Johnson, Jacobi, James, Jaspers

An American clergyman & philosopher, Samuel Johnson (1696-1772) met Berkeley in Newport, Rhode Island, and they became friends. He later became the first president of Columbia University (1754), and wrote the first philosophical text in America, Elementa Philosophica, published by Benjamin Franklin in 1752, and was dedicated to Berkeley. First and foremost a denominational polemicist, he was opposed to the Calvinistic Puritanism.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819): German philosopher; Among his more intimate friends were Wieland, Hamann, Herder, Lessing, and Goethe. His writings are characterized by poetic fancy and religious sentiment rather than by logical necessity. He held that the understanding can only join and disjoin given facts, without explaining them, and that knowledge deduced in this way is conditioned and relatively unimportant, being always related to a background of existence which forever remains beyond abstract thinking. All demonstrable knowledge, therefore, is relative and conditioned; it does not touch the ultimate nature of things. The faculty by which we grasp ultimate facts is not the understanding, but faith, which Jacobi identified with reason. It was Jacobi who first pointed out the fatal contradiction involved in Kant's application of the category of causality to the Ding an Sich. Jacobi's principal works are the two philosophical novels.

William James (1842–1910) was a pioneering psychologist and philosopher. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism. He provided a wide-ranging account of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and interpreted them according to his pragmatic leanings. Some of the important claims he makes in this regard:

• Religious genius (experience) should be the primary topic in the study of religion, rather than religious institutions--since institutions are merely the social descendant of genius.
• The intense, even pathological varieties of experience (religious or otherwise) should be sought by psychologists, because they represent the closest thing to a microscope of the mind--that is, they show us in drastically enlarged form the normal processes of things.
• In order to usefully interpret the realm of common, shared experience and history, we must each make certain "over-beliefs" in things which, while they cannot be proven on the basis of experience, help us to live fuller and better lives.

The investigation of mystical experience was constant throughout the life of James. He defined truth as that which works in the way of belief. His Theory of Emotion holds that emotion is the mind's perception of physiological conditions that result from some stimulus. Of Philosophy of History he took Carlyle's side, but without Carlyle's one-sided emphasis on the political/military sphere, upon heroes as the founders or over-throwers of states and empires. Wikipedia

Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), German philosopher is one of the originators of existentialism, whose work influenced modern theology and psychiatry as well as philosophy.

• In his first major work, General Psychopathology (1913; trans. 1963), Jaspers criticized the scientific pretensions of psychotherapy as misleading and deterministic.
• Jaspers's major work in three volumes, Philosophy (1932), gives his view of the history of philosophy and introduces his major themes.
• Jaspers identified philosophy with philosophical thinking itself, not with any particular set of conclusions. His philosophy is an effort to explore and describe the margins and limits of experience.
• He used the term das Umgreifende ("the encompassing") to refer to the ultimate limits of being, the indefinite horizon in which all subjective and objective experience is possible, but which can never be rationally apprehended.
• Another important work is Existenzphilosophie (1938; Philosophy and Existence, 1971). The term Existenz designates the indefinable experience of freedom and possibility that constitutes the authentic being of individuals who become aware of the encompassing by confronting such limit-situations as chance, suffering, conflict, guilt, and death.

Jaspers also wrote extensively on the threat to human freedom posed by modern science and modern economic and political institutions. Among his poltical works is The Question of German Guilt (1946; trans. 1947). His correspondence (1926-69), with the German-born American philosopher Hannah Arendt, was published in English in 1992." Courtesy of FunkandWagnalls.com

Reid, Royce, Ryle, Rawls

Thomas Reid (1710-1796), Scottish philosopher, and a contemporary of David Hume, was the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense, and played an integral role in the Scottish Enlightenment. His theory of knowledge had a strong influence on his theory of morals. He thought epistemology was an introductory part to practical ethics: When we are confirmed in our common beliefs by philosophy, all we have to do is to act according to them, because we know what is right. His moral philosophy is reminiscent of the Latin stoicism mediated by the Scholastica, St. Thomas Aquinas and the Christian way of life. He often quotes Cicero, from whom he adopted the term "sensus communis".

Josiah Royce (1855–1916) was an American objective idealist philosopher. His key works include The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885) and The World and the Individual (1900-01).The heart of Royce's idealist philosophy was his contention that the apparently external world has real existence only as known by an ideal Knower, and that this Knower must be actual rather than merely hypothetical. He offered various arguments for this contention in both of the aforementioned key works. He appears never to have repudiated this view even though his later works are largely devoted to exposition of his philosophy of community.

Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976), philosopher, was a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein's insights into language, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine". In The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle admits to having been taken in by the body-mind dualism which permeates Western philosophy, and claims that the idea of Mind as an independent entity, inhabiting and governing the body, should be rejected as redundant piece of literalism carried over from the era before the biological sciences became established. The proper function of Mind-body language, he suggests, is to describe how higher organisms such as humans demonstrate resourcefulness, strategy, the ability to abstract and hypothesize and so on from the evidences of their behaviour.

John Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher and author of A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism, and The Law of Peoples. Rawls made an important and lasting contribution to political philosophy. Rawls's later work focused on the question of stability: could a society ordered by the two principles of justice endure? The political conception of justice that Rawls introduces in Political Liberalism is the view of justice that people with conflicting, but reasonable views, would agree on to regulate the basic structure of society. As such the political conception of justice would be the overlapping consensus about justice. Wikipedia

Savonarola, Tyndale, Servetus, Bruno

Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) Heresy Excommunicated Tortured Execution Rome, Italy: On the 7th of April 1498 an immense throng gathered in the Piazza della Signoria to enjoy the barbarous sight. Two thick banks of combustibles 40 yards long, with a narrow space between, had been erected in front of the palace, and five hundred soldiers kept a wide circle clear of the crowd. Some writers aver that the piles were charged with gunpowder. The Dominicans from one side, the Franciscans from the other, marched in solemn procession to the Loggia dei Lanzi, which had been divided by a hoarding into two separate compartments. The Dominicans were led by Savonarola carrying the host, which he reverently deposited on an altar prepared in his portion of the loggia. The magistrates signalled to the two champions to advance. Fra Domenico stepped forward, but neither Rondinelli nor Fra Francesco appeared. The Franciscans began to urge fantastic objections, and, when Savonarola insisted that his champion should bear the host, they cried out against the sacrilege of exposing the Redeemer's body to the flames. NNDB

William Tyndale (1492-1536) Heresy Execution : Though long an exile from his native land, Tyndale was one of the greatest forces of the English Reformation. His writings show sound scholarship and high literary power, while they helped to shape the thought of the Puritan party in England. His translation of the Bible was so sure and happy that it formed the basis of subsequent renderings, especially that of the authorized King James Version of 1611. Besides the New Testament, the Pentateuch and Jonah, it is believed that he finished in prison the section of the Old Testament extending from Joshua to Chronicles.

Michael Servetus (1511-1553) Execution : Physician and polemic, considerable attention was attracted by his first publication, De Trinitatis erroribus (1531). It is crude, but original and earnest, and shows a wide range of reading very remarkable in so young a man. The religious views of Servetus, marked by strong individuality, are not easily described in terms of current systems. His denial of the tripersonality of the Godhead and the eternity of the Son, along with his anabaptism, made his system abhorrent to Catholics and Protestants alike, in spite of his intense Biblicism, his passionate devotion to the person of Christ, and his Christocentric scheme of the universe.

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) Rome, Italy Excommunicated Execution :To Bruno, as to all great thinkers, philosophy is the search for unity. Amid all the varying and contradictory phenomena of the universe there is something which gives coherence and intelligibility to them. Nor can this unity be something apart from the things; it must contain in itself the universe, which develops from it; it must be at once all and one. This unity is God, the universal substance -- the one and only principle, or causa immanens -- that which is in things and yet is distinct from them as the universal is distinct from the particular. He is the efficient and final cause of all, the beginning, middle, and end, eternal and infinite. By his action the world is produced, and his action is the law of his nature, his necessity is true freedom. He is living, active intelligence, the principle of motion and creation, realizing himself in the infinitely various forms of activity that constitute individual things. To the infinitely actual there is necessary the possible; that which determines involves somewhat in which its determinations can have existence. Brunos writings had been much neglected when Jacobi brought them into notice in his Briefe über die Lehre Spinozas. Since then many have held that Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz were indebted to him for their main principles. So far as Descartes is concerned, it is highly improbable that he had seen any of Bruno's works. Schelling, however, called one of his works after him, Bruno.

Grotius, Gassendi, Geulinex, Gioberti

Hugo Grotius, 1583–1645, Dutch jurist and humanist, supported Oldenbarneveldt against Maurice of Nassau. After Maurice gained power he had Grotius condemned (1619) to prison for life, but Grotius made a daring escape in 1621 and fled to Paris. There, expanding certain views he had earlier recorded but had never published, he wrote De jure belli ac pacis [concerning the law of war and peace] (1625, definitive ed. 1631), usually considered the first definitive text on international law. In it Grotius contended that natural law prescribes rules of conduct for nations as well as for private individuals. He derived much of the specific content of international law from the Bible and from classical history. Although he did not condemn war as an instrument of national policy, he maintained that it was criminal to wage war except for certain causes. Much of his book is an attempt to make the conditions of warfare more humane by inducing respect for private persons and their property. Grotius returned briefly to Holland in 1631, but was forced to flee in 1632. From 1635 to 1645 he represented Sweden at the French court. Although generally regarded as the founder of international law, Grotius was indebted for much of his work to earlier scholars, especially Gentili. Grotius was also a leading student of theology and biblical criticism, and he wrote an authoritative account of contemporary Dutch political affairs. See study by E. Durnbauld (1969).The Columbia Encyclopedia

Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655): There are three strands of Gassendi's philosophy which are quite notable.

• First, he was responsible for making atomism respectable in European intellectual circles of the 17th century. Atomism derived from Greek philosophers, was transmitted and modified by Lucretius and Epicurus. In the Epicurean form atomism was incompatible with Christianity. Gassenid made atomism respectable by modifying it so that it did not conflict with Christianity. Thus, instead of insisting on the eternity of atoms, Gassendi has God create the atoms.
• Connected with his efforts to make atomism respectable was his rejection of Aristotelianism. There was, from the Renaissance on, a revolt against Aristotelian philosophy. Many of the philosophers of the 17th century were part of this revolt. Aristotle had rejected atomism, and this gives Gassendi some reason to reject Aristotle. The conection between Aristotle and the Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, which still dominated the universities in Gassendi's time, provided another reason for philosophers opposed to Scholasticism to reject Aristotelian philosophy.
• The third feature of Gassendi's philosophy is that he advocated a moderate skepticism. This moderate skepticism influenced philosophy perhaps more profoundly than Descartes' attempts to refute skepticism entirely. Captain's Choice Time Line Sources

Arnold Geulincx (1625-1669) {1} developed the ontologism and occasionalism which were latent in the Cartesian separation of mind and matter, and in the Cartesian principle that matter is essentially inert.

• Ontologism. Unless I know how an event happens I am not its cause: quod nescis quomodo fiat, id non facis. Now, I am ignorant of the manner in which a sense-stimulus passes into, or becomes a sensation in, the mind. Therefore I do not cause the sensation. Neither does the body cause it; for the body is essentially inert, unconscious, non-rational. Consequently, the sensation -- and what is true of sensation is true of all knowledge -- is caused by God Himself, the body and the bodily stimulus being merely the occasions of the conscious act.
• Occasionalism. Similarly, I have no consciousness of the manner in which my volitions effect movements of my own body or of external things. It is not I, therefore, who produce these movements, but God, Who by divine decree (instituto quodam decretoque divino) ordained that material things should be the occasions of effects which He alone produces.
• Ethical Doctrines. From these speculative principles Geulinex deduces certain ethical doctrines. He assumes that where I can do nothing I ought not to will anything (ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis). It is my duty, therefore, to renounce the world and all worldly motives of action, to retire within myself and cultivate, in humility and patience, the supreme virtue which is love of God and of reason (amor Dei ac rationis). In this system of conduct the hierarchical idea is not happiness, but duty. Jacques Maritain Center : History of Philosophy / by William Turner

Vincenzo Gioberti (1801-1852): Gioberti's writings are more important than his political career. In the general history of European philosophy they stand apart. As the speculations of Rosmini-Serbati, against which he wrote, have been called the last link added to medieval thought, so the system of Gioberti, known as "Ontologism", more especially in his greater and earlier works, is unrelated to other modern schools of thought. It shows a harmony with the Roman Catholic faith which caused Cousin to declare that "Italian philosophy was still in the bonds of theology", and that Gioberti was no philosopher. Method is with him a synthetic, subjective and psychological instrument. He reconstructs, as he declares, ontology, and begins with the "ideal formula", "the Ens creates ex nihilo the existent." God is the only being (Ens); all other things are merely existences. God is the origin of all human knowledge (called l'idea, thought), which is one and so to say identical with God himself. It is directly beheld (intuited) by reason, but in order to be of use it has to be reflected on, and this by means of language. A knowledge of being and existences (concrete, not abstract) and their mutual relations, is necessary as the beginning of philosophy. Gioberti is in some respects a Platonist. He identifies religion with civilization, and in his treatise Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani arrives at the conclusion that the church is the axis on which the well-being of human life revolves. In it he affirms the idea of the supremacy of Italy, brought about by the restoration of the papacy as a moral dominion, founded on religion and public opinion. In his later works, the Rinnovamento and the Protologia, he is thought by some to have shifted his ground under the influence of events. Exiled 1833 NNDB Copyright ©2005 Soylent Communications

The logic of the Infinite

The limitations of a neat, linear progressive mental approach can be illustrated by contrasting mental logic with spiritual reality, with what Sri Aurobindo terms the logic of the Infinite.

• Mental logic states that the whole is equal to or greater than the sum of its parts. Spiritual logic states that even the smallest part can be greater than the whole because each part is a manifestation of the Infinite. Each finite is itself the whole Infinite.
• Mental logic states that the whole or higher holon is more inclusive and more powerful than the part or lower holon. Spiritual logic states that even the smallest part can change the nature of the whole. Therefore, one Gorbachev can change the whole world.
• Mental logic states that there is a hierarchy from lower to higher planes of consciousness. Spiritual logic states that the highest manifestation occurs in what is now the lowest plane. Matter is the lowest wrung on the ladder of consciousness, but matter divinized becomes the highest.

The limitations of Ken Wilber's approach will be evident not just for those seeking a roadmap for spiritual experience, but even more so for those seeking guidance for the understanding and resolution of life problems. Though he may describe and explain historical trends such as the role of women, the model provides little insight applicable to issues facing humanity—abolition of war and poverty, stagnation in Japan, chaos in Russia, barbarism in Yugoslavia, the future of science, challenges facing business, potentials for Indian development, etc. It fails equally when applied to the life of the individual in family or in work. It fails because it is not a real representation of life or reality but only a mental model. Garry Jacobs

Calvin, Campanella, Condillac, Condorcet

John Calvin (1509-1564) is undoubtedly the greatest of Protestant divines, and perhaps, after St. Augustine, the most perseveringly followed by his disciples of any Western writer on theology. A generation divided him from Luther, whom he never met. By birth, education, and temper these two protagonists of the reforming movement were strongly contrasted. He took a monk's vows, was made a priest and incurred much odium by marrying a nun. Catholic Encyclopedia His most important work involved the organization of church governance and the social organization of the church and the city. He was, in fact, the first major political thinker to model social organization entirely on biblical principles. Calvin created the patterns and thought that would dominate Western culture throughout the modern period. American culture, in particular, is thoroughly Calvinist in some form or another; at the heart of the way Americans think and act, you'll find this fierce and imposing reformer. Richard Hooker

Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) wrote on a wide range of subjects, from Telesian philsophy to political philosophy and astrology. In 1622 he published his Apologia pro Galileo ("Defense of Galileo") in which he defended the Copernican system and the separate paths of Scripture and nature to knowledge of the Creator. He argued that truth about nature is not revealed in Scripture and claimed freedom of thought in philosophical speculation. His writings were influential not because of any scientific discoveries but because of animistic, empirical interpretation of nature. Campanella was a great admirer of Galileo and corresponded with him for many years. In his animistic, Neo-Platonic, astrological approach to nature he was, however, very different from the much more practical Florentine. Sources: Charles B. Schmitt The City of the Sun, by Campanella, was originally written in Italian in 1602, just after he was condemned to life imprisonment for sedition and heresy. This is one of the most important utopias, and may have influenced Bacon's New Atlantis. Alchemy site

Etienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac (1714-1780) was a major but independent figure of Enlightenment France. His first book was subtitled "a supplement to Mr Locke's Essay on Human Understanding", and he has often been depicted as the thinker who brought British Empiricism to France. However, he differed from Locke in several crucial ways.

• First, he claimed that all mental operations could be derived from sensation alone, rejecting reflection as a source of ideas.
• Second, he took Locke's attack on innate ideas a major step further, by denying the existence of any innate faculties. Mental faculties too (e.g. attention and memory) were themselves generated from the occurrence of simple sensations.
• Third, where Locke claimed that the function of language was to communicate ideas which could exist independently of it, Condillac insisted that the function of language was constitutive in their formation.
• This claim culminated in the view that knowledge itself is a well-made language, and that the basic form of a well-made language is algebra, which consists of tautological propositions.

Condillac developed a utility-cum-scarcity theory of value that anticipates the Marginalist Revolution by a century. Condillac's life and thought, or bibliography. F.C.T. Moore

Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and early political scientist who devised the concept of a Condorcet method. Ahead of his time in many respects as an 18th century thinker, he advocated a liberal economy, free and equal public education, constitutional justice, and equal rights for women and people of all races. His ideas and writings embodied the ideals of the Enlightenment and rationalism, and remain influential to this day. WikipediaWhen the French Revolution broke out Condorcet championed the liberal cause. He was elected as the Paris representative in the Legislative Assembly and he became the secretary of the Assembly. He drew up plans for a state education system which were adopted. Condorcet went into hiding and wrote a very interesting philosophical work Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (1795). He was arrested and imprisoned on 27 March 1794. Two days later he was found dead in his prison cell. J J O'Connor and E F Robertson

Mirandola, Malebranche, Mandeville, Mendelssohn

If there is such a thing as a "manifesto" of the Italian Renaissance, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494)'s "Oration on the Dignity of Man" is it; no other work more forcefully, eloquently, or thoroughly remaps the human landscape to center all attention on human capacity and the human perspective. Pico himself had a massive intellect and literally studied everything there was to be studied in the university curriculum of the Renaissance; the "Oration" in part is meant to be a preface to a massive compendium of all the intellectual achievements of humanity, a compendium that never appeared because of Pico's early death. Pico was a both a Neoplatonist and a humanist; in fact, Pico is one of the most read of the Renaissance philosophers because his work synthesizes all the strains of Renaissance and late medieval thinking: Neoplatonism, humanism, Aristoteleanism, Averroism (a form of Aristoteleanism), and mysticism. ©1996, Richard Hooker

Nicholas Malebranche (1638-1715)'s most important work, The Search After Truth, was Cartesian in inspiration and asserted views connected with the mechanical philosophy including the rejection of Scholastic apparatus of substantial forms, real qualities and powers in favor of the doctrine that the behavior of bodies must be explained by the configuration and movement of their parts and the claim that there is nothing in bodies like our ideas of color, taste and smell. Malebranche agreed with Descartes that awareness of mental states is immediate and infallible, perception of bodies is indirect and fallible, and that knowledge of things comes from clear and distinct ideas grasped by reason, and not by sensation or imagination. Malebranche also maintained some specifically Cartesian metaphysical doctrines such as the definition of matter as extension, that animals are machines, and that man has a soul really distinct from his body. Among Malebranche's most distinctive and original views are:

• the doctrine that we have knowledge of extended things only because we "see all things in God";
• that God alone is the true cause of all events, and
• that God, as the good in general, is the only intrinsically lovable being.

In his Fable of the Bees, subtitled "private vices, publick benefits", Bernard de Mandeville, (1670-1733) recounts how evil vices such as luxury, greed, envy, etc., all lead to public benefits by encouraging enterprise. Although apparently often treated as a defense of laissez- faire - "Thus every Part was full of Vice/Yet the whole Mass a Paradice" - the Fable can also be seen as a presentation of early underconsumption theory. Anticipating Keynes's paradox of thrift, Mandeville argued that the "moral" activity of saving was actually the cause of recessions whereas luxurious consumption (a "vice") was a stimulus. Indeed, Mandeville argued for government intervention, including the Mercantilist policy of protection to promote internal consumption. Thus "private Vices by the dextrous Management of a skilled Politician may be turned into publick benefits." History of Economic Thought Website

Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) modeled his philosophy after that of Christian Wolff (a prominent philosopher of the Enlightenment) and Gottfried Leibnitz (a European rationalist). He wrote some general philosophical works, including many dealing with the theory of art, but his most well known writings deal with Judaism. Mendelssohn conceived of God as a perfect Being and had faith in God’s wisdom, righteousness, mercy and goodness. He argued that, "the world results from a creative act through which the divine will seeks to realize the highest good." He accepted the existence of miracles and revelation as long as belief in God did not depend on them. He also believed that revelation could not contradict reason. Like the deists, he claimed that reason could discover the reality of God, divine providence and immortality of the soul. He was the first to speak out against the use of excommunication as a religious threat. He recognized the necessity of multiple religions and respected each one. By Shira Schoenberg

Social origin of religion

The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, the last major work published by Durkheim, five years before his death in 1917, is generally regarded as his best and most mature. Durkheim set out to do two things,

• establish the fact that religion was not divinely or supernaturally inspired and was in fact a product of society, and
• he sought to identify the common things that religion placed an emphasis upon, as well as what effects those religious beliefs (the product of social life) had on the lives of all within a society.

Recognizing the social origin of religion, Durkheim argued that religion acted as a source of solidarity and identification for the individuals within a society, especially as a part of mechanical solidarity systems, and to a lesser, but still important extent in the context of organic solidarity. Religion provided a meaning for life, it provided authority figures, and most importantly for Durkheim, it reinforced the morals and social norms held collectively by all within a society. Far from dismissing religion as mere fantasy, despite its natural origin, Durkheim saw it as a critical part of the social system. Religion provides social control, cohesion, and purpose for people, as well as another means of communication and gathering for individuals to interact and reaffirm social norms.

Durkheim's second purpose was in identifying certain elements of religious beliefs that are common across different cultures. A belief in a supernatural realm is not necessary or common among religions, but the separation of different aspects of life, physical things, and certain behaviors into two categories -- the sacred and the profane -- is common. Objects and behaviors deemed sacred were considered part of the spiritual or religious realm. They were part of rites, objects of reverance, or simply behaviors deemed special by religious belief. Those things deemed profane were everything else in the world that did not have a religious function or hold religious meaning. But while these two categories are rigidly defined and set apart, they interact with one another and depend on each other for survival.

The sacred world cannot survive without the profane world to support it and give it life, and vice versa. In general, those aspects of social life given moral superiority or reveance are considered sacred, and all other aspects are part of the profane. For example, the Catholic church respects the crucifix and the behaviors and actions performed during mass as sacred, while other behaviors and objects are not. While Native American societies differed greatly in the details, those religions also held certain objects and behavior sacred, such as certain animals and the rituals and rites performed by the shaman. This division of things into two separate but interacting spheres is common among all religions. Sources: Bellah, Robert N. 1973. Emile Durkheim: On Morality and Society, Selected Writings. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Thompson, Kenneth. 1982. Emile Durkheim. London: Tavistock Publications.

Suicide

Suicide, Durkheim's third major work, is of great importance because it is his first serious effort to establish an empericism in sociology. He proposed four types of suicide, based on the degrees of imbalance of two social forces: social integration and moral regulation.

• Egoisitic suicide resulted from too little social integration. Those individuals who were not sufficiently bound to social groups (and therefore well-defined values, traditions, norms, and goals) were left with little social support or guidance, and therefore tended to commit suicide on an increased basis. An example Durkheim discovered was that of unmarried people, particularly males, who, with less to bind and connect them to stable social norms and goals, committed suicide at higher rates than unmarried people.
• The second type, Altruistic suicide, was a result of too much integration. It occurred at the opposite end of the integration scale as egoistic suicide. Self sacrifice was the defining trait, where individuals were so integrated into social groups that they lost sight of their individuality and became willing to sacrifice themselves to the group's interests, even if that sacrifice was their own life. The most common cases of altruistic suicide occurred among members of the military.
• On the second scale, that of moral regulation, lies the other two forms of suicide, the first of which is Anomic suicide, located on the low end. Anomic suicide was of particular interest to Durkheim, for he divided it into four categories: acute and chronic economic anomie, and acute and chronic domestic anomie. Each involved an imbalance of means and needs, where means were unable to fulfill needs.
• The final type of suicide is Fatalistic suicide, "at the high extreme of the regulation continuum" (1982, p. 113). This type Durkheim only briefly describes, seeing it as a rare phenomena in the real world. Examples include those with overregulated, unrewarding lives such as slaves, childless married women, and young husbands. Durkheim never specifies why this type is generally unimportant in his study.

Durkheim felt that his empirical study of suicide had discovered the structural forces that caused anomie and egoism, and these forces were natural results of the decline of mechanical solidarity and the slow rise of organic solidarity due to the division of labor and industrialism. Sources: Thompson, Kenneth. 1982. Emile Durkheim. London: Tavistock Publications.

Kant, Kierkegaard, Schweitzer, Sri Aurobindo

Western Theology and Indian Mysticism
By Dr. HARIDAS CHAUDHURI

Cultural Integration Fellowship

In the view of Soren Kierkegaard, "the immediate relationship to God is paganism, and only after the breach has taken place can there be any question of a true God-relationship". In other words, paganism consists in man's immediate relationship to God while living the immediate life of nature. True spiritual life begins with a breach with immediacy through the development of the ethical. God is pure Spirit, and therefore radically different from Nature.

Albert Schweitzer agrees with Indian mysticism that the ultimate goal of man--his spiritual destiny--lies in immediate union with the infinite and eternal Being. But in his view, basically a Christian theologian that he is, this ultimate goal must be achieved not through knowledge and renunciation but through faith and ethical action. Like Immanuel Kant, Schweitzer finds it necessary to demolish knowledge in order to make room for faith.

Integral Philosophy as the Dissolvent of all Dichotomies: The outstanding merit of integral philosophy based upon Sri Aurobindo's masterly interpretation of Vedas, Upanishads, and Bhagavadgita is that the dichotomies of knowledge and faith, mysticism and ethics, world-and-life affirmation and world-life negation are dissolved in the integral consciousness of Being. History Philosophy Main Tenets Location About CIF 50th Anniversary Program Listing Special Events Bookstore Membership

Laura, Beatrice, Regina, Sylvia

Laura was the love of Petrarch's life. For her he perfected the sonnet and wrote the Canzoniere. Who Laura was and even if she really existed is a bit of a mystery. It has often been believed that the name "Laura" was a play on the name "laurel" the leaves which Petrarch was honoured with for being the poet laureate. However, there is a lot of evidence to show that Laura really did exist and that she was Laure de Noves. Falling in love at first sight, Petrarch (1304-1374) would be haunted by her beauty for the rest of his life. Already being married she would turn down all advanced he made toward her. Although he wrote the Canzoniere, a series of poems mostly about Laura and his love for her, she is absent from even being mentioned in his letters. If she was real, it is unknown if they ever spoke, or if she ever knew of his feelings for her.

Already Dante (1265-1321) had written his first book, the "Vita Nuova", or "New Life", an exquisite medley of lyrical verse and poetic prose, telling the story of his love for Beatrice, whom he had first seen at the end of his ninth year. Beatrice, who was probably the daughter of Folco Portinari, and wife of Simone de' Bardi, died in June, 1290, and the "Vita Nuova" was completed about the year 1294. Dante's love for her was purely spiritual and mystical, the amor amicitiae defined by St. Thomas Aquinas: "That which is loved in love of friendship is loved simply and for its own sake". The book is dedicated to the Florentine poet, Guido Cavalcanti, whom Dante calls "the first of my friends", and ends with the promise of writing concerning Beatrice "what has never before been written of any woman". The "Divina Commedia" is an allegory of human life. Beatrice, representing Divine philosophy illuminated by revelation, leads him thence, up through the nine moving heavens of intellectual preparation, into the true paradise, the spaceless and timeless empyrean, in which the blessedness of eternal life is found in the fruition of the sight of God.

Regina Olsen, The Sacrifice of Love: In 1840, just before he enrolled at the Pastoral Seminary, Kierkegaard became engaged to Regina Olsen. This engagement was to form the basis of a great literary love story, propagated by Kierkegaard through his published writings and his journals. It also provided an occasion for Kierkegaard to define himself further as an outsider. But when it came to the crunch, it seemed sufficient to make him break off the engagement . Thereafter, Kierkegaard frequently used marriage as a trope for "the universal" - especially for the universal demands made by social mores. Correlatively, becoming an "exception" was both a task and constantly in need of justification. The tortuous dialectic of universal and exception, worked out in terms of the sacrifices of love, subsequently informs much of Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, Prefaces, and Stages on Life’s Way. A frequent foil for the trope of marriage as the universal is the figure of a young man "poeticized" by a broken engagement, who thereby becomes "an exception."

As Philip Kemp points out, there has been some debate as to how "unfinished" the forty-odd minutes of Partie de Campagne actually are. Certainly the original intention on Renoir's part was to adapt Maupassant's original short story into a short feature film no longer than sixty minutes, with one of the main impetuses being the opportunity to work again with the 24-year-old Sylvia Bataille (at the time wife of Georges Bataille, future wife of Jacques Lacan) who had made such an impression in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936). (That aspect of the film is a total success, as Bataille's performance is simply luminous.) By Ian Johnston

Goethe, Schiller, Schelling

Goethe and Schiller differed in temperament and intellectual attitudes, approaching common issues from quite distant poles. As the older poet later recalled, "Schiller preached the gospel of freedom; I wanted to preserve the rights of nature." This simple, but trenchant, characterization crystallized several facets of their intellectual differences:

Schiller displayed a kind of religious fervor, Goethe a cooler, almost legal demeanor; Schiller emphasized the creative freedom of the artist, Goethe the constraints imposed by nature; Schiller looked inward, Goethe outward; Schiller was a Kantian idealist, Goethe—initially at least—a Spinozistic realist. But as their friendship matured, their ideas and attitudes began to migrate toward more common ground.

Goethe explained to Schiller why he was so engaged with Schelling's ideas: "since one cannot escape considerations of nature and art, it is of the greatest urgency that I come to know this dominant and powerful mode of thought." This "dominant and powerful mode of thought" solved for Goethe several deep problems concerning nature and art about which he constantly worried.

Robert J. Richards
The University of Chicago

Boethius, Baumgarten, Berdyaev, Buber

Boethius (c.480-c.525 CE) was philosopher, poet, politician, and (perhaps) martyr. His Consolation of Philosophy was unremarked in its own time and a late-blooming best-seller three hundred years later. Its vogue lasted most of a thousand years. Boethius was one of the main sources of material for the quadrivium, an educational course introduced into monasteries consisting of four topics: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and the theory of music. On this last topic Boethius wrote on the relation of music to science, suggesting that the pitch of a note one hears is related to the frequency of sound. He embarked on an ambitious project to translate and write commentaries on all the works of both Plato and Aristotle but he died before he could translate Plato's work and fulfil his aim of harmonising the two philosophies. He did, however, make Latin translations of Aristotle's Categories and De interpretatione and of Porphyry's Isagoge with two commentaries, which were widely used throughout the Middle Ages. Up to the 12th century his writings and translations were the main works on logic in Europe.

Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb (1714-1762) was a disciple of Leibnitz and Wolff, and was particularly distinguished as having been the first to establish the Theory of the Beautiful as an independent science. Baumgarten did good service in severing aesthetics (q.v.) from the other philosophic disciplines, and in marking out a definite object for its researches. The very name (Aesthetics), which Baumgarten was the first to use, indicates the imperfect and partial nature of his analysis, pointing as it does to an element so variable as feeling or sensation as the ultimate ground of judgment in questions pertaining to beauty. It is important to notice that Baumgartens first work preceded those of Burke, Diderot, and P. Andr, and that Kant had a great admiration for him.

Berdyaev, Nicholas, 1874–1948, Russian theologian and religious philosopher. After an early period as a Marxist, Berdyaev became prominent in a brilliant circle of Russian intellectuals famous in their time for their interest in Russian Orthodoxy. Forced into exile in 1922, Berdyaev attracted similar circles in Berlin and Paris. He wrote prolifically and gained wide recognition. He decried the dehumanization of man by modern technology and believed that man fulfills himself in the free, creative act. Fond of dichotomies, Berdyaev discussed history in terms of eschatology and the human in terms of the divine. He believed in the ideal of the Godmanhood. Among his many works are The End of Our Time (tr. 1933); The Destiny of Man (tr. 1937); Slavery and Freedom (tr. 1944); Dream and Reality: an Essay in Autobiography (tr. 1950); Truth and Revelation (tr. 1953). His philosophy has been chrarcterized as "Christian existentialist". He was proccupied with creativity and in particular freedom from anything that inhibited said creativity, whence his opposition against a "collectivized and mechanized society".

The work of the prolific essayist, translator, and editor Martin Buber (1878-1965) is predominantly dedicated to three areas:

• the philosophical articulation of the dialogic principle (das dialogische Prinzip),
• the revival of religious consciousness among the Jews (by means of the literary retelling of Hasidic tales and an innovative German translation of the Bible), and to
• the realization of this consciousness through the Zionist movement.

A man of considerable organizational talent, Buber shunned responsibility for the nascent political institutions of Zionism. Instead, he attempted to transform the Zionist movement by articulating what he saw as its unique historic mission: the realization of a Hebraic humanism (Grete Schaeder). His advocacy of a binational solution to the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine is widely considered to be an indication of the political utopianism Buber developed together with his friend Gustav Landauer, an aesthetic politics shaped in the anarchist and religious socialist movements of the first two decades of the twentieth century. Buber's best known work is the short philosophical essay Ich und Du (1923), first translated into English in 1937. I and Thou is considered to have inaugurated “a Copernican revolution in theology."

Gurdjieff and Ouspensky

Churning Opposing Thoughts

K R HARISH THE TIMES OF INDIA

Man, says Gurdjieff, is actually a machine because each of his actions, thoughts and feelings are passive and mechanical responses to stimuli. Life forces, however, can be used to wake him up. Every phenomenon in the universe is inevitably the manifestation of three forces — an active force, a resistance to that force and then a third force that is the neutralising force, perhaps emerging from the struggle between the active and the resisting force. In the Hindu myth of the churning of the ocean, the opposing forces of the devas and asuras churn the milky ocean (manthan) and something new, the nectar, emerges. So the starting point is to take any of life's forces — say one of our numerous habits, physical, intellectual or emotional — and attempt to stand against its demands. Then an internal churning happens between the force of the habit and the resistance of it and something new emerges: A new kind of awareness, consciousness, a hint of objective will. And we have so many habits to pick from. For example, take the common habit of constantly justifying ourselves. Try watching yourself each time you are placed in a situation that makes you justify yourself and resist the urge to justify. You will experience a kind of inner transformation, a touch of something higher than the petty call of ego. The secret of alchemy is the struggle between forces that convert lead into gold.

Urban life conditions provide a rich source of opportunity for awakening. Talking, for example, is a mechanical activity. Rarely do we speak consciously. It is difficult for us to control our speech. Take lying as another example. Refusing to lie, we will again see how difficult it is for us not to lie. Lies for coming late to work or for forgetting to return a call. Unpeeling one more mask is what Gurdjieff calls voluntary suffering. Expressing negative emotions is another favourite mechanical habit. We complain about even the weather, as though the weather was meant to be arranged for our personal comfort. Or take self-justification and try the experiment of refusing to self-justify even for a few hours and you will discover a new truth about yourself. The refreshing element of Gurdjieff's method is both the spirit of experimentation and verifying the truth by oneself, in true rational and scientific spirit and as in the highest tradition of the spiritual through direct perception. His teachings are for living in ordinary day-to-day life; a balance between the outer world of relationships-jobs-security with an inner life of clear seeing, lucid presence and sensitivity.

The Fellowship of Friends , The Fourth Way Tradition

and Principles of the Fourth Way , Suggested Reading

New Race

A Journal of Integral Studies

New Race - a name selected by the Mother - is a journal that seeks to promote Sri Aurobindo's vision of the future in the context of other insights and their relevance to the present day world. It maintains that Truth is a common human heritage and therefore eschews all parochial, fundamentalist and sectarian approaches. It fosters the primacy of individual freedom, social harmony and human unity. Above all, it stands for the progressive spiritualisation of mankind - a spirituality that subsumes and does not negate Matter and material life.

Sri Aurobindo Darshan : The University of Tomorrow is an online teaching facility offering higher education equivalent programmes dedicated to the ideals and vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Here, learners from all over the world can devote themselves to the knowledge of the truth of tomorrow, following Certificate, M.A. and Ph.D. equivalent programmes of study. The University seeks to consecrate itself to the discovery and practice of the fundamental principles of a new society that embodies and expresses a new consciousness. It has drawn together scholars throughout the world to facilitate its programmes and to guide learners and scholars in their study, research, and creative work related to these ideals.

The founder of the University, Professor V. Madhusudhan Reddy, had written out five objectives for this visionary project:

• 1. Sri Aurobindo Darshan: The University of Tomorrow will be our homage of aspiration and service, of love and consecration to Sri Aurobindo’s sublime vision of the Future.
• 2. wants to be an international center of education with a soul.
• 3. will be a place for true and living education, of endless search for Truth and its progressive manifestation and creative expression.
• 4. will be a place of integral and future studies where seekers from all parts of the world can devote themselves wholly to the knowledge of the Truth of Tomorrow.
• 5. wants to consecrate itself faithfully and completely to the discovery and practice of the fundamental principles of a New Society embodying and expressing the New Consciousness.

Sri Aurobindo Darshan: The University of Tomorrow, is a project of the Sri Aurobindo Centre of Advanced Research (S.A.C.A.R.), located in Pondicherry, India. S.A.C.A.R. is a Charitable Trust sponsored by the Institute of Human Study (I.H.S.), Hyderabad. Its objective is intensive research into human issues: social, cultural, and psychological, from a spiritual perspective, to find new paradigms that can help solve problems in these areas.

Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann

Abandoning his early adherence to idealism, Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950), propounded instead a philosophical realism based on the intelligibility of being. For Hartmann, ontology was the source of philosophy. He saw philosophy's mission as the statement of the problems of being and the unraveling of the irrational and the puzzling. Although a nontheistic humanist, he posited three levels of the spirit, which he considered to be a process rather than a substance.

He held the world to be a unity, but said that one would not be justified in calling that unity God. In his Ethik (1926, tr., 3 vol., 1932), he sought to develop a system of values from the ethics of Max Scheler; Hartmann's ethics, like Scheler's, are distinctive in their treatment of the freedom of the will. Hartmann argued that there exist objective values that we can intuit and use as guides for action. Encyclopedia

Teilhard de Chardin, Nicolai Hartmann and the Role of Freedom: Nicolai Hartmann was a contemporary of Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Both men were phenomenologists, that is, they sought to understand and describe the phenomena which they encountered. Their perspectives on the world, however, were quite different. Both studied mankind, but while Teilhard sought to situate mankind within the broad sweep of cosmogenesis - the evolution of the cosmos from its initiation - and from a religious perspective, Hartmann studied mankind at much closer quarters and from an atheistic perspective. Despite this bias, Hartmann focussed particularly on understanding man's spiritual nature. Sydney Hook, the philosopher who reviewed Hartmann's 'Ethics', recognised Hartmann as the greatest analyst, since Aristotle, of the ideals by which men live, and for which they live. (Stanton Coit, 1932,11) Dr. Anthony Kelly, Quodlibet Journal: Volume 2 Number 1, January 2000

Dooyeweerd and Nicolai Hartmann

With his brother-in-law, Vollenhoven, Dooyeweerd studied Nicolai Hartmann's writings in the early 1920s. Both Dooyeweerd and Hartmann were influenced by both neo-Kantianism and phenomenology and Hartmann's notion of strata is probably the nearest that any other thinker has come to Dooyeweerd's aspects - though it seems they arrived at their ideas independently since Dooyeweerd claimed his idea of aspects was not influenced by Hartmann and that Dooyeweerd did not read Hartmann's Neue Wege der Ontologie [New Ways on Ontology], in which Hartmann elaborated his notion of strata, until after his own Wijtbegeerte der Wetsidee.

In his 'new ontology', Hartmann investigated 'levels' or 'strata' of being in a sophisticated manner, not only positing distinct categories as a host of thinkers have done, but discussing the relationship between them. Harmann's strata bear a marked resemblance to Dooyeweerd's aspects, in being irreducible to each other. He used the metaphor of rungs of a ladder for these different strata. A useful comparison between the two notions is given by Seerveld [1985].

Hartmann talked about many pairs of categories that pervade all strata - unity and multiplicity, inner and outer, identity and difference, form and material, concord and discord are mentioned by Seerveld. This is not unlike Dooyeweerd's notion that each aspect contains echoes of the others, with the pairs cited being, respectively, of the quantitative, spatial, analytic, formative and aesthetic aspects. It seems that Hartmann's dualities simply had to be taken on trust whereas to Dooyeweerd they can be accounted for as aspectual echoes.

While Hartmann proposed only four or five strata, Dooyeweerd proposed fifteen aspects. A more radical way in which Dooyeweerd went further was to suggest that the aspects are spheres of law that enable functioning, enable existence, provide different ways of knowing and also provide norms. That aspects are law-spheres is Dooyeweerd's special 'insight' that makes his theory so valuable and shows how a full philosophy oriented towards Meaning can be possible.

The two sources of morality and religion

According to Bergson, obligations, that is, customs, arise because of the natural need an individual has for the stability that a society can give. As a result of this natural need, society inculcates habits of obedience in the individual. Habituation means that obedience to the whole of obligation is, in fact, for the individual, effortless. The psychological error then consists in externalizing an exceptional experience – which Bergson calls “resistance to the resistances” – into a moral theory. Duty becomes severe and inflexible. But there is more to this error. Kant believes that he can resolve obligation into rational elements. In the experience of resistance to the resistances, the individual has an illicit desire. And, since the individual is intelligent, the individual uses intelligence, a rational method, to act on itself.

According to Bergson, what is happening here is that the rational method is merely restoring the force of the original tendency to obey the whole of obligation that society has inculcated in the individual. But as Bergson notes, the tendency is one thing; the rational method is another. The success of the rational method, however, gives us the illusion that the force with which an individual obeys any particular obligation comes from reason, that is, from the idea or representation, or better still, from the formula of the obligation.

But, there is another force. The second force is what Bergson calls “the impetus of love” (The Two Sources, p. 96). The impetus of love, like joy but also like sympathy, is a creative emotion. The emotion must be explicated into actions and representations. But, this process of explication can be extended. The representations that the mystic explicates can be further explicated into formulas, for example, the formula of each person being deserving of respect and dignity. These formulas, which are the expression of creation and love, are now able to be mixed with the formulas that aim solely to insure the stability of any given society.

Since we are now speaking only of formulas, creation and cohesion, the two forces, are mixed together in reason. As before, whereas the rational method used in the experience of resistance to the resistances comes to explain the force of obedience, here in the mystical experience of the impetus of love the formulas come to explain the force of creation. A reversal has taken place. The very forces that have generated the formulas are instead now being explained by those very formulas. Indeed, this is the problem. How could some representation of intelligence have the power to train the will? How could an idea categorically demand its own realization? As Bergson says, “Re-establish the duality [of forces], the difficulties vanish” (The Two Sources, p. 96). The two forces are, however, but two complementary manifestations of life. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

We are all wounded

Integral psychotherapy, Brant Cortright

Consciousness and Its Transformation, Cornelissen, Matthijs (Ed.) (2001), SAICE

SRI AUROBINDO CENTRE FOR CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES

In some ways I think of Sri Aurobindo as the greatest psychologist the world has ever known, for he penetrated the mystery of human consciousness more deeply than any other person I am aware of. In so doing he has laid out some exciting discoveries for psychology that only now are we in a position to appreciate. When we bring psychology and depth psychotherapy into these teachings, we have integral psychology and integral psychotherapy.

One of the most important discoveries that depth psychology has made about the vital self is the universality of emotional wounding. To take a human incarnation on this earth is to be emotionally hurt and scarred growing up. We are all wounded. And the human psyche protects itself by developing defences against this emotional pain. In our family of origin there are failures to attune to the emotional state of the infant and young child, there are accidents, there are traumas, there is inevitable emotional pain growing up. The child internalizes the parental prohibitions and develops a coping strategy that pleases the family system, but in so doing adopts a false self that is estranged from the authentic self that lies buried within. Large portions of the self become unconscious, large areas of feeling and impulse become unconscious, and we dissociate from the body when we repress feelings, so areas of our physical being also fade out of consciousness.

As psychology learned more about the ubiquity of wounding, now we have psychotic, borderline, and normal neurotic. Neurosis is the norm. A few per cent of the population is psychotic or borderline, and 90-95% of the population is neurotic. Though neurosis is often seen in a negative way, it is actually a very positive thing, a significant developmental achievement. With neurosis we get to a much better way of functioning in the world. In neurosis we have a fairly stable sense of self that has good and bad aspects to it. We also have the capacity to operate from the reality principle, which is to be able to delay gratification in the present for the sake of greater reward in the future, to discipline ourselves, to set our sights on a goal and work to achieve it. Neurosis allows us to operate at quite a high level of functioning.

However, as you are all aware, neurosis also has some major drawbacks. Neurosis is a contracted state of defensive functioning. In neurosis we lose awareness of many of our feelings and impulses, large portions of the self become unconscious, there are deficits in the structure of the self, we lose awareness of significant parts of our physical existence, we become tied to repetitive patterns in our relationships, and the self’s natural growth process is blocked.

Spiritual practice can become a new form of repression when we take spiritual ideals and try to enforce them on our self. There are many people who are drawn to spirituality with the hope they can just transcend their psychological issues and use spiritual practice as a way to avoid their psychological work. But what happens of course is that we all take our psychological baggage with us. It’s hard to get around our psychology. We go beyond by going through.

Neurosis is avoidance, an escape from reality, a defence against what is. All of us have this split within us, one part that seeks reality, truth, while the other part is an escapist, trying to avoid reality with our defences and unconscious blocking. Until we resolve this split within ourselves psychologically, we will carry it into everything we do. Since spiritual work will not dismantle our psychological defences, unless we have some way of working psychologically with this it can easily undermine our practice.

Phenomenology

Between Essentialism and Transcendental Philosophy

J.N. Mohanty

J.N. Mohanty is one of America's leading interpreters of Husserl's phenomenology and the phenomenological movement for which Husserl's work was the impetus. This collection of essays traces the themes of essentialism and transcendentalism as they have appeared in the development of phenomenology from Husserl to Derrida. Beginning with Husserl's major phenomenological themes--essence, meaning, transcendental subjectivity, and life-world--Mohanty examines the tensions within phenomenology in general and within Husserl's phenomenology in particular. The accessibility of these essays, coupled with Mohanty's consideration of lesser-known phenomenologists (Ingarden, Scheler, Hartmann, et. al.) mark this as a major updating of phenomenology for a contemporary audience. Northwestern University Press, June 1997

Achieve! Arise! Conquer!

As psychologist Adler saw it, “Achieve! Arise! Conquer! Whatever name we give it, we shall always find in human beings this great line of activity – this struggle to rise from an inferior to a superior position, from defeat to victory, from below to above.” (Quoted by Heinz L. Ansbacher and R. Rowena in The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler.) This human trait could lead him far indeed when utilized for the progress of knowledge, of consciousness. But the state of ignorance we are in perverts it. Camus put forth this perversion pointedly: “We can't do without dominating others or being served… The essential thing, in sum, is being able to get angry without the other person being able to answer back.” (The Fall)

The hungry little imp of tyranny concealed in most human beings is anxious to exert itself – and a dictatorial position provides him with the luxury in its complete bloom. But to ascend to power in the one of the several normal ways and then to capture it craftily and to possess it for life is not easy. No wonder that the tyrant in a man should burst forth in an opportune moment, when anarchy rules the roost, when a harangue or two can yield what it ordinarily should take a decade or two to achieve. But just as the ephemeral mob-leader is born out of the crowd's readiness to submit its collective impulse to him, the dictator is born out of a population's readiness to be supplicant to him. As an apology for their cowardice and their inability to challenge him, the people imagine superhuman powers in him and the dictator takes recourse to everything that comes handy, ranging from demagogy to the worst of crimes, to fit into the popular imagination. “Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers from which they dare not dismount,” wrote Churchill in While England Slept (acknowledging the Indian origin of the proverb).

Ancient Indian sages tried to check this weakness in people who were in power, through moral, ethical and philosophical education, by cautioning the princes, nobles and executives about the consequences of their Karma. It seems to have had a sobering effect on many. Sometimes it cultivated an ascetic mood in the ruler. He renounced his authority or lost interest in it, his attention going over to other-worldly values. That, certainly, was not the ideal solution to the problem. The ideal – to act with authority but without falling a victim to one's ego remained a far cry, possible only at long intervals of time.

But there are examples of a leader's total commitment to the ideal of democracy checking him from hugging his status as a dictator once a crisis was over. A kind of democracy was in vogue in the city-state of Rome when it was attacked by a neighbourhood enemy, in the 5th century B.C. When the unprepared Romans had lost all hopes of surviving the attack, some of them ran to a wise farmer named Cincinnatus, busy tilling his land. He was made the dictator. He asked all the able-bodied Romans to gather at one place, each one bringing with him as simple a thing as a wooden plank. At the dead of night they made a ring around the enemy camp, each one planting his plank in front of himself. In the morning the enemy found itself practically imprisoned inside a wooden fortification. It surrendered. Cincinnatus, his commission done, made a beeline for his land and resumed driving his plough, turning down his countrymen's offer of a life-long dictatorship.

Can the tyrant in us be tamed by such idealism? To a great extent it can be, provided the idealism is cultivated. True democracy can perhaps be possible only when man has realized his equality with fellow beings at a spiritual plane. Until then the danger of despotism and tyranny have to be warded off with 'eternal vigilance', for despotism will not disappear with the disappearance of the pronounced despot alone; tyranny is not the monopoly of only the branded tyrant. by: Manoj Das on Jan 12 2005 12:00AM in Religion SULEKHA

Theory and Praxis

Curriculum, Culture and English Studies
Edited by: Prafulla C. Kar, Kailash C. Baral, Sura P. Rath, ISBN: 81-85753-55-5, Year of Pub: 2004, Price: Rs.495.00, Description: This volume of selected papers from the Journal of Contemporary Thought of the Forum on Contemporary Theory of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda commemorates the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Journal (1991-2000).

The papers are organized around the topic of the discipline of English studies : its history, institutional context, transformation, and pedagogical and curricular imperative. As the discipline is situated within a complex context of intersections of several attitudes and ideologies involving the intricate processes of knowledge-formation in both colonial and postcolonial settings, the essays included in the volume both address specific questions about English studies and broad questions about English studies and board questions about the social and political ideologies and its ongoing debate regarding its curricular and pedagogical imperatives. The volume will provide a useful resources to both literary scholars and scholars from the sister disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Contributors: Fred Dallmayr, Barbara Godard, Hiren Gohain, Stephen Greenblatt, Jaime Harker, Kalidas Misra, John Sumanth Muthyala, Promod K. Nayar, Anna Neill, Robert Newman, Sura P. Rath, Steven R. Shelburne, S. Viswanathan, et al.

Rectitude

Pursuing incessantly the cause radical
Offering realism a critical stance
Hoping to transcend the dialectic triad
Reason was the helper, reason is the bar.

Appearance and Reality, Truth and Method
Process and Reality, Time and Eternity
Being and Nothingness, Being and Time
Visible and Invisible, Time and Narrative.

Experience and Judgement, Sense and Non-sense
Conjectures and Refutations, Freedom and Limit
Difference and Repetition, Critique and Clinic
Humanism and Terror, Discipline and Punish.

Identity and Difference, Ethics and Infinity
Matter and Memory, Totality and Infinity
Eros and Civilization, Ideology and Utopia
Reason and Revolution, Totem and Taboo.

Blindness and Insight, Criticism and Crisis
The Raw and the Cooked, Theory and Praxis
Speech and Phenomena, Models and Metaphors
Holism and Evolution, Toys and Reasons.

Violence and the Sacred, Myth and Terror
Madness and Civilization, Art and Illusion
Motivation and Personality, Love and Will
Realism and Reason, Surrender and Catch.

[Wed-XX01] posted by Tusar N Mohapatra @ 11:48 PM