From: "Debashish Banerji" <ewcc@…>
Date: Wed Mar 2, 2005 1:17 pm
Subject: Critical reason and common sense

Rich,

A note on your equation of critical reason and common sense - I had thought of the two as opposed to each other. In other words, while critical reason attempted to probe the foundations of statements, presumably to arrive at truth, common sense was self-evident, validating a time-tested truth, and therefore immune to critical reason.

Sri Aurobindo's use of the term "common sense" as you have quoted it (i.e. when some begin yoga the first thing they renounce is their common sense) refers to the term, I believe, as belonging to the domain of established practical realities of life - such as if one stops eating, one will die or if one puts one's finger in the fire, it will burn. These things are self-evident "facts" of the present condition of human and social life and need to be accepted as the hard-nosed ground of our beginnings, but not necessarily as the fixed foundations of the future. For Sri Aurobindo their acceptance constitutes the basis of the difference which he makes between mental idealism and spiritual realism. Whereas the first believes that some mentally held truth-principle must prevail over anything which opposes it, the latter believes in arriving at the possibilites of an unmanifested or veiled truth by first accepting the conditions of the present - working from the near to the far as in Sri Aurobindo's third principle of integral education.

A good example of the difference between moral idealism and spiritual realism would be the difference in opinion between Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo concerning England's approach to Hitler. Gandhi wrote an open letter to Churchill urging him not to use violence against Hitler but rather to win him over by the power of love. Sri Aurobindo held on the other hand that Gandhi's approach would be nothing short of national suicide and put his force fully on the side of the Allies in their war effort against Hitler. Though Sri Aurobindo's stand was certainly taken on far deeper than superficial grounds, one could also say that compared to Gandhi's, it was common-sensical.

However, this does not mean that the conclusions of common-sense do not lend themselves to critical enquiry, even if they need to be accepted as heavily loaded probabilities of the present. When asked by a disciple if one could theoretically dispense with food and sleep, Sri Aurobindo responded in words to the effect - yes, one can but if you were to do so now you will die. Here he is affirming common sense while at the same time pointing to its relative reality in time and space, not to any absoluteness of its truth.

In the quote on "critical reason" from Sri Aurobindo put out by Amrita, the office of the critical reason is to question seemingly self-evident truths, and to take nothing for granted. However, Sri Aurobindo's espousal of this faculty is made with conclusions in mind far different from the espousal of the same faculty by the champions of the Enlightenment, as for example in Kant's critical transcendentalism. For the rational Enlightenment, critical reason stands sentry against the acceptance of any irrationality. For Sri Aurobindo, critical reason holds any or all propositions in doubt until proved otherwise by the power of a self-evident experience of truth. The existence of the latter (i.e. the possibility of experiencing truth and of knowing it due to its self-evident nature) is a given in Sri Aurobindo. In Kant, the need for something of this kind does not go unacknowledged and in fact feeds into his definition of "common-sense". For Kant, pure reason alone can never know the world as-it-is, thus the "objective world" if it exists, is completely transcendent to human beings, so that nothing in it can be truly self-evident. While the laws of reason are self-evident, since they do not depend on individual differences and are the equal property of all human beings, they can operate only on the evidence of the senses, which remain subjective and to which the realities of the world are not self-evident - i.e. there is nothing "common-sensical" about the world. If there was to be something truly common-sensical, it would have to transcend the subject-object dichotomy - i.e. there must be somthing within the subjective senses which must coincide with something in the objective world and thus arrive at an experience which is transcendent of subject and object. For Kant, who develops this idea in his Critique of Judgement, it is the aesthetic sense which serves this function. The experience of Beauty for Kant is the awakening to an intuition of order in a seemnigly chaotic or bewilderingly complex world, an experience which is at once objective (i.e. beauty is an inherent property of a beautiful object) and subjective (i.e. we have a sense in us which perceives this objective property). This experience (or intuition) is the only human escape from the wall that separates us from the world and thus from the trap of a critical intelligence without any ability to arrive at absolutes. In other words, for Kant as well (and Kant's Critique of Judgement may be seen as the intitiatory text for both Aesthetics as a modern western Philosophical discipline and of German Transcendentalist thought), critical reason is useful to purify our assumptions and arrive at practical relative conclusions but must cede to suprarational experience if we are to have any taste of Reality. Following Sri Aurobindo then, we might say to this that for Kant, the experience of Beauty becomes the door to the realm of the self-evident spiritual experience of Truth, another realm about we may say, as in other more familiar cases, that Sri Aurobindo's yoga begins where Kant's philosophy of Critical Transcendentalism ends.

Debashish