Sri Aurobindo and the Law of Contradiction
Many years ago, K.D. Sethna, then a young man and an aspiring intellectual wrote to the Mother saying that Sri Aurobindo had been illogical in one of his writings. The Mother reported this to Sri Aurobindo saying, "This young man feels you are illogical." Perhaps Sri Aurobindo had laughed. Philosophy had been Sethna's subject as an undergraduate.
K.D. Sethna is completing a hundred years this November. Some time ago when I mentioned the above incident of his salad days to him he chuckled and as is his wont with me, merrily recounted the whole episode to me. Sethna's poetry thrills me with rapture. His far reaching contributions in many fields of human knowledge fill me with wonder. As an apologist for the Aurobindonian world-view he stands second to none. And behind all this protean mental activity the sadhak - ever cheerful, never complaining, complete in his surrender to the Mother, alive to his human limitations; all this makes me feel that I am in the presence of a great soul. I dedicate my article on logic in the light of Sri Aurobindo to this "Clear Ray" which has issued forth from the sun of Sri Aurobindo's supramental splendour.
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The three mental functions of man, viz. thinking, willing and feeling when purified have each their corresponding object, which they seek after. For thought, the Truth that underlies appearances, for will, the pursuit after some highest Good and for feeling the quest for Beauty. The human mind, systematising its knowledge of the general processes of these
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seekings has come up with the disciplines of Logic, Ethics and Aesthetics. Just as a student of Ethics does not automatically come to be a virtuous man or a saint, or an aesthetician become a gifted artist so a man trained in logic does not possess - by the mere fact of that training - the scientific or spiritual Truth. In fact this systematic training is not indispensable if history is any indicator. Scientists have created rational theories without being logicians per se and mystics have realised the Brahman without knowing a whit of formal logic. Locke points this out with telling effect. "God", says Locke, "has not been so sparing to men, to make them barely two-legged and left it to Aristotle to make them rational."1 But this is not what Logic proposes to do. It is not the business of Logic to make men rational, but rather to teach them in what their being rational consists.
The 19th century materialism, fresh with the triumphs of science made all rationality synonymous with scientific rationality. But even as early as the 18th century, Kant in his preface to the work, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), had declared, "Our age is the age of criticism to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion and the authority of legislation are regarded by many as grounds of exemption from the examination by this tribunal. But if they are exempted, they become the subjects of just suspicion, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination." Implicit in this declaration are two things. First, the vulnerability of religion and legislative authority to a rational scrutiny and secondly, passing of the test of a free and public examination as the criterion for a sincere respect. In Europe where the mental support of religion was a credal theology, Kant's declaration reinforced the parting of ways between religion and philosophy.
Sri Aurobindo's reaction to such an attitude is typical. The realm of religious being of man and the religious life is one, at which, "the intellectual reason gazes with the bewildered mind
1. Essay, Bk. IV. c.xvii. 4.
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of a foreigner who hears a language of which the words and the spirit are unintelligible to him and sees everywhere forms of life and principles of thought and action which are absolutely strange to his experience. He may try to learn this speech and understand this strange and alien life; but it is with pain and difficulty, and he cannot succeed unless he has, so to speak, unlearned himself and become one in spirit and nature with the natives of this celestial empire. Till then his efforts to understand and interpret them in his own language and accord-ing to his own notions end at the worst in a gross misunderstanding and deformation. The attempts of the positive critical reason to dissect the phenomena of the religious life sound to men of spiritual experience like the prattle of a child who is trying to shape into the mould of his own habitual notions the life of adults or the blunders of an ignorant mind which thinks fit to criticise patronisingly or adversely the labours of a profound thinker or a great scientist."2
According to Sri Aurobindo: "There are four necessities of man's self-expansion if he is not to remain this being of the surface ignorance seeking obscurely after the truth of things and collecting and systematising fragments and sections of knowledge, the small limited and half-competent creature of the cosmic Force which he now is in his phenomenal nature. He must know himself and discover and utilise all his potentialities: but to know himself and the world completely he must go behind his own and its exterior, he must dive deep below his own mental surface and the physical surface of Nature. This he can only do by knowing his inner mental, vital, physical and psychic being and its powers and movements and the universal laws and processes of the occult Mind and Life which stand behind the material front of the universe: that is the field of occultism, if we take the word in its widest significance. He must know also the hidden Power or Powers that control the world: if there is a Cosmic Self or Spirit or a Creator, he must be able to enter into relation with It or Him and be able to remain in whatever contact or communion is possible, get into
2. Social and Political Thought, SABCL, Vol. 15, p. 120.
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some kind of tune with the master Beings of the universe or with the universal Being and its universal will or a supreme Being and His supreme will, follow the law It gives him and the assigned or revealed aim of his life and conduct, raise himself towards the highest height that It demands of him in his life now or in his existence hereafter; if there is no such universal or supreme Spirit or Being, he must know what there is and how to lift himself to it out of his present imperfection and impotence. This approach is the aim of religion: its purpose is to link the human with the Divine and in so doing sublimate the thought and life and flesh so that they may admit the rule of the soul and spirit. But this knowledge must be something more than a creed or a mystic revelation; his thinking mind must be able to accept it, to correlate it with the principle of things and the observed truth of the universe: this is the work of philosophy, and in the field of the truth of the spirit it can only be done by a spiritual philosophy, whether intellectual in its method or intuitive. But all knowledge and endeavour can reach its fruition only if it is turned into experience and has become a part of the consciousness and its established operations; in the spiritual field all this religious, occult or philosophical knowledge and endeavour must, to bear fruition, end in an opening up of the spiritual consciousness, in experiences that found and continually heighten, expand and enrich that consciousness and in the building of a life and action that is in conformity with the truth of the spirit: this is the work of spiritual realisation and experience."3
It is the third of these four necessities of man's self-expansion, which is relevant to this article. Sri Aurobindo insists on the indispensability of the philosophical approach to spiritual knowledge in the integral spiritual endeavour. It is true that great mystics have sometimes dispensed with philosophy, "arrived instead through the heart's fervour or a mystic inward spiritualisation",4 yet in the whole move-
3. The Life Divine, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1993, pp. 861- 62.
4. Ibid., p. 861.
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ment it is indispensable. "If the supreme truth is a spiritual Reality, then the intellect of man needs to know what is the nature of that original Truth and the principle of its relations to the rest of existence, to ourselves and the universe."5
In the spiritual life, Sri Aurobindo writes in The Life Divine: "Our thinking mind is concerned mainly with the statement of general spiritual truth, the logic of its absolute and the logic of its relativities, how they stand to each other or lead to each other, and what are the mental consequences of the spiritual theorem of existence. But besides this understanding and intellectual statement which is its principal right and share, the intellect seeks to exercise a critical control; it may admit the ecstatic or other concrete spiritual experiences, but its demand is to know on what sure and well-ordered truths of being they are founded. Indeed, without such a truth known and verifiable, our reason might find these experiences insecure and unintelligible, might draw back from them as possibly not founded on truth or else distrust them in their form, if not in their foundation, as affected by an error, even an aberration of the imaginative vital mind, the emotions, the nerves or the senses; for these might be misled, in their passage or transference from the physical and sensible to the invisible, into a pursuit of deceiving lights or at least to a misreception of things valid in themselves but marred by a wrong or imperfect interpretation of what is experienced or a confusion and disorder of the true spiritual values. If reason finds itself obliged to admit the dynamics of occultism, there too it will be most concerned with the truth and right system and real significance of the forces that it sees brought into play; it must inquire whether the significance is that which the occultist attaches to it or something other and perhaps deeper which has been misinterpreted in its essential relations and values or not given its true place in the whole of experience. For the action of our intellect is primarily the function of understanding, but secondarily critical and finally organising, controlling and formative.
5. Ibid., p. 878.
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"The means by which this need can be satisfied and with which our nature of mind has provided us is philosophy, and in this field it must be a spiritual philosophy. Such systems have arisen in numbers in the East; for almost always, wherever there has been a considerable spiritual development, there has arisen from it a philosophy justifying it to the intellect. The method was at first an intuitive seeing and an intuitive expression, as in the fathomless thought and profound language of the Upanishads, but afterwards there was developed a critical method, a firm system of dialectics, a logical organisation. The later philosophies were an intellectual account or a logical justification of what had been found by inner realisation; or they provided themselves, a mental ground or a systematised method for realisation and experience."6
II
The three Laws of Thought were once upon a time thought to underlie all thinking. Some even supposed that the task of Logic lay merely in developing their implications. They are known as the Law of Identity, the Law of Contradiction and the Law of Excluded Middle. The Law of Identity is that everything is what it is or symbolically, that A is A; every subject is a predicate of itself. The Law of Contradiction is that contradictory propositions cannot both be true or symbolically, that A is not not-A. The Law of Excluded Middle is its corollary. It says that contradictory propositions cannot both be false or symbolically, that everything is either A or not-A.
The three Laws of Thought have in the main been conceived of as descriptive, prescriptive or formal.7 As descriptive they have been regarded as descriptive a) of the nature
6. Ibid., pp. 878-79.
7. Much of the material in this section, i.e. II, has been taken bodily from the excellent article by S. Korner on the Laws of Thought in the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (1967).
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of being as such, or b) of the subject matter common to all sciences, or c) of the activity of thinking or reasoning. As prescriptive laws they have been conceived of as expressing absolute or conventional standards of correct thinking or reasoning. As formal laws they have been held to be propositions which are true in virtue of their form and independent of their content, true in all possible worlds, or true of any objects whatsoever. In this article I will concern myself only with the descriptive interpretations. The most important among the descriptive interpretations are the metaphysical and the empirical interpretations.
Metaphysical Interpretation: For Aristotle, who discussed the Laws of Thought in his logical and metaphysical works, they are primarily descriptive of being as such and only secondarily as standards of correct thinking. It is thus a metaphysical or ontological impossibility that "the same can and cannot belong to the same in the same reference",8 from which it follows as a rule of correct thought and speech that it is incorrect to assert, "the same is and is not".9
Empirical Interpretation: From the conception of the Laws of Thought as being descriptive of "being as such", whatever it may mean precisely, we must distinguish the conception of them as empirical generalisations of a very high order. This view was most clearly expressed by John Stuart Mill in his System of Logic (1843).
We shall now discuss specifically the Law of Contradiction. Aristotle produced seven "proofs" to demonstrate the indispensability of the Law of Contradiction. With a similar intention formal logicians are nowadays wont to show that its negation implies any proposition whatever (and thus also the Law of Contradiction itself). The reasoning is as follows.
1) To assume that the Law of Contradiction is false is to assume that for some proposition p, both p and not-p are true.
8. Metaphysics III, 2,2.
9. Ibid., IV, 6,12 .
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2) From the truth of v it follows that v or x is also true, when x is an arbitrary proposition and or is used in the nonexclusive sense of and/or.
3) From the truth of v or x and the truth of not-v the truth of x follows.
But x is an arbitrary proposition for which for example the Law of Contradiction may be chosen.
Aristotle's defence of the Law of Contradiction as descriptive of "being as such" includes implicitly a defence of the metaphysical principle of identity against Heraclitus, who held it possible for the same thing to be and not to be and who explained the concept of becoming as implying the falsehood of the principle that everything is what it is. Before Aristotle this principle had been defended by Parmenides. John Stuart Mill's approach is avowedly empirical. He regarded the principle of contradiction as "one of our first empirical generalisations from experience and originally founded on our distinction between belief and disbelief as two different mutually exclusive states."10
III
We are now in a position to see the Law of Contradiction in the context of Sri Aurobindo. We have to do this in the context of the many extra-logical concerns that go into the making of a philosophy. The Upanishads are the base of Vedantic philosophies. There is considerable divergence of view between Sri Aurobindo and the other great Vedantin, Sri Sankara. For Sri Sankara the Law of Contradiction is the criterion of truth. In Sri Sankara, Reality is a concept based on a spiritual experience. While it is unreachable by thought we can say this much about it that it is free from contradictions.
10. System of Logic, Bk. II, Ch. 7. In the same vein Mill argues that the empirical character of the Law of Excluded Middle follows from, among other things, the fact that it requires for its truth, namely that the predicate in any affirmative categorical proposition must be capable of being meaningfully attributed to the subject, since between the true and the false there is the third possibility of being meaningless.
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For Sri Aurobindo however there cannot be one logical criterion of Reality, for Reality for him is not of the nature of logical truth. It is a living whole and transcendent which escapes completely the net of a circumscribing logic. The Isha Upanishad is a case in this point for Sri Aurobindo. Let us see what Sri Aurobindo has to say.
"Synthesis of knowledge, synthesis of dharma, reconciliation of harmony of the opposites form the very soul of this Upanishad. In Western philosophy there is a law called Law of Contradiction, according to which opposites mutually exclude each other. Two opposite propositions cannot hold good at the same time, they cannot integrate; two opposite qualities cannot be simultaneously at the same place and in the same instrument. According to this law, opposites cannot be reconciled or harmonised. If the Divine is one, then however omnipotent He might be, He cannot be many. The infinite cannot be finite. It is impossible for the formless to assume form, then it abrogates its formlessness. The formula that the Brahman is at the same time with and without attributes, which is exactly what the Upanishad says about God who is nirguno guni, with and without attributes, is not admitted by this logic. If formlessness, oneness, infinity of the Brahman are true, then attributes, forms, multiplicity and finiteness of Brahman are false; brahma satyam jaganmithya, 'the Brahman is the sole reality, the world is an illusion' - such a totally ruinous deduction is the final outcome of that philosophic dictum. The Seer-Rishi of the Upanishad at each step tramples on that law and in each sloka announces its invalidity; he finds in the secret heart of the opposites the place for the reconciliation and harmony of their contradiction. The oneness of the universe in motion and the immobile Purusha, enjoyment of all by renunciation of all, eternal liberation by full action, perpetual stability of the Brahman in movement, unbound and inconceivable motion in the eternal immobility, the oneness of the Brahman without attributes and the Lord of the universe with attributes, the inadequacy of Knowledge alone or of Ignorance alone for attaining Immortality, Immortality ob-
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tained by simultaneous worship of Knowledge and Ignorance, the supreme liberation and realisation gained not by the constant cycle of birth, not by the dissolution of birth but by simultaneous accomplishment of Birth and Non-Birth, these are the sublime principles loudly proclaimed by the Upanishad.11
It is not difficult to see why this Upanishad posed so much difficulty for Sri Sankara. Sri Aurobindo in the same article highlights these difficulties: "It is said in the Upanishad, 'Into a blind darkness they enter who follow after the Ignorance, they as if into a greater darkness who devote themselves to the Knowledge alone'. Sankara says I am not willing to give to the words vidya (knowledge) and avidya (ignorance) their ordinary sense; vidya here signifies devavidya, 'the science of propitiating the gods'. The Upanishad declares, 'vinasena mrtyum ttrtva sambhutyamr-tamasnute, 'by the dissolution crosses beyond death and by the Birth enjoys Immortality'. Sankara says it has to be read asambhutyamrtam'by Non-Birth enjoys Immortality', and vinasa (dissolution) as signifying here 'birth'. In the same way a commentator of the Dualistic School when he came across the word tattvamasi, 'Thou art That', indicated that it should be read as atat tvamasi, 'Thou art that other one'."12
Thus we see that as far as the interpretation of Sruti is concerned Sri Aurobindo preserves a much greater fidelity to the scripture. But what is it that prompted Sankara to resort to such ingenuities in order to explain or rather explain away the text of the original? Doubtless it was the overwhelming logical force of the Law of Contradiction as the criterion of Reality.13 In his commentary on the Brahma Sutras
11. Bengali Writings, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1991, p. 67.
12. Ibid., p. 68.
13. K.C. Bhattacharya points out that in Sri Sankara, 'the union of contradictories is not denied of phenomenal objects but only of the noumenon' (vide. K.C. Bhattacharya, Studies in Vedantism, p. 25). The Law of Contradiction being the criterion of Truth, the phenomenal world is condemned as a lie, mithya. The anirvacaniyata of Maya constitutes the element of mysticism in Sri Sankara.
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Sri Sankara asserts the Law of Contradiction several times. He explains the Sutra II. ii. 33 thus: (Contradictory attributes cannot exist) in the same entity, because (it) is not possible, (and therefore, the Jain doctrine is not correct). In the course of refuting a Jain doctrine in his commentary on the aphorism he asserts that his "refutation should also be understood to refute the tenets about one and the same entity having contradictory attributes such as being one and many, eternal and non-eternal, separate and non-separate."14 To take another instance, Sri Sankara says, "That the transcendent Brahman considered by and in itself should possess both kind of indicatory marks, is not reasonably sustainable. It is not possible to understand that that one and the same entity, in itself, is endowed with specific attributes such as form (rupa) etc. and also being the reverse of that (i.e. being without any attributes), because of the contradiction (involved)."15 A little later in the same pdda Sri Sankara asserts that even scriptural authority can be over-ruled if it comes in conflict with the Law of Contradiction. "(If the opponent were to say) that there could not be such a fault because of scriptural authority, (we reply) - No, because it would not be reasonably sustainable that one entity can ever have more than one nature."16 Sri Aurobindo was acutely aware of this and addresses the issue at some length in The Life Divine.
Central to the metaphysical issue is the difference in the concepts of the Absolute in Sri Sankara and Sri Aurobindo. In Sri Sankara the Absolute is a mere and perfect Spirit, kevala atman, which is in its essential nature acosmic. Not only is the individual becoming an illusion but the cosmos itself is a superimposition, adhyasa on that mere and perfect Spirit. All relativity is thus abolished. Sri Sankara's position hinges on the Law of Contradiction. The Absolute and the relative are irreconcilable opposites. Oneness with God is incompatible
14. Brahma-Sutra Sankara-Bhasya, Eng. Trans. V.M. Apte, Bombay: 'opular Book Depot.
15. Ibid., III. ii. 11.
16. Ibid., III. ii. 21.
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with the idea of having relations with Him. In Oneness the One is Himself the enjoyer and the enjoyed and the question of relation does not arise. Sri Aurobindo sums this up as follows,".. .if unity is the one eternal fact, then cosmos and individual are non-existent; they are illusions imposed on itself by the Eternal. That may well involve a contradiction or an unreconciled paradox; but I am willing to admit a contradiction in the Eternal which I am not compelled to think out, rather than a contradiction here of my primary conceptions which I am compelled to think out logically and to practical ends. I am on this supposition able either to take the world as practically real and think and act in it or to reject it as an unreality and cease to think and act; I am not compelled to reconcile contradictions, not called on to be conscious of and conscious in something beyond myself and world and yet deal from that basis, as God does, with a world of contradictions. The attempt to be as God while I am still an individual or to be three things at a time seems to me to involve a logical confusion and a practical impossibility."17
He goes on to point out the triple error in this view, "the error of making an unbridgeable gulf between the Absolute and the relative, the error of making too simple and rigid and extending too far the Law of Contradictions and the error of conceiving in terms of Time the genesis of things which have their origin and first habitat in the Eternal."18 For Sri Aurobindo, "It is through... a profounder catholic intuition and not by exclusive logical oppositions that our intelligence ought to approach the Absolute." For him, "The Absolute is not a sceptical logician denying the truth of all his own statements and self-expressions, but an existence so utterly and so infinitely positive that no finite positive can be formulated which can exhaust it or bind it down to its definitions."19
17. The Life Divine, 1993, p. 375. He is referring in this passage to the paradoxical nature of Maya, sadasadvilaksana. Technically speaking this is a violation of the Law of Excluded Middle, a corollary of the Law of Contradiction.
18. The Life Divine, 1993, p. 375.
19. Ibid., p. 379.
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Such being the truth of Sri Aurobindo's Absolute, it is evident that we cannot bind it by the Law of Contradiction. I now give his position on this law. "That law is necessary to us in order that we may posit partial and practical truths, think out things clearly, decisively and usefully, classify, act, deal with them effectively for particular purposes in our divisions of Space, distinctions of form and property, moments of Time. It represents a formal and strongly dynamic truth of existence in its practical workings which is strongest in the most outward term of things, the material, but becomes less and less rigidly binding as we go upward in the scale, mount on the more subtle rungs of the ladder of being. It is especially necessary for us in dealing with material phenomena and forces; we have to suppose them to be one thing at a time, to have one power at a time and to be limited by their ostensible and practically effective capacities and properties; otherwise we cannot deal with them. But even there, as human thought is beginning to realise, the distinctions made by the intellect and the classifications and practical experiments of Science, while perfectly valid in their own field and for their own purpose, do not represent the whole or the real truth of things, whether of things in the whole or of the thing by itself which we have classified and set artificially apart, isolated for separate analysis. By that isolation we are indeed able to deal with it very practically, very effectively, and we think at first that the effectiveness of our action proves the entire and sufficient truth of our isolating and analysing knowledge. Afterwards we find that by getting beyond it we can arrive at a greater truth and a greater effectivity.
"The isolation is certainly necessary for first knowledge. A diamond is a diamond and a pearl a pearl, each thing of its own class, existing by its distinction from all others, each distinguished by its own form and properties. But each has also properties and elements which are common to both and others which are common to material things in general. And in reality each does not exist only by its distinctions, but much more essentially by that which is common
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to both; and we get back to the very basis and enduring truth of all material things only when we find that all are the same thing, one energy, one substance or, if you like, one universal motion which throws up, brings out, combines, realises these different forms, these various properties, these fixed and harmonised potentialities of its own being. If we stop short at the knowledge of distinctions, we can deal only with diamond and pearl as they are, fix their values, uses, varieties, make the best ordinary use and profit of them; but if we can get to the knowledge and control of their elements and the common properties of the class to which they belong, we may arrive at the power of making either a diamond or pearl at our pleasure: go farther still and master that which all material things are in their essence and we may arrive even at the power of transmutation which would give the greatest possible control of material Nature. Thus the knowledge of distinctions arrives at its greatest truth and effective use when we arrive at the deeper knowledge of that which reconciles distinctions in the unity behind all variations. That deeper knowledge does not deprive the other and more superficial of effectivity nor convict it of vanity. We cannot conclude from our ultimate material discovery that there is no original substance or Matter, only energy manifesting substance or manifesting as substance, - that diamond and pearl are non-existent, unreal, only true to the illusion of our senses of perception and action, that the one substance, energy or motion is the sole eternal truth and that therefore the best or only rational use of our science would be to dissolve diamond and pearl and everything else that we can dissolve into this one eternal and original reality and get done with their forms and properties for ever. There is an essentiality of things, a commonalty of things, an individuality of things; the commonalty and individuality are true and eternal powers of the essentiality: that transcends them both, but the three together and not one by itself are the eternal terms of existence.
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"This truth which we can see, though with difficulty and under considerable restrictions, even in the material world where the subtler and higher powers of being have to be excluded from our intellectual operations, becomes clearer and more powerful when we ascend in the scale. We see the truth of our classifications and distinctions, but also their limits. All things, even while different, are yet one. For practical purposes plant, animal, man are different existences; yet when we look deeper we see that the plant is only an animal with an insufficient evolution of self-consciousness and dynamic force; the animal is man in the making; man himself is that animal and yet the something more of self-consciousness and dynamic power of consciousness that make him man; and yet again he is the something more which is contained and repressed in his being as the potentiality of the divine, - he is a god in the making. In each of these, plant, animal, man, god, the Eternal is there containing and repressing himself as it were in order to make a certain statement of his being. Each is the whole Eternal concealed. Man himself, who takes up all that went before him and transmutes it into the term of manhood, is the individual human being and yet he is all mankind, the universal man acting in the individual as a human personality. He is all and yet he is himself and unique. He is what he is, but he is also the past of all that he was and the potentiality of all that he is not. We cannot understand him if we look only at his present individuality, but we cannot understand him either if we look only at his commonalty, his general term of manhood, or go back by exclusion from both to an essentiality of his being in which his distinguishing manhood and his particularising individuality seem to disappear. Each thing is the Absolute, all are that One, but in these three terms always the Absolute makes its statement of its developed self-existence. We are not, because of the essential unity, compelled to say that all God's various action and workings are vain, worthless, unreal, phenomenal, illusory, and that the best and only rational or super-rational use we can make of our knowledge is to get
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away from them, dissolve our cosmic and individual existence into the essential being and get rid of all becoming as a futility for ever.
"In our practical dealings with life we have to arrive at the same truth. For certain practical ends we have to say that a thing is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, just or unjust and act upon that statement; but if we limit ourselves by it, we do not get at real knowledge. The Law of Contradictions here is only valid in so far as two different and opposite statements cannot be true of the same thing at the same time, in the same field, in the same respect, from the same point of view and for the same practical purpose. A great war, destruction or violent all-upheaving revolution, for example, may present itself to us as an evil, a virulent and catastrophic disorder, and it is so in certain respects, results, ways of looking at it; but from others, it may be a great good, since it rapidly clears the field for a new good or a more satisfying order. No man is simply good or simply bad; every man is a mixture of contraries: even we find these contraries often inextricably mixed up in a single feeling, a single action. All kinds of conflicting qualities, powers, values meet together and run into each other to make up our action, life, nature. We can only understand entirely if we get to some sense of the Absolute and yet look at its workings in all the relativities which are being manifested, - look not only at each by itself, but each in relation to all and to that which exceeds and reconciles them all. In fact we can only know by getting to the divine view and purpose in things and not merely looking at our own, though our own limited human view and momentary purpose have their validity in the cadre of the All. For behind all relativities there is this Absolute which gives them their being and their justification. No particular act or arrangement in the world is by itself absolute justice; but there is behind all acts and arrangements something absolute which we call justice, which expresses itself through their relativities and which we would realise if our view and knowledge were comprehensive instead of being as they are;
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partial, superficial, limited to a few ostensible facts and appearances. So too there is an absolute good and an absolute beauty: but we can only get a glimpse of it if we embrace all things impartially and get beyond their appearances to some sense of that which, between them, all and each are by their complex terms trying to state and work out; not an indeterminate, - for the indeterminate, being only the original stuff or perhaps the packed condition of determinations, would explain by itself nothing at all, - but the Absolute. We can indeed follow the opposite method of breaking up all things and refusing to look at them as a whole and in relation to that which justifies them and so create an intellectual conception of absolute evil, absolute injustice, the absolute hideousness, painfulness, triviality, vulgarity or vanity of all things; but that is to pursue to its extreme the method of the Ignorance whose view is based upon division. We cannot rightly so deal with the divine workings. Because the Absolute expresses itself through relativities the secret of which we find it difficult to fathom, because to our limited view everything appears to be a purposeless play of oppositions and negatives or a mass of contradictions, we cannot conclude that our first limited view is right or that all is a vain delusion of the mind and has no reality. Nor can we solve all by an original unreconciled contradiction which is to explain all the rest. The human reason is wrong in attaching a separate and definitive value to each contradiction by itself or getting rid of one by altogether denying the other; but it is right in refusing to accept as final and as the last word the coupling of contradictions which have in no way been reconciled together or have not found their source and significance in something beyond their opposition."20
In this long extract Sri Aurobindo deals with the empirical and metaphysical considerations which determine his attitude toward the Law of Contradiction. He would not disagree with Mill when he says that Law of Contradiction
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is our first empirical generalisation from experience. For this is a pragmatically correct truth of fact. But Sri Aurobindo goes on immediately to bring in the metaphysical factor viz. a hierarchy of planes in an increasing order of subtlety where the Law of Contradiction gets increasingly modified. Mill says that the Law of Contradiction is originally founded on our belief and disbelief as two different mutually exclusive states. Sri Aurobindo would reply to this that this is so due to the fundamental insufficiency of mental cognition which being essentially divisive cannot but dwell on mutually exclusive states. In the higher reason of the supramental rationality this insufficiency is remedied for the supramental sees even the multiplicity in the terms of unity.
Sri Aurobindo is thus an idealist. But he is not an idealist in the mould of Bradley and Sri Sankara. Bradley (as also Sri Sankara) holds that a relation between two terms must be related to them by a second relation, and so ad infinitum, and the impossibility of this infinite process is one reason why he holds that Reality cannot be, though it may appear as, a system of terms in relation.21 Hegel's notion of the Absolute is very different from that of Sri Aurobindo yet their approach towards the Law of Contradiction is similar. Hegel distinguishes between abstract understanding, which petrifies and thus misdescribes the ever changing "dialectical process" that is reality, and reason which apprehends its true nature. The supramental rationality of Sri Aurobindo is replaced here by the dialectical process. Hegel objected to the principle that A is A or, what for him amounts to the same thing that A cannot be at the same time A and not-A because no mind thinks or forms conceptions in accordance with this law, and... no existence of any kind conforms to it.22 For Hegel contradiction is not a relation which holds merely between propositions but one that is also exemplified in the real world, for example in such phenomena as the polarity of magnetism, the antithesis between inorganic
21. Bradley, F.H., Appearance and Reality, Bk. I. c. ii.
22. Die Enzyclopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften.
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and organic matter and even the complimentarity of complimentary colours. Sri Aurobindo's view is similar. Sri Aurobindo in fact cites the most fundamental contradictions as examples of Nature's method. "For essentially, all Nature seeks a harmony, life and matter in their own sphere as much as mind in the arrangement of its perceptions. The greater the apparent disorder of the materials offered or the apparent disparateness, even to irreconcilable opposition, of the elements that have to be utilised, the stronger is the spur, and it drives towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be the result of a less difficult endeavour. The accordance of active Life with a material of form in which the condition of activity itself seems to be inertia, is one problem of opposites that Nature has solved and seeks always to solve better with greater complexities; for its perfect solution would be the material immortality of a fully organised mind-supporting animal body. The accordance of conscious mind and conscious will with a form and a life in themselves not overtly self-conscious and capable at best of a mechanical or sub-conscious will is another problem of opposites in which she has produced astonishing results and aims always at higher marvels; for there her ultimate miracle would be an animal consciousness no longer seeking but possessed of Truth and Light, with the practical omnipotence which would result from the possession of a direct and perfected knowledge. Not only, then, is the upward impulse of man towards the accordance of yet higher opposites rational in itself, but it is the only logical completion of a rule and an effort that seem to be a fundamental method of Nature and the very sense of her universal strivings."23
Sri Aurobindo attacks the logician who seeks to circumscribe the Truth in the net of his logic. "The logician thinks he has ensured himself against error when he has made a classification of particular fallacies; but he forgets the supreme and general fallacy, the fallacy of thinking that logic
23. The Life Divine, 1993, pp. 2-3.
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can, as a rule, prove anything but particular and partial propositions dealing with a fragmentary and one-sided truth. Logic? But Truth is not logical; it contains logic, but is not contained by it. A particular syllogism may be true, so far as it goes, covering a sharply limited set of facts, but even a set of syllogisms cannot exhaust truth on a general subject, for the simple reason that they necessarily ignore a number of equally valid premises, facts or possibilities which support a modified or contrary view. If one could arrive first at a conclusion, then at its exact opposite and, finally, harmonise the contradiction, one might arrive at some approach to the truth. But this is a process logic abhors. Its fundamental conception is that two contradictory statements cannot be true at the same time and place & in the same circumstances. Now, Fact and Nature and God laugh aloud when they hear the logician state his fundamental conception. For the universe is based on the simultaneous existence of contradictions covering the same time, place and circumstances. The elementary conception that God is at once One and Many, Finite & Infinite, Formed and Formless and that each attribute is the condition of the existence of its opposite, is a thing metaphysical logic has been boggling over ever since the reign of reason began."24
We end our discussion by citing two passages from Savitri. The first describes the contradiction at the very origin of things:
A contradiction founds the base of life:
The eternal, the divine Reality
Has faced itself with its own contraries;
Being became the Void and Conscious-Force
Nescience and walk of a blind Energy
And Ecstasy took the figure of world-pain.25
24. Essays Divine and Human, CWSA, Vol. 12, p. 10.
25. Savitri - A Legend and a Symbol, CWSA, Vol. 33, p. 141.
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The next describes the play ofprakrti with purusa, Being with Becoming.
Ashamed of her rich cosmic poverty,
She cajoles with her small gifts his mightiness,
Holds with her scenes his look's fidelity
And woos his large-eyed wandering thoughts to dwell
In figures of her million-impulsed Force.
Only to attract her veiled companion
And keep him close to her breast in her world-cloak
Lest from her arms he turn to his formless peace,
Is her heart's business and her clinging care.
Yet when he is most near, she feels him far.
For contradiction is her nature's law.26
(The emphasis in both passages is mine.)
26. Ibid., p. 181.
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