The Ultimate Insight: On the Explanatory Power of Absolute Self-Awareness

[Dana Lomas]

This should warrant some feedback, the latest blog piece from once-upon-a-time participant here Peter Sas ... The Ultimate Insight: On the Explanatory Power of Absolute Self-Awareness

[David Sundaram]

Dana Lomas wrote:

This should warrant some feedback, the latest blog piece from once-upon-a-time participant here Peter Sas ... The Ultimate Insight: On the Explanatory Power of Absolute Self-Awareness

Quoting from it and then commenting on what's said in said quote:

"It is certainly not the case that philosophical theorizing is entirely absent in the East – quite the contrary, Eastern spirituality contains some of the deepest philosophical thinking ever done. It is just that in Eastern spirituality all theorizing is ultimately subordinated and subservient to the spiritual goal of Liberation: theory for the sake of theory is rejected, because it stands in the way of the spiritual goal. The notion of Absolute Self-Awareness, then, signifies in the Eastern context not just the ultimate nature of reality, it also signifies the individual’s realization of the Absolute as his / her own innermost Self and as such the final Liberation from the suffering inherent in finite human existence."

This supports my point that 'Eastern Spirituality' is essential Life-aversive in as much as it is focused on getting 'out' of (i.e. 'liberated' from) 'existence' because it regards said existence as 'inherently' being finite and 'endemically' entailing suffering.

IMO, said philosophy totally misses/eclipses/abandons the fact that Life (i.e. the Being-n-Doing 'existence) is limitlessy! 'full' and ever-brimming-over with (what, in my treatise, I short-hand reference as) Love and Joy which I argue (therein) is Life's Essence - which Essence I postulate is THE Spirit of The Flow of Creation. As such, said 'philosophy' is exactly the opposite of what 'spirituality' REALLY is. It indicates an abandonment of the desire to Create (i.e. experience and express) 'more' Love and Joy - clearly, as evidenced by all of the "liberation from 'suffering' and experience of 'finitude' propaganda - as a psycholgist I opine: because its proponents (egotistically, IMO, though they fool themselves into thinking otherwise) refuse to positively accept and embrace and love-and-joy-ingly work/play with the fact that 'limitation' and 'suffering' are the 'price' of the 'ticket' to existential participation 'in' the everlasting Flow of Creation.

It is my 'argument' that the kind of 'Eastern Philosophy' referenced here is a 'freaked out' response to what such philosophers 'see' and (so) 'experience' as the 'down' -side of Life.

I would also suggest that much of 'Western Philosophy' is also basically a 'freaked out' response in that many  such philosophers seek/ take 'refuge' in just  mentally 'thinking' and 'talking about' things ('humans' will colonize other plants in 'the future', etc, phooey!) way of avoiding actually engaging with the emotional complexities (swirls?) they would otherwise encounter in the 'natural' 'course' of their existence in relation to and with their fellow beings.

Please note: All of the above is just my personal an emotion-generated riff on what's alluded to in the quoted paragraph. The logic of the whole article is most excellent, I think!

[Santeri Satama]

Nice presentation of absolute idealism, ending with the already familiar metaphor of Russian nesting doll. Which is none other than the problem of infinite regression, which BK used to argue against relational relativism, and thus as justification for absolute idealism. Which, as we see, leads to infinite regression...

Pyrrhon, Nagarjuna, Derrida, Scott etc. make some good anatman arguments against absolute/atman. Triad of global-local scalar of Self Breathing Nature offers nice Aufhebung/sublation of the atman-anatman polarity. 

[Ashvin Pandurangi]

"What all this makes clear is that the Enlightenment experience has both a theoretical and a practical value, indeed it is the ultimate accomplishment both philosophically and spiritually. Enlightenment is not just the insight that liberates from the confines of finite existence, it is also the insight that provides the ultimate epistemological foundation for the Absolute-Idealist worldview. This implies an extreme form of rationalism, such that in principle everything is explainable for us, finite human beings, because insofar as we are self-conscious beings we have a prereflective intuition of the nature of Absolute Self-Awareness as the self-causing cause of reality-as-a-whole." 

I agree with SS here. "Absolute Idealism" in the way he formulates, i.e. the Absolute is an object (Mind) which experiences itself into existence,  t is ontologically deficient. This is exactly the type of formulation which 'post-modern' or 'post-structural' critiques have laid to waste, IMO. I also don't think he is representing Plotinus and German idealists as fully as he should, but we don't need to go there to see why his formulation fails.

That being said, I believe this sort of idealist formulation can be rehabilitated with a healthy dose of imaginative philosophy or psychology.