Back
to his roots from The Immanent Frame by Matteo Bortolini
As Talcott Parsons’s beloved student at the
Department of Social Relations at Harvard in the 1950s, Bellah was subject to
high expectations… From the point of view of the sociology of ideas, this
strategy might be seen as both a homage to a venerable sociological
tradition—going all the way back to Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer and the
incredibly vast array of interests of 19th-century sociology—and as an attempt
to bring Talcott Parsons’s work to a higher level of complexity and explicative
power. Many may not know, but Parsons was a biology major and remained a
voracious reader all his life, eager to make almost everything fit inside his
signature “theory of social action.” …
Luhmann’s, as well as Bellah’s, silence about
historical change in general should not be mistaken for lack
of scholarship or courage: on the contrary, it comes from a lucid understanding
of the promises and the limits of theory vis-à-vis the study
of individual historical facts and processes that takes Parsons’s tendency to
over-theorize seriously and tries to find a way to transcend its shortcomings.
The story of Robert Bellah and Religion in
Human Evolution can thus be told as the quest a hero had to bring to
an end against all odds and impediments, and as the dutiful effort of a
metaphorical son to resume and further the work of his metaphorical father
within a long line of ancestors—even putting the clear Weberian inspiration
aside, Bellah’s decision to go back to pre-axial and axial-age civilizations
after a life of work on modernity and modernization might be read as parallel
to Durkheim’s decision to focus on Australian aboriginals after The
Division of Labor in Society and Suicide, a
choice that Bellah himself once interpreted as a journey into the unconscious
sources of social existence analogous to Freud’s work on dreams…
I would make a fool of myself by saying that the
main thrust beyond Bellah’s latest work is the resentment of the unappreciated
intellectual. No need to call Nietzsche into question: I am just saying that
besides the aspiration to bring his self-assigned life plan of research to an
end, Bellah might have had another, all too human, desire to fulfill.
Perhaps more importantly the author does not write
to simply address followers of Sri Aurobindo but has done an even greater
service by attempting to make the Record available to a wider audience by
drawing comparisons with the work of several of the most renown philosophers of
the late 20th Century including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and
especially Gilles Deleuze who figures most prominently in his analysis of the
Record of Yoga.
Contemporary philosophy or theory is now in a
post-metaphysical stage given the myriad of problems associated with ideologies
that have been spun from worn out metaphysical creeds throughout the 20th
century. It is a stroke of genius to analyze Sri Aurobindo’s yoga by employing
the language of Gilles Deleuze because of its relevance to contemporary
thought. Given the fact that The Record of Yoga and Sri Aurobindo’s many other
important texts were written close to 1o0 years ago and thus are cloaked in the
language of metaphysical idealism, that although appropriate for the times, now
represent a discourse largely removed from the necessities of our
Post-Metaphysical Age, Banerji has performed an invaluable service for
contemporary scholars, theologians as well as followers of integral yoga.
Because of the seemingly incommensurable discursive gap between Aurobindo and
Deleuze one would never gleam the similarities if someone as skilled as Banerji
has not attempted his comparison.
R: A short note on the... Posted March
17, 2012 at 12:26 pm | Permalink
Reading them today I can not help to smile because
language – as we know from Future Poetry – charts the leading edge of our
evolutionary turn. So for example to read these words in the 21st century well
after the intuitive poetic vision that inspired their first utterance has
passed, I can only wonder what the signifier psychicization differs and defers
to? If one takes SA seriously about the infinite expressive potentialities of
the Divine then one would be real surprised if this did not also correspond to
an equally expressive ever-evolving language.
Therefore it seems to me rather unlikely that what
Sri Aurobindo may have first gleamed in language from an intuitive vision over
75 years ago would in fact be the very same language he would cloak his “guru english” in today.
Over time sublime experience becomes reified in language, inspirational poetry
quickly becomes stale ideology. While one can memorize his system and learn to
parrot Sri Aurobindo’s words mapping his experience onto the countless
differences that shape the experiences and inner topography of each one of us
is a whole other enchilada.
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