Hitler and his God

The Human Cycle

Sri Aurobindo’s writings are not only based on a severely tested spiritual experience but also on a vast erudition. He was thoroughly familiar with the tradition and cultures of the East and the West and some of their principal languages, and he had imbibed the literature and the poetry of their epics and lyrics, Homer and Shelley as well as Vyasa and Kalidasa. He admired Plato greatly and classical Greek culture as a whole – “where living itself was an education” – witness his essay on Heraclitus and the four thousand hexameters of his unfinished epic Ilion. He had the highest appreciation of the Buddha, “in his action the most powerful personality that we know of as having lived and produced results upon earth” 965, and referred to Nietzsche throughout his oeuvre.

It is a sign of his erudition (and excellent memory) that he used an idea of Karl Lamprecht as the starting point of The Human Cycle. Lamprecht (1856-1915) was a famous (Pan-)German historian, professor of history at Bonn and Leipzig, author of a Deutsche Geschichte (history of Germany) in twelve volumes and adviser to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg. As “one of the first scholars to develop a systematic theory of psychological factors in history” he gave Sri Aurobindo the idea of a cycle of humanity’s development consisting of a symbolic, typal, conventional, individualistic and subjective stage.

The symbolic stage is predominantly religious and spiritual; life is the direct expression or symbol of an inner truth. The typal stage is predominantly psychological and ethical; spiritual truths become moral ideals or norms and psychological qualities “typal” categories. “The conventional stage of human society is born when the external supports, the outward expressions of the spirit or the ideal become more important than the ideal, the body or even the clothes more important than the person.” It is a stage of standardization and rigidity which gradually becomes “a name, a shell, a sham” which “must either be dissolved in the crucible of an individualist period of society or else fatally affect with weakness and falsehood the system of life that clings to it”. 966

“The revolting individual flings off the yoke, declares the truth as he sees it and in doing so strikes inevitably at the root of the religious, the social, the political, momentarily perhaps even the moral order of the community as it stands, because it stands upon the authority he discredits and the convention he destroys and not upon a living truth which can be successfully opposed to his own. The champions of the old order may be right when they seek to suppress him as a destructive agency perilous to social security, political order or religious tradition; but he stands there and can no other [according to the famous statement of Martin Luther], because to destroy is his mission, to destroy falsehood and lay bare a new foundation of truth.” With the individualistic stage “the Age of Protestantism has begun, the Age of Reason, the Age of Revolt, Progress, Freedom” 967 – the age of possible renewal and rebirth, renaissance and reformation.

It is this age of breaking up of the petrified layers of human thought and society which allows humanity to see the world new again and to explore the living reality. It is the passage to “the subjective period of humanity through which man has to circle back towards the recovery of his deeper self and a new upward line or a new revolving cycle of civilization”. The historical phases of this “human cycle” will be clear after everything we have learned in our story about the end of the Christian era in Europe, the beginning of a new cycle of searching possibilities with the Renaissance and the Age of Reason, and the importance of the great mutation, the Wende, starting around 1880 in which we are still fully involved at present and which has already produced such dramatic events. It should be added that Sri Aurobindo’s cycles are never repetitive but the expression of an upward evolution, realizing itself in an ever widening spiral.

“The Age of Reason is visibly drawing to an end”, he wrote in 1916. “Novel ideas are sweeping over the world and are being accepted with a significant rapidity, ideas inevitably subversive of any premature typal order of economic rationalism, dynamic ideas such as Nietzsche’s Will-to-live, Bergson’s exaltation of Intuition above intellect or the latest German philosophical tendency to acknowledge a suprarational faculty and a suprarational order of truths. Already another mental poise is beginning to settle and conceptions are on the way to apply themselves in the field of practice which promise to give the succession of the individualistic age of society not to a new typal order, but to a subjective age which may well be a great and momentous passage to a very different goal. It may be doubted whether we are not already in the morning twilight of a new period of the human cycle.” 968

Sri Aurobindo was convinced of the importance of the change to which humanity was being subjected. Far from considering that the confusion and violence of this change was a negative omen, he valued it positively as the accelerated evolution into a new and greater era. “All these tendencies, though in a crude, initial and ill-developed form, are manifest now in the world and are growing from day to day with a significant rapidity. And their emergence and greater dominance means the transition from the rationalistic and utilitarian period of human development which individualism has created to a greater subjective age of society.” 969 Yet so profound was the change, including the globalisation of mankind, that it led to the explosion of two “hot” world wars and a potentially still more destructive “cold” third one, the slaughter of millions, and the re-emergence of the darkest layers in the human personality.

Sri Aurobindo had clearly perceived the threatening aspect of the German national character before the First World War. “The military power, the political and commercial ambitions of Germany and her acute sense of her confined geographical position and her encirclement by an unfriendly alliance were the immediate moral cause of [the First World War]; but the real cause lay in the very nature of the international situation and the psychology of national life. The chief feature of this psychology is the predominance and worship of national egoism under the sacred name of patriotism.” The national egoism of Germany had taken on excessive proportions leading to an irreversible course of its politics. “In Germany it was the aristocratic and the capitalist class combined that constituted the Pan-German party with its exaggerated and almost insane ambitions … Pan-Germanism covered the longings of German industry for possession of the great resources and the large outlet into the North Sea offered by the countries along the Rhine. To seize African spaces of exploitation and perhaps French coal fields … was the drift of its real intention.” 970

In The Human Cycle Sri Aurobindo presents Germany’s conclusions of its dominant Darwinistic stance as follows: “The conquest of the world by German culture is the straight path of human progress. But culture is not, in this view, merely a state of knowledge or a system or cast of ideas and moral and aesthetic tendencies; culture is life governed by ideas, but ideas based on the truths of life and so organized as to bring it to its highest efficiency. Therefore all life not capable of this culture and this efficiency must be eliminated or trodden down, all life capable of it but not actually reaching to it must be taken up and assimilated. But capacity is always a matter of genus and species and in humanity a matter of race. Logically, then, the Teutonic race is alone entirely capable, and therefore all Teutonic races must be taken into Germany and become part of the German collectivity; races less capable but not wholly unfit must be Germanized, others, hopelessly decadent like the Latins of Europe and America or naturally inferior like the vast majority of the Africans and Asiatics, must be replaced where possible, dominated, exploited and treated according to their inferiority. So evolution would advance, so the human race grow towards its perfection.” 971 It is all there, the German racial superiority complex and their future racial politics, summarized in a few lines.