In the first few short essays that introduce this book, the author sets out to describe Sri Aurobindo as a darshanik, one who does not speculate and intellectualise, but who directly realises or spiritually and intuitively perceives the truth of existence. Sri Aurobindo expanded this traditional role to include Western thought and truths in a universal synthesis. In a series of very personal mini essays, he writes on Sri Aurobindo’s role of darshanik vis-à-vis Indian philosophy, Western philosophy, linguistic and literary philosophy, and the philosophies of psychology, religion, history, and what he terms the political thought for humanity’s future.
Singh calls Sri Aurobindo a philosopher in action, who not only spoke the truth for his times but for the next few hundred years, calling men to awaken to their highest possibilities and showing the way it was to be done.
REVIEW
This is a book that could interest different readers for somewhat different reasons. Those without extensive knowledge of philosophy can expect to find in it an accessible introduction to an otherwise forbidding topic. Specialists, on the other hand, are likely to discover in these pages unexpected new perspectives on modern India’s most important philosopher. The conflicting approaches suited to such diverse audiences could not, perhaps, have been combined with perfect success in a single volume. Academic critics may find fault with the book on various grounds, including an excessive reliance on quotations from general histories of philosophy and an almost complete lack of references to primary sources. Yet Dr Singh – who is not a professor of philosophy, but a medical doctor – has carried off his ambitious project with admirable flair and written a book whose merits seem to me to outweigh its limitations.
One of the strengths of the book is the balance it maintains in its view of the subject, beginning in the introduction with “Sri Aurobindo the Philosopher” and “Sri Aurobindo the Non-Philosopher” and extending to the equal treatment of Sri Aurobindo as an Indian philosopher or darshanik, on the one hand, and at the same time as a global thinker whose contributions can be adequately appreciated only in the context of world philosophy. Especially surprising in a book by a non- academic is the way it brings out the relevance of Sri Aurobindo to some of the more recent developments of modern philosophy in chapters such as “Sri Aurobindo and Walter Benjamin” and “Sri Aurobindo and Saussure”. Although the treatment of these subjects leaves much room for further work, here and elsewhere we get a sense of Sri Aurobindo’s ability to illuminate discussions that were only beginning to take place during his time.
The author himself describes his book as a collection of “blogs”. He invites us to read it accordingly, explaining: “In this world of digital Attention Deficit Disorder, my attempt is to let the reader have the freedom to pick essays at random as they attract his fancy.” The blog concept partly accounts for the relatively easy readability of a book that deals with inherently demanding ideas. But it is also responsible for an occasional superficiality in the discussion of topics that call for scholarly and philosophical treatment. The book’s accessibility may give it a wider readership than a work of serious philosophy would ordinarily enjoy. The lack of the expected trappings of scholarship, however, will tend to limit its impact on the field of academic philosophy both within and outside of India.
Dr Singh himself raises the question: “Why has one of the greatest philosophers of India…not been studied in detail in our academic circles and universities? Perhaps he is too pragmatic for them. For to understand him even intellectually would mean changing one’s life. Perhaps the colonial mindset that Indian intellectuals have suffered prevents them from a deeper immersion in his vast outlook and inlook.” Both factors may well be involved in the academic neglect of Sri Aurobindo (with notable exceptions) even in his own country. The present book is at least a step in the right direction, though only an initial step. One hopes that it will contribute to a philosophical renaissance in India that will not be contingent on the vagaries of academic endorsement.
Sri Aurobindo’s pragmatism – in the philosophical sense of the word associated with the American psychologist and philosopher William James, among others – is rightly emphasised by Dr Singh, who devotes a substantial chapter to “Sri Aurobindo and Pragmatism”. The pragmatic view of philosophy, which evaluates ideas in terms of the difference they make to our lives, cannot be better illustrated than by a passage in The Life Divine where, after a brief discussion of contrasting theories of the relationship between consciousness and the world, Sri Aurobindo comments: The difference, so metaphysical in appearance, is yet of the utmost practical import, for it determines the whole outlook of man upon life, the goal that he shall assign for his efforts and the field in which he shall circumscribe his energies. For it raises the question of the reality of cosmic existence and, more important still, the question of the value of human life. (CWSA vol. 21, p. 23)
This being the true function of philosophy, its over-professionalisation and relegation to specialised university departments is clearly a defect of modern civilisation, especially in India where widespread philosophical movements have played such a historic role since antiquity. For this reason, the basically non-academic character of the present book can be welcomed as perhaps a sign that the Indian philosophical spirit is beginning to reawaken on its own terms not derived from the West and may once again take hold of life, turning it towards the higher objects of human existence as happened on a large scale several times in the past. If so, Sri Aurobindo’s writings are sure to be among the chief sources of inspiration.
Dr Singh accurately credits William James with being one of those who “opened Western philosophy to a new kind of subjectivism, that of consciousness turning upon itself and observing its own movements”. Henri Bergson’s “Creative Evolution” is mentioned in the same passage, along with the names of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Camus, key figures in the movements of phenomenology and existentialism. But with the exception of Bergson, who is the subject of another chapter, these names occur only in passing here and elsewhere in the book. The author has missed the opportunity to bring out more systematically the significance of the turn towards subjectivism in philosophy and culture to which Sri Aurobindo gave so much importance. It is also a little surprising that the book contains only scattered references to Nietzsche, who was a forerunner of twentieth-century subjectivism and the modern European thinker to whom Sri Aurobindo most often alluded.
Although Sri Aurobindo mentioned by name only a few philosophers of his own time – notably Nietzsche, James, Bergson and Bertrand Russell – his writings are remarkably relevant not only to traditional branches of philosophy such as metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics and ethics, but to the expanded range of topics with which contemporary philosophy concerns itself, including philosophy of history, philosophy of science and philosophy of language. In order to highlight his potential contributions to these disciplines, it is both legitimate and necessary to juxtapose his ideas with those of thinkers he never referred to and perhaps never heard of. Dr Singh does this freely in some of the most ground-breaking and thought-provoking chapters of the book.
In “Sri Aurobindo and Karl Popper”, we might have expected to encounter Sri Aurobindo’s views on questions central to what we now call philosophy of science, a field in which Popper was a major figure. As it turns out, the chapter focuses instead on Popper’s no less influential role as a social commentator, as represented especially by his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, written in the early 1940s a few years after Sri Aurobindo had described the rise of “totalitarian mysticism” in his revision of The Human Cycle. (CWSA vol. 25, p. 206) Popper’s defence of the individual provides an occasion for presenting crucial aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s political philosophy, such as his ironic unmasking of the pretension of state collectivism to be benevolently subordinating the individual to the good of all, when it is actually immolating him on the sinister altar of a magnified egoism. Today, when we see a new wave of authoritarianism sweeping over the world, Sri Aurobindo’s insights once again offer clarity as we confront the burning issues of our times.
What is called the “linguistic turn” has been a significant feature of the development of philosophy since the early twentieth century. The convergence of philosophy with linguistics has taken a variety of sometimes contradictory forms, ranging from Saussure’s Structuralism to Wittgenstein’s Ordinary Language Philosophy. In chapters relating to these trends, Dr Singh correctly identifies Sri Aurobindo’s reflections on language, especially in connection with his interpretation of the Veda and in his writings on poetry and translation, as a feature of his thought that could be of particular interest to contemporary philosophers. Once again, the treatment of these and other topics in Sri Aurobindo and Philosophy may not be definitive, but at the very least it is stimulating. The book points in a number of hitherto largely unexplored directions. It can be recommended as a refreshingly original and open-minded introduction to what Sri Aurobindo called the intellectual side of his work for the world.
— Richard Hartz
Richard studied philosophy at Yale University and South Asian languages and literature at the University of Washington. He first visited Pondicherry in 1972 and settled in the Ashram in 1980. He works in the Archives and Research Library.
