Eliade says in his PhD thesis that Vedic philosophy was already one step ahead of current Western philosophy, because it recognized, as a matter of course, the "contingency" or "historicity" thesis whereby social, historical, psychological existence is contingent and flows in history. Vedic philosophy just accepted all this, and then moved to the next step of seeking the transcendent ground.
He says that Western social science and philosophy are hung up on this idea that contingency is inescapable and must either be surrendered to or embraced. Obviously most German and French philosophy of the 20th century agrees with this, by saying that there can be no transcendental ground of philosophical inquiry and that even the subject is historically contingent, an "empirico-transcendental doublet" resulting from a certain metaphysics and a certain socio-economic experience in history.
Is Western philosophy failing to reach the next step already known by Indian metaphysics for thousands of years? The step from a transcendental to a transcendent philosophy?
I am suspicious because Eliade says right off the bat that the search for truth, the hallmark of the Western tradition since Plato, is meaningless to the Indian except insofar as it is instrumentalizable toward the quest for transcendence. Deespite the echoes of Heidegger on veritas vs. aletheia, that creeps me out. I am worried about this oriental encroachment on the Western tradition, as if it was all just three thousand years of misguidedness. Can you be a perennialist without wanting to be a Bronze Age slave-owner? Is something like Hegel really just superfluous?
to transcend is to deny life user, that’s why the west is better, we fight we bleed we live philosophically speaking
Dylan Bell
Transcendence is for pussies.
Jaxson Thomas
But immanence disgusts me. You end up with milquetoast Habermasian communicative rationality or decisionist vulgar Schmitt garbage.
Fundamentally: What would a sublation of the Vedic concern for the transcendent ground and the Western concern for its unfolding in historicity look like?
Ethan Wood
interesting reference op.
i think that the issue is not about philosophy here or there but the larger cultural system in which that quest is immersed. cause some comparative philosophy has showed similar attainments but manifested in quite different ways. maybe the decisive point is the separation of disciplines in the west, which doesnt allow them to develop in a single coherent cultural system, but has them all advancing at its own pace making it impossible fr them to interact in a relevant way.
because think of the first encounters with india or china and all the difficulty westerners found when trying to apply categories such as religion philosophy literature etc. in these places all that was mixed and such separation seemed, or at least seems now, pointless without seeing how it all works as a whole.
i think that is the price we pay for industry. because the excesses of it would be unthinkable to someone having a bit of the systemic consequences of concrete actions.
maybe the split immanence/transcendence only makes sense from that separated point of view. cause, even if it makes sense applying those notions to other civilizations, maybe when you are immersed in a cultural system that covers all aspects of life, you wouldnt feel the need to think of this world as opposed to another, but simply as life in its course. or something of the kind.
Levi Thompson
*having a bit of awareness about the the systemic
Liam Campbell
Is this why I can't stop Goat Yoga? I have transcended the Western trap?
Ryder Collins
Madhyamaka. But to me it was obvious that what Plato was trying to do was a difficult marriage of Parmenides (Being, eternal Spirit) and Heraclitus (Becoming, ever-flowing Matter).
Luke Martin
Western philosophical tradition is not meaningless. If it was, it means you are still thinking about it in a "right/wrong" way, that is, you believe it is meaningless because another tradition - allegedly more "true" - bests it in several aspect. But Eliade is criticizing exactly this kind of approach. The point is not that the search for truth is or has been useless, the point is rather that this search should be re-framed as a mean toward transcendence. Ancient philosophy was much more on track on this theme, since it was conceived first and foremost as a way of life.
The first step to be a perennialist is not to think about ancient traditions as "right" or "wrong" but as a manifestation of the same thing: the sacred or the transcendent.
Joseph Phillips
but poo in the loo?
Cameron King
All I know about Eliade is that he wrote something about liking to read a lot and suffering dimness of the eye as a result, a story where he fucks pajeet pusy, that he wrote a book on religions and that he was associated with the fash
Thanks romanian educaiton
Dylan Cooper
Can you recommend somewhere to start with Madhyamaka? It looks interesting.
I think that sounds great, but it makes me ask how the Hegelian eschatological/teleological view OF Hegelianism itself - that is, Western philosophy's view of itself as an ascending progression, toward something higher, better, than the Greek way of life in its "naively" immanent way-of-lifeness - relates to the comfortably perennial/immanent traditions?
Is our Hegelian march through history a success? An optional detour? Was it all just a way of realising that we should go back and do it the way the Greeks did it all along? Is the profane ontologically worthwhile, and did our sojourn in the profane have a purpose?
Which is the same question I have here: If we come to realise that the immanence-vs.-transcendence perspective is a product of the Western worldview, what is the next step?
Lots of people point out and name this perspective. Heidegger and Husserl obviously do; Derrida even more directly does; Spengler calls it a unique feature of the Faustian geist; Wittgenstein like Derrida basically says it's an illusion, and that meaning only ever unfolds immanently; Deleuze and Foucault all those fuckers do it; and more recently, Taussig has used Benjamin to call immanence "mimesis," and say that the ability to NAME and reflect on mimesis (as opposed to just enacting it) is itself a kind of "doubling" of mimesis, a stepping-back into a peculiarly Western self-awareness of the immanence.
All of these people highlight the transcendental "mode" of detachment from Spirit, awareness of Spirit as Spirit, and Self as Self.
Which is all fine. But the question I have for all of them is: What was the point of becoming aware of the mode, then? In other words, was the history of Western thought Hegelian or not? Is the transcendental turn an advantage over Eastern philosophies or just an incidental feature?
Jaxon Perry
>affirms life >dies a decrepit cretin
So THIS is the power of Optimism!
Adrian Campbell
Just follow Nietzsche and you too can make your life as barren as your mind and die an incontinent burden on the people you've looked down upon.
Adam Evans
>Can you recommend somewhere to start with Madhyamaka? It looks interesting. Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso) (2009), The Middle Way: Faith Grounded in Reason Huntington, C. W., Jr. (1989), The Emptiness of Emptiness: An Introduction to Early Madhyamika Westeroff, Jan. (2009), Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka. A Philosophical Introduction Translated by Garfield (1995), The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā
Jose Clark
Also I wanted to recommend anyone ITT: Thomas C. Mcevilley (2001), The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies
James Richardson
Why tho
Samuel Hall
>tfw traditionalist >tfw going to mass weekly >tfw praying daily >tfw performing yoga >tfw practicing meditation >tfw reading sacred texts >tfw studying philosophy >tfw sharing revelations with spiritual qt gf >tfw hoping to live an authentic life with joy and success and children and kindness >tfw dislike modernity but enjoy the christian marriage of neoplatonic eternalism with jewish historicism
Easton Rogers
i like your queestions a lot but i cant make any interesting answers sorry what i should i read
Owen Clark
...
Elijah Long
Take the Gilles pill if you're gonna talk immanence.
Christopher Price
Can you redpill me on Giles contra Plato. Difference metaphysics seem very counterintuitive compared to archetypal forms.
i read those when i was checking madhyamaka and let me add other important ones: murti-the central philosophy of Buddhism streng-emptiness siderits' translation of nagaruna's mmk tom tillemans, work as a whole pic related
westerhoff seemed to me too intellectually oriented and not even good at it, and garfield is fine but definitely not the best.
secondnig mcevilley's work, it is a nice hpothesis that gives a good overview.
Parker Wright
>what is the next step? you know, i think that answer cant be given until you are there, fr when those old categories drop, the whole picture will be qualitatively new and will therefore wont be possible to be compared on the same level.
all those names you drop dont have of course an answer to your question in the last paragraph, and i can say i only found some materials fr it in poets and painters who are philosophically oriented. i guess thats one of the points a meant when saying the western division is what doesnt let one advance, it is too one sided.
Ryan Thomas
It is counterintuitive, but that's why a critique of representation and its role in forming a particular image of thought or another (through common sense and good sense) can be found in almost every one of Deleuze's books.
Ontological differences aren't however as anti-Platonic as they're made out to be. Even Deleuze describes it as philosophizing in a Platonic matter without being a Platonist. If you consider the fact that Socrates was asking about the Ideas rather than offering them as positive knowledge (definitions), it gets even easier to see why Deleuze's approach isn't even that strange. Differences understood as primordial do have a sort of identity to them, a logic of "Difference and Repetition", or rather differenciation and consolidation through repetitions with variation, that reminds me of the logic of substance in Kant (something, substance, must subsist in order for change to be possible otherwise it isn't change but discontinuity of some kind). While I don't understand all the implications, an ontology of difference does "explain" some things well enough: complication (an initial tension before the world came to be, between a plurality of singularities) works well with becoming and the lack of equilibrium that it requires (even if everywhere identities and compromises as composites are formed) for example. There's also the fact that differences can be productive (creating effects) or the fact that non-liniarity is the norm in nature (singular points extending themselves over ordinary, liniar, points on a graph until a new singular point, a threshold, is reached). There's also the resonances between singularities, their unlikely connections that don't sublate them into something transcending them even though they do become something else in the process (Proust's famous orchid and wasp example). Also, the Kantian notion of simultaneity as temporal rather than spatial works well with pluralism because, at least according to Whitehead, you need truly independent points (which might resonate afterwards) in order to attain it otherwise a logic of succession is introduced (spatial or temporal succession). To be fair, it gets very difficilt once Bergsonian time is introduced because it means thinking of a past that sticks with us (and in this way the continuity between past, present and future is justified) which no longer allows an external observer seeing the whole of time in a spatial manner (an A-B-C-... until the end of time already laid out and predetermined).
I know I'm rambling, but the point is that we must imagine Platonic Ideas as resulting from these pre-individual singularities and resonating with them rather than preceding and conditioning them in order to have a logic of becoming rather than permanence. As to why the two do not get confused (since that logic of Difference and Repetition can so easily lead us back to a false identity, an "optical effect", thought to be real) that's the hard part.
Camden Johnson
>romanian >not shitposting pick one and only one
Ryder Smith
sauce on pajeet pussy?
Jose Hughes
bengal nights
Aaron Ortiz
>muh material conditions
Lincoln Ross
Does anyone know what Eliade's personal religious beliefs were? Was he an orthodox Christian, or a perennialist?
Jace Foster
someone asked this in a course i took recently with one of his actual students and a semi-expert on him
he said a "transfigured christianity" was eliade's hope for the future, but not really a perennialist
eliade was clearly VERY conversant with the perennialists, collaborated with evola in the 70s and corbin as well, and most perennialists consider him a fellow traveller and related figure, but he himself criticised guenon heavily in later life though he was slightly more positive on guenon in the 40s/50s i think
the short answer is: syncretic, vaguely but sincerely christian, sincere Iron Guardist
