New Spirits – Reading Deleuze in India
Consciousness exists only in connection with other consciousness
Posts on consciousness, thought, immanence, representation, and philosophical transformation in the Reading Deleuze in India project.
I am undergoing a metamorphosis. Recently, at a gathering, someone said this was a wonderful group of caterpillars. I paused. He said, yes… soon these will be butterflies. A friend once said that metamorphosis was a proof of God’s existence. How else could one explain a butterfly arising from a caterpillar through purely evolutionary steps? Can such a leap in complexity be grasped in evolutionary terms at all? I am not a biologist, and it interested me only as a…
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Some time ago, I spoke with a friend about taking leave of many ideas. I told her that—quite unscientifically—I visit my memories and think about why I no longer find certain ideas interesting, that these are often ideas I engaged with during my studies. Great ideas! From Kant and Hegel, etc. She was quite taken with my account and asked whether I was writing it down. I said: why? I am taking leave, after all. She was disappointed. Did she…
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The best of all possible worlds? When I studied philosophy in Heidelberg, I read about the logic of possible worlds. Everything possible was also real, only not accessible to me at the moment. This was an answer to a fundamental problem in propositional logic, namely that an “if…, then” sentence—with a false premise and a true conclusion—was true as a whole. In the Western Enlightenment, we find in Leibniz the assumption that we live in the best of all possible…
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Approaching great themes with short texts—is that possible? The Mediterranean region is the birthplace of monotheism—Judaism, Christianity, Islam. India is the birthplace of Hinduism. Countless gods are conceived here, or else the absence of God, or the universality of the Divine, depending on which of the numerous strands one follows. Two principles are visible here, however: the maxim of individuality, which continues even beyond death, and the thought of being part of something much greater, within which individuality must be…
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In Europe, we have an idea of the Enlightenment as something in which an individual recognizes that he or she lives under constraints imposed by others. The task then is to overcome these constraints and place oneself under a greater law. A light comes on and shines into all the dark corners, to question what has not yet been reflected upon and questioned. This movement of thought is described with the metaphor of light as a torch. The light of…
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Mnemosyne Atlas This is a personal blog. Yet at the same time it is also about a transformation of consciousness. Consciousness does not exist singularly within human beings. It exists only in connection with other consciousness. Consciousness is communicative. A journey into consciousness is therefore always more than just a personal journey. It is a manifestation. In 2016, I traveled to India. I wanted to read Gilles Deleuze there. I had an inkling that this would open up a new…
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