From Man Human to Man Divine

VI

Sight Behind Thought

"All that escaped conception's narrow noose

Vision descried and gripped; their seeing thoughts

Filled in the blanks left by the seeking sense."

Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book II, Canto XI, p. 268.

"The impersonal truth of things can be rendered into the abstract formulas of the pure reason, but there is another side of truth which belongs to the spiritual or mystic vision and without that inner vision of realities the abstract formulation of them is insufficiently alive, incomplete. The mystery of things is the true truth of things; the intellectual presentation is only truth in representation, in abstract symbols, as if in a cubist art of thought-speech, in geometric figure."

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 357.

"A many-sided Ignorance striving to become an all-embracing Knowledge"¹ — such is the definition, as offered by Sri Aurobindo, of the consciousness of man the mental being. Indeed, in the realm of the living, man is distinguished from all other creatures by his insatiable noetic urge. And since in his present normal status, the mental being that man is relies principally on thought for the gathering and the consolidation of his knowledge, he conceives that to be the highest or the main •process of knowledge. The intellect of man does not consider that it knows a thing unless and until it has been able to reduce its awareness of it into a system of mental concepts. But, as we have pointed out in the preceding chapter "Sight, More Sight...", the true knowledge, the essential knowledge is beyond the bounds of any intellectual conception of the truth; it is basically a "realisation", in the fullest sense of the term. And we all know that the realisation involves the reduction of the object of knowledge into a fact and not merely into an idea . And for this reason the inner

1. The Life Divine, p. 565.

Page 122

---

being of man is never satisfied with "...the staple or dry straw of Reason's tilth"²: its demand is for the concrete. Thus every concept remains incomplete and almost unreal to the deeper part of our nature until it becomes translated into a concrete experience.

But what is the basic trait of this concrete seizing of an object? It is primarily and essentially 'vision'; for, among all the biological species, man is clearly distinguished by the predominant role that sight-perception plays in his noetic framework. As Abel Rey has so aptly pointed out, "It is the organ of vision — and not the auditive, tactile, olfactory sense organs — that has made man the homo sapiens."³ In fact, "in the physical world there are always two forms of knowledge, the direct and the indirect, pratyakṣa, of that which is present to the eyes, and parokṣa, of that which is remote from and beyond our vision. When the object is beyond our vision, we are necessarily obliged to arrive at an idea of it by inference, imagination, analogy, by hearing the descriptions of others who have seen it or by studying pictorial and other representations of it if these are available. By putting together all these aids we can indeed arrive at a more or less adequate idea or suggestive image of the object, but we do not realise the thing itself; it is not yet to us the grasped reality, but only our conceptual representation of a reality. But once we have seen it with the eyes, — for no other sense is adequate, — we possess, we realise; it is there secure in our satisfied being, part of ourselves in knowledge."⁴

This essential all-sufficient superiority of 'vision' over other senses (compare the French saying: 'voir, c'est comprendre', 'To see is to understand') has led man to identify knowledge with light and sight in all spheres of comprehension. Thus, Goethe in his last moments calls for light and more light, and the ancient Upanishadic utterance epitomises for ever the ardent prayer of all seekers after the Truth: 'tamaso mā jyotirgamaya'⁵, 'lead me out of darkness to light.' It is thus not at all a chance phenomenon that a great number of terms actually used to represent intellectual operations are nothing but so many visual metaphors! to wit, 'demonstration' (from L. monstrare: to show), 'theory' (from Gk. theoreo: behold), 'viewpoint', 'clarity', 'prevision', 'intuition' (from L. tueri tuit: look), etc.

2.Savitri, Book II, Canto X, p. 243.

3.Abel Rey, La Science dans l'Antiquité, p. 445.

4.Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga p. 290.

5.Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.

Page 123

---

Man is thus impelled almost imperatively to fall back upon some imaged background even in the ethereal domains of abstract thought, or rather — we should say — in order to compensate for this very abstractness. And, what is more, if we examine carefully, we shall find that "thought in itself, in its origin on the higher levels of consciousness, is a perception, a cognitive seizing of the object or of some truth of things, which is a powerful but still a minor and secondary result of spiritual vision, a comparatively external and superficial regard... In mind there is a surface response of perception to the contact of the observed or discovered object, fact or truth and a consequent conceptual formulation of it; but in the spiritual light there is a deeper perceptive response from the very substance of consciousness and a compre-hending formulation in that substance, an exact figure or revelatory ideograph in the stuff of the being.... Thought creates a representative image of Truth; it offers that to the mind as a means of holding Truth and making it an object of knowledge; but the body itself of Truth is caught and exactly held in the sunlight of a deeper spiritual sight to which the representative figure created by thought is secondary and derivative, powerful for communication of knowledge, but not indispensable for reception or possession of knowledge:"⁶ (Italics ours.)

As a matter of fact, mind can at best know things only by their surface indications such as superficial characters, forms, function-ings, etc., and never in their 'occult self-being and essence'. And as a result it can never come to any deep and firm experience of Truth. For that, the intellectual mind has to be replaced by a 'mind of vision' capable of direct reception of the Truth; conception has to give place to knowledge-vision,⁷ and the thinker should transform himself into a seer so much so that he shall be able to exclaim:

"My mind transfigures to a rapturous seer."

(Savitri, Book V, Canto III, p . 408.)

6.The Life Divine, p. 945.

7.Compare: "But thought nor word can seize eternal truth...

Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight" (Savitri, Book II, Canto. XI.) "But the mind's ignorance veils the inner sight" (Ibid., Book V, Canto HI.)

Page 124

---

"The veil is torn, the thinker is no more:

Only the Spirit sees and all is known."

(Ibid., Book IX, Canto I, p. 571.)

It needs no mention that the sight of which we are speaking has nothing to do with mere physical sight. In fact, the operation of sight is not confined to physical seeing alone. To each place of consciousness corresponds a particular strand of sight. Thus, we may possess and utilise a sight in the sense-mind, an emotional sight of the heart, a conceptual sight, a psychic sight, a mental intuitive sight, a spiritualised mental sight, etc., etc. Indeed, sight is not, as is so often erroneously held, the result of the development of our physical sense-organs; it is antecedent to it, inherent in the very stuff of consciousness, "not dependent on the circumstance of terrestrial evolution and... can be employed without the use of the physical eye..."⁸

Thus, with the progressive widening and heightening and deepening of consciousness, ever new vistas of light open up before the ascending soul and every step of advance on this 'path of the Gods' (devayāna) brings in a new ascension of sight, and this process continues till we reach the highest sight, parā dṛk, the all-embracing, all-relating and all-unifying vision of the supramental infinite consciousnes.⁹

But one question still remains to be answered. Why should this supraphysical sight, this inner and the higher occult-spiritual awareness, be designated 'sight' at all? Without going into the deeper and detailed elucidation of this question — for that will lead us away from the main theme of the present essay — let us content ourselves with the following words of Sri Aurobindo:

"...this luminous seizing and contact that is the spiritual vision, dṛṣṭi,... is to the spirit what the eyes are to the physical mind and one has the sense of having passed through a subtly analogous process. As the physical sight can present to us the actual body of things of which the thought had only possessed an indication or

8.Sri Aurobindo, Kena Upanishad (1952 ed.), p. 76. (Readers wishing to pursue the point further may consult Chapters VIII and IX of this book).

9.Compare the following expressions occurring in Savitri:

"All-vision" (Book I, Canto III.)

"All-seeing eagle-peaks" (Book I, Canto IV.)

"The all-seeing tops" (Book I, Canto III.)

Page 125

---

mental description and they become to us at once real and evident, pratyakṣa, so the spiritual sight surpasses the indication or representations of thought and can make the self and truth of all things present to us and directly evident, pratyakṣa."¹⁰ (Italic ours.)

The present essay is an attempt at showing that, since the seer-knowledge is always more authentic, more compelling and more satisfying than a mere thinking knowledge, an ever-insistent although mostly unconscious thirst for this vision, dṛṣṭi, invariably creates in man, the mental being, the exigence of 'visualisation' in diverse domains of his intellectual activity. It is natural, of course, that this sight-support in the fashion of a chameleon changes its aspect from domain to domain, and even in the same domain from one individual to another; but however covert, camouflaged or transfigured, it is invariably there with its lurking presence. We propose to study this interesting phenomenon in its polychrome manifestation.

It is almost an axiomatic truth recognised on all hands that vision is the principal, if not the unique, point d'appui of a poet. "The essential power of the poetic word is to make us see, not to make us think or feel; thought and feeling must arise out of or rather be included in the sight, but sight is the primary consequence and power of poetic speech."¹¹

Now the thinker too is often guided in his deliberations by an inner background of specific vision. In fact, the thinker will be able to express the knowledge more and more in proportion as he leans on the inner vision as his secret support. If he happens to be a poet-philosopher, let the thinker in him first of all fall silent in reverent hush¹² and let the poet behold and give shape; and once this is adequately done, let the philosopher translate the vision thus gained in terms of conceptual thought. The philosopher Heidegger expressly wanted to do something of the sort - although in his case there was not the fusion of the two personalities in the same individual. In fact, as pointed out by M. Delfagaauw, Heidegger sought to give expression to his essential thought in the form of a commentary on the poet Holderlin.¹³

10.The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 803.

11.Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, pp. 32-33.

12.Compare: "This witness hush is the Thinker's secret base."

(Savitri, Book II, Canto XIII, p. 283.)

13.Bernard Delfagaauw, "Heidegger et Holderlin" in Actes du Xlème Congrès International de Philosophie (Bruxelles, 1953).

Page 126

---

A profound thinker seeks no doubt the nourishment of his conceptual scheme in the effulgent source of an inner vision. But, what is more interesting, his thinking itself often assumes a pictorial appearance. For, as has been aptly described by M. Masterman-Braithwaite, whenever "we think most deeply, we nearly always throw the whole logical machinery over. At such times we 'doodle', we compare, we 'match', we write down isolated words, we draw pictures on the edges of the paper, we make models. Nor is this a primitive vestigial habit; for recent psychological and ethnological researches show that when we have to act quickly we still, in an only slightly extended sense of the words, think pictorially."¹⁴

On a close scrutiny we are apt to discover that this principle of imaging or pictorial thinking extends its domain far and wide and penetrates even into the inner recesses of philosophical thinking, so much so that Masterman-Braithwait could not help posing the interesting query:

"The question arises as to whether the same pictorial principle does not often operate in our thinking on a larger scale, even though we may not perhaps have noticed it... Is it, for instance, upon this same principle that such a composite 'picture' as Spinoza's Ethics is built up? If so, we could talk, in an exact sense, about 'metaphysical picture'."¹⁵

But why single out Spinoza alone? A perceptive investigation of the process of philosophical inquiry is bound to reveal to us the interesting fact that even in this austere domain of abstract thought and in spite of the apparently wide diversity of approach, it is always a secret sense of visualisation, implicit or explicit or however transfigured in appearance, that plays the dominant role as the underlying support of all philosophers. For, as we shall presently see, in every phase of philosophical deliberation, in the individual comprehensions of 'truth'-ideas, in the process of elaborating them, in communicating them to others as well as in the attempt to demonstrate their validity, the philosophers — to whatever type of school they may belong — are overtly or covertly guided by the insistent need of some sort of visualisation.

Indeed, what the philosophers seek after are supposed to be

14.Margaret Masterman-Braithwaite, "The Pictorial principle in Language", Ibid., Vol. XIV, p. 139.

15.Ibid., p. 140.

Page 127

---

objecta, self-existent truths beyond the mutilating idiosyncracies of individual thinkers¹⁶ (by the way, does not the term objectum already suggest an exigence for vision-entity, a phenomenon aptly designated by the french neologism, chosification of the image?), and these objecta can only be reached through a progressive process of ever-etherealizing abstraction.¹⁷ In this field of abstracting operation, the seeker is never checked by the inhibiting injunction Non plus ultra — 'go no farther'; plus ultra —'farther beyond' — is the command-word at every step. But, what is remarkable, this abstraction on an ever-ascending scale does never for a moment atrophy the power of vision, nor does it necessarily denude the 'truth' of all forms. Rather this process liberates the intellect from its preoccupation with the superficial view of things,¹⁸ awakens it to an acute sense of vision in a new dimension so much so that one feels for certain that one has known a thing only when one has seen it in its essence. Thus an inmost vision becomes the hall-mark of guarantee of one's knowledge.

As a matter of fact, every conscientious seeker after knowledge, every 'lover of wisdom' or philosophos as the Greeks would say, in setting out upon his quest after knowledge, is confronted at each step with the searching query: "How to be sure that the knowledge that I have so far gained is in fact true knowledge?" And, as Spinoza recommended in his De Intellectus Emendatione, before all things means must be devised for the improvement and clarification of the faculty of intellectus. For one must be careful about the distinction between the various forms of knowledge and be satisfied only with the highest and the best. The first kind of knowledge is hearsay knowledge, the second sort comes from vague experience; the third type is that gained through the faculty of ratio, by a process of ratiocination; but, according to Spinoza, the fourth and the highest form of knowledge is that received in intellectus or direct perception and the great philosopher admits ruefully: "The things which I have been able to know by this,

16.Cf. the . Indian conception about apauruieya satya, 'truth impersonal and universal'.

17.A dominant trait of a particular school of classical Indian philosophical inquiry is to indulge in the process of an ever-insistent negation, neti neti ('not this', 'not this') and thus pass beyond all names and forms, nāma-rūpa.

18.The reader may refer in this connection to the very interesting account of Prajapati-lndra-Virochana Samvad in the Chhandogya Upanishad, VIII. 7-12.

Page 128

---

knowledge so far have been very few." This intuitive knowledge, this scientia intuitiva, is a perception of things sub specie eternitatis, in their eternal aspects and relations, and incidentally, this offers us in a phrase a definition of any true philosophy worth the name."

For the proper connotation of the technical terms intellectus, ratio and wisdom used above, we may recall the words with which Herbert Read introduces his paper: "The Limitations of a Scientific Philosophy":

"A distinction which runs through the whole development of human thought has become blurred during the past two hundred years. Implicit in all ancient philosophy, acknowledged by medieval scholastics and the natural philosophers of the Renaissance, and even by Locke and Newton, is a difference of kind...between wisdom and understanding. By wisdom was meant an intuitive apprehension of truth, and the attitude involved was receptive or contemplative! Intellectus was the name given to this faculty in the Middle Ages. Understanding, on the other hand, was always a practical or constructive activity, and ratio its name..."²⁰

We may note too in this connection that the Indian term for philosophy is darśana, 'Vision', and the Indian conception of a Rishi is that of 'one who has seen the truth' and not merely constructed it through the arduous exercise of his noetic apparatus.

This, then, is the first basic visualisation encountered in the realm of philosophical pursuit, constituting the diamond core of all true philosophical thinking and invariably sustaining every philosopher in his effort at rearing up the structure of his thought. For in spite of Saint-Exupéry's aphoristic utterance that truth is not what we discover but what we create, the fact remains that it is always the intuitive vision that precedes the elaboration of the thought-edifice. For all true 'creation' in the field of philosophy has its source in some intuitional core; the intellectual explanation and systematisation bringing in a host of rich ideas is brought about only in the wake of the 'vision suprême', as Henri Sérouya would say. To quote in part from his very interesting paper "La Creation en Philosophic'':

19.For the main substance of this particular paragraph, vide the chapter on Spinoza in Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy.

20.Herbert Read, The Forms of Things Unknown (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), p. 15.

Page 129

---

. "In the matter of philosophical creation, it is the intuition and suprasensible vision that represents the unfailing base. All those who have had the rare privilege of having these flashes, this spontaneous vision and this inner flame, to help them in the direct apprehension of the real, will declare in one voice the efficacy of intuition in the case of all true creative spirits, whatever may be the mode of their creation. And by the real I mean the essence of things, all that is in them intrinsic and spiritual. Suppress this intuitional core, this marvellous source of spontaneity, and philosophy loses its living interest in spite of any other value that it may possess.... The true philosopher does not invent, even if his system or his conceptions of the universe appear to exhibit an exceptional worth. His originality consists in seeing with his soul's eyes the profound reach of the real, in other words, in a total and adequate vision of the universe."²¹

It hardly needs pointing out that this basic central vision is by no means a superficial physical vision; it is rather a vision of the pure reason and, for those who can ascend still higher up, it is the vision of the spirit. But in philosophical discourses there is always involved a great risk of misrepresentation not altogether avoidable in all situations. Those who have not drilled themselves in the iron discipline of pure intellection are ever apt to fall back unwittingly upon the stratum of ordinary vision of the sensibly concrete - a tendency natural and normal to our sense-bound mind - and thus distort and disfigure the purity of the primal vision.

For, experience shows that in philosophical communication the immediate clarity of the language of discourse is often measured by the facility with which the reader can respond to the situation evoked. And who does not know that the visual response is the most direct of all sense responses? Thus the comprehension of a particular philosophical text is in general commensurate with the facility of its pictorial representation to our mind's eye. And this is true in relation to all types of word-expressions used by the philosopher: those signifying sentiments and feelings as well as those signifying concepts and constructs. In every case, as soon as we encounter any particular word-expression, our first almost instinctive impulse is to paint on our mind's canvas the appropriate scene or situation in which the pronouncement appears to acquire

21. Vide Actes du Xlème congrès International de Philosophic Vol. I, pp. 18-25. Italicised in the original. (Translated from the French original.)

Page 130

---

its supposed relevance. And, in this subtle manoeuvre towards the domain of the concrete, one is supported by all sorts of unexpected aids: the etymology of the word, the syntactical relation of the word-expression, the history of one's subconscious association and acquaintance with the term, and so on and so forth. This then is the second form of visualisation we encounter in the field of philosophy.

Wittingly or unwittingly, some philosophers have utilised this propensity to visualise on the part of their general readers, to drive home forcefully the truths they have glimpsed. Thus, in their philosophical demonstration, they use a wealth of well-chosen images that invariably sway the readers' attention on to the field of the visually concrete. Master tacticians, they wield in philosophy the painter's brush or the poet's quill and thus strive to induce in their readers a sense of the demonstrative veracity of the ideas put forward. To select only a single instance out of a legion, let us listen to Bergson discussing 'Vitality':

"A very small element of a curve is very near to being a straight line. And the smaller it is, the nearer. In the limit it may be termed a part of the straight line, as you please, for in each of its points a curve coincides with its tangent. So, likewise, 'vitality' is tangent, at any and every point, to physical and chemical forces; but such points are, in fact, only views taken by a mind which imagines stops at various moments of the movement that generates the curve. In reality, life is no more made up of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines."²²

Leaving behind this spectacle of a constant recourse to picturesque language and the insinuation of images and metaphors, let us now pass on to the consideration of a third form of 'chosification' or 'objectification', which, although very subtle, is by no means any less potent in the realm of philosophical pursuit.

It is a common enough experience with many thinkers that instead of offering precise and unequivocal definitions they throw

22. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 31. Compare the following comments offered by Will Durant on Bergson:

"If Bergson is occasionally obscure it is by the squandered wealth of his imagery, his analogies, and his illustrations; he has an almost Semitic passion for metaphor, and is apt at times to substitute ingenious simile for patient proof. We have to be on guard against this image-maker, as one bewares of a jeweller..." {The Story of Philosophy, p. 463.)

Page 131

---

in sometimes some striking names and labels and build their word-structure around these self-justifying entities. And these names, in their turn, become gradually ossified, gather some 'unsubstantial substance' around them, and generally end in gaining some ill-got 'thingness' (choséité being the French neologism) through the process of constant usage. One is thus very soon apt to forget that these terms are nothing but nomina ('names') and by no means res ('things'); and in this way it is not we who embrace the ideas but rather the ideas that embrace us: lllasque (perfectiones) non tam capere quam ab ipsis capi.²³

In philosophical discourse we should always bear in mind that to designate is not the same thing as to name. To say that a certain term refers to a particular situation (physical, abstract or fictitious) or, in other words, to give a rule of designation, does not necessarily presuppose any ontological assumption. But because of our almost incorrigible penchant for visualisation we are quite often misled by an unwarranted analogy from the thing-language of every-day life. This attribution of choséité ('thingness'), and, for that matter, of real existence to the designatum, -'the charm of the designatum' as we might term it, - typifies the third process of visualisation frequently encountered in the domain of philosophy.

Indeed, here in this realm of pure abstraction, nothing is easier than believing that one has understood a point of thought when one has not really understood it. For the philosopher forges a host of terms and these become in the sequel so many starting-points for chains of philosophical argumentation. The reader feels no longer the necessity of going back directly to the source for the proper comprehension of the ideas encountered. Instead, he falls back again and again upon the 'materialised' terms which, because of their vicarious 'thingness', impart a false sense of clarity and solidity to the demonstration offered.

This third type of visualisation by proxy leads us to the study of another form of visualisation that entails the most serious consequence in the field of the philosophers' dialogues.

It is indeed a curious phenomenon that the philosophers are not always mutually convincing: what appears as abundantly clear and almost self-evident to one turns out to be nothing more than the

23. Yvon Belaval, Les Philosophes et leur Langage (Paris: Gallamard), p. 101.

Page 132

---

fire-works of verbiage, flatus vocis, and an absolute trompe-l'oeil to others.

But, for this lack of mutual comprehension, the sincerity of the disputing philosophers need not be doubted. The basic cause of all this disagreement is not far to seek. In fact, as Yvon Belaval has pointed out, every single true philosopher possesses his own 'privileged perception'. Thus while Descrates is endowed with a clear and distinct intuition of the 'soul', his disciple Malebranche misses it altogether. Leibniz, Hume, Maine de Biran differ in their experience of the self. In the red of an arm-chair Husserl grasps the very essence of red, but the nominalists can only shrug at this Husserlian venture. And what to say of the Kantian 'in itself and "for itself, which for many other philosophers is nothing but predilection for the mysterious? Thus it is that being exasperated by others' inability to comprehend what they have put forth, some philosophers have accused their detractors of 'intellectual blindness' ('cécité intellectualle').

The proper diagnosis of this strange situation is that every philosopher has got his individual world of vision which is more often than not closed to his fellow-comrades. Here then is the fourth form of visualisation one comes up against in the proper appreciation of philosophers' ideas; for each one of them has got his own individual way of looking at things, and this endows a particular philosophical term ("transcendence" or "absolute", for example) with an ever-varying halo proper to the individual thinker. This "scintillation", to use the picturesque expression of M. Jean Wahl, often creates an insuperable obstacle in the way of a proper agreed comprehension of a philosophical text.

This 'selective blindness', the phenomenon of reciprocal miscomprehension and mutually destructive battle of ideas so much prevalent amongst the philosophers, has given rise to what has been termed the 'anarchy of systems'. As a matter of fact, anyone wishing to undertake the study of philosophy is at once struck by an almost unbelievable plurality of systems claiming allegiance in this particular domain of human venture. And what is most disconcerting, these systems are more often than not mutually exclusive. Their incompatibility, at least on the surface, is so much pronounced that their co-existence in the compass of a single unifying system seems well-nigh impossible of achievement. Confronted with this strange situation, the student of philosophy

Page 133

---

may easily glide into the mood of absolute scepticism; for, "in view of the enormous variety of opinions, the question should repeatedly arise as to whether in all this welter of names and philosophemes there is any hard truth or whether all is pure error."²⁴ Did not in ancient times Agrippa and Sextus Empiricus already make use of the phenomenon of tropos apo tes diaphonias²⁵ to support their denial of the possibility of any true knowledge at all?

But on a closer scrutiny of the situation we shall find that what is disconcerting is not so much the multiplicity of systems as the diversity of the various 'starting visions' ('visions de départ', as one Dutch thinker has styled it) that are at the bottom of these different systems. And what is still more intriguing is the fact that the builders of particular systems do rarely take the trouble of explaining expressly these basic 'points of view' or how they arrived at these for the first time. But it is precisely on this that everything else hinges; for once we admit the truth-validity of these basic presuppositions arising out of the initial visional core, we are slowly but surely led to the very same conclusions as derived by the philosopher in question. In fact, as Prof. J.P.A. Mekkes has pointed out, whether one examines the doctrines of the scholastic philosophy or those of modern idealism, whether one approaches the different phenomenological schools or the diverse schools of existentialism, everywhere one encounters a semblance of self-evidence that leaves the reader in a state of utter confusion. Without any shadow of doubt the whole course of philosophical argumentation is fashioned to demonstrate the merit and inviolability of the dominant vision of the system concerned. And, indeed, (this is what most puzzles the tyro) it is next to impossible to detect any lacuna, the absence of even a single link, in the long chain of rigorous reasoning that leads us from the first premiss of the central vision of the philosophical system up to its periphery. But there precisely hangs the ticklish question: "How is it that there exists an almost unbridgeable chasm between the different starting visions? Why is it that the only possible contact

24.Adolfo P. Carpio, "The Anarchy of Systems and the Theory of Truth" in Proceedings of the Xlth International Congress of Philosophy, Vol. I, p. 14.

25.'Anarchy of Systems' (Pyrrh, Hipot., I. 164.)

Compare the Sanskrit proverb:

'Nāsau munir yasya mataṁ na bhinnaṁ ('There is no sage whose opinions do not differ from those of others').

Page 134

---

between them happens to degenerate into fierce polemics, but at the end of all this fury and logical battle one finds that the initially adopted points of view remain intact in their mutual isolation?"²⁶

The answer is not far to seek. As a matter of fact, because of its sole reliance on the supposed all-sufficient autonomy of reason, certain intrinsic limitations are bound to plague and circumscribe all philosophical thought — philosophical thought, we hasten to add, as it is understood in our day. For, reason left to itself, without a flaming intuitional background to support and guide it, can never be creative or sure of its gaze. In fact,

"In her high works of pure intelligence,

In her withdrawal from the senses' trap,

There comes no breaking of the walls of mind,

There leaps no rending flash of absolute power,

There dawns no light of heavenly certitude.

A million faces wears her knowledge here

And every face is turbaned with a doubt.

All is now questioned, all reduced to nought.

*

There is no summit on which she can stand

And see in a single glance the Infinite's whole."²⁷

And this insufficiency of reason as a means to authentic knowledge arises from the fact so often missed that reason in itself is almost a neutral instrument. As Sri Aurobindo has so trenchantly put it:

"It can in its nature be used and has always been used to justify any idea,... In philosophy it gives equally good reasons for monism and pluralism or for any halting-place between them, for the belief in Being or for the belief in Becoming, for optimism and pessimism, for activism and quietism. It can justify the most mystic religionism and the most positive atheism, get rid of God or see nothing else.... Ask it not to lean to one idea alone, but to make an eclectic combination or a synthetic harmony and it will satisfy you; only, there being any number of possible combinations or harmonies, it will equally well justify the one or the other and set

26.J.P.A. Mekkes, "Critique Transcendantale de la pensée Théorique", Actes du Xlème Congrès International de Philosophie, p. 26.

27.Savitri, Book II, Canto X, p. 251:

Page 135

---

up or throw down any one of them according as the spirit in man is attracted to or withdraws from it."²⁸

This utter dubiousness of rational knowledge has been delineated with such picturesque potency in a passage of Savitri that we feel tempted to quote it in extenso here:

"An inconclusive play is Reason's toil.

Each strong idea can use her as its tool;

Accepting every brief she pleads her case.

Open to every thought, she cannot know.

The eternal Advocate seated as judge

Armours in logic's invulnerable mail

A thousand combatants for Truth's veiled throne

And sets on a high horseback of argument

To tilt for ever with a wordy lance

In a mock tournament where none can win.

Absolute her judgements seem but none is sure;

Time cancels all her verdicts in appeal.

Although like sunbeams to our glow-worm mind

Her knowledge feigns to fall from a clear heaven,

Its rays are a lantern's lustres in the Night;

She throws a glittering robe on Ignorance."²⁹

Such being the case it is illusive to consider that the thought-knowledge gained through the mediation of reason can ever embody any definitive truth of things: it has neither any access to the root of things nor for that matter can it embrace the totality of their secret mysteries. In reality, if we examine carefully, we shall find that intuition and not reason is always our first guide. "Intuition always stands veiled behind our mental operations. Intuition brings to man those brilliant messages from the Unknown which are the beginning of his higher knowledge. Reason only comes in afterwards to see what profit it can have of the shining harvest."³⁰

This preconises the path we should follow if we would seek after

28.Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, pp. 111-12.

29.Savitri, Book II, Canto X, p. 252.

30.The Life Divine, p. 67.

Page 136

---

true knowledge: we must step back from the arena of conceptual thought and rely instead more and more on revelatory vision and luminous insight.³¹ But since this inner illumination is in the nature of things progressive and the long path of advance stretches from the first glimmer of imperfect sight to the summit-sight of Super-mind or the divine Gnosis, we should not be too easily duped or satisfied with the torch-flares of wayside stations but ever push forward, dive inward and soar upward in order to complete and perfect our visional knowledge by new seeings gained on higher and higher plateaus of our being. We should constantly aspire with the Vedic Rishi: "O Sun, thou all-seeing Intelligence, may we behold thee bringing to us the great Light, blazing out on us for vision upon vision of the beatitude..."³² so that at the end of our Journey of Illumination we may exclaim with the Seer Praskanva: ud vayaṁ tamasaspari jyotiṣpaśyanta uttaraṁ, devaṁ devatrā suryam aganma iyotiruttamam³³ ("Beholding a higher Light beyond this darkness, we have followed it and reached the highest Light of all, Surya divine in the divine Being.")

31.Compare:

"There is a deeper seeing from within

And when we have left these small purlieus of mind,

A greater vision meets us on the heights

In the luminous wideness of the Spirit's gaze."

(Savitri, Book II, Canto V, p. 168.)

Also:

"Mental knowledge is not true knowledge. True knowledge is that which is based on the true sight, the sight of the Seer, of Surya, of the Kavi. Mental thought is not knowledge, it is a golden lid placed over the face of the Truth, the Sight, the divine Ideation. When that is removed, sight replaces mental thought, the all-embracing truth-ideation, Manas, Veda, Dṛṣti, replaces the fragmentary mental activity." (Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, pp. 166-67.)

32.Rig-Veda, X. 37-8.

33.Rig-Veda, I. 50-10.

Page 137