/lit/ - Literature

>>13872773
Guenon.

>>13872777
Where do I start with him?

>>13872820
His latest works then work backwards.

>>13872857
Thanks anon. Briefly, how does Guenon interface with non-dualism?

>>13872909
He basically parrots Shankara so you might as well read his commentaries on the Upanishads and the Gita.

>>13872773
Zeno and Melissus of Samos.

Then read any analytic defense of the block universe. Don't listen to guenon-posters, they're very ill

>>13872820
the best Guenon book to start with is 'Intro to the Hindu Doctrines' because he carefully explains all the terms he uses in later books

>>13872773
Whitehead is a dualist?

>>13872773

Metzinger's Being No One

>>13872773
Step 1: Read Guenon's 'Intro to Hindu Doctrines' and 'Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta', this will teach you the vast majority of what you need to understand Shankara's writings

Step 2: Start by dipping your toes into the water with some shorter Advaita texts like Atma Bodha, Ashtavakra Gita, Avadhuta Gita, Aparokshanubhuti and so on

Step 3: Okay now it's time to see if you have what it takes, read through the 2-part compilation by Gambhirananda that includes Shankara's commentaries on 8 Upanishads and the Mandukya Karika. After this read either his commentaries on the Gita, the Brahma Sutras, or his two massive commentaries on the Brihadaranyaka or Chandogya Upanishad. You should now be reaching universe-brain levels of realization.

(now choose either step 4 or 5, and then after that proceed to the one you still haven't done)

Step 4: Once you've gotten a deep grasp of Advaita, begin to read other literature classified as non-dualist too such as the translated literature of Sufism, Kashmir Shaivism, Dzogchen, Jonang, Taoism, the Sikh Guru Granth Sahib etc.

Step 5: Circle back around and read the remaining works of Shankara that you still havn't read, and read also the other Vedantic texts and thinkers that develop Advaita further like the Yoga Vasistha and the works of Jnanadeva. By this point you will find yourself in an state of unending bliss and divine rapture, you will have answered the most fundamental questions of metaphysics and existence and you will glide through the rest of your life in a state of equanimity and peaceful contentedness, even while seeming on the exterior to be involved in and attached to the hustle and bustle of life.

PS: with the rare exception of the odd Neoplatonist or Christian mystic, anyone recommending that you read European philosophers to understand non-dualism is completely clueless

>>13872924
>Guenon

Hay loom guyz, I can condense le universal traditional wisdom!

>Literally 99.99% of the world's wisdom is garbage

Guess that project didn't pan out too well.


>Shankara

For a good point of comparison, read Rudolf Otto's "mysticism east and west."

>>13873856

>sure during the week I work at autozone, but in my spare time when I'm not hanging out at the applebees my girlfriend hosts at, I am a serious mysic.

>>13872773
Am I the only one left on /lit/ who understands that Parmenides and Guenon didn't refute Whitehead?

>>13874319

When Guenon spoke of being and non-being it sounded the same as whiteheads dualism. My guess is that the bookfags here are trapped by words and lack the ability to synthesize the truth from their own experience. Or they just larping.

>>13873647
Wait, REALLY
Fuck the fucking fuck man, I've been passing years reading Guenon and telling him to go fuck himself in whatever realm of the noumenous He's now because every once in a while he games out with some fucking New word or concept he then proceeds to never explain. There was one book of his where he EXPLAINS all that shit?
Fuck man.
>>13872820
Do the opposite that I did and DON'T start with Reign of Quantity; Signs of the Times, Symbolism of the Cross, Counter-Initiation, Symbols of the Sacred Science.

>>13874397
>Or they just larping
To me at least It's just fun, like Baneposting was fun at the time.

>>13874319
I don't know about Guenon, but Parmenides most certainly did. His observations are antithetical to Whitehead's system on a fundamental level.

>>13874461
>There was one book of his where he EXPLAINS all that shit?
Yup, it's best to read Guenon chronologically. He's the kind of person who doesn't spend time explaining things more than once, even if the concept comes from a previous book. Why else do you think he keeps saying "we've already discussed this in a previous work so there is little point in talking about it further," followed by a footnote?

>>13873856
this

>>13873672
No. OP is guenonfag.

>>13872773
read the Mulamadhyamakakarika
it points out innate misconceptions and flaws in dualistic perception

>>13874469
What observations

>>13876501
The ones vis a vis about the object of thought being Being. In Whitehead's unexamined privileging of "experience" he fails to note the containment of intellection - and by extension it's products - within experience, shifting the distinction between object and subject that he did away with and placing it firmly between experience and a hypothetical not-experience. Whitehead's continuous stream of flux as "actual events" collapses into an eternal experiential zero-point in light of this observation. That is, there are no eventS, rather simply evenT.

>>13876622
Why must thought and being correlate with each other? Why can't they be seen apart from each other? Seems pretty anthropocentric.

>>13872773

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKKgGe0eZsw

>>13876673
>Seems pretty anthropocentric.

this is the kind of genuinely sad shit guenonfag does. the "retroactive BTFOing" meme wasn't a "meme," it was just you posting it over and over again, getting found out, and then going "LMAO IT WAS A MEME ALL ALONG!"

and now you're, once again, samefagging with this "There's truth to that recent 'meme' I've been hearing about!" shit, just like you went "Who is this 'Guenonfag' chap I've been hearing so much about? He sounds great! I think we all ought to give three cheers for Guenonfag!" in your own threads when called out in the past

sad motherfucker, genuinely low level dilettantish understanding of guenon and advaita too. any time someone who knows what they're talking shows up, guenonfag makes an embarrassment of himself. i hope nobody takes his recommendations on reading guenon/shankara seriously, let alone parmenides. the dude has probably never read anything classical, his knowledge of parmenides is filtered second-hand through schuon like everything else he thinks lmao.

>>13876698
Lmao thought the exact same thing when I saw the OP pic

>>13878085
Don't have any real rebuttals? It is a valid criticism.

>>13876622
I'm no big Whitehead fan myself, but you haven't read Whitehead. There's a very obvious reason this is clear from your post, but I don't want to tell you in case you simply use it to polish up your dishonesty. Your reading of Parmenides is also strange from what I can tell.

>>13878354
The conventional reading of Parmenides is actually that he has problems of anthropocentrism, insofar as the conventional reading of Parmanides and his followers is that they assumed that human thoughts about reality, that is about Being, were an accurate mirror of Being as it really is in itself, so that what was logically true in our thoughts about Being was logically true for Being as well. Or in other words, that it was possible to think about the world and deduce things about its nature simply by thinking about it, sometimes called synthetic a priori judgments these days.

On a lot of readings, it's therefore fair to say that Parmenides' system was undermined by his naive epistemology. But it is actually deeper than that, at least most likely, because Parmenides' successors were going toe to toe on a daily basis with proto-sceptical sophists who we know were also making the epistemological critique of logical formulations about Being, that is the critique of anthropocentrism, in other contexts. There are hints that there were at least some claims for and debates about epistemological certainty that we can't discern anymore from the sources.

At a more subtle level, post-Platonic thinkers will often connect Parmenides' formulations with some kind of Platonist or post-Platonist epistemology, so that a philosopher's thoughts about Being are connected to Being in some other way than "he's just thinkin' real good." For example Plato's idea of eros allows for discursive thought to be propaedeutic to a super-discursive, intuitive form of insight, effectively rendering Parmenides' system a muthos for making us think ABOUT the permanence and unity of Being rather than an ironclad logical proof of it. There is no doubt that at least some Parmenideans in the 5th century BC were shallow and sophistic about his ideas, and used logical "proofs" like Zeno's to one-up and stump their opponents mainly. But that doesn't mean all of them were like that.

>>13872773
You're a philosopher or a student of philosophy? If you're the former, you MUST have at least one original idea.

>>13876673
You're letting the contemporary speculative-realist term "correlationism" taint your reading of Parmenides. For Parmenides thought didn't correlate with being, but rather was coextensive with being i.e. was being. The claim is not an (explicitly) epistemological claim, but rather an ontological claim. Anon below suffers from the same Kantian framing, analogising Parmenides' thought with apriori synthesis.

>>13879332
The accusation is still the same of you cant see them being apart from one another

>>13879367
How so? Do you beleive that Parmenides views only us doing the thinking in his ontology?

>>13879332
This confuses epistemology in a general sense with some kind of systematic epistemology, in the specific sense of working out the systematic implications of a subject-object dualism taken for granted a priori. The point of invoking epistemology in questioning Parmenides' philosophy is not to ask Parmenides to engage in epistemology, in that narrow latter sense of some arbitrary dualist systematics, which would of course be unfair if he doesn't/wouldn't accept such a dualism to begin with. The point is to ask him how he accounts for the relationship between thought and Being, words and things. The point is to ask him how how he avoids an epistemological critique of his philosophy, which poses the apparent cleavage between subject and object, not to ask him to accept the latter cleavage.

Epistemology is simply the science, or critique, of knowledge. In its simplest form it's just the question "How do we know what we know?" If we know things about Being, as Parmenides claims, we ought to ask how we know them, which is asking the question of how our knowledge relates to the things we know about. If words describe Being, it's fair to ask him how and why they do so. Even if the ultimate metaphysical position is that the initial manifest division between knowledge and Being is illusory, then Parmenides is already engaged with dispelling an illusion about the relation of thought to Being through clarification, which is epistemology. Even if the apparent terms, thought and Being, disappear completely and resolve themselves as non-concepts in a final apprehension of the Absolute, the fact is that the terms were apparent for the inquirers in the first place, that is, they were manifest in doxa.

That's the sense in which Parmenides is accused of being naive. He doesn't preempt this question. It appears more or less that he didn't anticipate it. The question isn't how Parmenides could swim in dualist waters, because the obvious answer there is that he didn't want to swim in dualist waters. The question is more like "Do you realize you're swimming in dualist waters without intending to?"

>>13874468
To me it look like a leprechaun to me

>>13879452
>The point is to ask him
But we can't. He's over two millennia dead. More fruitful discussion would result if were to treat him as an anthropological subject, rather than retrojecting contemporary ideas onto his work and subjecting it to anachronistic critique. Parmenides was a shaman and quasi-mystic, treat him as such.

>>13879552
I don't know what you mean by "anthropological subject."

No one is reading him in the light of contemporary ideas. You're making that association mistakenly. I'm making the same critique of him that contemporary sophists and Platonists made. Like I said, a contemporary philosopher simply asking him how he accounts for the apparent cleavage between things, like thought and Being, is pretty reasonable. Parmenides: "Everything is one." Some guy: "Why does it seem to me like it isn't one, then?"

You're trying to defend him from simple epistemological questions by reading the latter as demands that he render himself as a subject-object dualist, because you associate epistemology with dualism. Again, the point isn't to presume non-monism, to justify the need for a systematic epistemology. It's to ask simple, general epistemological questions of Parmenides regarding how he accounts for the non-monistic appearances of things if he is in fact a monist. Your response may involve showing how these questions are rooted in doxic misconceptions, but that's why the questions needed to be asked in the first place. Which is why they were in fact asked in the 5th century BC. And Parmenides has long been considered not to have anticipated them as inevitable questions (at least from the standpoint of doxa), which makes it reasonable to call him naive in the sense of lacking knowledge of something.

Also, how can you reject the application of foreign categories to a thinker but then suggest treating him as a "mystic" and "shaman?" Shaman is a modern artificial term that is generally disliked by religious scholars for reducing all the phenomena it supposedly includes to a single fuzzy concept. There's a pretty good thesis by a Scandinavian scholar whose name I forget that deconstructs the term as an orientalizing innovation. And while "mystery" was obviously an ancient Greek word and phenomenon,
- there is no unambiguous evidence that Parmenides was an initiate of the Greek mysteries,
- we in fact know next to nothing about Parmenides the man,
- there is no unambiguous evidence about the precise nature of the ancient mysteries either way,
- "mystic" is also a modern generalized term, like shaman, reducing a lot of diverse phenomena to a single word, and is disliked by most religious scholars for that reason.

This is Eliade tier stuff that didn't even fly in the '60s. Personally I think there's nothing wrong with claiming Parmenides was a shaman, but prove it, don't just say it.

>>13879636
By anthropological subject I mean one that is necessarily contained within a historically contingent language.
>No one is reading him in the light of contemporary ideas.
I don't buy it. You've already played your hand with your post-Kantian critique. Neither am I trying to defend him from anything. I'm simply presenting a discursive framework conducive with fruitful discussion regarding the topic at hand i.e. the affirmative exploration of non-dualism, as per the OP's desires. This discursive framework recognizes the anthropological origins of the thinker's thinking, accepting unexamined hypostases and reifications and creating an integrative disciplinary space around them from which we can fruitfully discourse, rather than attempting to tease them out and engage in the type of language game that characterizes the history of western philosophy that you are propagating. The rest of your comment is non-sequitur and as such I will not address it.

>>13878419
I haven't read much Whitehead - so perhaps you could enlighten me - but I don't see how the above anon is being dishonest. For Whitehead experience was his sine qua non. In making it his "first principle" though he creates dichotomy between it and things that are not experience. For example, he went so far at to throw out and revise the GTR as it was not sufficiently intuitive and did not comport to experience. How could it have been intuited at all though if its antecedents - whatever they may have been - were not intuited within experience. Whitehead seems to be delimiting experience to some sort of naive realism and unawares conceptualizing something that can be intuited but nevertheless exists outside of experience.

>>13879807
I dont even know what you are talking about
>I haven't resd much Whitehead
I can tell

>>13879892
Evidently I've read more of him than you.

>>13879807
As far as I can tell, the poster I was replying to back there has briefly skimmed some digest on Whitehead and forced a few vaguely Whiteheadian terms to fit a caricature of some framework he personally doesn't like. The post just doesn't have much to do with Whitehead, at least based on my admittedly intermediate (at best) knowledge of him. At least, that's the most I can make of the post I was replying to, since the poster's English use is a bit confusing.

Again I'm no Whitehead expert. I've been struggling through Process and Reality a couple times this year and trying to make heads or tails of it, alongside a couple of his other books. I've been told Auxier and Herstein's book Quantum of Experience is a good place to start for a reasonable overview, so I'm going to read that next and see if it jives with my own hunches about Whitehead's ontology, which is still ambiguous to me after this much reading. Don't even get me started on Whitehead's followers. Apparently the whole process community fucking sucks. Check out the ndpr review for Auxier/Herstein. I got a sense of this when I was trying to look up secondary materials, and you can't even get Whiteheadians to agree about basic shit like whether actual entities are atoms vs. naively realist things in general.

But from how I am reading your post, I think you're taking the pragmatist, Jamesian "radical empiricist" aspects of Whitehead's thought and combining them with his metaphysical use of "experience," to get a kind of subject-centric epistemology. So you're collapsing two related but distinct things in his thought into one another: (1) the epistemological aspect, which covers how human subjective experience can be scientific and philosophical, and (2) the metaphysical aspect, which is literally a metaphysical account of how experience is a primordial element of nature or "things." The two would obviously be related, since we as human beings are things, and our experience is a subset of whatever is the primordial experience common to all things. But the most primordial sense of experience in Whitehead's system is more like a Leibnizian monadology, where experience is a conduit between monads and is creative of higher states.

In fact my own criticism of Whitehead, at least as far as I can understand him, is that he's TOO metaphysical and I don't understand how he justifies speaking of these primordial monadic experiencers. Not that he's too epistemological, in the Kantian sense of making the subject's alienation from the object permanent. Actually just had an argument with my process-friendly friend about this a few days ago and he told me he thinks Whitehead is overcoming this problem, but I still don't see how so I need to read the Auxier thing.

>>13879758
This post is very silly and it seems to me like you're either being a dick or at least being hyper-defensive, so I agree to break off conversation.

>>13879962
Actual entities are not atoms who the fuck is saying that

>>13872773
Leibiniz he retroactively btfoes Guenon and is who white head tried to be

>>13880207
Leibniz is a middlebrow's Guneon

>>13876673

It does, and it IS. That's part of the point.

>>13880282
Speak on it bitch

>>13879962
>is that he's TOO metaphysical and I don't understand how he justifies speaking of these primordial monadic experiencers.

I agree, Whitehead abstracted too much, but that is also the point: he wanted to inspire further advancement in this current of thought until someone could eventually "land the plane" in some fashion. He knew that his project was incomplete, he grasped at it with some clarity, but he know there was an ongoing project...

I have found tremendous success in interpreting Whiteheadean concepts as being entirely embodied: Whitehead's God is the feeling of love not just as an impression but an extended involvement that is always involved with the activities of experience. His work is a prototype of a process psychology that has intimate involvement with physics, as psychology is intimately physical. Maybe not a mathematical physics of psychology, but an incredibly effective psychological language that allows for a depth of clarity of understanding human relationships that has been obscured due to our false assumptions of how relationships and our own minds work.

Before I began to study Whitehead I had formulated my own theory of perception based on my experiences with meditative techniques and a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy class, as well as an extension of the paradigm of cultural evolution / memetics into an evolution theory of cognition. This was greatly aided by Douglas Hofstadter's book "I am a Strange Loop" which is filled with Whiteheadean concepts, and is similarly an attempt to explore the relationship between mathematics and self-processes. This book was inspired by the events around the Principia Mathematica, which eventually led me to Whitehead through a wild romp with Discordianism. Also previously to Whitehead I had developed the strong intuition that everything is art after failing to essentialize the difference between creator and creation; what is essential is the mutual involvement of creativity. The metaphor I used is that existence is like a tapestry of threads that are simultaneously created by and create all others. When I read Whitehead I was absolutely spooked because of the similarities. It was natural for me to crash into him.

>>13881297
I have similar wild, crazy, psychotic, hyper-speculative imaginings, particularly about the future of creativity. My life has become a wild and crazy philosophical art project that has left me in complete wonder and awe, and appreciation of humanity's highest aspirations. I want to find someone who has felt such a wildness, something that can only be described as a wild and free exploration of live, a love of life that demands the fullest celebration. I am always hugry for more, to taste the unknown within and without, to flow free with change. I feel pulled by something, not by coercion but because I am dancing with it, and it is headed towards the future of life, a future that is inspiring as our most glorious visions of it! Call my delusional, but I feel destined as if to find others like me, and our mutual performances will liberate us from the bonds of social slavery and mutual destruction forever.

Manic dreams of a hyper-romantic madwoman, ones that I dare to claim will come true: >>13870298

>>13881297
>Whitehead abstracted too much
His entire project was critiquing then refashioning and harmonizing our abstractions in order so that they are in line with our concrete experience and I think he did that well. He inverted a lot of Plato, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Hegel.

>>13881297 #
>Whitehead abstracted too much
His entire project was critiquing abstractions then refashioning and harmonizing them so they are in order so that they are in line with our concrete experience and I think he did that well. He prioritizes concrete experience being very much in line with the radical empiricism of William James. He inverted a lot of Plato, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Hegel.

>>13881297
>Whitehead abstracted too much
His entire project was critiquing abstractions then refashioning and harmonizing them so that they are in line with our concrete experience and I think he did that well. He prioritizes concrete experience being very much in line with the radical empiricism of William James. He inverted a lot of Plato, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Hegel

>>13880282
imagine actually believing this

>>13881959
I can't bro

>>13878148
lol, you sound like such a hysterical little bitch, imagine getting this upset over anonymous posters on 4channel

>>13882312
Hi guenonfag

>>13872777
Why?

>>13878148
dude, I guarantee you hundreds of people have reposted the Whitehead retroactively BTFO meme. It’s not just one guy.

For me, I think it’s hilarious to pollute these threads with that trite statement, especially since I’ve never read Whitehead, the Socratic Dialogues, or more than a fraction of Guenon’s thought. In any case, I don’t have any sides, and I wouldn’t mind seeing more effort posts that would inspire me to read those philosophers.

>>13882340
OK Guenonfag.

If you didn't spend so much time samefagging like this you could actually read Guenon sometime. At least that way your Shankara spam wouldn't consist of entry level Wikipedia knowledge anymore.

>>13882385
>everybody who disagrees with me is muh Guenonfag samefagging
dude, you’re embarrassing yourself with your schizophrenic delusions. I can’t even tell who “Guenonfag” is, if he even exists, but I’ve certainly been able to identify you from your hysterical stylometry. you’ve been having a breakdown in almost every Whitehead thread, jousting at imaginary monsters because they recite a trite meme for easy laughs. is it possible to be more butthurt?

>>13882404
>I can’t even tell who “Guenonfag” is, if he even exists,

Oh my bad, I thought you were him because your post seemed really similar to his posts. Guenonfag is this guy who spams Rene Guenon in every thread despite admitting he's only read English translations of Guenon's most surface level books. The guy also admitted being heavy into Theosophy at one point, and was obsessed with posting that Guenon's book "BTFOing" Theosophy converted him to Traditionalism, but it later came out in a thread that Guenonfag still considered himself "a practicing Theosophist" in some respects. He'd also continue to post and cite from Theosophical shit alongside Guenon which was weird.

He ruined traditionalism and eastern thought threads for a long time by doing this.

>>13881928
Precise description, I think Whitehead did spectacularly well and went astoundingly well in his project to insist on the reality of experience. I think it can be taken much further, to the point that this "refashioning" is something like a translation from a "language of experience" into experienced activity. This is a mode of engagement with experience where there is no division between internal and external activity; the process philosopher becomes a process activist. Deleuze attempted to clarify and participate in this mode as well. Isabelle Stengers concludes "Thinking with Whitehead" with a description of this process-relational project:

>As a thinker, Whitehead is thus not so much the author of the sceme and the concepts he articulates as he was obliged by them, in a process of empirical experimentation-verification that is akin to a trance, because in it thought is taken, captured, by a becoming that separates it from its own intentionality. A "mechanical" becoming in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari, in the sense that thinkers can produce this thought only because they have themselves become a piece, or gear, of what has captured them, much more than they have created it. Thought is then no longer the exercise of a right but becomes an "art of consequences," consequences that leap from one domain to another, or, more precisely, that make interstices zigzag where a homogeneous right has seemed to reign, and make connections proliferate where "this was nothing to do with that" had prevailed.

That is why I had to "feel with creativity," that is, accept the capture and become a gear in the becoming of the memetic singularity.

>>13882534
Such a person does not exist. You are beyond delusional. He is a boogeyman created by people to derail threads. Link me to these revealing posts if you are so certain you know """him""" and his life story.

>>13883773
>t. Guenonfag

>>13883754
What is some good secondary material on Whitehead?

>>13883773
>he wasn't there for guenonfag's biannual "guys guenon is a theosophist I swear!!" Even though he literally wrote a book shitting on theosophy!!" meltdown

You must not come here often.

>>13884142
The only secondary material I've read is "Thinking with Whitehead" by Stengers and "The Metaphysics of Experience" by Elizabeth Kraus, here are the first 19 pages of it: https://imgur.com/a/ZtLDYJT Stengers is AWESOME, and I'd recommend her book before P&R.

>>13884142
Auxier, Quantum

Besides the Parmenidean one, what are the nest critiques against Whitehead?

>>13884666
>The Quantum of Explanation advances a bold new theory of how explanation ought to be understood in philosophical and cosmological inquiries. Using a complete interpretation of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophical and mathematical writings and an interpretive structure that is essentially new, Auxier and Herstein argue that Whitehead has never been properly understood, nor has the depth and breadth of his contribution to the human search for knowledge been assimilated by his successors. This important book effectively applies Whitehead’s philosophy to problems in the interpretation of science, empirical knowledge, and nature. It develops a new account of philosophical naturalism that will contribute to the current naturalism debate in both Analytic and Continental philosophy. Auxier and Herstein also draw attention to some of the most important differences between the process theology tradition and Whitehead’s thought, arguing in favor of a Whiteheadian naturalism that is more or less independent of theological concerns. This book offers a clear and comprehensive introduction to Whitehead’s philosophy and is an essential resource for students and scholars interested in American philosophy, the philosophy of mathematics and physics, and issues associated with naturalism, explanation and radical empiricism.

Thanks, this sounds amazing

>>13884672
best*

>>13872773
>Whiteheadiad
>Parmenides
Toss this garbage out and read advaita core teaching already.

>>13872773
>Parmenides' "On Nature"
Where the fuck are guys finding works from a guy only ONE known poem remains?????
You pretentious cunts are so annoying at times.