Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra (b.1956)
Postmodernism and Sri Aurobindo
This article considers the features of postmodernity, cultural postmodernism and philosophical postmodernism and assesses the philosophy and praxis of Sri Aurobindo against these features. In developing the common ideas of philosophical postmodernism, the article considers its major thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, along with their predecessors, such as Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche. As a junior contemporary of Nietzsche and a senior contemporary of Heidegger, Sri Aurobindo is located historically with them as a predecessor of postmodernism.
The article considers his views in terms of the epistemic shift from modernism to postmodernism and attempts to characterize the individual and social specificity of postmodern praxis in his teaching, as well as in that of his spiritual partner and collaborator, Mirra Alfassa, aka the Mother.
1.
Deism is not a homogeneous ideology. Like Enlightenment philosophy itself, it has a number of strands and regional manifestations. What I have represented could be considered a simplification. What is common to Deist thought are the tenets—(1) God created the world with laws and does not intervene in its workings and (2) Humans are endowed with Reason as a faculty to understand the laws governing the world. For reference, see Gay (1968).
- 2.
The “end of history” in Hegel has been variously interpreted. But what is common to these is the progress of a rational spirit in History, an epistemological finalism as destiny for the human and this finalism as the special prerogative of the West.
- 3.
“I believe there has been no dangerous vacillation or crisis of German culture this century that has not been rendered more dangerous by the enormous and still continuing influence of this philosophy, the Hegelian … Such a point of view has accustomed the Germans to talk of a ‘world-process’ and to justify their own age as the necessary result of this world-process; … History understood in this Hegelian fashion has been mockingly called God's sojourn on earth, though the god referred to has been created only by history. This god… has already ascended all the dialectically possible steps of his evolution up to this self-revelation: so that for Hegel the climax and terminus of the world-process coincided with his own existence in Berlin. … he implanted into the generation thoroughly leavened by him that admiration for the ‘power of history’ which in practice transforms every moment into a naked admiration for success and leads to an idolatry of the factual..”—Nietzsche (1997, pp. 104-105).
- 4.
The appropriation of Nietzsche by the Nazi government was aided by the selection and editing of late texts published as The Will to
Power by Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, a Nazi sympathizer and later member of the Nazi party. The Will to Power was touted as Nietzsche’s definitive statement and promoted in Nazi circles through a 1930 edition by Nazi editor Alfred Baumler. After the end of World War II, Nietzsche was consigned to oblivion along with all things Nazi. The Walter Kauffman editions, particularly of The Will to Power in 1967, has done much to reinstate Nietzsche as a philosopher very much at odds with racism and ethnocentrism.
- 5.
Jaspers published a perceptive introduction to Nietzsche in 1936 in which he held him to be in sharp opposition to Nazism (1965) and Heidegger gave a number of lectures on Nietzsche starting from 1936, continuing through the period of World War II and ending in the early 1960s when he published a two volume set on Nietzsche (1991). Though Heidegger had a controversial relationship with the Nazi party, his interpretations of Nietzsche are not aligned with the party’s appropriation.
- 6.
Nietzsche refers to this as “the unconditional will to truth” (Nietzsche, 2006, 112–113).
- 7.
See Foucault (1977, p. 38): “To awaken us from the confused sleep of dialectics and
of anthropology, we required the Nietzschean figures of tragedy, of Dionysus, of the death of God, of the philosopher’s hammer, of the Superman approaching with the steps of a dove, of the Return.”
- 8.
Heidegger’s essay “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics” discusses this history of Western metaphysics tracing back from the modern technological to the initiating Greek moment, and it does so in a spirit of interlocution with Hegel’s historicism (1969, pp. 42–74).
- 9.
See Part I, European Nihilism, Chapters 27–29 and Part II Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being in Volume IV of Heidegger, Nietzsche.
- 10.
This view of “authenticity” belongs to the later Heidegger, of a post-Being-and-Time phase. See “Time and Being” in Heidegger, On Time and Being, 1–24.
- 11.
The “unthought” of thought is more properly articulated by Foucault in The Order of Things, 351–357 but the idea is prefigured in Heidegger.
- 12.
“My whole philosophical evolution has been determined by my reading of Heidegger. But I recognize that it is Nietzsche who brought me to him.” Foucault as quoted in Deleuze, Foucault, 149.
- 13.
Derrida develops his attention to aporia in his later writing. See for example
Derrida (1992a).
- 14.
Derrida’s messianism, which he sometimes calls “messianicity without messianism” or “structural messianism” is related to religious messianism without being religious. In his words, “I regard [it] as a universal structure of experience, and which cannot be reduced to religious messianism of any stripe.” See Derrida, Marx and Sons, 248.
- 15.
This micropolitical aspect is better developed in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia texts co-written with Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.
- 16.
“…the high dream of philosophic Anarchism, associated by the inner law of love and light and right being, right thinking, right action and not coerced to unity by kings and parliaments, laws and policings and punishments with all that tyrant unease, petty or great oppression and repression and ugly train of selfishness and corruption which attend the forced government of man by man. It is even possible that our original state was an instinctive animal spontaneity of free and fluid association and that our final ideal state will be an enlightened, intuitive spontaneity of free and fluid association. Our destiny may be the conversion of an original animal association into a community of the gods” (1997, p. 292).
- 17.
Monastic practices leading to transcendence developed into schools in the late Vedic period and may have been related to the seeking for freedom from the social oppressions of a caste hierarchy. Buddhism, Sankhya and later, Advaita Vedanta are schools of this kind.
- 18.
I am referring to collective forms of ecstatic devotion such as in Gaudiya Vaishnavism, a sect of devotion to Krishna founded by Sri Chaitanya (1486–1534), in which naam samkirtan or collective chanting of Krishna’s name accompanied with music and dancing creates the conditions for states of collective euphoria; or to Tantric or
heterodox practices of collective ritual erotic activity such as chakra-puja which may have their roots in aboriginal rituals of communitas.
- 19.
Banerji, Seven Quartets, 36–39. One may also relate this to Deleuze and Guattari’s “Body without Organs.” See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 150–151.
- 20.
Comparable to Deleuze and Guattari’s approach as a project rather than a theory—viz. “How to Make oneself a Body without Organs.” See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 149–167.
- 21.
I realize a potential for confusion here. While for Deleuze and Guattari, there is only one “plane of immanence,” that for which there is no transcendent, one may conceive of intermediate planes of virtual immanence for layered actualities. The Vidya, inclusive of Satchidananda and Vijnana (Supermind) would be more properly the Deleuzian plane of immanence. Even though it can be spoken of in terms of parts, these are a difference-in-kind from the hierarchism of the planes of Avidya. Such parts are functional relations that can equally assume the name of the plane of immanence. The Supermind serves the function of self-ordering of the Whole in terms of Real-Ideas.
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