Sunday, February 8, 2015

Jürgen Habermas on Richard Rorty

One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the "holy", the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."
Richard Rorty
quoted by Jürgen Habermas, in "Philosopher, poet and friend," Sound and Sight
The article originally appeared in German in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on June 11, 2007.

A true Lover doesn't follow any one religion,
be sure of that.
Since in the religion of Love,
there is no irreverence or faith.
When in Love,
body, mind, heart and soul don't even exist.
Become this,
fall in Love,
and you will not be separated again.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Rumi Odes & Quatrains translated by Shahram Shiva
http://www.rumi.net/rumi_poems_main.htm

“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Matthew 22:36-40 (NRSV)
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.
Matthew 5:43-45 NRSV

I belong to no religion. My religion is Love.
Meher Baba
http://www.theawakenermagazine.org/avol08/av08n02/av08n02p05.htm

Love is the sum and substance of all religions, and the only essential of all creeds. Leave the rigmarole alone.
Meher Baba
in Bhau Kalahari, Lord Meher, revised online edition, p. 904
http://www.lordmeher.org/rev/index.jsp?pageBase=page.jsp&nextPage=904

"Many are the means described for the attainment of the highest good, such as love, performance of duty, self-control, truthfulness, sacrifices, gifts, austerity, charity, vows, observances of moral precepts. I could name more. But of all I could name, verily love is the highest: love and devotion that make one forgetful of everything, love that unites the lover with me. What indescribable joys does one find through love of me, the blissful Self!"
Krishna
Srimad Bhagavatam
Translated and edited by Swami Prabhavananda
Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1972, pp. 240-241

"Only if one knows the truth of love, which is the real nature of Self, will the strong entangled knot of life be untied. Only if one attains the height of love will liberation be attained. Such is the heart of all religions. The experience of Self is only love, which is seeing only love, hearing only love, feeling only love, tasting only love and smelling only love, which is bliss."
Sri Ramana Maharshi
in David Godman
Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi
http://bhagavan-ramana.org/bhakti.html

"Once, as Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai was coming forth from Jerusalem, Rabbi Joshua followed after him and beheld the Temple in ruins. 'Woe unto us," Rabbi Joshua cried, "that this, the place where the iniquities of Israel were atoned for, is laid waste!'

"'My son,' Rabbi Yohanan said to him, 'be not grieved. We have another atonement as effective as this. And what is it? It is acts of loving-kindness, kindness, as it is said, For I desire mercy and not sacrifice [Hosea 6.6].'"
Talmud, Abot de Rabbi Nathan 6

"Basically, there is only one precept -- not being selfish.
If people are selfish, they will violate the precepts.
If people are not selfish, they will not violate the precepts."
Venerable Master Hsuan Hua
_Spring Sun, Lotus Flower:
Quotes form the teachings of Vernable Master Hsaun Hua_
Burlingame, CA: Buddhist test Translation Society, 2004, p. 10


"When loving devotion is at its highest, nothing remains of the individual self for it becomes universalized and all-pervading."
Kirpal Singh
_The Night is a Jungle_
Tilton: The Sant Bani Press, 1975, p. 259

Embracing Tao, you become embraced.
Supple, breathing gently, you become reborn.
Clearing your vision, you become clear.
Nurturing your beloved, you become impartial.
Opening your heart, you become accepted.
Accepting the World, you embrace Tao.

Bearing and nurturing,
Creating but not owning,
Giving without demanding,
Controlling without authority,
This is love.
Tao Te Ching 10
http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/taote-v1.txt

“No other thing do I know, O monks, on account of which unarisen ill will does not arise and arisen ill will is abandoned so much as on account of this: the liberation of the heart by benevolence. For one who attends properly to the liberation of the heart by benevolence, unarisen ill will does not arise and arisen ill will is abandoned.”
Buddha
Anguttara Nikaya, 1.ii.7 (trans. Nyanaponika & Bodhi, 1999, p. 34


My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
As quoted in Tibet, a Guide to the Land of Fascination (1988) by Trilok Chandra Majupuria and Indra Majupuria
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tenzin_Gyatso,_14th_Dalai_Lama


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

... on that universal energy, at the fountainhead of all existence ms Rand: the heart has no curiousity, the heart wants to know ....

Tom Hickey said...

the heart has no curiosity, the heart wants to know

"Philosophy" means love of wisdom. According to the ancients, it leads to the pursuit of truth. For them, the pursuit of truth was a way of life.

Tom Hickey said...

As love and knowledge, heart and mind converge in wisdom, they are discovered to be one. This is the message of the famous ladder of love passage in Plato's Symposium.

Anonymous said...

”Macro policy and macro institutions, appropriately designed, enhance space for spontaneity at the micro level”. [peterc]

And inappropriately designed we end up with the horror acid trip (kool-aid) gone terribly wrong called Donetsk that is just a flashpoint, a point of emergence of what could come. This is Fire – no longer a servant.

Asking what is the best framework for our existence (?) is a really good question (inferred from Peter’s post).

For me, after 200,000 years on the road for our struggling humanity – I clearly see we need ‘trinocular’ vision.

Because the answer to this question is the framework already exists: Your existence is obvious! It is not hidden under some rock somewhere”. [Prem Pal] We just don’t recognise it. Ergo, we know naught of its value – other than we do not like it to end.

I think this is because of perspective and elevation: the soldier in a trench somewhere or a trader in the pits has a much different perspective of life on this earth, than an astronaut - or a cosmologist gazing out into the prospect of a trillion galaxies ablaze with Light, ‘black hole’ (ahhh their mystery) at the core - in a living Universe expanding more powerfully than the gravity that pulls it back. Or a mother who has just given birth to a brand new human Miracle, and is filled with the deepest Love – it took the Cosmos billions of years of evolution of the atoms, for her to be able to accomplish that!

And yet we will destroy all of that in seconds because of some idiot’s ‘Cause’. There was a photo on the web recently of a heavily pregnant woman strangled by a soldier over a table. Without focus, we are hypnotised by society. We think that $money, social position and power gives us stature. What gives a human being stature is being human; and what makes a human being human is ‘hu’ (the primordial Energy) + manas (a conscious mind).

I suppose you might view a city or country and its institutions and policy concepts as a giant petri dish on which human bacterium might thrive,  but I do not think that does us justice. Nor does it augur of success. Success needs thirst and focus and direction. And direction is provided by Life!

In days gone by, some good people fell so much in love with wisdom it became a way of life, and led them to focus on and pursue ‘Truth’. For them, love and knowledge converged in wisdom and yet they stood helpless one side of a seemingly impassable river. Wisdom told them that what they were looking for was already inside of them, and all of the books, the austerities and prayers, the practices and disciplines, were to prepare them to cross that river, within themselves. Wisdom told them to serve their brothers! They had plenty of descriptions of what was on the other side too – but not the experience. They were told that a true Teacher of their Age, was the one who would NOT give them even more theory and rituals, but would take them across to see for themselves. This to me, is evolution!

Personally, I do not think idiots who treat human existence as cannon fodder understand anything about Life? And in a benign way neither do Town Planners. To me, we are human beings in essence, countrymen only temporarily and only on the outside. Society is just an expression; no country lasts forever. No ideology.

We stand on our 200,000 year old road and strive for perfection: perfect the society, perfect the technology, perfect the human relations. This is binocular vision. Perfection is an Energy that dwells within every human heart and knowing that Energy stabilises binocular vision with a third pillar. It brings duality into focus, clarity and effect. It enables creativity without chaos. This is evolution.

There are two warriors in this world and they both could have what they want if they understood each other.