Kant's common sense in the double meaning of shared intelligence and taste

An anthropology of the internet from The Memory Bank by keith

A Kantian anthropology for the internet age

What then might be an anthropology for the internet age? I would start with Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch. He held that Cosmopolitan Right, the basic right of all world citizens, should rest on conditions of universal hospitality, that is, the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory. In other words, we should be free to go wherever we like in the world, since it belongs to all of us equally. The contrast with our routine experience of international travel today could not be more marked. He says, “The peoples of the earth have entered in varying degree into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity.” This confident sense of an emergent world order, written over 200 years ago by the man who defined ‘anthropology’ for modern purposes, can now be seen to be a product of the high point of the liberal revolution, before it was overwhelmed by its twin offspring, industrial capitalism and the nation state. We now live in a less confident world, but it can still generate moments that touch our universal humanity, like the first man to orbit the earth in space or a Chinese man confronting a tank on global television.

Kant believed that human co-operation in society required us to rely on personal judgement moderated by common sense, in the double meaning of shared intelligence and taste. This common sense, also the title of his contemporary Tom Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet that launched the American war of independence, was generated in everyday life, in shared social experience (good food, good talk, good company). Earlier he wrote an essay, “Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose”, which included these propositions:

In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural faculties which aim at the use of reason shall be fully developed in the species, not in the individual.

The means that nature employs to accomplish the development of all faculties is the antagonism of men in society, since this antagonism becomes, in the end, the cause of a lawful order of this society.

The latest problem for mankind, the solution of which nature forces us to seek, is the achievement of a civil society which is capable of administering law universally.

This problem is both the most difficult and the last to be solved by mankind.

A philosophical attempt to write a universal world history according to a plan of nature which aims at perfect civic association of mankind must be considered to be possible and even as capable of furthering nature’s purpose.

The world is much more socially integrated today than two centuries ago and its economy is palpably unjust. We have barely survived three world wars (two hot, one cold) and brutality provokes fear everywhere. Moreover, the natural (we would say ‘ecological’) consequences of human actions are likely to be severely disruptive, if left unchecked. Histories of the universe we inhabit do seem to be indispensable to the construction of institutions capable of administering justice worldwide. When Roy Rappaport wrote recently that “Humanity…is that part of the world through which the world as a whole can think about itself”, he was repeating the central idea of Kant’s prescient essay. The task of building a global civil society for the 21st century is urgent and anthropological visions must play their part in that.

Copernicus solved the problem of the movement of the heavenly bodies by having the spectator revolve while they were at rest, instead of them revolve around the spectator. Kant extended this achievement for physics into metaphysics. In his preface to The Critique of Pure Reason, he writes, “Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects… (but what) if we pose that objects must conform to our knowledge?”. In order to understand the world, we must begin not with the empirical existence of objects, but with the reasoning embedded in our experience itself and in all the judgments we have made. Which is to say that the world is inside each of us as much as it is out there. This is why one definition of ‘world’ is ‘ all that relates to or affects the life of a person’. Our task is to bring the two poles together as subjective individuals who share the object world in common with the rest of humanity.

The 19th and 20th centuries, in identifying society with the state, constitute a counter-revolution against Kant’s Copernican revolution. This was launched by Hegel, whose Philosophy of Right contains the programmes of all three founding fathers of modern social theory (Marx, Weber, Durkheim) rolled into one. This counter-revolution was only truly consummated after the first world war. The result was a separation of the personal from the impersonal, the subject from the object, humanism from science. It was enshrined in the academic division of labour and it is why most people have never heard of Kant’s seminal contribution to anthropology. This is the split that the decline of national capitalism in the face of the digital revolution might allow us to reverse. In my book, I argued that the cheapening of the cost of information transfers as a result of the digital revolution makes it possible for much more information about individuals to enter into commercial transactions at distance that were until recently largely impersonal. This repersonalization of the economy has its counterpart in many aspects of contemporary social life, not just in the forms of money and exchange. It involves a new idea of the person, one that is based on digital abstractions as much as on the emergence of more concrete forms of individuality. The customized interactions that most academics now have with amazon.com and similar pliers of books reflect this trend, at the same time personal and remote.

I do not imagine that I am alone when I respond in this way to our moment of history. Clearly one consequence of the use of new technologies in teaching is that learning can now be much more individualized and ecumenical at the same time; and this juxtaposition of self and the world in itself poses a threat to the traditions of the academic guild. Here then is one source of a renewed emphasis on subjectivity. It all adds up to a radical revision of conventional attitudes to subject-object relations, grounds indeed for us to reconsider the positivist dogmas on which so many modern university disciplines are based, including social anthropology’s paradigm of scientific ethnography. It has long been obvious to me that learning anthropology would be impossible if we were not, each of us, human beings in the first place. Anthropologists who once could rely on public ignorance as support for their exotic tales must now cope with mass mobility and communications. We have to consider seriously what our expertise can offer that is not delivered more effectively through novels and films, journalism or tourism. We live in a time when both the rhetoric and the reality of markets encourage individuals to choose the means of their own Enlightenment. It would be surprising if trends in the teaching of anthropology did not reflect all this; perhaps we are on the verge of a new paradigm for the discipline, one that will reflect the social and technological changes of which the internet is the most tangible symbol.

References

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Cassirer, E. 1981 Kant’s Life and Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press

Castells, M. 1996 The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Vol. 1: The rise of network society. Oxford: Blackwell.

Comte, A. 1975 (1832-40) Cours de la philosophie positive. Paris: Hermann

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Durkheim, E. 1965 (1912) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Glencoe IL: Free Press

Goody, J. 1977 The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 1989 The Interface Between the Oral and the Written. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.

Greco, T. 2001 Money: understanding and making alternatives to legal tender. Burlington VT: Chelsea Green

Grimshaw, A. and K. Hart 1993 Anthropology and the Crisis of the Intellectuals. Cambridge: Prickly Pear Press. 1995 The rise and fall of scientific ethnography. In A. Ahmed and C. Shore eds The Future of Anthropology. London: Athlone Press.

Hart, K. 2001 (2000) Money in an Unequal World. London and New York: Texere. First published as The Memory Bank. London: Profile. 2003 Studying World Society as a Vocation. Goldsmiths Anthropology Research Papers No.9. London: Anthropology Department, Goldsmiths College.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1952 (1821) The Philosophy of Right. London: Oxford U.P.

Heidegger, M. 1983 (1930) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Bloomington: Indiana U.P.

Kant, I. 1993 (1784) Idea for a universal history with cosmopolitan intent. In C. Friedrich ed The Philosophy of Kant. New York: Modern Library. 1795 Perpetual Peace: a philosophical sketch. Download from internet 1977 (1798) Anthropology form a Pragmatic Point of View. Carbondale IL: University of Southern Illinois Press

Keynes, J.M. 1930 A Treatise on Money (two volumes). London: Macmillan

Locke, J. 1960 (1690) Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.

McKitterick, D. 1992 A History of Cambridge University Press. 

Vol. 1: Printing and the book trade in Cambridge, 1534-1698. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.

Marx, K. 1970 (1867) Capital: a critique of political economy. Vol.1 London: Lawrence and Wishart

Marx, K. and F. Engels 1968 (1848) The Manifesto of the Communist Party. In Marx-Engels Selected Works. London: Lawrence and Wishart

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Rappaport, R. 1999 Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.

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Weber, M. 1981 (1922) General Economic History. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Books

Supreme Court has become an ally of the Hindu nationalists

The Indian Supreme Court and the quest for a 'rational' Hinduism
Ronojoy Sen (The Times of India, New Delhi)

South Asian History and Culture, Volume 1, Issue 1  January 2010, pages 86 – 104 - informaworld.com view references (19) 

Gajendragadkar and Ramaswamy spoke a language very similar to Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and his idea of 'pure' Hinduism. According to Radhakrishnan, 'At the moment, however, temples present an air of dull acquiescence and tedious routine. To attempt to abolish temples, which are so passionately loved and affectionately revered, is vain. But we must improve the tone and the atmosphere …. Worship in temples must be of the purest form.'⁹⁷ Many of the court judgements echoed Radhakrishnan.

If figures like Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan made frequent appearances in Court judgements, there were also some notable absences. This is perhaps best illustrated in the marginalization of Vivekananda's teacher and guru, Ramakrishna Paramahansa. Ramakrishna, who can be located in the Bhakti tradition and was characterized by mysticism and unreason (pagalami), was a sharp contrast to his disciple Vivekananda, who established a Hindu monastic order to achieve social and religious reform. The contrast between these two figures is vividly expressed, as Sumit Sarkar has noted, in the disparities between the Dakshineswar temple (where Ramakrishna lived for over 30 years) and the Belur Math founded by Vivekananda. Sarkar writes, 'The temple [Dakshineswar], like any major Hindu sacred site, is thronged with crowds which cut across class divides, noisy, colorful, not over-sensitive to dirt …. Belur Math is much more of an upper middle class devotional-cum-tourist spot: almost aggressively hygienic, it is full of guards and notices warning visitors from bathing in the river or spoiling the lawns.'⁹⁸

This study in contrast in a way admirably captures the approach of the Supreme Court and its essential practices doctrine. The essential practices doctrine can then be seen as the Court's attempt to discipline and cleanse religion or religious practices that are seen as unruly, irrational and backward by putting the state in charge of places of religious worship. But as Dhavan and Nariman point out, 'Religious faiths have to be run by their followers and not by bureaucrats. The followers have to emerge from the faith and not be appointed by the State or statute.'⁹⁹ The Court has systematically appealed for legitimation to authoritative figures associated with Vedic rationalism as well as privileged canonical texts that are located within this tradition. By doing so the Court has not only narrowed the 'institutional space for personal faith'¹⁰⁰ but also marginalized popular religion by, in Ashis Nandy's words, treating it as 'parts of an enormous structure of irrationality and self-deceit, and as sure markers of an atavistic, regressive way of life'.¹⁰¹ […]

The essential practices doctrine, as developed by Gajendragadkar, sought to cleanse religion of superstition and irrationalities. It was based on the premise that the state must protect only the 'essential and integral part' of religion. While it was certainly desirable that the state play a role in passing laws that abolished social practices such as untouchability and the bar on the entry of the lower castes into temples, the Supreme Court permitted the state to become deeply involved in administering religious institutions and even regulating rituals and modes of worship. Beginning with Durgah Committee, the Court gave sanction for an elaborate regulatory apparatus for religious institutions. The involvement of the state in religious institutions flew in the face of the Nehruvian assumption that the domain of religion would gradually shrink. Instead of religion disappearing from the public sphere, the state became the principal agent of Hindu reform. The court rulings have, thus, furthered the reformist agenda of the Indian state at the expense of religious freedom and neutrality. The Court has also become an ally - often inadvertently - of the Hindu nationalists in their aggressive demands for homogenization and uniformity. 4:32 PM Sarkar, Sumit (1993) An Exploration of the Ramakrishna Vivekananda Tradition Indian Institute of Advanced Study , Shimla; Nandy, Ashis (2001) The Twilight of Certitudes: Secularism, Hindu Nationalism and other masks of Deculturation. Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics Permanent Black , Delhi

International law should also accommodate Gandhi, Kautilya and Sri Aurobindo

The Scandal of Enlightenment and The Birth of Disciplines: Is International …
P Singh, F De Dret, O de la Globalización - Prabhakar Singh, 2010 - lawlib.wlu.edu
Page 1. THE SCANDAL OF ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE BIRTH OF DISCIPLINES: IS
INTERNATIONAL LAW A SCIENCE? Prabhakar Singh

This paper addresses the existential dichotomy of international law. What began as barely audible notes of dissent in TWAIL has developed into a powerful chorus of protest yoking science and pre-science, history and pre-history and legal and pre-legal together. Science, from an anti-modernist view, is corrupt and the international law is today preoccupied with, as Koskenniemi rightly points out, proving its scientificity. This makes international law all the more unwanted. Thus if international law is proven a science, will it become anti-indigenous, anti-poor, anti-subaltern or anti-tribal, like sciences? The answers are not that obvious.

Analysing J C Bose and Ramanujan, India‘s two great scientists, Nandy remarks how their life was torn between their practice of foreign science as professional scientists and indigenous beliefs that by objectifying and impersonalizing knowledge and by dehistoricizing the producers of knowledge one could argue away the imperfect realities of living persons and human history from the world of knowledge. No wonder, therefore, Indian alternative science for even the most ardent alternative seeker like Nandy is impossibly unmanageable. It not only seems a half-dissent, it also seems inefficient, chaotic, abstruse, amorphous, and unsure of itself. China does much better comparatively. The effect of science through colonisation on Asia, thus, has produced mixed emotions. An anti-modernist view of science sees its effects as an effort of the aggressor trying to … demystify the ordinary Indian as a pseudo-alternative to the Western man: hypocritically spiritual while being shrewdly materialistic, violent and self interested; neither a dedicated counterplayer of the West like Japan, trying to defeat the West at its own game, nor clearly Oriental like Confucian China, which, while manifestly hostile to the West, shares with the West some basic values like performance, organization and instrumental rationality; neither a person who meets the norm of civility in the West, nor openly noble savage.

International law, unfortunately, is not free from this attitude. In this paper, some obvious narratives of MILS via political science, psychology, sociology and anthropology have been either discussed faintly or ignored for obvious reasons. Economics, history and psychology have been chosen to read through international law because both the disciplines are two ends of the complete circle of the disciplines. Between them a complete rainbow of disciplines lies that mandates a series of efforts on the part of the observers of international law to register comments. It is hoped that the readers of this work would pick up the threads left open by this paper to weave an entire fabric of international law in the future. Though limited in its breadth of coverage, the paper, nonetheless, seeks to take a step in the right direction. Post colonial and anti-modernist voices in international law have made a strong case for a new international law. We must save international law from sweeping generalisations and interventionist universality while proving its scientificity. If proving international law a science would mean overlooking contextual milieu of its application, this science would remain undesirable.

International law today should be an exercise in restoring the symmetry of the forgone days. It should not only be a debate about Kant, Grotius, and Vitoria. It should also accommodate Gandhi, Kautilya and Sri Aurobindo. A theory of justice from Rawls and Dworkin must also be complemented with the theory of justice of Amartya Sen. Chimni's six fold perspective of international law shows the new directions to be developed further. International law in its current form cannot be sold as the medicine to world‘s problems. It has developed on its own experience as an agenda of capitalist avarice. But, its structure, howsoever, discriminatory cannot be pulled down. All we can do is to pull down individual discriminatory bricks and replace by a better one. But this is easier said than done. One should not forget that today, living in the Third world is bad breeding; becoming a Third-World social scientist is even worse. The former is like the original sin, the latter like acquired viciousness.

***

Sen‘s vision of justice and a perfect social order is non-parochial, inclusive and humane. It is entrenched in reason and helps remove inequities. His idea of justice is free of the tyranny of majoritarian will and one that touches lives that people actually live. In the process, it takes global concerns into account; Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Penguin-Allen Lane, London 2009).Also, Sen, Development as Freedom (OUP, Oxford 2001). […]

Nandy observes that the universalism that had fuelled the early British reformers had given way to a second phase of tolerance of Indian culture because of obvious fears of a second mutiny. See, Nandy, supra note 1 at 6, footnote number 8. Nandy thinks that such an analysis comes from the works of Francis Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence, British Imperialism in India (Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton 1967). […]

Ashis Nandy, The Uncolonized Mind‘ in A. Nandy (ed), Exiled at Home: The Intimate Enemy, supra note 1 at 80. […] B.S. Chimni, The Sen Conception of Development and Contemporary International Law Discourse: Some Parallels (2008) 1:1 Law & Development Review, art. 2 available at http://www.bepress.com/ldr/vol1/iss1/art2/  […] B.S. Chimni, Alternative Visions of Just World Order: Six Tales from India (2005) 46:2 Harvard International Law Journal 289-402.

Politics is more constrained than many people think

A simple theory of political jobs, with respect to the health care debate

from Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen

Political jobs would be torture for most people.  You have no freedom.  You are underpaid and over-bugged.  You lose a lot of your privacy.  You have to stop writing emails or saying what you think.  You don't get to read many good books or go for many quiet walks.  It's hard to be a non-conformist.  And so on.

Yet it's really hard to get top political jobs.  So who gets them?  People who truly, deeply love the power.

Plus "doing what the voters want" very often feels like, or can be described as, "doing the right thing."

The "spending freeze" from Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen

There's not much to say in terms of the economic issues, the real lesson is that politics is more constrained than many people think.  Berating Obama for his lack of courage or his "failure to get tough" is simply denying or postponing this fundamental realization.

We lend ourselves to be controlled and managed by the Asura

The Task before us  from All choice by Barindranath Chaki

Some fifty thousand to more than a million years back, the early human beings started their journey on earth, definitely with hopes for Joy and Bliss, for satisfaction and fulfilment, for conquering diseases and Death, with inquisition and thirst for knowledge in their eyes and their fresh undisturbed intelligence. They marched onwards and created civilizations and cultures, created Arts and Literature and Poetry and Music, created the Society and all the social norms and rules and paraphernalia. Even they tried to solve all the problems and difficulties of life. 

  

But in their attempts for doing so, they now find themselves in a world, which they have almost completely spoiled. Now, men and women and their world are ruled and conquered by darkness and ignorance, by sorrows and sufferings, by chaos and disorder, by battles and warfare and destructions, genocides and mass-murders, by incurable mental and physical ailments and diseases and untimely deaths, in spite of all their wisdom and knowledge, all their feasts and festivals and parties and merry-makings, all the assortments and arrangements of enjoyment and pleasure, in spite of all their prosperities and riches, in spite of all their medical and scientific researches and discoveries and preparations, in spite of all religions and worships, in spite of all their peace talks and preaching of Ahimsa or non-violence, in spite of all their civilizations and progresses. Mankind has lost all their hopes and aspirations, all their spontaneous inborn simplicity and clarity and peace.

 
So, we have to change the world. And how?   

We will change the world, never by preaching this and that religion. They are already fighting against each other for centuries. I do not mean to attack any religion; Persons who represented the Supreme Consciousness initiated them all. But we have added so much of falsehood, doubts, hatred, clashes and even bloodsheds into them, that they can seldom lead us to our Goal.   

We will bring the change never by political changes and revolutions, by change of Governments or creating League of Nations or commonwealths or UNOs, however noble and lofty may be the Ideas behind.   

We will make the change, never by changing external activities or habits of society or of life, not by keeping or shaving beards or hairs, not by changing dresses, not by changing political parties or social groups, or by changing religions.   

Never can we reach the Goal by trying to change others in a prototype, as the Communists tried and failed, or by trying to criticize others or by trying to find faults with others, NOT by declaring that we alone are the conveyors of Truth, and others are of Untruth. I will come to the issue of Truth or Untruth later.   

We are to change ourselves, first. Each of us is to change himself or herself… 

  

However, as we find, Man is, mainly and in majority, still far away from the Divine Possibility: Man is greatly involved in egoism, in Tamas, in vital and mental limitations and obstructions. Sometimes, even if and even when Man delves in and professes higher thinking and spirituality and a further evolution beyond humanity, he is still living and moving with a predominantly active lower nature. The human beings are more or less engrossed in limited or partial ideas, mental opinions, preferences, ignorant habits and mental constructions centered around lower vital nature, which has enslaved him with pride, arrogance, enmity, hostility, jealousy, envy, greed, cravings, passions, selfishness, egoism. Man is still living with ignorance, doubt, stupidity, falsehood, laziness, and Tamas.. 

If somewhere there is an endeavour for growing or creating something noble and great and aspiring for a higher possibility, forming a collectivity for moving forward, then it may also be found that from several corners attacks are creeping in, overtly or covertly, vehemently or stealthily, from the lower nature full of darkness and ignorance. Ego becomes the main force in Man, along with all narrowness, all crookedness, all poisonous divisions, tending to pull down all that great and noble in Man. 

  

The change, as some may think, is not at all easy. 

  

The change I am speaking of is not easy. Had it been easy, it would not have delayed by 50,000 years. All the religions, all the lofty social endeavours, including the French revolution or the Marxist revolution in Russia, have failed to change the human nature from what it is practically and what it should be. That is because the matter is very very difficult. Why difficult? Because we are insincere, egoistic, driven intolerance and hatred and animal enmity and anger, and above all we fail to know and understand Truth in its entirety.

The change needs a sincere and an undefeated ceaseless sadhana…

As ordinary human beings, we are leading ourselves to the Abyss, through our lowest emotions, passions, pre-occupations and occupations, through our fears and distrust and gross indulgence. Often we close our eyes to the Light, often we shut up our inner windows when we hear the Call. We lend ourselves to be controlled and managed by the Asura… To stop remaining the grossly animal man, immersed in darkness and narrowness and hatred and violence, that is what is desired. Our pre-occupation and occupation should be The Next Step, the New Evolution.   Barin Chaki 22-01-2010 [Revised from some of my previous writings published elsewhere] Please visit ASPIRATION  The New Horizon  All choice  The New Platform  Barin Chaki Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo's Teaching & Method of Practice The Life Divine The Hidden Forces Of life The Mother - US Edition

Marxists worked on their minds, and their penetration was more enduring

JANUARY 20, 2010 Jyoti Basu and the unnecessary success of Indian Communism

Jyoti Basu's demise is not the end of an era... We should take this opportunity to highlight one important phenomenon, which was concentrated mostly in pre-Independence Bengal, viz. the shift of a large majority of revolutionaries -- particularly from the Anushilan Samiti circuit -- from Nationalism to the Communist movement.

An auxiliary reason for this development was British aid: revolutionary prisoners were given Marxist literature, because the British knew that the Communists opposed terrorist violence and aimed for a mass uprising in the long term, thus leaving British (and other oppressors') lives out of harm's way until the time of the Revolution, which moreover might never materialize. […]

After the success of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917-20, it was but natural that activists of a revolutiony temperament worldwide would feel attracted to Marxism. At least, they did so wherever an alternative was lacking. In Italy, many joined the Fascist movement and grabbed power in 1923 on a very similar wave of revolutionary enthusiasm.

Did India have an alternative? The freedom movement was captured by M.K. Gandhi in 1920 and left no room for revolutionaries, whom Gandhi emphatically disowned and condemned. The fledgling RSS, founded by an Anushilan Samiti disappointee, Dr. K.B. Hedgewar, renounced politics and preferred work in the sphere of culture, social self-organization and "character building". Hedgewar rejected offers to integrate his volunteer corps with the Hindu Mahasabha in political work for national independence and for the safeguarding of Hindu interests.

So, it is likely that many revolutionaires, initially motivated only by love of India and freedom, turned to Marxism not because of this ideology's intrinsic strengths, but for lack of a native ideological alternative. Revolution-minded people obviously could not reconcile with Gandhian nonsense, anymore than the moderate constitutionalists (including the young Jinnah) could. They wanted to act decisively against the British colonialists, and also against backward social forces hampering the devolution of the fruits of freedom to the masses. Naturally they had no patience with muddle-headed Gandhism and associated anachronisms. […]

Nobody in India seemed to understand the challenge and the need for a convincing native alternative. Sri Aurobindo lamented that the mind of the Hindus had become dysfunctional, but he too failed to formulate an alternative, let alone to work for it. After his personal experience with the failure of the armed struggle, he soon retired from politics and, while giving lucid comments on political evolutions, never came out again to provide practical leadership.

All this while, Gandhi worked on people's emotions, but the Marxists worked on their minds, and their penetration was more enduring. Thus we see a long list of freedom fighters taking up Marxism and Socialism of various varieties. Not all these men and women were Marxists in the true sense, they only wanted to serve the national cause but not in the Gandhian way. Thus, the problem was a lack of native Indian/Hindu vision and an ensuing line of action.

We should not paint each and every Communist as a villain, but highlight the fact that a true native ideological narrative needs to be developed from scratch and articulated. This would address a historical lacuna in India. Indian Marxism will die a natural death only when such a vision emerges. POSTED BY KOENRAAD ELST AT 2:03 PM

Balance between pluralism and solidarity

 A Neo-Weberian theory of American civil religion posted by Philip Gorski

• For the religious nationalist, America is a “Christian nation” or, perhaps, a “Judeo-Christian nation.” In this vision, religious and political communities should be coterminous. 
• For the radical secularist, America is a liberal society comprised of autonomous individuals. In this vision, religious and political communities ought to be completely distinct. 
• For the civil religionist, finally, America is a moral community that seeks to balance solidarity and pluralism. In this vision, the religious and political communities inevitably overlap with one another. 

Using Max Weber’s notion of “value spheres,” we can put this somewhat more formally: liberal secularists believe that the religious and political spheres should be radically separated; religious nationalists believe that they should be tightly integrated; and civil religionists believe that they should be overlapping but independent. [...]

one of the fundamental challenges confronting all modern democracies, perhaps particularly the United States, is achieving and maintaining the appropriate balance between pluralism and solidarity. Excessive pluralism, whether of an individualistic or a sectarian variety, impedes the level of social cooperation that is necessary to the achievement of the common good and individual flourishing (libertarian opposition to health-care reform is merely the most topical example). Conversely, excessive solidarity, whether of a racial or national variety, squelches the cultural pluralism and individual autonomy that are the wellsprings of societal adaptation and creativity. If we accept this premise, then we must reject radical secularism and religious nationalism, at least in their extreme forms. The one leads to excessive pluralism; the other to excessive solidarity.

Now, there are plenty of people who would agree about the need to balance pluralism and solidarity, but who would disagree that civil religion is a necessary means to this end.

• First, there are non-theistic neo-Kantian rationalists—such as Rawls, Habermas, andAudi—who would be somewhat uneasy about the religious dimension of civil religion. 
• Then, there are theistic neo-Aristotelian confessionalists—such as MacIntyre, Yoder, and Hauerwas—who would be somewhat uneasy about the civil dimension of civil religion.  

But each critique supplies an answer to the other. For example, the rationalists often assert that certain abstract principles and formal procedures, such as “communicative rationality” or “public reason,” are sufficient means to the ethical aims of a civic republic such as the United States. But they are also compelled to admit that civic virtue and civic friendship are necessary as well.

Virtue and friendship, however, cannot be founded on abstract principles or formal procedures. Rather, as the neo-Aristotelians have repeatedly and rightly insisted, they can only be sustained within narrative communities. But the neo-Aristotelians are also neo-confessionalists who worry that civic engagement undermines religious community. In Hauerwas’s phrase, the job of the church is to be the church. A politically engaged church, he implies, cannot be a narratively authentic church because it must compromise its first principles for the sake of political expediency. 

The fatal flaw in this position is the assumption that an agreement on principles of political justice can only be founded on an agreement on foundational principles of justice. This is not the case. As John Rawls has recently shown, and as Jacques Maritain showed long before him, divergence of first principles of justice does not preclude convergence on political principles of justice, such as human rights or social solidarity. The same might be said about civic narratives. One can embrace the American creed for different reasons, both secular and sacred: natural law, Kantian ethics, covenant theology, neo-Romanism, and so on.

Sri Aurobindo and India's role in the world's future

• August 15th, 1947 - Sri Aurobindo
• India's Role in the World's Future - Sraddhalu Ranade
• Sri Aurobindo and world events - Sraddhalu Ranade
• The problems of human unity in Sri Aurobindo's light (Sri A. B. Patel memorial lectures) - M. V Nadkarni
• India's Spiritual Destiny: Its Inevitability and Potentiality
• Joint Programme in Sri Aurobindo Studies by IGNOU and SACAR
• Sri Aurobindo and the New Age
• Sri Aurobindo — A Contemporary Reader
• Sri Aurobindo and the New Age: Essays in Memory of Kishor Gandhi
  
• Social Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the New Age
  
• Sri Aurobindo and the New Age Anilbaran Roy
• Beyond the Human Species: The Life and Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother (Omega Books)
  

Sri Aurobindo was hardly a champion of any religious creed

AntiMatters, Vol 3, No 4 (2009) About Home > Vol 3, No 4 (2009) > Banerji
Sri Aurobindo, India and Ideological Discourse
Debashish Banerji
Abstract: In the first part of this talk, I consider Sri Aurobindo's nationalism and contextualize it within the colonial-national interchange and the modern understanding of the nation. This includes a consideration of the nation-soul idea. In the second part, I apply the implications of this nationalism to Sri Aurobindo's social ideas - concerning the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Auroville and, in general, the social context of the Integral Yoga and his vision of the future, so as to engage reflection on the present. Full Text: PDF
Talk presented at Fundamentalism and the Future, Conference held at California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA, September 11–12, 2009. Originally published in the Fall 2009 issue of Collaboration . Republished with permission.

Sri Aurobindo has been increasingly marginalized or co-opted by a variety of mainstream discourses. He has been appropriated, for instance, by the Hindu right, along with Vivekananda. Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo are now seen as the founding figures of what is known as Hindutva3 in India. And along with this, happily accepting this identification, the Marxist left has turned on Sri Aurobindo as one of its "whipping boys." So Sri Aurobindo has increasingly been reduced to this image in modern and contemporary scholarship: either a champion, one of the founding figures or "mascots" of Hindutva, or "the whipping boy" of Indian Marxism.4

Now both of these are gross reductions. Sri Aurobindo in fact, had socialistic leanings, though he was generally averse to any ideological labeling. Thus, when necessary, he contested authoritarianism in the practice of Socialism. He stood against both Stalinism and Maoist China as regimes creating political conditions which stifled the freedom of individual growth. Yet, he was definitely not in favor of a rampant capitalism, identifying it as "economic barbarism." So there are grounds for constellating Sri Aurobindo with certain socialistic thinkers in terms of his intellectual preferences.

As far as religion and spirituality are concerned, as clearly evidenced by the passage from The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo was hardly a champion of any religious creed, attempting to cabin the approach to the Divine in terms of boundaries or a certain national history. In the passage of our consideration, he has very clearly conceptualized a field of plural religion and spiritual practice in premodern India.

However, he has been co-opted by the emergent political field of Hindutva in modern times. This has led to a certain perception of Sri Aurobindo in mainstream Indian discourse and among a large number of his Indian followers as the champion or founder of this unitarian definition of Hinduism.
This image has sought its support in certain texts of Sri Aurobindo. These are usually early nationalistic texts which have been taken out of context and interpreted in modern times according to prevalent discourses of nationalistic religion. [...]

An important thing to bear in mind, is that 19th century Europe was shot through and through with the idea of this racial philosophy of history. Today we may find it difficult to believe, but the whole of the 19th century Europe was pervaded by the sense of racism. It wasn’t something exclusive to Germany. It was in England, it was all over Europe. There was a sense that the world is made up of races, and these races can be arranged in a classification scheme which represents them eternally in their essential truth in terms of a hierarchy of scale. It was this racial essence which stood largely behind the European idea of the nation. This was the discourse of Racist Enlightenment and it was the predominant discourse of colonialism.

Thus we can see that the idea of nation soul arises out of the discourse of the Enlightenment and its extension in colonialism. Sri Aurobindo, Vivekananda, and other thinkers of the Bengal Renaissance have subverted this colonial discourse by inserting a spiritual content into it. This is the dialogic response to the interpellation of racial colonialism, whether Positivist or Orientalist. This is the acceptance of the interpel-lated discourse which becomes transformed in the retelling. What was attempted by these Indian nationalist spiritual thinkers was the extension of an alternate discourse in the forms of the West. It appeared to be new, but it may be seen as a case of old wine in new bottles. It was the spiritual knowledge and experience of the colonized culture being crafted in the discourse of the colonizer. Along with a spiritual inflection to racial essence came a transformed content to the nation soul. [...]

Modernity with its homogenizing forces, with its ability to isolate and disperse populations across the globe is contested by alternate societies, alternate social forms, what today we call intentional communities. But the idea of the intentional community as an alternate form to the drive of modernity was part of the discourse of Indian nationalism, not only present before Sri Aurobindo but continuing after him.

It is the idea of the spiritual community, the intentional community of Universal Man-making, Visva-Bharati, that was fielded by Rabindranath Tagore at Shantiniketan, for example, prior to the birth of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Again, it is the idea of a spiritual community dedicated to truth and a simple life of offering to the Divine that was privileged by Gandhi in his vision of the postcolonial village, and in his own ashram at Sabarmati. It is this idea of spiritual community that takes a certain form with Sri Aurobindo, which is not a pre-modern form, but a postmodern form. That is something important we need to realize. It is the privileging of a communitarian social form but in a way which puts it into dialogue with the forces of modernity. [...]

When instead of evolving towards a greater freedom of collective expression arising from inner union, a passive surrender in the disciples demands literal solutions to every trivial concern, the ashram devolves into a religious order or cult. Instead of a plural field of becoming and embodiment, it begins to be dominated by parasitic forces who erect an unreachable icon and a cultic practice and demand boons of mundane satisfaction from it. On the other hand, what responds to them is no longer the guru but a number of intermediate authorities who rise to take advantage of the need for displaced or surrogate responsibility. The light that leaned down from Above recedes and what is left in its place is a ground reality of the rhetoric and politics of authorization, the control of substitute authorities in place of the freedom and beauty of Love, and the regime of Theology in the name of Knowledge.

It is important to ponder these possibilities in the ideal and life of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. In the later years of her life, the Mother took this ideal a step closer to the world at large with the creation of Auroville. Among other things, the Mother may have responded to some of the shadows of the ashram idea in setting up an alternate social field for the practice of the same yoga. Here, she insisted, there was to be no religious worship and no hierarchic authority. It is the aspiration for Becoming, a growth of consciousness in individuals representing all forms of world culture, which alone would safeguard the progress to Unity and Harmony for this society.

Thus, shorn of all premodern "Indian" formalisms, it represented a postmodern form, free of traditional commitments. But set up to be independent and in the proximity of the ashram, what Auroville also represented is an opportunity for a dialogue between premodern Indian forms of spiritual culture with a long cultural history and a new postmodern international form built purely on the foundation of a spiritual anthropol-ogy, an integral psychology for achieving the same goals. As we know from the history of these organizations, that dialogue was sundered and remains largely unexplored.

Today, the rise of Hindutva as an identity construct in India combined with a religious interpretation of the Integral Yoga among many at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, threatens to define tight boundaries of belonging and normative behavior in the originating social context which was conceived by its founders as a laboratory representative of humanity and a world transforming practice. With the departure of the Masters and the early generations of disciples who lived in their atmosphere of plastic wideness, depth and height — a culture which enabled individual interpretation, practice, expression and an increasing inner growth into Oneness — what seems to be developing is a field of politics, group conditioning, cultic identity and majorita-rian justice.

Today the social habitus necessary to the flowering of the Integral Yoga may be in danger. It is time for all people of sincerity and aspiration, who have been touched by the light that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother brought to humankind, to introspect deeply and to rethink our choices, alignments, responsibilities and actions. BANERJI : SRI AUROBINDO, INDIA AND IDEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE 112

(title unknown) from enowning by enowning
Morgan Meis in The Smart Set on the danger in the world. In short, Heidegger came to believe that Husserl's phenomenological method was abstracting away all the juicy stuff that makes up the world we actually perceive. [...]

Once you've established that human beings understand the world in different ways depending on all kinds of circumstances, you have also opened up the possibility that there are better and worse ways to relate to the world. In Being and Time, for instance, Heidegger argues that since human beings are the sort of creatures that wonder about themselves, that ask the question "What is it to be a human being?" it is more authentic for such human beings to live in a culture that encourages people to think about that question in the deepest way. Heidegger noted that there were two such notable societies, the ancient Greeks and the Germans. And here we can further understand Heidegger's rather enigmatic attraction to the Nazis.

He found the Nazis exciting because he thought that they were encouraging the Germans to think really hard about what it means to be Germans. This encouraged thinking Germans to be human beings at the highest level of being a human being: creatures who constantly question what it means for a human being really to be a human being. His ultimate disappointment with the Nazis was, thus, a disappointment with their ability to pull this off, to make Germany into the great cosmic center of thinking about the Question of Being. In the end, the way Heidegger saw it, the Nazis failed him.

Write Heidegger's philosophy off all you like, expunge it from the records. But the problem isn't going to go away. At its heart, the debate between Husserl and Heidegger touches at root issues of how we understand the world and whether that understanding is stable and timeless. Heidegger was not a "relativist" (as the accusation sometimes goes), but he was deeply convinced that human beings are what they are, in the deepest ways, because of the cultures, traditions, and modes of life from which they spring.

For those who are convinced that there is deep truth in that insight (and this includes most of us, if we stop and think about it for a moment), Heidegger is our contemporary. His particular take on Phenomenology opened up huge new philosophical possibilities that directly influenced schools of thought like Existentialism, Deconstruction, and Pragmatism. More important, the tentacles of Heidegger's thinking are part of what set the stage for many of our most trenchant debates about history, culture, and human nature. Heidegger (cue ominous music here) is everywhere. That means the ugliness is everywhere, too. Once you connect "being human" to a certain set of traditions, to a nation or an ethnicity or anything else, the little fascist inside begins to grow.

Heidegger's little fascist was nastier and more virulent than most. Screw him then, throw him to the dogs. I suspect, though, that the little fascist is alive and well in many of us. Heidegger walked down a road that all of us have taken to some degree. The monstrous detour down which Heidegger got lost is not as difficult to stumble upon as we like to pretend. Every time we try to suppress Heidegger, we end up reminding ourselves that he hasn't gone away. • 2 December 2009 Home > Columns > Idle Chatter The Heidegger in All of UsWhether we like it or not... Morgan Meis is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for The Believer, Harper’s, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily. He can be reached at morganmeis@gmail.com.