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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Gnosticism

Intermediate ascents

23 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in God, Jainism, Monasticism

≈ Comments Off on Intermediate ascents

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, ascent/descent, chastened intellectualism, Gnosticism, ibn Sīnā, intimacy/integrity, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas P. Kasulis, Yoga Sūtras

It seems to me that the concepts of ascent and descent allow relatively easily for intermediate positions between them, compromises that attempt at a synthesis. I suspect that in this respect they are different from the related binary of intimacy and integrity. Thomas Kasulis tries to argue that intimacy and integrity are incommensurable – one may experience elements of each at once, but it is difficult to take a moderate position between them, let alone to establish a synthesis. I am not convinced that Kasulis is right about this, but I do think that at least middle grounds on intimacy and integrity are harder to establish than on ascent and descent.

For relatively few seek the pure transcendence of the Yoga Sūtras, abiding in a pure universality outside the changing world. It is an uncompromising and drastic ascent that demands we act and be with a higher universal, leaving the particulars of the world behind us. Jain monks, following a similar path, deliberately renounce dependence to all particulars up to and including food – they often end their lives through sallekhanā or santhara, intentional slow starvation. Continue reading →

Of transcendence

11 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Flourishing, God, Politics

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

ascent/descent, Augustine, conservatism, Eric Voegelin, Front Porch Republic, Gnosticism, Karl Marx, Mark T. Mitchell, Martha Nussbaum, modernism, Simone Weil, Thomas Aquinas

Last time I discussed the relationship between the concepts of Ascent and of transcendence. I think there’s more to say about the latter. Last time I had noted two forms of transcendence: an Ascent beyond the physical world, and the “transcendence by descent” endorsed by Martha Nussbaum in which one transcends one’s own limits. But I think there’s also a third type found between them, one which I’ve spoken of before in other terms.

A key feature of any kind of transcendence, it seems to me, is dissatisfaction: something appears wrong with that which one is trying to transcend. In Nussbaum’s transcendence-by-descent, one is dissatisfied with one’s own weaknesses and flaws. In an Ascent, one is in some sense dissatisfied with the whole world. But what if one is dissatisfied with the whole world in a way that motivates one not to step outside the world, but to change it? Continue reading →

On hating the real world

03 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Christianity, Confucianism, Early Factions, Place, Politics, Supernatural

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

architecture, Communism, conservatism, Eric Voegelin, Frank Gehry, Front Porch Republic, Gnosticism, modernism, modernity, natural environment, Romanticism, Simone Weil, Wendell Berry

A few months ago I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who is particularly given to pithy epigrams. We were discussing the Stata Center: a brightly colourful building on the MIT campus, designed by architect Frank Gehry, which is designed deliberately to look chaotic, unfinished, random. It’s not a building that leaves many people feeling neutral. My friend disliked its artifice, disjoint from the things around it. I said I thought it would be terribly inappropriate in the middle of a historic neighbourhood, but that it’s just right for a school like MIT, so focused on progress and the future. She didn’t think it was appropriate anywhere, and added: “Frank Gehry hates the real world.”

I’ve been thinking about that quote while reading articles by Patrick Deneen and others at Front Porch Republic, who would probably agree with my friend about Gehry’s architecture (though not about much else). Continue reading →

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