Update: Your turn #2 (this post closes tomorrow Wed. at 10pm)

Interesting discussion. I like the lecture/discussion format better. It gives us the opportunity to share and argue some of the issues treated in the first half of the class. Let’s summarize some of the points: 1- In addition to a methodology for proper thinking, philosophy can provide wisdom (Σoφíα). I maintain this was the original goal of Greek philosophy, something we lost along the way. What wisdom? Not knowledge: one can be knowledgeable and un-wise. Jainism seems to indicate that if a person is endowed with good mental states, she can produce good verbal-and-bodily conduct: An inner potential that gets realized through concrete actions in the world. This is pretty close to Aristotle’s notion of virtue. 2- Goodness cannot be achieved without intending and repeating -good- thoughts and actions in order to generate good habits. That’s the wisdom-technique, (from techne, craft). Thus, I brought up the idea of auto-poesis (“repeat an action and you create a habit, repeat a habit and you will form a destiny”). 3- Regarding a-himsa, the main point is violence. How can one define it? Obviously, inflicting unnecessary suffering can be seen as a form of violence. But jaina goes deeper: Violence is a “mental form.” See it as an “inner fear” that elicits a conduct characterized by its lack of justice (or fairness). This is the form of himsa we must fight. A just act cannot be violent because it does not stem from a visceral fear (see it at a form of irrationality). Killing doesn’t have to be violent. Killing in self-defense can be just (think of the European Resistance against the Nazis in WWII). How about emotions? Gandhi is subtle here: The right emotion can help. Anger is legitimate when directed against injustice. 4- Let’s not forget jaina as a tool for civil emancipation. Ahimsa was Gandhi’s method of struggle against the British oppression in India throughout the earlier part of the Twentieth-Century. Martin Luther King employed it as a centerpiece for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s. In both instances, ahimsa proved to be a viable political tool. 5- Later, the discussion shifted to actions: Helping the homeless with the right intention vs. helping just to impress a friend. Which is better? For Jainism the former. But doesn’t the homeless get his money-help regardless? Indeed, that’s part of the homeless’ karma (metaphorically speaking: he deserves it). For the giver, there is more to achieve, though. The right intention, something he doesn’t have yet. Perhaps Aristotle would agree. This giver is not virtuous.

Emergence

I talked to you about emergence as a way of understanding the universe as a possible form of higher organization. Can one see the universe as emergent? I'll come back to this soon. Here is another interesting site.
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I our last discussion the word “experience” was tossed around. Should I abstain from a possible experience out of fear? Aristotle would say “certainly”. Fear has a good side: it can become a filter for potentially harmful experiences. It’s true that too much fear leads to paralysis, no fear to fearlessness. But developing the right amount of fear can inform my decisions. One may add, how do I know if I don’t experience it to begin with? Well, I have the capacity to “understand” a given experience without actually experiencing it (just as much as I can empathize with the suffering of a woman that has been raped, or my wife’s breastfeeding or with my daughter’s sadness though I’m not a woman). I don’t have to get drunk to understand the harm it inflicts to the body.

Gandhi's logic of a-himsa

* ... a steady progress with discipline.

* The power of the satyagrahi is greater than if he were violent.

* There is no defeat in a-himsa.

* In a-himsa the bravery consists in dying, not in killing.

* The satyagrahi should never have any hatred toward his opponent... must be prepared to suffer until the end.

* ...truth never jimsa a cause that is just.

* A satyagrahi is never vindictive. He believes not in destruction but in conversion.

* A-himsa presupposes the ability to strike.

* ...injustice must be resisted. A-himsa is better, but where is does not come naturally jimsa is both necessary and honorable.

* So long as one retains one's sword, one has not attain complete fearlessness.

* A-himsa is impossible without self-purification.

* A weak man is just by accident. A strong satyagrahi is unjust by accident.

* A satyagrahi is dead to his body even before his enemy attempts to kill him, i.e. he is free from attachment to his body and only lives in the victory of his soul.
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Taken from Ghandi on Non-violence (New Directions, 1965).

Important terms in Jaina philosophy

Karman: Bits of material, generated by the person’s actions, that bind themselves to the life-monad or soul through many births. This has the effect of thwarting the full realization and freedom of the soul.

Kalpa: A world cycle. A period of time comprising 4,320,000 yrs. Pali-kappa is an endlessly long period of time. The metaphor is that of a piece of silk rubbed one on a solid piece of rock one cubic mile in size every 1000 yrs. When this wears the rock away, a kalpa has passed.

Jiva: “One who lives in the body,” a mortal being. The embodied self, which identifies with the mind as ego. It creates the notions of duality and causality and thereby becomes bound to the cycle of birth and death. It has been defined as a life-monad.

Ajiva: non-soul, inanimate substance. Ajiva is divided in two categories: non-sentient (i.e. a feeling being) material and non-sentient and non-material.

Moksha: liberation.

Kevala: state of omniscience. Kevala is necessarily accompanied by freedom from karmic obstruction by direct experience of the soul’s pure form, unblemished by its attachment of matter.

Ratnatraya: The basis of Jaina ethics. It comprises the right knowledge, right faith and right conduct. They must be cultivated at once. Right faith leads to calmness and tranquility, but right faith leads to perfection only when followed by right conduct. Knowledge without faith and conduct is futile. Right conduct is spontaneous, not a forced mechanical quality. Attainment of right conduct is a gradual process. The process to achieve this is ahimsa.

Ahimsa: Skt (non-harming) Jaina doctrine of non-violence. Since thought gives rise to action, non-violence of thought is more important than non-violence of action. It is also one of the five virtues in Raja-Yoga.

Pugdala: equivalent to matter.

The comment post closes Monday 18 at 11pm.

Just a reminder: I'll close the comment-post below this Tuesday May 19, at 10pm.

Notes on Hinduism 2

So we have extreme asceticism: Hindu wanderers were known as Munis (the silent ones). From the Munis developed the Sanyasis and the entire complex of wandering mendicants. 

A different homelessness: The Munis choose a homeless life, without wife, children or possessions of any sort, except robe, staff, begging bowl and drinking cup. These wondering saints are destitute yet, honored by most. What is the purpose of asceticism?  It brings human nature closer to a spiritual disengagement from life, but also it becomes a way to understand the limits of the body-experience before the physical phase of the death experience is upon oneself.

The Aryan Component: The Aryans invaded the subcontinent shortly after 2000 B.C. They came from the north and settled in the Hindu Valley (where five tributary rivers flow from the lower Himalayan regions). Later, around 1200 B.C. the Aryans moved to the central Ganges region (between the Himalaya Mountains and the Ganges River). They bring with them some interesting ideas:

Yajna (sacrifice): This worship through sacrifice is characteristic of the Aryan people in the early period. The most common sacrifice is the drinking of soma (a fermented drink). There was also the horse sacrifice, an elaborate ritual which took years to perform and required a large number of priests. The transition from sacrificial act to ontological absolute happens because the sacrifice was considered the dynamic whereby the entire cosmic-human order was sustained in existence. 

Atman/Brahman: Inner self of all things, supreme reality. Both designate the final reality, the inner support of beings, the One behind multiplicity. "Thou art that" means that the deepest subjective reality is identical with the absolute manifested objectively in the world without.

The Union of Traditions: Maya: The term refers to the creative power of Brahman, came later to mean the insubstantial nature of the visible world, a phenomenal world which is "unreal"; (the appearance of things).

Samsara: The world conceived as a constant endless, cyclic, process of change, of birth and death and rebirth. At the time of death,one form gives way to another form according to a process designated as reincarnation.Another body of the human, subhuman, or suprahuman succeeds the dissolution of the body.

Ineffability: The sublime character of Brahman the ultimate truth, which cannot be understood in any adequate manner. In the Kena Upanishad it's represented as "unthinkable form... not understood by those who understand it and understood by those who do not understand it."

Karma: The law of moral causality. Every deed, good or evil, has an inevitable consequence leading either toward final release from the birth death cycle, or toward further immersion in the painful cycle of unending change. The law of Karma is known as sowing and reaping. Some point to the fatalism involved in the notion of Karma. Others rejoin that a person is always free to perform deeds that will lead to salvation or a least to an improved state of existence.

Moksha: Salvation by union with Brahman. Salvation meant a liberation from the confining, limiting world of time and an emergence into the more expansive world of the eternal and infinite. It means the extinction of phenomenal existence and absorption into Brahman.

Bhakti: Intimate devotion to a personal deity. In centuries before Christianism, Hinduisn developed an amazing awareness that the supreme way of salvation is through the love of God.

Update: Some thoughts + your turn #1

I got my HTML right this time. The Read more here option is now selective (as it should). I changed the order of the post and some content (the Hinduism post is now more conceptual. Please, read it to inform your post discussions).

Let's summarize some of the points in today's lecture. (I may have seem all over the place but keep in mind, there's always a conceptual constellation). 1- Change and "the odd couple" (Heraclitus' pantha rei vs. Parmenides' eon) 2- Hegel's master/slave dialectic to explain religious syncretism (and Joseph Losey's The Servant as a fine example of a film), 2- The symbolic richness of Neti, neti as negative theology, 3- Children's power for empathy -and fish-empathy in Julio Cortazar. 4- About Brian Pennington's book: Is Hinduism a colonial invention? 5- The proto-symbolic power of poetry employed as poetic philosophy. Your comments in class? Right ON! Now, let's argue here.
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In my lecture (Tuesday) introducing Eastern Philosophy, I brought up this idea of metaphor¹as worldmaking: a conceptual frame through which we could comprehend stuff. What I’m trying to say is that to facilitate our discussion, one doesn’t have to take some of these ideas literally: I don’t have to literally and a priori accept the idea of “karma” to illuminate other aspects of such metaphor. If God and the universe is the same thing, how can one meaningfully address the issue of teleology? Then, one can say does it make sense that I even bring up the question? Is there any sense in conceiving such proposition without losing sight of the difficulty of the endeavor?

Nelson Goodman: Willingness to accept countless alternative true or right world-versions does not mean that everything goes, that tall stories are as good as short ones, that truths are no longer distinguished from falsehoods, but only that truth must be otherwise conceived than as correspondence with a ready-made world. Then, there is redemption and Benjamin.

Finally, I want to bring some of the paradoxes implicit in our discussion: Karma (what’s the limit between what I’m supposed to be and what I am) self-realization; is it even possible? i.e. just a second before my death (imagine a somewhat morally lived life), have I realized myself, how do I know it?) or moksha (liberation of what?)²
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¹According to philosopher Paul Ricoeur, a metaphor is a rhetorical process to liberate the capacity of a fiction to re-describe the reality. ² According to Buddhism atma-jnana is a precondition to moksha.

Sacred Hindu texts

(1) Vedas means wisdom or knowledge, and contains hymns, prayers and ritual texts composed during a period of a thousand years. (2) The Upanishads are a collection of secret teachings including mystical ideas about man and the universe, it contains the core teaching of Vedanta ¹. The word, Brahman, comes into focus within this group, which is the basis of reality, and atman, which is the self or soul. (3) The Ramayana, which is one of two major tales of India. The work consists of 24,000 couplets based on the life of Rama, a righteous king who was an incarnation of the God Vishnu. (4) The Mahabharata is the second epic and is the story of the deeds of the Aryan clans. It is composed of 100,000 verses written over a 800 year period. The text has immense importance to culture in the Indian subcontinent. Its discussion of human goals (artha or purpose, kāma, pleasure or desire, dharma or duty, and moksha or liberation) takes place in a long-standing tradition, attempting to explain the relationship of the individual to society and the world (the nature of the 'Self') and the workings of karma.Contained within this work is a classic called the Bhagavad Gita, or the "Song of the Blessed Lord." It is one of the most sacred books of the Hindus and the most read of all Indian works in the entire world. The story is centered on man's duty, which, if carried out, will bring nothing but sorrow. The significance of this story is based on Hindu belief of bhatki, (devotion to a particular god as a means of salvation). These two stories have become ideals for the people of India in terms of moral and social behavior. (5) The Puranas are an important source for the understanding of Hinduism, and include legends of gods, goddesses, demons, and ancestors describing pilgrimage and rituals to demonstrate the importance of bhatki, caste and dharma.

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¹A spiritual tradition explained in the Upanishads that is concerned with the self-realisation by which one understands the ultimate nature of reality (Brahman). Vedanta teaches that the believer's goal is to transcend the limitations of self-identity and realize one's unity with Brahman. Vedanta is not restricted or confined to one book and there is no sole source for Vedantic philosophy.Vedanta is based on two simple propositions: 1. Human nature is divine. 2. The aim of human life is to realize that human nature is divine.