Agent 888

My most recent work on the relationship of memory to tantric mysticism and its contemporary relevance as evaluated through the lens of musical-autobiographical memory, presented a few weeks ago at this year's American Academy of Religion conference. academia.edu/63985103/The_W…

David Bentley Hart, sounding a lot like Ludwig Klages vis-a-vis his (mostly negative) appraisal of modernity’s metaphysical presumptions (From the conclusion of ‘All Things Are Full of Gods’)

“It’s just the mechanistic image, the world reduced to its most basic limeaments, which modern persons have been indoctrinated to think of as reality’s ’true nature’ just as a metaphysical prejudice. But there’s no such world… it’s a figment of materialist dogma.” -D.B. Hart

“The only ‘science of mind’ that might actually reveal the intrinsic nature of the mental world would be something like the contemplative disciplines of the world’s mystical traditions. There can be no science of mind that’s not, to put it bluntly, a spiritual science” -DB Hart

Being a philosopher who doesn’t read the history of philosophy seems to me much like a writer who doesn’t read, or a more particular instance of that general idea.

“If there’s no duality of mind & nature - if nature is visible spirit & spirit is invisible nature, as Schelling said - then there’s no such thing as the hidden Ding an Sich: everything is manifestation, expression, communicating itself as the thinkable content of a mind” -Hart

"The Church is cold, But the Alehouse is healthy and pleasant and warm." -Blake

David Bentley Hart on LLMs (“All Things Are Full of Gods”)

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.” -Richard Feynman

“He isn’t a philosopher, and so the banality of what he’s saying - as well as his overestimation of its significance - should be viewed indulgently.” -David Bentley Hart

“What from below are untraversable abysses are, from above, merely junctures where ladders must be let down.” -David Bentley Hart

ortho-aletheia (“correct-unrevealing”) > ortho-doxy (“correct opinion”)

“Since Sputnik put the globe in a ‘proscenium arch,’ and the global village has been transformed into a global theater, the result, quite literally, is the use of public space for ‘doing one’s thing'”  -McLuhan, ‘From Cliché to Archetype’

all the information in the world ready at hand doesn’t mean anything by itself; only that information that lives inside of actual minds matters.

“Life and mind aren’t merely written into the cosmic rules; in a sense, they write those rules.” -David Bentley Hart

"As reason - the power of the natural unity of humanity - so also love, is free, universal, in its nature. Only where reason rules, does universal love rule; reason is itself nothing else than universal love." -Ludwig Feuerbach

“A transcendent Bliss, unimaginable & inexpressible by the mind & speech, is the nature of the Ineffable. That broods immanent & secret in the whole universe & in everything in it… but to reach it the mental reception must be subtilised, spiritualized, universalized” -Aurobindo

“Purposiveness occurs at two levels, one of general determinism and one of special liberty: empirical freedom unfolds under the canopy of a transcendental destiny.” -David Bentley Hart

@daniel_dsj2110 Kwasi Wiredu and Valentin Mudimbe both passed in the last few years (at 90 & 83). Peter Sloterdijk perhaps? Feels like a different landscape now, much more fractured & fragmented.

Are there no longer any world renowned philosophers? I can’t think of anyone in their 50s or 60s now that has the influence of a Rawls or Habermas— neither of them were as influential as Foucault. Of course, I’m not that familiar with the state of philosophy in China or Africa.

“We should recognize the laws of relation & organization found at the level of life as our primary & general indices of the nature of reality, so that biology becomes our general paradigm & physics is demoted to a special case of its expression.” -David Bentley Hart

“A definition of the modern era might be the reign of pure syntax… an ontology of death… that the really real is the realm of abstract quantifications & unyielding structural laws & that relation, agency & the semantics of life are secondary & accidental.” -David Bentley Hart