WEIGHING IN THE BALANCE OR RUNNING AMUCK?
( This article, which is a rejoinder by the editor of Mother India to an attack published in the Bombay bi-monthly Quest, was originally offered to that very periodical. Professor A. B. Shah, co-editor of Quest, had been eager from the beginning to have a counter-attack by a member of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. But he wanted it to be about 6000 words long. The present piece, although shortened a great deal from its first detailed draft, still considerably exceeded the required length. So he wrote to the author: "I see your point in trying to deal with Mr. Alvares's article as thoroughly as possible, but I am afraid in the process your rejoinder has become much too long for Quest. From the point of view of the non-specialist reader 1 would be committing an unpardonable error, particularly in view of the fact that it would be more than 18 months after the publication of Mr. Alvares's article that the rejoinder appears in print. I am, therefore, much against my personal inclination, returning the typescript. However, I shall look forward to its publication in Mother India." As Mr. Alvares has already shot his bolt, Mother India will not afford space to any reaction he may now have to our attempt at exposing his pretensions. The controversy will be considered closed with each party having once had his say.)
It is over a year and a half since Mr. Claude Alvares declared in effect Sri Aurobindo a spiritual charlatan and his philosophy nonsense.1 I chose to ignore his attack, in spite of requests by friends to join issue with him. "This absurd article," I said to myself, "will soon be forgotten." But now I learn that he is busy writing a whole volume on Sri Aurobindo in the same vein.2 I should like to warn unwary
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readers against any such projected magnification of the ineptitudes with which the article teems.
Mr. Alvares has decided that science and contemporary world-insights flatly contradict Sri Aurobindo. But is he truly au fait with them and does he at all know, even in outline, what Sri Aurobindo's philosophy is?
According to Sri Aurobindo, the ultimate Reality is an Absolute, an Eternal, that is at once a self-merged freedom beyond conception and a fullness self-manifested in a multiple unity as Sat-Chit-Ananda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss) and Vijnana, a creative Supermind or Gnosis which brings forward the hidden truths of Being-Consciousness-Bliss and organizes them into an ideal harmony of the infinite and the finite, an archetypal or perfect cosmos. In addition it formulates various subsidiary cosmic "planes" and sets going the time-process of our universe. In relation to that process it acts in a diversity of ways the role of God — One who is the Lord and Lover of His creatures or else the World-Mother, no less than the Self of all things, a secret Omnipresence at once constituting and containing its creation even while outwardly projecting each individual and object as other than the deity. But here Sat-Chit-Ananda and Supermind have also an opposite aspect of themselves, the Inconscient, a state of entire involution or apparent self-loss as the starting-point of an aeonic evolution by grades and degrees towards their plenary state in the form of a totally transfigured and divinized humanity upon earth.
Mr. Alvares has failed in several respects to express Sri Aurobindo's philosophy correctly. Thus he has not understood Sat-Chit-Ananda and Supermind as ever-existing plenitudes side by side with their own involution. To him the Aurobindonian Sat-Chit-Ananda "is the world and its forms, progressing through an evolutionary process from the initial stage of Complete Ignorance (matter) through Life and Mind to Supermind (Spirit, absolute consciousness)".3
This is a lopsided presentation, leaving no scope for the central theme of Sri Aurobindo's "Integral Yoga": descent of
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the Truth-consciousness or Supermind into our fumbling humanity. The supramental Light is to be invoked to come down into our nature in order to change it. That "gnostic" Power would perfect the organization of this nature around our inmost soul-element or psychic being and call forth the Divinity which is involved in material existence and which serves, by its covert presence there, to give that existence ultimately a permanent Divine Life as an intrinsic luminous right, a dharma or self-law, rather than as a mere super-imposition, however brilliant, a siddhi or infused and hence insecure capacity.
Intellectual acumen is obviously not Mr. Alvares's forte in face of a comprehensive and therefore complex spiritual vision. But a true grasp will not make any difference to his verdict on the Aurobindonian philosophy, for it must still bring in terms like "Absolute" and "Eternal", to which he is acutely allergic beyond any restraint by reason. Oblivious of Sri Aurobindo's terrestrial aim, he affirms: "I prefer to stick to the fundamental insight of Heidegger's being-in-time, and relegate all non-temporal conceptions to the sphere of non-being, non-existence, non-meaning."4
He falls foul also of certain linguistic turns in Sri Aurobindo in connection with the Eternal's self-deployment as space and time, and he cannot make head or tail of some subtle distinctions Sri Aurobindo makes when discussing the Eternal's diverse possibilities of poise in regard to past, present and future. He talks of Sri Aurobindo's "stylistic gaucheries" and "excruciating gibberish".5 Obviously, again, he is ill-acquainted with the occasions for an intricate play of thought and word in the difficult universe of metaphysical discourse.
But what most strikes us in Mr. Alvares is not only a blind animus and a chronic incompetence in his chosen field but also a huge muddle-headedness and a pretentious exploitation of "little learning".
To expose briefly the inadequacy behind his persistent "name-dropping" would be almost enough to disqualify his
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approach to Sri Aurobindo. For, it is on the basis of this appeal to modern thinkers that he condemns Sri Aurobindo as irrelevant "for our times".6 However, I shall take him up in essentials on the other count, too — the hostility that sees no good at all in his subject.
1
The Misfire about Heidegger
Whenever an original thinker expresses profound ideas, a number of his formulations are bound to seem at first obscure and prolix to most readers. One needs to get steeped in an innovator's vision before one can see its lines in sharp focus everywhere. There are also in such a writer large areas of lucid depth-exposition. To ignore these and fasten on the apparent densities is to falsify the picture. But glaring indeed would the falsification be if one picks, as does Mr. Alvares, on a treatise like The Life Divine of Sri Aurobindo, which Aldous Huxley, as a pronouncement published in Mother India (July 1956, p. 10) proves, considers "a book not merely of the highest importance as regards its content, but remarkably fine as a piece of philosophic and religious literature".
And surely it is "batty" and self-defeating to accuse Sri Aurobindo of being awkward or unintelligible and show partiality for the most forbidding of modern German philosophers, who is an "oddball" in style if ever there was one. As a note to a subsequent reference shows,7 Mr. Alvares has drawn upon Heidegger's Being and Time. On the style of this work, Marjorie Grene, an authority, comparing it to that of his later writings, pronounces: "The earlier book is written as though with a sledge hammer: repetitive though its blows are, they are heavy and the syntax is notoriously twisted and obscure."8 Heidegger's later works are smoother in construction, but, as H. J. Blakham observes, they are "oracular in tone and one can have no confidence in interpreting the
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cryptic sentences in which his thought is condensed".9
Linguistically, Heidegger is "tough going" in one way or another. His substance, too, is a stumbling-block to a lot of readers. It is not only a Logical Positivist like Carnap who considers "much of metaphysics like Heidegger's 'The nothing naughts' ...meaningless".10 Many outside the Vienna Circle have had to struggle with his concepts no less than his phraseology. Particularly his copious talk of "Nothing" has rendered him for realistic or rigorous minds a purveyor of "non-being, non-existence, non-meaning".
Patient and sympathetic students, however, have worked their way to the central Heidegger. And the message they have found makes one wonder whether Mr. Alvares, invoking his name, appreciates in the least the true drift of this philosopher's system.
To give another instance of Mr. Alvares's muddle-head-edness we may well ask: "Is his claim really justified that Heidegger, as a contemporary witness, is at odds with Sri Aurobindo?" One has only to look at Grene's article in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy to see that Mr. Alvares has grasped Heidegger very partially when he writes: "Temporality...is the primordial state of being or existence, for each of us exists 'toward our end', which is death. What Heidegger calls 'within-time-ness' is something given along with existence itself..."11 Mr. Alvares refers only to Heidegger's Being and Time with its stress on dread or anxiety (Angst) over one's finitude; but that book is not all of this philosopher. Even if Mr. Alvares be taken to represent its thesis correctly, his version would merely be of the early Heidegger. Being and Time was published in 1927. A work like Introduction to Metaphysics which appeared in 1953 makes almost a contrast as if feeling an incompleteness in the old theme and widening it out to its true shape and thus, without annulling it, playing on it a most momentous variation.
To the mature Heidegger, we have "fallen out of Being", we have lost Being's "nearness and shelter". We run after one thing or another instead of seeking the "Ground"
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through which all things are — Being in its own self, Being that is "the Holy" (Heilig) and that is "Healing" (Heilen) and is "Whole".12 We should not get lost in the superficial mass-man nor in the outer life's disconnected "beings" — "from genes to space-ships", as Grene puts it:13 an inner return to a direct experience of the one Being should be our pursuit. The negative inner intensity of each of us existing "toward our end", which is death, and thus facing Nothingness, has been transformed into a positive expansion of the self into its basic reality which, as the absence of all separate superficial states, is a superb Nothing.
Even in Being and Time, contrary to Mr. Alvares's perception, there is a sort of oblique mysticism. The negative inner intensity is sought to be so deepened that, in the act of confronting in one's very marrow, so to speak, one's own "death" in prospect and one's past "guilt" for not living authentically, one attains a paradoxical liberation, such a peak of subjective pain at one's finitude that a sheer breaking through one's false surface life takes place. It is natural and not freakish that two great theologians, Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, have based themselves on the "existential" analysis in Heidegger's Being and Time.
As if guarding himself against the possible narrowness attaching to the label, Heidegger repudiated the description of himself as an "existentialist". More properly he is that bete noire of Mr. Alvares: an "ontologist", concerned with that which underlies or persists through the fluctuations of time and history.
Another authority than Grene is A. B. Naess who writes in the New Encyclopaedia Britannica (1975). Naess distinguishes the nature of Heidegger's Being from the psychological means by which it is to be attained. Those means are dreadful and dark, yet they conduct us to a different state, one of radiant happiness. Quoting Heidegger, Naess tells us: " ...'Knowing joy... is a door to the Eternal'... Being is associated with 'light' and with 'the joyful'... Being 'calls the tune'; 'to think Being' is to arrive at one's (true) home."14
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After referring to Heidegger as "a critic of technological society and of the role of science", Naess also notes his turning away from common religion but acutely remarks: "Heidegger has no place for God, whose absence nevertheless plays an important role in his thinking. He does not exalt human goals but sees human existence as a cult of Being — a notion not unlike certain notions of God."15
Without any direct naming, we have in the account of both Grene and Naess the great formula of the Upanishads: Sat-Chit-Ananda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss) as the Ultimate for Heidegger. Sri Aurobindo's Absolute and Eternal is essentially here. Is it surprising that Frederic Spiegelberg, once a student of Heidegger's in Germany, later Professor of Asiatic and Slavic Studies at Stanford University, California, should inform us that "back of Heidegger's system... there is a great deal of mysticism" though "Heidegger would be the last one to admit that", because he does not want to use "the expressions of traditional theology" and "remains unaware of his interrelation... with the great thoughts of Indian philosophy"?16
Similar is the considered opinion of Rhoda P. Le Cocq in her methodical survey, The Radical Thinkers: Heidegger and Sri Aurobindo. She concludes: "To the present writer, reading Sri Aurobindo's works makes Heidegger's meaning more explicable, and vice versa."17
2
The Fumble with Weizsacker
Another of Mr. Alvares's gaffes is to summon to his aid "the German physicist Carl F. Von Weizsacker" as the author of The History of Nature.18 We are made to think that Weizsacker stands at the opposite pole to Mr. Alvares's bugbears — a system like Plato's, which focuses on a stable realm of "Being-Ideas" beyond time and history, and a concept like Sri Aurobindo's Eternity and Supermind. But
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what do we actually find in the chapter "Man: Inner History" in Weizsacker's book? Talking of religion, he writes:
The rationalistic explanation quickly comes to mind that man has made God in his image. The Bible has it the other way: God created man in His image... This, I believe, is the profounder truth. In non-mythical language: the image in which God appears to man does not show what man is but what he might be. It is the image of man's potentiality of being, that which determines his life...
I do not say that this image of the objective potentiality exhausts the idea of divinity. The metaphysics behind the fact that the divine reveals itself to us in this fashion, that is something 1 do not dare touch upon.19
Then Weizsacker dwells on how this image helps us to understand "the combination in religion of the supra-historical with the historical", and he goes on to speak of the "challenges" posed by the image "in different ages, among different peoples". "But every one of the challenges is as such inescapable and absolute. The challenge cannot be derived from history, since it determines history."20 Basically, "the German physicist" is worlds away from Mr. Alvares.
I may add that Weizsacker visited the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo a few years back. A major theme in his talk with some of us for nearly two hours was that modern scientific theory needed to link up in its own way with the essentials of Plato. Before he left, he presented me with a copy of the only book of his which he had with him in English translation, The History of Nature, and using my Ashram name, he inscribed it:
To Amal Sethna
from C. F. Weizsacker
who is leaving Sri Aurobindo Ashram
with a thankful heart.
10.12.69
Well might Weizsacker have felt happy in the Ashram, being in mind very different from Mr. Alvares. If he were not
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different, he would not be sufficiently interested in the idea of that mysterious power of Yogic psychology, the kundalini, to contribute a 47-page introduction to a book about it.21 Touching on what he calls "the esoteteric concept of prana" he comments: "prana is not necessarily incompatible with our physics. Prana is spatially extended and vitalizing. Hence above all it is moving potency. The quantum theory designates something not entirely remote from this."
3
The Miscalculation from Simpson, Monod and Dobzhansky
Coming to the topic of evolution Mr. Alvares gibes at Sri Aurobindo's phrase about biological history: "the fact of a successive creation with a developing plan in it..."22 According to Mr. Alvares, the elements at work in this history "have now been mapped out in such great detail by scientists like Simpson, Monod and Dobzhansky that no vestige of any 'plan' is anywhere in evidence".23 Random genetic mutation and unseeing natural selection are the agencies of evolution these scientists have stressed. But it is unphilosophical to decide for evolution's planlessness without first paying attention to what Teilhard de Chardin calls "the Phenomenon of Man". The crucial question is: "Can an utterly planless universe be conceived as giving rise to so inherently planning an animal as Man, who is admittedly its highest product?" Is it not possible to think of an animal like man as the result of a hidden or disguised plan in the universe, which by being hidden or disguised would naturally create a large initial impression of planlessness? One has no right to make with a sweeping finality the choice of an alternative which seems highly improbable, while the other — which equates to the Aurobindonian view of an involved Supermind within the "Inconscient" from which evolution starts — is at the worst ingenious. As we shall see later, even
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scientifically the theory Mr. Alvares accepts for evolution's phenomena is under fire.
I venture also to query whether Dobzhansky can be lumped, without any reservation, with Simpson and Monod. Whatever be his look backward, his look forward is at total variance with theirs. And, quite unlike them, he is an ardent though not indiscriminate admirer of Teilhard and devotes the whole last crowning chapter of his most significant book, The Biology of Ultimate Concern, to the theme: "The Teil-hardian Synthesis."24 His attitude in general towards the future is best summed up in the words: "Modern man ...needs nothing less than a religious synthesis. This syn-thesis...must include science but it cannot be science alone, and in this sense it cannot be 'scientific'."25
The Teilhardian Synthesis ends with a vision of a convergence of human beings on a planetary scale in a sort of super-organism charged with super-consciousness — the famous "Omega Point" in which progressive evolution goes past "reflective" individuality to a "co-reflective" collectivity. Here the developing character Sri Aurobindo mentions of the successive creation becomes relevant to the issue of a planned or unplanned universe. Not that the development is in a straight line: there are zigzags, ups and downs, blind alleys, and yet we mark an overall advance. It is as if a plan leading to Man across innumerable hurdles were secretly unfolding. Mr. Alvares himself admits: "It appears that there has been a tendency in evolution for matter to assume increasingly complex forms of organization in a hierarchy whereby the more complex are assembled out of the less."26 How is this tendency to be accounted for? Mr. Alvares accepts it complacently, feeling no need for an explanation. But even so anti-Teilhard a scientist as Medawar confesses:
We have...no convincing account of evolutionary progress — of the otherwise inexplicable tendency of organisms to adopt ever more complicated solutions of the problem of remaining alive. This is a 'molecular' problem, in the newer biological usage of that word, because its
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working out depends on a deeper understanding of how the physicochemical properties and behaviour of chromosomes and nucleoproteins generally qualify them to enrich the candidature for evolution...27
Elsewhere Medawar pinpoints the problem by speaking of "nucleic acids and the chromosomal apparatus" proffering "genetical variants...more complex and more elaborate than the immediate occasion calls for."28 On the very "level of the miqrosphere", where "the elucidation of evolutionary processes" is claimed by Mr. Alvares to go against Sri Aurobindo,29 we have a kind of nisus towards a series of successive increasing developments. The Aurobindonian alternative to the one which Mr. Alvares favours on the authority of Simpson and Monod is certainly more plausible.
Nor is it that apart from the spot of "finalistic" mystery here — albeit a central spot — everything promises to reduce biology to a science of molecules, as Monod would claim, and so to a special branch of inorganic physics. Everybody knows that modern physics has grown rather peculiar and is no longer such as nineteenth-century materialism thought it could rely on. But, leaving aside ultimate reaches, do we have a riot of reductionist triumphs in all its observable phenomena?
The biologist Barry Commoner, Director of the Center for the Study of Natural Systems at Washington University, St. Louis, is explicit in returning a negative answer: "The complete experience of modern physics does not support the precept — however deeply rooted this may be — that all complex systems are explicable in terms of the properties observable in their isolated parts."30 A prominent example is "superconductivity." No explanation has been found by putting separate electrons together. Superconductivity was explained by John Bardeen only by considering the interaction of the electrons with the pre-existing molecular structure of the metal.31 Here is a "holistic" approach entirely at odds with reductionism. Similarly, says Commoner, the property of self-duplication, which is "uniquely associated
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with the intact living cell", fails to be accounted for by "the properties of those separable cellular constituents, such as DNA, which participate in this process".32
The Watson-Crick "template" theory of DNA synthesis on which the notion of DNA's self-duplication rests — the theory which is the mainstay of Monod and thus of Mr. Alvares — has proved too simplistic in the face of accumulating evidence. Various elements outside its terms have become basic data, thanks to the researches of Kornberg, Khorana, Karam, Ehrenstein et al.33 Commoner sums up: "There is no known mechanism, apart from the unknown one which exists in the intact cell itself, which provides a specific co-ordination of these elements sufficient to insure precise replication of a complex DNA fiber, nor is there any good evidence that this has yet been achieved in vitro. It cannot be said, therefore, that precise replication of DNA, which is the hallmark of biological reproduction, is due solely to the inherent chemical capabilities of the DNA molecule."34 Rightly does Commoner title his article with the critical query: "Is Biology a Molecular Science?"
4
The Confusion about Entropy, Evolution and Supermind
Closely connected with the question of a divine plan of progress is the great play which Mr. Alvares, to show his acquaintance with scientific ideas, makes with the second law of thermodynamics which is also the law of entropy. This law expresses the observation that in energy-changes within a closed system more and more energy gets dissipated in the form of heat beyond practical use, thereby causing increasing randomness and disorder among the molecules. It suggests that ultimately the energy of our universe will reach a maximum of dissipation and disorder devoid of any prospect of "mechanical work".
Mr. Alvares's main theme here is the bearing of entropy
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on the future of evolution. But before we come to grips with this problem we may touch on a bit of fanciful philosophical naivete pompously paraded by him in the matter of entropy and time. He says:
...Time-sense is a primary fact of consciousness.
Time itself is not however a part of the external world, as Aurobindo believed. Change is a fact of nature. And biological change within our own organism is experienced subjectively in consciousness as time. Our human condition is firmly linked to the order of nature, throughout which there is a single direction of change. To the subjective awareness this is the direction of time.
The direction of time, or time's arrow as Eddington put it, we perceive from the operation of the law of entropy... This law...stands for a definite trend in the natural order. And this trend points to a direction in time.
...Of course, it is not suggested that the experiencing subject recognizes his internal change as change of entropy, but that change which is so characterized in the language of physical science is what underlies temporality as a fact of consciousness.35
It is most curious how Mr. Alvares fails to perceive that in noting the dissipation of energy the physicist has to remember the order in which he took the readings of his thermometer. He has to know which record was "before" and which "after", for the purpose of detecting the increase of entropy in what appears to be an irreversible direction.36 To be aware of "before" and "after" in the study of entropy is to be aware not of spatial positions but of temporal ones, what is "earlier" and "later" in time. This sequence which cannot be reversed in any particular context gives us an irreversible temporal direction, "time's arrow". Entropy can be found to increase only as time proceeds uni-directionally in the universe independently of entropy-increase.
The uni-directional time-factor is always involved in every exposition of the law of entropy. Thus Isaac Asimov tells us that the briefest way he knows to state the first and
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second laws of thermodynamics is: "In any closed system the total energy-content remains constant while the entropy continually increases with time."37
The given-ness of time is also accepted by Eddington: "Progress of time introduces more and more of the random element into the constitution of the world"38 — "Like other physical quantities time enters [our consciousness]...as a particular measurable relation between events in the outside world..."39 The sole thing Eddington does not grant is that objective time enters our consciousness with an arrow. He differentiates time's "duration" from its "going on" which he associates with increase of entropy.40 What he overlooks is that time has still its "before" and "after", "earlier" and "later", to indicate its irreversible uni-directionality, its intrinsic arrow.
Even Mr. Alvares indirectly discloses this character of time when he says: "...Mankind and history must one day find an end, if the law of entropy follows its rigorous course."41 The implication is that entropy will reach its maximum at some point of time enormously "after' or "later": this is the oblique suggestion in Mr. Alvares's "one day".
If time has an intrinsic arrow in the sphere of what he calls "nature" and "change", it is absurd to propose that entropy-increase within our organism underlies temporality as a fact of consciousness. Subjective time consists essentially of an experienced movement in the present away from the past towards the future. This movement, for all its difference from objective time, shares with it a perception of "before" and "after", "earlier" and "later" and it continuously causes an inner sense of change as the present keeps handing over its character to the past and assumes a new one. Change is already a part of subjective time and is not confined to the physical world. Also, even more than there, entropy is irrelevant here where the uni-directionality of time is an immediate datum of our inner life.
Mr. Alvares comes a cropper at all points. What one can
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really say is not that the trend of entropy constitutes or determines time's arrow but that it makes us see an already existent arrow of time in a special light.
Turning to evolution Mr. Alvares sees Sri Aurobindo as bypassing the law of entropy and not realising that it is a brake to his ideal of human beings evolved beyond themselves and transformed into supramental ones leading a collective divine life on earth of unity-in-diversity and illumined dynamism. How it could be a brake is not quite clear. Is it because such a life would mark a supreme height of energy-organization and thus flout the second law of thermodynamics? Or does a supramental fulfilment assort ill with a world which must entropically end "not with a bang but with a whimper"? In our opinion, Mr. Alvares has completely confused the relevance of entropy to evolution and Supermind.
The amount of available energy for evolutionary and transformative use may be diminishing, but surely for a very long time a good deal will be to hand. It is not after the prophesied "heat-death" of the universe that Sri Aurobindo's "gnostic beings" are envisaged as developing out of us by human aspiration and the response of divine grace. Long before the anticipated low-temperature dead-end the involved Supermind will have evolved in co-operation with the free descending Supermind. And the evolution of something beyond the mind is warranted by the very tendency Mr. Alvares has admitted for matter in evolution to assume increasingly complex forms of organization. His own intended argument here is that, with this tendency before us, there is no "logical or empirical need" to posit an involved Supermind for any evolutionary rise.42 But indirectly his argument grants that both logically and empirically a rise in evolution like the advent of the Supermind may be expected anyhow. If so, surely something supramental can evolve in the future, like life and mind in the past, despite "the limitations put on nature by the law of entropy".43 To think thus is precisely to bypass entropy, as does Sri Aurobindo
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who never refers to it, in a survey of evolutionary progress.
The only difference is that Sri Aurobindo looks behind the "tendency" which Mr. Alvares admits. Scientifically, by virtue of the unity of nature, all that is manifested must be already present in some mode, however rudimentary or latent. Such presence is one aspect of the Aurobindonian "involution". Sri Aurobindo points out another aspect: "...if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realisation of that which she secretly is."44 In that case, we should accept the "Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind" — states towards which we are directed by "the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Immortality".45
The contingency that "mankind and history must one day find an end, if the law of entropy follows its rigorous course",46 cannot with its remotely far future stand in the way of the Aurobindonian super-evolution. And, if indeed "gnostic beings" come to be, can one say what they will do about the problem of entropy? Put an active Supermind both below and above the evolutionary process and you immediately imply a divine intention to manifest God from a starting-point which seems totally antithetical to Him. Be-cause of God's self-chosen adventure of that antithesis the entropic movement is quite in place — just as much as is the apparent lack of purpose in genetic mutation and natural selection — but cannot be taken as the last word for Heidegger's "being-in-time" by which Mr. Alvares sets much store. The whole biological history which science sees as a line of "increasingly complex forms of organization" for many hundreds of millions of years and which Sri Aurobindo reads as "the fact of a successive creation with a developing
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plan in it" is an index of a counter-entropic current. Not only is biological history irreversible on the whole, as Julian Huxley puts it, but also, as he stresses, the rise in the level of physical organization goes hand in hand with "the emergence and increasing organization of what we must call 'mental properties' ".47 Here we have an index to the possibility — nay, the certainty — of a triumphant divine life on earth with new organs and faculties supremely supra-phy-sical in power and therefore likely to be capable of changing the inexorable-looking second law itself of thermodynamics. A universe like ours, though seen running down in physical energy at present, is not necessarily such as to render a supramental fulfilment improbable as an event in the time to come or even as an indefinitely sustainable phenomenon of the future.
The law of entropy, let us remember, is an empirical discovery and carries no a priori validity. Eddington has argued, along with all other physicists, that if the universe is held to run down completely at some calculable future point, we must postulate a calculable point in the past when its organization was at a maximum.48 How did it come to be in that totally wound-up state? If entropy must always increase, such a state is impossible. Weizsacker conceives that perhaps our universe passes through a periodic round of world-beginning and world-end.49 A cyclic universe of this sort must imply at some epoch a framework even of purely physical events lacking the rule of the second law. Or if, with Eddington, we refuse that framework, nothing save a supra-physical power is left in to reverse that rule in toto.50
In any case, on the strength of the entropy-law we cannot negate a universe of the Aurobindonian type with a Supermind plus Sat-Chit-Ananda as its secret motive-force progressively manifesting itself.
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5
The Unawareness of the Problem of Life and Mind
Even apart from biological history's ascending gradation of what Teilhard terms "complexity-consciousness", the study of the living and perceiving organism has led a number of distinguished scientists to believe that there are vital and mental forces transcending physical ones. These scientists help to cast grave doubt on the Monod-Simpson picture of a planless evolution. Mr. Alvares is blissfully unaware of their existence.
Perhaps he does not bother to be aware because he declares, in connection with life and mind, that "there is no more any necessity to think of 'critical' points of transition" in the evolutionary process.51 May I remind him of Dob-zhansky's words: "The origin of life and the origin of man are, understandably, among the most challenging and also most difficult problems of evolutionary history. It would be most unwise to give a fictitious appearance of simplicity to these singularly complex issues....The flow of evolutionary events...contains crises and turning points which, viewed in retrospect, may appear to be breaks of the continuity. The origin of life was one such crisis, radical enough to deserve the name of transcendence. The origin of man was another.... The appearance of life and of man were two fateful transcendences which marked the beginnings of new evolution."52
Mr. Alvares's attitude is strange, since Monod, his master, although a materialist, is honest enough to notice a few eminent contemporaries as upholders of "vitalism". He first names Elsasser and Polanyi, then adds with some astonishment: "Even the great Nils Bohr himself, it seems, did not dismiss such hypotheses. But he did not claim to have proof that they were necessary."53 Monod forgets to include the equally great Erwin Schrodinger who went to the length of envisioning mind as the unifying and indeed
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unitary principle of all reality.54 We have also the famous zoologist Alister Hardy who has cogently argued even for a telepathic background to the psychic factor he demonstrates as constituting through "behavioural selection" the main evolutionary determinant, with genetic mutation and natural selection its blind-looking helpers.55
Further, there is Albert Szent-Gyoergyi, twice awarded the Nobel Prize (1937,1955), researcher in Monod's own field of molecular biology.56 On various grounds he supposes "an innate 'drive' in living matter to perfect itself" and humorously remarks: "I know that many of my colleagues, especially the molecular biologists, will be horrified, if not disgusted, to hear me talk about a 'drive' and will call me a 'vitalist' which is worse than being called a communist..." Not that he advocates a dogmatic vitalism but he repels the charge that he has been a vitalist "while the real situation was clear and simple". To him "many of the greatest problems of biology are unsolved, if not untouched" and "physics in its present state hardly allows the analysis of the underlying mechanisms" and "and we have to wait for the discovery of entirely new physical sciences till we can penetrate deeper into the nature of life." This is not a position built on "gaps" in knowledge, though gaps in plenty are visible. Also, "physical sciences" have to be there, but with the sense of an ultra-physical background by which the harmonious organizations typical of vital events acquire a true rationale and are not explained away in terms of what are in fact merely instrumental processes. Those sciences have to be newly oriented both in experiment and understanding. Seeing that Sidney Fox in Florida built protein-like substances without the intervention of living matter, Szent-Gyoergyi dares to cross the very borderline between the "inorganic" and the "organic" and write: "Maybe this drive is not an exclusive property of living systems, but is the property of matter in general." His last word actually is still more extreme: "Since I was not afraid to use the word 'drive',
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I might as well be even more audacious and use the word 'wisdom'."
Of course, mental phenomena are to Szent-Gyoergyi totally beyond the possibility of detailed physical analysis. Monod himself confesses about the mind-body question: "There lies the frontier, still almost as impossible for us as it was to Descartes.. .Brain and spirit are ideas no more synonymous today than in the seventeenth century."57 A few sentences earlier, Monod, though ever hopeful of materialism's triumph, candidly notes about "subjective experience": "Physiological experimentation has so far been unable to help us." Does the "analysis of language" give us help? Again, Monod confesses that this analysis discloses the subjective experience only after it has been "transformed" and "certainly does not reveal all its operation".
A whole troop of master-neurologists and cerebral specialists — Sherrington, Hinshelwood, Burt, Russell, Brain, Eccles, Penfield — can be cited as the support of Monod's negative statement on "physiological experimentation". They are at one with what Penfield writes in an article in the Spring 1974 issue of The American Scholar, drawn from his latest book, The Mystery of the Mind:
After years of striving to explain the mind on the basis of brain action alone, I have come to the conclusion that...it will always be quite impossible to explain the mind on the basis of neuronal action within the brain.... The mind is peculiar. It has energy. The form of that energy is different from that of neuronal potentials that travel the axone pathways.
In fact, "mystery" to the extreme degree enfolds not only the mind but also in another way the mind's very instrument, the brain, making it outstandingly an "evo-lute" inexplicable in sheer neo-Darwinian terms. Hinting at a secret planning elan, one of the authorities on genetics and evolution, A. Tetry, has pronounced:
"It is hard to believe that such complex organs as the
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human brain really have resulted from purely fortuitous mutations. Complex organs introduce new elements, new co-ordinations and a different architecture and organization. In order to be effective an evolutionary mutation must adjust itself to the preceding mutation and occur at precisely the right place and time. Even large-scale pleiotropic effects are unable to account for the characteristic correlations and co-ordinations found in all living organisms."58
Thus scientific attitudes and contemporary world-insights in many fields are not so materialistically simple and single-tracked as Mr. Alvares pretends. They leave ample room for and even demand a vision like Sri Aurobindo's of the universe and man, in which one sole yet multi-powered divine Reality acts in numerous forms and modes, through changing degrees and designs, with various oppositions and interplays, by diverse disguises and revelations of itself.
6
The Muddle over Einstein
A favourite tactic of Mr. Alvares is to appeal now and again to Einstein's theory of relativity in order to castigate Sri Aurobindo for speaking of an Absolute, an Eternal, or even a cosmically manifesting Supermind. Mr. Alvares strikes me as having not the slightest glimmer of either Einstein's mentality as a physicist or the total philosophical "aura" of his relativity theory and his basic theoretical method.
Not that we can directly annex Einstein to religion or spirituality. He has plainly repudiated belief in a Personal God occasionally tampering with the cosmic process, and in belief in the survival of death by the human personality. But such beliefs are not the only possible sign of the religious-spiritual temperament. Even Buddhism with its Nirvana and Adwaita with its impersonal Absolute Brahman do not
subscribe to them. Einstein has acutely characterized his own
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stance in regard to such beliefs as well as to membership of any established church by calling himself a profoundly religious unbeliever. And, on the positive side, he has expressed his profound religiousness by his very commit-ments in scientific thought.
These commitments are wittily stated by him in a famous pair of epigrams. One is: "God may be sophisticated but he is not malicious." Einstein means by this that though reality may be very complex it has a structure of rationality and is not impervious to definite and objective formulation in causal terms. The other epigram runs: "God does not play dice with the world." Both the utterances involve a denial, by relativity physics, of the basis of quantum physics — namely, the unavoidable disturbance of reality by our measuring instruments and therefore the formulation of it in terms of probability alone. Because of that denial many physicists today look on Einstein as a "metaphysician", one who introduces assumptions which are not demanded by the pointer-readings on our measuring apparatus — the very type of "metaphysics" which in an older form he set out to banish when he threw overboard Newton's absolute space, time and motion. His ultimate attitude is thus more akin to that of Newton than Mr. Alvares realizes. And the kinship extends significantly to the free use of the word "God".
Mr. Alvares is also quite in error in believing that Einsteinian physics has rendered every concept of absolute reality invalid. He prates of relative space and relative time. Does he not know that science can never rest with relative quantities? Its whole quest is for absolute quantities. Science busies itself with two kinds of measurements: local, variant, relative measurements and universal, invariant, absolute measurements. What any observer records from his limited frame of reference is measurements of the former class. Science begins with them but aims at discovering what will hold for all observers: such measurements are of the second category. There is an Einsteinian universal, invariant or absolute and it is couched not in the old-fashioned linkage of
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three space-readings with one separate time-reading but in what Minkowski designated as the four-dimensional continuum of indivisible space-time — with a semi-Euclidean or "hyperbolic" geometry in the special theory of relativity and a "curved" Riemannian, instead of a "flat" Euclidean, geometry in the general theory. The perspectives achieved for both the theories can be gathered from Einstein beyond any misconception.
"According to the special theory of relativity," he writes, "the four-dimensional continuum formed by the union of space and time retains the absolute character which, according to the earlier theory, belonged to both space and time separately..."59 In the general theory, absolutism or relativism would result from the way we answer the question: "Are particles to be thought of as singularities of space-time or is space-time to be understood as a system of relations between particles?" Einstein's own trend of mind is evident from his assiduous quest to launch from general relativity into a unified field theory. Such a theory would give us a complete mathematical picture of particles as being simply regions of a certain "curvature" of space-time: we should have nothing more than point-instants of a single ultimate field. The theory of relativity, whether special or general, was to Einstein not only an exposure of the old physical quantities as relative but also a trail blazed towards a new absolute.
No doubt, "absolute" here does not connote quite the same thing as in philosophy. But we are in the same realm of mental disposition: we seek to overpass mere relativities, merely limited visions of spatio-temporal events. It is illuminating in this context to mark what Lincoln Barnett in his book The Universe and Dr. Einstein,60 to which Einstein contributed a foreword, sees when looking forward to the unified field theory: "the urge to consolidate premises, to unify concepts, to penetrate the variety and particularity of the manifest world to the undifferentiated unity that lies beyond." Barnett could not help discerning in that theory,
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which was Einstein's ideal, an affinity to Platonism: "More than twenty-three hundred years ago Plato declared, 'The true lover of knowledge is always striving after being.... He cannot rest at those multitudinous phenomena whose existence is appearance only'."
Along Barnett's line of vision, the fusion of time with space must imply that they are expressions, essentially alike, yet with a dual functional shade, of one and the same reality which is a substratum existing beyond immediate experience and appearing in that experience as relative space and time.
We seem to be in deep waters. If, as Mr. Alvares says, "the theory of relativity...is the most perfect representation of external reality available to us" for "the purposes of natural philosophy",61 we are plunged indeed in "metaphysical" depths. But the view we have taken is in full accord with Einstein's own mental bent. In addition to the pair of epigrams we have quoted, there are those memorable and penetrating pronouncements: "Religion without science is blind; science without religion is lame" — "the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible to our mind" — "Cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific research". Einstein conceives of a secret harmony pre-established between a universal Intelligence and the human mind, a harmony creating the possibility for this mind to understand the workings of the cosmos.62 He has avowed himself a Spinozist,63 one to whom the pantheos of Spinoza — the rational Intelligence immanent in the world — is the God science must recognize. Does Mr. Alvares get the hang of such a statement? Einstein was not a practising philosopher, but Spinoza was, and the foundational implication of Spinozism is a single infinite world-substance with an infinite number of attributes, each of which is infinite, but only two of which our human minds can deal with: infinite thought and infinite extension. Spinozism is pretty close to something like an Absolute, though in pantheistic and not transcendental terms.
We are in deep waters too with the revolution in scientific
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theoretical method Einstein's discovery of general relativity brought in. Formerly the physicist believed he reached his fundamental axioms by generalization from observed phenomena through a kind of inductive reasoning. In the place of that picture has come the mode of mental activity which Karl Popper calls "hypothetico-deductive". A scientist builds a hypothesis (often resting on a "hunch"), then makes deductions from it and submits the end-product of the long logical process to an experimental test. Experiments decide the ultimate validity of the hypothesis: the hypothesis itself subsists in a domain which experiments do not directly touch at all. Since the validated hypothesis is logically demanded, however distantly, by the experiments, it cannot be rated even by quantum physicists as "metaphysical" in any pejorative sense. But, unquestionably, it has to a high degree a non-empirical status.
One may try to water down the starting-point of the theorist to mean "guess-work", but Einstein warns us against equating the theoretical effort to "idle day-dream-ing".64 A great ardour and rigour of the inner consciousness are needed. And when he asks the theorist to "give free rein" to the faculty which a carping critic might dub "fancy" he exacts "much intense hard thinking".65 The theoretical flight which leaps far beyond observed phenomena is best described from Einstein's own account66 as an act of free fiction or free invention or free creation of the mind.67 No wonder he could assert: "In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed."68
A creative activity of the mathematical consciousness, akin to the activity of the artist in the non-mathematical sphere, lies at the base of the Einsteinian method. The fundamental concepts of Einstein are compassed by a species of inner vision, divination, "intuition" (Einstein's own word).69 Somehow the mind at its acutest is able to have direct insight into reality, to be one with reality and know it from the inside, as it were, by getting a touch of merger with it. The oneness, the inside knowledge by a glimmer of
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identification, argues for reality itself a secret nature analogous to the mind. We could hardly be surprised then to find Einstein, for all his aloofness from conventional religion, subscribing to — as he puts it70 — "the firm belief, which is bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind revealing itself in the world of experience".
Here, on a certain level, we have a straight contact of the world of science with that of Sri Aurobindo.
Here light is shed also on the background of Einstein's indifference to survival of death by the human personality. When the body falls apart, the individual mood in the mental component would be gone. But the "superior mind" to which it had responded in its scientific explorations would still have the essential mind-stuff that had once formed Einstein's genius. In the information we have about Einstein's outlook on death a hint of his instinct of such a result can actually be traced. Boris Kuznetsov, Chairman of the International Einstein Committee, has recounted:
In Einstein's attitude towards death we find a certain synthesis of Tolstoy's sense of kinship with nature and the absorption in human problems characteristic of Dostoyevsky. When a visitor once asked Einstein how he would judge his life on his death-bed, Einstein answered: 'I would not be interested in such a question, either on my death-bed or at any time. After all, I am only a tiny particle of nature.'
He gave a similar answer in 1916, when he was seriously ill, to Hedwig Born (Max Born's wife), who asked him whether he feared death. 'No,' he said, ' I feel myself so much a part of everything living that I am not in the least concerned with the beginning or ending of the concrete existence of any person in this eternal flow.'
This awareness is not only of the eternal flow of natural processes but also of the eternal flow of human knowledge and activity.71
Above all, the awareness is a far-off touch of pantheistic mysticism's sense of the ever-living universal Whole that is
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the Spinozistic "superior mind" self-revealed in Nature. And in this touch, which is organic to the totality of the scientific posture of consciousness associated with Einstein, we have once again a sympathetic sign towards Sri Aurobindo's world.
7
Blunders and Slanders about Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and the Ashram
Sri Aurobindo's world, however, is not merely of speculative philosophy, of conclusions "we reach...by a process of thought, by abstraction", as Mr. Alvares opines.72 It is a world of spirituality with philosophical systematization coming in its wake. Immediate spiritual experience and mystical realization are here concerned. Mr. Alvares appears to be congenitally incapable even of asking whether any value can be attached to what William James broadly termed "the varieties of religious experience".
How, with such a handicap, is he to take anything Aurobindonian by the right end? For instance, he is puzzled that Sri Aurobindo, while giving importance in his philosophical scheme to the fact of evolution as discovered by science, refuses to bind himself down to any specific theory of the manner in which the evolution of forms has proceeded. Mr. Alvares waxes indignant that a stand like this would ignore even the theory advocated by Simpson and his followers. But, supposing science to have the final say, is the Simpsonian construct really the last word from its mouth?
An impartial survey in Science in the Twentieth Century tells us about "the so-called 'synthetic' or neo-darwinian theory of which G. G. Simpso has been one of the leading exponents":73 "...despite its many advantages and despite the mathematical analyses of Fisher (1930), Wright (1931) and Haldane (1932), the synthetic theory fails to account for all the observed phenomena." At the end of our section 5 we
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have already mentioned perhaps the most serious failures, those listed apropos of the human brain. Now we may place them in their proper order and quote the entire roll of the synthetic theory's failures and follow on with the general conclusion of the author:
Thus, it cannot really be said to explain the emergence of co-adaptation (Cuenot) or of 'tools' (Cuenot and Tetry) based on the mutual adjustment of two independent parts. And it is hard to believe that such complex organs as the human brain really have resulted from purely fortuitous mutations. Complex organs introduce new elements, new co-ordinations, and a different architecture and organization. In order to be effective, an evolutionary mutation must adjust itself to the preceding mutation and occur at precisely the right place and time. Even large-scale pleiotropic effects are unable to account for the characteristic correlations and co-ordinations found in all living organisms. No wonder, therefore, that J. K. Kalin has called the synthetic theory a kind of 'synthetic euphoria,' and that even such eminent members of the American school as Waddington and Olson have mentioned difficulties and raised objections.74
We are finally told: "In point of fact, none of the theories we have been discussing provides an entirely satisfactory account of all the facts of evolution, particularly of the emergence of taxonomic groups and of adaptations."75
Hence from the scientific viewpoint itself Sri Aurobindo would be justified in his indifference. Besides, we have marked how the factors set in prominence by the Simpso-nians can themselves acquire a different over-all meaning so as to accomodate non-physical agents: all depends on where the stress for explanation is put.
Centrally, however, what we have to understand is that Sri Aurobindo founds his perception of the evolutionary ascent of consciousness not on the current data of biology but on his vision of both involved and free Supermind. Science has provided a helpful milieu for his call upon man to evolve
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from the limited mental into the boundless supramental in consonance with the two earlier impossible-seeming harmonizations of opposites: the accord of apparently brute matter with sentient life and the accord of instinctive and apparently non-reasoning vitality with self-aware, nature-probing, value-questing, ever-aspiring intelligence. Sri Aurobindo is not essentially tied up with one explanation or another which science at the moment offers of changes in the organism and of species-development. Were science to deny evolution, his call to man would still go forth. But most probably there is an inner relationship between the modern evolutionist age with its emphasis on matter's configurations and the epoch of Sri Aurobindo's experiential philosophy of Supermind with its basic transformative drive, its world-acceptance and its demand for concrete results of spirituality on the material plane.
As for the problem of spirituality in general, we cannot but admit the occurrence of numberless inner "encounters", during human history, between man and what he has been convinced of as being superhuman or divine realities. Sri Aurobindo is fundamentally in the line of the seers of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita and the world's other scriptures. If we are to run down those seers and later mystics like St. Francis and St. Teresa, Rumi and Baha-ullah, Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi as deluded fools, we needs must keep away from Sri Aurobindo. But all these mystics were, in a high sense, empiricists, practical masters, demanding that their followers subject themselves to strict disciplines, experiment in extraordinary experiences without the aid of any drugs and go beyond hallucination or even a flash-in-the-pan mystical moment to a permanent realization which would leave them calmer, wider, deeper, sweeter, stronger. As compared to mere philosophers, they would actually merit the title of super-scientists.
Sri Aurobindo stands in very commendable company and there is no cause to accuse him, as Mr. Alvares does,76 of inventing on after-thought an adesh, a divine command from
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within, to lend a halo to his abrupt departure from British India in 1910. Mr. Alvares pictures him as flying perforce from imminent arrest and deportation. This is a perversion of fact. Every student of the political history of those days is aware that by a timely astute article Sri Aurobindo made arrest and deportation impossible. Nor, as Mr. Alvares suggests,77 was it necessary for him to go into political exile in order to start Yoga. The experience of Nirvana — silence of the mind in the Absolute Brahman — is dated to 1908; the realization of the Cosmic Krishna — Vasudeva sarvam — came later in the same year during his detention in Alipore Jail; even the vision of what he afterwards was to call the "overhead planes" of "gnostic consciousness" began in prison. Of course, Mr. Alvares is free to look on all this as bogus, but he must at least get right his chronology of the bogus before leaping to certain historical conclusions or to "debunking" inferences.
And how ridiculous is all his talk of "The mystification of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother"78 to anyone who has come into touch with either of them! Whoever has stood in Sri Aurobindo's presence can testify to its wonderful illuminative and peace-creative effect. The same applies to the one whom he put at the centre of his work: the Mother. None of the prejudicial accounts Mr. Alvares constructs can make the slightest impression on those who, like myself, have been in long contact with her profound understanding of our nature, her guiding technique of fortiter in re, suaviter in modo, her happiness-giving radiance of look and gesture, her charmingly human blend of sympathy and irony, seriousness and wit. There was also her keen sympathy with the underdog, so that any servant could appeal to her over the head of his boss. Above all, no-one can ever forget how with her eyes and her smile she could produce an astonishing impression of beauty. Many of us perhaps carry this impression as our strongest and dearest memory of her. Possibly knowing this, Mr. Alvares has prepared that phrase which marks the nadir of his bad taste: "...when she died — this must be admitted
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— she was one of the ugliest women in the world."79 Another vulgar stroke is his joining hands with Morarji Desai in saying disparagingly that she "dressed in costly saris and used all the modern accessories of make-up".80 Morarji Desai, a prudish puritanical mind with old-world ideas of spirituality, cannot be expected to understand the Mother or Sri Aurobindo. The Mother was modern and had lived once in the finest art-circles of France. Sri Aurobindo was also modern and fully approved what she did. The "costly saris", however, were never the Mother's own purchases. They were people's gifts and the givers expected her to show her appreciation by wearing them. Sometimes, in spite of her exquisite taste, she put on somewhat loud clothing just for the sake of pleasing the devoted but indiscriminate donor. She had no attachment to anything. We can appreciate the non-attachment also when we mark that, contrary to Mr. Alvares's statement, she completely dropped "the modern accessories of make-up" after "the time of Aurobindo": there was no "later" for them such as Mr. Alvares insinuates.81 He shows himself irresponsible, carried away by what I have called his "blind animus".
He keeps suggesting that the Mother and Sri Aurobindo must always be split apart: "...no serious student of Aurobindo's philosophy considers the Mother's ideas as part of the sage's system."82 The word "sage" is a little odd in Mr. Alvares's mocking mouth; but surely Sri Aurobindo could be no sage at all if he, when he put her side by side with himself on darshan days for twenty-four years, failed to see as potential in her the perversity Mr. Alvares with a super-sage vision has been able to discern. It would be, on Sri Aurobindo's part, a more than Himalayan blunder to make her not only the heart of his Ashram's Yogic activity but also the cynosure of all aspiring eyes turning everywhere in the world towards his earth-oriented, life-embracing, time-fulfilling Yoga of integral transformation of bodily existence no less than of mind and vital force by the power of the Supermind which holds the secret truth, the perfect original,
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of all manifested modes. From day-to-day relationship with the Mother we knew that Sri Aurobindo had her in mind when he penned those lines about the chief character of his epic Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, lines beginning with an. occult yet vividly moving vision and continuing to a clear large play of luminous language:
As in a mystic and dynamic dance
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
Inhabited with rich creative beats
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple door to things beyond.
Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;
Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense
Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight
Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives.
A wide self-giving was her native act;
A magnanimity as of sea or sky
Enveloped with its greatness all that came
And gave a sense as of a greatened world.83
Mr. Alvares will most probably make nothing of this burst of poetic inspiration. He has a rare genius for not understanding heights and depths. But more marvellous still is his genius for misunderstanding even surfaces if they are a little unusual. I shall give one supreme instance.
Charging Sri Aurobindo with "megalomania", he writes:84
Such an attitude of general superiority is radically evident in Aurobindo's claim, for example, to have written the perfect poetry, the future poetry. The literary critic, Mr. Nissim Ezekiel, has mercifully laid that claim to rest. What could any critic do when confronted with passages such as these?:
'In poetry anything can pass — for instance, my
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"voice of a tilted nose":
O voice of a tilted nose,
Speak but speak not in prose!
Nose like a blushing rose,
O Joyce of a tilted nose.
This is high poetry but put it in prose and it sounds
insane.'
Mr. Alvares is convinced that Sri Aurobindo is dead serious here. But any reader can see what Sri Aurobindo is driving at. He is in one of his tomfooling moods, his warmly human bouts of humour. We have only to focus on that pun — "Joyce" — to realize the tricks the writer is up to. And, if we care to look up the context of this hilarious outburst, we shall gather at the same time how utterly lacking in a sense of humour is Mr. Alvares and how utterly absent is even a moron's perceptiveness in this self-appointed authority on literary style no less than philosophy and science. Here is the context, to which Mr. Alvares himself refers in a note.85 I wrote to Sri Aurobindo:
The English reader has digested Carlyle and swallowed Meredith and is not quite unwilling to re-Joyce in even more startling strangenesses of expression at the present day. Will his stomach really turn at the novelty of that phrase which you wouldn't approve; "the voice of a devouring eye"? "The voice of an eye" sounds rather idiotic, but if the adjective "devouring" is added the phrase seems to become effective. "Devouring eye" is then a synecdoche — isolating and emphasizing Shakespeare's most remarkable quality, his eager multitudinous sight, and the oral epithet provides a connection with the idea of a voice, thus preventing the catachresis from being too startling. If Milton could give us "blind mouths" and Wordsworth
Thou Eye among the blind, That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, is there very much to object to in this visioned voice? In Sri Aurobindo's reply, the passage which Mr. Alvares has
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quoted came on the heels of the following:
Can't accept all that. A voice of a devouring eye is even more re-Joycingly mad than a voice of
eye pure and simple. If the English language is to go to the dogs, let it go, but the Joyce cut by the
way of Bedlam does not recommend itself to me.
The poetical examples have nothing to do with the matter.
Poetry is permitted to be insane — the poet and the madman go together: though even
there are limits. Meredith and Carlyle are tortuous or extravagant in their style only —
though they can be perfectly sane when they want.
From Mr. Alvares's presentation of Sri Aurobindo's laughing answer we can infer one of two things. Either Mr. Alvares is deliberately dishonest and tries to distort Sri Aurobindo or else he is a dunce of the first water. Here he seems to be the latter.
As for his ideal critic, Mr. Nissim Ezekiel, I would refer Mr. Alvares — if I could believe that he was capable of a lucid spell freeing him for a moment from his peculiar schizophrenia of duncehood and dishonesty — to the article, "A Cross Critic Cross-examined", on pp. 447-72 of my book Sri Aurobindo — the Poet.
I must close now, but not before I illustrate most clearly an act of deliberate dishonesty by Mr. Alvares. He tells us: The tiny town of Pondicherry is conveniently sliced into two residential units, a 'white' section and a 'black' section, by an 18-foot-broad canal called the Quai de Gingy. When the French ruled the roost, they occupied the white section and the local Tamils the other. The white section is bounded on the East by the sea.
When the French left in 1954, the Ashram and its inmates came to monopolize this white section (the buildings are all painted white)...86 Mr. Alvares distinctly says that white is the colour in which the buildings occupied by the Ashramites and standing in the old white section are painted. In itself the state-
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ment would be harmless and one may even surmise that somehow an impression of white was produced. But the subtle insinuation of his bracketed phrase is that the Ashram-ites are the successors of the once-roost-ruling French and have put themselves against the poor black Tamils whom the French must have despised and exploited. There was no need to specify the colour of houses except for the sake of that suggestion. The section was called white in the days of the French because white people lived there, not because the houses were painted white. Surely the other section was not called black because its buildings were painted black? A strong hostile hint is what Mr. Alvares is after. And its barb gets sharpened when in the course of his article he begins a sentence with: "The week I was in Pondicherry...."87 We acquire the sense of an eyewitness talking. Yet the fact remains that, from long before the French ceased to be the rulers of Pondicherry, the buildings owned by the Ashram and its inmates have been blue-grey and the houses rented by them brick-coloured.
It is possible that at some distance the blue-grey, acted upon by the sun over years, may look whitish in the exposed parts. But what about the unexposed parts and those buildings whose colour has not faded enough and especially the buildings which have had — as all do have at some time or other — their coat of blue-grey renewed? A survey of the several phases of one and the same colour, which is never pure white, must prevent one from making a statement like Mr. Alvares's. To make such a statement, in spite of the unmistakable varied evidence before one, is to stand convicted of deliberately distorting the truth.
Or else one is so careless an observer that one lets oneself be carried away by the whitish appearance of some houses and never uses one's eyes to make a correct all-round appraisal. The conclusions of an observer of this type, even if honest, are worthless and lead one to disvalue his testimony in other matters, too. If Mr. Alvares really believes all Ashram houses to be painted white, he is a poor witness to
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the state of the Ashram and of Pondicherry. But can we write him off with a bit of pity as an innocent myopic? Everywhere in his account of the Ashram's activities in the town he claims acuity of observation and judicial perceptiveness. Can we let him off here as having slipped somehow just in one place? This is hardly possible. For, having visited or at least looked at the main complex of buildings which is technically known as the Ashram, the complex within which there are the Samadhi and the house of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as well as the Meditation Hall, he could not have missed seeing from the Ashram gate a huge house diagonally opposite the Ashram block and painted yellow because it was not an Ashram property. (At present it is and has the typical blue-grey.) In spite of seeing it he could write that the Ashram has monopolized the old white section of the town. It should be obvious that he is bent on falsifying facts. How then shall we excuse him for the whiteness ascribed to the Ashram buildings? Here is a case of wilful mendacity no less than of pushing forward a minor aspect like colour with malice prepense.
Nor is it only one building in the old white section that was a non-Ashram property when Mr. Alvares paid his visit to Pondicherry. The Indian Government House and various Government offices, the Town Hall, the town hospital, the public library, the courts, the two biggest banks, several Roman Catholic institutions, the Institut Francais of Indo-logy, a number of non-Ashram hotels, several shops, many non-Ashram families both Indian and European — all these have been for years in the section "bounded on the East by the sea". To generalize that the Ashram and its inmates have monopolized this section is a gross exaggeration, a "terminological inexactitude", as Churchill would have ironically said, on a grand scale.
A third calculated inaccuracy is the glaring implication that no Ashramites or Ashram activities are to be found on the West side of the canal. Scores of followers of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have their houses there. I lived
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for 10 years on that side. An Ashram restaurant and guest-house are also just beyond the canal.
Neither is it in the least true that, as Mr. Alvares reports,88 all local people on the west of the canal live in "pretty gruesome conditions". Some of the richest Tamil families have their fine houses there. And can we speak of the long varied market place, which is beyond the canal, as all subsisting in conditions that are pretty gruesome? Mr. Alvares makes statements too sweeping for a week's tourist. Perhaps he could not find out enough. But then he should have held his peace.
About the East side, however, he has gone out of his way venomously to babble nonsense in order to put the Ashram in the wrong box. And this kind of "ulterior motive" creating mischief by twisting truth or withholding inconvenient facts is at play in different forms all over the article. I was present during many an event he reports and my direct testimony negates the conclusions he tries to draw. He has not attempted to weigh things in the balance: he has just run amuck. But his running amuck is actually no more than "sound and fury, signifying nothing" — "nothing" in a non-challenging and non-regenerative connotation that Heidegger would have been ashamed to have encouraged in this world of "being-in-time".
"Being-in-time": the expression is a most meaningful one to end with, for it is on the temporal existence that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother concentrated whatever perfection of Eternity, whatever power of Supermind, they could reach and draw earthward, hoping with their high and happy light to convert into Superman even such resistant material as Mr. Alvares.
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Notes and References
1."Sri Aurobindo: Superman or Supertalk", Quest 93, January-February 1975 (Bombay), pp. 9-23.2."Aurobindo and Science", Quest 96, July-August 1975, p. 71, col. 2
3.P. 17, col. 2
4.P. 20, col. 1
5.P. 19, col. 2; p. 20, col. 1.
6.P. 18, col. 1, fn.
7.As the note to a subsequent quotation shows. See p. 23, n. 23.
8."Heidegger, Martin", The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Editor in Chief, Paul Edwards (The Macmillan Co. & The Free Press, New York, 1967), Vol. 3, p. 463, col. 1.
9.Six Existentialist Thinkers (Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., London, 1951), p. 103.
10.The Age of Analysis
11.P. 20, col. 2.
12.The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3, p. 462, col. 1.
13.Ibid.
14."Heidegger, Martin", The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (1975), Vol. 8, p. 740, col. 1.
15.Ibid., p. 738, col. 2.
16."Sri Aurobindo and Existentialism", The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, Edited by Haridas Chaudhuri and Frederic Spiegelberg (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London, 1960), p. 53.
17 The Radical Thinkers: Heidegger and Sri Aurobindo (California Institute of Asian Studies, San Francisco, 1969), p. 189.
18.P. 19. col. 1.
19.The History of Nature (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1949), pp. 181-82.
20.Ibid., p. 182.
21.The Biological Basis of Religion and Genius by Gopi Krishna (Harper & Row, Religious Perspective Series, New York).
22.P. 18, col. 2.
23.P. 19, col. 1.
24.The Biology of Ultimate Concern (Collins, Fontana, London, 1971), pp. 108-37.
25.Ibid., p. 109.
26.P(Pelican Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1969), p. 117..
27.The Art of the Soluble
28.Ibid., , p. 89.
29.P. 16, col. 1.
30."Is Biology a Molecular Science?", Anatomy of Knowledge, edited by Marjorie Grene (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1969), p. 90.
31.Ibid.
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32.Ibid., p. 91.
33.Ibid .,pp. 80-82.
34.Ibid., p. 81.
35.P. 20, col. 2; p. 21, col. 1.
36.Cf. L. Susan Stebbing, Philosophy and the Physicists (Pelican Books, Har-mondsworth, Middlesex, 1944), p. 195; also H. Levy, The Universe of Science (The Thinker's Library, Watts & Co., London, 1947), pp. 28-31.
37.View from a Height (Lancer Books, New York, 1963), p. 147
38.The Nature of the Physical World (Everyman's Library, J. N. Dent & Sons, Ltd., London, 1935), p. 84.
39.Ibid.,p,105
40.Ibid.,p.85
41.P. 22, col. 2.
42.P. 18, col. 1.
43.P. 20, col. 2.
44.The Life Divine
45.Ibid.
46.P. 22, col. 2.
47.Issues in Evolution, Vol. 3 of Evolution After Darwin, Sol Tax, Editor (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1964), pp. 139, 112.
48.Op. tit., p.90
49.Op. cit.,139-97
50.Op. cit., p.91
51.P. 18, col. 1.
52.Op. cit., pp.45,59
53.Chance and Necessity (Collins, London, 1972), pp. 35-36.
54.My View of the World (The Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1964).
55.The Living Stream: A Restatement of Evolution Theory and Its Relation to the Spirit of Man
56."Drive in Matter to Perfect Itself", Synthesis (Redwood City, California), 1974, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 17, 21-24.
57.Op. cit., p,148
58."Genetics and Evolution", Science in the Twentieth Century, Edited and with a Preface by Renee Taton, translated from the French by A. J. Pomerans (Thames & Hudson, London, 1966), p. 447.
59.The World As 1 See It, Translated by Allan Harris (John Lane, The Bodley Head, London, 1941), p. 164.
60.A Mentor Book, The New American Library, New York, 1963, p. 122.
61.P. 21, col. 2.
62.Op. cit.,p.120
63.lbid.131
64.Ibid., p.180
65.Ibid.
66.Ibid., , pp. 134-36.
67.Cf. C. P. Taylor and F. Barron, Eds., Scientific Creativity and Its Recognition and Development (New York, 1963).
68.Op. cit., p. 136.
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69.Ibid., p. 135.
70.Ibid., p. 131.
71.Einstein and Dostoyevsky,
72.P. 19, col. 2.
73.See "Genetics and Evolution" by A. Tetry in Science in the Twentieth Century, p.446
74.Ibid.p.447,
75.Ibid.
76.P. 9, col. 1.
77.Ibid.
78.Ibid.
79.P. 11, col. 1.
80.Ibid.
81.Ibid.
82.Ibid.
83.Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1970), p. 15.
84.P. 15, col. 1.
85.P. 22, col. 2, note 9: "Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, Vol. 26, p. 315 (Centenary Ed.)." The correspondence originally appeared in the collection edited by me, Life — Literature — Yoga, Revised and Enlarged Ed. (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1967), pp. 157-58.
86.P. 11, col. 1.
87.P. 13, col. 1.
88.P. 11, col. 2.
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