Materialism

This article examines the establishment of globally standardized time under law in colonial India. Despite pretensions to abstract universality, globally standardized time was and remains a particular construction, built on the basis of particular interests. Since its creation, select parties have competed to dominate the production and operation of globally standardized time, and their competition has been steeped with law. In short, globally standardized time and what we today call transnational law are mutually implicated in the construction of one another. The history of their interaction in colonial India makes clear the ways they work together as a sort of technology, produced and maintained for particular purposes. Those purposes include the capacity to stabilize expectations and establish normative baselines in support of transactional networks across borders, and ultimately around the world. The process continues to this day, with standardized time and law interacting to enable and disable a changing array of legal practices and expectations internationally. The establishment of globally standardized time under law in colonial India reveals the foundations of this interrelationship, including imperial interests and ideologies embedded in its material development.

This liturgy is a performative lecture and an attempt to rethink ourselves in animistic relation to electronic waste through an honest confrontation with my own Catholic-Protestant formation. I want to make an inquiry into new animism, championed by Nurit Bird-David, through my own non-animistic cultural lenses. Partially a very personal piece, I will tell how e-waste touched and shaped me and will transpose my relationality to you through the liturgy. This oral storytelling is accompanied by a ritualized recycling of electronic waste. As a contrast, the lecture part will focus on our attempt to give form to this hyperobject. Through various attempts at quasi-animistic methodologies, we tried to create access to electronic waste in our art research project Times of Waste.

The name of Bṛhaspati is associated with the materialist doctrine in India. He is supposed to be the preceptor of the gods. It was in order to help them in their battle against the demons that he created the materialist doctrine and thereby deluded the demons. This story, Puranic in origin, can be traced back to a late Upaniṣad, Maitrī. However, the story given in the Viṣṇu Purāṇa and other sources does not contain anything specifically materialistic; all the heretical doctrines preached by Māyāmoha appear to be pre-existing; the Jains and the Buddhists are particularly mentioned, not
the Lokāyatikas or the Cārvākas. More interestingly, in some other later sources, Bṛhaspati does not seem to be a god or a demi-god; he is as much a human as Kapila, Gautama and other founders of philosophical systems are. This trend of treating Bṛhaspati as a human is found in Kṛṣṇamiśra’s play, the Prabodhacandrodaya. He belongs to the camp of Kali. Whatever be the identity of Bṛhaspati, his attribution to materialism is inappropriate and has got nothing to do with the development of materialism in India.

The emergence of representation and its abolition animate the final movement of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The form of representation alone is enough to turn Christianity into a kind of nihilism – it has absolute spirit as its content, but “content” as such is distorting. Hegel presents the comic parabasis as a first (and one-sided) abolition of representation. But the parabasis and the abolition of representation are almost completely absent from Hegel’s treatment of comedy in the Lectures on Aesthetics. What has happened? Has Hegel, engaged in a polemic against romanticism, become wary of affiliating an authority like Aristophanes with Schlegelian irony? Or is the parabasis still legible, between the lines and in a new configuration, in the Aesthetics?

B KULTURWISSENSCHAFTEN BA PHILOSOPHIE; WELTANSCHAUUNG Unsterblichkeit 18. Jahrhundert AUFSATZSAMMLUNG 19-1 Thema: Das Problem der Unsterblichkeit in der Philoso-phie, den Wissenschaften und den Künsten des 18. Jahr-hunderts / hrsg. von Dieter Hüning, Stefan Klingner und Gide-on Stiening.-Hamburg : Meiner, 2018.-425 S. ; 24 cm.-(Auf-klärung ; 29. 2017).-ISBN 978-3-7873-3449-0 : EUR 158.00, EUR 138.00 (Forts.-Pr.). [#6190] Die für das 18. Jahrhundert zentrale Frage nach der Unsterblichkeit wird in dieser Ausgabe des stets lesenswerten interdisziplinären Jahrbuchs Aufklä-rung 1 sehr umfassend und vielschichtig erörtert. 2 Mit Dieter Hüning, Stefan Klingner und Gideon Stiening haben sich drei Herausgeber dem Thema gewidmet, die für Qualität garantieren. Stiening gibt ab diesem Jahrbuch die Publikation gemeinsam mit Martin Mulsow und Friedrich Vollhardt heraus und übernimmt damit die bisherige Herausgeberposition von Lothar Krei-mendahl, der insbesondere zu Bayle und Hume wertvolle Forschungsbei-träge geleistet hat. Die Fülle der Bezüge, mit denen die Abhandlungen über das Unsterblich-keitsthema aufwarten, läßt sich hier nur andeuten. Die Spanne reicht von Christian Wolffs Unsterblichkeitskonzept das in zwei Beiträgen von Hanns-Peter Neumann und Paola Rumore behandelt wird. 3 Wolffs Konzeption der Unsterblichkeit wird hier einmal in bezug auf die Verknüpfung mit persona-1 Zuvor wurde besprochen: Thema: Winckelmann / hrsg. von Elisabeth Décultot und Friedrich Vollhardt.-Hamburg : Meiner, 2015.-241 S. : Ill. ; 24 cm.-(Aufklä-rung ; 27. 2015).-ISBN 978-3-7873-2852-9 : EUR 112.00, EUR 96.00 (Forts.-Pr.) [#4749].-Rez.: IFB 17-3 http://informationsmittel-fuer-bibliotheken.de/showfile.php?id=8466-Thema: Ge-lehrtenrepublik / hrsg. von Marian Füssel und Martin Mulsow.-Hamburg : Mei-ner, 2015.-352 S. : Ill., graph. Darst. ; 24 cm.-(Aufklärung ; 26. 2014).-ISBN 978-3-7873-2756-0 : EUR 112.00, EUR 96.00 (Forts.-Pr.) [#4750].-Rez.: IFB 16-3

The economy creates–not destroys–society and it is the material reality that makes the economy practicable and realistic. There is, therefore, no economy without a material grounding. As a matter of ideological configuration, the material upon which the economy stands as the begin-all and end-all of social interaction constitutes the philosophy of materialism.

Baron d’Holbach has a reputation of being one of the most radical Enlightenment critics of religion. The author attempts to show, however, that although he harshly criticizes the religion of his day, he nevertheless makes a heavy use of the concepts of medieval religious philosophy—most centrally, the conception of the will as a rational desire. The author shows, moreover, that the modern, Cartesian conception of the will as an independent mental faculty would not be even compatible with the baron’s materialism. Far from trying to overturn the medieval philosophy, the author argues that d’Holbach attempts to use an originally Aristotelian conception of the will for undermining the Cartesian conception of the will—which the baron associated with his contemporary theology. Apart from suggesting that d’Holbach’s radicalism was more ideological than philosophical, this observation implies that the attempts to accommodate modern philosophy must have been a part of theological mainstream in the 18th-century France.

A wide range of theories, starting from American naturalism and pragmatism (Dewey, 1935), Sellars’ views on the myth of the given (1956), epistemological behaviorism and Rorty’s anti-representationalism (1965, 1979) etc. have directly or indirectly lead to the formation of various “classical” positions of hard or soft eliminativism (Churchland - 1981, Churchland - 1986, Stich - 1983, Dennett - 1988).

These theories, by eliminating mental phenomena, also eliminate their basic criterion, intentionality, which based on “classical” views (Brentano, 1874) constitutes the main distinctive feature between the mental and the physical. The problem of intentionality within a materialistic framework, is the inability to explain how a material-biological structure such as the brain, is related to something out of itself and furthermore represents this something in the form of mental content, or, as Searle (1983) has formulated the question: How can “atoms and void” possibly refer to or be directed to or in the end understand something that is outside themselves?

Modern answers “rescuing” intentionality, either resort to mental realism (ontological or functional) and the retention of mental representations of the world within the subject (Fodor, 1981), or they extend the notion of intentionality in positions of flow of information (Dretske, 1980 et al.), or they limit intentionality to the referentiality of language (Quine, 1975). Of particular importance in eliminative materialism is Dennett’s argument (1987), in which he defends the instrumental quality of intentionality in a functional framework, while ruling out its reduction, eliminating in the end any of its potentially natural character.

Today, the problem of intentionality is becoming again relevant in the realm of cognitive science, as during the past decade, important views on embodied cognition attract interest, eliminating mental phenomena and internal representations (Dreyfus - 2002, Chemero - 2009, Rowlands - 2012 et al.), broadening the horizon of eliminative theories at the same time. However, the philosophical tradition of these positions on embodied cognition, situated largely on phenomenology, gives intentionality a key role.