Category: Philosophy

Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter

New Harbinger, 2017

Amazon.co.uk

Publisher’s Description:

Our world culture is founded on the assumption that the Big Bang gave rise to matter, which in time evolved into the world, into which the body was born, inside which a brain appeared, out of which consciousness at some late stage developed. As a result of this “matter model,” most of us believe that consciousness is a property of the body. We feel that it is “I,” this body, that knows or is aware of the world. We believe and feel that the knowing with which we are aware of our experience is located in and shares the limits and destiny of the body. This is the fundamental presumption of mind and matter that underpins almost all our thoughts and feelings and is expressed in our activities and relationships.

The Nature of Consciousness suggests that the matter model has outlived its function and is now destroying the very values it once sought to promote. For many people, the debate as to the ultimate reality of the universe is an academic one, far removed from the concerns and demands of everyday life. After all, life happens independently of our models of it. However, The Nature of Consciousness will clearly show that the materialist paradigm is a philosophy of despair and, as such, the root cause of unhappiness in individuals. It is a philosophy of conflict and, as such, the root cause of hostilities between families, communities, and nations. Far from being abstract and philosophical, its implications touch each one of us directly and intimately.

An exploration of the nature of consciousness has the power to reveal the peace and happiness that truly lie at the heart of experience. Our experience never ceases to change, but the knowing element in all experience – consciousness, or what we call “I” – itself never changes. The knowing with which all experience is known is always the same knowing. Being the common, unchanging element in all experience, consciousness does not share the qualities of any particular experience: it is not qualified, conditioned, or limited by experience. The knowing with which a feeling of loneliness or sorrow is known is the same knowing with which the thought of a friend, the sight of a sunset, or the taste of ice cream is known. Just as a screen is never disturbed by the action in a movie, so consciousness is never disturbed by experience; thus it is inherently peaceful. The peace that is inherent in us – indeed that is us – is not dependent on the situations or conditions we find ourselves in. In a series of essays that draw you, through your own direct experience, into an exploration of the nature of this knowing element that each of us calls “I,” The Nature of Consciousness posits that consciousness is the fundamental reality of the apparent duality of mind and matter. It shows that the overlooking or ignoring of this reality is the root cause of the existential unhappiness that pervades and motivates most people’s lives, as well as the wider conflicts that exist between communities and nations. Conversely, the book suggests that the recognition of the fundamental reality of consciousness is the first step in the quest for lasting happiness and the foundation for world peace.

Reviews:

“I’ve gained deeper understanding listening to Rupert Spira than I have from any other exponent of modern spirituality. Reality is sending us a message we desperately need to hear, and at this moment no messenger surpasses Spira and the transformative words in his essays.”

Deepak Chopra, author of You Are the Universe, Spiritual Solutions, and Super Brain

“Rupert Spira guides his reader on a delightful journey of discovery that uncovers and reveals what the Kashmiri Masters have called ‘the greatest secret, more hidden than the most concealed and yet more evident than the most evident of things,’ and that is consciousness itself. Rupert deserves to be congratulated for the clarity and sensitivity with which he presents the teachings of the ancient and modern Masters concerning consciousness, and his own deeply personal experience, in such a way that it can be both easily understood and applied.”

Mark Dyczkowski, author of The Doctrine of Vibration: An Analysis of the Doctrines and Practices of Kashmir Shaivism

“In these essays, Rupert Spira cracks the shell of materialism by elucidating the ‘calamitous assumption that lies at the root of our materialistic culture,’ and he artistically and persuasively leads us to the universal antidote: the realization of the primacy of consciousness. As a scientist, I very much appreciate Rupert’s pointing out that scientists will never truly succeed in their exploration of the world until they successfully investigate the nature of the subject known as ‘I.'”

Paul J. Mills, professor of family medicine and public health at the University of California, San Diego

About the Author:

From an early age Rupert Spira was deeply interested in the nature of reality, beginning to meditate at the age of seventeen and studying the teachings of the classical Advaita Vedanta tradition over the next twenty years. In 1997 he met his teacher, Francis Lucille, who introduced him to the Direct Path teachings of Atmananda Krishna Menon and to Jean Klein and the Tantric tradition of Kashmir Shaivism. More importantly, Francis directly indicated to him the true nature of experience. Rupert lives in the UK and holds regular meetings and retreats in Europe and the US.

JOB:s kommentar:

Man får väl säga samma sak här som om första upplagan av Bernardo Kastrups Why Materialism Is Baloney.

Materia eller medvetande?

Douglas Hedley, som doktorerade under Werner Beierwaltes i München på 90-talet och nu är professor i religionsfilosofi i Cambridge och director för The Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism, beskriver i sin artikel ‘Werner Beierwaltes and the Yearning for Transcendence’ från 2022 Beierwaltes’ förhållande till Heidegger på ett slående sätt motsvarar den mer intuitiva uppfattning jag själv alltid haft om den sistnämnde. Beierwaltes’ kritik gäller just det huvudsakliga som gjort det litet svårt för mig att se honom som en av de mest relevanta tänkarna, samtidigt som Hedley också betonar en viss affinitet med moment som utan tvekan är värdefulla.

“Heidegger’s densely poetic and obscure summoning of a return to Being rather than beings, and indeed, the endeavour to think ‘the difference between Being and beings’ was of particular significance for Beierwaltes as a crypto-Neoplatonic endeavour”, inleder han, omedelbart signalerande Beierwaltes’ distinkta och mindre vanliga ingång. Och han utvecklar detta: “Beierwaltes was acutely aware of the genius of Heidegger and there was an elective affinity. It was the opposite of the enthusiasm of the French poststructuralists for the end of metaphysics. It was in conscious opposition to the procrustean ‘End of Metaphysics’ narrative and in a sense because of the persistence of aspects of Eckhart or Schelling in Heidegger’s thought that Heidegger remained a presence for Beierwaltes. The Heideggerian critique of metaphysics served only to reinforce the need for metaphysics.”

Det var p.g.a. detta som det inte var den tidige Heidegger utan “the later critic of Plato that drew his fire: the philosopher who introduced the concept of the ‘onto-theological’ and held that metaphysics, on account of its onto-theological character, i.e., that it allegedly has always thought of being as ‘something’ and this ‘something’ as God, has never been able to think BEING. As a result, it succumbed to ‘forgetfulness of being’.”

Det här är väl det mest centrala, och vad som primärt slår platonskt orienterade läsare av Heidegger som problematiskt. “Beierwaltes subjects this thesis to withering and trenchant critique. As long as Heidegger himself, Beierwaltes notes, is unable to shed more light upon what BEING is, one must consider the possibility that Neoplatonism and thinkers in its wake, such as Meister Eckhart or Cusa, were able to free themselves from the ‘forgetfulness of being’ through their concept of the ‘beyond being’. Plotinus refers to the One explicitly as not ‘something’ in any categorical sense of a thing, just as BEING, as Heidegger insists, cannot be ‘something’. Or indeed are we supposed to consider the unum and the non aliud or idem, which, for Eckhart and Cusanus, is the designation of God, as ‘something’?”

Hedley fortsätter på ett sätt som börjar föra tankarna i riktning mot den “lägre romantiken” – det som är ett av mina generella problem med den s.k. “konservativa revolutionen” i Tyskland som Heidegger ibland räknas som en del av: “The critique of Heidegger in Beierwaltes is often a radical and remorseless onslaught upon Heidegger’s capacity to eclipse brilliant Attic light with Black Forest tenebrosity!” Man erinrar sig här Voegelins kritik (se förslagsvis min översättning av Vetenskap, politik och gnosticism, 92-4), och givetvis Heideggers politik.

Vidare: “Beierwaltes investigates Heidegger’s return to the pre-Socratics with a ruthless exposure of Heidegger’s philological limitations, often attributable to his use of Wilhelm Pape’s Griechisch-Deutsches Handwörterbuch; sometimes critiquing Heidegger’s quasi-Romantic fantasies about archaic Greek thought, or simply his procrustean tendency to project his own ideas and obsessions into his favoured texts.”

Men “[w]hile sensitive to the ethical ambivalence of Heidegger’s desire to overcome technical rationality” var Beierwaltes också “affected by the desire of the Schwarzwald sage to awaken the sense of wonder as the very engine of philosophy”, eftersom “the attunement to the logos, as the speech of Being, and the awareness of the ineffable source of meaning, was a deep aspect of the philosophical program of Beierwaltes”. Såtillvida delade Beierwaltes, “despite the profound misgivings and criticisms” en “kindred vision of philosophy to that of Heidegger, one opposed to the varieties of positivism, existentialism or sociological-marxisant [Hedley torde mena “marxisant sociology”] that were ubiquitous in German academia in the latter part of the last century.”

Artikeln innehåller också mycket annat av vikt rörande Beierwaltes, och Hedley är även i övrigt en viktig kännare av den platonska traditionen, naturligt nog med visst fokus på Cambridge-platonisterna som han ser som en länk mellan den florentinska renässansplatonismen och den platonska förnyelsen i romantiken och den tyska idealismen.

En av de viktigaste europeiska försvararna i vår tid av hela den platonska traditionen i vid mening. Filosofiprofessor i München, bortgången 2019.

Foto: Giuseppe Girgenti

Proklos. Grundzüge seiner Metaphysik (1965)

Plotin. Über Ewigkeit und Zeit (1967)

Platonismus und Idealismus (1972)

Identität und Differenz (1980)

Denken des Einen. Studien zur neuplatonischen Philosophie und ihrer Wirkungsgeschichte (1985)

Selbsterkenntnis und Erfahrung der Einheit (1991)

Eriugena. Grundzüge seines Denkens (1994)

Heideggers Rückgang zu den Griechen (1995)

Der verborgene Gott. Cusanus und Dionysius (1997)

Platonismus im Christentum (1998)

Das wahre Selbst. Studien zu Plotins Begriff des Geistes und des Einen (2001)

Procliana. Spätantikes Denken und seine Spuren (2007)

Fussnoten zu Plato (2011)

Catena Aurea. Plotin Augustinus Eriugena Thomas Cusanus (2017)

Werner Beierwaltes: Platonismus und Idealismus

Föreläsning av Keith Ward 2015.

Foto: Portland Seminary

“A discussion on the overlap between Philosophy and Religion. There are competing philosophical views of reality. Main contenders are: common sense, reductive materialism, radical empiricism, and idealism.

The lecture will review these, and defend an idealist view – that matter is a projection of mind, and that mental, conscious being is the fundamental form of reality. This is one philosophical basis for belief in God.”

Denna beskrivande text signalerar ett kvarhållande av det exoteologiska sammanhanget; den idealistiska verklighetssynen samordnas med det som endast en filosofisk grund för dess tro i betydelsen “belief”. I min (egentligen oavslutade) serie inlägg 2011-12 med kommentarer till en av Wards texter om materialismen försöker jag som alltid – om än jämförelsevis kort – peka på att den idealistiska verklighetsvyn i sig implicerar en potentiell verklighetsväg och verklighetsvaro, ett direkt sofiskt esoförverkligande utöver det blotta försanthållandet och dess exoförstådda föremål. Men detta kan ses som ett nästa steg; utläggningen av verklighetsvyn som s.a.s. blott vy förblir givetvis också i sig av största vikt.

Mindre känd, senare bok av författaren till Ideas Have Consequences, som väger in en historicistisk dimension som balanserar – men alls inte uppger – den klassiska idealismen.

Av de s.a.s. rent amerikanska (d.v.s. ej som Voegelin och Strauss från Europa invandrade) konservativa tänkare som jag tror jag först läste om i Nash var nog Weaver den som, naturligt nog inte minst genom sin allmänna platonism, gjorde starkast intryck på mig.

Weaver var kritiker av imperiet och dess atombombningar. Men också av Babbitts (och Mores) likaledes imperialismkritiska “nya humanism”, som han i sin magisteravhandling från 1934, året efter Babbitts död, såg som otillräcklig för att uppnå sina syften eftersom den i alltför hög grad var förbunden med moderniteten och avvek för mycket från traditionen, metafysiken och religionen (en kritik som i högre grad drabbar Babbitt än More). På flera punkter överensstämmer denna kritik med den idealistiska revision (utöver den klassiska idealismen byggande på den svenska filosofiska idealismen under 1800-talet) som jag försöker föreslå i min – oavslutade, pågående – diskussion av den värdecentrerade historicism som ju introducerade ytterligare moment av modernt tänkande.

Weaver var också retorikspecialist vid Chicagouniversitetet (The Ethics of Rhetoric, Language is Sermonic). Hans förståelse av detta ämne var en integrerande del av hans konservatism och kommer därför också till uttryck i Visions of Order. Att tänka sig att jag en gång undervisade om honom, om en sådan tänkare, på en retorikkurs i Lund…

Richard M. Weaver: Visions of Order