When a poem by a disciple was read out to Sri Aurobindo he expressed special admiration for the line:
Seer-suns beyond the gold of Plato's brain'.
We may legitimately surmise that Sri Aurobindo admired this flight of poetic imagination not only because it winged with the right words a certain view of Plato but also because it summed up his own insight into the truth of Platonism vis-a-vis the Ultimate Truth as seized by his yogic consciousness.
The line by Amal Kiran suggests at the same time that Plato had his mind set glowing with a wonderful perception of spiritual reality and that, for all the extreme brilliance of this perception, there is a realm of revelation filled with a greater light of Eternal Verities than Platonism could compass.
Sri Aurobindo's general outlook on Plato may be appreciated from some statements found in his letters to his disciples. The longest of them runs: "Plato was a great writer as well as a philosopher — no more perfect prose has been written by any man — in some of his books his prose carries in it the qualities of poetry and his thought has poetic vision."2 The historical background to the poetic vision in Plato's thought is touched upon by Sri Aurobindo when he writes apropos of Heraclitus and the Age of the "Mysteries" in Greece:
"To ignore the influence of the mystic thought and its methods of self-expression on the intellectual thinking of the Greeks from Pythagoras to Plato is to falsify the historical procession of the human mind. It was enveloped at first in the symbolic, intuitive, esoteric style and discipline of the Mystics, — Vedic and Vedantic seers, Orphic secret teachers, Egyptian priests. From that veil it emerged along the path of
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a metaphysical philosophy still related to the Mystics by the source of its fundamental ideas, its first aphoristic and cryptic style, its attempt to seize directly upon truth by intellectual vision rather than arrive at it by careful ratiocination, but nevertheless intellectual in its method and aim. This is the first period of the Darshanas in India, in Greece of the early intellectual thinkers. Afterwards came the full tide of philosophic rationalism, Buddha or the Buddhists and the logical philosophers in India, in Greece the Sophists and Socrates with all their splendid progeny; with them the intellectual method did not indeed begin, but came to its own and grew to its fullness. Heraclitus belongs to the transition, not to the noontide of the reason; he is even its most characteristic representative. Hence his cryptic style, hence his brief and burdened thought and the difficulty we feel when we try to clarify and entirely rationalise his significances. The ignoring of the Mystics, our pristine fathers, purve pitarah, is the great defect of the modern account of our thought-evolution."?
What is particularly relevant for us is the juxtaposition in the phrase: "from Pythagoras to Plato." The coupling of the two Greeks is meaningful, there is a line of thought joining them. But, in the context of mysticism, they are not on a par. "A mystic," Sri Aurobindo declares, "is currently supposed to be one who has mystic experience, and a mystic philosopher is one who has such experience and has formed a view of life in harmony with his experience. Merely to have metaphysical notions about the Infinite and Godhead and underlying or overshadowing forces does not make a man a mystic. One would never think of applying such a term to Spinoza, Kant or Hegel: even Plato does not fit into the term, though Pythagoras has a good claim to it. Hegel and other transcendental or idealistic philosophers were great intellects, not mystics."!
Yes, Pythagoras, unlike Plato, is unchallengeable; actually elsewhere Sri Aurobindo has gone so far as to say: "Pythagoras was one of the greatest of the mystics."5 But, although Plato is different, we should note the way in which
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the Master of the Academy is excluded from the company of the mystics: "Even Plato..." This means that Plato has something about him which the other eminent intellectuals lack. Sri Aurobindo sees in him a subtle sight such as cannot be traced in his encyclopaedic contemporary Aristotle. Sri Aurobindo read the Republic and the Symposium in the original when he was at Cambridge, he also went on to imitate the Platonic dialogue-form in a remarkable work, fairly long yet unfinished, of his late teens, The Harmony of Virtue; and a deep sense of the value of both the Platonic matter and the Platonic manner persisted. About Aristotle he has said: "I always found him exceedingly dry. It is a purely mental philosophy, not like Plato's."! In Plato Sri Aurobindo recognises an inspiration from above the mere mind, creating simultaneously a profound philosophy and a superb style through which his thoughts come to us "in large streams of subtle reasoning and opulent imagery".7
Sri Aurobindo's estimate of Plato crystallises further in two brief phrases. One of them again brings in the adverb "even": "We may reasonably doubt whether even a Plato or a Shankara marks the crown and therefore the end of the outflowering of the spirit in man.:" Here Plato stands for the highest reach of evolution which nevertheless to Sri Aurobindo is not the grand terminus: he looks forward to a superhuman achievement, with a more-than-mental "gnosis" as the day-to-day instrument of self-awareness and world-awareness.
The second phrase occurs in a letter where Sri Aurobindo answers the question: Can any part of our nature, the mental or the vital, be retained after death by the true soul, the psyche, and carried over to the next birth instead of there being a complete reinsouling, the taking up of an altogether new subtle vehicle along with the physical by the psyche? Sri Aurobindo's answer is that, while a person with "a strong spiritual development" could certainly retain his vital-mental being, the carrying-over is possible also to "one like Shelley or like Plato for instance" who has a developed mental
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personality centred around the psychic individual.9 Here Plato represents the philosopher, just as Shelley represents the poet, who has lived intensely in the light of his inmost being which is ever open to divine influences.
The fact that Plato, though acutely intellectual, yet reflects a supra-intellectual source of knowledge affines him essentially to Sri Aurobindo. What is more, the mode in which he embodies in mental terms the substance of the "seer-suns" creates an intimate affinity in Platonism to Sri Aurobindo's mystic philosophy. This affinity comes of - to quote Sri Aurobindo's own words on Plato — "his eternal, ideal plane of fixed ideas, by which he seems to have meant at once an originating real-idea and an original ideal schema for all things."10 Real-idea: that is an Aurobindonian expression of capital significance. It connotes something quite other than the mental idea which is a thing apart from the reality concerned. The mental idea creates an abstract figure of an existence outside itself. Whether we regard that existence as of a different kind from the stuff of ideation or of a similar kind, there is always the sense of detachment of the subjective being from objective reality in order to observe, understand and judge. The real-idea belongs not to Mind but to a superior Consciousness which Sri Aurobindo names Super-mind. Supermind is an infinite Reality bringing out as Idea the truth of its own being. This idea is a coming forth, in creative self-knowledge, of that which lay concentrated in uncreative self-awareness. It is a pregnant vibration of reality itself and therefore a real-idea. Differentiations of the one truth, a multiplicity and diversity of real-ideas expressing what is infinitely implicit in the Absolute, are held in the Supermind, which is the ultimate existence itself in its aspect of Creator, and there they are organised in a perfect harmony before they are cast into the mental-vital-material mould which we know as our universe. "Mind, Life and Body," says Sri Aurobindo, "are an inferior consciousness and a partial expression which strives to arrive in the mould of a various evolution at that superior expression of itself already
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existent to the Beyond-Mind. That which is in the Beyond-Mind is the ideal which in its own conditions it is labouring to realise."!'
Sri Aurobindo goes on to sum up: "The Real is behind all that exists; it expresses itself intermediately in an Ideal which is a harmonised truth of itself; the Ideal throws out a phenomenal reality of variable conscious-being which, inevitably drawn towards its own essential Reality, tries at last to recover it entirely whether by a violent leap or normally through the Ideal which put it forth. It is this that explains the imperfect reality of human existence as seen by the Mind, the instinctive aspiration in the mental being towards a perfectibility ever beyond itself, towards the concealed harmony of the Ideal, and the supreme surge of the spirit beyond the ideal to the transcendental. The very facts of our consciousness, its constitution and its necessity presuppose such a triple order; they negate the dual and irreconcilable antithesis of a mere Absolute to a mere relativity."12
And, just as between the Absolute and the relativity there stands the Supermind (or the Truth-Consciousness, as Sri Aurobindo often designates it) to connect the overwhelming multiplicity of the latter to the all-absorbing unity of the former, Sri Aurobindo sees standing between the Supermind and our sphere of ignorance a delegate power of the Truth-Consciousness, an inferior or diminished supramental Knowledge-Will from which a lapse into the mental-vital-physical diffusion and division can occur. This is the Over-mind. "The integrality of the Supermind keeps always the essential truth of things, the total truth and the truth of its individual self-determinations clearly knit together; it maintains in them an inseparable unity and between them a close interpenetration and a free and full consciousness of each other: but in Overmind this integrality is no longer there. And yet the Overmind is well aware of the essential Truth of things; it embraces the totality; it uses the individual self-determinations without being limited by them: but although it knows their oneness, can realise it in a spiritual cognition,
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yet its dynamic movement, even while relying on that for its security, is not directly determined by it. Overmind Energy proceeds through an illimitable capacity of separation and combination of the powers and aspects of the integral and indivisible all-comprehending Unity.... The one total and many-sided Real-Idea is split up into its many sides; each becomes an independent Idea-Force with the power to realise itself."13
Thus the Overmind, itself above Ignorance, can be a first parent of it. "For if each principle loosed into action must follow its independent line and carry out its complete consequences, the principle of separation must also be allowed its complete course and arrive at its absolute consequence; this is the inevitable descent, facilis descensus, which Consciousness, once it admits the separative principle, follows till it enters by obscuring infinitesimal fragmentation...into the material Inconscience...."14 The line at which the fall takes place is the formulation of the mental consciousness which can either build a constructed whole out of separate units or else grasp a commonality or an essentiality of things by an insubstantial-seeming abstraction. And, when out of the material Inconscience, the One emerges on its way back, it is again at the dividing line of the Mind that the self-aware reaching upward takes place. In the philosophic mentality, the point de depart is a piecing together of things to find a whole or a penetrating through abstractions towards their unity.
Plato is the example par excellence of such a starting-point. But with his poetic vision he was able to have some glimpse of spiritual realities instead of spinning out mere dialectic. All the same the terms in which he caught a reflection of them could not help remaining somewhat uncertain, if not wavering. He was not quite sure whether he was dealing with what logicians label as Universals, each idea the general and common essence of a class of objects, or with the laws according to which things operate, the Pythagorean "numbers", the mathematical constancies and regularities ruling
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the sensible world, or with archetypal models, divine originals, forms of perfect purpose, whose broken shadows and faulty imitations we perceive around us. He was not quite sure also whether the world-creative Power whom he called the Demiurge is one with the supreme reality of Ideas, their self-manifesting aspect, or a subordinate deity copying out in mutable phenomena transcendent patterns passive for ever. Nor was he quite sure again whether these phenomena were created out of nothing or compounded of the ideal realities and an alien "chaos", an enigmatic "non-being" on whose vacant flux they set their shaping seals.
Many of his ambiguities appear to stem from his mind's translation of the Overmind's version, rather than the Super-mind's authenticity, of the Real-Idea. Pertinent here is a reply by Sri Aurobindo to a question concerning the following quotation from Plato: "The world of sense is the copy of the world of Ideas. In our visible world there is a graduation of beings.... The same holds true of the intelligible realm or pattern of the world; the Ideas are joined together by means of other Ideas of a higher order;...the Ideas constantly increase in generality and force, until we reach the top, the last, the highest, the most powerful Idea or the Good, which comprehends, contains or summarizes the entire system." The question put was, in effect: "Is not Plato here nearly on the verge of understanding in mind the realisation of the Overmind? Can the passage be taken as due merely to mental ideas?" Sri Aurobindo wrote back: "He was trying to express in a mental way the One containing the multiplicity which is brought out (created) from the One, — that is the Overmind realisation. Plato has these ideas not as realisations but as intuitions which he expressed in his own mental form."Is
In passing we may remark that here we have the keyword to the setting apart of Plato from Pythagoras on the one hand and from Aristotle on the other: "intuitions." It points to flashes of truth which hail from above the mental plane and which are to be distinguished from "realisations" that
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are established spiritual experiences as well as from the mental plane's typical seekings to build truth by its limited and uncertain though ingenious and multi-mooded power.
The key-word recurs when Sri Aurobindo discusses some correspondences between Indian spirituality and the mystic thought in the background of a certain line of Greek philosophy. Broadly he writes: "The ideas of the Upanishads can be rediscovered in much of Pythagoras and Plato and form the profoundest part of Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism with all their considerable consequences to the philosophical thinking of the West."16 Again, observing how the Greek intellectuals give by their philosophy "some light on the spiritual destiny of man,"17 Sri Aurobindo tells us: "Plato who was influenced by Heraclitus, tried to do this...; his thought sought after God, tried to seize the ideal, had the hope of a perfect human society. We know how the Neo-Platonists developed his ideas...and how they affected Christianity. The Stoics, still more directly the intellectual descendants of Heraclitus, arrived at very remarkable and fruitful ideas of human possibility and a powerful psychological discipline, — as we should say in India, a Yoga, — by which they hoped to realise their ideal."18 Yes, an India-Greece rapprochement on the spiritual plane cannot help being seen. But simply because Sri Aurobindo is Indian by birth he does not attribute to India all that bears the stamp of spirituality in Greece. He has himself mentioned some proofs of the independent growth: the Apollonian mystics, Pythagoras, the oracles, the reformed Mysteries. And in this connection a letter of his throws into sharp relief the originality of Plato.
Now the answer is to a straight query about India. The query, inspired by a passage from Plato on the Idea of the Good and on God the Creator, wondered whether Plato had obtained his thoughts from Indian books. Sri Aurobindo said: "Not from Indian books — something of the philosophy of India got through by means of Pythagoras and others. But I think Plato got most of these things from intuition."19
However, the Platonic intuition is far from being perfect.
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And, in relation to his realm of ultimate Ideas, the ambiguities of it arise from lack of knowledge of the "various evolution" that Sri Aurobindo speaks of. Evolution implies in the Aurobindonian scheme the hidden activity of real-ideas within the phenomenal flux, their godhead lying in a state of "involution" and gradually awaking to its own glorious plenitude until what is flawless above is manifested in flaw-lessness below. That complete self-disclosure of the Divine on earth in a radiant future was utterly beyond Plato's conception, however much he might dream of a political Utopia. Dim approximation, temporary a peu pres — this constituted in his philosophy all that was possible of the True, the Beautiful and the Good in the kingdom of man. But once we accept the process of evolution within a Platonic cosmology we have not only to think of a divine counterpart to the whole triple strain of mental-vital-physical being: we have also to think of a divine mentality, a divine vitality and even a divine physicality as forming the covert nature of the Platonic "chaos" and unfolding on earth in answer to their counterpart in the Supermind. For, the fluctuant "non-being" in which the Real-Idea comes to have a partial play is nothing save the supreme existence projected as a total "Inconscience": there everything of that existence seems lost, but the loss is as if by a tremendous wager of the Supermind with itself to bring forth its perfection under the initial terms of its own dire opposite.
Sri Aurobindo tells us that the ancient Indian scriptures have pointers to the Supermind. But the nearest philosophical statement in the past of the broad basis though not of the detailed superstructure and still less of the many-lustred crown of his Yogic knowledge of it is in Plato. A modern seeing of the Platonic Ideas in a spiritually new dimension bringing out their true significance and value may be considered Sri Aurobindo's greatest work in the context of his interchange with Greece the metaphysician, just as a modern revival of the Homeric hexameter with its Olympian pace naturalised in a new language — English — may be
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counted his greatest accomplishment vis-a-vis Greece the bard.
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True, Sri Aurobindo has not devoted a special essay to either that metaphysician or that bard — and this omission may lead us to underestimate their presence in his consciousness. At least we may tend to overlook the full force of Plato's impact. We cannot do so with regard to Homer, since Sri Aurobindo has several substantial passages on him in The Future Poetry as well as in his numerous letters and there is a whole long epic Ilion (over 4,500 lines) which directly takes up a Homeric theme and treats it masterfully with a Homeri-cised Aurobindonian art whose blueprint, as it were, is in his extensive disquisition, On Quantitative Metre. But how an awareness of the Athenian Academy's Master no less than of the singer from "Scio's rocky isle" glowed within Sri Aurobindo the Yogi is evident from a number of signs. It is not only to be surmised from declarations like: "I had steeped myself...in the original Hellenic spirit..."20 It can also be glimpsed time and again from their spontaneous alignments in his writings.
Thus, when he laughs at the pseudo-scientific reduction of mind to matter on account of "a response, interaction, connection, a correspondence if you will" between them, he begins by saying that no amount of this can prove that "love is a chemical product" and concludes with three dissimilar yet concordantly decisive examples of what can never be shown as "only a combination of physiological reactions or a complex of the changes of grey brain-matter or a flaming marvel of electrical discharges". These examples are: "Plato's theory of ideas or Homer's Iliad or the cosmic consciousness of the Yogin."21
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Notes and References
1."Lammergeyer", Altar and Flame : Poems by Amal Kiran (Aspiration, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1975), p. 19.
2.The Future Poetry and Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1972), p. 546.
3.Heraclitus (Calcutta, 1947), pp. 8-9.
4.The Future Poetry, p. 547.
5.On Yoga, II, Tome One (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1958), p. 201.
6.Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1953), p. 339.
7.Heraclitus, p. 10.
8.The Life Divine (Sri Aurobindo Library, Greystone Press, New York, 1949), p. 679.
9.On Yoga II, Tome One, p. 463.
10.Heraclitus, p. 36.
11.The Life Divine, p. 110.
12.Ibid.
13.Ibid., pp. 256-7.
14.Ibid., p. 261.
15.Sri Aurobindo Circle Annual, 1963 (Pondicherry), p. 1.
16.The Foundations of Indian Culture (The Sri Aurobindo Library, New York, 1953), p. 306.
17.Heraclitus, p. 52.
18.Ibid.
19.Sri Aurobindo Circle Annual, 1963, p. 2.
20.The Foundations..., p. 232.
21.The Problem of Rebirth (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1952), p. 30.
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