Abstract
This essay explores the way we can rethink and transform language, knowledge, self, society and state by walking and meditating with Sri Aurobindo. It explores how Sri Aurobindo helps us to deepen and broaden our conventional views of language and knowledge. It explores the vital and spiritual aspect of language and the spiritual sadhana involved in language as a form of life and movement of consciousness. It rethinks knowledge as a companion of liberation—inner and outer, self and social. It rethinks self and society as not only empirical but transcendental. It presents Sri Aurobindo’s critique of the State and the need for the cultivation of spiritual anarchism and fraternity. It also discusses Sri Aurobindo’s ideals of humanity and how we can realize it beyond anthropocentrism as a unity of all species. It then explores the challenge of alternative futures and the way Sri Aurobindo can help us do yoga with our alternative planetary futures.
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Notes
- 1.
We need to meditate further the term sickness of mind used by Nandy here. It may refer to Sri Aurobindo pointing to limits of mind closed within itself. Aurobindo (1905) has also spoken about his three madness’. As Sri Aurobindo writes: “The first one is this. I firmly believe that the accomplishments, genius, higher education and learning and wealth that God has given me are His.” The Second one is: “by whatever means I must have the direct vision of God.” “My third madness is that while others look upon their country as an inert piece of matter—a few meadows and fields, forests and hills and rivers—I look upon my country as the Mother.” So to understand Nandy’s phrase “sickness of mind,” we need to relate this to Sri Aurobindo’s madness (see Heehs, 2008). We also need to understand mind which confirms to existing conventions of slavery is pathological. At the same time, what Nandy further writes about Sri Aurobindo can help;
It is impossible to read the life of Aurobindo without the sensing the “inner” pain which went with the imperialism of India. Much of the pain was inflicted and much of the destruction of his cultural self undertaken within the confines of his family. This further ensured that his suffering passed for education, upbringing or development. It was a total system which young Aurobindo had to confront. Rebellion in such a case was bound to seen as hopeless and the “exotic” alternative he found in mysticism was probably the only one available to him. The challenge was to keep the mysticism humane and politically non-conformist [..] This could be put another way. If Aurobindo’s life story and his spiritualism was a statement of pain it was also an interpersonal withdrawal to protect values which he would have had to give up in light of conventional reason. And echoing Freud on art, he could have said, only in spiritualism the omnipotence of thought and, hence the political potency and moral vision of the dominated—been retained in our civilization. It was an “insane” and “irrational” attempt to preserve the ideas of the oneness of man, and of man as part of an organic universe (Nandy quoted in Sharma 2014, 87–88).
- 2.
In his important reflections on pragmatism, Richard Hartz suggests that Sri Aurobindo had read William James and had a deep appreciation of his work and significance. In Hartz’ words;
A few years after the death of William James, we find Sri Aurobindo noting “that the gulf between East and West, India and Europe is much less profound and unbridgeable now than it was thirty or forty years ago.” He commented particularly on the rise in the West of “new philosophies … not indeed directly spiritual, vitalistic rather and pragmatic, but yet by their greater subjectivity already nearer to Indian ways of thinking.” Occasionally he mentioned names in this connection. He referred, especially, to “the thought of Nietzsche, of Bergson and of James.” Speaking of the interest of Bergson, James and others in intuition and mysticism, he emphasized that the writers in question could by no means be dismissed as “incompetent dupes of the imagination,” but were “psychologists of the first rank and the most original contemporary thinkers in the philosophic field.
Sri Aurobindo clearly had a favourable impression of William James, but we have almost no clues to what he might have read of his philosophical writings. He recalled in the 1930s that “a long time ago” he had read a book on psychology by James (perhaps The Principles of Psychology, unless he meant the abridged version, Psychology: Briefer Course). He had found it “not at all an ordinary book in its kind,” a rare compliment from the Indian Yogi to a Western psychologist. Otherwise on the few occasions when he mentioned James by name it was in connection with his philosophy. These passing references provide little specific information. But they do suggest that he regarded James as a key figure in a trend of modern thought that was important for the future (Hartz, 2021a).
- 3.
Here, what Cornelissen (2013, 105) writes based upon the reflections of Sri Aurobindo deserves our careful consideration;
If there is indeed, as the Indian tradition claims, a knowledge that can be apprehended directly from within without the necessary mediation by the senses, then this has major consequences for the choice of optimum methodology in Psychological. There where such direct inner knowledge refers to phenomena in the external world, one can indeed decide on the accuracy of the inner knowledge ‘objectively’ by comparing the symbolic rendering of that inner knowledge with the symbolic rendering of sense information about the external events. But where the inner knowledge refers to inner states or processes, this may not be the appropriate way of verifying such knowledge. What we need there is not objectivity, but reliable subjectivity. In our study of outer world, progress is to a large extent made by using better and better instruments [..] In the inner domain the instruments of choice is self-observation, which includes knowledge by intimate direct contact, knowledge by identity, and the pure witness consciousness (sakshi). Just as in the physical domain, the quality of the results in the inner domain can be ascertained on the one hand through corroboration by equally or better qualified observers, and on the other hand by the intrinsic quality of the instrument. The latter can in its turn be ascertained by what that specific instrument delivers in comparatively well-established fields of inquiry. The only difference is that in the inner domain, the instrument is not some physical instrument, but the inner instrument of knowledge, the antakarana, of the researcher. The quality of this instrument depends on things like the amount of immixture and improper functioning; its freedom from ego, vital desires, mental preferences and physical limitations; its sensitivity, flexibility and ability to move at will through different inner worlds and centers of consciousness; etc. Yoga, in its widest sense of spiritual discipline, is the method of choice to perfect the inner instrument of knowledge. It leads to a more comprehensive, impartial and harmony enhancing understanding of reality not only through its purification of the inner instrument, but also by raising the observing consciousness above its ordinary, corrupting and limiting involvement in the processes and entities that psychology is supposed to study. That it can indeed deliver is attested to by the incredibly rich Indian heritage in the psychological field.
- 4.
Consider here the following lines from one of Habermas’s interviews: “[the issue of global justice] on the analytical level, it demands a great deal of empirical knowledge and institutional imagination” (Habermas, 2002, 166).
- 5.
In his The human cycles, Sri Aurobindo tells us of the limits of the typal and conventional models of self and society as well as modes of self and societal realization which resonates with pathways of post-conventional development of self, society and moral consciousness in Jurgen Habermas and Lawrence Kolhberg and a new hermeneutics of self, going beyond standard models of self-formation and given by existing state and society in Michael Foucault (Foucault, 2005; Habermas, 1990).
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Giri, A.K. (2022). Rethinking and Transforming Language, Knowledge, Self, Society and State and the Calling of Alternative Planetary Futures: Walking and Meditating with Sri Aurobindo. In: Puri, B. (eds) Reading Sri Aurobindo. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3136-9_13
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