Yogic Disciplines: Buddhism, Jainism, and Vedanta

A lecture by Christopher Key Chapple:

God and the Organism: A Dialogue with John Protevi

John Protevi is one of the most stimulating cross-paradimatic philosophers working today. His profound exploration of the possible intersections between Deleuze, cognitive science and dynamical systems theories is a powerful example of how empirical research and speculative philosophy can fit together to illuminate the complexly of human existence on this planet. His book Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (2009) is one of my all-time favourites. Learn more about John's work at his website: here      

From Christopher Long's Digital Dialogue series:

 

Digital Dialogue 56: God and the Organism from Christopher Long on Vimeo.

Description: John Protevi, Phyllis M. Taylor Professor of French Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University, joins me for episode 56 of the Digital Dialogue, God and the Organism. John's work focuses on Continental phenomenology and, more specifically, on contemporary French philosophy. In addition to his many publications on embodied cognition and French philosophy, his book, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, came out with University of Minnesota Press in 2009, and he has another book, Life, Earth, War: Deleuzean Interventions, forthcoming with Minnesota Press.

h/t dmf

Speculation and Confronting the Real

"It is no longer thought that determines the object, whether through representation or intuition, but rather the object that seizes thought and forces it to think it, or better, according to it. As we have seen, this objective determination takes the form of a unilateral duality whereby the object thinks through the subject." — Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, p 149

Sometimes we protest too much. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is essential for me because he wrote about the primacy of perception (prior to conception), and how the immediacy of the world underlies our conceptions of it. There is a pre-reflective tangibility to Being that opens up meaning as consequence. Perception prior to conception. The Real is that which remains after we shut the fuck up. Whatever story we want to tell is so much less than the primacy of this tangible reality.

“So long as the 'me' is the observer, the one who gathers experience, strengthens himself through experience, there can be no radical change, no creative release. That creative release comes only when the thinker is the thought, but the gap cannot be bridged by any effort. When the mind realizes that any speculation, any verbalization, any form of thought only gives strength to the 'me', when it sees that as long as the thinker exists apart from thought there must be limitation, the conflict of duality, when the mind realizes that, then it is watchful, everlastingly aware of how it is separating itself from experience, asserting itself, seeking power. In that awareness, if the mind pursues it ever more deeply and extensively without seeking an end, a goal, there comes a state in which the thinker and the thought are one. In that state there is no effort, there is no becoming, there is no desire to change; in that state the 'me' is not, for there is a transformation which is not of the mind.”

– Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom, p.140.

#postmetaphysics

UPDATE barely on topic:

David Eagleman, neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, on the embodied mind:

"As much as we like to think about the body and mind living separate existences, the mental is not separable from the physical... We have discovered that the large majority of the brain's activity takes place at this low level: the conscious part – the "me" that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is only a tiny bit of the operations. This understanding has given us a better understanding of the complex multiplicity that makes a person. A person is not a single entity of a single mind: a human is built of several parts, all of which compete to steer the ship of state. As a consequence, people are nuanced, complicated, contradictory. We act in ways that are sometimes difficult to detect by simple introspection. To know ourselves increasingly requires careful studies of the neural substrate of which we are composed." [source]

And Raymond Tallis, scholar and former professor of geriatric medicine at Manchester University, in response:

"Yes, of course, everything about us, from the simplest sensation to the most elaborately constructed sense of self, requires a brain in some kind of working order. Remove your brain and bang goes your IQ. It does not follow that our brains are pretty well the whole story of us, nor that the best way to understand ourselves is to stare at "the neural substrate of which we are composed". This is because we are not stand-alone brains. We are part of community of minds, a human world, that is remote in many respects from what can be observed in brains. Even if that community ultimately originated from brains, this was the work of trillions of brains over hundreds of thousands of years: individual, present-day brains are merely the entrance ticket to the drama of social life, not the drama itself. Trying to understand the community of minds in which we participate by imaging neural tissue is like trying to hear the whispering of woods by applying a stethoscope to an acorn." [source] 

I think both of these fellas are correct. Intellectual capacity is a biological phenomenon founded in large part on unconscious functions and processes, while at the same time its higher-order cognitive operations are contextual enactments of distributed properties associated with and expressed through complex networks and communicative activities. A non-reductive materialist framework takes both irreducible capacities and physical embodiment into account when trying to understand mental action. There is no contradition in this regard. Confronting the Real entails thinking matter as matter and not being afraid to limit your speculations accordingly.

ht/dmf

The Life Of The Buddha

"If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism." -Albert Einstein

The following documentary (50mins) covers the life of Siddhartha Gautama, a young prince from India who went out to find the reason for Dukkha [suffering] of human life. He later found the reason of Dukkha and teached a way to live life. He was later known as the Buddha, the founder of "Buddhism".

[ see also the short doc The Buddha (20mins) ]

The Buddha

Watch the full episode. See more The Buddha.

[ h/t Leon - After Nature ]

The Rising Culture and Worldview of Contemporary Spirituality

Spirituality as an expression and extension of the human capacity for wonder is a healthy and thought provoking activity. Beyond belief and prior to religious dogma is a reverence for being alive in a cosmic event. And any approach to social development and sustainability must recognize the deep human needs, values and resiliencies at the heart of the spiritual life.  We are in many ways spiritual animals.

From the Integral Ecology Center:

The Rising Culture and Worldview of Contemporary Spirituality: A Sociological Study of Potentials and Pitfalls for Sustainable Development

by Annick Hedlund-de Witt

Several social scientists claim that the rise of the culture of contemporary spirituality is a pivotal part of the gradual but profound change taking place in the Western worldview, both reflecting the larger cultural development, as well as giving shape and direction to it. Its emergence is therefore not to be neglected in attempts to create a more sustainable society. The aim of this study is to generate insight into the culture and worldview of contemporary spirituality and explore its potentials and pitfalls for sustainable development. An investigation of the sociological literature on the so-called “New Age” phenomenon results in a delineation and overview of these and shows that this culture is both a potentially promising force, as well as a phenomenon posing specific risks. A structural–developmental understanding is introduced in order to be able to distinguish between regressive and progressive tendencies in this culture, and comprehend the deeper logic behind the observed potentials and pitfalls. This may serve to facilitate the actualization of the culture's potentials while mitigating its pitfalls, and in that way contribute to the timely challenge of creating a more sustainable society.

Read More: Here

Annick Hedlund-de Witt is presently a PhD researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. In her work she explores the relationship between ‘worldviews’ (or: ‘philosophies of life’) and the ways these relate to goals and issues of sustainable development, including social-cultural change, individual environmental behaviour and policy attempts to influence these.

Ivakhiv on Artmonks and Deliberate Creativity

Adrian Ivakhiv has a interesting post up discussing the relationship between a deliberate, monastic way of life and the inherent creativity of artistic modes of being. As someone who has been seeking to move more and more towards living “off the grid’ in recent years, the modes of life and worldly-perception Adrian describes is deeply appealing.

Below is an excerpt, but do read the entire post (here):

If Thoreau’s quest to “live deliberately [...] and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” were cross-bred with A. N. Whitehead’s insight that creativity is the driving core of all things in the universe, the “universal of universals,” then today’s “artmonks” are children not of Marx and Coca-Cola (as Godard once labeled the activists of the 1960s and Xiaoping Lin more recently called the Chinese artistic avant-garde), but children of Thoreau and Whitehead.

The monastic ideal has always been about living deliberately. And in a world that is rapidly outgrowing the secular-religious divide — becoming simultaneously post-secular, for those outgrowing the constraints of secularism, and post-religious, or at least post-traditional, for those no longer in obeisance to inherited religion — monasticism today is reinventing itself in interesting and creative ways. “Artmonks” are those who bring a mindful deliberation and dedication to the creative process, following it wherever it leads them. They are the monks of immanence, post-traditional devotees synthesizing the vita contemplativa with the vita activa in an age of Burning Man and the internet.

Adrian goes on to provide a list of people who seem to work from this context, and then briefly discusses C.S Peirce’s later thoughts about a sequence of emergence in aesthetic, ethical and logical experiences. Go check it out here

UPDATE: the following exchange took place in the comments on Adrian’s post:

MICHAEL: Beauty (aesthetics), Goodness (ethics) and Truth (eco-logics), by any other name… Although, what justification does Pierce give for positing a hierarchical order to these? I think these forces co-arise together in a world where the embodied mental, material (in an all inclusive sense), and the social co-occur simultaneously. An inventory of what is available within hominid experience suggests the ever-presence of all three.

ADRIAN: You’re probably right. I’m just trying to work through Peirce’s notion (which he only came to hold in his later years, it seems) that there is an order or sequence in their emergence. It’s not a hierarchy, but rather a priority and dependency, and it follows from the fact that meaning (thirdness) arises out of the mediation of relations (secondness, actuality), and that before there are relations between any two things, there are those two things prior to their being related or even actualized (firstness, virtuality). The aesthetic moment, at least in this reading of Peirce, comes at our encountering the thing in its firstness (or as close as we can get to that, since once we’ve encountered it, it’s already a second). That thing, of course, can already be its own second- and/or thirdness: e.g., if it’s another entity (human or otherwise), then it is already it’s own sign (3dness) and already related to and dependent on others (2dness). But in the relationship between me and it, my ability to make sense of it (logos, truth) is dependent on my encounter with and response to it (ethos, conduct) which is in turn dependent on the form it takes independent of me (aesthetikos, beauty).

So this is a kind of slice into the 1st-2nd-3rd sequence of emergence. But you are right that all three are always interacting in the holistic/composite flow of experience.

MICHAEL: I like the notion of emergent worlds/perspectives and the understanding of extended levels of activity taking on new relationships. ‘Firstness’, perhaps, being the primordial suchness from which all reality flows; ‘secondness’ being the differentiation (actualization) and emergence of coalescent assemblages; and ‘thirdness’ as recursive systems and ‘signification’ (all the way up to the symbolic). There are many ways to imagine the unfolding of cosmic contingency and Peirce’s seems as though it has its merits.

Bruno Latour: "politics as the composition of a common world"

Bruno Latour on modernity, ecology and new politics (h/t Scu):

“On governments the question becomes complicated because we are now talking about the politics of Nature and that's a rather new quandary.” - Bruno Latour

An Interview with Bruno Latour, thinker and social anthropologist.

Bruno Latour is one of France's most innovative, provocative and stimulating thinkers and social anthropologists. Given French Cartesian orthodoxy, it is not surprising that he is more appreciated in the Anglo-Saxon world, where his books such as “We Have Never Been Modern” (1993) are better known than in his native France. Jon Thompson, the publisher and chief editor of Polity Press, London, described him as France's most original and interesting thinker and in 2007, Bruno Latour was listed as the 10th most-cited intellectual in the humanities and social sciences by The Times Higher Education Guide.

Mr. Latour's seminal work has been in the field of Science and Technology Studies. With his “Actor Network Theory” he has advanced the notion that the objects of scientific study are socially constructed within the laboratory. Thus scientific activity is viewed as a system of beliefs, oral traditions and culturally specific practices, reconstructed, not as a procedure or as a set of principles but as a culture. Mr. Latour will be in India this week conducting workshops in New Delhi. In this exclusive interview with The Hindu's Vaiju Naravane in Paris, he discusses the new challenges facing humanity and of India's role in the climate debate.

Q: I wish to start this interview with a discussion of one of your most famous books — “We Have Never Been Modern”. Could you explain what you meant by that? What made you write this book and where do you go now?

LATOUR: The Great Narrative of the Western definition of the world was based on a certain idea of Science and Technology and once we began, 30 or 40 years ago to study the practices of the making of science and technology, we realized that this definition could not sustain the old idea of western rationality taking, in a way the place of archaic attachment to the past.

The Great Narrative was based on the idea of Science which was largely mythical. Science has always been linked to the other cultures of the Western World, although it has always described itself as apart — separated from politics, values, religion and so on. But when you begin to work on a history of Science — Galileo, Newton, Pasteur, Einstein, Kantor or whoever, you find on the contrary, that things have never been severed, that there has always been a continuous re-connection with the rest of cultures and especially with the rest of politics...

Read More @ The Hindu

Cornel West on Truth and Finitude

Cornel West (b.1953) is an American philosopher, author, critic, actor, civil rights activist and prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America. West is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University, where he teaches in the Center for African American Studies and in the Department of Religion.

West is known for his combination of political and moral insight and criticism and his contribution to the post-1960s civil rights movement. The bulk of his work focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their “radical conditionedness." West draws intellectual contributions from such diverse traditions as the African American Baptist Church, pragmatism and transcendentalism.

Below is a clip from the documentary film The Examined Life where West talks about the ultimate nature of reality and human experience:

"A philosopher is a lover of wisdom. It takes tremendous discipline. It takes tremendous courage to think for yourself, to examine yourself. That socratic imperative requires courage in a way William Butler Yates used to say, 'It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul, than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.' Courage to think critically. Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher, for any human being in the end. Courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope.

Plato says philosophy is a meditation on, and a preparation for death. By death what he means is not an event, but a death in life. Because there's no rebirth, there's no change, there's not transformation without death. And therefore, the question becomes how do you learn how to die. Of course Montaigne talks about that in his famous essay, 'To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die.' You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die.

I believe that Theodore Adorno was right when he says, 'The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak.' That gives it an existential emphasis, you see. That if we're really talking about truth, as a way of life as opposed to truth as a set of propositions that correspond to a set of things in the world. Human beings are unable to ever gain a monopoly on Truth capital T. We might have access to truth small t, but they're fallible claims about truth. We could be wrong. We have to be open to revision and so on. So there is a certain kind of mystery that goes hand in hand with truth. This is why so many of the existential thinkers be they religious like Meister Eckhart or Paul Tillich, or be they secular like Camus and Sartres, that they are accenting our finitude and our inability to fully grasp the ultimate nature of reality, the truth about things, and therefore you talk about truth being tied to the way to truth because once you give up on the notion of fully grasping the way the world is, you're gonna talk about what are the ways in which I can sustain my quest for truth.

How do you sustain a journey, a path toward truth, the way to truth. So the truth talk goes hand in hand with talk about the way to truth. And scientists can talk about this in terms of deducing evidence and drawing reliable conclusions and so on. And religious folk can talk about this in terms of surrendering one's arrogance and pride in the face of divine revelation and what have you. But they're all ways of acknowledging our finitude and our fallibility." - Cornel West

God's Divine Plan

Merry X-Mas Heathens!

Source: Theoretical Bullshit on Youtube