Open Integral

Edward Berge

See our IPS forum discussion about this new book at this link.

Balder said:

Elsewhere on the web, Jim Chamberlain (a former IPS member) posted a link to the work of Quentin Meillassoux, an emerging new voice in Continental philosophy and a former student of Badiou. It looks interesting and worth checking out.

After Finitude

And this Amazon page has some interesting reviews.

theurj said:

Just a quick comment this morning. Rayburn’s review at Amazon said:

“Guided by Badiou’s use of set theory, Meillassoux argues that Hume’s probabilistic reasoning rests upon the dubious assumption that the set of possible outcomes of an event can be totalized. Probability as a metaphysical fact is undermined by Cantor’s discovery of “transfinites”–that is, the multiplicity of infinities that cannot be gathered into a single ‘meta-set.’”

This seems to be related to my prior critique of holarchical complexity?

The above is the title of the book published in 2002 by the State University of New York Press, edited by Catherine Keller and Anne Daniell. It is one of the contributions in the Suny Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought. The purpose of this book is to explore the interstices between the two brands of postmodernism in the title, generally represented by Whitehead and Derrida.

Now some might find such a project untenable, as these seem to be two fundamentally opposed camps. On the one hand the process folks might find deconstruction to be destructive of any and all notions of the good, the true and the beautiful, leaving nothing in its wake. It seems Ken is on this side of the street. On the other hand the deconstruction folks might find that such Whiteheadian notions of “actual entities” to be stuck in a modernist position of stubborn fixity and evil metanarratives.

Keller in the Introduction notes some of the similarities of the two projects:

“The profound parallels may still startle those who have the patience to untangle both skeins of arcane vocabulary. Both jubilantly privilege becoming over being, difference over sameness, novelty over conservation, intensity over equilibrium, complexity over simplicity, plurality over unity, relation over substance, flux over stasis. Both repudiate the inherited ‘truth-regimes’ of unifying metanarratives, which objectify reality from the vantage point of a stable, underlying subject. Both deconstruct—or, in Whitehead’s language, ‘criticize the abstraction of’—any essentialized substance of subject. And both accomplish this critique by exposing the Western linguistic structures that fabricate the illusory common sense of what Derrida calls ’self presence’ and what Whitehead calls ‘the subject-predicate form of proposition.’”

Keller also notes that to find some rapprochement between these camps one must not vilify each other. Regarding Griffin’s characterization of deconstruction she says that he never even engaged Derrida, that he “mounted the argument against a ‘deconstruction’ of his own invention.” This sounds a lot like what Ken does with Derrida as well. And from such a perspective there can be no creative hybrid, which is what the volume seeks. I’m guessing it is from this exploration that the next phase of “integral” will grow, not the dogmatic clinging to the postmetanarratives of either. And I will explore this book forthcoming in this thread, as time permits.

One thing leads to another, as usual. In the last thread we started talking about coming to an understanding of an author’s meaning. It seems there are more accurate interpretations than others, but who decides and how? Is it the author him/herself that determines their own meaning? Such was explored in the 2 chapters on literary theory in Ken’s Eye of Spirit and my own little essay at Integral World, “Who decides what Wilber means?” To introduce this thread I’ve selected a brief essay from a Christian theologian commenting on Derrida and Gadamer. I hope to explore Gadamer more fully in the comments to come.

Gadamer, Derrida and How We Read by Bruce Ellis Benson

The literary phenomenon of “deconstruction” is regarded by many as an irresponsible fad that has now become passé. Fortunately, most of the wild, irresponsible readings of texts that went under the banner of “deconstruction” are passé. Yet in the same way that the historical performance movement has so deeply influenced classical music that it has become virtually the norm, the work of Jacques Derrida and Hans-Georg Gadamer has so affected our ways of reading texts that we are no longer aware of it.

With the deaths of these two thinkers — Derrida in October at age 74 and Cadamer in 2002 at the remarkable age of 102 — we are in a position to reflect on that influence.

My joining the two figures may strike some as odd, since Gadamer and Derrida are often portrayed as polar opposites. According to the usual account, Gadamer is the conservative upholder of the traditional way of reading and Derrida the deconstructer of all that is sacred. If you’re for Gadamer, you must be against Derrida — and vice versa.

Yet the similarities in the way they’ve changed how we read and think about texts far outweigh their differences. Both, for example, stress the role of “play” in reading texts and the way in which we are controlled by (rather than in control of) history.

Derrida’s early work is particularly marked by a kind of Nietzschean playfulness. In Of Grammatology, for example, he gives a playful yet exquisitely subtle reading of Rousseau that brings the complexity of writing to the fore. Derrida recognized that writing has both advantages and disadvantages, and that it cannot have the one without the other On the one hand, writing can make an author’s thought present even without the author’s presence. On the other hand, the fact that in writing (unlike in speech) an author’s presence is unnecessary means that the author is no longer able to control interpretation. Charitable interpreters often make appeals to “what the author really meant,” but the absence of the author means that we are left with only the text. And texts can be understood in different ways.

For some early followers of Derrida, that recognition provided cover for sloppy ways of reading texts — as if a text could be read in any way. Derrida himself was an extremely careful, even scrupulous, reader of texts. That care is certainly evident in Derrida’s own writing. I found it also amply demonstrated in the seminars that I was privileged to take with him and the many times I heard him speak. Although a central theme in his thought is that texts can be read in various ways and at multiple levels, the depiction of Derrida as not believing in the possibility of an author’s ability to communicate by way of writing, or as giving license to readers to make texts mean whatever they want them to mean, is a caricature.

Not only did Derrida insist on the need for careful study of texts, using the appropriate “instruments of criticism,” but he was annoyed with those he felt had “avoided reading me and trying to understand” and so ended up with an interpretation of his texts that he deemed “false” (Limited Inc).

Yet Derrida was well aware that “this indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened a reading” (Of Grammatology), and that even a careful commentary is already an interpretation.

The recognition that there are no “purely literal” interpretations is just as much a theme in Gadamer, who claimed that we always bring our prejudices to a text and so read it in light of our own experience. He went against the grain in thinking that prejudices are not necessarily bad; he went so far as to say that they are absolutely’ essential for there to be any understanding at all.

However, Gadamer never suggested that we could or should rest on our prejudices. Truly entering into a conversation with a text means that we put both ourselves and our prejudices at risk. The text may have something to say to us that overthrows our prejudices, so that we find ourselves “pulled up short by the text” (Truth and Method).

Like Derrida, Gadamer thought that reading a text involves entering into a kind of play between text and reader in which the text has an effect upon us and we an effect upon the text. Of course, that play requires a certain degree of humility on the part of the reader. Gadamer himself radiated that kind of humility. In my encounters with Gadamer I found him to be just as interested in asking questions about my work as I was about his. When he agreed to read some of the early portions of my dissertation, not only was his critique gracious but also it was clear that he was interested in learning from me.

That kind of receptivity is precisely what Gadamer thought was necessary for understanding to take place. He thought of understanding as a kind of “event” that happens to us. For that event to take place, we have to be willing to listen. Given that willingness, events of understanding can take place continually. Not surprisingly, we are sometimes startled by these events of understanding, for they demonstrate to us just how little we are in control of texts.

This idea of being at the mercy not just of texts but also of history is a theme in both Gadamer and Derrida. Although Derrida is commonly read as either overthrowing or at least attempting to evade the effect of history and tradition, he made it clear just how much we are embedded in Western ways of thinking. Americans are usually amazed to discover that Derrida was often criticized in France as too conservative because of his insistence on studying classical texts. While Derrida was always trying to think beyond the bounds laid down by tradition, he realized that one can only go beyond those bounds in small ways and that, even in going beyond them, one displays a profound indebtedness to them.

Here we come to a point of difference between Gadamer and Derrida. Gadamer had a great respect for tradition and believed that being steeped in a tradition is what makes understanding possible. Derrida would no doubt have criticized Gadamer for being too positive about tradition. In turn, Gadamer would likely have criticized Derrida for not being sufficiently appreciative of the wisdom that tradition hands down to us. That difference is mostly a matter of emphasis, however, and not something fundamental.

Probably the most profound way in which Gadamer and Derrida have shaped hermeneutics is in how we think about texts. Both thinkers saw texts as constituted not by dead letters but by living words. Gadamer went so far as to claim that a text does not fully exist except in the moment in which it is read and understood. Further, the very reading and understanding of texts has an impact upon the texts themselves. Thus, rather than being static, texts are constantly in motion, since our interpretation of them affects their very being.

As living entities, texts have a history, and that history becomes so intimately connected to the texts themselves that there can be no clear distinction between text and interpretation history. Rather than their being merely an expression of an author’s thought, texts are mutually constituted by author and reader. That balance is one found in both Gadamer and Derrida, despite the fact that Derrida has often been (wrongly) read as saying that readers have the sole control of texts.

So what do these two figures mean for a pastor preparing a sermon on a biblical text? They call for rethinking the very essence of interpretation. Explicating a text requires a willingness to play with it, a willingness to hear what it has to say with open ears. While we all come to texts with our prejudices, engaging a text in a genuine dialogue means that those prejudices are put into question.

In reading a text like the Bible, one is well aware of its special authority and its peculiar way of questioning us. Yet, if we are to be truly faithful interpreters, we need just as much to question it. It is within this mutual questioning, this to-and-fro movement, that understanding takes place. Although Derrida is somewhat less sanguine about the ability of texts to communicate truth, Gadamer closes his magnum opus Truth and Method by saying that the “discipline of questioning and inquiring” indeed “guarantees truth.” We merely need to be willing to enter into dialogue and able to listen.

* * *

Bruce Ellis Benson, associate professor of philosophy at Wheaton College (Illinois). is a visiting scholar at General Theological Seminary and lecturer in philosophy of religion at Union Theological Seminary. He is the author of Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion on Modern Idolatry (InterVarsity Press) and, more recently, The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music (Cambridge University Press) This article appeared in The Christian Century, March 11, 2005, pp. 30-32. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current articles and subscriptions information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

Don’t get me wrong. Plain old masturbation is fun and healthy. I engage it in when I can, which is increasingly less these days as I age and my prostate enlarges. So I have to sublimate my maturbation into words and ideas, but it’s the same basic principle. And it’s fun and healthy too.

But is it merely masturbation? See the below abstract of the article “Buddhist Hermeneutics” by Robert Thurman. This demonstrates that such philosophy is far more than just mental abstraction but a component to the path of “enlightenment.” It also demonstrates that such ancient hermeneuticists were quite advanced in postformal operational reasoning. So much so that it calls into question Ken’s claim that their interpretations of “spirt” or the “nondual” were inadequate by today’s postmetaphysical standards.

The abstract (minus the special characters that didn’t translate here):

“Hermeneutics” as a philosophical discipline of rational interpretation of a traditional canon of Sacred Scriptures authoritative for a religious community has usually been considered peculiar to the West. This notion is anchored only in the misconception that “Eastern” thought is somehow “non-rational,” or “mystical,” hence excused from the burden of reconciling the tensions between some forms of authority and philosophical reason. Buddhism in particular has been misconceived in this way, due to its emphasis on meditational experience and non-dualistic wisdom. These misconceptions are quickly cleared away when we examine the role of authority in Buddhist teaching, appreciating the predominantly pedagogic concerns of kyamuni during his long tenure as a teacher who sought to encourage the individual disciple’s ability to think for himself; the role of analytic reasoning in Buddhist practice, wherein a practitioner’s first task is to sift through the complexities of Doctrine to discover its inner meaning as relevant to his own experience and its systematic transformation; the role of hermeneutical strategies in guiding the practitioner’s analytical meditations, wherein the first two stages of wisdom (prajñ) are cultivated through a refined discipline of philosophical criticism of all false views (drsti), such as naive realism, nihilism, etc., as to the nature of ultimate reality and of the self; and finally the role of transcendent experience, wherein the transcendence of verbalization is approached not as a non-rational escape into mysticism, but as an affirmation of empiricism, a rational acknowledgement of the fact that reality, even ordinary reality, is never, in the final analysis, reducible to what we may say about it. These four functions in Buddhism are traditionally expressed in an ancient rule of thumb known as the “Four Reliances”: “Rely on the Teaching, not the Teacher; rely on the meaning, not the letter; rely on the definitive meaning, not the interpretable meaning; rely on wisdom, not on consciousness.” To examine the traditional usage of these Reliances, we must trace the work of the Buddhist hermeneuticians, who, far from maintaining any “golden silence” beyond the silvery speech of philosophers, have kept alive over two and one half millennia an illustrious line known as the “Golden Speech” (Ch. jin ko) tradition, whose members include from among the sage-scholars of India, Tibet, China, and Japan, kyamuni himself (himself the first hermeneutician of his own Holy Doctrine!), Ngrjuna, ryadeva, Asanga, Chih I, Candrakrti, Fa Tsang, ntaraksita, and Tsong Khapa. This latter, working in the 14th and 15th centuries, was one of the greatest scholars of any of the Buddhist cultures, and his masterwork, Essence of the Eloquent, composed in 1407, provides a golden key with which the door to this tradition can be opened.

Brook Ziporyn. Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism. Chicago: Open Court, 2004. xxii + 452 pp. Notes, index. $32.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8126-9542-7.
 

Reviewed by: Robert Magliola, National Taiwan University and Abac Assumption University of Thailand, retired; Seminar Associate, Columbia University Seminar in Buddhist Studies.

Published by: H-Buddhism (January, 2007)
 

From Tiantai to Neo-Tiantai: Intersubsuming Western Philosophy
 

This book philosophizes. It philosophizes by transforming Tiantai Buddhism into a Neo-Tiantai Buddhism which engages with western philosophy, especially modern and contemporary western philosophy. I belong to that minority which affirms that “living philosophy” is one of the things Buddhist Studies should do, and I recommend this book as a brilliant example of such a genre.
 

In the introduction, and then the first sections of part 1, Brook Ziporyn exposits the key teachings of Tiantai so as to set them up as a springboard for his project, the formation of his Neo-Tiantai. Insofar as his exposition establishes the parameters for all that follows, I here indulge it at some length. In Ziporyn’s reading, Tiantai extends the Lotus SÅ«tra’s famous claim that Ã…Å¡rāvakas, by denying Bodhisattvahood, are in fact practicing the Bodhisattva path without knowing it (p. 15). Tiantai takes the clue from this collapse of the ends-means relation, by in effect applying it to Nāgārjuna’s distinctions between the Two Truths, conventional truth (Buddhism and ordinary speech) and ultimate truth (Emptiness, the “unspeakable”) and even to Nāgārjuna’s distinction within the mundane between ordinary truth and the false (non-Buddhist religious and philosophical theories).
 

Tiantai’s Three Truths are Emptiness, Provisional Positing (of what Nāgārjuna calls ordinary truth, but also of what Nāgārjuna calls false teachings), and Centrality (reversible as-ness, which Ziporyn shall re-name “Intersubsumption”). Emptiness and Provisional Positing are exactly equivalent, and this equivalency constitutes Centrality, which is reversible as-ness. In Ziporyn’s words, “the differentiations between things, their conventional designations, as well as any cockamamie philosophical or religious theory or personal illusion about them, are just as ultimately true and untrue as their Emptiness … both of these aspects are just as ultimate as the fact that these two aspects are simply aspects of one another. This is the interfusion of the Three Truths, which means even Centrality is not more ultimate than the other two. To indicate any of the three is to indicate all three: they are three ways of saying the same thing” (p. 16). Ziporyn calls Tiantai’s Three Truths, in “philosophical” terms, Global Incoherence, Local Coherence, and Reversible As-ness (“Intersubsumption”) respectively, and with refinement from affiliated Tiantai teachings, and some personal “tweaking,” these become the engine for what Ziporyn calls Neo-Tiantai. His Neo-Tiantai asserts that identity per se is synonymous with its own constitutive impossibility (p. 39). Any proposition, and indeed any experience, will at the same time globalize (make into a whole) and destroy itself, in such a way that these two are one and the same. For example, “To know how to squeeze new meanings out of old premises is to know oneself, for one has no self but this constant, somewhat desperate, and vaguely disreputable rereading and recontextualization of old claptrap.” The real truth that is delivered by exegetical ingenuity is that the exegetes are right in spite of themselves, “precisely by being so wrong.” They are “getting at the true kernel of the matter by straying so unjustifiably from the ‘original meaning’, although the true kernel” is not what they believe they see revealed but rather the very process of “finding true kernels in old lies” (p. 40). The rest of Ziporyn’s four-hundred-fifty-two page book is the application of this Neo-Tiantai formulation in terms of the classical issues of philosophy (with reference as well to John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Frank Oz, and a host of others).
 

Part 1 has as its title, “Neo-Tiantai Basics: Enframement, Coherence, and Agency–The Thusness and Otherwiseness of All Coherences,” and it is through this suite of puncta that the narrative logically moves. I would single out as crucial the progressive exposure of the “Four Ways of Being Thus and Otherwise: Impermanence, Illusion, Tertium Quid, Asness” (pp. 62-73). Comparative philosophers will appreciate, I think, Ziporyn’s reference to, and interpolation of, Merleau-Ponty here and throughout part 1. “Impermanence” is a face of Global Incoherence: “Whatever appears in experience will be transcended, i.e., will disappear, will be recontextualized, will assume a meaning other than the one it has appeared as.” But “Impermanence” turns out to be “Illusion” as a face of Global Incoherence: “Whatever appears is transcended already…. [W]herever there is appearance of any coherence there is also necessarily already transcendence of that appearance, the two are necessarily inseparable.” But “Illusion” turns out to be the situation of “Tertium Quid”: “Whatever appears is thereby transcended” (p. 65). The final step is “Asness”: “Appearing per se is being transcended per se. To be thus is to be otherwise” (p. 66). The Neo-Tiantai of part 1 permutates the great Tiantai masters, Zhiyi, Zhanran, and Zhili; and engages with Kant and Hegel, Frege, Whitehead, Nishitani, Davidson, and Źiźek (among others).
 

Part 2, “Desire and the Self: Towards an Ethics and Psychology of Constitutive Impossibility,” includes an extended treatment of ethics. If one applies the notion of Thusness and Otherwiseness to conventional definitions of good and evil, then “the essence of Neo-Tiantai ethics lies in recontextualization, rather than elimination or substitution…. My obsession or compulsion or stupidity or malice may be seen, when the camera draws back to the right distance, as it were, as a point in a curve describing bliss, generosity, health, and so on. The question lies then in how far back the camera is to be drawn. And the implication is that at any level of focus or analysis we may be resting at, it would be possible to push forward and discover that our present figure is made up of plenty of components that are horrible when judged by its standard, and vice versa; there need be no final level at which this process must stop” (p. 287). This formulation may generate a consequence which has been pejoratively attributed by many Buddhists to Tiantai itself: if every behavior is also every other behavior, both good and bad, neither good nor bad, then ethical responsibility loses its motivation. Even soteriological intervention loses its driving force. Neo-Tiantai considers itself immune from this criticism, because one should live one’s localized “coherence” very intensely, even while recognizing all other things/events are negatively/positively transcribed into it (and vice versa), but for Tiantai’s adversaries, this is precisely the flaw–the immunity tends to vacate moral earnestness.
 

In particular I recommend to “Continentalists” (scholars working in European philosophy) Ziporyn’s treatment of the double-bind (pp. 270-271 et circa), a motif they will recognize from the French poststructuralists, especially Lacan and Derrida. Ziporyn advises that one do what most successfully seems to fulfill, with one stroke (“a single token”), the contrary demands of one’s ad hoc double-bind (of course, for Tiantai, anything can be a double-bind and anything can be a stroke, depending on one’s “focal apparatus”). This localized “solution” is analogous, suggests Ziporyn, to the Lacanian “objet petit a, standing as a plug covering the ’stain of the Real’, i.e., the crack revealing the inconsistency of the Big Other” (p. 270). The representative problem is (“provisionally,” I assume) both satisfied and destroyed–one becomes the problem and hence is free from/as it.
 

Part 3, “Hermeneutics and Autoerotics: Truths and Other Hidden Parts, and How They Welcome Their Demise,” recontextualizes Neo-Tiantai in terms of the As-ness between/of erotics and hermeneutics (cf. Nietzsche, Bataille, the Post-Structuralists). Ziporyn is–with one stroke–classically Buddhist (and Tantrist, it seems to me) and philosophically “postmodern French” in his emphasis on the force of desire. In a sexual register, desire is said to be either “solitary” (“onany”) or “shared” (“love,” here taken to be re-contextualized auto-eroticism). Love as repackaged onany? We are far from the conventional reading of the Bodhisattva vows here! Ziporyn would/could deploy Intersubsumption to simultaneously affirm the conventional reading too, but then the end-result seems to be a flattening of morality again. For the counterpoint of auto-eroticism in hermeneutics, and a romp through academic politics, see especially (and appropriately, according to Ziporyn) the very same pages (pp. 423-426). For Neo-Tiantai’s disagreements with Zen, see pp. 408-409; with Levinas, pp. 347-350; with deconstruction, p. 418. “Pragmatically, if we may invoke an old trope, in deconstruction, all is wrong and false, while in Tiantai, all is right and true,” says Ziporyn. I demur. In fact, I have shown at some length in my own published work that for Derrida, all is not “wrong and false.” As for all being “right and true,” Derrida is Jewish enough to know that is impossible, very impossible indeed.
 

I close with some words about Being and Ambiguity’s style, the high intellectuality of which is laced with a Rabelaisian flippancy very offensive to some. Ziporyn’s text is “living philosophy.” It doesphilosophy. The counterpoints of Hegel and Lennon, etc., of classical elenchus and double-entendre, etc., “act out,” theatricalize, Neo-Tiantai’s principle of Intersubsumption. That is, the text does the philosophy.
 

In one of the Integral Review forums I’ve been in dialog with Richard Carlson, who is highly critical of Anderson’s recent article in Integral Review in particular and of Wilber in general. It seems that Aurobindo is held to a different standard when it comes to truth claims. In that light I offer the following from Debashish Baneji’s review of The Religious, the Spiritual and the Secular (by Robert Minor). Banerji compares Aurobindo’s truth claims to the usual “western” truth claims: The former incorporates a hermeneutical analysis with the claim to personal experience, whereas the latter is apparently only “mental” or “theoretical” without “spiritual experience.” I’ve heard quite similar arguments from Carlson, and from Alan here in this forum. I’d like to explore these truth claims.

From Banerji at the following link: http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2006/10/19/2427726.html:

Undoubtedly, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother believe that their teaching leads to the Truth, but they do not expect all human beings to believe this, nor do they encourage their disciples to convince others of it. Without being overt, Minor directs some rational skepticism at Sri Aurobindo’s Truth-claim as being based on no authority other than personal experience and the disciples’ consequent need to accept his word for it. Though Sri Aurobindo’s Truth-claim does proceed on the basis of his personal experience, it also justifies itself through a hermeneutic analysis based on Veda, Vedanta and Bhagavad Gita. This again, is nothing new in the Indian spiritual context, Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhavacharya, Chaitanya and numerous others establishing their claims for Truth based on these same double foundations of experience and textual interpretation. As for Sri Aurobindo’s inclusivism, it does not obliterate its “others”, but as Minor himself notes, is not averse to criticize what it considers their failings and limitations as seen from its own standpoint. Thus, they are not erased in his realization, and are free to hold their self-identifying differences. At the same time, Sri Aurobindo does show how these alternate traditions may be extrapolated into his own integral Truth, not losing themselves or being pre-empted in the process as in Advaita. The absolutism of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy, encompassing Being and Becoming and all the historical approaches to a realization of Reality can undoubtedly be called a grand form of inclusivism. Contemporary western thinking, operating in the wake of Hitler and Stalin and under the shadow of the Enlightenment’s self-fulfilling prophecy of capitalistic globalization, is particularly fearful of and averse to grand narratives, equating intellectual totalism with political or capitalistic totalitarianism. But if the seeking for a total rational description of Reality characterizes the trajectory of western metaphysics, it is no less present in Indian philosophical systems either, with the difference, that the Indian systems rely not merely on the mind’s plausible speculations on the nature of Reality, but on the power of a spiritual or supramental experience and its reproducibility. This is a critical distinction for two reasons: (1) The Truth-claim of a mental model is not experientially fulfilling and is much more likely to seek its fulfillment in the “outside world” through a conversion or erasure of otherness, particularly if there is a teleology attached to it; while a “spiritual” or “supramental” Truth-claim directs its fulfillment “within”, through individual practices aimed at reproducing universal subjective experiences. (2) Whereas a mental rationality is constrained to view logical opposites as irreconcilable, a “supramental rationality” is under no compulsion to do so, appealing to an experience that transcends mind. Thus, in a quotation of Minor from Sri Aurobindo, “… the Absolute, obviously, finds no difficulty in world-manifestation and no difficulty either in a simultaneous transcendence of world-manifestation; the difficulty exists only for our mental limitations which prevent us from grasping the supramental rationality of the co-existence of the infinite and finite or seizing the nodus of the unconditioned with the conditioned. For our intellectual rationality these are opposites; for the absolute reason they are interrelated and not essentially conflicting expressions of one and the same reality.” [Minor, 26 quote from SABCL XVIII, 377] Thus, Sri Aurobindo’s “thought” and practice need to be located in an Indian philosophical tradition, whose epistemological bases are different from those of the West. It is a failure to recognize this or to give adequate credence to it that is the source of Minor’s fear and skepticism and results in a perpetuation of a form of intellectual neo-colonialism.