Sunday, November 23, 2008

Skepticism in Sri Aurobindo

[Moral reflections Chandigarh Tribune - Stephen Phillips’s Skepticism in Aurobindo brings the volume to the late 19th century interpretation of the Indian tradition. One associates ‘mysticism’ rather than ‘skepticism’ with Aurobindo. Phillips suggests that his mysticism is a skeptical one (I would have thought the idea of a supramental consciousness was embedded in dogmatic metaphysics rather than skepticism which in Aurobindo is no more than a mildly superficial suspicion of others as authoritative).
Vijay Tankha Sunday, November 23, 2008
Indian Ethics — Classical Traditions and Contemporary Challenges Eds Purushottama Bilimoria, Joseph Prabhu and Renuka Sharma. Oxford.Pages 431. Rs 795.
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[Ecstatic Archaisms of Aurobindo Ghose - Prasanta Chakravarty By Aditya Nigam “If hatred is demoralizing, it is also stimulating,” writes Aurobindo Ghose in one of his early essay titled On Nationalism after returning to India from England in 1893. This pithy, striking statement possibly sums up the moral basis of violence as a stimulus among the swadeshi revolutionaries. Kafila - http://kafila.org/ The cultural-political trope of political vedantism must be recognized as a legitimate adversary for radical democratic politics in India. So intense is the attraction of this serene, gory and messianic radicalism that you tend to equate all micro-adversarial particularities in terms of one single enemy: the pluralist, even the culturally rooted one. The turn that Ghose’s Bandemataram took in the early years of the twentieth century effortlessly merged at one level with the political position of Brahmabandhab Upadhyay’s Sandhya, that outspoken radical-conservative magazine of the time in Bengal. So, how does one recoup a radical enough middle ground? For starters, how about celebrating tamas?]

Seems to be a season of Skepticism. [TNM]

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