Although the particular thinkers (Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault) referenced in the preceding article I posted on Death and Reckoning may on the surface seem to be pursuing a different manner of inquiry than Sri Aurobindo, in that they are separated by cultures and styles of discourse, I hope to show that their concerns are complimentary and that a dialog between them is required to respond to our contemporary aporia at the cusp of a global culture of nilhilism. After two thousand years of western philosophy in Foucault and Derrida one witnesses thought and language as it approaches its margins. Humanity has reached the limits of its representations, backgrounded by the vast field of the “unthought” (supra/sub consciousness), and foregrounded by the codependent arising of phenomena or “differance.” For the Modernist the dictum “I think therefore I am” no longer means quite what it did at the moment of Descartes conversion to representation, and that which could be thought. Because now those certain thoughts, that "I am", has only one destiny, and that is to vanish at the precipice of thought crossing over to its “other”. In the Order of Things Foucault writes:

"As knowledge reaches towards its origins, its "accidentally" disrupts its foundations and shows that our limits of knowledge are caught up in their own dissolution. "[B]y rediscovering finitude in its interrogation of the origin, modern thought closes the great quadrilateral it began to outline when the Western episteme broke up at the end of the eighteenth century: the connection of the positivities with finitude, the reduplication of the empirical and the transcendental, the perpetual relation of the cogito with the unthought, the retreat and return of the origin, define for us man's mode of being." (335) By uncovering knowledge's own finitudes, one discovers that historical inquiry has constituted a subject called "humanity" on the limits of its own limits, that is, the finitudes themselves make humanity possible. The modern cogito addresses itself not in what it thinks, but what it does not think, what thought is unthought, and articulates itself in the elsewhere of thinking. Humanity finds the limits of its knowledge and the constitution of its being not in what is thought, but what is unthought (or the generative double of thought)

And it is at the other side of the unthought ( in the West an unthought that emerges in the symbolist poetry, psycho-analysis, and subjective Nietzschean forces of Modernity ) where we would do well to introduce the work of Sri Aurobindo (and welcome the enlightened alterity of an Eastern gaze). Although we must make some distinctions in how we parse Sri Aurobindo's writing with respect to Western Scholarship and even recognize some of the limitations we may encounter when confronting its metaphysical assertions. Except for Martin Heidegger, both Derrida, and Foucault sought to studiously avoid making metaphysical truth claims, -and this is why so much of their writing seems enigmatic and often reads as riddles- because such truth claims reached their limits in the 20th century. The reason for this is not only for their culpability as the organizing ideas for totalitarian regimes both Religious and Secular, but much more for the fact that the linguistic turn in philosophy demonstrated that all metaphysical assertions could ultimately be reduced to language.

To this extent one has to also recognize the limits of discourse in Sri Aurobindo as he schooled in the European modernist tradition. In fact, since his defining discourses concern evolution and the advent of the supermind/superman he can not avoid being in dialog with certain prominent Western scientists and philosophers; most notably Darwin, and Nietzsche. Additionally because he conceives of progressive evolution he is also in an extended conversation with historical theorist such as Georg Hegel, social thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, and intuitive philosophers like Henri Bergson, all whose view of evolution was essentially progressive. (In contrast to Nietzsche, who thought rather that human evolution seemed to result in the multiplication of the contemptible "Last Man" with his slavish Christian morality, herd mentality, and emotional hollowness)

Although these subtle dialogs with modernist philosophers clearly influenced his discursive style, Sri Aurobindo is far too complex to simply be pigeonholed and to categorize him simply as a Modernist would clearly be mistaken. Indeed in  his deconstruction of the Enlightenment value of rationality, his decentering of human personality, and his open ended commitment to experience all add a distinctly post-modern flair to his work.

However, to critically interrogate his writing on yoga as one would works of European scholarship would be inappropriate – since these are more properly rooted in the Darshanic tradition of India – and one would be measuring what is also essentially specific to South Asian perspective, an embodied view of the world rooted in experience according to the analysis and language regimes of discursive Western practice; the epistemological continuity would simply fail.

One must therefore distinguish his discourse on yoga from that on evolution and society, to parse the difference between what he sees (darshan) from how he theorizes (discourse) his visions. Because here one encounters the bridge of experience which delivers us from our fraying thought, our reduction to language, the margins of philosophy. But it is his darshanic discourse on the phenomenological practices and experiences of integral yoga that furnishes a response to the post-structuralist yearnings before the finitude of thought.

The encounter between Sri Aurobindo and Michel Foucault occurs at the cusp of mans vanishing, before what Nietzsche would call his "crossing over" .  The event horizon of each ones "crossing over"  may be discontinuous or even displaced by centuries in its manifestation, but for all their seeming incommeasurablity in uncanny ways Sri Aurobindo and Foucault have certain styles of thinking in  consonance. If Sri Aurobindo style of thinking critically has an early postmodernist flair,  Foucault's thought movements - from structural to post-structural - are at times elegantly integral.

Both straddled the ruptures of the transitory thought movements referred to as modernism and post modernism. Sri Aurobindo an early visionary of a coming episteme interrogated the objective certainty of the Enlightenment conceiving a phenomenological praxis to unlock the subjective depths whose portals reveal the limits of our species epistemology, in an evolution beyond man; Foucault who dissected the representations of the Enlightenment revealing those psychological mutations which became modernism, an epoch whose end he forecast by proclaiming the end of man.

Both explorers of uncharted cultural topographies, who plunged into the depths of the human psyche to excavate the various strata of historical consciousness locating their corresponding experiences by tracing their separate veins of epistemology and power along an integral axis. Both committed to a triune analysis of phenomena, Foucault collectively assessing, language, economics, and natural history, Sri Aurobindo uncovering the physical, vital , mental, structures which comprise our species past and present. Both visionaries of a future in which man becomes something else, an other standing on the far side of our next epochal rupture, which can only be known through a radical epistemology. Sri Aurobindo conceives man as a transitional being, Foucault as a phenomena to vanish in the sands of time. Both re-imagined or re-visioned man Sri Aurobindo accordingly to the practice of sadhana and Foucault through the method called archeology. Both comprehend man as a transitional  phenomena and here both Foucault and Sri Aurobindo converge in developing methodologies that make transparent the heritage we conceive of as human nature. Both conceive man as having a dual nature Sri Aurobindo a surface personality with psychic depths and Foucault as an empirical/transcendental doublet.

This is not at all to say that both were alike or shared participation in a cultural milieu which defined similarities in their vision. Rather, there are significant divergences of approach which distinguish them as does their lives lived on two sides of early and late Modernism, East and West, teleology and randomness, metaphysics and post-structuralism as well as their personal commitments to ascetic or sexual practice. The primary referents in their discourses are separated at times by eras and cultures far away, yet they both return to a common principle of self-organization that is Nietzsche. Although Foucault's archeological methods and Sri Aurobindonian praxis of sadhana differ in their reconstruction of the Superman (Ubermensch) as primarily epistemological or ontological, cultural or individual, both practices have important consequences for the future bodies of "man" the transitional being.

rich 3/27/08