100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution

Posted on January 6, 2010 by R.C

100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution
by
Richard Carlson

Introduction:

As the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origins of Species take place this year, it is easy to overlook the fact that 2009 also marks the 100th anniversary of Sri Aurobindo’s first major text on evolution and consciousness. In Process and Evolution and Yoga and Human Evolution (1909) Sri Aurobindo begins to comprehensively articulate his vision of human evolution. Just as Darwin’s book became the foundation for a science of evolution, what has been called evolutionary spirituality can be traced back to Sri Aurobindo’s work. Many are acknowledging this bicentennial year of Darwin’s birth with a reassessment of his work in light of what we now know about evolution it therefore, also seems to be a good time to reassess Sri Aurobindo’s vision of human evolution in context of our contemporary understanding of the phenomena we call evolution, both scientifically and culturally a century later.

To do this in any systematic way requires a consideration of the development of Sri Aurobindo’s perspective on biological evolution, human progress, and human unity. Although his view of science and its limits does not seem to have change appreciably during the period from 1909 to 1949, his view of “human progress” seems to have become decidedly less optimistic and chastened over time. While not denying that the “yoga of the divine mother” or “nature’s yoga” is still striving to achieve human unity in latter years his tone becomes decidedly anti-humanist as he declares human progress to be most probably an illusion! Even though his view of history is essentially cyclic he starts his consideration of evolution by writing in Yoga and Human Evolution the following:

“ Whether we take the modern scientific or the ancient Hindu standpoint the progress of humanity is a fact.”(Aurobindo 1909)

However, by the early1940s when he is revising the last chapters of The Life Divine he writes:

In his 1949 postscript to The Ideal of Human Unity however, he still acknowledges the drive of nature toward human unity is inevitable:

How does one reconcile the idea of an evolution toward human unity which seems to be progressive with the development of human progress that seems to be is in Sri Aurobindo’s view circular? This is one issue that will be explored in this paper which attempts to reconcile Sri Aurobindo’s seemingly contradictory claims that while nature is propelling human society toward unity that human progress itself at best is circular and probably an illusion.

Before beginning however, it is important is to understand that the language and many of the concepts about evolution Sri Aurobindo employs are borrowed from the early 20th century. If one does not allow for this some serious misunderstandings can arise. For example, although his view of society and civilization is always tempered by the voice of the subaltern, the colonialist subject demanding liberation, it is also true that in his earlier writing Sri Aurobindo’s perspective on evolution seem to reflect the Edwardian values of the day. His evolutionary theories at times echo the voice of Herbert Spencer with regards to the progressive advance of civilization and the benefits it bestows on the “backward” races.

This paper seeks to penetrate the language and concepts Sri Aurobindo employs by taking an approach that attempts to extrapolate his thoughts from the early 20th century to the present in a manner coherent to contemporary theories and concepts. While interpreting Sri Aurobindo’s writing in terms of contemporary theory is wrought with problems, it is essential if we are to develop a platform for dialog between his writings and today’s complex understanding of evolution.

Several contemporary perspectives on evolution will be compared and contrasted to Sri Aurobindo’s work. The extremes of these positions are presented in the orthodox Darwinian view that essentially reduces evolution to genes and algorithms and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the theory known as Intelligent Design that supposes a transcendental creator stands behind the phenomena of the world. While orthodox Darwinism has roots in modernism, Intelligent Design, although borrowing arguments from modern science, finds it intellectual predecessors in the pre-modern era.

While rejecting that either of these extremes would resonate with Sri Aurobindo other contemporary theories are found to be more consistent with his work. In biological evolution we discover that in fact Sri Aurobindo seems to have anticipated recent developments in theories of evolution that concern punctuated equilibrium, symbiosis, complexity and emergence. With respect to his view of evolution as it relates to science and society his thoughts do not stray far from the constructionist approach to science that incorporates a dialectical approach to systems theory. One prominent example of this scientific orientation is called dialectical biology, in which one finds common ground in an understandings of the dialectic interplay between science and culture. In this respect Sri Aurobindo seems to have anticipated some post-modern critiques of science.

Although separated by the epistemic shift from modernism to post or hyper-modernist forms both Sri Aurobindo’s dialectic of spirit and matter and dialectic of science and culture share a common attempt to pry open the binary dimensions of whole/part organism/environment matter/mind. Both appreciate differences through observation and experience and set about to re-integrate contraries within a vast web of interconnections. The sense of interconnectedness is an underpinning of both dialectical approaches to systems theory and Sri Aurobindo view of evolution.

While spirit and matter do not meet in this paper, I believe it is possible to follow a few threads that do intertwine to get at an intelligible scientific account of evolution by reflecting on how spirit and biology both intersect through culture. By referencing dialectic essays on science that highlight the grave problems implicit in the claims of, what can be called, Darwinian fundamentalism which reduce organism to gene, nature to algorithm, culture to analogs of natural selection I believe one can find patterns consistent with the principle social text of Sri Aurobindo to enable the evaluation of today’s scientific truth claims in context of a contemporary practice of integral yoga.

The paper also attempts to show that in the way Sri Aurobindo situates science within the dialectic of history and culture that his perspective remains complex enough to enable a dialog on science and culture with some of today’s most brilliant theorist. To do this it is indispensable to find common intellectual genealogies both share; these I believe can be traced back to Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche.

The correspondences with these major philosophers of Modernity and Sri Aurobindo’s work I find to be as follows: Hegel with respect to the Ideal of Human Unity, Marx with references to science and culture in the Human Cycle, Nietzsche with his formulation of the Superman in the Life Divine and other texts. Although I do not ignore the qualitative differences between these thinkers the goal of this paper is to find mutual platforms of understanding to enable a wider dialog between Sri Aurobindo’s work and contemporary theory.

Although not ignoring the incommensurable dimension of discourse or the gulf that separates the meta-physician from the biologist, the cosmic from the empirical, I will avoid reducing either spiritual or scientific perspectives in terms of one another. That said while being careful to honor and separate the domains of the scientific from the spiritual my hope is that it will be possible to open up a cultural space for dialog between two otherwise “nonoverlapping magisteria”.

This paper has six short chapters and due to its length will be serialized on SCIY. These chapters are :

1.Intelligent Design versus Real-Idea (Why Sri Aurobindo would not believe in intelligent design)
2.Darwinian Fundamentalism, reductionism, pluralism, play
3.Anticipating Science and Society
4.Complexity: the Dialectics of the Visible and Invisible
5.Human Unity and the Illusion of Human Progress
6.The Dialectics of Biology and Culture

The purpose of this paper is not to determine any thing like a final reading of Sri Aurobindo versus contemporary theories of evolution rather, I will offer an interpretation based on my own reading and sensibilities, in the hope that in the future some more accomplished theorist and/or followers of Sri Aurobindo’s work will bring forth a more comprehensive teatment of the subject.
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Chapter I) Why Sri Aurobindo would not believe in Intelligent Design
(Intelligent Design vs. Real-Idea)

While the purpose Sri Aurbindo gives to evolution lends it directionality and transcendence. The fact that he presents a teleology as central to his views however, does not necessarily mean that his perspective squares with the contemporary theory known as Intelligent Design. In fact Sri Aurobindo’s teleology does not square with the fundamentalist view of the religions in the Abrahamic tradition, all of whom have found a common cause in the ideology of Intelligent Design, who dismiss evolutionary biology because they find it threatening to their faith.

Before going further it should be stated that in this paper Intelligent Design will be treated as “creationism” because, even though intelligent design is a theory supposedly put forward by disinterested scientist, it is no small coincidence that many of these scientist are being financed by people and organizations like the Discovery Institute who believe strongly in creationism and support scientific conclusions that bolster their particular religious ideology with funding. In the case of the Discovery Institute their primary goal in providing funding to scientist is to support “a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions”.

While Sri Aurobindo does not buy into its materialist reduction of life, and openly voices his objection to the chauvinism of science, he does keep open the possibility that certain Darwinian mechanisms such as natural selection are at work in evolution, even if they can not by themselves fully account for it. While acknowledging the limitations of science he certainly does not seem to find its theories that diverge from his own threatening, rather he contextualizes them in accordance with his own integral comprehension of the world. In the following passage in his essay on Materialism (1915) he defers to science by referencing a religious text:

“we have not to hide our face from it any more than could Arjuna from the terrible figure of the Divine on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, or attempt to escape and evade it as Shiva, when there rose around him the many stupendous forms of the original Energy, fled from the vision of it to this and that quarter, forgetful of his own godhead. We must look existence in the face in whatever aspect it confronts us and be strong to find within as well as behind it the Divine. Materialistic science had the courage to look at this universal truth with level eyes, to accept it calmly as a starting point and to inquire whether it was not after all the whole formula of universal being. Physical science must necessarily to its own first view be materialistic, because so long as it deals with the physical, it has for its own truth’s sake to be physical both in its standpoint and method”

Unlike religious fundamentalist one can not imagine him leading a fight to ban the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the public schools. Moreover, although one can imagine Sri Aurobindo engaging in civil disputes over the control of educational agendas with religious fundamentalist his work presents even greater metaphysical differences with those religious groups who lobby for Intelligent Design.

The significant metaphysical problem with intelligent design visa vie Sri Aurobindo’s accounts of evolution is in the implicit dualism that intelligent design raises. Given his appeal to Supermind or Real-Idea to reconcile the dialectic of spirit and matter, in which spirit evolves out of the heart of matter itself, one can reasonably conclude that Sri Aurobindo’s metaphysical perspective would not square with anything that could be called intelligent design; at the very least it would have to be called “supra-intelligent design”.

Intelligent design by necessity requires an intelligent designer or the positing of a creator who stands outside of their creation, as an inventor would from her invention. By contrast Sri Aurobindo’s envisages evolution as Lila, or play, that seems to place the creator square in the middle of creation; indeed creation is a game of self-finding. By combining evolution with play Sri Aurobindo introduces an element of contingency or uncertainty into the equation of creation that does not mesh with the perfect designs of creationist.

The central theme of evolution that Sri Aurobindo poses, that of the emergence from ignorance to knowledge, intuits a destining of species that is not comprehensible by reference to a designer distinct from the creation being design; as creationist account of intelligent design suggest. While intelligent design narratives maybe consistent with the creation stories of the Abrahamic tradition they do not square well with Sri Aurobindo’s view in which evolution is a divine process of self-becoming.

Additionally, while Sri Aurobindo’s metaphysical perspective diverges from that of Intelligent Design, one also supposes that his ability to comprehend what constitutes its ideological social agenda would be as important a factor in his rejection of it. Given his critical perspective on religion and society he speaks to in such texts as the The Human Cycle he would certainly understand the ideological dangers of embracing current theories associated with Intelligent Design. Theories of Intelligent Design are put forth to support an outright attempt to further the social agenda of right wing Christian based groups.

Sri Aurobindo who was brought up in England in the midst of a conservative Protestant household would have been very familiar with the the anti-Darwinist agenda of some conservative Christian denominations. Today the social agenda of right wing fundamentalist groups is a political force that has far reaching implications. Many contemporary commentators such as the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges and conservative political theorist Kevin Phillips have made the association between Fascism and the Christian Right. If anything Sri Aurobindo’s political writings show no trace of being persuaded by any Fascist argument it should therefore, be safe to assume that he would be suspicious of the agenda of the intelligent design movement.

What follows is a passage from the Human Cycle which demonstrates Sri Aurobindo’s perspective on the intolerance of Christianity in its persecution of science”

“The individualistic age of Europe was in its beginning a revolt of reason, in its culmination a triumphal progress of physical Science. Such an evolution was historically inevitable. The dawn of individualism is always a questioning, a denial. The individual finds a religion imposed upon him which does not base its dogma and practice upon a living sense of ever verifiable spiritual Truth, but on the letter of an ancient book, the infallible dictum of a Pope, the tradition of a Church, the learned casuistry of schoolmen and Pundits, conclaves of ecclesiastics, heads of monastic orders, doctors of all sorts, all of them unquestionable tribunals whose sole function is to judge and pronounce, but none of whom seems to think it necessary or even allowable to search, test, prove, inquire, discover. He finds that, as is inevitable under such a regime, true science and knowledge are either banned, punished and persecuted or else rendered obsolete by the habit of blind reliance on fixed authorities; even what is true in old authorities is no longer of any value, because its words are learnedly or ignorantly repeated but its real sense is no longer lived except at most by a few. In politics he finds everywhere divine rights, established privileges, sanctified tyrannies which are evidently armed with an oppressive power and justify themselves by long prescription, but seem to have no real claim or title to exist”. (Aurobindo 1972 p16)

As previously stated so called scientific theories of Intelligent Design often simply present a facade for creationist teaching. Although some Christian organizations have called on scientist not affiliated with their religious faith to discount evolutionary biology these scientist certainly represent a minority view in the scientific community at large. For instance, the faith based Discovery Institute, who is on the forefront of arguing that creationism be taught in American public school, has chosen to employ several scientist, some of whom claim to be atheist, to argue in support of their position.

In all likelihood the Discovery Institute has chosen such scientist with special intent because matters of faith notwithstanding, the very fact that they are marketed as “objective scientist” lends them a certain credibility with secular law makers. The Christian Right who are well skilled at playing politics are certainly savvy enough to know it is best to turn science and its inevitable conflicting theories back upon themselves when these conflicts can serve their socio political ends.

By in large the biologist who take apologist positions for Intelligent Design are discounted by perhaps as many as 99% all other biologist who affirm the mechanics of evolution and natural selection, although not all of these scientist would agree that everything can be reduced to natural selection. This issue will be taken up in the next section of this paper on Darwinian Fundamentalism.

Finally, a distinction should be made between Intelligent Design and the Anthropic Principle: the theory that the presence of life on earth places limits on the many ways the universe could have developed. While the Anthropic Principle can be used by the Intelligent Design movement to support its cause it can equally be employed by non-religious scientist as a way to explain the structure of our universe from first principles. A belief in the anthropic principle does not require one to posit a theological creator and many credible scientist entertain it. In short, one can believe in the Anthropic Principle while rejecting Intelligent Design.

It is quite possible that Sri Aurobindo might have been sympathetic to arguments for the Anthropic Principle it is also possible that he would have validated the principal by advancing the argument that because humans exists we observe a universe consistent with our existence; perhaps he would have argued for both.

While Sri Aurobindo undoubtedly believed that human life on Earth was special, I will only add that even if we are to believe that our universal environment is uncannily adapted to evolve life, specifically human life on Earth, any specific metaphysical conclusions do not necessarily follow. The Anthropic Principle in itself would still not mean we humans are necessarily special in any way or signal that life on Earth was one of a kind. Why? Because science also posits an infinity of universes and we have no way of knowing what goes on in all of these. If there were life everywhere in the universe would it follow that life on Earth was necessarily special? Moreover, String Theory tell us there are multiple dimensions and one would have to first chart all these in detail to lend life on Earth any special status. For his part, as I understand it, Sri Aurobindo believes the Earth to be unique in the special evolutionary role of the psychic being.

But even if it were found that life on our planet is special in some sense, humans share the Earth was a myriad of other life forms. If conditions on Earth make human life ideal, how much more so does it support the life of the cockroach, who has existed on it much longer than human beings. So if the anthropic principle merely argues that conditions are inexplicably favorable to support of life on Earth since we don’t really have a cockroach metaphysics – other than perhaps in Kafka- it would be hard to know which forms of life our universe really favor.

As far as Sri Aurobindo is concerned however, the Earth is unique in the evolutionary role that the soul or psychic being plays in it .

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Chapter II) Darwinian Fundamentalism: reductionism, pluralism, play

Good scientific theories usually have the following things:

1) predictive accuracy – the ability to forecast what we have not yet observed

2) internal coherence – the various parts of the theory should not contradict each other

3) external consistency – the theory should not contradict other accepted theories, or ‘laws of nature’

4) unifying power – the theory should bring together and explain previously disparate areas of knowledge

5) fertility – the theory should generate novel hypotheses

6) falsifiability – it should be possible to construct hypotheses that could lead to the rejection of the theory – this is an especially important scientific value

7) simplicity and elegance – this is a value judgment i.e. it is a subjective judgment made by scientists. Consequently simplicity is a desired characteristic rather than a defining characteristic of a scientific theory (Salmon)

For the purposes of this paper however, although not suggesting that his is an entirely fail safe system, I will use Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion as a default standard for verifying truth claims. Popper put forward this criterion as a critique and replacement for the “verifiability criterion” of logical-positivism. It will be used as a method to separate what we suppose to be “good science” from “bad science” or mere ideology. To the extent that an evolutionary narrative can be considered scientific is to the extent it can be falsified or the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment a.k.a through common experience of it.

The ideology of intelligent design as well as some of the theories associated with Neo-Darwinian biology can not be falsified so it is hard to make the claim that they are scientific in the strict sense. While intelligent design can not be falsified because we have no instruments to detect a designer who stands outside the material world he/she designed, one of the central tenets of Darwinian fundamentalism that only natural selection and genetic variation can explain all evolutionary descent can not be falsified in the same way.

For instance, it can not be demonstrated that all life descended from a single primordial cell solely by the process of natural selection and genetic variation. One can dispute the falsifiability of the proposition, by asking, What experiment can be conducted to show this did not happen? The problem is similar to the problem of “last night I dreamed of electric sheep.” There are no other witnesses to my dream but me, just as there are no witnesses left from the Precambrian era to account for everything that might have gone on then. If there are no witnesses, one can argue that there is no way to test the claim and the assertion is therefore not falsifiable.

Worse are the falsifiability claims of Neo-Darwinian evolutionary psychologist who claim to explain the origins of consciousness. The tales told by them of our psychological origins can never be falsified and so are similar to the just-so stories of Rudyard Kipling that, as Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin reminds us, they maybe useful as a quick way to solve a child’s curiosity can not be verified.

For Kipling, the elephant got its trunk because a crocodile pulled on it. Does this mean that elephant trunks occurred as an adaptation due to hungry crocodiles? Maybe, maybe not because it is a hypothesis that cant be proven. It is “just so”.

Evolutionary psychology seizes on a given trait in members of contemporary society and make up a just so story using analogs to Darwinian mechanisms -that inevitably concern survival – . So language evolves as follows:‘ We talk by making noises and not by waving our hands because hunter-gatherers living in the Savannah would have had trouble seeing one another in the tall grass.’ There is no way to falsify the above statement.

While these just so stories discredit the attempt to explain everything by natural selection, these tales do not entirely discredit the role that natural selection legitimately plays in evolution. For example, the proposition that life changes through generations, and this change is influenced by variation and natural selection could be tested. One could test this proposition by taking a life form, exposing it to the pressures of natural selection, observing the effects over time. This can be done quite easily and in fact is observed all the time. One can gather evidence for the applicability of natural selection and adaptation by observing bacteria evolve and adapt resistance to anti-biotics. Closer to our own skins, adaptation by natural selection has been determined to be the mechanism thats gives us our shades of color.

The mechanism of natural selection to explain environmental adaptation has held up remarkably well over the past 150 years. Even the claim by creationist that one can not falsify the fossil record on which Neo-Darwinism depends is not wholly true. The fossil record is constantly under interrogation and paradigm shifts in thinking about it do occur as evidence mounts. The Cambrian explosion in which the most complex forms of animal life seem to have appeared 530 million years ago has caused much scientific debate and was thought by Darwin to be the single biggest objection to his gradualist theory of evolutionary descent. Since then there have been many theories that have been proposed to account for the rapid explosion of life. Recently the theory of punctuated equilibrium developed in the early 1970s proposed a view that evolution over long intervals is nearly static and “punctuated” by short periods of rapid change.

This theory has forced many scientist to adopt more complex ways of conceiving evolution than simple reductive narratives would allow. Its must not follow that all scientist will agree on a single paradigm and in this instance the debate between reductionist and constructionist perspectives of evolution has been one of the most lively in science. Most notably, Daniel Dennet representing the former and Stephen Jay Gould the latter. However, most scientist no longer view evolutionary descent as reduceable to the simple selection at the genetic level, without a significant consideration of environmental factors.

Recently the finding of the fossil remains of the hobbit man on an island east of Bali has forced anthropologist and paleontologist to rethink human history from the relatively short span of time from ten to fifteen thousand years ago. Although there is no doubt that the paradigms that establish what Thomas Kuhn called “Normal Science” are so ideologically and professionally entrenched on the Universities as to make them hard to displace most paradigms and scientific theories do eventual fade away. This is in fact is considered the strength of science, its singular ability to demonstrate over time ever increasing understanding of phenomena.

To summarize to believe in natural selection when falsifiable is not to foreclose the horizon of other causes of evolution but merely to believe that: “organismic forms have had a history there have been significant genetic changes in species and that present life forms arose from others quite unlike them”. (Lewontin 2006)

The problem most religious people have with natural selection is with its idea of random mutation that suggest that a series of accidents has led to our current condition. To many the ideas that we are simply the result of random process contains a certain nihilistic underpinning. But the randomness of random mutation begins to take on different meaning when we understand that it is not solely the organism that is under study in biology but, rather the organism in context of the environment; the part in relationship to the whole. Those who merely see evolution as an extended phenotype or explainable solely through phyletic speciation as Richard Dawkins attempt to reduce all life to processes of natural selection and random mutation. This is the reductionist paradigm but, from a pluralistic point of view, that here means, that life must be seen from the context of both organism and environment, randomness is better understood as contingency. Here is Stephen Jay Gould:

I am not speaking of randomness/, but of the central principle of all history—/contingency/. A historical explanation does not rest on direct deductions from laws of nature, but on an /unpredictable sequence of antecedent states/, where any major change in any step of the sequence would have altered the final result. This final result is therefore dependent, or contingent, upon everything that came before—the unerasable and determining signature of history. …Contingency is an /unpredictable sequence of antecedent states/, not randomness, chanciness, or accident. (Gould)

In fact contingency is just one part of the equation, a law like quality is equally applicable to natural selection:

My argument in Wonderful Life is that there is a domain of law and a domain of contingency, and our struggle is to find the line between them. The reason why the domain of contingency is so vast, and much vaster than most people thought, is not because there isn’t a law like domain. It is because we are primarily interested in ourselves and we have posited various universal laws of nature. It is because…we want to see ourselves as results of law like predictability and sensible products of the universe in that sense. (Gould in Shermer 1999)

Now, to admit contingency itself as a feature of physical evolution seems to square well with Sri Aurobindo’s view of evolution as Lila (play) In any activity play or game there is always contingency or an element of chance, if there were not that game would be extremely boring. So to introduce contingency into evolution is certainly not at odds with evolution as play, nor does the idea of Lila or contingency necessarily discount the falsifiable of natural selection. So as we shall later see, it is interesting indeed that Sri Aurobindo perhaps also anticipates one of Gould’s most well known thesis concerning the non-linearity of evolution through catastrophic bifurcation.

Although there is a huge philosophical chasm that separates Gould as a scientist who denies teleology from Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual teleology, the fact that he constructs a theory that integrates consideration of both organism with environment into it, would seem a vision of evolution closer to an integral view than the reductionist strategies of what Gould calls Darwinian fundamentalism.

To understand the difference between the pluralist approach of Stephen Gould and his colleague Richard Lewontin and the reductionist accounts of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins is important if one wishes to know some of the stark differences between scientist who study evolution. What follows is a short but important history of the feud between Gould and Dennet in which Gould responded to Dennett in an article written for the New York Review of Books called the Pleasures of Pluralism (aka non-reductionism) and accused both Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins of being Darwinian Fundamentalist.

“Dennett had earlier written a feisty attack on theories of Gould, Lewontin, Noam Chomsky, and Stuart Kauffman, who reject a strict selectionist account of evolution and the origin of mind and language. Dennett, in his NYR, letter speaks of Gould’s “non-revolutions,” claiming that Gould’s alternatives to genic selectionism are empty. Gould claims that speciation (the rise of new species) differs in its mechanism from the sort of gradualistic changes observed in the genetics laboratory. Gould also claims that macroevolution, the major main trends evolution, depends in large part of species selection rather than individual or genic selection, thus operating at a different level from the microevolution or the sort observed with breeding fruit-flies. Furthermore, Gould denies selectionism, claiming that many traits have not been selected for and are not particularly adaptive, and coins the term “exaptation” to characterize the functioning of a trait which was not previously selected for or adaptive. He claims this is different from the previous, orthodox neo-Darwinist claim of “preadaptation” where a trait previously selected for one function or adapted to one environment is later selected for another function in a different environment. Dennett denies exaptation differs from preadaptation and accuses Gould of tooting his own horn by inventing a new term for a well-known idea. Gould claims that exaptive traits were not previously selected for, and that preadapted traits were so selected for some other function. (Dusek http://tomweston.net/dusek.htm)

These are the four main points that Stephen Jay Gould makes to dispute the reductionist arguments for natural selection.

1) contingency: (see above)

2) structural constraints: such as basic body plans, which may become far from optimally adaptive, but which are too difficult to change by piecemeal natural selection without making many other features of the organism maladaptive

3) “spandrels”: in evolutionary biology indicates a feature of an organism that arises as a necessary side consequence of other features, but which is not built directly, piece by piece, as a result of being favored by natural selection. Examples include the “masculinized genitalia in female hyenas, exaptive use of an umbilicus as a brooding chamber by snails, the shoulder hump of the giant Irish deer, and several key features of human mentality.

4) punctuated equilibrium: that proposes that instead of proceeding evenly or gradually evolution tends to happen in fits and starts, sometimes moving very fast, sometimes moving very slowly or not at all.

Here is part of a response made by Stephen Jay Gould to Daniel Dennett in a well publicized letter that followed the article that was well publicized in The New York Review of Books:

So if natural selection builds all of evolution, without the interposition of auxiliary processes or intermediary complexities, then I suppose that evolution is algorithmic too. But—and here we encounter Dennett’s disabling error once again—evolution includes so much more than natural selection that it cannot be algorithmic in Dennett’s simple calculational sense. Yet Dennett yearns to subsume all the phenomenology of nature under the limited aegis of adaptation as an algorithmic result of natural selection. He writes: “Here, then, is Darwin’s dangerous idea: the algorithmic level is the level that best accounts for the speed of the antelope, the wing of the eagle, the shape of the orchid, the diversity of species, and all the other occasions for wonder in the world of nature” (Dennett’s italics). I will grant the antelope’s run, the eagle’s wing, and much of the orchid’s shape—for these are adaptations, produced by natural selection, and therefore legitimately in the algorithmic domain. But can Dennett really believe his own imperialistic extensions? Is the diversity of species no more than a calculational consequence of natural selection? Can anyone really believe, beyond the hype of rhetoric, that “all the other occasions for wonder in the world of nature” flow from adaptation? (Gould 1997)

Gould and Dennett’s battle notwithstanding on how much of evolution can be solely attributed to natural selection, the state of the art in contemporary molecular biology that concerns the actual mechanisms that cause mutations in genetic evolution is called evo-devo and combines studies of species evolution -evo– with studies of individual development -devo-.

An excellent overview of Evo-Devo is to be found in an article written by Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff, entitled Evolving Evolution which is a review of two recent books on the subject by Sean Carroll, Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart. What follows are a few excerpts from this article:

“In 1894, the English biologist William Bateson challenged Darwin’s view that evolution was gradual. He published Materials for the Study of Variation, a catalog of abnormalities he had observed in insects and animals in which one body part was replaced with another. He described, for example, a mutant fly with a leg instead of an antenna on its head, and mutant frogs and humans with extra vertebrae. The abnormalities Bateson discovered resisted explanation for much of the twentieth century. But in the late 1970s, studies by Edward Lewis at the California Institute of Technology, Christiana Nüsslein-Vollhard and Eric Wieschaus in Germany, and others began to reveal that the abnormalities were caused by mutations of a special set of genes in fruit fly embryos that controlled development of the fly’s body and the distribution of its attached appendages. Very similar genes, exercising similar controls, were subsequently found in nematodes, flies, fish, mice, and human beings.

What they and others discovered were genes that regulate the development of the embryo and exert control over other genes by mechanisms analogous to that of the repressor molecule studied by Monod and Jacob. Eight of these controlling genes, called Hox genes, are found in virtually all animals—worms, mice, and human beings—and they have existed for more than half a billion years. Fruit flies and worms have only one set of eight Hox genes; fish and mammals (including mice, elephants, and humans) have four sets. Each set of Hox genes in fish and mammals is remarkably similar to the eight Hox genes found in fruit flies and worms. This discovery showed that very similar genes control both embryological and later development in virtually all insects and animals……………

According to this theory, the mutations, or variations, needed to drive evolutionary change can occur with little disruption either to the basic organization of an organism or to the core processes that make its cells function.” (Rosenfield Ziff 2006)

A common set of genes that is shared by all life forms that would seem responsible for all mutations and embryological morphology would in itself not be inconsistent with a perspective favoring an integral view of life.

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Chapter III) Anticipating Science & Society

One thing that can be said non-metaphorically about that the way Sri Aurobindo practiced yoga was that it he subjected his practice to forms of verification that can be called scientific The perfection of his yogic sadhana was a feat that required experimentation and one in which he sought demonstrable results. It should reasonably follow that his perspective on science would be one in which its truth claims were open to critical interrogation, just as were his experiments in yoga.

Given his penetrating intellectual insights into cultural change, his understanding of history as both progressive and cyclic, his multivocal criticisms of society, his integrative encounter with other voices and texts, his ability to effortlessly traverse the subjectivities of Europe and India and to transit freely between both ancient and modern zeitgeists, it seems reasonable to assume that he would size up science with a critical gaze.

While naturally rejecting the reductionism of evolutionary biology that goes as far as to suggest that all of evolution can be reduced to a single algorithm, he does not seem to have rejected some of the organizing ideas derived from Darwinian evolution. In general he does not seem to have discarded the necessity of scientific explanations on evolution. To restate a paragraph from his essay on Materialism (1915) he seems to understand perfectly well why science reasons as it does :

“Materialistic science had the courage to look at this universal truth with level eyes, to accept it calmly as a starting point and to inquire whether it was not after all the whole formula of universal being. Physical science must necessarily to its own first view be materialistic, because so long as it deals with the physical, it has for its own truth’s sake to be physical both in its standpoint and method”

In the above quotes he is obviously instancing scientific reason as helper rather than on reason as bar. That said before attempting to analyze his scientific world view one must admit that there are real problems with simply selectively quoting Sri Aurobindo, someone whose intellectual project involved constantly integrating binary perspectives and synthesizing ways of knowing that seem entirely contradictory. If we are not alert to the complexity that his stylistic approach presents we will fail altogether to understand him by simply referencing selected quotations out of context from his text. Isolated quotations will almost inevitably appear in other parts of his text in other contexts, that to the untrained eye, would seem to contradict or cancel each other out .

So we should not be surprised that while praising the scientific method in his 1915 essay on Materialism he appears to contradict himself in his essay of the same year entitled Evolution: “the materialistic view of the world is now rapidly collapsing and with it the materialistic statement of the evolution theory must disappear” . It is only when one assumes an integrative stance visa vie his text, that implicitly contextualizes any statement by admitting the possibility of its opposite under different circumstances that one can fully appreciate his integral approach. So when one finds that in one place he extols the virtues of science yet in another he seems to denounce it, one must avail oneself of the essential element of context to be able to understand the integrative meaning he is trying to get at.

If we take the above the quotation regards the collapse of the “materialistic statement” as envisaging a future of science we have to equally understand the respect he accorded it in his own day:

“it must interpret the material universe first in the language and tokens of the material Brahman, because these are its primary and its general terms and all others come second, subsequently, are a special syllabary. To follow a self-indulgent course from the beginning would lead at once towards fancies and falsities. Initially, science is justified in resenting any call on it to indulge in another kind of imagination and intuition. Anything that draws it out of the circle of the phenomena of objects, as they are represented to the senses and their instrumental prolongations, and away from the dealings of the reason with them by a rigorous testing of experience and experimentation, must distract it from its task and is inadmissible.” (Aurobindo1915)

His prophecy concerning the collapse of a materialistic science seems to clearly not to have come to pass some eighty four years after his forecast. This is especially true if one regards the reductionist formulas of evolutionary biology and most traditional neo-Darwinian accounts of evolution as paradigmatic. In fact, some may argue after reading the works of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett that we may now be farther away from a non-material science than when Sri Aurobindo penned his prophecy. In fact, we maybe farther away from the logical proof that begins the Life Divine, then when he wrote:.

“We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind.” (Aurobindo 1949 p3)

Indeed the most recent contemporary narratives that much of science tells points back to materialism as its first and final cause. But things might be changing. Reductionism is no longer the only scientific game in town and in fact other evolutionary narratives are being written that move in an opposite direction, from simple reductionism to principles of complexity and emergence to help explain nature. Such narratives can be gathered from the new science of complexity.

Complexity theorist such as Stuart Kaufmann (2007) and others at the Sante Fe Institute offer a new scientific paradigm that posits emergence instead of reduction, self-organization instead of natural selection in a complex reorientation from materialism to a view of nature that may resacramentalize her. While their new vision of the sacred does not conform to traditional spiritual narratives the approach of complexity theorist at least promises to lead us in a direction that over time may collapses the house of cards that materialist reduction is built on and toward an emergent conception of life, mind, and perhaps spirit as well.

An analysis of complexity theory is beyond the scope of this paper although it will prove useful in helping to conceptualize Sri Aurobindo’s later thoughts on the process of physical and vital evolution, which will be done in the next section of this paper. Before getting into complexity theory however, lets consider his thoughts on the mechanisms of evolutionary biology and in so doing we will discover that in fact he seems to have anticipated some of the more recent developments in our current understanding of evolution.

Sri Aurobindo complex understanding and his particular way of articulating truth correspondences between matter, life, mind and the particular moment in history under pressure of transformation would not have necessarily avoided narratives of biological evolution that include natural selection, so long as everything is not reduced to natural selection.

In fact, there is evidence in his essay on Evolution (1915) that suggest that although he isn’t buying into orthodox Darwinism, he does accept its claims of natural selections as a dismissal of Lamarck evolution (evolution by acquired traits), with an interesting caveat..

“Equally important are the conclusions arrived at by investigators into the phenomena of heredity that acquired characteristics are not handed down to the posterity and the theory that it is chiefly predispositions that are inherited;”

and:

“The propagation of acquired characteristics by heredity was too hastily and completely asserted; “

so even when he adds:

“it is now perhaps in danger of being too summarily denied. Not Matter alone, but Life and Mind working upon Matter help to determine evolution.”

This could be interpreted to reference the role culture has come to play in human evolution. Because it is certainly true that cultural processes of development -the passing on of cultural heritage from one generation to the next-are Lamarckian, especially if one considers the exponential developments of science that builds rapidly on past scientific knowledge.

But of course one can not decouple Sri Aurobindo’s perspective of physical evolution (visible) from the evolution of the soul through rebirth (invisible) and he writes in the same essay on evolution: “Heredity is only a material shadow of soul-reproduction, of the rebirth of Life and Mind into new forms.”

When Sri Aurobindo references what he calls “invisible evolution” his view of the matter are incommensurable with any empirical discipline of science. Confronted with this incommensurable way of knowing the world one could decide either to leave the matter here, if one wishes to satisfy oneself solely with a spiritual perspective (invisible evolution) and make a religion of his teaching or, if one wishes to understand him in a more integral manner could simply restate Sri Aurobindo’s assertion from the same year in his essay on Materialism (1915) that to understand (visible) evolution science by necessity must:

“it (science) must interpret the material universe first in the language and tokens of the material Brahman, because these are its primary and its general terms and all others come second, subsequently, are a special syllabary. To follow a self-indulgent course from the beginning would lead at once towards fancies and falsities. “

Sri Aurobindo’s project can be said to be a valiant attempt to find ways to integrate various levels of understanding and seemingly incommensurable experiences by respecting each ones particular articulation of truth while simultaneously harmonizing their unique claims to truth. But he also seems to have anticipated several recent scientific claims on the role punctuated equilibrium, symbiosis, complexity and emergence play in evolution as well as to have held perspectives that many social theorist share today. These social theories dismiss positivist arguments for reductive epistemology and highlight how biology can be used as an ideological tool. Additionally, early on at a time it was still popular, Sri Aurobindo discounted the more extreme implications of Spencer’s Social Darwinism “survival of the fittest” strategy and clearly was repelled by the social engineering program of eugenics.

For example, Sri Aurobindo’s view of evolution does not suffer from the positivist gradualism of his day in which Darwinian evolution is ordered. He protests the linearity “the materialist theory supposes a rigid chain of material necessity; each previous condition is a co-ordination of so many manifest forces and conditions; each resulting condition is its manifest result” the simple “one way transmission of heredity” (1915) If anything the progression of species proceeds by broken symmetry

He also seems to anticipate a view of species evolution which first became articulated in the scientific literature of Ernest Mary’s Kirkpatrick speciation in 1954 but which only gained widespread recognition in the 1970s in the theory of punctuated equilibrium in the pioneering work of Stephen J Gould, and Niles Eldridge in 1971.

Sri Aurobindo writes in his essay on Evolution:

“Instead of slow, steady, minute gradations it is now suggested that the new steps in evolution are rather effected by rapid and sudden outbursts, outbreaks, as it were, of manifestation from the unmanifest. “

Additionally, he also speaks of the misuse of the Hobbesean notion of nature tooth and claw applied to natural selection as the survival of the fittest rather, he speaks of symbiosis or co-operation and the co-evolution of phenomena which only emerged in a mature theory in Biology in the 1980s through the writing of Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan on endosymbiosis. Sri Aurobindo writes:

“And her material means ? Not the struggle for life only. The real law, it is now suggested, is rather mutual help or at least mutual accommodation. Struggle exists, mutual destruction exists, but as a subordinate movement, a red minor chord, and only becomes acute when the movement of mutual accommodation fails and elbow-room has to be made for a fresh attempt, a new combination.”

Sri Aurobindo is most critically adept in his analysis of the misapplication of the scientific theory of evolution when applied to cultural phenomena. At the time he was writing survival of the fittest was often invoked as a metaphor for free market capitalism:

“The theory of evolution has been the key-note of the thought of the nineteenth century. It has not only affected all its science and its thought-attitude, but powerfully influenced its moral temperaments, its politics and its society. Without it there could not have been that entire victory of the materialistic notion of life and the universe which has been the general characteristic of the age that is now passing, – a victory which for a time even claimed to be definitive, – nor such important corollary effects of this great change as the failure of the religious spirit and the breaking-up of religious beliefs.

In society and politics it has led to the substitution of the evolutionary for the moral idea of progress and the consequent materialization of social ideas and social progress, the victory of the economic man over the idealist. The scientific dogma of heredity, the theory of the recent emergence of the thinking human animal, the popular notion of the all-pervading struggle for life and the aid it has given to an exaggerated development of the competitive instinct”, (1915)

Yet, he also knows that the metaphor could be as easily invoked by Marxist to imagine the ideal state

the idea of the social organism and the aid it has given to the contrary development of economic socialism and the increasing victory of the organized Sate or community over the free individual, – all these are outflowings from the same source.” (1915)

Already in 1915 Sri Aurobindo intuits developments of biology based ideologies interrogating the claims of those who would forge a theory of culture based on the metaphor of survival of the fittest and advance arguments in support of eugenics. Sri Aurobindo was very suspicious about the field of eugenics. Here he writes:

“Where then lies the hope that mind will repair its errors and guide itself according to the truth of things ? The hope lies in Science, in the intelligent observation, utilizing, initiation of the forces and workings of the Inconscient. To take only one instance, – the Inconscient operates by the law of heredity and, left to itself, works faultlessly to ensure the survival of good and healthy types. Man misuses heredity in the false conditions of his social life to transmit and perpetuate degeneracy. We must study the law of heredity, develop a science of Eugenics and use it wisely and remorselessly, – with the remorseless wisdom of Nature, – so as to ensure by intelligence the result that the Inconscient assures by instinctive adaptation. We can see where this idea and this spirit will lead us, – to the replacement of the emotional and spiritual idealism which the human mind has developed by a cold, sane, materialistic idealism and to an amelioration of mankind attempted by the rigorous mechanism of the scientific expert, no longer by the profound inspiration of genius and the supple aspiration of puissant character and personality.” (1915)

But the most striking similarities between Sri Aurobindo’s view of evolution and contemporary science are perhaps to be found in the field known as complexity theory. The following section will introduce Sri Aurobindo’s ideas of inner (invisible) and outer (visible evolution) while drawing analogies with the current science of complexity theory.

……..
Chapter IV) Complexity and the Dialectics of the Visible and Invisible

As Sri Aurobindo tells us spiritual (invisible) evolution will never entirely match contemporary scientific narratives (visible) of the same phenomena because “ a theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical evolution: it must stand on its inherent justification (LD 835) and because all good scientist “must only trace things back as far as material causes allow” (1915). The evolution of soul, less its rebirth can be verified by a discipline that relies on empirical measurement as its method.

Historically, science has made a distinction between what Galileo first referred to as primary qualities and what he called secondary qualities. Galilean science has followed on this premise. Primary qualities are those independent of an observer. They are objective existing in themselves and are of solidity, spatial extension, motion, number, and figure. Primary qualities are said to be facts “in themselves” and are independent of a subjective perception and apprehension of them. Secondary qualities are those that produce sensations in a subject and require a subject to be apprehended. Secondary qualities include color, taste, smell, and sound. If we could refer to primary qualities as the machinery of nature, secondary qualities could be referred to as the machinery of subjectivity.

Secondary qualities in themselves can not be empirically measured in the same way as primary qualities. At best subjective sensations can be correlated with physiological or behavioral responses to measure their relationship to the subject. The affect of sensations on the consciousness of the subject has only begun to be studied using scientific inquiry. Cognitive science is one branch of science that studies the affect of sensations on a human subject. To study sensations however, still requires that they first be converted in terms of primary qualities to produce data that can be measured. For example, sound would be studied in terms of those algorithmic processes within the ear that convert sonic energy to mechanical energy to nerve impulse to neuronal firing in the brain. These measurements can then be quantified in terms of data. But to gather any idea of the feelings that the sensations invoke in the subject, the affect of the sensation, one would have to rely on her self-report. Sensation itself can never be decoupled from a subject.

If science has only begun to scrutinize secondary qualities it is not likely that in the near future it will seriously entertain research into what maybe called tertiary qualities or into experiences which may not even require an object or a sensation. Although some studies are underway into what is generally called the spiritual, that are backgrounded by different orientations to spirituality such as Buddhist, Christian, Romantic, Vedantic, at present this track of science is a significant deviation from the standard norm of the vast majority of scientific research. The study of experiences not associated with an object or even a sensation but, with an ineffable eidetic field that requires an organ of perception -perhaps akin to William Blake’s creative imagination or the quiescent witness-self of the Upanishad- are presently still veiled to the five senses and abstract reasoning that are the focal point of a liberal scientific education today. Science through its one-eyed reductive vision knows little if anything of things that require a fourfold vision such as spiritual experiences, they are outliers on its epistemological grid and consequently are treated by it as chimera. When it does at all study so called spiritual experience it refers to it as paranormal phenomena or often pejoratively as extra-sensory perception. It seems that it will be a long while yet until spirituality will be invited into the house -ever under construction- of Science. However, if we are open minded enough to honor the tension of the encounter between the visibly empirical and the invisible spirit without reducing either to terms of one or the other, some interesting results may emerge.

The chapter of the Life Divine entitled Man in the Evolution, is one of the last ones rewritten by Sri Aurobindo and as such demonstrates some of his final thoughts on human evolution. In this chapter he weaves a fascinating web of complex associations of those cybernetic processes governing the dialectics of spirit and matter.

“This terrestrial evolutionary working of Nature from Matter to Mind and beyond it has a double process: there is an outward visible process of physical evolution with birth as its machinery, — for each evolved form of body housing its own evolved power of consciousness is maintained and kept in continuity by heredity; there is, at the same time, an invisible process of soul evolution with rebirth into ascending grades of form and consciousness as Its machinery”. (Aurobindo 1949 p825)

Sri Aurobindo challenges those Darwinian narratives of evolution that constraint it within linear pathways of causality, the arrow of progress and time pointing forever forward, or as he puts it, a one way transmission of heredity by selection. His own description suggests the non-linearity of evolutionary processes comprised by the forces of the seen and unseen. He doubts gradualist narratives of the evolution of species, or of one species following another neatly in an evolutionary series. The only neat succession of evolutionary appearances he seems to admit are at the macro-level from matter to life to mind. Ultimately, Sri Aurobindo posits two different ways human evolution could have happened:

“There are here two possibilities; either there was the sudden appearance of a human body and consciousness in the earth-nature, an abrupt creation or independent automatic manifestation of reasoning mentality in the material world intervening upon a previous similar manifestation of subconscious life-forms and of living conscious bodies in Matter, or else there was an evolution of humanity out of animal being, slow perhaps in its preparation and in its stages of development, but with strong leaps of change at the decisive points of the transition.” (1949)

Its hard to imagine a sudden appearance of a human body and consciousness on the earth, as an “abrupt creation” unless perhaps if our origins are extra-terrestrial. If we could not imagine that scenario then Sri Aurobindo would have us accept an evolution of humanity emerging from animality. Sri Aurobindo develops this narrative and references sources from Indian mythology and spirituality such as the Vishnu Purana, Tantra and Upanishads as supporting the theory that animal forms preceded human ones.

Sri Aurobindo also debates various morphological theories of how the human may have descended, considering both the proto-human as a unique non ape-like species as well as our descent from an ancestry of primates He seems finally to support a view consistent with the following:

“If the appearance in animal being of a type similar in some respects to the ape-kind but already from the beginning endowed with the elements of humanity was the method of the human evolution, the appearance in the human being of a spiritual type resembling mental-animal humanity but already with the stamp of the spiritual aspiration on it would be the obvious method of Nature for the evolutionary production of the spiritual and supramental being.” (1949)

But he decries linearity, a gradualist serialization of species and references forces other than hereditary variation as playing an important role in evolution:

“but all this need not mean that the types developed one from another in an evolutionary series. Other forces than hereditary variation have been at work in bringing about the appearance of new characteristics; there are physical forces such as food, light-rays and others that we are only beginning to know, there are surely others which we do not yet know; there are at work invisible life-forces and obscure psychological forces. For these subtler powers have to be admitted even in the physical evolutionary theory to account for natural selection;” (1949)

Although Sri Aurobindo is referring to these subtle forces as invisible, we should also recall one of the three laws of the future that Arthur C. Clark’s has defined, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. This law is so ingrained in us, now that we can fly the globe or surf the web, that Gehm’s Corollary to Clarke’s Third Law cynically puts it, “Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.” or even more to the point Marge Simpson states “We can do anything now that scientists have invented magic,” (Clark 1962)

We are now able to parse matter almost magically to a degree that would have surpassed the understanding of Sri Aurobindo’s age. His work was written before the discovery of the dna molecule. One does not really know how he would assess the biological sciences today. For instance, how would he conceive of evolution in light of genomics and bioinformatics? How would he assess the discovery of the cybernetic process that now govern bio-chemistry? How would he apprehend a paradigm of life not in vitalistic terms but in terms of information? Would he regard the application of precise cybernetic principles to biology as making visible the invisible life forces he was referring to when he wrote the above passage, in the early 1940s, when Shannon, Von Neumann, Wiener and others were just defining the new paradigm of information (cybernetics)?

Given his emphasis on the incarnation of the spirit into flesh, of soul into matter, of the divinization of cells, would he privilege information over embodiment as does the science of cybernetics? Whatever suspicions he may have held regards the cybernetic paradigm that governs our current biological understanding, is it possible that the networks of bio-technology that have exponentially arisen since the 1940s, have advanced in such a way as to have converted what he would have considered occult knowledge back then into what we view today as natural processes, that have become transparent to us through our senses extended in technology?

And what about our psychological condition? The working of the mind has undoubtedly also become more transparent to science since the time that Sri Aurobindo penned the above passage. At the time of Sri Aurobindo’s passing the science of mind was still prescribing such savage procedures as lobotomy for curative treatment. When Sri Aurobindo was writing there was no brain imaging technology. Whereas our minds can be now be made visible through images that correlate psychological phenomena to physiological brain states. In some of his letters of yoga he shows great concern that science will figure out ways to manipulate brain states to induce changes in subjective consciousness.

So how he would he view recent developments in the biological and cognitive sciences? Would he have viewed the ability to make transparent those unseen evolutionary forces by the extension of our sense in technology as a process of occult revelation?

“if the occult or subconscious energy in some types answers to the need of the environment, in others remains unresponsive and unable to survive, this is clearly the sign of a varying life-energy and psychology, of a consciousness and a force other than the physical at work making for variation in Nature. The problem of the method of operation is still too full of obscure and unknown factors for any present possible structure of theory to be definitive. “(1949)

But while keeping in mind his rejection of eugenics in his 1915 essay on Evolution Sri Aurobindo does seem to have enough foresight into history as to extrapolate from what he knew already about bio-technology the possibility that human biological/spiritual evolution may preceded through the intervention of its own sciences; in other words that our minds may operate upon biology to produce new genetic mutations in organisms: “It has been noted that the human mind has already shown a capacity to aid Nature in the evolution of new types of plant and animal: it as created new forms of environment, developed by knowledge and considerable changes in its mentality. It is not an impossibility that man should aid nature consciously also in its own physical and spiritual evolution and transformation.” (1949)

But is it possible that science will develop explanations that are consistent with spiritual narratives? Like most scientist today Sri Aurobindo does seems rather skeptical that a linkage can be made between the dialectic of spirit and matter of internal (karma/rebirth) and external (matter/spirit) in a scientific theory. It is quite possible the twain of metaphysics/physics may never met:

“A theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life-evolution; it must stand on its own inherent justification: it may accept the scientific account of physical evolution as a support or an element, but the support is not indispensable. “ (1949)

Aware of what science does he would know that most theories if they are truly scientific eventually grow old and die to be reborn as still other theories:

“The scientific theory is concerned only with the outward and visible machinery and process, with the detail of Nature’s execution, with the physical development of things in Matter and the law of development of Life and Mind in Matter; its account of the process may have to be considerably changed or may be dropped altogether in the light of new discovery,” (1949)

In the course of this passage he switches back to a focus on inner spiritual evolution and when he does this his metaphors oddly mirror those of the self-organization processes referred to in complexity theory. In Sri Aurobindo the organization of form charts a trajectory along a graduated scale of increasingly complex orders of being. He continues:

“but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a spiritual evolution, an evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul’s manifestation in material existence. In its outward aspects this is what the theory of evolution comes to, — there is in the scale of terrestrial existence a development of forms, of bodies, a progressively complex and competent organization of Matter, of Life in Matter, of Consciousness in living Matter; in this scale, the better organized the form, the more it is capable of housing a better organized, a more complex and capable, a more developed or evolved Life and Consciousness. (1949)”

While he does not discount some claims made by Neo-Darwinians he does not entirely reject Lamarckian evolution, which is not surprising for Lamarck also charts an evolution according to a ascending scale of ever more complex organisms. He also departs from justifying his theory of evolution by appeal to scientific empirical proofs “exact genealogy” in favor of logical demonstration of truth claims that reference “a developing plan” .

“Once the evolutionary hypothesis is put forward and the facts supporting it are marshaled, this aspect of the terrestrial existence becomes so striking as to appear indisputable. The precise machinery by which this is done or the exact genealogy or chronological succession of types of being is a secondary, though in itself an interesting and important question; the development of one form of life out of a precedent less evolved form, natural selection, the struggle for life, the survival of acquired characteristics may or may not be accepted, but the fact of a successive creation with a developing plan in it is the one conclusion which is of primary consequence.” (1949)

Evolution commences when the spirit enters into matter, so begins “nature’s yoga”:

“At first she houses herself in forms of Matter which appear to be altogether unconscious, then struggles towards mentality in the guise of living Matter and attains to it imperfectly in the conscious animal. This consciousness is at first rudimentary, mostly a half subconscious or just conscious instinct; it develops slowly till in more organized forms of living Matter it reaches its climax of intelligence and exceeds itself in Man, the thinking animal who develops into the reasoning mental being “ (1949)

As this passage continues instead of a theory of Intelligent Design, he posits Real-Idea:

“if it be asked, how then did all these various gradations and types of being come into existence, it can be answered that, fundamentally, they were manifested in Matter by the Consciousness-Force in it, by the power of the Real-Idea building its own significant forms and types for the indwelling Spirit’s cosmic existence” (1949)

He then adds that due to its complexity this process does not necessarily lend itself to measurement, although it may become transparent by similarity. The process he adds is also non-linear:

“the practical or physical method might vary considerably in different grades or stages, although a basic similarity of line may be visible; the creative Power might use not one but many processes or set many forces to act together.” (1949)

He then describes the very complex operations by which Real-Idea works in Matter :

“In Matter the process is a creation of infinitesimals charged with an immense energy, their association by design and number, the manifestation of larger infinitesimals on that primary basis, the grouping and association of these together to found the appearance of sensible objects, earth, water, minerals, metals, the whole material kingdom. “ (1949)

The manner in which matter self-organizes into more complex forms in an odd way seems to anticipate contemporary narratives of some scientist at the Santa Fe Institute who intuit the novel emergence of greater wholes from the organization of increasing magnitudes of complexity in matter. Here is Sri Aurobinodo:

“In Life also the Consciousness-Force begins with infinitesimal forms of vegetable life and infinitesimal animalcules; it creates an original plasm and multiplies it, creates the living cell as a unit, creates other kinds of minute biological apparatus like the seed or the gene, uses always the same method of grouping and association so as to build by a various operation various living organisms....” (1949)

Then jumping a bit ahead in the text we learn:

“In its outward aspects this is what the theory of evolution comes to, — there is in the scale of terrestrial existence a development of forms, of bodies, a progressively complex and competent organization of Matter, of Life in Matter, of Consciousness in living Matter; in this scale, the better organized the form, the more it is capable of housing a better organized, a more complex and capable, a more developed or evolved Life and Consciousness. ” (1949)

Stuart Kauffman’s evolutionary theory is interesting in that instead of reducing nature to processes of natural selection and the particles of physics, he posits the emergence of phenomena from increasing orders of complexity. Unlike scientist such as physicist Steven Weinberg who claim that all explanatory arrows point downward from society to biology to chemistry to physics, Kauffman protest this as an impoverished claim that resist the failure of physicist to reason upward from physical laws to larger scale events in the universe.

By making reference to biological phenomena such as preadaptations -in which an organism uses a preexisting anatomical structure inherited from an ancestor for a potentially unrelated purpose. (an example being the preadaptation of dinosaurs who first developed feathers for their insulation properties and only later used them to assist in flight) Kauffman argues that biology can not be reduced to physics (aka atoms or particles) but rather to selective conditions in the evolution of the organism that can only be explained by emergent properties.

Specifically, emergence refers to the process by which complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions and also to an unpredictable yet definite system which arises from the interactions within a limited and defined space.

In his book Reinventing the Sacred in which he attempts to discredit the methodology of Galilean Science that would reduce nature solely in terms of primary qualities Kauffman argues: “the biosphere is a co-constructing emergent whole that evolves persistently. Organisms and the abiotic world create niches for new organisms, in an ongoing open textured exploration of possible organisms. There is a physical basis of this “open texture” in the non-ergodic universe“….

“At a still higher level, the human economy cannot be reduced to physics. The way the diversity of the economy has grown from perhaps a hundred to a thousand goods and services ﬁfty thousand years ago to tens of billions of goods and services today, in what I call an expanding economic web, depends on the very structure of that web, how it creates new economic niches for ever new goods and services that drive economic growth. This growth in turn drives the further expansion of the web itself by the persistent invention of still newer goods and services. Like the biosphere, the global economy is a self-consistently co-constructing, ever evolving, emergent whole. All these phenomena are beyond physics and not reducible to it. “ (Kauffman 2008 p4)

In short, Kauffman claims biology ” is emergent with respect to physics, just as life, agency, value, meaning have all emerged from the evolution of the biosphere “(Kauffman 2008 p43) In other words biology emerges from physics but can not be explained by it -aka biology can not be reduced to physics- and similarly consciousness emerges from biology but can not be explained by reducing it to biological terms.

While being careful not to confuse scientific explanations with what are essentially spiritually oriented ones the idea of biology emerging from yet, not reducible to physics and consciousness emerging from yet, not reducible to biology, does not conflict with the Vedantic suggestion that begins The Life Divine:

“Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness.” (Aurobindo 1949 p3)

And when Sri Aurobindo adds:

“And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind.”(1949)

Kauffman would agree with Sri Aurobindo to the extent that reason itself does not represent the pinnacle of human development and we must go beyond reason if we are truly to find wholeness:

“Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has ﬁnally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never fully know. The Enlightenment’s reliance on reason is too narrow a view of how we ﬂourish or ﬂounder.” (Kauffman 2008 p.xi)

Some complexity theorist take the emergent view of life to even suggest a creativity in nature that assumes a natural teleology:

“Discussions of the origin of life usually assume that there is a specific event, however improbable, by which dead matter became a living entity. Naturalistic accounts, although in seeming opposition to theistic explanations of the apparent design of even the simplest cells, often share the assumption that there is a specific line to be crossed. If the problem is recast as one of a process of emergence of biochemistry from protobiochemistry, which in turn emerged from the organic chemistry and geochemistry of primitive earth, the resources of the new sciences of complex systems dynamics can provide a more robust conceptual framework within which to explore the possible pathways of chemical complexification leading to life. In such a view the emergence of life is the result of deep natural laws (the outlines of which we are only beginning to perceive) and reflects a degree of holism in those systems that led to life. Further, there is the possibility of developing a more general theory of biology and of natural organization from such an approach. The emergence of life may thus be seen as an instance of the broader innate creativity of nature and consistent with a possible natural teleology. ” (Wiley)

Kauffman further makes the claim that his view of evolutionary emergence will again endow science with meaning: once one gets beyond reductionism, it leads to a radically new scientific world view, which changes our place in the universe as human beings. “We are not meaningless chunks of particles spinning around in space. We are organisms with meaning in our lives, and the way the biosphere will evolve is ceaselessly creative.” (Kauffman in Salon)

Kauffman however, is still a scientist, and a very respected one at that, whose scientific world view only allows him to seek natural rather than supernatural causes. So although he even uses the word God, his God is a fully natural one and he even makes a distinction between an immanent God within nature and God being nature itself:

“I’m saying God is the sacredness of nature. And you can go a step beyond that. You can say that God is nature. That’s the God of Spinoza. That’s the God that Einstein believed in. But their view of the universe was deterministic. The new view is that evolution of the universe is partially lawless and ceaselessly creative. We are the children of that creativity. One either does or does not take the step of saying God is the creativity of the universe. I do. Or you say there is divinity in the creativity in the universe….
(Kauffman in Salon)

And he concludes his book by stating:

“The God we discuss then might be God as the unfolding of Nature itself. We may wish to broaden our sense of God from the creativity in nature to all of nature law governed and partially beyond natural law. Then all unfolding of Nature is God, a fully natural God. And such a natural God is not far from an old idea of God in nature, an immanent god, found in the unfolding of Nature. Whether God is immanent in nature’s magnificent unfolding of nature itself in its magnificent unfolding and persistent becoming is God the is an essential difference. We do not need to believe in or have faith in a God as the unfolding of Nature. This God is real. The split between reason and faith is healed”.(Kauffman 2008 p288)

Since discussions of God always are dependent on some metaphysical premises it needs to be noted that Sri Aurobindo’s metaphysics are much more complex than Kauffman’s. (Perhaps advanced to the same degree as Kauffman’s understanding of science is to Sri Aurobindo’s) Aurobindo’s view of God has three poises transcendent, cosmic, and immanent. Kauffman would reject the first two poises as supernatural, and would even seem to reject the view of an immanent God; if that God was purely a supernatural one. But it is unclear whether Sri Aurobindo’s immanent poise of God can be regarded as entirely supernatural. While at times he does seem to resort to narratives in which there is a clear dualism between prakriti (nature) and purusha (soul) he ultimately suggest that matter is secret God. This later view -so long as this Matter/Nature is seen also as fully Divine- would seem to partially unite the narratives told by the spiritual sage and complexity scientist. In fact, Sri Aurobindo’s term “natures yoga” that imparts to nature a principle of emergence in which it become ever more fully conscious, while not identical to an emergent view of nature whose creativity endows it with a natural teleology, certainly is similar enough to suggest a dialog between the two perspectives may prove fruitful.

The view of evolution that sees the increasing complexity of nature as central to its narrative also raises the question as to whether increasing complexity should be seen in terms of progress. In the next section we will explore ideas of evolution and progress with regards to society, but we will close here with a short examination of how biological evolution relates to progress.

The idea of biological progress itself need not relate to a specific teleological but its an interesting question and one as usual that is disputed by scientist. For example, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould disagreed as to whether we should view the evolution of the brain as progressive or not.

Richard Dawkins notes that on a short evolutionary time scale it can be demonstrated that the brain has over the course of the past three million years grown larger; that is until about fifth thousand years ago when its growth seems to have ceased. But he views the period from three million years ago to fifty thousand years ago as suggesting progress: “It looks, in a general way, as though there are some progressive changes running through this series. Our brain case is nearly twice the size of erectus’s; and erectus’s brain case, in turn, is about twice the size of that of Australopithecus afarensis.” (Dawkins 1996)

But just how relevant this fact is for valuing biological evolution in terms of progress is made problematic by Stephen Jay Gould who argues that statistically this has little relevance when arguing for directionality in evolution:

Gould ‘showed then that apparent trends in the sizes of foraminiferans and the brains of mammals are better viewed as expanding variance with a fixed lower limit of size, rather than as trends of increasing size. Since then others have joined him in refusing to see evolution as steady progress.” (1996) http://www.newscientist.com)

Gould and others suggest that biological evolution results not solely in an increase in complexity but in decreases in complexity as well:

“Gould tells us how Bruce McFadden in 1988 analyzed the history of the horses and found a complex pattern of branching with many reversals of direction. He describes how Dan McShea, in a series of papers since 1992, has found no consistent trend to complexity in the evolution of backbones. He also describes what is perhaps the most telling of these examples— G. Boyajian and T. Lutz’s analysis in 1992 of the evolution of ammonite shells. These have sutures that make simple curves in the earliest fossils, but became on average increasingly complex as evolution progressed. Boyajian and Lutz used fractal dimension as an objective measure of complexity, and compared ancestors with their identified descendants. Rather than a general trend to increased complexity, they found a tangled web of lines in which complexity decreased as often as it rose, with simple-sutured shells present throughout. If the starting point is the simplest possible structure, evolution will result in increasing mean complexity even if lines of descent are random walks.” (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15220504.900-review–the-game-of-life.html)

If increasing complexity can be equated with progress than Gould’s account of its increases and decreases or advance and reversals seem comparable to Sri Aurobindo’s accounts of human progress in which:

“It may be conceded that what man has up till now principally done is to act within the circle of his nature, on a spiral of nature-movement, sometimes descending, sometimes ascending, — there has been no straight line of progress” (Aurobindo 1949 841)

Finally, what progress has actually occurred in the recent evolution of the human body? Recent studies such as those cited in the book the 10,000 Year Explosion (Cochran and Harpending 2009) have suggested that the human body is still evolving. The book disputes Stephen Jay Gould’s claim that Homo sapiens have not biologically changed for the past 40,000 years. The authors cite recent studies that suggest that human beings are still evolving genetically and perhaps faster than ever. These studies are based largely on the recent massive amount of information that has accumulated through the global genome project.

The more dramatic claims that Cochran and Harpending cite in their book however are controversial, such as that the brain of ethnic groups like Ashkenanzi Jews have evolved to make them more intelligent than average. These claims are difficult to prove and the reasoning behind such assertions appear to be similar to Kipling’s just-so stories. The explanation is given that around 800 A.D. Ashkenazi Jews were prohibited by religion from agricultural professions and so began to make a living in banking and money lending that forced them to become adapt at mathematical calculations and statistical data thus sharpening their brains. One can not however, interview people of that period to gathered the evidence to support or falsify these claims.

These stories of recent genetic mutations involving the brain and human consciousness ultimately can only make assumptions about populations in the poorly documented period before recorded human history. Therefore, it is not surprising that most claims for natural selection and genetic variation in humans beings over the past 40,000 years have been challenged. The claims however, that have gained wide acceptance concern the mutation of genes involved in resistance to malaria, coding for lighter skin color and the digestion of novel food.

So if we are still changing genetically does this represent biological progress? What is progress exactly? What value systems must progress be measured against?

Of course biological progress and the emergence of complex social systems from biology are two different phenomena and in the next section the question will be poses as to whether the evolution of human societies should be viewed as progressive.

………………….
Chapter V)The Illusion of Human Progress and the Ideal of Human Unity

Sri Aurobindo’s view of history may best be described as a hybrid of both Indian and European perspectives. His central narrative marries a cyclic view of history with a progressive evolution of society that culminates in a world state governed by the ideal of human unity. To synthesize the contradictory demands of recurring cycles of history with the progressive advance of humanity he introduces the idea of ever widening circles of history. “The wheel of Brahma rotates forever but it does not turn in the same place; its rotations carry it forward.” (1909)

To get a sense of how Sri Aurobindo develops his historical perspective it is important to allow him to speak in his own voice. Here is how he begins his first major thesis on yoga and human evolution (1909):

“The whole burden of our human progress has been an attempt to escape from the bondage to the body and the vital impulses. According to the scientific theory, the human being began as the animal, developed through the savage and consummated in the modern civilized man. The Indian theory is different. God created the world by developing the many out of the One and the material out of the spiritual. From the beginning, the objects which compose the physical world were arranged by Him in their causes, developed under the law of their being in the subtle or psychical world and then manifested in the gross or material world.

From karana to sukshma, from sukshma to sthula, and back again, that is the formula. Once manifested in matter the world proceeds by laws which do not change, from age to age, by a regular succession, until it is all withdrawn back again into the source from which it came. The material goes back into the psychical and the psychical is involved in its cause or seed. It is again put out when the period of expansion recurs and runs its course on similar lines but with different details till the period of contraction is due.” (1909)

This piece was written in what has been called Sri Aurobindo’s Hindu period (Heehs 2008) in which he strongly identified himself as a Hindu. During this time right after his release from prison on charges of sedition against the British Raj, Sri Aurobindo often expressed the desire for India’s freedom and self-determination by giving voice to it through the subcontinent’s Vedic traditions. It is therefore not surprising that he places the European scientific narrative of evolution within the context of an Indian conception of history. In doing this Sri Aurobindo’s view of evolution furnishes what perhaps can be called a redemption narrative of the Kali Yuga, in which the last turn of the cycle of History -that in the traditional narrative represents its final degenerate stage- takes on new spiritual possibilities:

“Hinduism regards the world as a recurrent series of phenomena of which the terms vary but the general formula abides the same. The theory is only acceptable if we recognize the truth of the conception formulated in the Vishnu Purana of the world as vijñana-vijrimbhitani, developments of ideas in the Universal Intelligence which lies at the root of all material phenomena and by its indwelling force shapes the growth of the tree and the evolution of the clod as well as the development of living creatures and the progress of mankind.

Whichever theory we take, the laws of the material world are not affected. From aeon to aeon, from kalpa to kalpa Narayan manifests himself in an ever-evolving humanity which grows in experience by a series of expansions and contractions towards its destined self-realization in God. That evolution is not denied by the Hindu theory of yugas.

Each age in the Hindu system has its own line of moral and spiritual evolution and the decline of the dharma or established law of conduct from the Satya to the Kaliyuga is not in reality a deterioration but a detrition of the outward forms and props of spirituality in order to prepare a deeper spiritual intensity within the heart.

In each Kaliyuga mankind gains something in essential spirituality. Whether we take the modern scientific or the ancient Hindu standpoint the progress of humanity is a fact. The wheel of Brahma rotates for ever but it does not turn in the same place; its rotations carry it forward. ” (1909)

The above passages demonstrate Sri Aurobindo’s distinctive view of evolution as an attempt to synthesize an Indian conception of History with the scientific theory of evolution. This fact should be remembered when he is speaking in a voice that seems to extrapolate human evolution in terms borrowed from European social theorist such as Herbert Spencer. In this regard whenever Sri Aurobindo appears to be simply stating a premise it needs to be remembered that there is always something more complex going on. While at times he certainly appears to be voicing ideas of progressive evolution that derive from Spencer, he never discards the voice of the subaltern, the colonialist subject who understand all to well the implications of European imperialism and its associated racial superiority complex.

Before going further it is also important to understand the language issues one faces when comparing historical perspectives separated by almost a century in which social values have changed significantly enough to suggest an epistemic rupture. In this case we are comparing cross-cultural writing in the early twentieth century with contemporary discourse on society and science that has fully assimilated critical theory and the linguistic turn in philosophy. To be able to excavate appropriate meaning will require the ability to parse language and trace back concepts through epistemic changes in order to divine authorial intention. In short, given the passage of almost a century it is essential to understand changes in culture and language that make any one to one correspondence between certain concepts and words spoken long ago with identical meanings today problematic.

For example, in Synthesis of Yoga Sri Aurobindo writes: “that even the racial type considered by us the lowest, the Negro fresh from the Barbarism of Central Africa is capable , without admixture of blood, without waiting for future generations, of the intellectual culture, if not yet of the intellectual accomplishment of the dominant European”. (Aurobindo SOY 9/10 circa 1915)

One can not of course imagine any serious scholar let alone someone expanding on spiritual philosophy today to make a similar statement. Today one might encounter such speech in the voice of fascist media personalities, such as Rush Limbaugh on his reactionary talk radio show, expressing a racist view of American xenophobia. Indeed, this one statement has been taken by some academics writing from a leftist social orientation as proof that Sri Aurobindo was a racist .

Such interpretations however, stray far from the mark for on closer inspection of the text one finds that Sri Aurobindo means no gross disrespect for the African. His speech is certainly not on par with the reactionary talk radio show host. A closer reading of the text reveals that here as elsewhere the subaltern voice always backgrounds the European historical narratives told. Elsewhere he will speak of Africans not as comprising the lower rungs of an evolutionary ladder of cultural ascent but rather as the remnants of a historically distant civilization far advanced from the late Edwardian period in which he pens this text. Moreover, in expressing his ideas on historical development Sri Aurobindo goes beyond the prejudices of the day by even having the audacity to suggest that the Central African can eventually reach the level of the European. Most Europeans of that day never even considered the peoples of Southern Lands to be capable of reaching European stature at all except by virtue of becoming wholly colonized by European values and Christianized by its religion.

But even so his observations and word choice inevitably reflect the values of England where he was raised and the Victorian era in which he was educated. The conventions of language governing the day define the limitations of the concepts he is trying to express. Similarly, when he applies terms to evolution such a “progressive” he is using a concept whose genealogy can be traced back to Herbert Spencer, and that carries with it the overtones of race and class issues raised by Social Darwinism.

The following statement from Synthesis of Yoga is instructive regards the influences on Sri Aurobindo of early 20th century European thought that credits science with the advance of civilization that bestows its benefits to the “backward races” :

“the whole trend of modern thought and modern endeavor reveals itself with an observant eye to a large conscious effort of nature in man to effect a general level of intellectual equipment , capacity and further possibility by universalizing the opportunities modern civilization affords for the mental life Even the preoccupations of the European intellect the protagonist tendency, with material nature and externalities is a necessary part of the effort. It seeks to prepare a sufficient basis in mans physical being and vital energies in his material environment for his full mental possibilities By the spread of education to , by the advance of the backward races, by the elevation of the depressed classes, by the multiplication of labor saving devices (aka technology) , by the movement toward ideal social and economic conditions by the labor of Science toward improved health , longevity and sound physique in civilized humanity , the sense and drift of this vast movement translates itself into intelligible signs. ,,,” (Aurobindo SOY p10 circa 1915)

The reference to backward races would now seem racist if one did not understand the complexity of Sri Aurobindo’s voice. If one did not anticipate the reintroduction of the subaltern perspective one would be tempted to simply pass off the preceding statements off as Eurocentic, one that extols the benefits of the European Enlightenment to the backward races, but as has been noted, Sri Aurobindo’s writing always resists any simple interpretation. In fact, he begins the paragraph previous to the one above with the conjecture that “We may perhaps, if we consider all the circumstances, come to this conclusion that mental life, far from being a recent appearance in man, is the swift repetition in him of a previous appearance from which the Energy in the race had undergone one of her deplorable recoils….” and a few paragraphs later he will observe that Indian tradition asserts that this which is to be manifested is not a new term in human experience, but has been developed before and has even governed humanity in certain periods of its development…And if since then Nature has sunk back from her achievement, the reason must always be found in some unrealized harmony, some insufficiency of the intellectual and material basis.

In the above passage things become more complex if we pay attention to the embolden words above because he makes the claim that it is the effort of nature in man, responsible for the progression of the particular mental acumen that results in western science being perfected in Europe. We will come back to the meaning of this phrase shortly.

But even when we understand the complexity of Sri Aurobindo’s text in reading his words today, the concept he employs that refers to progressive evolution in context of a hierarchy of intelligence still pose difficulty in entirely freeing itself from conjuring up ideas of European superiority over the backward races and by invoking the memory of those racist ideologies that have also appropriated this narrative.

The idea of progress coupled to phenomena of evolution has been throughly interrogation since the end of the First and Second World Wars that between them nearly destroyed civilization, as Europe marched progressively forward. The progress of society or civilization in the post-war era has been found to be problematic especially in the context of cross-cultural studies. For instance, the “fact” that Columbus brought progress to the New World has been taught to American school children for generations but it is only within the past several decades, that the narratives of indigenous people, who were here in pre-Columbian times, have been given a voice to tell their story of the genocide perpetrated by Europeans that destroyed any chance they may have had for the progressive development of their own cultures. Progress has been demonstrated to be a value judgment that when the referent is culture always couches the cultural values and aspirations of those making the reference.

The progress of science and industry spoken of in the early 20th century tragically gave us the weapons of mass destruction that threatened to put an end to human evolution once and for all. Progress rather than signaling the triumph of European civilization at the start of the 20th century has been exposed to be simply an ideology to justify colonial expansion and subjugation of indigenous populations.

From its European context the quote from Sri Aurobindo on the Central African reflects this image of progress. In this context progress can be seen as a social ideology that corresponds to other hijacked evolutionary ideologies reflected in the German Idealism of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, and Herbert Spencer’s “progressive evolution”. All the above ideas at one time or another have been utilized by those with couched power agendas for their use value in aligning different races and cultures along a scale of graduated being in which the European was seen to be the most highly evolved. A close reading of Sri Aurobindo however, will show that he had no such agenda. This fact should be understood properly before moving on to consider Sri Aurobindo’s view of human progress.

Although in many ways Sri Aurobindo was certainly a visionary in his view of history he did not claim to be a prophet. The impossible burden of proof placed on prophecy is not lost on him. Even the future of poetry it seems can not be anticipated twenty five years years hence:

“ The gods of life and still more the gods of mind are so incalculably self-creative that even when we can distinguish the main lines of which the working runs or has so far run, we are still unable to foresee with any certainty what turn they will take or of what new thing they are the labor. It is therefore impossible to predict what the future poetry will actually be like. We can see where we stand today but we cannot see where we shall stand a quarter century hence” (Sri Aurobindo FP p.1972)

If this be the case with the life gods of poetry how much more is this so with the gods governing human history. Indeed how could one expect him to anticipate the developments in subsequent years when he wrote this optimistic assessment of the future in his 1909 essay Process and Evolution:

“It is not likely that the immediate future of the democratic tendency will satisfy the utmost dreams of the lover of liberty who seeks an anarchist freedom, or of the lover of equality who tries to establish a socialistic dead level, or of the lover of fraternity who dreams of a world-embracing communism. But some harmonization of this great ideal is undoubtedly the immediate future of the human race. Once the old forces of despotism, inequality and unbridled competition, after they have been once more overthrown, a process of gradual samyama will be performed by which what has remained of them will be regarded as the disappearing vestiges of a dead reality and without any further violent coercion be transformed slowly and steadily out of existence.” (1909)

Of course what followed were the two great wars that almost destroyed civilizations and the partition of his beloved India. It seems like a harmonization in the immediate future was not to be in the cards dealt by history. The old forces of despotism, inequality, and unbridled competition have proven too entrenched in human nature to be easily discarded. But of course he realized this too and as such his ideas on human progress appear to have shifted over time.

Sri Aurobindo did not ever naively conceive of progress in human terms without acknowledging the reversals of history and the practice of power for domination. In his essay Processes of Evolution he states:

“But the forces of the old world, the forces of despotism, the forces of traditional privilege and selfish exploitation, the forces of unfraternal strife and passionate self-regarding competition are always struggling to reseat themselves on the thrones of the earth. A determined movement of reaction is evident in many parts of the world and nowhere perhaps more than in England which was once one of the self-styled champions of progress and liberty. The attempt to go back to the old spirit is one of those necessary returns without which it cannot be so utterly exhausted as to be blotted out from the evolution. It rises only to be defeated and crushed again. On the other hand the force of the democratic tendency is not a force which is spent but one which has not yet arrived, not a force which has had the greater part of its enjoyment but one which is still vigorous, unsatisfied and eager for fulfillment. “ (1909)

Sri Aurobindo also understood that danger of concepts which attempt to liberate one from history only to end in totalitarian ideologies, quipping here:

“Every attempt to coerce it in the past reacted eventually on the coercing force and brought back the democratic spirit fierce, hungry and unsatisfied, joining to its fair motto of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” the terrible addition “or Death”. (1909)

Nevertheless in 1909 his assessment of human progress is optimistic, he write: “ Whether we take the modern scientific or the ancient Hindu standpoint the progress of humanity is a fact.” But by 1949 however, after two world two world wars and partition, his views on human unity (harmonization) have taken on a distinctly anti-humanist flair. Perhaps in having witnessed the cataclysms of history he recognizes that it may only be through the further devastation of a Third World War that Nature will be able to propel humanity toward his ideal of human unity:

“Two stupendous and world-devastating wars have swept over the globe and have been accompanied or followed by revolutions with far-reaching consequences which have altered the political map of the earth and the international balance, the once fairly stable equilibrium of five continents, and changed the whole future. A third still more disastrous war with a prospect of the use of weapons and other scientific means of destruction far more fatal and of wider reach than any ever yet invented, weapons whose far-spread use might bring down civilization with a crash and whose effects might tend towards something like extermination on a large scale, looms in prospect; the constant apprehension of it weighs upon the mind of the nations and stimulates them towards further preparations for war and creates an atmosphere of prolonged antagonism, if not yet of conflict, extending to what is called “cold war” even in times of peace.”

“But the two wars that have come and gone have not prevented the formation of the first and second considerable efforts towards the beginning of an attempt at union and the practical formation of a concrete body, an organized instrument with that object: rather they have caused and hastened this new creation. The League of Nations came into being as a direct consequence of the first war, the U.N.O. similarly as a consequence of the second world-wide conflict. If the third war which is regarded by many if not by most as inevitable does come, it is likely to precipitate as inevitably a further step and perhaps the final outcome of this great world-endeavor Nature uses such means, apparently opposed and dangerous to her intended purpose, to bring about the fruition of that purpose. “ (1949)

Whereas in 1909 Sri Aurobindo viewed the harmonization of the human race in terms of human progress and seemed to imply simply that the overturning of a few despotic regimes, the universal declaration of human rights, and the reform of hyper-capitalism, (all of which are still would be worthy goals today) would be enough to accomplish the task, by 1949 the advance of human unity follows rather, on the jagannath of Rudra, god of destruction. In the above passage Sri Aurobindo seems to say that human unity will be achieved in spite of and not, because of human intention. If human unity is to be achieved it will be by the will of Nature by the process “nature’s yoga”. Before exploring “nature’s yoga” further however, it would be best first to assess human progress in terms of the toll it has taken already on nature itself.

In his book a Short History of Progress anthropologist Ronald Wright describes how civilizations collapse due to what he calls “progress traps”. In his book Wright details how four civilizations, Easter Island, Sumer, the Maya and Rome self-destructed from a combination of lack of foresight and poor choices that eventually would lead to overpopulation and irreparable environmental damage. From his reading of the “flight recorders in the wreckage of crashed civilizations” (Wright 2005 p. 129) he follows the persistent concern that “each time history repeats itself, the price goes up”. He finds this history instructive for our global civilization believing that we have much to learn to make our experiment with civilizations sustainable today especially in light of global climate change.

In analyzing these four instances, Wright notes that Easter Island and Sumer failed due to depletion of natural resources: “their ecologies were unable to regenerate”. Whereas the Maya and Rome failed in their heartlands, “where ecological demand was highest,” but left remnant populations that survived. It is only by virtue of natural regeneration and human migration (Wright 2005 p. 102) that the overall experiment of civilization done so well. The worst kind of ideological pathology in Wright view are those cultural beliefs that act against sustainability.

“Wright argues that progress, as an ideology is merely a myth. Humans see their own progress and advancement in the rapid transition from an industrial economy to information based one, while the reality is that – the food technology of the late Stone Age is the only one we cannot live without. The crops of about a dozen ancient people feed the 6 billion people of the world today. Despite more than two centuries of scientific crop breeding, the so-called green revolution of the 60’s and the genetic engineering of the 90’s, not one new staple has been added to our repertoire of crops since prehistoric times. However, the invention of agriculture is itself “a runaway train”, as it led to the expansion of populations, but which, seldom solved the food problem because of two inevitable consequences: One, biological, the population grows until it hits the bounds of the food supply. Two, social: all civilizations become hierarchical; the upward concentration of wealth ensures that there can never be enough to go around – another progress trap. “

“Wright observes that since the Chinese invented gunpowder, there has been great progress in the making of “bangs”: from the firecracker to the cannon, to the petard to the high explosive shell. Just when high explosives were reaching a state of perfection, “progress” found the infinitely bigger “bang” in the atom. He muses, when the “bang” we make can blow up our world, we have made rather too much progress.” (Mistry 2005)

For Sri Aurobindo the question of human progress is, as almost everything he wrote about, complex. While he believes in 1909 that human progress is the agent of change and writes: “ Whether we take the modern scientific or the ancient Hindu standpoint the progress of humanity is a fact.”(Aurobindo 1909) by the early 1940s his view seems to have notably altered and he writes:

“the idea of human progress itself is very probably an illusion, for there is no sign that man, once emerged from the animal stage, has radically progressed during his race-history; at most he has advanced in knowledge of the physical world, in Science, in the handling of his surroundings, in his purely external and utilitarian use of the secret laws of Nature. But otherwise he is what he always was in the early beginnings of civilization: he continues to manifest the same capacities, the same qualities and defects, the same efforts, blunders, achievements, frustrations. If progress there has been, it is in a circle, at most perhaps in a widening circle. Man today is not wiser than the ancient seers and sages and thinkers, not more spiritual than the great seekers of old, the first mighty mystics, not superior in arts and crafts to the ancient artists and craftsmen; the old races that have disappeared showed as potent an intrinsic originality, invention, capacity of dealing with life and, if modern man in this respect has gone a little farther, not by any essential progress but in degree, scope, abundance, it is because he has inherited the achievements of his forerunners. Nothing warrants the idea that he will ever hew his way out of the half-knowledge half-ignorance which is the stamp of his land, or, even if he develops a higher knowledge, that he can break out of the utmost boundary of the mental circle.” (Aurobindo 1949 p832)

No longer optimistic about the inevitable triumph of human progress, the evolutionary transcendence of the human race he suggests will be facilitated only by a few special individuals.

“if a superior creation is intended, then, certainly, it is not out of man that the new grade, type or pattern can develop; for in that case there would be some race or kind or make of human beings that has already the material of the superman in it, just as the peculiar animal being that developed into humanity had the essential elements of human nature already potential or present in it: there is no such race, kind or type, at most there are only spiritualised mental beings who are seeking to escape out of the terrestrial creation. If by any occult law of Nature such a human development of the supramental being is intended, it could only be by a few in humanity detaching themselves from the race so as to become a first foundation for this new pattern of being. There is no reason to suppose that the whole race could develop this perfection; it cannot be a possibility generalized in the human creature.” (Aurobindo 1949 831/832)

In the above passage what is notable is the use of the word “if”, as in “if a supramental creation is intended”. One finds in his text that even when his statements suggest an inevitability that “if “ is implicitly never far away. If his mature conclusions regarding human progress are no longer optimistic he does not discount some forms of human progress, if not in developing new skills and traits then marked by an increase in subtly, complexity, and variety of development:

“It cannot truly be said that there has been no such thing as human progress since man’s appearance or even in his recent ascertainable history; for however great the ancients, however supreme some of their achievements and creations, however impressive their powers of spirituality, of intellect or of character, there has been in later developments an increasing subtlety, complexity, manifold development of knowledge and possibility in man’s achievements, in his politics, society, life, science, metaphysics, knowledge of all kinds, art, literature; even in his spiritual endeavor, less surprisingly lofty and less massive in power of spirituality than that of the ancients, there has been this increasing subtlety, plasticity, sounding of depths, extension of seeking.” (Aurobindo 1949, 841)

Although he even issues a caveat here, prefixing the above statement with the following:

“it may be conceded that what man has up till now principally done is to act within the circle of his nature, on a spiral of nature-movement, sometimes descending, sometimes ascending, — there has been no straight line of progress, no indisputable, fundamental or radical exceeding of his past nature: (1949) “

Therefore, Sri Aurobindo concludes that the mere refining of skills by the Modern has done nothing to facilitate the transformation of humanity that is the aim of his yoga to accomplish:

“his progress has not indeed carried the race beyond itself, into a self-exceeding, a transformation of the mental being. But that was not to be expected; for the action of evolutionary Nature in a type of being and consciousness is first to develop the type to its utmost capacity by just such a subtilisation and increasing complexity till it is ready for her bursting of the shell, the ripened decisive emergence, reversal, turning over of consciousness on itself that constitutes a new stage in the evolution”(841)

When Sri Aurobindo says that human progress is probably an illusion he is stating that there is no unending linear human progress as was the type envisioned in the European Enlightenment. In the European post-Enlightenment view of progress, humanity follows a steady path of evolutionary advance. In contrast Sri Aurobindo views human progress as defined by advances and then by sudden reversals in fortune that result in it following a curved rather than a straight lines. In this respect Sri Aurobindo’s view of human progress is fairly consistent with the views of Ronald Wright who states that human progress, as an ideology is merely a myth. The path of progress is beset by a myriad of traps and snares that ultimately lead human kind to circle back on itself.

But if there is nothing in collective human progress that is being perfected to prepare for an inevitable descent of what Sri Aurobindo calls the “supramental manifestation” then what is it that is preparing for the appearance of the superman? A careful reading of Sri Aurobindo reveals that the deliverance of the new race is not dependent on human progress but by the force he has already described in the Synthesis of Yoga “the effort of nature in man” or “nature’s yoga”.

But what does this exactly mean that the evolution of human consciousness is not the result of human progress but is a product of nature? In the following passage Debashish Banerji elaborates:

“Mankind has not evolved as a species, there is no such thing as “human progress.” On the other hand there is a cosmic evolution which is going on (this is the teleological part in SA) which is not only an evolution of forms but an evolution of consciousness. This is “nature’s yoga,” which leads to the statement “all life is yoga.” This cosmic evolution throws up different general (genus) and special (species) manifestations of gradations of consciousness. These genus and species do not “evolve” within their class but are subject to cosmic evolutionary forces, so that they develop and express certain innate capacities at certain times and others at other times. He does not elaborate on a theory for non-human cases, but this stasis and “progress in a circle” applies to mankind as well until the point that there is a sufficient generalization of all the human capacities in the mass through “nature’s action” in or as time. When this happens, some new possibilities of emergence occur – in the human case, these possibilities are part of individual choice as yoga.” (Banerji 2009)

In other words, Homo sapeins is a vehicle, the conduit in the dialectic between spirit and matter, that is under pressure from the Supermind (shakti) to create ever more complex orders of being. Human nature (prakriti) itself need not change, just facilitate the initial conditions in a few special individuals for the novel emergence of the superman. In other words, for what Sri Aurobindo calls the supramental manifestation to occur “nature’s yoga” requires only its facilitation by a few special individuals as it perfects itself in them through the evolution of their psychic being (soul). The psychic being then facilitates the preparation in these individuals for the grace and descent of Supermind.

In contrast to Teilhard De Chardin’s view of evolution in which it is the collectivization of human consciousness advancing toward a noosphere that facilitates the omega point of species, Sri Aurobindo invest his hope in the individual as the unit of evolutionary selection. In so doing the Aurobindian superman on closer inspection shares many similar traits with the Nietzschean overman. A brief comparison between the way the two construct their concept of the super/overman would be useful here.

Nietzsche’s view of human evolution contrast with Sri Aurobindo in that he sees evolution as leading not to the creation of the overman but rather, to the triumph of the herd. He views natural selection as breding inferior forms of life; if humanity is evolving he believes that it is evolving toward a common mediocrity. The creative force facilitating the creation of the overman in Nietzsche’s view is not collective human progress but rather, an expression of nature’s life force manifesting in individual self-affirmation that he calls “will to power”. The meanings Nietzsche ascribes to this will are complex and stated a bit differently in his various texts, what follows is a brief synopsis of its fourfold variation:

“It is a dynamic vision of life that values life in its aspect of Becoming. It is the kind of home wherein the Overman can live. Here the world of Becoming gets interpreted as a dynamic unfolding of preservation and enhancement conditions which elicit the approval of the Overman. This, then, is the unity within the four major demarcations of the Will in Nietzsche’s thought. (1) The Primal Will which equals Becoming. (2) The Will in the theory of Will to Power which equals the dynamic unfolding of quantities of power under the conditions of preservation and enhancement. (3) The Will in the notion of Will to Power which equals the power of positing values i.e., the creating of horizons through form-creating interpretations. And (4) the Will of the child which equals the ability to affirm life as it is, i.e., to see the self as ground for valuation. But this is to say that the self sees itself as Will to Power and in seeing itself as Will to Power it sees itself as an interpreting activity. The Will of the child as a self-propelling wheel will ultimately will its own most interpretation, for in that interpretation it wills itself. In this sense the theory is an interpretation of Becoming which requires a yes-saying.” (Cavalier)

Both Nietzsche’s overman and Sri Aurobindo’s superman affirm life in the world, both also come into being through the aspirations of extraordinary individuals rather than the by the actions of the masses. Just as Nietzsche champions nature’s underlying creative will as the vehicle of transformation that takes man to overman Sri Aurobindo affirm nature’s underlying occult action that he calls “nature’s yoga ” as that primal evolutionary force driving the transformation of man to superman.

Sri Aurobindo however, develops his ideas on the subject by tracing a genealogy that leads back to ancient India, and so contextualizes it within the tradition of Indian spirituality. By contrast Nietzsche’s view of the overman can be traced back to ancient Greece and so he contextualizes the creation of a superior being within the European philosophical tradition. Among other things the move toward Indian spirituality results in Sri Aurobindo developing a concept that is not only of an immanent god in nature but also of a Godhead with a cosmic and transcendental poise. Although Nietzsche views the “will to power” as a metaphysical force underlying the primal forces of nature and claims the “world is the will to power — and nothing besides” he would disdained the association of this will with a supernatural god. Moreover, Nietzsche views “will to power” purely in terms of its Becoming in the world whereas Sri Aurobindo views natures yoga not only in terms of Becoming but also in terms of Being.

But for these qualitative differences that result largely from their cross cultural encounter, Sri Aurobindo’s view mirrors Nietzsche’s in conceiving of a metaphysical will/force as driving creation of a new superior being and in suggesting that it is not collective human progress but the extraordinary individual who will facilitate the creation of the superman. Moreover, both Sri Aurobindo and Nietzsche agree that the morality of the superman (overman) will transcend conventional ideas of good and evil therefore, one should not be surprised in their rhetorical styles of affinity. For example, in the prologue to “Thus Spake Zarathustra” (1885) Nietzsche declares the following:

“I teach you the Superman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? – The superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the superman shall be the meaning of the earth! – Man is a rope, tied between beast and superman – a rope over an abyss – What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under...” -

The notion of humanity as a bridge between the animal and the Superman is in fact almost identical to Sri Aurobindo’s view of man the transitional being. He says: “Man is a transitional being; he is not final. For in man and high beyond him ascend the radiant degrees that climb to a divine supermanhood. There lies our destiny and the liberating key to our aspiring but troubled and limited mundane existence”. In eschewing collective progress in favor of an occult force of nature operating in extrodinary individuals who act in a world according to standards that would defy conventional morality Sri Aurobindo’s view like Nietzsche’s is also categorized by an profoundly anti-humanist tone. This anti-humanist tone also characterizes his thoughts on the advance of human societies toward human unity, although this part of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy is more reminiscent of Georg Hegel than Friedrich Nietzsche.

As already mentioned, the premises that undergird what Sri Aurobindo calls the supramental manifestation are often qualified by “if” statements in his writing as in “if “ this manifestation is to occur it will not be due to human effort but rather by “the effort of nature in man”. Similarly, he believes that the advance toward human unity will also be driven by the occult action of nature’s effort in man although he seems to view the success of this collective project as inevitable; at least that is “if “ the human race survives! In other words, although human history can be viewed as a progressive advance toward unity it is not human progress per say that drives mankind toward unity but, it is “the effort of nature in man” that is responsible.

In conceiving of this effort of nature in man as an unfolding of Spirit within the dialectic processes of human history in which humanity progressively moves toward an idealized synthesis marked by a teleology that results in the triumph of the Spirit, Sri Aurobindo demonstrates a perspective on historical processes that can be called Hegelian. In Hegel’s view of history he focuses on a dialectic interchange between the binary forces he calls thesis and antithesis that progressively move humanity toward a synthesis and historical omega point. Here is a synopsis of how Hegel sizes up human history:

“This model begins with an existing element, or thesis, with contradictions inherent to its structure. These contradictions unwittingly create the thesis’ direct opposite, or antithesis, bringing about a period of conflict between the two. The new element, or synthesis, that emerges from this conflict then discovers its own internal contradictions, and starts the process anew. The reason the Hegelian dialectic is termed “progressive” is because each new thesis represents an advance over the previous thesis, continually until an endpoint (or final goal) is reached. To specifically apply this model Hegel’s view of world history, it represents the manner in which the Spirit develops gradually into its purest form, ultimately recognizing its own essential freedom. To Hegel, “world history is thus the unfolding of Spirit in time, as nature is the unfolding of the Idea in space.” The dialectical process thus virtually defines the meaning of history for Hegel.” (Dave) http://www.historicalinsights.com/dave/hegel.html

Although the comparisons that are stated above between Sri Aurobindo and Hegel are striking and it is tempting simply to go no farther than in accepting their similarities of historical vision, a closer examination of their work reveals important differences as well. For example, Hegel derives his ideas of from the European Enlightenment and his conception of history therefore remains a rational one, whereas Sri Aurobindo expression of Real-Idea as that force evolving from ignorance to gnosis is defined by its supra-rational perspective. In the following passage Debashish Banerji elaborates on the constrating perspectives between Sri Aurobindo and Hegel:

“One may say Sri Aurobindo seems to rub shoulders with Hegel and other philosophers of evolution who see Consciousness involved in earth and evolving through history. But this resemblance again is partial. Whereas the Hegelian Idea works out its inexorable syntheses using nature and humanity deterministically as instruments, with no occult process of the aspiration of Ignorance from below and the response of a self-existent Knowledge above or of the resistance of a conscious denial in the Ignorance, what one may call Falsehood, rendering the emergence of consciousness precarious, Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of evolution uncovers the arduous agency of becoming in the Ignorance and particularly in the human individual. Moreover, the Hegelian Idea remains rational, a post-Enlightenment notion of consciousness reaching its full expression and its identity of being in collective human “understanding” and therein reaching the “end of history; while for Sri Aurobindo, the Idea involved in the processes of history is what he terms the “Real-Idea” of Supermind, a faculty and operation of consciousness from which Mind is derived and whose properties of infinite freedom and wholeness mind aspires to but can never experientially comprehend, except through its self-transcendence.” (Banerji 2008) http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2008/8/8/3830554.html

So it is interesting to assess Sri Aurobindo’s culminating vision of history’s progressive march toward Human Unity with these comparisons and contrasts to Hegel in mind. In an earlier passage taken from the text which we will now again reference, Sri Aurobindo has conceded the anti-humanist point that it may even take the specter of a final horrible war to achieve the inevitable ends of Human Unity. In other words, human unity might be gained in spite of, and not because of any humanist effort. In this concluding paragraph in his postscript to the Ideal of Human Unity (1949), he sums up his final word on the matter:

“We conclude then that in the conditions of the world at present, even taking into consideration its most disparaging features and dangerous possibilities, there is nothing that need alter the view we have taken of the necessity and inevitability of some kind of world-union; the drive of Nature, the compulsion of circumstances and the present and future need of mankind make it inevitable. The general conclusions we have arrived at will stand and the consideration of the modalities and possible forms or lines of alternative or successive development it may take. The ultimate result must be the formation of a World-State and the most desirable form of it would be a federation of free nationalities in which all subjection or forced inequality and subordination of one to another would have disappeared and, though some might preserve a greater natural influence, all would have an equal status. A confederacy would give the greatest freedom to the nations constituting the World-State, but this might give too much room for fissiparous or centrifugal tendencies to operate; a federal order would then be the most desirable. All else would be determined by the course of events and by general agreement or the shape given by the ideas and necessities that may grow up in the future. A world-union of this kind would have the greatest chances of long survival or permanent existence. This is a mutable world and uncertainties and dangers might assail or trouble for a time; the formed structure might be subjected to revolutionary tendencies as new ideas and forces emerged and produced their effect on the general mind of humanity, but the essential step would have been taken and the future of the race assured or at least the present era overpassed in which it is threatened and disturbed by unsolved needs and difficulties, precarious conditions, immense upheavals, huge and sanguinary world-wide conflicts and the threat of others to come. The ideal of human unity would be no longer an unfulfilled ideal but an accomplished fact and its preservation given into the charge of the united human peoples. Its future destiny would lie on the knees of the gods and, if the gods have a use for the continued existence of the race, may be left to lie there safe.”

The final lines of this passage are staggering in their implications for human agency because even when Human Unity is achieved, the fate of mankind will ultimately still reside with the gods and whatever use they may have for humanity.

And perhaps these Gods may not look so benevolently on humanity if a fundamental shift in human consciousness does not follow the achievement of nature’s drive toward world union. In the final chapter of the Life Divine Sri Aurobindo view on the future of the human race becomes at times most pessimistic when he considers what can happen if the evolutionary pressures of mind working upon life in humanity do not prove able to support it due to a lack of “inner” human progress:

“The evolution of Mind working upon Life has developed an organization of the activity of Mind and use of Matter which can no longer be supported by human capacity without an inner change. An accommodation of the egocentric human individuality, separative even in association, to a system of living which demands unity, perfect mutuality, harmony, is imperative…….because the burden which is being laid on mankind is too great for the present littleness of the human personality and its petty mind and small life-instincts, because it cannot operate the needed change, because it is using this new apparatus and organization to serve the old infraspiritual and infrarational life-self of humanity, the destiny of the race seems to be heading dangerously, as if impatiently and in spite of itself, under the drive of the vital ego seized by colossal forces which are on the same scale as the huge mechanical organization of life and scientific knowledge which it has evolved, a scale too large for its reason and will to handle, into a prolonged confusion and perilous crisis and darkness of violent shifting incertitude. Even if this turns out to be a passing phase or appearance and a tolerable structural accommodation is found which will enable mankind to proceed less catastrophically on its uncertain journey, this can only be a respite. For the problem is fundamental and in putting it evolutionary Nature in man is confronting herself with a critical choice which must one day be solved in the true sense if the race is to arrive or even to survive. ” (Aurobindo 1949, 1054/55)

In short, Sri Aurobindo conceives his ideal of human unity driven by the effort of nature in man as inevitable, but only if the human race survives to witness it!

I would like to conclude this section by offering up one possibility as to why Sri Aurobindo’s perspective on human progress seems to have shifted during the course of his lifetime by referencing his original text on Yoga and Human Evolution from 1909, in which he writes:

“The progress of mankind has been placed by many predominately in the development of the human intellect, and intellectual development is no doubt essential to self-conquest. The animal and the savage are bound by the body because the ideas of the animal or the ideas of the savage are mostly limited to those sensations and associations which are connected with the body. The development of intellect enables a man to find the deeper self within and partially replace what our philosophy calls the dehatmaka-buddhi, the sum of ideas and sensations which make us think of the body as ourself, by another set of ideas which reach beyond the body, and, existing for their own delight and substituting intellectual and moral satisfaction as the chief objects of life, master, if they cannot entirely silence, the clamor of the lower sensual desires……

But it is not only through the intellect that man rises. If the clarified intellect is not supported by purified emotions, the intellect tends to be dominated once more by the body and to put itself at its service and the lordship of the body over the whole man becomes more dangerous than in the natural state because the innocence of the natural state is lost. The power of knowledge is placed at the disposal of the senses, sattva serves tamas, the god in us becomes the slave of the brute. The disservice which scientific Materialism is unintentionally doing the world is to encourage a return to this condition; the suddenly awakened masses of men, unaccustomed to deal intellectually with ideas, able to grasp the broad attractive innovations of free thought but unable to appreciate its delicate reservations, verge towards that reeling back into the beast, that relapse into barbarism which was the condition of the Roman Empire at a high stage of material civilization and intellectual culture and which a distinguished British statesman declared the other day to be the condition to which all Europe approached. The development of the emotions is therefore the first condition of a sound human evolution. Unless the feelings tend away from the body and the love of others takes increasingly the place of the brute love of self, there can be no progress upward….” (1909)

In reading the above passage it is clear that Sri Aurobindo insisted that the transformation of intellectual capabilities must be supported by the purification of the emotions that provides the platform for human progress.

Although his perspective on human progress may simply have changed because he further refined his ideas about it, in separating it out from “the effort of nature in man,” one can also imagine another contributing factor for his shift in perspective as well.

Over the course of his lifetime having witnessing the horrors of two world wars, the degradations of colonialism, the violence of partition, and the myriad of other travesties that took place during the period in which he lived, he certainly could have come to the conclusion that the advance of mankind’s intellectual capabilities, of science, technology, and industrialism only exacerbated human cruelty and magnified mankind’s propensity for evil. It was the hardening of the heart rather than the purification of emotions that supported the intellectual advance of the 20th century. Could this decoupling of mental from vital, of intellectual from emotional evolution led him to eschew the idea of human progress as he envisioned it in 1909?

If this suggestion can be admitted then Sri Aurobindo would have come to the same conclusion as most intellectuals of that era who early in the 20th century believed in unending human progress, but by mid-century came to despair at drawing any comparisons between human harmony with intellectual progress.

…….

Chapter VI) The Dialectics of Biology and Culture: science, ecology & economics

The previous sections of this paper explored the relationship of contemporary scientific and social perspectives on evolution with those of Sri Aurobindo in marking the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of his first essays on Yoga and Evolution. This final section concludes by exploring the relationship of science and society itself. The comparison given here will be between Sri Aurobindo’s thoughts on this relationship and the perspective given in a constructionist approach to science and society that applies a dialectical methodology. The hope is to facilitate a dialogic platform which allows Sri Aurobindo to converse with several of today’s most brilliant scientist and philosophers of science.

Perhaps it is best if the twain between science and religion do not meet. Trying to engage science and spirituality in a dialog has a long and troubled history. The incommensurable narratives of matter and spirit they both tell have proven time and time again troublesome for reaching any common understanding. In fact, if science and spirituality do share something in common it is that they all too often accuse the other of totalizing a universal narrative that usurps all ways of looking at the world that are inconsistent with their own.

Religion and science each have their own fundamentalist practitioners who would reduce the world solely to accounts told in their holy books or biology text books. One can not easily imagine an encounter between science and religion in which some violent reaction would not be triggered. Worse perhaps then the violent confrontation between science and religion is when either one appropriates the narratives of the other for the purpose of furthering their own ideological concerns. In the case of religion one example would be in their use of science to justify creationism, while in the case of science such appropriation usually results in one of the just-so stories of origins or cultural analogs of natural selection that Neo-Darwinism tells.

At their most extreme both religion and science utilize the authority vested in them by the church or the academy to suppress dissent. While religion has by far proven the worst offender of the two in expressing intolerance toward non-believers, science also has its methods of purging radicals from its ranks, who would dared to question the dominant scientific paradigm of the day. While not so extreme as to burn its dissidents at the stake the church of science often uses more subtle methods to show displeasure with its heretics, denying those who challenge the consensus view of normal science entrance into its congregation. This is done by passing over candidates for academic tenure or by the refusal of professional journals to publish research.

Given the polarization of science and religion and the heavy handed tactics the authorities of both constituencies have been known to employ against dissenters a direct confrontation between the two perhaps is not advisable. If we wish to get anywhere in trying to integrate the stories of science and spirit it would perhaps be better to hold their incommensurable narratives in a creative tension than to observe them engage in battle or superficially explain away the other in terms of their own ideology .

In spite of the unbridgeable gap between science and spirituality however, both do share one undeniable trait in common; both science and religion are embedded in culture. If the twain between science and spirituality does meet it is that they both perform their functions within a shared platform of society and culture. A dialog between science and spirituality may therefore best be facilitated by appealing to their shared communicative platform of culture.

This holds true also for any dialog one would wish to begin between integral yoga and science. It would perhaps be best to begin such a dialog by first exploring Sri Aurobindo’s dialectic between yoga and culture and then to look for resonances with narratives told by credible scientist regards the dialectics of science and culture. Better yet, in Sri Aurobindo’s own work one finds him at times also critically exploring the dialectic between science and culture. It would therefore seem best to arrive at a dialogic platform to engage science and integral yoga using their diffusion in the semi-permeable membrane of culture, rather then by a direct confrontation as a means to begin the conversation.

When one examines how Sri Aurobindos views the relationship between science and society one is struck by its resonance with constructionist narratives of science and society that applies both a dialectical method and systems theory. One such scientific approach is called Dialectical Biology a term coined by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin of Harvard University. While systems theory can be defined as a way of knowing that:

Rather than reducing an entity (e.g. the human body) to the properties of its parts or elements (e.g. organs or cells), …. focuses on the arrangement of and relations between the parts which connect them into a whole (cf. holism). (Heylighen and Joslyn) Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/systheor.html

Applying a dialectical method to systems theory provides the additional insight that eliminates some of the problems involved in constructing a mental model often designed by systems theorist:

A dialectical approach to systems theory recognizes that the system is an intellectual construct designed to elucidate some aspects of reality but necessarily ignoring and even distorting others. The dialect method adds value by asking: what the consequences would be of different ways of formulating a problem and of bounding an object of interest (Levins p122)

While systems theory is heavily dependent on quantitative mathematical analysis, of pregiven variables within an abstract system, a dialectic understanding of processes embeds the system within the opposing forces acting upon it in the environment to develop a qualitative understanding of the phenomena. In other words a dialectical methods helep facilitate a way in which systems can be viewed in their interaction with the environment. As such systems “acquire qualitatively new properties through emergence, resulting in continual evolution”. (Heylighen and Joslyn)

For instance in a study of the economy, systems theory may construct a model based on production, prices and profits in an attempt to explain their relationship and trajectory. While it may do this successfully it is still incomplete because it neglects to comprehend the social relations intrinsic to economics.”Systems theory quantifies the dynamics of the elements of the system, while dialectics translates the the results into qualitative language that leads to a holistic understanding” (Levins p122)

With regards to the theory of evolution:

Whereas the ultra-Darwinian view of evolution focuses nearly exclusively on the external (while Darwin himself was somewhat more pluralistic), modern geneticists analyzing the developmental processes of individual organisms (ontogeny) often focus nearly exclusively on the internal in their acceptance of genetic determinism. Counter to this genetic determinism (and narrow reductionism), Levins and Lewontin, in The Dialectical Biologist, explain:

An organism does not compute itself from its DNA. The organism is the consequence of a historical process that goes on from the moment of conception until the moment of death; at every moment gene, environment, chance, and the organism as a whole are all participating….Natural selection is not a consequence of how well the organism solves a set of fixed problems posed by the environment; on the contrary, the environment and the organism actively codetermine each other. (Lewontin, Levins p 89)

A dialectical relationship exists between a subject, such as an organism, or even human society, and the environment. They exist as one (in tension), given that an organism is part of nature. The former is dependent upon the latter for its existence, and both realms are transformed throughout their relationship, but “do not completely determine each other” (Lewontin, Levins p136). http://monthlyreview.org/0505clarkyork.htm

Notwithstanding the knowledge by identity that is peculiar to Sri Aurobindo’s way of knowing the world, in comparing Sri Aurobindo discourse to the scientific approach of dialectical biology one finds that both employ an epistemology that follows the particular through to its countless interconnections in the whole (world.) Both agree about the importance of appreciating difference (multiplicity) while simultaneously apprehending holism (unity). Both share an integrative view of organism and environment, science and culture, individual and society, whole and part. Both are suspicious of uncritical notions of human progress. Both agree that when the economic function of science is exploited by the marketplace the impact on human societies can be devastating. In so doing both share a certain symmetry in thinking about the role of economics and science with Karl Marx.

Like Marx both view the practice of science as mediated in society by its economic function. “Marx’s treatment of scientific progress is consistent with his broader historical materialism. Just as the economic sphere and the requirements of the productive process shape man’s political and social institutions, so do they also shape his scientific activity at all stages of history. Science does not grow or develop in response to forces internal to science or the scientific community. It is not an autonomous sphere of human activity. Rather, science needs to be understood as a social activity which is responsive to economic forces” (Rosenberg)

Before going further it should be clarified that although Sri Aurobindo perspective converges with Marxist thought in considering the impact of economics on science they diverge radically in how they perceive the roots of the problem and its ultimate solution. Moreover, both Marx and the biologist examined here employ a dialectical method and while Sri Aurobindo’s view in many ways reflects a dialectical approach to spirit and matter, his method of resolving the relationship between the two can more properly be called integral. If one wishes to read an exhaustive comparison between Sri Aurobindo and Marx one should read Sri Aurobindo and Karl Marx by Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya who remarks that one fundamental agreements between the two is that: “they expressed their profound and studied concern from the alienated man in an age dominated by matter, machine and money” (Chattopahhayaya 1988 p13).

In Sri Aurobindo’s view the impact of economics on science becomes problematic when it is appropriated for the self-aggrandizement of the titans of capitalism. Sri Aurobindo, never afraid to call a spade a spade, refers to this appropriation of science by the titans of capitalism as economic barbarism. He states the case that science solely in the service of the machinery of titanic capitalism poses a threat to human life itself. He goes so far as to state that when science is exploited by the vital power demands of the capitalist it threatens to collapse not only the common good but poses a risk to life itself. This dangerous dialectic here is between the quest for knowledge and a vulgar will to power. Here is Sri Aurobindo:

“But if science has thus prepared us for an age of wider and deeper culture and if in spite of and even partly by its materialism it has rendered impossible the return of the true materialism, that of the barbarian mentality, it has encouraged more or less indirectly both by its attitude to life and its discoveries another kind of barbarism, —for it can be called by no other name,— that of the industrial, the commercial, the economic age which is now progressing to its culmination and its close. This economic barbarism is essentially that of the vital man who mistakes the vital being for the self and accepts its satisfaction as the first aim in life. and aim, so the vitalistic or economic barbarian makes the satisfaction of wants and desires and the accumulation of possessions his standard and aim. His ideal man is not the cultured or noble or thoughtful or moral or religious, but the successful man. To arrive, to succeed, to produce, to accumulate, to possess.. He values education for its utility in fitting a man for success in a competitive or, it may be, a socialized industrial existence, science for the useful inventions and knowledge, the comforts, conveniences, machinery of production with which it arms him, its power for organization, regulation, stimulus to production. The opulent plutocrat and the successful mammoth capitalist and organizer of industry are the supermen of the commercial age and the true, if often occult rulers of its society.” (Aurobindo HC 1972)

The essential barbarism in all this is the pursuit of unfettered accumulation, possession, enjoyment, as the enlarged vital being replaces the soul of man. This results is the colonization of the environment by the desiring machine of hyper-capitalism. He continues:

“Therefore, in a commercial age with its ideal, vulgar and barbarous, of success, vitalistic satisfaction, productiveness and possession the soul of man may linger a while for certain gains and experiences, but cannot permanently rest. If it persisted too long, Life would become clogged and perish of its own plethora or burst in its straining to a gross expansion. Like the too massive Titan it will collapse by its own mass, mole ruit sua. (Aurobindo HC 1972)

While this warning given between 1916-1918 in the Human Cycle was dire when written, the passage of time seems to have done nothing to mitigate Sri Aurobindo’s concerns. He wrote the following lines in the 1940s in the last chapter of The Life Divine. If anything it appears that his perspective seems to have hardened. In a passage quoted also in the previous section he expresses his concerns for the survival of the human race because the pettiness of the human personality can not accomplish the changes required of it to positively assimilate the “colossal forces” co-extensive with the huge mechanical organization of life and scientific knowledge which it has evolved.

“because the burden which is being laid on mankind is too great for the present littleness of the human personality and its petty mind and small life-instincts, because it cannot operate the needed change, because it is using this new apparatus and organization to serve the old infraspiritual and infrarational life-self of humanity, the destiny of the race seems to be heading dangerously, as if impatiently and in spite of itself, under the drive of the vital ego seized by colossal forces which are on the same scale as the huge mechanical organization of life and scientific knowledge which it has evolved, a scale too large for its reason and will to handle, into a prolonged confusion and perilous crisis and darkness of violent shifting incertitude. Even if this turns out to be a passing phase or appearance and a tolerable structural accommodation is found which will enable mankind to proceed less catastrophically on its uncertain journey, this can only be a respite. For the problem is fundamental and in putting it evolutionary Nature in man is confronting herself with a critical choice which must one day be solved in the true sense if the race is to arrive or even to survive. ” (1054/55)

One can not help to see that part of the problem is the nature of the hyper-capitalist economy, the unregulated marketplace where a vital struggle of competition of all against all takes place. We do not know how Sri Aurobindo would view today’s global capitalism, but from his writings above it is clear that he would not approve of unfettered free markets in which nature, life, and labor were exploited by the the vital will of the opulent plutocrat, the successful mammoth capitalist and organizer of industry. In all likelihood therefore, he would view science in the service of today’s unregulated free markets as bound to end with mixed results for the common good.

In fact, contemporary science in service of the neo-liberal economy has been thoroughly critiqued in post-modern scholarship and stands accused of exploiting the common good for its own financial gain. In Marxist terms the inability of science to fully serve the common good is an inevitable result of the inequalities that govern class based societies. If anything the inequality of society has only been exacerbated since Sri Aurobindo concluded the Life Divine.

In the book Biology Under the Influence, a collection of dialectical essays on ecology, agriculture and health by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Levins asks straight forwardly: Is Capitalism a Disease? In the essay Levins demonstrates that the best facilitator of disease is poverty:

“Rates of death and other harmful outcomes increase with the level of poverty in illness like coronary heart disease, cancer of all forms, obesity, growth retardation in children unplanned pregnancies and maternal mortality.”(Levins 2006)

In fact, in determining the epidemiology of many illnesses economic conditions often can not be separated from biological causality. For example, Levins asks: Is tuberculosis cause by Mycobacterium tuberculosis or by the conditions of poverty and lack of sanitation in which these germs breed?

The impact of class on mental health is also dramatic. Recent Harvard studies have shown that among groups of teenagers from high school all of whom did equally well academically, working class kids showed prolonged rises in the hormone “cortisol” under any kind of stress while upper class kids showed a quick rise and then decline.

Moreover the phenomena of economic globalization can also make us ill:

“Reductionist science would state the cause of cholera is the byproduct of the cholera bacteria, but cholera live among plankton along the coast. The plankton blooms when the sea get warm and when runoff from sewage and from agricultural fertilizers feed the algae. The products of world trade are carried in freighters that use seawater as ballast that is discharged before coming to port, along with beat that live in the ballast water. The small crustaceans eat the algae, the fish eat the crustaceans, and the cholera bacterium meets the fish eaters.. Finally, if the public health system has been gutted by structural adjustments to the economy then the full explanation of the epidemic is jointly, Vibro cholera and the World Bank” (Levins 2006 p21,22)

Levins deconstruction of the relationship between organism/environment, class/health, culture/biology all demonstrate those condition under which “Life would become clogged and perish of its own plethora or burst in its straining to a gross expansion” In some ways the revelation Levins makes regards public health in an era of hyper-capitalism and neo-liberal global markets extends Sri Auorbindo’s critique of the exploitation of the life-world by the titans of capitalism in an industrialist economy.

Another critique of science that is shared by Sri Aurobindo and dialectical biology is of its myopic reductionist view of the world that reduces life to a series of narrow material causes. Although Sri Aurobindo may understand the reason science pursues this particular epistemology he does not look favorably on its ability to diagnosis the true source of societal ills. While not introducing spirituality into their consideration Lewontin and Levins also despair at the ability of reductionist science to diagnosis problems plaguing society.

Levins extensive critique of the public health system challenges not only the manner it has been ill served by the inequalities fostered by unregulated capitalism but also calls into question the ideological manner in which science often frames problems. Among other things this scientific ideology focuses too narrowly on biological causes while often neglecting proper consideration of the wider natural ecology and historical processes that it is embedded within. When one frames the challenges posed by this neglect of the wider ecology the resultant feedback loop calls into question the notion of scientific progress itself. The reductionist method employed by science that focuses too narrowly on the cause of disease creates blind spots that fails to anticipate others diseases.

In his study, Levins considers the failure of traditional scientific epistemology to anticipate the wider sweep of the dangers to public health. In doing this Lewontin and Levins reveals the mixed results science has had in its successes in extending human life expectancy while simultaneously failing to anticipate the outbreak of infectious diseases:

The scientific tradition of the “West,” of Europe and North America, has had its greatest success when it has dealt with what we have come to think of as the central questions of scientific inquiry: “What is this made of?” and “How does this work?” Over the centuries, we have developed more and more sophisticated ways of answering these questions. We can cut things open, slice them thin, stain them, and answer what they are made of. We have made great achievements in these relatively simple areas, but have had dramatic failures in attempts to deal with more complex systems. We see this especially when we ask questions about health. When we look at the changing patterns of health over the last century or so, we have both cause for celebration and for dismay. Human life expectancy has increased by perhaps thirty years since the beginning of the twentieth century and the incidence of some of the classical deadly diseases has declined and almost disappeared. Smallpox presumably has been eradicated; leprosy is very rare; and polio has nearly vanished from most regions of the world. Scientific technologies have advanced to the point where we can give very sophisticated diagnoses, distinguishing between kinds of germs that are very similar to each other.”(Lewontin, Levins 2006)

And below they continue by considering the failures of the public health system in coping with diseases that mostly impact the poor:

“But the growing gap between rich and poor make many technical advances irrelevant to most of the world’s people. Public health authorities were caught by surprise by the emergence of new diseases and the reappearance of diseases believed to be eradicated. In the 1970s, it was common to hear that infectious disease as an area of research was dying. In principle, infection had been licked; the health problems of the future would be degenerative diseases, problems of aging and chronic diseases. We now know this was a monumental error. The public health establishment was caught short by the return of malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, dengue, and other classical diseases. But it was also surprised by the appearance of apparently new infectious diseases: the most threatening of which is AIDS, but also Legionnaire’s disease, Ebola virus, toxic shock syndrome, multiple drug resistant tuberculosi, arid many others. Not only was infectious disease not on the way out , but old diseases have come back with increased virulence and totally new ones have emerged.” (Lewontin, Levins 2006)

The failure to take a longer view of human history and the impact that environmental changes have had on human health they conclude is a major part of this problem:

“So what was wrong with our epidemiological assumptions? We need to recognize that the historical mindset in medicine and related sciences was dangerously–and ideologically–limited. Nearly all who engaged in public health prediction took too narrow a view, both geographically and temporally. Typically, they looked only at a century or two instead of the whole sweep of human history. Had they looked at a wider time-frame, they would have recognized that diseases come and go when there are major changes in social relations, population, the kinds of food we eat, and land use. When we change our relations with nature, we also change epidemiology and the opportunities for infection.

In considering the dialectic relationship between the natural environment, culture and disease Levins weaves a complex web of associations that often escape the consideration of the problem solving techniques employed by scientific reductionism:

Waves of European conquest spread plague, small pox, tuberculosis, Deforestation exposes us to mosquito borne, tick borne, rodent carried diseases. Giant Hydroelectric projects and their accompanying irrigation canals spread snails that carry liver flukes and allow mosquitoes to breed. Monocultures of grain are mouse food , and if owls and jaguars and snakes that eat mice are exterminated the mouse population erupts with its own reservoirs of diseases. New environments such as warm chlorinated circulating water in hotels allow Legionnaires bacteria to prosper. It is…. usually rare because it is a poor competitor, but it tolerates heat better than most, and it can invade the larger but still microscopic protozoa to avoid chlorine. Finally, modern spray showers provide bacterium with droplets that can reach the furthest corners of our lungs” (Levins 2006)

In their book both Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin seem to be saying that advances in medicine and bio-technology may not so much result in “scientific progress ‘ as they do in shifting disease and other human ills to other locations in the environment or human body.

Levins and Lewontin share a view of society and biology that is not only dialectic but holistic as well. Here again convergences can be found with Sri Aurobindo writing. Whatever divergence there may be that separate Levins/Lewontin from Sri Aurobindo, epistemological, historical, experiential, or belief all these seem to shrink in their systemic apprehension of the relationship between society, science and economics.

The similarities of Lewontin and Levins with Sri Aurobindo’s social thought regards it symmetry with Marx, is of Marxism in its most idealized form. For example, Levins views a Marxist practice of health science as an attempt to integrate the insights of ecosystem health, environmental justice, health care for all, and alternative medicine. Although Sri Aurobindo would no doubt add an integration of spiritual practices as well into the above equation it is hard to see him disagreeing with Levin’s idealized view of the health sciences.

Moreover, in a move that makes possible a dialog with non-western epistemology, Lewontin and Levins rather than attempting to colonize indigenous knowledge forms with scientific ways of knowing, do as good constructionist do and credit experience as the true source of knowledge. Anchoring knowledge in experience leads them to construct a world view that does not privilege any particular European understanding of the world, nor attempts to reduce mind to mere genetic predisposition or to explain away culture using analogs of Darwinian natural selection. It also allows them to appreciate the diversity of knowledge that can be gained through the worlds indigenous traditions. Below Richard Lewontin considers the similarities between intuitive and scientific knowledge:

“Scientific and intuitive knowledge are not fundamentally different epistemologically: they differ instead in the social processes of their production and are not mutually exclusive. In fact one of my goals in teaching mathematics to public health scientist is to educate their intuition, so that the arcane becomes obvious and even trivial, and complexity loses its power to intimidate.”(Lewontin 2006 p87)

He continues by placing indigenous ways of knowing on equal footing with scientific knowledge:

“All knowledge comes from experience and reflection on that experience in the light of previous knowledge. Science is not uniquely different from other modes of learning in this regard… “

“What is special about our science is that it is a particular moment in the division of labor, in which resources, people, and institutions are set aside in a specific way to organize experience for the purpose of discovery…. “

“Our self-consciousness reduces certain kinds of errors but does not eliminate them, nor does it protect the scientific enterprise as a whole from the shared biases of its practitioners… ”

He goes on to explain how the methods of indigenous medical practices mirror those of Western medicine:

So called traditional knowledge is not static or unthinking. Africans (probably mostly women) brought as slaves to the Americas quickly developed an African-American herbal medicine. It was put together partly from remembered knowledge of plants found in both Africa and America, partly from borrowed Native American plant lore and partly from experimenting on the basis of African ruler about what medicinal plants should be like. The teaching of traditional medicine always involves experimenting, even when it is presented as the transmission of preexisting knowledge. Finally the criteria for prescribing various herbal therapies in non European/North American medicine are probably better grounded than those that guide decisions about cesarean sections, pacemaker implants, or radical mastectomies in US scientific medical practice. (Lewinton 2006)

It is not only just similarities in social thought that Sri Aurobindo shares with dialectical biology but there is a philosophical resonance as well. In what only can be called an integral move Lewontin expresses an epistemology that assesses wholes in terms of difference yet simultaneously views difference through a holistic interconnectedness. He does this however, by avoiding the historical traps that have been set by previous attempts to order Holism into hierarchical systems and teleology. “Dialectics appreciates the prereductionist kind of Holism (Hegel) but not its static quality, its hierarchical structures with a place for everything and everything in its place, nor the a priori imposition of purposefulness that may or may not be there, Thus it negates the materialist reduction’s negation of the earlier holism, a negation of a negation.” (Lewontin 2006)

The holism Lewontin advocates for can be demonstrated by natural ecology:

“Ecology has brought to pubic consciousness the realization that all things are inter-connectedness in the world The powerful impact of the realization that things are connected sometimes leads to claims that we can not separate body from mind, economics from culture, the physical from the biological, of the biological from the social. Much creative research has gone into showing the connectedness of all phenomena that are usually treated as separate. It is said that because of this interconnectedness they are all “One” an important element of mystical sensibility that asserts oneness with the Universe.

Holism so seen follows a process of deconstruction and reconstruction:

(but) Of course you can separate the intellectual constructs “body” from “mind” “physical” from “biological” from “social”.We do so all the time as soon as we label them. We have to in order to recognize and investigate the world. But it is not sufficient. After separating them we have to join them again, show their interpenetration, their mutual determination, their entwined evolution, and yet also their distinctness; “ (Lewinton 2006)

The manner in which Lewinton present a picture of the whole by first appreciating it differences through disentangling part from whole, and then reintegrating them in a way that makes their interpenetration explicit, their mutual determination transparent, their evolution entwined, is similar to the way Sri Aurobindo formulates integrality in his work and is apparent in the dialectical method he often uses to argue for it.

It is apparent that in their systemic view of science and culture that both the dialectical methods of scientist who take a constructionist rather than a reductionist view of the world and Sri Aurobindo integral perspective on science and culture have notable points of convergences.

I would suggest it is at these points of convergence that we may find a common platform to harmonize, otherwise diametric poles of experience that science and spirituality represent. To totalize either spirituality or science or privilege one over the other in a conversation would be to reduce our experience to all too narrow terms and collapse the multi-dimensional perspective in which we experience the world to a singular linear vision of causality.

It is true constructionist accounts of science such as those given by dialectical biology do not reference metaphysical teleology nor do they attempt to explain origins by invoking the idea of God. However, unlike the reductionist narratives of Darwinian Fundamentalist they do not automatically dismiss spirituality as irrelevant. Although they do share an aversion to Creationism and its “scientific models” of intelligent design, they do not denounce spirituality or privilege science in terms of human experience. They would grant both sovereign rule over their own domains of experience and meaning. This perspective can perhaps best be expressed in the words of Stephen Jay Gould – a scientist strongly influenced by dialectical biology- who in granting science and spirituality equal value in telling narratives that covered their respective fields of experience nevertheless viewed science and religion as two “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” .

At best this view honors spirituality and science as distinct ways of making sense of the world. A peaceful coexistence between faith and science is thought possible as long as one domain does not intrude on or try to colonialize the other.

While the agnosticism of Gould and others who share his view would not accept a spiritual narrative as an ultimate cause of things but still see spirituality as serving a meaningful function in society so too Sri Aurobindo -who accepts a spiritual narrative of the world- expresses a similar regard for the materialistic outlook of science:

“Physical science must necessarily to its own first view be materialistic, because so long as it deals with the physical, it has for its own truth’s sake to be physical both in its standpoint and method” (1915)

So although science and spirituality may not directly enjoin in an intimate embrace, if we accept the validity of both approaches for making sense of the world it is possible to facilitate their peaceful coexistence in culture. But is it possible that in the future that the twain between science and spirituality will meet?

Whether science will come to parse the subtle realms of consciousness that are non-physical or occult to us now and open its narratives to things that express the mystery of spirit or will retain its materialist view of the world forever, is hard to know with certainty, as Richard Levins reminds us.

“Science is often wrong because we study the known by making believe it is the known. Physicist in the late 1930s were lamenting the end of the atomic physics. All the fundamental properties were known – the electron, the neutron , and the proton had been measures- What more was there ? Then came neutrinos, positrons, mesons, antimatter, quarks, and strings. And each time the end was declared” (Levins 2006)

It is hard to determine to what ends science may lead us, the jury it seems will forever be out to lunch and no final verdict may ever be reached.

References
(abbreviated)

Sri Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press Pondicherry

The Life Divine (1949)
The Synthesis of Yoga
The Human Cycle (1949)
The Ideal of Human Unity (1949)
Process and Evolution (1909)
Yoga and Human Evolution (1909)
Materialism (1915)
The Future Poetry (1972)

reference

chapter 1

Chris Hedges:
American Fascist. The Christian Right and the war on America
Free Press (January 8, 2008)

Kevin Phillips
American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury
Viking Press 2006

Chapter
Karl Popper: Falsifiability
Conjectures as Refutations (1963)

Rudyard Kipling
Just So Stories
Chartwell Books (2009)

Thomas Kuhn
The Structure of Scientific Revolution
University of Chicago 3rd ed (1996)
direct reference

chapter 2

Salmon (www.flyfishingdevon.co.uk/salmon/year1/audioscientificmethod/scimeth.htm)

Richard Lewinton Richard Levins
The Dialectical Biologist
Harvard University Pres 1985
Gould wonderful life? (need year)

Stephen Jay Gould in Schermer
Glorious Contingency

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/shermer_contingency.html

Dusek: (http://tomweston.net/dusek.htm)

Stephen Jay Gould
New York Review of Books
Volume 44, Number 10 · June 12, 1997

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1151

Israel Rosenfield, Edward Ziff
Volume 53, Number 8 · May 11, 2006
Evolving Evolution

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18970

Chapter 4
Arthur C Clarke
Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination”, in Profiles of the Future (1962).

Stuart Kauffman
Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion
Basic Books 2008

Stuart Kauffman Interview
(http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118495085/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0)

(http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118495085/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0)

(http://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2008/11/19/stuart_kauffman/)

(http://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2008/11/19/stuart_kauffman/)

“It looks, in a general way, as though there are some progressive changes running through this series. Our brain case is nearly twice the size of erectus’s; and erectus’s brain case, in turn, is about twice the size of that of Australopithecus afarensis.

Richard Dawkins

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15220504.900-review–the-game-of-life.html?full=true

http://forum.richarddawkins.net/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=101188

Stephen Jay Gould in the New Scientist

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15220504.900-review–the-game-of-life.html?full=true

Cochran and Harpending
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
Basic Books (2009)

Chapter 5

Heeh, Peter The Lives of Sri Auorbindo
Columbia University Press (2008)

Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress
De Capo Press (2005)

Devika Mistry
http://www.strategicforesight.com/bookreview_shorthistory.htm (2005)

Banerji, Debashish (2009)
Personal Correspondence

Cavalier
http://caae .phil.cmu.edu/cavalier/80254/Nietzsche/W_P_5.html

Nietzsche Friedrich
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Cambridge University Press (2006)

Banerji, Debashish (2008)

http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2008/8/8/3830554.html

Chapter 6

Heylighen and Joslyn
Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/systheor.html

Richard Lewinton, Richard Levins
Dialectic Bology

http://monthlyreview.org/0505clarkyork.htm

(Rosenberg)/marx

Chattopahhayaya
Sri Aurobindo and Karl Marx
(1988 p13).

Richard Lewinton, Richard Levins
Biology Under The Influence
Monthly Review Press (2007)

updates:

…..

I cant think of a better way to update this article then by linking to a radio program podcast that inquires into the purpose of evolution asking: What does Evolution Want?

Here is a link with a brief summary of interviews

To the best of our knowledge

http://ttbook.org/book/science-and-search-meaning-what-does-evolution-want

If there’s one strand of evolutionary theory that sticks in the craw of nearly every religious believer, it’s the idea that human beings are just an evolutionary accident. But what if we aren’t? What if the evolution of humans, or some brainy creature like us, was inevitable once life first appeared on Earth? In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, we’ll talk with maverick paleontologist Simon Conway Morris and explore the question “What does evolution want?”

1) Renowned British paleontologist Simon Conway Morris believes human-like intelligence was the inevitable outcome of the appearance of life on earth and guess what -to the chagrin of Daniel Dennet- Richard Dawkins does too…

2) Its an non-traditional belief among scientist but Historian and philosopher of science Robert Richards believes that Charles Darwin himself believed evolution marches inevitably toward greater complexity.

3) Ruth Padel is an acclaimed British poet and a direct descendent of Charles Darwin. She’s now written “Darwin: A Life in Poems,” having grown up hearing stories about her famous ancestor.

4) John Haught is a Roman Catholic theologian at Georgetown University, and the author of “God After Darwin” and “God and the New Atheism.” His vision of evolution is influenced by Teilhard De Cardin

5) Paleo-anthropologist John Hawks talks about how we continue to evolve–changes that can be seen in the bones of modern humans.

25 thoughts on “100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution”

Don Salmon on March 13, 2010 at 9:36 am said:

Hi Rich:

Very interesting and thought provoking article. One point about your interpretation of a passage in The Life Divine. You quote Sri Aurobindo as doubting progress. However, on p. 833 he clearly states that he is stating that “line of reasoning” in order to refute it. (of course, Sri Aurobindo never, as far as I’m aware, supports the modernist idea of economic/political/technological progress without a spiritual basis). Here’s the passage:

Volume: 18-19 [SABCL] (The Life Divine), Page: 833
This is a line of reasoning that has a considerable cogency and importance, and it was necessary to state it, even if too briefly for its importance, in order to meet it. For although some of its propositions are valid, its view of things is not complete and its cogency is not conclusive. And first we may without much difficulty get rid of the objection to the teleological element which the idea of a predetermined evolution from inconscience to superconscience, the development of a rising order of beings with a culminating transition from the life of the Ignorance to a life in the Knowledge, brings into the structure of the terrestrial existence. The objection to a teleological cosmos can be based on two very different grounds,—a scientific reasoning proceeding on the assumption that all is the work of an inconscient Energy which acts automatically by mechanical processes and can have no element of purpose in it, and a metaphysical reasoning which proceeds on the perception that the Infinite and Universal has everything in it
already, that it cannot have something unaccomplished to accomplish, something to add to itself, to work out, to realise, and there can therefore be in it no element of progress, no original or emergent purpose.
rcarlson on March 13, 2010 at 1:48 pm said:

Don

your comments are certainly appreciated,.

The idea of progress associated with evolution is certainly an ideology of the Enlightenment that was widespread in Sri Aurobindo times and while in many ways he is a post-Enlightenment thinker, given the time he was writing its historical formations are still notable in his works. Its for this very reason that I foreground this seeming shift in his writing on collective human progress (1909-1949) In embracing a more Nietzschean individual move away from false consciousness toward liberation and in eschewing a Teilhardean massification of noospheric consciousness moving toward the teleology of an omega point, is to observe him interrogate those very valuations of progressive human evolution that are derived from the Enlightenment. No doubt he had long before recognized the imperialistic impulses that such progressive ideologies spurred in Europe, but it interesting to see his work evolve during the epistemic ruptures in the wake of the Wars. And it is certainly indicative of a cultural perspective that is mature, critical and evolutionary.

In short, in the paper nowhere do I assert that Sri Aurobindo did not believe in progressive evolution in the entirety of the meaning he assigns to it, -the Enlightenment influence be what it may- but rather “For Sri Aurobindo the question of human progress is, as almost everything he wrote about, complex.”

In the passage you quote he seems to be talking about the the “value” he assigns to the progress of nature or cosmos and I would not specifically disagree with you on that.

However, its not exactly a straight forward teleology in nature that its progress leads to because he does prefix his statements on a supramental evolution on a very big “if”. The biggest “if” being the survival of the human race.

There are some important nuances required to fully understand what he means by progressive evolution. Namely when Sri Aurobindo talks about progress one has to make a distinction between, 1) the progress of nature and nature’s yoga, 2) of humanity as a whole, 3) of specific individuals.

Whereas in the case of number #1 and #3 he does seem to tend toward the possibility of progress, I do question his view of #2 as being progressive.

Regards # 2: Sri Aurobindo, in this very chapter of Life Divine, as I recall, states outright: that humanity as a whole will not undergo the supramental transformation and will remain as a transitional species step in the ladder that leads to the gnostic being. Although he may have believed naively in his early writings of a the progressive evolution of the human race I argue his view of general human progress certainly changed from 1909 to 1949 and his final views on (general) human progress are oddly similar to those ideas of agricultural progress in which I cite Ronald Wright:

“Wright argues that progress, as an ideology is merely a myth. Humans see their own progress and advancement in the rapid transition from an industrial economy to information based one, while the reality is that – the food technology of the late Stone Age is the only one we cannot live without. The crops of about a dozen ancient people feed the 6 billion people of the world today. Despite more than two centuries of scientific crop breeding, the so-called green revolution of the 60’s and the genetic engineering of the 90’s, not one new staple has been added to our repertoire of crops since prehistoric times.”

I argue that Sri Aurobindo’s view of humanity’s spiritual progress is similar to Wright’s view of agricultural progress in that although he believes that humanity as a whole has developed:

“increasing subtlety, complexity, manifold development of knowledge and possibility in man’s achievements, in his politics, society, life, science, metaphysics, knowledge of all kinds, art, literature; even in his spiritual endeavor, less surprisingly lofty and less massive in power of spirituality than that of the ancients, there has been this increasing subtlety, plasticity, sounding of depths, extension of seeking.”

That fundamentally humanity has added no new staple of human qualities or its spiritual crops:

“But otherwise he is what he always was in the early beginnings of civilization: he continues to manifest the same capacities, the same qualities and defects, the same efforts, blunders, achievements, frustrations. If progress there has been, it is in a circle, at most perhaps in a widening circle. Man today is not wiser than the ancient seers and sages and thinkers, not more spiritual than the great seekers of old, the first mighty mystics, not superior in arts and crafts to the ancient artists and craftsmen;”

I will have to quote at length from the paper to get at the complexity of his idea of human and natures progress:

For Sri Aurobindo the question of human progress is, as almost everything he wrote about, complex. While he believes in 1909 that human progress is the agent of change and writes: Whether we take the modern scientific or the ancient Hindu standpoint the progress of humanity is a fact.”(Aurobindo 1909) by the early 1940s his view seems to have notably altered and he writes:

“the idea of human progress itself is very probably an illusion, for there is no sign that man, once emerged from the animal stage, has radically progressed during his race-history; at most he has advanced in knowledge of the physical world, in Science, in the handling of his surroundings, in his purely external and utilitarian use of the secret laws of Nature. But otherwise he is what he always was in the early beginnings of civilization: he continues to manifest the same capacities, the same qualities and defects, the same efforts, blunders, achievements, frustrations. If progress there has been, it is in a circle, at most perhaps in a widening circle. Man today is not wiser than the ancient seers and sages and thinkers, not more spiritual than the great seekers of old, the first mighty mystics, not superior in arts and crafts to the ancient artists and craftsmen; the old races that have disappeared showed as potent an intrinsic originality, invention, capacity of dealing with life and, if modern man in this respect has gone a little farther, not by any essential progress but in degree, scope, abundance, it is because he has inherited the achievements of his forerunners. Nothing warrants the idea that he will ever hew his way out of the half-knowledge half-ignorance which is the stamp of his land, or, even if he develops a higher knowledge, that he can break out of the utmost boundary of the mental circle.” (Aurobindo 1949 p832)

No longer optimistic about the inevitable triumph of human progress, the evolutionary transcendence of the human race he suggests will be facilitated only by a few special individuals.

“if a superior creation is intended, then, certainly, it is not out of man that the new grade, type or pattern can develop; for in that case there would be some race or kind or make of human beings that has already the material of the superman in it, just as the peculiar animal being that developed into humanity had the essential elements of human nature already potential or present in it: there is no such race, kind or type, at most there are only spiritualised mental beings who are seeking to escape out of the terrestrial creation. If by any occult law of Nature such a human development of the supramental being is intended, it could only be by a few in humanity detaching themselves from the race so as to become a first foundation for this new pattern of being. There is no reason to suppose that the whole race could develop this perfection; it cannot be a possibility generalized in the human creature.” (Aurobindo 1949 831/832)

In the above passage what is notable is the use of the word “if”, as in “if a supramental creation is intended”. One finds in his text that even when his statements suggest an inevitability that “if “ is implicitly never far away. If his mature conclusions regarding human progress are no longer optimistic he does not discount some forms of human progress, if not in developing new skills and traits then marked by an increase in subtly, complexity, and variety of development:

“It cannot truly be said that there has been no such thing as human progress since man’s appearance or even in his recent ascertainable history; for however great the ancients, however supreme some of their achievements and creations, however impressive their powers of spirituality, of intellect or of character, there has been in later developments an increasing subtlety, complexity, manifold development of knowledge and possibility in man’s achievements, in his politics, society, life, science, metaphysics, knowledge of all kinds, art, literature; even in his spiritual endeavor, less surprisingly lofty and less massive in power of spirituality than that of the ancients, there has been this increasing subtlety, plasticity, sounding of depths, extension of seeking.” (Aurobindo 1949, 841)

Although he even issues a caveat here, prefixing the above statement with the following:

“it may be conceded that what man has up till now principally done is to act within the circle of his nature, on a spiral of nature-movement, sometimes descending, sometimes ascending, — there has been no straight line of progress, no indisputable, fundamental or radical exceeding of his past nature: (1949) “

Therefore, Sri Aurobindo concludes that the mere refining of skills by the Modern has done nothing to facilitate the transformation of humanity that is the aim of his yoga to accomplish:

“his progress has not indeed carried the race beyond itself, into a self-exceeding, a transformation of the mental being. But that was not to be expected; for the action of evolutionary Nature in a type of being and consciousness is first to develop the type to its utmost capacity by just such a subtilisation and increasing complexity till it is ready for her bursting of the shell, the ripened decisive emergence, reversal, turning over of consciousness on itself that constitutes a new stage in the evolution”(841)

When Sri Aurobindo says that human progress is probably an illusion he is stating that there is no unending linear human progress as was the type envisioned in the European Enlightenment. In the European post-Enlightenment view of progress, humanity follows a steady path of evolutionary advance. In contrast Sri Aurobindo views human progress as defined by advances and then by sudden reversals in fortune that result in it following a curved rather than a straight lines. In this respect Sri Aurobindo’s view of human progress is fairly consistent with the views of Ronald Wright who states that human progress, as an ideology is merely a myth. The path of progress is beset by a myriad of traps and snares that ultimately lead human kind to circle back on itself.

But if there is nothing in collective human progress that is being perfected to prepare for an inevitable descent of what Sri Aurobindo calls the “supramental manifestation” then what is it that is preparing for the appearance of the superman? A careful reading of Sri Aurobindo reveals that the deliverance of the new race is not dependent on human progress but by the force he has already described in the Synthesis of Yoga “the effort of nature in man” or “nature’s yoga”.
roc on March 14, 2010 at 2:22 am said:

Rich,

you quote Wright,

“Wright argues that progress, as an ideology is merely a myth. Humans see their own progress and advancement in the rapid transition from an industrial economy to information based one, while the reality is that – the food technology of the late Stone Age is the only one we cannot live without. The crops of about a dozen ancient people feed the 6 billion people of the world today. Despite more than two centuries of scientific crop breeding, the so-called green revolution of the 60’s and the genetic engineering of the 90’s, not one new staple has been added to our repertoire of crops since prehistoric times.”

After reading Jared Diamond’s “Guns germs and steel”, I should say that there are several reasons for the existence of only 6 staple crops. Humans developed these staple breeds after crossing several wild species. What we presently know about the major staple crops is due to several generations of experimenting of wild breeds. One of the main reasons that these limited number of staple crops is the size of the seed. Most of the seeds of wild cereals are too small to harvest them in great quantities. Human intervention has probably changed the quantity of conscious bodies rather than quality of conscious bodies on earth. Humans have progressed or stabilized in numbers on earth but now we realize, however that things are not going to be the same because resources are limited.

Human progress when measured in terms of society or mass progress is a dubious measure of progress because there are several
sections of society with different interests. So the burden of progress relies upon the limited number of individuals who understand nature’s intentions and who live in the experience higher consciousness. So these may be called the “heros”. There are a lot of “ifs” in this narrative and nothing is definite about humans as race progressing to supermind. Even if the mass under performs in the portfolio, the heros have to perform excellently to maintain the average looks like

But your example of limited staples, i feel, somehow does not fit this human progress narrative very well.
rcarlson on March 14, 2010 at 12:34 pm said:

ROC: But your example of limited staples, i feel, somehow does not fit this human progress narrative very well

RC: Well the fact is human progress is the point being contested so if you got a better one -to describe ever-presence and development, repetition and difference then lets have it? Sciy hopes to be a proving ground for evolutionary tropes. Actually the more I think about it, the more I like the metaphor of staple crops trope versus the evolution of human qualities. I have no idea why you think that your example from the popularizer Diamond – whose work has problems to ” sociobiological or materialist histories”…. would make a better one. Moreover the belief in a number of individuals who know “nature’s intentions” or who live in a “higher consciousness” is a metaphysical one and therefore entirely conjectural, whereas a harvest of spiritual crops can be imagined more concretely in terms of general human qualities. aka wonder, curiosity, morality, abduction, intuition, love….. all of which can not be demonstrated to have changed much….

But if you like Diamonds work as a conjectural account of human evolution then by all means come up with a metaphor to explain it.
roc on March 15, 2010 at 1:07 am said:

If you are using the example of a dozen staple crops as a metaphor for dubious progress in the mass of the humans, one can agree at this comparison from one perspective only. yes, what you say is right. But what i am trying to say is that there are reasons why only a dozen cereals are cultivated and they have been excellently explains in Diamond’s book (his book though a popularizer is coming from a scholar qualified in plant biology. the book may have problems explaining all the important human conquests based on technology and geography, which i agree, becuase history is complex and cannot be completely explained. But the reasons Diamond gives about the dozen cereals we harvest are based on facts. Why cannot we believe it. The fact is that the size of seeds of the rest of the cereals are too small to harvest in large quantities.

So, if you are evaluating progress in a spiritual scale, then one can say that progress has not happened. May be a 1 or 2 on a scale of 10. But in terms of stabilizing the race( which is one prime progress of all animals on earth) then humans have progressed 8 on a 10 scale. That’s why spiritual progress can be hoped only from a limited higher consciousness experiencing humans hypothesis.
All i was trying to say was that humans have done a great job in bringing and harvesting cereals from wild breads in the forests and their intervention is commendable. They definitely progressed in the technology of cultivation of crops. Not adding one more cereal cannot be the explanation for failed human progress at least in terms of progress measured in human population scale.
rc on March 15, 2010 at 1:49 am said:

Roc: Not adding one more cereal cannot be the explanation for failed human progress at least in terms of progress measured in human population scale.

RC: Your missing the point, for its not about adding further staples its about the stabilization of human qualities across time versus technics, its about speciation and enculturation not addition or subtraction, and certainly it is not meant to raise questions of either successful or failed progress that both pose traps of thinking when theorizing evolution.

The issue you raise however about seeds is an important one. If consciousness and our bodies are under mutation then so too is the seed. The hybrid seed co-evolves with the virtual flows of global capital, Genetically altered seeds that are used to produce the mono-cultural crops of the Monsanto harvest we consume. The evolution of these staples such as the corn, whose mutation is determined by commodity markets- then become so all pervasive in our (American) diet that they inscribe an entire global system of economic production into the very biological codes of our transitional bodies
roc on March 15, 2010 at 3:22 am said:

I understand your comparison but was trying to see another side of dozen cereals victory over other plant cereals and why humans choose to stick with these dozen cereals instead of
other cereals. I found Diamonds book very useful in explaining this anomalous fact.

I agree with you about the commercial seed interests and corporate profit motives.

The great leap of human progress (scientific, intellectual) has happened in the last three to two thousand years. Genetic engineering
is around from last half a century. Even if humans make a new cereal in the lab, large population will not accept
to consume it. There are valid reasons to oppose to consume genetic engineered food . Even otherwise people do not like to eat new food because food habits are tied to traditions, culture and food preparations.

Sometimes I feel we are asking too much from present humans in regard to spiritual progress in comparison to the progress
of man from millions of years. The time scale we are talking
is in millions of years of human progress. Mass of the people are happy the way
they are. They cannot believe that humans have a spiritual destiny or a higher purpose. They cannot think other than
immediate needs and desires. All sociological evidence shows that mass of humanity is bound to the identity of the body.

So the burden of spiritual progress is on the few individuals who make it their purpose to bring this new values
for humanity if one believes in higher destiny hypothesis. How can one not believe when he/she experiences bliss on earth( which is another matter)? Any way
this will take several generations of individuals to make it happen that is if humans survive the next environmental
catastrophe (global warming or something else that way we are going). These individuals should participate in higher
places of power in the state administration to have any effect on the society. Otherwise a spiritual fringe here and
there is not going to make great difference.

Will these spiritual people turn to politics and public administration and change policies
for any higher values to establish in the society in the future or at least some support for alternate destinies for mankind? I feel, it is possible because some individuals were able to do it in the past.
Will humanity survive the environmental disasters? This is a hard question because the
problems we face are unprecedented.
rcarlson on March 15, 2010 at 10:38 pm said:

a comment to clarify something I wrote earlier in my first response to Don,:

“The idea of progress associated with evolution is certainly an ideology of the Enlightenment that was widespread in Sri Aurobindo times and while in many ways he is a post-Enlightenment thinker, given the time he was writing its historical formations are still notable in his works. ”

and I wanted to add

Its for this very reason that I foreground this seeming shift in his writing on collective human progress (1909-1949) In embracing a more Nietzschean individual
move away from false consciousness toward liberation -or supra-liberation- and in eschewing a Teilhardean massification of noospheric consciousness moving toward the teleology of an omega point, -IMO- is to observe him interrogate those very valuations of progressive human evolution that are derived from the Enlightenment. No doubt he had long before recognized the imperialistic impulses that such progressive ideologies spurred in Europe, but it interesting to see his work evolve during the epistemic ruptures in the wake of the Wars. And it is certainly indicative of someone whose cultural perspective is mature, critical and evolutionary.
…

One thing also that we should adjust for in metaphors regards staples is that staple crops include more than cereals:

“Most staple foods derive either from cereals such as wheat, barley, rye, maize, or rice, or starchy root vegetables such as potatoes, yams, taro, and cassava.[2] Other staple foods include pulses (dried legumes), sago (derived from the pith of the sago palm tree), and fruits such as breadfruit and plantains.[3]“(wiki)
..

roc I agree that the environmental stakes are enormous. This matter also speaks to the importance of groups like Navdanya in India

Navdanya

“Navdanya is a network of seed keepers and organic producers spread across 16 states in India.

Navdanya has helped set up 54 community seed banks across the country, trained over 500,000 farmers in seed sovereignty, food sovereignty and sustainable agriculture over the past two decades, and helped setup the largest direct marketing, fair trade organic network in the country.

Navdanya has also set up a learning center, Bija Vidyapeeth (School of the Seed) on its biodiversity conservation and organic farm in Doon Valley, Uttranchal, north India.

Navdanya is actively involved in the rejuvenation of indigenous knowledge and culture. It has created awareness on the hazards of genetic engineering, defended people’s knowledge from biopiracy and food rights in the face of globalisation and climate change.

Navdanya is a women centred movement for the protection of biological and cultural diversity.”

…
Dr. R on May 27, 2010 at 6:00 am said:

Aurobindo is master of illicit reification! He bandies about pseudo-agents such as “Life”, “Mind”, “Overmind”, “Supermind” and so on without a hint of any self-questioning of the appropriateness of (mis)using language in this way. It is absurd to write, as he does, that evolution requires the intervention of “Life” and “Mind” as though these were entities or agents of which it makes sense to say that they intervene or fail to intervene. “Life” and “Mind” are not entities with causal powers. They are universal terms or general categories abstracted from particulars possessing the complex of attributes we want to conveniently designate by the use of “life” and “mind”.
Whose life? Whose mind? Whose “overmind”? Whose “supermind”?
These terms refer to attributes and it is absurd to reify attributes since they inhere only in objects or entities.
Aurobindo’s fundamental philosophical fallacy is to elevate attributes to the status of entities or agencies with causal powers.
Thus, it is pure philosophical nonsense to speak, as Aurobindo does, of “the descent of the Overmind”, “the descent of the Supermind” and so on. These are not entities or agents and it makes no sense to say that they ascend or descend anywhere.
debbanerji on May 27, 2010 at 1:31 pm said:

R: Aurobindo’s fundamental philosophical fallacy is to elevate attributes to the status of entities or agencies with causal powers.

It seems you have invented the ground rules for philosophy. All that is going on is that Sri Aurobindo’s experience and hence assumptions regarding consciousness are not the same as yours and that seems to be driving you crazy. Whereas to ‘normal’ human experience consciousness is a property of living beings, to a yogi living beings are phenomenal constructions of Consciousness. Similarly, Life, Mind, Overmind and Supermind are forms of Consciousness and hence have agency. Person and the Principle are expressions of different modalties of Consciousness with different properties, but anything which is conscious can have agency. What you seem to assume is that all philosophy needs to base itself on your experience of reality. Yoga Philosophy in general (aka darshan) is based on the realzied yogi’s experience of reality and is always accompanied with a praxis (yoga). This makes its own claim to the discourse of Philosophy in general, though its bases need to be theorized. No one set the boundaries of anydiscipline in stone, disciplinary boundaries are all open to revision.
Dr. R on May 27, 2010 at 9:53 pm said:

DB: “you have invented the ground rules for philosophy.”
The principle that it is an error to turn attributes or qualities into subejcts or agents is an elementary principle of logic, philosophy, and common-sense. While the use of such language may have a purpose or point in literature to convey figurative meanings, it is plainly silly to do so in a literal way as Aurobindo does again and again.
Second, Aurobindo falls often into category mistakes because of his unbridled tendency to reificate qualities or attributes. I don’t care what sort of (delusional?) “experiences” someone claims to have. If that person says “Saturday is handsome.” and intends it to mean literally, it’s just plain nonsense. Weekdays cannot sensibly be described as “handsome” or “ugly”.
“Life”, “Mind”, “Overmind”, “Mind of Light”, “Supermind” and so on and the interminable proliferation of oracular pronouncements on them in Aurobindo’s turgid writings fall into the same category of philosophical nonsense if construed as entities or agents. “Mind” has not descended into DB. DB is an organism or subject possesed of set of attributes conveniently designated by “Life” and “Mind”. There is nothing more to the claim that “DB is a living being and has a mind.” In terms of Aurobindo’s fanciful use of language, however, it turns out that one can write an entire essay on how “Life” and “Mind” “descended” into DB, or worse, on how DB as some sort of empty container “ascended” into “levels of Life and Mind” and became filled with the (queer) “substances ” of “Life” and “Mind” and what not!
Why waste precious words and paper (just think of the trees! ) on all this fanciful verbiage? Why not simply say “DB is alive and thinks.”?

DB: “All that is going on is that Sri Aurobindo’s experience and hence assumptions regarding consciousness are not the same as yours and that seems to be driving you crazy. Whereas to ‘normal’ human experience consciousness is a property of living beings, to a yogi living beings are phenomenal constructions of Consciousness. Similarly, Life, Mind, Overmind and Supermind are forms of Consciousness and hence have agency. Person and the Principle are expressions of different modalties of Consciousness with different properties, but anything which is conscious can have agency. ”
“Consciousness”? Here we go again merrily along the illicit reification trail! What “Consciousness”? Whose “Consciousness”? To speak of some weird, disembodied, “un-subjectified” “Consciousness” as an agent is again a misuse of language and philosophical confusion. There is no such thing as “consciousness” floating around in space or existing sui generis in some strange world. I wonder if Aurobindo’s “Platonizing” tendencies have run out of control here. Remember Plato with his weird notion of a “World of Forms or Ideas” in which the “Ideas” of Love, Justice, and so on existed sui generis in their pure form uncontmainated by particulars? That is the sort of thing Aurobindo is doing here with all this talk of self-subsisting entities such as “Life” ,”Mind”, and so on existing above and beyond particular livng and conscious entities. But it’s “spooky metaphysics” all the same!
DB himself has some inkling of this because he writes that “anything which is conscious can have agency”. I have no quarrel with this statement, but it is a far cry from claiming that “Consciousness” can have agency. It is intellelligible, then, to speak in this vein of “anything which has an overmind or is overmentally conscious can have agency”, “anything which has a supermind or is supramnetally conscious can have agency” and so on, but this is very different from claiming that “Overmind can have agency.” or “Supermind can have agency”. The questions for Aurobindo and his followers are then: “Who are the agents, persons, or entities who possess an overmind?” and “Who are the agents, persons, or entities who possess a supermind” and so on. Whether these questiosn are intelligible depends on the intelligibility of the notions of possessing an “overmind” or “supermind”.

DB: “Yoga Philosophy in general (aka darshan) is based on the realized yogi’s experience of reality and is always accompanied with a praxis (yoga).”
How do you know whether the person is a “realized yogi”? And, assuming that the person is a “realized yogi”, how do you know what actually was the “realized yogi’s” experience of reality?
This is a standard line of appeal to the (alleged) mystic’s (alleged) religious or other sort of experiences. It is often used to silence criticism. It is also a slippery slope to dangerous nonsense. Any person can make this appeal in defense of any kind of irrational or false beliefs and claims. However, the fundamental issue concerns whether the alleged “realized yogi’s experience of reality” is intelligible in the first place and whether it is veridical or delusional. We cannot have access to the “realized yogi’s” private experiences indepedently of how he or she has expressed it in language or by other means. f the person has used language, then language being a public institution and not a private creation has its rules of intelligibility to which those utterances, at the very least, must conform. Problems of intelligibility and consistency in the linguistic expressions of the “realized yogi” point to problems either with the quality of those experiences and/or that person’s understanding of those experiences. There is no means independent of the linguistic expression of the “realized yogi” to validate those experiences or the yogi’s understanding of those experiences. Hence, a careful study of the writings of the “realized yogi” is the only means available to others to determine, to the best extent feasible, the truth of the matter.
Dr. R on May 27, 2010 at 10:02 pm said:

“Hence, a careful study of the writings of the “realized yogi” is the only means available to others to determine, to the best extent feasible, the truth of the matter.”

What this implies is that we have no independent recourse to “realized yogi’s” experience of reality first to authenticate or validate what he or she has written about it. That’s putting, asDB does, the cart in front of the horse. What we can do is to scrutinize the writings first to determine whether indeed they contain good grounds for believing that the person is a “realized yogi” and whether his or her alleged experiences are verdical or delusional, important or trivial.
Dr. R on May 27, 2010 at 10:49 pm said:

Aurobindo’s entire theory of evolution rests on his theory of the involution of “Satchidananda” into its opposite “the Inconscient”. If this theory of involution is incoherent, then A’s theory of evolution collapses.
The incoherence in the theory of the involution of “Satchidananda” is comparable to the incoherence in the theory of Incarnation in Christianity. It is incoherent to suppose that God became a human being in Jerusalem, got crucified, etc., etc., for the obvious reason that an infinite being cannot transform itself into a finite being. This is not a limitation on God’s omnipotence. Rather, it is not the sort of thing even God can do. God cannot bring about states of affairs which are logcially impossible, e.g., create a square circle. Since it is logically impossible for an infinite being to become finite and still remain infinite, or an eternal being to become mortal and still remain eternal, the Christian doctrine of Incarnation, and hence, the doctrine of Trinity, is plain and simple nonsense and a gross abuse, on the part of the “Church Fathers”, of the precious instrument of language!
Analogously, “Satchidananda” is what it is and it makes no sense t0 suppose that it can transform itself into anything else, not to mention transforming itself into its opposite, i.e., the dreaded “Inconscient” of Aurobindonian imagination, and still remain what it is. The “Inconscient” is characterized by attributes which are the very opposites of “Sat”, “Chit”, and “Ananda” in just the way the person Jesus had attributes such as “being born”, “died on the cross”, etc., which are the opposites of the attribute of “eternality” (= unborn, cannot die) possessed by God. Hence, it is incoherent to suppose that “Satchidananda” can become “the Inconscient” in just the way it is incoherent to suppose that God incarnated as Jesus or any finite being for that matter.
So, let’s move on and try to discover the nature of evolution without being “blinkered” by inadequate theories.
debbanerji on May 28, 2010 at 7:16 am said:

The only thing I can agree with in all this diatribe is that it is futile to spend any more ink (printing or virtual) debating this. That Consciousness or Satchidananda has agency is not Sri Aurobindo’s invention but part of the discursive condition of Indian Philosophy (darshan). This discourse has an independent existene and history along with its companion discourse of praxis (yoga). It is not an Idealist premise as Platonic Ideas may be considered to be (though there too the question of reality of said Ideas continues to haunt the western discourse). For that matter, Consciousness has agency to Hegel as well. The coupled Indian discourse of darshan-yoga assumes a milieu of aspirants to the realization of Reality as self-conscious and independent of apparent “human agency.” Dr. R’s universalistic claim that this is incoherent is part of what Sri Aurobindo calls “The Denial of the Materialist” in the LD and no one (least of all Sri Aurobindo) is interested in proving a point to him. Life, Mind, Overmind, Supermind as forms or appearances of Consciousness are conscious principles and have agency. In the Indian discourse there is another way of referring to these as Person instead of Principle but that makes it no different. Conscious principles of Life, Mind etc. are there synonymous with Life-Being, Mind-Being, etc and referred to as Pranamaya Purusha, Manomaya Purusha etc. These are self-presentations of Brahman or Satchidananda. As far as I am concerned, there is no further issue to this argument and the stale logical strait-jacket of “DR” R’s demonstrations of the impossibility of Incarnationism or of Involution of Satchidananda in the Inconscinece merits no further attention.
R.C on May 28, 2010 at 6:18 pm said:

DR: Aurobindo is master of illicit reification!

RC: But you can accuse the entire history of metaphysics as being guilty of this charge!
And one who make this accusation today certainly has more ammunition available to them now than at the time Sri Aurobindo started writing about evolution over 100 years ago.

Moreover, your argument is fairly conventional and essentially comes down to the fact that none of us have access to Sri Aurobindo’s experience so there is no way to empirically verify it to establish its truth claims thus, to believe in it is just an act of faith.
Ok so what?

I am not sure why you chose to comment on this particular article because it does not even remotely assert the validity of Sri Aurobindo’s vision or theory of evolution. In fact it concludes with the conclusion that science and religion are Nonoverlapping Magisteria and today we should be careful not to culturally conflate the two.

The article also supports common sense in that while everyone should be able to believe what they want about our origins it would be irresponsible to build public policy around religious or metaphysical narratives. Moreover, the first chapter of the article argues that an in depth reading of Sri Aurobindo reveals that he would most likely agree with this premise. (a.k.a Why Sri Aurobindo would not believe in Intelligent Design). The article demonstrates that Sri Aurobindo certainly understood the rules for establishing scientific facts, the relative importance of this and the implications for society regards the dangers of privileging religious arguments over scientific or rational ones. He wanted to establish a social democracy in India not a theocracy.

In fact in the last article posted under Praxis that gives Si Aurobindo’s views on Psychology of Yoga he asserts that even what is considered to be “occult” in Indian Psychology must be put in terms of Western Science in order to establish its validity to a wider world.

This does not mean that Sri Aurobindo wholeheartedly embraced scientific or rational explanations of phenomena and he found their underlying epistemology inferior than the ways of knowing of a yogi he had honed from the darshanic tradition, but, and one finds this in his socio-political text, he was critically self-aware as to what he was undertaking and knew the constraints of communicating his experience within a civic polity.

Moreover, the article attempts to assess the claims made by Sri Aurobindo in his account of evolution against both contemporary cultural and scientific views on evolution. But it does this with the understanding that any theory of evolution today that smacks of teleology would be widely discredited and rejected out of hand. Therefore, it does not attempt to conflate physics and metaphysics but rather, explores those elements of his writings about evolution that may in fact have fruitful correspondences with the narratives science tells us about evolution today. Of course contemporary science would not agree with his teleological approach or any of its metaphysical elements but, some of Sri Aurobindo’s ideas put forth on evolution over 90 years ago do correspond in many interesting ways to some views contemporary science holds today that concern symbiosis, punctuated equilibrium and principles of emergence and complexity theory. More interesting however, is his cultural assessment of the phenomena in that he avoids the problematic Enlightenment derived associations of evolution with collective human progress and warns circa 1914 about the dangers of eugenics.

Since most of his writings on evolution are dated by in pre War years, one does not in fact know if given the abject failure of metaphysics in the 20th century, whether his argument would take a different form now than he proposed then. I would assume given the importance he stresses on the ability to evolve that if he were writing today that his discourse would be very different. The article notes how is view of evolution were evolving over his lifetime No one let alone Sri Aurobindo argued to have his theory of evolution taught in the public education system or adopted as public science policy, he is putting out his vision for those to accept or reject based on their experience. . To attempt to transpose his discourse into a Platonic setting from the cross-cultural Darshanic tradition simply to philosophically discredit the metaphysical premises of his argument is only to set up a straw man for a fall.
debbanerji on May 28, 2010 at 7:56 pm said:

RC: Moreover, your argument is fairly conventional and essentially comes down to the fact that none of us have access to Sri Aurobindo’s experience so there is no way to empirically verify it to establish its truth claims thus, to believe in it is just an act of faith.
Ok so what?

While I am in agreement with all you have to say, this characterization of “DR” R’s position needs further commentary. As Vivekananda, adapting the method of Science to the field of yoga-darshan pointed out, the difference between an Idealist tradition and “Indian metaphysics” is exactly this that its claims are empirically verifiable – more, such verification is its only raison d’etre. Just as the discursive conditions of Science include assumptions which are verifiable and a community which is engaged in verifying such claims and assumptions, the discursive conditions of yoga-darshan is the same, though the mothods of verification are different. If there is a statement made by a scientist that kangaroos exist in Australia, it is open to others in this community to go to Australia to verify the statement. One does not write diatribes sitting in London that such a statement is nonsense, incoherent, illogical etc. At most, one can say one is not interested in the statement or in verifying it. The same goes for a statement in the discourse of drashan-yoga. To say that one has no access to Sri Aurobindo’s experience hence SA had no right to state it or hence it is patently false is of the same order as claiming that kangaroos cannot exist because one has never seen them. Again, what accompanies the statements of darshan is a historical archive of experiences and a method of verification. There exists a long and continuous history within the darshan-yoga discourse asserting facts of experience such as that Consciousness (chit-shakti) has existence independent of its specific manifestations and also has independent agency. And the only raison d’etre for Sri Aurobindo’s darshanic statements is their experience through the method provided in his yogic writings.
Kepler on May 29, 2010 at 1:12 pm said:

One could go further in comparing scientific empiricism to mystic empiricism by pointing out that scientists make observations (which others can reproduce), but scientists also produce theory to attempt to account for the observed phenomena. In mystic traditions (e.g. Indian Yoga), a mystic’s experiences can be (with difficulty) pursued and verified by others, but the theory created by mystics based on their experiences is something additional, and could be as insufficient as various scientific theories have proven to be. A mystic’s philosophy is generally no more a simple description of experiences than a scientific theory is.

So while a mystic’s philosophy is an attempt to account for concrete experiences, that doesn’t make the philosophy immune to error of various kinds. But it certainly (and very importantly – as you point out) provides it with a solid empirical basis, to be distinguished from the more purely speculative metaphysics that is characteristic of western philosophy since the ancient Greeks.
Dr. R on May 29, 2010 at 2:36 pm said:

1. Alright, before I point out the tangle of confusion and misunderstanding in RC’s and DB’s responses to my criticisms, let me make one point in favor of Mr. Aurobindo Ghose’s views on evolution and human evolution: there are several interesting ideas in his account which are logically independent of the Vedantic “metaphysical swamp” in which they are stuck or embedded. What this means is that they can be extricated from that “metaphysical swamp” and considered on their own in terms of their plausibility and explanatory power with no loss of their significance or meaning. I will mention as an example his idea that the evolution of species is progressive (although not in a unilinear fashion) in respect of powers of consciousness exhibited in species. In his account, he further explains this evolutionary progress in terms of his theory of involution of Satchidananda-Supermind into the “Inconscient”, but while I reject his theory of involution as incoherent, this does not require me to also reject his claim of progress in evolution in respect of powers of consciousness exhibited in species. I think it is a testable empirical claim. I also think that, Gould notwithstanding, it is a plausible claim.

2. RC’s claim that Aurobindo would not countenance “Intelligent Design” is based on a conflation of three different points: a) An omnipotent and omniscient creator designed the universe, b) This creator designed and brought the universe into existence in one stroke of creation ex nihilo, and c) This creator is an “extra-cosmic creator” or is “outside” the universe which it created. It is correct to claim that Aurobindo does not or would not accept (b) and (c), but he clearly affirms (a) in his Life Divine chapter. 14 on “The Supermind as Creator”. Of course, in Aurobindo’s account, the “Supermind-Creator” does not engage in “special creation”, or creation ex nihilo, but it is certainly a designing and organizing agency or being in itself or a capacity or power of some being. So, if “Intelligent Design” is understood in terms of an affirmation of an omnipotent and omniscient designing and organizing agency or being as the ultimate explanation of the universe, Mr. Aurobindo Ghose’s account does embrace that conception.

3. RC suggests that reification has been rife in the history of metaphysics. True. So what? It is still a mistake! Fanaticism is a feature of all religious history, but that does not undermine a descriptive or evaluative account of it in any particular religion. A mistake is a mistake even if it is widely prevalent! Thus the criticism that reification is rife in Aurobindo’s writings is not logcially answered by the retort that it is also rife in the history of metaphysics. As to his claim that metaphysics has been an “abject failure” in the twentieth century, I can only rcommend even a cursory perusal of standard textbooks on metaphysics to temper that bombastic statement.

4. DB’s response to the charge of reification is to claim, in essence, that reification in Aurobindo is not a mistake but corresponds to the latter’s “experience of reality”. This is based on the dangerously confused assumption that an unintelligible claim or statement in ordinary language can be rendered intelligible, or must be accepted as intelligible, merely on grounds of an authoritarian appeal to someone’s inscrutable private “yogic” experience. DB seems to have completely missed, or deliberately overlooked, my argument that no amount of appeal to such private experiences can render intelligible claims such as “Saturday is handsome.”, “Justice has a serious face.” and so on if they are meant to be taken literally and not figuratively.
In the same way, when Aurobindo writes of “Mind”, “Life”, “Consciousness” and so on as if they are independent entities and ascribes directional movements of “ascent” and “descent” to them and writes as if he means all this literally, it makes no sense at all. If you think it makes sense to speak of “Consciousness” as some sort of an entity existing over and above conscious beings such as animals and humans, think whether it makes sense to speak of “Justice”, outside the language of mythological personification, as an entity existing over and above just and unjust actions and just and unjust persons. Language allows us the freedom to describe an epoch marked by a great deal of injustice as an epoch marked by the dominance of injustice or the “descent” of injustice, but it would be intellectually immature to think that such descriptions literally mean that some spooky entity by the name of “Injustice” has become dominant or has “descended” into human society.
Sure, there will be no shortage of “mystics”, especially in the booming religious market of India, who will claim that they have seen visions of a “Dark Being” called “Adharma” or “Injustice” spreading and covering the four corners of the Earth, but it would require a person of feeble intellect to accept such claims at face value and conclude that it makes sense to believe that “Injustice” is an entity or being.

5. DB writes: “To say that one has no access to Sri Aurobindo’s experience hence SA had no right to state it or hence it is patently false is of the same order as claiming that kangaroos cannot exist because one has never seen them.”
Again, DB assumes that one can endow a statement with intelligibility merely by an authoritarian appeal to alleged experiences of alleged spiritual authorities. I would ask that DB ponder this question for a minute: What sort of an experience could conceivably show anyone that “Consciousness” is an entity existing over and above and independently of particular beings possesed of attributes we refer to by the term “consciousness”? I think that both DB and Aurobindo would be hard-pressed to give a coherent answer to this question because of the unintelligibility in the second part of the question.
DB also succumbs to the fallacy of false analogy here. While there is nothing unintelligible in the claim that Kangaroos or particular entities of that sort may exist even if one has not seen them for oneself, it is a different matter with claims such as “Injustice is a person with a black visage.”, “Justice has a golden aura around her head.” “Consciousness has descended into Matter.”, “Mind has evolved from Life.” “Supermind will evolve from Mind.” and so on. We really do not know what they mean if they are meant to be taken literally. They remain unintelligible to anyone familar with the semantics of those terms in the English language.
Dr. R on May 29, 2010 at 3:33 pm said:

Let me sum up my main case against DB’s attempt to defend Aurobindo’s pervasive and flawed method of reification in his writings:
Your reliance on the appeal to A’s experiences will not work because of the mutual contradictions and rival accounts of mystics, yogis, seers, and such. If the appeal to the experiences of a mystic to justify his or her claims is a plausible mode of argument, then we should conclude that the “experiences of reality” of Shankara, Ramanuja, and Madhva all validate their theological systems. But then, the catch here is that they contradict each other on several metaphysical issues. Thus, a refutation by reductio ad absurdum of your appeal to the experiences of a mystic to validate his metaphysical claims.
When Ramana Maharishi heard portentous and pompous statements on bringing down the supermind, etc., he had one annihilating response to all that by way of a great rhetorical question: WHO is to bring down WHAT and WHERE?
LOL LOL LOL
I submit that this question still hangs today like the sword of Damocles over the heads of “Aurobindonian Fundamentalists”! LOL
So, a follower of the Maharishi can say that M’s experience bears no testimony at all to this talk of facilitating by means of yoga “the descent of the Supermind” and such. In DB’s court of appeal, this would mean, on the authority of M’s experience, and contrary to Aurobindo’s divagations, that there is no such thing as “descent of the Supermind” or “bringing down the Supermind”. But, then, in that selfsame court one would also claim that there is such a thing as “bringing down the Supermind” and so on because of A’s experiences! Again, a reductio ad absurdum against DB’s court of appeal.
R.C on May 29, 2010 at 6:23 pm said:

DR So, if “Intelligent Design” is understood in terms of an affirmation of an omnipotent and omniscient designing and organizing agency or being as the ultimate explanation of the universe, Mr. Aurobindo Ghose’s account does embrace that conception.

RC: Not only do you have to contort the meaning of the dualistic, pseudo-science of Intelligent Design as it is widely understood today to make your point but, you entirely miss the point here.

The point is there is no evidence that Sri Aurobindo would buy into the pseudo-scientific theory of conservative Religious ideologies that attempt to rescue their meta-physical accounts of creationism from scientific scrutiny by making them appear scientific. He clearly understood that difference and importance of keeping science and religion
distinct in such matters, and in matters of State he advocated for a secular polity.

(BTW. While Aurobindo’s account of evolution is still metaphysical it differs from that of the Intelligent Design Movement in that in his account the divine itself is involved in matter in a lila of self-finding. The creator is creation eliminating the dualism present in monothestic accounts of Intelligent design in which a omnipotent force outside creation plays the role of designer or organizer. If anything it could be called a self-organizing process or supra-intelligent self-finding rather than intelligent design, but again that is not the issue I raised in my comment, and is beside the main point)

DR RC suggests that reification has been rife in the history of metaphysics. True. So what? It is still a mistake!

RC: You miss the point again my friend. There is nothing new in any of your arguments that attack metaphysics. So the fact that you choose to single out Sri Aurobindo
for an attack in the context of an article that does not even argue for the metaphysical basis of his theory of evolution speaks more to the personal agenda that you have invested in yourself. So goes the logic in my: so what?

DR:As to his claim that metaphysics has been an “abject failure” in the twentieth century, I can only rcommend even a cursory perusal of standard textbooks on metaphysics to temper that bombastic statement.

RC: Doc, now I suspect that you are probably only spoiling for a fight -besides the fact that the article you commented on takes no position on the correctness of Aurobindo’s theory of evolution – on the one hand you vehemently argue against metaphysics yet when another party equally protest the phenomena you suddenly turn pivot and start quoting text books. So my suspicions now – are that you just want a good tussle.

In fact, I stand by my statement that Metaphysics has been an abject failure in the 20th century. I dont need to glance through any text book a glance back through the bloody
history of the 20th century demonstrates that in fact that no god came to save us, and most meta-physicians on either side were all for cheering on the carnage and finding sources in their holy books to justify it.

Moreover, a glance back through history might do your own work some good, since you seem oblivious to the historical context backgrounding Aurobindo’s writing in the early part of the 20th century, before anyone wrote a word about the post-metaphysical age, that philosophically confronts us today.

DR: his claim of progress in evolution in respect of powers of consciousness exhibited in species. I think it is a testable empirical claim. I also think that, Gould notwithstanding, it is a plausible claim.

RC: Oddly the one claim you would agree with in Sri Aurobindo, I would disagree with although Sri Aurobindo did not argue it so simplistically and perhaps the source of this belief in progressive evolution (esp that concerns humans) owes more to the ideology of the Enlightenment than to Sri Aurobindo who believed in the progressive evolution of Nature but not so simply regards to human (species) evolution that at its best can be seen as a mixed bag. According to him it is individuals who progress to the superman not the entire species,
Also progress is a value judgment and not a scientific one. This evolve the change, become different, it is only the values of the observer to label them progressive or not.

Moreover, you are confusing complexity with powers of consciousness. “Powers of consciousness” per say does not even describe any specific thing that can be tested scientifically. Therefore, I dont think any reputable biologist of note would agree that one can test the amorphous powers of consciousness exhibited in species of which you speak.
Kepler on May 29, 2010 at 6:32 pm said:

Our Dr. R goes on and on about the supposedly illicit and incoherent reification of terms like Mind or Consciousness, as he doesn’t believe there could be any such universal principle capable of action given that these are only categorical abstractions of the properties of particular entities, as Red is a descriptive abstraction of a certain color property belonging to particular entities.

This reflects a certain metaphysical commitment that no one need accept, and it would in fact render much science problematic. When a gravitational phenomenon is causally explained by the curvature of space-time – which particular entity’s space-time is it? What particular entity are we referring to when we say “a species evolves”? Certain containing realities can determine the phenomena of their contents, and their reification is often adopted as part of an overall inference to the best explanation. There is no such “rule of language” that prevents it – only commitments to certain positions in the philosophy of language that one need not accept. In mystic philosophy Consciousness or Spirit is often proposed as a cosmic initiating and containing principal in which particular phenomena are formed, contained, and acted upon, like an ocean and its waves. If any such reality seems foreign to one’s routine daily experience of life and therefore presumed unlikely or even incoherent, that’s fine but it’s a mighty weak argument to those who have had concrete empirical contact with it.

Regarding disagreement of mystic’s philosophies, even if two mystics have an identical experience they may interpret or elaborate it in different philosophical terms. This doesn’t remove the empirical basis of the resulting philosophies, which convey on them greater epistemic weight than purely speculative metaphysical theories have. As a matter of fact Sri Aurobindo described his first yogic realization in terms very similar to the traditional illusionist Adwaita Vedanta, but subsequent experiences led him to view this illusionism as only a transitional appearance, and as not ultimately providing the best explanation of universal reality.
Dr. R on May 30, 2010 at 12:57 am said:

1. On Why RC Needs To Get his Aurobindo Straight:
In his article “100 years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution” RC quotes a passage from Aurobindo ‘s Life Divine (Chap. 23, “Man and The Evolution”, p. 832):
“However, by the early1940s when he is revising the last chapters of The Life Divine he writes “the idea of human progress itself is very probably an illusion, for there is no sign that man, once emerged from the animal stage, has radically progressed during his race-history; at most he has advanced in knowledge of the physical world, in Science, in the handling of his surroundings, in his purely external and utilitarian use of the secret laws of Nature “ (Aurobindo 1949 p. 832)
RC clearly thinks and want us to believe that this is a view Aurobindo himself holds.
Well, I read that chapter and page and guess what? RC has failed to recognize that this passage is an exposition of a point of view later (on p. 833) criticised by Aurobindo himself!!!! Aurobindo is not affirming this point of view as his own, but rather expounding it as an alternative view to his own!
After expounding this view which denies spiritual evolution and moral and cultural progress in human history, Aurobindo writes on p. 833 of The Life Divine:
“This is a line of reasoning that has a considerable cogency and importance, and it was necessary to state it, even if too briefly for its importance, in order to meet it. For although some of its propositions are valid, its view of things is not complete and its cogency is not conclusive.” The rest of the chapter is concerned with showing the plausibility of his case for human spiritual evolution as an inevitable aspect of the evolutionary process and the plausibility of affirming that “…man as he is cannot be the last term of that evolution.” (p. 846-847)
I would recommend that RC refrain from foisting or reading Gould’s muddled ideas on evolution (that judgment on Gould’s ideas comes from one of the foremost evolutionary biologists of our day, John Maynard Smith) on or into Aurobindo’s writings.
2. On Why RC Needs to Understand ID (Intelligent Design) Correctly:
It goes without saying that ID must be identified in terms of its core claims before one can discuss the issue of whether and to what extent it is shared by or compatible with Aurobindo’s ideas.
I refer RC to the Discovery Institute’s (the official mouthpiece of ID) definition of ID: (http://www.discovery.org/csc/topQuestions.php#questionsAboutIntelligentDesign)

“The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”
This is certainly a thesis Aurobindo affirms over and over again in his Life Divine.
It is critical to note that the Discovery Institute holds that ID is not identical to creationism and disavows Biblicla creationism:
“Discovery Institute is not a creationist organization, and it does not favor including either creationism or the Bible in biology textbooks or science classes.”
ID as propounded by the Discovery Institute also eschews claims on the nature of the agency which has brought about “Intelligent Design” in the universe. Obviously, Aurobindo would diverge from DI here and argue that the agency in question is the “Supermind” involved in “Matter”.
3. Science and Religion: Again, RC foists Gould’s muddled ideas on religion and science on Aurobindo. The central muddle in Gould’s view is the failure to distinguish the descriptive or empirical issue of whether science and religion have stepped on each other’s domain from the normative or prescritive issue of whether it is a good idea for them to do so. As Bertrand Russell has documented in his book Religion and Science, in the history of the West, Judeo-Christianity was always in the face of science dictating what is permissible for the latter to investigate or propound. It continues to do even today in the area of genetic research, cloning, Darwinian evolutionary science, and so on. So, the answer to the descriptive question of whether religion and science have been stepping on each others’ toes is an affirmative one. Gould’s normative or prescriptive thesis is that it is a good idea for science and religion not to do so because, according to him, religion is purely a domain of values and science a domain of factual inquiry and investigation into the nature of reality. It sees to have escaped Gould’s eyes that religions everywhere in the world contain assertions about the origin and the nature of the world, the nature of anmals and human beings, and the sorts of entities which exist in reality unknown to humans, e.g., spirits, supernatural beings, etc. Thus, given this component of religions, there is unavoidable conflict between religion and science when science investigates, as it should, whether such claims are plausible.
In my view, Aurobindo does not hold views similar to Gould’s. What he holds is that the fundamental quest for God or the Absolute is at the heart of all religions and that this quest follows the general patterns of development from the crude to the increasingly complex and veridical conceptions also exhibited by the history of science . (The Life Divine p. 699)
I would proffer that it is a reasonable intepretation of Aurobindo’s writings to ascribe to him the view that both science and the fundamental quest of all religions are on the same broad continuum or spectrum of empirical inquiry or inquiry into the nature of reality. This makes possible and explains satifactorily (or it could do so) episodes of conflict, divergence, and ultimate convergence between those two forms of empirical inquiry.
Dr. R on May 30, 2010 at 1:28 am said:

RC: “Moreover, you are confusing complexity with powers of consciousness. “Powers of consciousness” per say does not even describe any specific thing that can be tested scientifically. Therefore, I dont think any reputable biologist of note would agree that one can test the amorphous powers of consciousness exhibited in species of which you speak.”
I did no such thing. What I have in mind is exactly the increasing complexity of powers of consciousness exhibited across the range of evolution of species. This is a claim affirmed by Aurobindo. He refers to new powers of consciousness emerging in evolution and the transformative effects of such powers on their bearers.
What are these powers of consciousness? I suppose we could construe them in terms of powers of comprehension of the environment, powers of self-consciousness, powers of thinking, and powers of problem-solving and adaptation to environmental challenges, and powers of “aesthesis”. Anyone who has read Aurobindo should know what “aesthesis” means for him. Of course, there is room here for making these claims more specific and precise, but I hope you get the drift of my delineation of “powers of consciousness”.
The claim that a chimpanzee exhibits more of such powers or a greater degree of such powers in comparison, say, to a monkey, and that humans exhibit more of such powers or a greater degree of such powers than chimps are testable hypotheses.
Since I qualified the claim, following Aurobindo’s own statements, and said that this sort of progress in evolution is not unilinear or continuous, it is unfair to assert, as you do, that the view is “simplistic”.
R.C on May 30, 2010 at 12:23 pm said:

DR: Well, I read that chapter and page and guess what? RC has failed to recognize that this passage is an exposition of a point of view later (on p. 833) criticised by Aurobindo himself!!!! Aurobindo is not affirming this point of view as his own, but rather expounding it as an alternative view to his own!

RC: Well Doc I read your comments and guess what? The only admission made here is a testimony to your poor reading skills!

Had you really read the entire chapter in Sri Aurobindo or had you made an attempt to comprehend what I actually wrote in the article you would have found that the quote you mention on Page 833, is just a taking off point I use for the exposition of Sri Aurobindo’s nuanced views on evolution and progress. Either you failed to read the article, are simply unable to comprehend the subtleties and nuances in the argument or you simply argue in bad faith. In short you are conflating progress in nature and human civilization (in this same chapter he will assert that in no way does he mean that the whole of humanity will evolve to to have the gnostic status conferred on it, but rather will remain a transitional stage in natures ascent). I have been over this specific point more times then I ever imagined because of people who automatically associated Sri Aurobindo with the ideology of collective human progress (as you seem to do in your progressive view of evolution) My suggestion to you is you scroll up and go back to read the second comment in this comment train in which I respond to the same mistaken inquiry. This link should bring you to the comment

DR:. On Why RC Needs to Understand ID (Intelligent Design)

RC:In fact I understand ID just find, the real problem here is your monumental failure to understand the difference between the social and philosophical aspects of Sri Aurobindo thought. Nor does it seem that you are able to comprehend the difference between holding a belief in the private sphere or an intentional community versus the attempt to force those views on to the public sphere.

DR: the last term of that evolution.” (p. 846-847)
I would recommend that RC refrain from foisting or reading Gould’s muddled ideas on evolution (that judgment on Gould’s ideas comes from one of the foremost evolutionary biologists of our day, John Maynard Smith) on or into Aurobindo’s writings.

RC: Man your claims are so far fetched and stray so far from the actual content of the text that they really no longer deserve the energy required for a response, since your Janus faced contortions reinforce my belief that you just showed up here spoiling for a fight, let me sum up:

In the article I go out of my way to explain just how different Gould and Aurobindo accounts of evolution are and allow both to stand on their own merit. Again you are conflating the metaphysical philosophical positions with social ones. My point is that regards evolution that religion and science should not be conflated in the public sphere. (Got any objections to that?) This is what Gould and John Maynard Smith believed and my conjecture is that given his preference for a secular polity, his ability to separate the mission of science from that of religion that Sri Aurobindo would to.

Regards your John Maynard Smith comparison and your claims that he is the foremost evolutionary biologist of the day -like other items you have written here- is just your opinion factually there is no world cup competition for biologist where one is claimed world champ. Rather there are a number of excellent evolutionary biologist in the field who have competing theories. Smith did disagreed with Gould on several points, but so does Richard Dawkins. But if you want a quote from him on Gould here is a good one: “Stephen Gould is the best writer of popular science now active. . . . Often he infuriates me, but I hope he will go right on writing essays like these”.
R.C on June 6, 2010 at 12:46 am said:

IMO ( reflected in the article) if you want to either take the metaphysical or the empirical (scientific) argument for or against evolution thats all well and good within the personal sphere, but in terms of civic discourse you really run into problems when you conflate the two for example:

DR: I will mention as an example his idea that the evolution of species is progressive (although not in a unilinear fashion) in respect of powers of consciousness exhibited in species. In his account, he further explains this evolutionary progress in terms of his theory of involution of Satchidananda-Supermind into the “Inconscient”, but while I reject his theory of involution as incoherent, this does not require me to also reject his claim of progress in evolution in respect of powers of consciousness exhibited in species

and

DR:The claim that a chimpanzee exhibits more of such powers or a greater degree of such powers in comparison, say, to a monkey, and that humans exhibit more of such powers or a greater degree of such powers than chimps are testable hypotheses.<

RC:Reviewing this correspondence proved to be a head scratcher! So here are some concluding thoughts:

Doc I am not sure how we got to this point that you needed to put forward the most obvious fact of evolution, that requires no hypotheses to be tested at all! Merely because we are here arguing philosophical points on the internet is self-explanatory! To test your hypothesis would require something along the lines of putting apes in a room for 100,000 years with two computer keyboards to see if they even get passed how to spell banana….

But the fact that we can use computers while monkeys cannot does not demonstrate a scientific hypothesis. What confuses me most here Doc is that in trying to argue basically what are empiricist points contra Sri Aurobindo’s metaphysics (aka we have no access to his personal consciousness) is that your own argument succumbs to one of the most popularly flawed metaphysical beliefs about evolution namely;progressive evolution be it unilinear or otherwise. So while you harp on Sri Aurobindo for putting forward metaphysics instead of an inter-subjective recognition of normative validity claims, at the end of the day your own couched metaphysical beliefs and teleology do much the same thing.

While it may be a satisfying personal metaphysical explanation, to argue that evolution is being propelled by a teleology or “increasing powers of consciousness” from a scientific perspective it is entirely convoluted!

A scientific explanation would state that these “powers of consciousness” unfold in evolution because of adaptation a.k.a they either fill adaptable niches that ensure survival of the organism, or are epi-phenomenal features of natural selection (spandrals) that take on their own evolutionary lineage. But natural selection has not been demonstrated to function to substantiate any teleological ends least of all the amorphous “increasing powers consciousness” that you construe:

DR: “ in terms of powers of comprehension of the environment, powers of self-consciousness, powers of thinking, and powers of problem-solving and adaptation to environmental challenges, and powers of “aesthesis”

RC: Although this may be in part how evolution seems to have fashioned Homo sapiens among the millions of other species that have existed, scientifically there is no reason to believe that your “powers of consciousness” be anything other than the product of Natural Selection.

Moreover, to state that evolution is driven by an increase in “powers of consciousness” is to invoke the affirmation of its opposite namely, that evolution also necessitates the decrease in powers or functions of consciousness or bodily adaptations. (devolution)

If certain evolutionary functions evolve over time often they do so at the expense of other appendages of the organism that tend to atrophy over the course of evolution for example, humans (sans technology) no longer can climb trees like apes, whales who were originally land creatures, after taken to the oceans, can no longer walk the Earth. Even with the augmentation of technology McLuhan would argue that following a technological extension or prosthesis a type of biological amputation often ensues.

But before anyone can put forward the argument for evolution in terms of “increasing powers of consciousness”, one would first have to define what Consciousness is, which no one really has done yet to everyone’s satisfaction.

In fact, Doc it appears that you are merely substituting your own value judgments for what can empirically be demonstrated to cause evolution. We would all have to gain access to your private sphere of consciousness to determine how you came upon your value system or how you define what consciousness is, least we all be led down the slippery slope into the chasm of DR’s personal solipsism.

But before one could even begin to assess evolution in terms of your valorization scheme one would have to assess what these increasing powers of consciousness do. And how would one value these increasing powers of consciousness if they can also manufacture the genocide of its own species, destroy its environment, or engineer biological organisms and bombs to blow itself up with?

Moreover, the outcome here would depend on just how one defines Consciousness and how one values Power, to the same extent one would be able to conclude if evolution actually scored a net increase or decrease in your “powers of consciousness”

It is perhaps not surprising, since you are obviously confused regards separating out metaphysical arguments from social or ethical ones, the error you make here. The fact is that your argument that evolution is being mysteriously guided toward some increasing powers of aesthetics is as metaphysical as anything Sri Aurobindo argues. It seems its just that you think that after the passing of a century or so that you have figured out a Logic to better ‘splain it based on recent European philosophy and its objections to Plato.

While your explanation may be internally sufficient to meet your personal philosophy it fails badly the litmus test set forth in this Article namely, of being worthy to be called scientific or to be admitted into the civic sphere (esp regards education) because it places normative validity claims outside the realm of rational discourse!

Posthuman Destinies

Science, Culture, Integral Yoga

100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution

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