Freedom is a false hope given the finite nature of our reality

Post-postmodern Politics - A Going Under by Scott Payne Saturday, 30 January 2010

One of the predominant themes underlying much of postmodern political philosophy is that of freedom. If the practice of mainstream political discourse is the application of power as a means of molding the parameters and contours of reality itself into autopoetic dance of self-referentiality, then the role of the postmodern political actor is to fight back against the conforming embrace of that power via acts of true and novel freedom and creativity. […]

The problem; however, is that the pre-eminent postmodern philosophers fall prey to a subtle version of the very essentialism their own critiques are designed to counter. In the case of both Foucault and Delueze, the whole purpose behind any political action/discourse is to escape the panopticon of power and achieve a state of freedom and authenticity. […]

This trajectory of sincere political action assumes that just such a state exists and is possible to attain, a variant on the Manichean theology that supplants good and evil for power/oppressed and freedom. Experience, on the other hand, tells us that things are not so simple.

In reality, the ability to gain a degree of freedom is a sense of false hope held tight by those who have articulated the context bound nature of our understanding and, indeed, existence, but are unwilling to grapple with the ultimate and logical conclusion of those realizations. Not only our understanding of the world, but our very experience of and existence in the world are bound within the context of a particular set of experiences. We can seek to expand the boundaries of our experiences, but the finite nature of our reality makes the kind of omniscience required to overcome our contextual circumstances both physically and logically impossible.

To suggest that we can somehow escape the context of power accumulation and application is to suggest that, on some level, we are not involved in or a part of the fluctuations of that power, that our identities are not, in some senses, made up of and of the same confluence of forces that generate that power. But, as the postmodernists realized: context is king -- and those contexts that act as incubators for power and its machinations are the very same contexts that give birth to our own understandings and identities. (example? see above)

Whether we like it or not, we are stuck with -- or, perhaps, within -- those contexts. Us, our notions of authenticity and freedom, power, and the banalities of our every day lives, all part of the same basic process and intimately interconnected because they are in a constant and necessary state of interaction. This is the grizzly and natural conclusion of the postmodernist critique, Nietzsche's proclamation denotes it in no uncertain terms: God, and all his promises of salvation, are dead.

What Is Modernity?- A Sketch by Trevor Malkinson Thursday, 17 December 2009

But the relationship between Eros and Thanatos is a complicated one, as only a handful of philosophers have recognized. For it’s the perturbing agitating force of Thanatos that spurs and opens up Eros into further and further growth. Eros is thus the sublimation of the powerful destructive forces of Thanatos up and into creative emergence. As Freud says, Eros and Thanatos “never appear in isolation from each other, but are alloyed with each other in varying and very different proportions and so become unrecognizable to our judgment” (42). Or as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze has put it- “Destruction, and the negative at work in destruction, always manifests itself as the other face of construction or unification… Beyond Eros we encounter Thanatos; beyond the ground, the abyss of the groundless; beyond the repetition that links, the repetition that erases and destroys. It is hardly surprising that Freud’s writings should be so complex” (43). Every system has three possibilities when it comes to responding to the disturbance of Thanatos: it can succumb to system dissolution; it can cling to its current organization in a fierce conservatism, and/or externalize the pressure outward in acts of aggression; or it can release into trans-formation and higher order levels of complexity. It’s crucial for modern civilization to accept that it will never evolve beyond this disturbing ‘dark side’ of our makeup- no matter how successfully we think we have banished it- for it’s the very engine of our own creative evolution. If we don’t admit to and accept the constant presence of Thanatos we’ll continue to suffer the ravages of its untamed release, which has been such a devastating feature of the modern era. As Terry Eagleton points out, “history is dependent upon powers that are perpetually capable of sinking it without a trace…In the forging of civilizations, the death drive is harnessed to soberly functional ends, growing strategic and astute; but it continues to betray a delight in power and destruction for their own sake, which continually threatens to undermine those ends…Civilization must pay homage to its other, not least because there is a sense in which it lives off it.” (44) […]

But when the Faustian bargain for growth and development is put in the service of only our own individual separate-self desires, we get mired in an endless chase that the Buddha called dukkha, or suffering (47). We end up inevitably in the realm of the hungry ghosts, always starving for more, trying vainly to fill the infinite emptiness exposed by separation. Unable to withstand the force of the inner pressure(Thanatos) demanding that we open up- that we move from our current evolutionary moment of individualism back toward a re-integration with the broader whole(s) of culture, earth and cosmos- many have turned to diversion, addiction, and excess in order to dispel the inner torment and be freed of this unsettling power. Massive amounts of energy has also been expelled outward into the business of profit making, endless accumulation, and bald personal ambition. Reason and order have often given way to disorder and chaos. “Reason can restrain our disruptive desires only by drawing its own energies from them, fuelling itself from this turbulent source…Being too aloof from those powers, it will fail to shape and inform them from within, and so will allow them to run riot” (48). Modernity has been convinced that it is a vehicle for Eros, bringing progress and prosperity to all through its spectacular growth and development; this is the ideological mask it has proudly worn. However, its emphasis on the individual and its devotion to a strict rationality have left it vulnerable to a fierce Thanatos, a profound and destructive nihilism that is eating at it from within. More and more, disintegration and demise have come to rule the day as the refusal to answer the evolutionary call continues (49). Eros is struggling to maintain a hold on the human story.

The Beams of the Absolute and The Struts of Discipline: Religion in the Post-postmodern Age by Chris Dierkes Friday, 15 January 2010

Postmodernity—in its later mostly European philosophical versions anyway—has had a significant interest in religion. Martin Heidegger awaited the god who was to come.  Emmanuel Levinas reformulated traditional Jewish Rabbinic religious and ethical concepts toward an experience of transcendence and care though he was still an atheist.  Famed father of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida wrote movingly in his later years on grief, friendship, and negative theology—again all within an officially atheistic framework.  Neo-Marxist thinker Slavoj Zizek calls his philosophy a (atheistic) materialist theology.  Jurgen Habermas—one of the philosophers who embodies a transition from postmodernity to post-postmodernity—has dialogued with The Pope recently and written on the ways in which secular minded and religious minded folk can live and work together in the future.

In other words, postmodernity argued forcefully that transcendence/salvation—were there to be any—must be found in this world not out of it.  The technical term for the divine within is called immanence.  Immanental transcendentalism is the great goal of postmodern religion—that means merging or finding transcendence within the world not through escaping it.

Sri Aurobindo opened up my eyes about the connection between the material and the spiritual world

Congressman Dennis Kucinich « Values in World Thought by Tom

Edison Dudoit: Hi, my name is Eddie. When you were downstairs voting, we had a discussion with your assistant about the spiritual and philosophical essence behind your answers and explanations to our questions, and we’re all very curious where that sort of consciousness developed in you.

Dennis Kucinich: From literature; from the English romantic poets; from Roman Catholicism; from mysticism; from the writings of Gandhi; from an understanding of Hinduism and Buddhism – and as I mentioned earlier – Catholicism, of theism and atheism; from studying quantum physics; playing baseball, football; from being a father; from asking questions; from coming to an understanding that my life doesn’t belong to myself alone; from realizing that I am by reference anyone else. That we are multidimensional beings; that there is a physical element to who we are, there is an emotional element, intellectual, spiritual; that we exist simultaneously in so many different levels as beings; that our thoughts matter, our words matter, our actions matter, they need to be integrated.

And so it’s not the province of any one religion – although my thinking derives from many different religions – or of any particular type of political philosophy. There is a Hindu writer and statesman by the name of Sri Aurobindo; when I started to read his works, it kind of opened up my eyes about the connection between the material and the spiritual world. Now, my study of Roman Catholicism also reflected on that, and I saw it in a different light when I started to study Aurobindo. I see this constant interplay between the material and the spiritual world going on all the time. I believe that without spirit we’d just be empty shells, and spirit infuses us and helps us quicken and elevate the material world; helps it ascend. So I try to put that in to every moment. And you know what? It works. And it makes life interesting and fun. …That’s a partial answer. …

There’s a sense in which when we talk about having vision, we put it in the context of time. I find that if we are in touch with our timeless nature, if we can understand that time truly is an illusion, not simply in an existential way, but in a way in which we are universal beings, we are connected to everything and all. And when you stand for something, there are principles that are timeless. Human unity is a timeless principle. Interconnectiveness – timeless principle. Interdependence – a timeless principle. Peace – timeless. Love – timeless. Hope – timeless.

So when you look at the expanse of the universe and you try to draw forth from that universe the possibilities into this present time – whether it arrives, whether those hopes are realized in 2006, ‘08, ‘12, ‘16, ‘20, on and on – is not the point! It’s that you connect your aspirations with a dream and move towards it. And that’s what counts. It is the journey, not the destination. We don’t always know where things will lead, but we have the right to make the choice to take the trip. And so I choose to take a journey of hope, and that in itself is its own reward. Where it leads, I can’t tell you. …

Keats once wrote that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” We have the opportunity of creating a more joyful world by reaching for the beauty that’s in the world and the beauty that’s inside of each one of us. And so you have a chance of connecting with that and sharing it with the world and it’s really in a sense an obligation. So I invite you to participate. This idea for a Department of Peace is really about creating a culture of peace and a structure to help facilitate the culture. So I invite you. I’ll be out in your area again. There are things that we can do, things you can do now, like start connecting with people across the country and around the world.

Dennis Kucinich: I think it was Joseph Campbell in some of his writing about mythology, writes about how sometimes kingdoms are saved by the protagonist asking the right question. First question: who are we? Next question: what are we here for? You can take it from there. These are questions with answers. What does it mean to be a nation? Is war inevitable? Are we innately aggressive and those impulses can’t be changed? …

Dennis Kucinich: There is an evolutionary process that we participate in. If you look at… If any of you have studied evolutionary biology, you’ll know that there is an often slow and steady upward spiral in the growth of a species, but there’s also a point in evolutionary biology called “punctuated equilibrium,” where there is a break in the evolutionary process and a sudden upward spiral in the transformation of a species. We need to start thinking about our own ability through self-awareness to transform ourselves, to be more than we are and better than we are as a species, to catch that impulse of a quickened evolutionary growth. We cannot even imagine who we could be! We cannot even imagine the type of beings we can become, once we get attuned to an alignment with a higher vibration, which is really love in its fullest expression. It’s about realigning with that, just suddenly become far beyond anything you ever thought you could be. And the operative word is “be,” as opposed to just having.

Years ago, a writer by name of Erich – who I think may have come from Santa Cruz – wrote a book called “To Have or To Be,” exploring the dichotomy of an advancing materialistic addiction overwhelming people’s sense of ethicacy (sic) and actualization. He also, in a book called “The Art of Loving,” talked about how love is this transformative force in our lives and in society. He wrote a later book called “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness,” which talks about how the impulse to love is also constantly in a conflict with destructive impulses.

I mean in the Hindu religion, you have Vishnu – the god of creation – and Shiva, destruction, existing simultaneously. The beauty of this and of being aware that these forces are always at play is to ask, “Okay, what are we signing up for here? Are we letting these destructive impulses play through us, because they can… or are we letting the force of creation move through us, because that can happen too.” Those things are always happening. In a way, that’s what goes on at a cellular level in our own bodies. So when we speak of aligning ourselves with an evolutionary impulse, we have to have an understanding of our own ability to self-actualize our progression as a species. That’s what we have to be able to do, and when we understand that, there’s no telling what we can become. The only limitations we have are those that we impose on ourselves; are those where we chain ourselves in a prison of our own lack of awareness. That’s our own limitations – otherwise, we don’t have any limitations. None.

Sri Aurobindo spent quite a bit of time expressing himself in published writings

A Brief History of Evolutionary Spirituality – by Tom Huston ... By evolutionarymystic March 10, 2010

Foremost among these were the Indian philosopher-sage Sri Aurobindo, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and the French paleontologist and Catholic priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Other key figures included the American essayist ...

Yet it was the work of the great Sri Aurobindo that, while following a similar thread to Bergson and Teilhard, brought an entirely new dimension to this burgeoning field— namely, translating the concept of spiritual evolution into a spiritual practice. After completing his studies in literature and philosophy at Cambridge in 1892, he became a leading figure in the Indian independence movement and was declared “the most dangerous man alive” by the British Empire, but eventually left the freedom fight to devote his life to exploring liberation of an altogether different kind.

After experiencing a deep spiritual awakening, Aurobindo’s consciousness opened onto a vision of human possibilities that saw the attainment of nirvana—typically held to be the goal of all mystical pursuits—as merely the beginning of a personal engagement with the evolutionary force that has been driving the cosmos forward since the dawn of creation. Leading his spiritual community in the practice of “integral yoga,” Aurobindo was the first to synthesize the modern understanding of evolution with the timeless revelation of enlightenment, and pioneered the idea that human beings are capable of aligning their lives with the trajectory and purpose of the universe itself.

Sri Aurobindo’s Marriage—a discussion by Raman Reddy pertaining to a few aspects in context of the latest biography published by the Columbia University Press. Comment posted by: Kepler

Defining “succeed” as inner spiritual realization, that's no doubt true. Defining it as transformation of nature and life on earth, then other things can also assume a place. E.g. Sri Aurobindo spent quite a bit of time expressing himself in published writings.

Ennapadam Panchajanya By Durgadevi 

In my view the most important and seminal book on India’s Freedom Movement that has been published after our independence is the recent book of Smt Radha Rajan titled ‘Eclipse of the Hindu Nation, Gandhi and his Freedom Struggle.” V. Sundaram

Smt Radha Rajan considers 1893 as an important year in the evolution of our struggle for national freedom. She does so not because Mahatma Gandhi went to South Africa for the first time in his life in the year 1893 but because it was in 1893 that Sri Aurobindo started writing his series of 9 biting articles about the Indian National Congress (INC), titled ‘New Lamps for Old’, in Indu Prakash, a Marathi-English Daily published from Bombay. Sri Aurobindo was a young lad of 21 years at that time and the INC was barely 8 years old! …
Sri Aurobindo came to the right conclusion: “Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.”

The Congress of that time, was quite intolerant of criticism by Sri Aurobindo and reacted in such a peculiar manner that it pressurized the editors of Indu Prakash to discontinue the series of fiery articles by Sri Aurobindo.

Following the lead given by Sri Aurobindo, the economic rape and plunder of India by the British Government came to be documented by many public men of the time. Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917) wrote his famous book titled ‘Poverty and Un-British Rule in India’ in 1901. The public anger against the Colonial Government soon became a war cry. To quote the words of Smt Radha Rajan in this context: “Yet Dadabhai Naoroji, like Gandhi later in Hind Swaraj, blamed the British only partially, indeed, half-heartedly. Naoroji understood that the predatory Raj was responsible for India’s gross impoverishment and economic deprivation, yet he defined this rapaciousness as ‘Un-British’!” Excepting leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai, Sri Aurobindo and Veer Savarkar, all the rest of the National leaders from 1885 till 1905 seem to have been great admirers and supporters of the Colonial British (different from ‘Un-British’) Raj in India…

Sri Aurobindo was not taken in by the patently pro-British views of Gandhi in his Hind Swaraj and other writings. Sri Aurobindo did not share the view of Gandhi that the devilish evils of colonial administration could be attributed to modern Western civilization which ignored the Christian roots and went on the path of loot and plunder, exploiting most of Asia, Africa and America. In an explosive article titled ‘Lessons at Jamalpur, published in Bande Mataram (Sri Aurobindo was its editor) on September 01, 1906, Sri Aurobindo saw clearly the roots of Christianity and exposed them: …

When Sri Aurobindo was at the height of his powers as a fiery, patriotic political journalist, he wrote a series of outstanding articles on “Passive Resistance” under the general title ‘New Thought’ in his own Journal, ‘Bande Mataram’ from April 11, 1907 to April 23, 1907. Smt Radha Rajan says that Gandhi’s exposition on “Satyagraha” or “Passive Resistance” seems vacuous by comparison with Sri Aurobindo’s writings on “Passive Resistance”. I fully endorse her view that Gandhi could add very little to Sri Aurobindo’s discourse on “Passive Resistance”. Smt Radha Rajan has written, “In typical Gandhi vein he does not give credit where it is due in his HIND SWARAJ, considered by Gandhians to be his seminal work. “

Religion less as creedal assertion and more as embedded, embodied practice

Visioning a civilised democracy ET, 4 Feb 2010, Kiran Karnik

Sigmund Freud believed that the first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization. Sixty years of the Republic is as good a time as any to keep this in mind as we reflect on and, if necessary, refine or redefine the vision for the country. Of late, the 'super-power' tag, as a goal, has gained ascendancy amongst many people; others prefer descriptions like "economic power-house" or "a seat at the high table". The objective branding of 'biggest democracy' has been supplemented by the corporate favourite: "fastest growing free-market democracy". Many also focus on India’s cultural richness and talk of India’s 'soft power'. […] 

Sadly, democracy occasionally degenerates into majoritarianism. A majority riding roughshod over the rights or views of a minority certainly cannot be the vision for India; nor an aggressive, organised minority coercing others through threats… These regressive and fascist tendencies often ride on linguistic or regional chauvinism, caste or religious identity, or xenophobic pseudo-patriotism.   

The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Polity: a Meditation on Aurobindo’s Thought by Sugata Bose, Modern Intellectual History, 4, 1 (2007), Posthuman Destinies

The Indian intellectual deserves to be put on a par with the European thinker and, as Kris Manjapra argues, ought to be viewed “as engaging and revising through phronesis” the full range of Indian, European and in-between ideational traditions which he or she encountered.9 … In 1905 Bepin Pal wrote of the new patriotism in India, different from the period when Pym, Hampden, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Kossuth and Washington were “the models of young India”. The old patriotism “panted for the realities of Europe and America only under an Indian name”. “We loved the abstraction we called India”, Pal wrote, “but, yes, we hated the thing that it actually was.”

Taking exception to American exceptionalism by George Shulman, The Immanent Frame, Feb 26, 2010

The United States is an empire in decline, as well as a nation under enormous economic duress, and civil religion remains the language by which people here struggle to engage and make sense of those circumstances. The very decline of American power will intensify attachment to the language and symbols typically associated with civil religion, and politicians will feel incredible pressure to invoke it, because they strategically seek electoral legitimacy, and because they themselves are deeply invested in, gripped by, an “American” political identification. The only alternative is that Americans mourn their investment in empire—i.e., in being god’s chosen nation and the “world’s greatest superpower”—to confront and accept the loss of a beloved identity and worldly power. […]

But as Asad also argues, we need to see religion less as creedal assertion and more as embedded, embodied practice. In just these terms, in turn, David Morgan’s post redefines “civil religion,” not as a set of beliefs, but as a body of practices that convene people and conjure their aspirations toward a future. While Morgan holds onto the national frame, and repeats the futile effort to distinguish a “civic patriotism” from its dark double, his turn toward practices is incredibly important as a way to think what “religion” means if we put the focus on democracy, rather than nationality. […]

If we imagine democracy, not as creedal doctrine, but as liturgical practices embedded in ordinary life, then perhaps we can salvage something of value from the nationalist (and religious) traditions braided by the discourse of civil religion. To truly listen to those the enfranchised have cast out as others, to hear their experience of the conduct of the enfranchised and their sense of their own needs, and to debate what that testimony means about how security and identity are conceived, is to begin to rebuild a democratic life in which “the people,” or political community, is reconstituted. That life has creedal elements, to be sure, but politics is a relation to people, not principles, and is thus a relation that requires listening as well as claim-making and conflict. My thought, then, is to shift from seeking to define a benign civil religion focused on state sovereignty in national form, as if democracy is thereby housed or engendered, to exploring “democracy” directly in popular and local, but also electoral practices. We should ask what practices constitute this form of life, and should identify the dispositions, capacities, and commitments we must try to engender if we are to sustain it. Such questions by no means require a localist answer, and indeed will generate arguments in favor of state power, as well as deep conflict over competing claims to represent both “the people” and a democratic faith.

Individuality cannot be dissociated from the pursuit of a disinterested object

The Promise of American Lives - Heroic Individualism in the Writings of Herbert Croly
Kevin C. Murphy, Columbia University (Copyright 2003-2009, All Rights Reserved) Crolian Means: Artisanal Fulfillment and Heroic Exemplars

Still, the question remains – if the nation is not the gardener but instead the fertile soil, what then brings on this flowering of diverse democratic individuality? Croly’s answer: aspiration itself. “The truth is that individuality cannot be dissociated from the pursuit of a disinterested object,” he writes. “It is a moral and intellectual quality, and it must be realized by moral and intellectual means. A man achieves individual distinction, not by the enterprise and vigor with which he accumulates money, but by the zeal and the skill with which he pursues an exclusive interest – an interest usually, but not necessarily connected with his means of livelihood.”²⁰ Thus, concludes Croly, a person cultivates her own individuality by freely engaging in an aesthetic or occupational pursuit of her choosing, and the best form of government is one that offers a diversity of pursuits for such citizens to engage in.

In defining individuality thus, Croly acknowledges his intellectual debt to the writings of nineteenth century British cultural critics John Ruskin and William Morris, both of whom extolled “the insistence on the worker’s right to joyful and useful labor” as the “moral core” of their public philosophies. As historian T.J. Jackson Lears argues in his seminal work No Place of Grace, both Ruskin’s medievalist-centered appraisal of modern life and Morris’s socialist-leaning update of Ruskin’s thesis emphasize the critical importance of artisanal creation to the happiness of the individual. Similarly, both lament the “degradation of work” as the primary flaw in the organization of modern economic life. According to Lears, these antimodern arguments of Ruskin and Morris influenced a generation of American intellectuals and progressives, who in “yearning to reintegrate selfhood by resurrecting the authentic experience of manual labor…looked hopefully toward the figure of the premodern artisan.”²¹

Yet, Lears argues, the national predisposition toward progress caused American heirs of Ruskin and Morris, ranging from the wide-ranging thinkers of the Arts and Crafts Movement to the progressive founders of the Settlement Houses, to jettison the antimodernist component of their critiques and instead make peace with the emerging bureaucratic-industrial order. As American reformers “began unwittingly to accommodate themselves to the corporate system of organized capitalism,” remarks Lears, “their focus began to shift from social justice to personal fulfillment.” […]

Despite the much-heralded emphasis on nationalism throughout Promise of American Life, the central argument of Croly’s tome – the motive force that spurs his progressive vision of the ideal polity -- rests primarily in the hands of exemplary individuals.²⁶ Indeed, the only way that the “noble and civilized democracy” which Croly has spent the entire book articulating can come to pass is if America’s citizens aspire and strive toward a heroic or saintly ideal.

In placing so much rhetorical weight upon the idea of heroism, Croly’s Promise enters into a dialogue with a number of intriguing canons, and none so obvious as that of his early progressive contemporaries. Historians as diverse as James Higham, T.J. Jackson Lears, George Cotkin, and Gail Bederman have all noted the cultural veneration of the heroic ideal at the turn of the twentieth century. As Cotkin puts it in his study of William James’ own embrace of this heroic ideal, the “discourse of heroism…enthused American culture after 1880” and had “transformed itself into a full-fledged revitalization movement” soon thereafter. Be it in Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur, the dime novel adventures of Deadwood Dick, the sculling paintings of Thomas Eakins, the Muscular Christianity of Dwight Moody, the virile public image of Theodore Roosevelt, or the “capacity of the strenuous mood” idealized by William James, the discourse of heroism was omnipresent among the thinkers of Herbert Croly’s generation, and as such Promise falls clearly within the cultural mainstream of its time.²⁷

Yet Croly’s use of heroic exemplars also speaks to longer-standing traditions in the American mind. For one, although it may at first seem counterintuitive given both Croly’s contempt for Jeffersonian provincialism and his arguments in favor of political centralization, the emphasis on democratic improvement through heroic emulation place Promise squarely in the civic republican tradition. In the words of political scientist Michael Sandel, “the republican conception of freedom…requires a formative politics, a politics that cultivates in citizens the qualities of character self-government requires.” And this type of formative politics is clearly at the center of Croly’s tome. As Sandel notes, “repeatedly and explicitly, Croly wrote of the ‘formative purpose’ of democratic life. More than a scheme for majority rule or individual liberty or equal rights, [Croly’s] democracy has as its highest purpose the moral and civic improvements of the people…the point of democracy [for Croly] was not to cater to people’s desires but to elevate their character, broaden their sympathies, and enlarge their civic spirit.”²⁸ 

Manmohan Singh has built a whole career evading limelight

PM as Political Manmohan

Shekhar Gupta, IE - Jul 03, 2004

Manmohan Singh is known to be a quiet, self-effacing man, who has built a whole career and reputation by trying to personally stay out of limelight… His own non-political background and abhorrence of palace intrigue and lack of personal ambition or greed are comforting for Sonia Gandhi. 

Rule of law

Abhishek Singvi, HT- April 21, 2004 3:46 PM

From time immemorial, we have idealized the rule of law in precept and undermined it in practice. We have forgotten Cicero’s warning that

“we are in bondage to the law so that we might be free”

and that

“howsoever high you may be, the law is above you.”

We ignore Montesquieu who saw

“liberty as the right to do as the law permits”

and we violate William Penn’s apt words,

“Law is the insurance we have on our lives and property. Obedience is the premium we pay for it.”

Multilateral thinking

Vinay Kamat, STOI- February 22, 2004 3:51 PM

Our mental compasses do not point to the West alone. They point every-where. Not Lateral thinking; this is multilateral thinking.

Remaking India: one country, one destiny

Arun Maira, ET - February 19, 2004

The change springs from deeper roots. While initially slower, it is more sustainable because it is founded on commitment from the implementers towards their own aspirational plans rather than compliance with an expert’s plans. [Remaking India: One Country, One Destiny (Response Books)]

I do not believe in the real politik which you talked about

To tusarnmohapatra@gmail.com date18 February 2010 19:40 mailed-by rediffmail.com Dear Shri Mohapatra,

I hope you remember our long conversation on various issues starting from Unification of India and Pakistan for solving of J&K conflict and concluding after the discussion regarding the role of educated and enlightened people in capturing the democratic power through demand driven election.

While I found that there were some crucial differences between the way you and think, I still felt happy that I spoke to a person today who is committed to the welfare of the citizens of this country. I appreciate your efforts in forming a political party and making an attempt to enter the electoral politics. I sincerely wish you all the best in your endeavour.

As I told you over phone, my thinking is on similar lines, however I do not believe in the real politik which you talked about. I don't want to tread the path followed by other political parties, but want to travel in an entirely different direction. However, I may not be able to reach the goal in my life time, but I am sure that the idea and ideology will take roots and will have its positive outcome later. Nonetheless, it is important that educated people of this country should endeavour, though through different methodologies, to make a difference to the citizens of this country.

Please be in touch through e-mail. You are most welcome to meet me whenever you are in Delhi and spend some quality time. 

To tusarnmohapatra@gmail.com date 19 February 2010 19:59 mailed-by rediffmail.com

Yes, I prefer to stick to an ethical line. You are right that there are no such examples in history. This is a case of who will bell the cat? We all know what is right, but we don't follow or strive to achieve it as it is a difficult path.

Further, I strongly believe in right means to achieve noble ends and I don't look forward for short cuts. What we strive to build should be on a solid foundation, despite the time it takes. In fact, movements aiming at bringing transformational changes in the society and civilisation should be at a different pedestal and quality, otherwise they will not last long and will degenerate in no time.

Secularism can be seen as a rupture from the past and a prerequisite to Sri Aurobindo's "Subjective Age"

VO Chidambaram Pillai: Tilak's Southern Lieutenant—by R Venkatachalapathy Comment posted by: auroman 

Some form of secularism (church-state separation) is necessary because it serves as a useful antidote to the infrarational forms of religion, whether it arises from Hinduism or Islam.  Secularism in that sense can be seen as a rupture from the past and a prerequisite to Sri Aurobindo's "Subjective Age".

Comment posted by: Govind

That is certainly the most positive way to look at it. I can detect a parallel between Sri Aurobindo's own experience as a child, with Krishnadhan Ghose attempting to bring about a similar drastic rupture from the past in the case of his own son. Our so-called founding fathers seem to have tried to do the same with Mother India. My faith tells me that India's further growth too will follow the trajectory of Sri Aurobindo's Life and She will arrive. Perhaps that is the inner significance of the 15th of August.

Comment posted by: auroman

Assuming you are referring to Nehruvian secularism, certainly there are opportunists who play vote bank politics but there may also be those who reach out to minorities because they want to be inclusive, help the poor and the downtrodden.  That instinct of compassion is laudable even though it sometimes leads to laxity in standards and govt excesses.

Posted by Tusar N Mohapatra at 7:17 PM

Indian politics, before fully recovering from the impact of colonialism, is grappling with multiple dimensions of the perceived menace of globalization. Opportunity, prosperity, and migration are drawing fresh contours of diversity thus confusing and destabilizing old affiliations and affections. Such a scenario stimulates breaking forth from the past and shedding meaningless embellishments yoked to culture and tradition.  Inculcating a modern outlook at the moment, therefore, is the need of the hour, and only Savitri Era Party is equipped with such a perspective. [TNM]

Posted by Tusar N Mohapatra at 6:27 PM 

The reformist role that The Mother & Sri Aurobindo have played is patently subversive not only to the Hindu but also for the Christian religion. This is inevitable when the idea is to forge a unity overarching diverse cultures and continents. [TNM] The Mother & Sri Aurobindo have paved the way for an epochal synthesis. [TNM]  2:53 PM

Posted by Tusar N Mohapatra at 8:29 PM

Jatindranath Mukherjee, M.N. Roy, Acharya Narendra Deva, Dr. K B Hedgewar, Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad: a galaxy of front ranking patriots spanning the whole gamut of political spectrum have acknowledged their debt to Sri Aurobindo. There is no reason why the same elevating sentiments cannot be recreated in our time and a genuine nationalist revolution played out. [TNM]

To Bankimchandra, the whole of life was religion

M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (Pathfinders) This idea of the cult of humanity emanated from the Positivist notion of the religion of humanity formulated by Auguste Comte, which had a great reception in Calcutta particularly from the 1880s onwards. (Geraldine Hancock Forbes, Positivism in Bengal: A Case Study in the Transmission and Assimilation of an Ideology, p.70)  Kris Manjapra, M. N. Roy, 2010, p. 22 

The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo - Google Books Result V. P. Varma - 1990 - Philosophy - Since Aurobindo is a metaphysician accepting the ... 1 Sri Aurobindo refers to some significant institutions: (a) the Indian ...

line 5, read "in all (57) stages from the first thought of ... by SK Maitra - 1953
humanism of Comte or Mill, then certainly Sri Aurobindo is not a humanist, for he cannot subscribe to that view of man which forever pins him down to ... Review: [untitled] S. K. Maitra Reviewed work(s): The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo Philosophy East and West, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Jul., 1953), pp. 178-182 (review consists of 5 pages) Published by: University of Hawai'i Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1397265

Sri Aurobindo and Karl Marx: integral sociology and dialectical ... - Google Books Result Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya - 1988 - Political Science - One naturally feels inclined to raise the question: what precisely did historicists like Comte, Marx and Sri Aurobindo mean by the invariable laws of ...

pad~16~2-Book Reviews by D Societies - 2006
particular, Sri Aurobindo confirms the Vedic vision in his writings. In The Human Cycle, in contrast to August Comte's depiction of the evolution of ...

Bankimchandra: Development of Nationalism and Indian Identity Dr. Anil Baran Ray Prabuddha Bharata August 2005

As regards the sources, Bankimchandra acknowledged the influence of English utilitarianism and French positivism on his political thought but asserted all the same his independence of them by critiquing them where they, in his opinion, deserved such criticism… Bankimchandra took Auguste Comte’s prescription, as offered in the latter’s philosophy of positivism, that the ‘human deity’ be worshipped, but did not take Comte’s reasons for such prescription. Comte argued that since God could not be seen but only imagined and that since He was extra-cosmic and superior to humanity, man should devote himself rather to the worship of concrete humanity than an abstract God. Unlike Comte, Bankimchandra did not want to make a distinction between abstract God and concrete humanity. He wished to combine the abstract and the concrete by observing that God was the inmost essence of all human beings and that ‘worship’ of the one was worship of the other as well. Having made God and humanity one, Bankimchandra next observed that the dharma of man lay in his attainment of full humanity through the cultivation and harmonious development (anushilan, as he termed it) of all his physical and mental faculties as also through the performance of dutiful actions in the selfless spirit of Krishna, who, in Bankimchandra’s opinion, represented the best example of full humanity in respect of both being and doing. Bankimchandra then went on to assert that man attained his full ‘maturity’ when, having developed himself after the anushilan dharma, he directed his devotion to God. God was in all beings. Therefore, devotion to God meant progressively extending one’s love for oneself and one’s family to one’s community to one’s country and finally to whole of humanity or the entire human race. Love for the whole humanity, however, was an ideal very difficult to realize in actual practice and so Bankimchandra advised his countrymen to take love for one’s country as the highest religion. As he put it, ‘Considering the condition of mankind, love of one’s own country should be called the highest dharma’ (199). ..... Sri Aurobindo’s Bhavani Mandir was clearly a product of the inspiration he received from Bankimchandra’s Ananda Math. And that Bankimchandra inspired many revolutionaries of India to embrace the gallows with ‘Bande Mataram’ on their lips is a well-documented fact of history. Many have spoken against his theory of religious nationalism and criticized him for his failure to maintain the distinction between religion and politics, without realizing that, to him, the whole of life was religion and as per such a perception and philosophy of life, man’s spiritual and temporal lives were incapable of being distinguished. As Bankimchandra himself observed, ‘They form one compact whole, to separate which into component parts is to rend the entire fabric.’ (21) ... [Bankimchandra and the making of nationalist consciousness (Occasional paper), The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (Soas Studies on South Asia)]

Swami Vivekananda (January 12, 1863 – July 4, 1902) | Great Indian ...

progress and spiritual insight into the works of John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer and G.W.F. Hegel. ..... Aurobindo Ghosh considered Vivekananda as his spiritual mentor. ... –Sri Aurobindo–1915 in Vedic Magazine. ...

The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Polity: a Meditation on Aurobindo’s Thought by Sugata Bose, Modern Intellectual History, 4, 1 (2007), By debbanerji Posthuman Destinies

It engages in that exercise of elucidation by interpreting a few of the key texts by Aurobindo Ghose on the relationship between ethics and politics in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Both secularist and subalternist ...
The misappropriation of Aurobindo by the Hindu right has been facilitated by the secularists’ abandonment of the domain of religion to the religious bigots. To a secularist historian like Sumit Sarkar the invocation to sanatan dharma by Aurobindo is deeply troubling and makes him implicitly, if not explicitly, the harbinger of communalism in the pejorative sense the term came to acquire some two decades after Aurobindo had retired from active political life.4 To an anti-secularist scholar like Ashis Nandy the “nationalist passions” of Aurobindo located in “a theory of transcendence” are mistakenly deemed to be too narrowly conceived compared to the broader humanism of the more universalist, civilizational discourses ascribed to Tagore and Gandhi.5 The specific failures in fathoming the depths of Aurobindo’s thought are related to more general infirmities that have afflicted the history of political and economic ideas in colonial India…

The Indian intellectual deserves to be put on a par with the European thinker and, as Kris Manjapra argues, ought to be viewed “as engaging and revising through phronesis” the full range of Indian, European and in-between ideational traditions which he or she encountered.9 … In 1905 Bepin Pal wrote of the new patriotism in India, different from the period when Pym, Hampden, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Kossuth and Washington were “the models of young India”. The old patriotism “panted for the realities of Europe and America only under an Indian name”. “We loved the abstraction we called India”, Pal wrote, “but, yes, we hated the thing that it actually was”…

“And so”, Sumit Sarkar writes somewhat derisively, “the revolutionary leader becomes the yogi of Pondicherry”. 31 Aurobindo may have retired from active participation in politics, but his days as a thinker on the problem of ethics and politics were far from over. In that respect the best was perhaps yet to come.