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Spirituality and sexuality

should it be of interest to anyone, i just happened to come across an english introduction to Levinas for undergrad students, it should be pretty readable even for people without any philosophical background. i only skimmed through it a bit, but it seems like a pretty good introduction.

undergrad introduction to Levinas
 
Quoting from http://www.pkrishna.org/Is_Self_Illusion.html:

"Question: Is instinct a form of physical conditioning?

I would say instinct is biological conditioning. But freedom from conditioning does not mean the ending of conditioning. It means right relationship with the conditioning. Sexuality is there in animals, but it does not create the kind of problems we have created from it. We must learn from the animals. When you put it in its right place, it does not create problems. But we have not discovered the right place, we exploit it to serve so many ends of our own creation."

"Question: For this should one suppress or examine one's instincts while one still has them?

If you directly want to achieve a result, such as freedom from sexuality, you will end up fighting with it and suppressing it and distorting it. Some religious people have tried that. They have tried to take vows and prevent themselves from sexual activity. It creates distortion, they are burning inside. Sexuality and instincts are part of nature and we must respect nature because it exists. But we must understand our relationship with that instinct. I will give an example. You come into contact with a person of the opposite sex, and it produces a sexual response in your body and mind, a sexual desire arises. It is like any other desire. From where does the insistence come, that my desires must be fulfilled? If I am willing to kill, I am willing to be violent, I am willing to force another person in order to fulfill my desires then it creates a problem. >From where does that insistence come? That insistence is the ego. The desire and the sexuality is not the ego. If I watch it, and if it can be fulfilled without any cruelty, I am quite happy to fulfill it. If it cannot be fulfilled, I let go. Then you are free! So find out if all desires can be held like wishes. Wishes are innocent things, there is no addiction to their fulfillment. In fact, nothing in itself is evil, until the ego gets attached to it. The house does not create possessiveness. I have become possessive in relation to the house. My wife does not create attachment; I get attached. You take any virtue, you add the ego to it and it will turn into a vice. You take humility and you add the ego to it and it will become feeling small, inferior. You take love and you add the ego to it and it will become possessiveness, attachment, jealousy and all that. You take sexuality and add the ego to it and it will become lust and rape and all that. So the problem is not in the external thing, the problem is in the ego. Find out if it is possible to relate with everything without bringing in the ego. The ego is a beggar. It is always wanting something for itself. Stop being a beggar and just be a friend. That is all that has to be learned. Nothing is wrong with nature, nothing is wrong with the world. But I create the ego, and then everything goes wrong. That is the only problem."

The whole article is awesome and I would suggest it to anyone.
 
Coolio said:
Nope, I'm not interested in Buddhism as it introduces an objective value system into spirituality and philosophy.
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Yeah, religions tend to do that.




Concerning the Buddhist perspective: I am sure that most Buddhist modernists in the west would apply the "middle path" perspective to sex. That is, the right type of sex (let's say "right" in this context is in accordance with the Buddhist precepts) in moderation is acceptable. Excess sex would means the subject is giving into a desire for complete sensual gratification that--as already suggested in this thread by people more intelligent than myself--is, possibly, ultimately unattainable.

As stated before, monks and nuns ("serious" Buddhists) are, for the most part, expected not to have any sexual outlets whatsoever. I can not speak for how Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and southeast Asian lay Buddhists would have interpreted sex through the Dharma; I simply don't know enough of the culture and history of those regions.

Furthermore, I know that Tantric Buddhists in Tibet have historically used graphic pictorial depictions of sex; interestingly, the monks who actually created them were celibate for the most part, and the images were meant to capture the act of two opposites unifying (a sort of sexual yin/yang, as it were). Again, I don't know enough of the culture to truly state whether or not this applied to all Tantric Buddhits.
 
I still want to hear about this objective value system that Buddhism employs(?)
 
Oh, you mean the Dharma were Buddha says:
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe simply because it has been handed down for many generations. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is written in Holy Scriptures. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of Teachers, elders or wise men. Believe only after careful observation and analysis, when you find that it agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all. Then accept it and live up to it.
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That sounds pretty subjective to me...
 
Merely an objective value advocating subjectivity. I feel I needn't remind you of the complex Buddhist cosmology, karma, reincarnation, the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Six Perfections, the Five Aggregates of Individuality, the precepts one takes during Buddhist initiation, and the various canons; all external guideposts designed to either make sense of the universe or assist a practitioner in achieving nirvana. If that quote is at the center of Buddhism for you, that's fine; however, it has not been that way historically, and millions of practitioners have devoutly followed a system of accepted truths based on someone else's teachings and experiences.

Concerning the topic at hand, I think the Oneida Community is an odd historical peculiarity. It was a Christian commune with some nontraditional beliefs, one of them being complex marriage. Every man would be married to every women, and vice versa. From my understanding, young men would be introduced to sex by older, postmenopausal women, and the men would learn to control their ability to ejaculate. In this way, population control was set up. I don't know much of the philosophy behind the movement, but it is somewhat unique in terms of spirituality and sexuality, and definitely opposed to many typical Christian teachings.
 
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azzazza !? said:
the decentration/ambiguation of the subject is hardly my own convoluted theory (i wish!) its practically a given in contemporary continental philosophy since Heidegger. it can also be, be it more implicitly, found in the early existentialists such as Kierkegaard and Sartre.
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This intertwining of subject and object is also clearly present in the Eastern traditions.
 
^its not surprising Heidegger had extensive contacts with eastern philosophers. he's still very popular over there, as far as western philosophy goes. but he's always been and always will be a western philosopher (as he himself clearly notes in his dialogues with eastern thought)
 
I don't know much of Hiedegger (and probably won't in the near future), but I was under the impression that it is frowned-upon, both by scholars of western and eastern thought, to think that his philosophy was an attempt to reconcile the the two?
 
^correct. its a dialogue in which the two sides remain necessarily distinct. the general thesis being that culture and linguistics are constitutive in relation to thought. that being said, there is a sort of 'bridge', but it is fundamentally 'western colored'. the same goes for the other side. philosophy as a discipline is through and trough Greek in its mode of thinking. the idea of escaping our background, which is our thought (as it creates a distinct space as to what can and cannot be thought), to an 'archimedean vantage point', is illusionary and does not do right to the fundamental otherness of eastern thought. Heidegger himself explains this thoroughly in his dialogues.
 
^ Interesting. It sounds like Hiedegger might be a person I'd agree with, had he not written in German ;).

I'd like to hear your ideas (or knowledge of others') about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and all that it entails. If you can share your thought in the grammars and beauty thread, I'd really be interested in reading them :).
 
I'm not sure about east and west being "fundamentally" different. I think these commonalities between east and west are captured in the idea of a perennial philosophy. The ontological schema is the same whether we are dealing with Plato's hierarchy of forms, eastern chakras, or the Jewish hierarchy of sephirots. It's hard to say whether these variations have a single source or are an example of convergent evolution but I think they serve as foundations to each tradition and therefore the traditions have some sort of commonality on a fundamental level. With that said the traditions do have their own unique perspectives. The Greeks had a bias towards 3rd person interpretations of this ontology, Jewish and Christian perspectives have a bias towards 2nd person interpretations as an "Other", and eastern traditions have a bias towards 1st person embodiment.
 
i'm having trouble finding that thread, i'll elaborate a bit here. it might be bit short, i'm a bit strapped for time as of late. sorry for the off-topic though (/cheeky smile)

heideggers ethnic sympathy's for the 'german homeland' and its language are well known (and have served for wild speculations as to his membership card of the NSDAP). he is very fond of the german language (most notably in the poetry of Hölderlin) and (rural) culture (sentimental pastorism lol).

its a difficult point though, he is clearly very careful about the idea of a shared reality, yet, does not seem to dismiss a universalism entirely. but its heavily nuanced. in On The Way to Language he often speaks about the 'beckoning to and from Being' and listening to its emptyness, its calling. but Being itself is a kind of a non-concept. his venture to say more about it ended in an unsatisfying 'nothingness', which he considered a kind of failure or at least disappointing. the point being (in my interpretation) of an amorphous state of logical collapse. on this verge, thoughts are no longer thoughts, but, perhaps, can be likened to pencil streaks. they have no concrete content whatsoever and lie more in a realm of non-linguistic experiences then anything else. this can be seen as the empty space or opening that makes any dialogue possible. yet it is an amorphous entirety of the material. its the ineffable, the silent, and the enduring.
and then there is the 'forgetfulness of Being': through the binary oppositions of our greek heritage (true-false, subjective-objective and so on). the distinctions one makes do account for our experience of the world. or rather; our not experiencing it, our bracing ourselves against it. its not a strong relativism, as these can be 'unlearned' (or: Being brought to rememberance), at least to a certain degree. which seems to point us to a certain source, yet this source is nothing. and nothing is again a relative term in opposition to something.
in the words of Wittgenstein about a poem of Uhland: "if you do not try to utter the unutterable, then nothing gets lost. but the unutterable is uttered -unutterably- in what is uttered." if one tries to, it seems one always gets caught up in ones words and these themselves seem to be the problem. which then points us in the exact opposite direction of relativism. it seems as there is both, and both in an absolute way. this is on the complete verge of thought into nonsense though, a place where even experienced philosophers begin to falter. 'thinking the unthinkable'

Derridas can also be taken as speaking of this in his notion of the 'repeats' which is inherent to language, and a fundamental basis for the mere existence of it. in this repeat we are shown an emptiness of the words we use. for instance, i can repeat a sentence without its meaning, as an illustaration for a type of sentence.
now when we repeat someone elses words in the exact same tone and manner as the other person, this gets a parodic effect. but one cannot conceptualize or grasp the precise distance as to the why of this effect. it has to do with a dispersing of a subject-object dichotomy. it seems to come into a 'pure externality' of language, with which the original speaker is confronted. language as pure object; yet such a 'language' as object does not exist its no longer language, yet it is.

but to say the ontological schema is the same is, i think, wrong. the perspective you speak of is the ontological scheme. you will, for instance, not see or grasp the meaning of chakras through, say, Heideggers ontology. what does seem to be possible, to a certain extent, is to 'absorb' one into the other (partially). though this destroys it as it was and does not give one acces to the other mode of thinking, as it is to, or sees, itself. you can use ones eye as a metaphor for ontological scheme. without it, you do not see anything. any scheme lays a claim on 'the absolute', which is by definition, the same for all, as it is, well, absolute. yet this absolute does not appear distinct from the ontological scheme you use, its simply invisible, save in relation to the words/concepts/scheme one uses. does this make it any less absolute? paradoxically, no! the absolute is not absolute to itself, only relative to the not-absolute, that being its 'access road', which actually is the absolute. which refers back my (apparently rather clear) post on Sisyphus and desire etc.

(might be a bit jumbled, this one)
 
in the line of this, a general point against relativism is that in assuming the relativistic vantage point, the point from which you speak has an absolute pretention itself. relative-absolute is another one of those binaries. but then again (paradox within the paradox) without them, there is nothing to see.
 
^ Very informative, thank you.

azzazza !? said:
but Being itself is a kind of a non-concept. his venture to say more about it ended in an unsatisfying 'nothingness', which he considered a kind of failure or at least disappointing.
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See, this is IMO a very good summary of what I personally think is Western Thought's major shortcoming.

Why is Nothing so undesirable?

The rejection of Nothing seems to me to have spawned off an entire school that, after all is said and done, remains pretty useless: Existentialism.

Again, I am far from being well-read in western Philosophy, but to me it seems that this is the most fundamental problem.

Is it somehow strange that I feel that Nothing is absolutely beautiful? Mind you, Nothing here is a noun. Or Anti-noun, I suppose :).

(I will split off this duscussion and mege it with the languages thread shortly).
 
azzazza !? said:
in the words of Wittgenstein about a poem of Uhland: "if you do not try to utter the unutterable, then nothing gets lost. but the unutterable is uttered -unutterably- in what is uttered." if one tries to, it seems one always gets caught up in ones words and these themselves seem to be the problem.
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Sorry, couldn't resist. But this to me is a perfect demonstration of the Incoherence of the Philosophers. Whoever gets the hidden reference here gets a cookie :).

My point remains - it seems that my point of view w.r.t. Nothing has a lot to do with my intellectual orientation being further east of Athens, but not much further than Kashgar.
 
^the problem Heidegger has with nothing is not the fact that its 'nothing' (on the contrary), but the fact that it is not. the term is inprecise. it is 'no-thing', this is a relative term. his self ascribed failure is the fact that he always fall's back into binary, no word seems to actually 'reach out' from within itself. and such that is not what he tries to convey by the concept 'Being' (be-ing, busy-to-be-in, 'busy being in').

i get the hidden reference! its about poetic language. words and meaning are not closed-off inside themselves.
for example logically: when you say 'triangle', you are also saying 'vertices are 180 degrees'
but also non-logical: a philosopical quote can be used in a variety of different contexts, even to such an extent that the original philosopher does not recognize himself in his own quote in such an other context anymore.
or translations: say that they all are excellent translations, but each translation bases itself off the prious one, not the original text. eventually, you get to a point where the original text is unrecognizable.

so it means that in every utterance we make, there is an enormous amount of 'unspokenness'. as a poet attempts to describe his feelings in language, there is a distinct feeling of inadequacy, or at least the shortcomings of the meaning of the words alone (hence all the formal aspects) to convey his intention. trying to grasp that meaning by using ever more words which all refer to much more beyond their reference (which is also not accessible/overseeable to the poet) simply results in an unpenetrable over-density which paradoxically destroys the intention. its about a sort of 'letting language speak for itself'.

now where's that cookie =D
 
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