolutionary biology. The old “efficient markets hypothesis” underlying classical models is being replaced by the “adaptive markets hypothesis,” where Adam Smith’s invisible hand becomes more directly analogous to natural selection.” [...]

“There is another lesson to be learned from evolutionary biology that will not make economists, or the public at large, particularly happy: when complex systems evolve over time the paths they take is contingent on historical accidents (as opposed to being deterministic, like the laws of macro-physics, outside quantum mechanics). Sociologists, psychologists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists will readily tell their economic colleagues that it is certainly possible to explain past events (the extinction of the dinosaurs, the dot-com bubble) by the use of sufficiently complex causal-historical models. What seems to be out of reach, however, is precisely what economists want most: predicting the future, the hallmark of “good” science.”

“The moral of the story is that all of the above is not a failure of economics, sociology, psychology, ecology or evolutionary biology. It is the predictable outcome of the fact that these sciences deal with complex, historical systems, unlike much (though not all) of physics. The real assumption we need to get rid of is the highly persistent and pernicious one that physics is the golden standard by which all other sciences ought to be measured. Now if we only could convince federal funding agencies of that...”

Comment: What a breath of fresh air from Professor Massimo Pigliucci! [...]

Among economists, we have bought the unscientific myth that if we spend a century creating beautiful mathematical models of an imaginary economy, without people in all their complexity and unpredictability, and our competence is judged by our understanding of the model, but not the reality of real economies!

We are a ‘hard’ science and much ‘superior’ to ‘wishy-washy sociology, psychology and history, even though it is well-known that humans are not ‘well behaved’ like physical objects. We are not like wooden pieces on a chess board, as Adam Smith put it.

It is worrying too that just as more economists begin to realise that “the old 'efficient markets hypothesis' underlying classical models is being replaced by the 'adaptive markets hypothesis,' into which realisation, the oldest nonsense in modern economics (invented as a mass myth from the 1950s), is being re-introduced into the latter, under the guise that the metaphor of “Adam Smith’s invisible hand”, such that it is to be regarded as “more directly analogous to natural selection.”

Please spare us from this spurious nonsense; it’s bad enough that the proponents of the so-called scientific basis of economics have got away with their claims that the mystical disembodied body part was the ‘most important idea’ of modern economics, which is something that they never got from the texts of Adam Smith (see my paper: 'Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand: from metaphor to myth’, 2008 and downloadable from the homer page of Lost Legacy).

***

Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744) spent most of his professional life as Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Naples... Timothy Costelloe

The reduction of all facts to the ostensibly paradigmatic form of mathematical knowledge is a form of "conceit," Vico maintains, which arises from the fact that "man makes himself the measure of all things" (Element I, §120, p.60) and that "whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand" (Element II, §122, p.60). Recognizing this limitation, Vico argues, is at once to grasp that phenomena can only be known via their origins, or per caussas (through causes). [...]

Since history itself, in Vico's view, is the manifestation of Providence in the world, the transition from one stage to the next and the steady ascendance of reason over imagination represent a gradual progress of civilization, a qualitative improvement from simpler to more complex forms of social organization. Vico characterizes this movement as a "necessity of nature" ("Idea of the Work," §34, p.21) which means that, with the passage of time, human beings and societies tend increasingly towards realizing their full potential. From rude beginnings undirected passion is transformed into virtue, the bestial state of early society is subordinated to the rule of law, and philosophy replaces sentiments of religion.

"Out of ferocity, avarice, and ambition, the three vices which run throughout the human race," Vico says, "legislation creates the military, merchant, and governing classes, and thus the strength, riches, and wisdom of commonwealths. Out of these three great vices, which could certainly destroy all mankind on the face of the earth, it makes civil happiness" (Element VII, §132, p.62). In addition, the transition from poetic to rational consciousness enables reflective individuals-the philosopher, that is, in the shape of Vico-to recover the body of universal history from the particularity of apparently random events. This is a fact attested to by the form and content of The New Science itself. Timothy Costelloe http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vico/#3

New metaphysical “sound” from any nation of the world

Dec 25, 2008 New Book Series from Larval Subjects by larvalsubjects
Open Humanities Press has announced a new book series devoted to the publication of original metaphysical systems. This is an exciting moment in Continental thought and a bit of a watershed for the future of Continental philosophy. The old stereotype runs that Anglo-American philosophy is focused on problems, while Continental thought tends to be focused on the history of philosophy and commentary. As a result, within Anglo-American philosophy we tend to get original work (though often very boring), while in Continental thought, at least within the English speaking world, we get commentary after commentary. This is not, of course, to diminish the value of commentary or its potential to function as a platform for the development of new philosophical trajectories. However, this focus on the history of philosophy places real institutional constraints on philosophers in the English speaking world working in the Continental tradition. Insofar as one must be concerned with either getting a position or gaining tenure, and insofar as Continental journals and presses are geared towards the history of philosophy, doing original work becomes a losing proposition as you’re unlikely to find a publishing venue for that work and thereby lose valuable time in doing this work. This new series goes part of that way towards ameliorating that problem, though it also opens the door to anxiety as to whether or not we really have anything to say in our own voice. At any rate, here’s the announcement:

New Metaphysics
Series editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour
The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphysics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analytic-continental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments.

We favor instead the spirit of the intellectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical “sound” from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main interest is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy. Please send project descriptions (not full manuscripts) to Graham Harman, graham@rinzai.com.

Open Humanities Press is an international Open Access publishing collective. OHP was formed by scholars to overcome the current crisis in publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online through www.openhumanitiespress.org.

Jewish French mystic Mirra Alfassa and the Cambridge-educated yogi Sri Aurobindo

Affective Communities : Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship
Leela Gandhi

ISBN: 817821641 Publisher: Permanent Black Book Format: Hard Bound Language: English Physical Description: 254 pages Year of Publication: 2006

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. So E.M Forster famously observed in Two Cheers for Democracy. This epigrammatic manifesto, where friend stands as a metaphor for cross-cultural collaboration, holds the key, Leela Gandhi argues, to the hitherto neglected history of western anti-imperialism. Focusing on individuals and groups who renounced the privileges of imperialism to elect affinity with the victims of expansionism, she uncovers the Utopian-socialist critiques of empire that emerged in Europe, specifically in Britain, at the end of the nineteenth century.

Leela Gandhi reveals for the first time how those associated with marginalized lifestyles, subcultures, and traditions--including homosexuality, vegetarianism, animal rights, spiritualism, and aestheticism--united against imperialism and forged strong bonds with colonized subjects and cultures. She weaves together the stories of a number of South Asian and European friendships that flourished between 1878 and 1914, tracing the complex historical networks connecting figures like the English socialist and homosexual reformer Edward Carpenter and the young Indian barrister M.K. Gandhi, or the Jewish French mystic Mirra Alfassa and the Cambridge-educated yogi Sri. Aurobindo.

Challenging homogeneous portrayals of 'the west' and its role in relation to anticolonial struggles, Leela Gandhi puts forward a powerful new model of the political: one that finds in friendship a crucial resource for anti-imperialism and transnational collaboration. GMPublications.com

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COVER STORY India Today Cover Story The gift of humanity November 16, 2007
The gift of humanity
THE GIFT OF HUMANITY Communal experience: Auroville, Puducherry

Potters, candle makers and perfumers work in their designated zones; there are information centres and handicraft boutiques; a biosphere is coming up; and the township has a solar kitchen that can feed 10,000 at a time.
Everything is open to everyone and there are no barricades or guards. Auroville is a commune that belongs to no one and yet aims to belong to the whole of humanity.

What was started in the early 1930s as Mother’s—Aurobindo’s disciple Mirra Alfassa—idea of an experiment in human unity, has been realised at Auroville. Commended in 1966 by UNESCO as a project of importance to the future of humanity, the township was inaugurated on February 28 1968.
Today it houses more than 1,700, with more than 600 Indians. Though countless visitors come to Auroville, it does not seek to be a tourist attraction. The idea is to encourage people to stay and participate.

Living in harmony There is an emphasis on research in fields from organic farming to dance and even the study of lights, sound and meditation.
Auroville has proven to the world that an idealistic community—not built around a cult or religion—can not only exist successfully, but also engage with local communities, evolve architecture that has been acclaimed the world over and work towards environmental restoration—the only experiment of its kind in the world! by Nirmala Ravindran

We are thankful that questions were asked

Savitri: the Light of the Supreme Home Mirror of Tomorrow Main Page Previous: About Savitri—Huta’s Prefatory Note Next: The Opening Lines of Savitri—an Account by Nirodbaran
Sri Aurobindo’s Letters Pertaining to The Symbol Dawn
by RY Deshpande on Tue 16 Dec 2008 05:16 AM IST Permanent Link Cosmos

Sri Aurobindo wrote innumerable letters on Savitri during the long period 1930-50. These were essentially written in response to the questions put to him, mostly by Amal Kiran (KD Sethna) and covered a variety of themes. We have here in them good details about the genesis of the poem, it first becoming a tale based on the Mahabharata story and then a symbol and a legend presenting the issue of this mortal creation. There are spiritual aspects in it, and autobiographical revelations of the yogic attainments, and matters pertaining to the early compositions of Savitri, explanations of the new aesthesis and poetic techniques, marking it as the poetry of the future.

It is, as the Mother says, the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo. The epic begins with the most daunting prolegomena, forming at once the most difficult entry-point to enter into its esotericism and spirituality, luminously occult but functionally and structurally most significant. Things that were set into motion in the transcendent have suddenly started rushing into the cosmic and the earthly, in the process of evolutionary growth. No wonder, these descriptions proved not only too mystical but also very cryptic and baffling.

But we are thankful that questions were asked and extremely grateful that Sri Aurobindo spared no effort in elucidating the recondite and the spiritual and the occult as much as the literary, features and characteristics that demand new understanding of the poetry that is there in it. The Mother’s explanation of the Symbol Dawn is a precious gift to us; so also are the letters written by Sri Aurobindo about some passages of it. We present these in the following compilation. RY Deshpande

Sri Aurobindo’s presentation of evolution has its intellectual roots in the Providential theology of Hegel

"Such a Body We Must Create:" New Theses on Integral Micropolitics
Daniel Gustav Anderson
INTEGRAL REVIEW December 2008 Vol. 4, No. 2

12: Hegel (1902) asserts that Providence "manifests" in time in the variable form of historical manifestations (p. 14), where historical manifestations include human consciousness developing according to an a priori plan. Aurobindo Ghose (1949) employs this definition as well: "a pre-determined evolution from inconscience to superconscience, the development of arising order of beings with a culminating transition from the life of the Ignorance to a life in the Knowledge" (p. 742). And also like Hegel, Aurobindo characterizes this evolution as Providential, and worded very carefully in the passive voice to allow a measure of plausible deniability.

"Even in the Inconscient there seems to be at least an urge of inherent necessity producing the evolution of forms and in the forms a developing Consciousness," Aurobindo (1949) posits, "and it may well be held that this urge is the evolutionary will of a secret Conscious Being and its push of progressive manifestation the evidence of an innate intention" (p. 742). Aurobindo’s engagement with Hindu traditions notwithstanding, his presentation of evolution has its intellectual roots in the Providential theology of Hegel. [...]

21: In this essay I classify Gebser as a Hegelian, but it should be understood that Gebser is not precisely a Hegelian in the Providential way Aurobindo seems to be. Gebser does posit a spiritualized (but atemporal) origin, metaphysically real, that manifests through human practice in a near-future new reality, which is taken to proven the reality of said origin. Thus, Gebser assumes the origin he seeks to prove, a tendency Marx diagnoses in Hegelian thinking in the 1844 Manuscripts and Althusser explicates (see Thesis Two)—even in the face of Gebser’s own strong words against Hegel (Gebser, 2004, pp. 41-42). [...]

67: I find the origin of integral theory as an intellectual movement in Aurobindo’s post-Hegelian positivism (Anderson, 2006); Hampson (2007), in a useful counterbalance to my position, cites Gebser’s positivist, post-Hegelian synthetic work as the foundational gesture of integral theory. Both positions have merit, and broadly speaking, do not contradict, insofar as both Aurobindo and Gebser were working from largely the same intellectual milieu the Hegelian and post-Hegelian idealism Wilber (2000a) praises as a "lost opportunity" (pp. 523-537) and in the context of Empire’s transformations. Such is the ambivalence of the post-colonial situation. 5:26 PM