"Unbeknownst even to some of its promoters, the creation of mental constructs . . . takes the place of attention to the advent of the Unpredictable. That is why the 'true' mystics are particularly suspicious and critical of what passes for 'presence'. They defend the inaccessibility they confront." - Michel de Certeau.

The writings of Michel de Certeau on mysticism are interdisciplinary, original and tantalizing. They draw on disciplines ranging from history, theology and spirituality to psychoanalysis, semiotics and cultural theory. While de Certeau concentrated on sixteenth and seventeenth-century French and Spanish spiritualities with their emphasis on 'spiritual experience', one of his most controversial views was that mysticism is not purely a matter of interiority but is a form of disruptive 'social practice'.

In a time of institutionalized comforts, of Integral Theory, Integral Religion and Integral Psychology, the caution of Michel de Certeau becomes more pressing than ever. De Certeau relates the rise of mysticism with social conditions which "possess" and displace experience within the language of orthodoxy. The science of 'mystics' he proposes is not so much a system of named experiences as a blueprint of praxis, a language of tactical retreat, a shifting map of recognized departures and social attitudes of refused identification. In this article, Philip Sheldrake, Vice-Principal and Academic Director of Saturn College, Salisbury and Honorary Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Wales, Lampeter, opens a window on de Certeau's studies and caveats on mysticism.   more »

In this corner, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion's illusions; in the other corner, "radical orthodox" theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have proven themselves worthy adversaries--and have also shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed.

Žižek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century's greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in The Monstrosity of Christ concerns nothing less than the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event—God becoming human. For the first time since Žižek's turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others.

Žižek begins, and Milbank answers, countering dialectics with "paradox." The debate centers on the nature of and relation between paradox and parallax, between analogy and dialectics, between transcendent glory and liberation....   more »

With the 1978 publication of Orientalism, Edward Said launched a critique of Western scholarship on the Middle East that still reverberates through academia and government. By characterizing Middle Eastern cultures as incapable of adapting to modern life, the early Orientalists, in Said’s view, hid their colonial, and indeed racist, biases. In the process, he suggested, Orientalists fooled themselves—and Westerners generally—into believing that their studies were undertaken with total neutrality. Said particularly attacked Bernard Lewis as the contemporary exemplar of this entrenched view. In a series of exchanges, Said argued that such scholarly bias contributed to the failure of the West to recognize Palestinians as a distinct people or to value Middle Eastern nations except for their oil. While Said did not live to see how Lewis’s views would influence the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq, the terms of his critique still divide scholars.

Despite decades of controversy, however, neither Said’s most recent supporters, such as Juan Cole and Rashid Khalidi, nor his most ardent critics, Raphael Patai and Daniel Pipes, have succeeded in subjecting Said’s concerns to a serious analysis that might address the central question: can scholarship on the Middle East ever be freed from its political context? ...   more »

With the ascendency to Indian politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a plethora of literature has appeared paying serious attention to the phenomenon of "Neo-Hinduism" in India, and by and large relating it to fascist possibilities. This postcolonial literature, swelling the shelves over the last five years, has piggybacked onto a larger more international body of postmodern writing on nationalism and its dangers that has been growing in stridency ever since the pseudo-religion ...   more »

Fanaticism is often associated with religious practice and its mystical tendencies. In this article on G.K. Chesterton view of the fanatic, the reviewer notes that Chesterton rather associated fanaticism with a particular logic that is derived from mystical experience and not from mystical experience itself.

Today, we often hear it said that “fanaticism” is the consequence of religion, that science is its alternative. If I understand Chesterton's view of both the scientists and Islam, it is that “fanaticism” stems from both. But it comes not from the original mystical insight but rather from the “logic” that flows from it and subsumes all else in its wake. Scientism denies any place for revelation in its “logic.” Islam's “logic” ends up denying secondary causes or an understanding of the divinity in which diversity in the Godhead and Incarnation are impossible. The subduing of the world to Allah is a conclusion not of the mystical insight but of the logic that follows from it.

In the end, “fanaticism” is not a product of mysticism, but of logic. By looking for its causes in the wrong place, we often reveal our own “fanaticisms.” The “fanatical” concern about the religious cause of “fanaticism” has blinded us to the “fanaticisms” that stem from science itself and has caused us to misunderstand what it is within Islam that often makes it so “fanatical.”...   more »

Reference: 100 years of Sri Aurobindo on evolution

In those places where Heideggerian thought has been influential, it became impossible to defend human values against the claims of science. This was particularly true in France, where structuralism—and then poststructuralism—reigned supreme over the intellectual landscape for several decades before taking refuge in the literature departments of American universities. Anchored in the thought of the three great Germanic "masters of suspicion"—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—against a common background of Heideggerianism, the human sciences à la française made antihumanism their watchword5, loudly celebrating exactly what humanists dread: the death of man. This unfortunate creature, or rather a certain image that man created of himself, was reproached for being "metaphysical." With Heidegger, "metaphysics" acquired a new and quite special sense, opposite to its usual meaning. For positivists ever since Comte, the progress of science had been seen as forcing the retreat of metaphysics; for Heidegger, by contrast, technoscience represented the culmination of metaphysics. And the height of metaphysics was nothing other than cybernetics.

Let us try to unravel this tangled skein. For Heidegger, metaphysics is the search for an ultimate foundation for all reality, for a "primary being" in relation to which all other beings find their place and purpose. Where traditional metaphysics ("onto-theology") had placed God, modern metaphysics substituted man. This is why modern metaphysics is fundamentally humanist, and humanism fundamentally metaphysical. Man is a subject endowed with consciousness and will: his features were described at the dawn of modernity in the philosophy of Descartes and Leibniz. As a conscious being, he is present and transparent to himself; as a willing being, he causes things to happen as he intends. Subjectivity, both as theoretical presence to oneself and as practical mastery over the world, occupies center stage in this scheme—whence the Cartesian promise to make man "master and possessor of nature." In the metaphysical conception of the world, Heidegger holds, everything that exists is a slave to the purposes of man; everything becomes an object of his will, fashionable as a function of his ends and desires. The value of things depends solely on their capacity to help man realize his essence, which is to achieve mastery over being. It thus becomes clear why technoscience, and cybernetics in particular, may be said to represent the completion of metaphysics. To contemplative thought—thought that poses the question of meaning and of Being, understood as the sudden appearance of things, which escapes all attempts at grasping it—Heidegger opposes "calculating" thought. This latter type is characteristic of all forms of planning that seek to attain ends by taking circumstances into account. Technoscience, insofar as it constructs mathematical models to better establish its mastery over the causal organization of the world, knows only calculating thought. Cybernetics is precisely that which calculates—computes—in order to govern, in the nautical sense (Wiener coined the term from the Greek xvbepvntns, meaning "steersman"): it is indeed the height of metaphysics.   more »

When Sri Aurobindo left his body the evolution of consciousness did not suddenly cease. Namely, there have been several significant mutations of discourse regimes, in response to the advent of the practice of Critical Theory. It is my view that one can view this succession of discourse in the same light as one would the development of a future poetry; it is a representation of the evolution of language.

While it would be understandable for a traditional religion to discard the advent and development of styles of discourse which follow on the death of its founder, in a spiritual practice whose organizing idea is of the evolution of consciousness, to discard the ideas, movements, cultural logic, etc that are part and parcel of this development, would be its undoing.

Peter Heehs book is a critical biography written in a contemporary academic style, that is -as all contemporary academic styles - informed by Critical Theory. It is not surprising therefore, that it treats its subject in a manner appropriate for this type of discourse. The fact that those in a yoga whose unique major metaphysical premise is of the evolution of consciousness would criticize its language and method of inquiry because it follows a discursive style that is indicative of how consciousness has evolved over the past 58 years is nothing short of ironic. It is almost as if these reactionary followers of Integral Yoga in looking back to the past to co-opt modes of expression that have now become fossilized discursive practices, as consciousness has evolved into a new millennium, have begun looking backward to the past instead of forward to the future to complete the project of integral yoga. Such a backward looking view of the yoga can be understood to have flipped the goals of the Integral Yoga in substituting devolution for evolution.....   more »

Interestingly, at the historical moment of inception of third order cybernetics whose non-linear flows give us chaos theory and complexity science, Deleuze and Guattari are molding a discourse whose concern for subjectivities and sociologies of state chart a parallel evolution. Just as chaos theorist are developing models of dissipative systems or butterfly effects, and distributive networks are building out toward a world wide internet*, Deleuze and Guattari are rejecting the hierarchical organization of philosophical texts, that proceed by dialectic, evolving a "rhizomatic" method as a more efficient way of tracing organic morphologies, apprehending "multiplicities" and comprehending the complexity of texts.

Although their ontology is founded on difference they make it clear that they do not want to become entangled in a simple dialectic of unity versus multiplicity. "What is important is not whether the flows are One of multiple we are past that point"(p23)

Following the organic branching of a rhizome is certainly a conceptual evolution from tracing a dialectical tree back to its "roots" in some figure of "abstract" unity.

The development of the “rhizome as method” follows the evolution of representations, in which collective enunciations begin to approach the limits of possibility in thought and word. As such the evolution of the rhizome goes through Joyce and Nietzsche:

"Joyce's words, accurately described as having 'multiple roots', shatter the linear unity of the word, even of language, only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge. Nietzsche's aphorisms shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to invoke the cyclic unity of the eternal return."

and can be traced back to Lao Tzu

“Thought Lags Nature”    more »

In New York on the last day of an American tour, absorbing the demise of Yankee Stadium and maybe of Wall Street as we thought we knew it, Zizek’s talk is a blast-furnace but not a blur. The theme through all Zizek’s gags is that the financial meltdown marks a seriously dangerous moment — dangerous not least because, as in the interpretation of 9.11, the right wing is ready to impose a narrative. And the left wing is caught without a narrative or a theory. “Today is the time for theory,” he says. “Time to withdraw and think.”

Dangerous moments are coming. Dangerous moments are always also a chance to do something. But in such dangerous moments, you have to think, you have to try to understand. And today obviously all the predominant narratives — the old liberal-left welfare state narrative; the post-modern third-way left narrative; the neo-conservative narrative; and of course the old standard Marxist narrative — they don’t work. We don’t have a narrative. Where are we? Where are we going? What to do? You know, we have these stupid elementary questions: Is capitalism here to stay? Are there serious limits to capitalism? Can we imagine a popular mobilization outside democracy? How should we properly react to ecology? What does it mean, all the biogenetic stuff? How to deal with intellectual property today? Things are happening. We don’t have a proper approach. It’s not only that we don’t have the answers. We don’t even have the right question.   more »

The concluding section on Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies by Debashish Banerji continues its second installment's reflections on the Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence presented to us as the emerging destiny of post-Enlightenment Modernity and compares this destination with its appropriation and supercession in the Neo-Vedantic teleology of Sri Aurobindo. What are the differences, dangers and promises of these destinies and what are the conditions for achieving an alternate destination? ...   more »

This is a fragment constituting a continuation of Debashish Banerji's reflections on Techno-Capitalism as the epistemic regime of modernity and posible post-human futures at the eschatological cusp of history. Here the alignment of Marx and Hegel with the Enlightenment vision/teleology is contemplated and questions asked regarding a comparative alignment with the Neo-Vedantic teleology (if it can be called that) of Sri Aurobindo.   more »

This article attempts to sketch out Sri Aurobindo's contribution to the future of humanity as carried in his major texts. In doing so, it also tries to underline the cross-cultural nature of these texts and the disciplinary redefinitions implicit in them.   more »

There is an extended essay on Integral World on a topic which began as a short article here on SCIY.  The article was on ideological orientations of theories and practices which claim the title integral. The article on integral world goes into much greater depth exploring the genealogies of ideological orientations. The link is here:
http://www.integralworld.net/carlson.html

A final post in this series on language concerns the mutation of consciousness triggered by the shift away from the word as signature of the thing in the world, to word as signfier. I again use Foucault's Order of Things as reference, (even though it like all other text has its critics).

According to Foucault's history this shift from words as signature of the thing, or as pure representation occurs through the advent of “General Grammar” in the 17th and early 18th century. He traces the shift through the work of such Grammarians as Bopp and Rask Foucault's method here is different than most historians who trace history through the linearity of ideas or the impact of individuals by establishing historical continuity. Rather he follows a method he calls an Archaeology. The study of Archaeology proceeds with the analysis not of individuals or specific events, but rather through the systems of thought and apprehension present in a given era which determine its discourse. He calls these eras epistemes. Moreover, Foucault says : “Archaeology is much more willing than the history of ideas to speak of discontinuities, ruptures, gaps, entirely new forms of positivity, and of sudden redistribution (Archaeology of Knowledge)

Foucault does not treat the history of grammar - later to become the science of philology and linguistics - in isolation but rather excavates it in the episteme of the Classical Age. He connects the history of Grammar with the study of Natural History -which will later become Biology - and the History of Wealth -which will later become the science of Economics-. Its probably not to much of a stretch to see this threefold study of history in comparative terms to Sri Aurobindo's method of analysis as follows: biology (physical) economics (vital) linguistics (mental)

Here Foucault describes the interrelatedness of these three domains:

The history of grammar is not the projection into the field of language and its problems of history that is generally that of a reason or of a particular mentality , a history in any case that it shares with medicine, mechanical services, or theology but that it involves a type of history -a form of dispersion in time, a mode of succession of speed of deployment or location,- that belongs to it alone even it is not unrelated to other types of history, (Archaeology of Knowledge) and here is how he traces back the origins of the study of general grammar:

.. the practice of the history of comparative grammar was to rediscover -beyond Bopp and Rask- earlier research into the filiation and kinship of language it was determined how much Anquuetil-Duperron contributed towards the composition of the Indo-European domain it was to uncover the first comparison of Sanskrit and Latin Conugations it may even lead back to Harris or Ramus (Archaeology of Knowledge)

One must first understand how Foucault perceives the episteme of the Renaissance which precedes the Classical Age in which General Grammar emerges to fully appreciate the mutation of consciousness that occurs. Knowledge in the Renaissance was concerned with knowledge by Resemblance and Similitude, while the Classical age is annunciated through an knowledge of Difference.

( It may be worthwhile to explore the similarities and differences between knowledge by Resemblance and Similitude in the European tradition and Sri Aurobindo's metaphors, tropes, discourse, and the Indic sources he draws on, in speaking of a knowledge by Identity)

The divergence of epistemes of the Renaissance and the Classical Era is explored below. Its annunciating figure is Don Quixote who reads the world through a book.

“The four modes of resemblance are pretty straightforward: 1) convenience = spatial proximity, which relies upon and breeds resemblance; 2) emulation = resemblance at a distance; 3) analogy = resemblance of relation; man is center of world; 4) sympathy = resemblance provoking spatial and qualitative change....   more »

Rooted within language, even in its most holistic form, is the pregnant push towards sequencing, sparing, punctuation -- differentiation in time and space. In the Vākyapadīya, the Śabdatattva, symbolized by the seed sound AUM, [48] is sequenced by the power of time into the various recentions of the Veda and all spoken words. [49] For Derrida the image is one of the sign, as the linguistic whole, being differentiated by spacing (on the page) and interval or pause (in speaking) into articulated meaning and sound-image. It is the actualizing of this inherent force for differentiation that enables language to function. But it is, at the same time, the limit of language. As Derrida puts it, since a sign (the unity of signified and signifier) cannot be produced within the plentitude of absolute presence, there is, therefore, no full speech, no absolute truth or full meaning. [50] In the words of Lao Tzu, "The tao that can be spoken is not the eternal tao" [51] Or as Hegel once put it, "When speaks the soul, alas, the soul no longer speaks." [52] But whereas Lao Tzu and Hegel are mourning the inability of manifested language to make present the soul or the tao, Derrida and Bhartṛhari emphasize the positive contribution of articulated speech. The sphoṭa and the sign (Derrida's whole) are manifested, and in the dynamic tension of that manifestation lies truth.

Rather than arriving at a skepticism of language, namely, that it is devoid of any truth content (the conclusion of the Buddhists and many modern skeptical critics of language), truth is seen to be contained in the very dynamics of language itself. Thus Derrida's thesis that there is no referent outside of the text is not as nihilistic as it at first sounds, and Bhartṛhari's sphoṭa is not as artificial an entity as much Indian philosophy has assumed.

In Vākyapadīya I:5, there are two terms which Bhartṛhari uses to describe the Veda: it is the prāptyupāya or the means for the attainment of Brahman; and it is the anukāra or symbolization of Brahman. For now let us confine our attention to the term anukāra, which comes from the root kṛ, "to do" or "to make" and suggests the dynamic activity of the Word-Principle. The Vṛtti elucidates the verse by stating that the activity of the Vedic seers in speaking the mantras is the criterion case of word-making activity. The term mantra, notes Aurobindo, signifies a "crossing over" through thought (root man, "to think," and tṛ, "to cross over") from the Absolute or Unmanifested to the human experience of manifested language. [53] As pure Sanskrit language, the mantras are conjunctions of certain powerful seed syllables which induce a particular rhythm or vibration in the psychosomatic structure of consciousness and arouse a corresponding psychic state. Such seed sounds can be differentiated in a great variety of ways producing an immense progeny of language. The evocative power is at its height before the mantras become too locked into particular forms of articulation. Poetry is at its peak before language becomes too fully elaborated. Then it must be deconstructed or evolved backwards to recover its original power for signification. Articulation is necessary, but the further it goes the greater the loss of freedom and power within language.

This also seems to be what Derrida means when he refers to the prose book as a corpse of language which must be exited from or transcended [54] -- the delimiting of the multisignificant roots has been pursued to its logical conclusion, and the power of the word has been exhausted. The aim of the project of deconstruction, says Derrida, agreeing with Aurobindo, is to get back to metaphoric, poetic language, where the power for signification has not yet been used up. [55] Bhartṛhari also reminds us that as language divides and separates, this necessary process in the end can become a source of confusion. The process of difference, pushed to its logical conclusion, produces such a plethora of speaking accents that communication of knowledge is obstructed. [56] Unlike Derrida and Aurobindo, Bhartṛhari's solution is not to deconstruct or reverse the process of differentiation, but to control it by the imposition of strict grammatical rules (the science of the Grammarians) by which the power of the root mantras to convey knowledge and action will not be obfuscated. [57] Bhartṛhari, along with the other Grammarians, claims to have uncovered the pure forms of the correct unfolding of the patterns of differentiation inherent in the Śabdatattva and symbolized (anukāra) in criterion form in the initial speaking of the Vedas... [58]   more »