Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

CHAPTER 20

Man and Collective Man

I

We have seen that Sri Aurobindo made a move in February 1910 from Calcutta to Chandernagore and in April from Chandernagore to Pondicherry in answer to an ādeś, an unmistakable inner command; and during the few weeks at Chandernagore and the first years at Pondicherry, he devoted himself entirely to "silent Yoga", with a view to consolidating the gains of his sādhanā and working out their practical implications for the larger life of humanity. He had, indeed, retired from active political participation, and cut off his connection with political leaders and movements in Bengal and India. But this did not mean that he had retreated to an inaccessible Silence or contrived an insulation from the currents of everyday actuality. On the other hand, it was basic to his Yoga that he should include within the scope of his spiritual action, not only himself, but all life and all world activity as well. He was still aware of the winds blowing about although not enslaved by them, and he was continually deploying his attention to the drift of world affairs and the course of human destiny - but from the vantage point of his achieved higher consciousness. It was not as though he had shut out from his mind the whole problem of India's fight for independence: that couldn't be; only, it had now become part of the larger problem of human destiny itself - the triple problem of man's individual, his social and his racial destiny.

Before Mirra Richard (the Mother) came to Pondicherry to meet Sri Aurobindo in March 1914, she had already traversed - as we saw earlier - a similar spiritual path, and she had recorded in 1912 that the aim to be attained was the realisation of human unity by "founding the Kingdom of God which is within us all"; and this was to be achieved through the twin processes of individual and social transformation.¹ As she saw it, man the individual, society or the human aggregate, and the race or the human totality were three interlinked terms of the supreme problem of establishing a universal harmony; and the master-key to the solution lay in "the manifestation by all of the inner Divinity which is One". When, sometime after their meeting, Sri Aurobindo and the Richards decided to launch the Arya and its French counterpart, the aim was really to carry out one of the objectives she had earlier formulated: "To speak again to the world the eternal word under a new form adapted to its present mentality... the synthesis of all human knowledge."² The Life Divine, The Psychology of Social Development and The Ideal of Human Unity were Sri Aurobindo's separate utterances of "the eternal word", as applied to the individual, the social or communal group and the global human family respectively. The Life Divine began with the first issue of the Arya in August 1914; Human Unity started more than a year later in September 1915, and Social Development two years later in August 1916; and after running together for two more  

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years, they both concluded in July 1918, and The Life Divine itself came to an end six months later in January 1919. It may thus be said that the three works unfolded themselves almost simultaneously, that they were on? Testament, one Manifesto - "the eternal word" - though uttered each time with a different emphasis. In another sense. The Life Divine was the seminal statement, the Grand Theorem, and die other two were but corollaries, significant reverberations, or necessary extensions. And this is amply borne out by such a passage as the following from the last chapter of The Life Divine:

There is a Reality, a truth of all existence which is greater and more abiding than all its formations and manifestations; to find that truth and Reality and live in it, achieve the most perfect manifestation and formation possible of it, must be the secret of perfection whether of individual or communal being. This Reality is there within each thing and gives to each of its formations its power of being and value of being. The universe is a manifestation of the Reality, and there is a truth of the universal existence, a Power of cosmic being, an all-self or world-spirit. Humanity is a formation or manifestation of the Reality in the universe, and there is a truth and self of humanity, a human spirit, a destiny of human life. The community is a formation of the Reality, a manifestation of the spirit of man, and there is a truth, a self, a power of the collective being. The individual is a formation of the Reality, and there is a truth of the individual, an individual self, soul or spirit that expresses itself through the individual mind, life and body and can express itself too in something that goes beyond mind, life and body, something even that goes beyond humanity. For our humanity is not the whole of the Reality or its best possible self-formation or self-expression, - the reality has assumed before man existed an infrahuman formation and self-creation and can assume after him or in him a suprahuman formation and self-creation.³

The entire last chapter of The Life Divine from which the above passage has been extracted was written in the later nineteen thirties at the time of the revision of the work, and here we have a bold and brilliant summing-up of the inter-related argument of all three books. While Aurobindonian metaphysics comprehends everything from the atomic to the cosmic (and beyond, too, to the transcendental), Man and Collective Man and the Human Totality occupy the realm between; and it is these latter that are the theme of Social Development and Human Unity. So important, indeed, are these two works - in themselves, no doubt, but even more in relation to The Life Divine - that Kishor Gandhi has categorically declared of Sri Aurobindo: "As he is now widely acknowledged as the greatest philosopher of all ages, so also he should be recognised as the greatest social philosopher of all times."⁴ At any rate, these are not "made books" - laboriously made out of other books - but rather "the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life".⁵  

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II

The Psychology of Social Development was published in book form in 1949, and was given a new title. The Human Cycle. In the third and final sweep of its tremendous argument. The Life Divine is the projection of Sri Aurobindo's theory of the 'spiritual evolution', from the Ignorance to the Knowledge; The Human Cycle is likewise the projection of his theory of 'social evolution', from the 'symbolic' to the 'psychological' stage. Although reprinted over thirty years after its serialisation in the Arya, the book was not subjected to any drastic revision. Occasional references to Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler and to Fascism, Nazism and Soviet Communism show that here and there a sentence or a paragraph was added when the Arya sequence of twenty-four chapters was reissued as The Human Cycle. However, anything like a full-scale revision was thought unnecessary, for the illustrations from recent and past events were deemed sufficient in the main for the "working out and elucidation" of the theory of the social cycle set forth in the book.

As a convenient starting-point, Sri Aurobindo takes up the German theorist Lamprecht's idea that human society progresses through certain distinct stages - symbolic, typal, conventional, individualist and subjective - that are "a sort of psychological cycle through which a nation or a civilisation is bound to proceed".⁶ Having warned the reader against the dangers of such straight-jacketing of the inner psychological processes of human history - "too complex, too synthetical of many-sided and intermixed tendencies" - Sri Aurobindo nevertheless finds the terms useful and makes them the springboards for his own leaps of dialectic. Sir James Frazer saw human history as moving from the age of magic to the age of religion, and again from the age of religion to the present age of science. Oswald Spengler has elaborated with immense erudition his theory of the growth and decline of civilisations; and Arnold Toynbee has likewise seen the historical process as a succession of challenges and responses. A theory is but a theory, a formula is but a formula; and human nature comprises too many imponderables, too many unexpected spurts of chance, too many intricate chain-reactions of fission or fusion. When we fasten on the externals of a situation, things seem easy enough to record - to tabulate - to draw inferences from. But what is visible has its source in the invisible, and human actions are generally the outer expression of certain inner movements - sundry instinctive cravings, intellectual formulations, or spiritual aspirations. With the arrival of Man or Homo Sapiens upon the scene of terrestrial evolution, there has been a climate of continuous 'change', continuous yet not uniform; an endless complexity, an infinite variety has characterised the drama of man's evolution from his early primitivism to the moral, intellectual and spiritual hills of striving and peaks of achievement in the panoramic expanse of human history. While The Human Cycle is chiefly concerned with the individualist and subjective stages in the evolution of society, the first chapter briefly but pointedly touches upon the three earlier stages as a preparation  

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for the effective take-off in the second chapter.

In India, the Vedic age could be called "symbolic" in the true sense of the word:

If we look at the beginnings of Indian society, the far-off Vedic age which we no longer understand, for we have lost that mentality, we see that everything is symbolic. The religious institution of sacrifice governs the whole society and all its hours and moments, and the ritual of the sacrifice is at every turn and in every detail, as even a cursory study of the Brahmanas and Upanishads ought to show us, mystically symbolic.... Not only the actual religious worship but also the social institutions of the time were penetrated through and through with the symbolic spirit.⁷

This point, of course, has been made already in The Secret of the Veda, but here Sri Aurobindo's aim is to show how what was once living could become a dead habit in course of time and turn into a pernicious thing as well. For example, there was the institution of caturvarnya which, in its Vedic origins (as may be inferred from the celebrated Purusha Sukta), had a "symbolic, religious or psychological significance"; no mere poetic image this, no "economic evolution complicated by political causes", no iniquitous system of exploitation:

To them [the men of the Vedic age] this symbol of the Creator's body was more than an image, it expressed a divine reality. Human society was for them an attempt to express in life the cosmic Purusha who has expressed himself otherwise in the material and the supraphysical universe. Man and the cosmos are both of them symbols and expressions of the same hidden Reality.⁸

It was predominantly a spiritual age, and the religious forms and observances were subordinate to the imperatives of the Spirit. The Vedic description of the Purusha was meant to convey directly through symbol - for the symbol was more direct than the 'sense' it symbolised - that the Divine was Knowledge, Power, Protection and Mutuality, and Work and Service, all at once, even as Shakti is Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati -Wisdom, Power, Harmony and Work, the four supreme godheads of the cosmic order.

With the passage of time, however, 'symbol' became 'type', and what had been spiritual and religious became psychological and ethical:

Religion becomes then a mystic sanction for the ethical motive and discipline, Dharma; that becomes its chief social utility, and for the rest it takes a more and more other-worldly turn.... This typal stage creates the great social ideals...⁹

The 'ideals' - the Brahmin's, the Kshatriya's, the Vaishya's, the Shudra's - do not long retain their original purity; and becoming progressively unrelated to the inner life, they dwindle into protestations or the emptiest formalities without sincerity, without substance, without truth. And so the 'typal' gives place to the 'conventional' stage:

The conventional stage of human society is born when the external supports,  

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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. Thus in the evolution of caste, the outward supports of the ethical fourfold order, - birth, economic function, religious ritual and sacrament, family custom, - each began to exaggerate enormously its proportions and its importance in the scheme.... This rigidity once established, the maintenance of the ethical type passed.... In the full economic period of caste the priest and the Pundit masquerade under the name of the Brahmin, the aristocrat and feudal baron under the name of the Kshatriya, the trader and money-getter under the name of the Vaishya, the half-fed labourer and economic serf under the name of the Shudra. When the economic basis also breaks down, then the unclean and diseased decrepitude of the old system has begun; it has become a name, a shell, a sham.... That invisible fact is the last and present state of the caste system in India.10

Such is the slow decline and fall into poisonous decrepitude of the inspiring Vedic symbols of the Purusha, the whole Community viewed as the projection of the Divine in the world. With the total obscuration of the 'soul' of the symbol, with the complete drying up of the 'life' of the type, only the dead 'form', the tyranny of convention, the meaningless externals, the arrogant assumption of superiority, the general diffusion of inequity - only these remain. When this becomes intolerable - as it must sooner or later - there is the inevitable revolt, and the stage is set for the age of individualism and reason.

From 'symbol' to 'type', from 'type' to 'convention' - and a dead end; then the individualistic revolt, the assertion of reason, the beginnings of the reign of science the derogation of revelation and faith and religion - to what end? "The dawn of individualism is always a questioning, a denial";¹¹ the debris of past formalisms dead to life has to be cleared first, the dead church, the dead social institution, the dead ritual, the dead code of honour, the dead scholasticism, all have first to go, and reason is a good hatchet, a good demolisher, an efficient cleanser of our Augean stables. But the tasks of fresh construction cannot be delayed long, and here individualism has to reverse its natural gear and look in new directions for allies:

It must find a general standard of truth to which the individual judgement of all will be inwardly compelled to subscribe without physical constraint or imposition of irrational authority. And it must reach too some principle of social order which shall be equally founded on a universally recognisable truth of things...¹²

In Europe, reason and science were the means adopted to establish a just social order, and this meant - at least for a time - the fulfilment and triumph of the individualistic age of human society. But the application of a rigid scientific method to probe human nature and prescribe human needs has only succeeded in discovering the truth and law of the "collectivity, the pack, the mass". In the modern omnicompetent State (in the "god-state" of the Duce, the Fuehrer, the Big Brother),  

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the commissar and the technocrat - aided more and more by the computer! - might set up a beehive-kind of human society, "a new typal order based upon purely economic capacity and function". But, of course, the progress of the "god-state", before it could achieve its deadly fulfilment, might be halted in time. There has been a backlash against reason's negations; there is now a growing suspicion of Science's self-sufficiency; and the awakening East at least is unlikely to repeat in its entirety the Western experience with its unbridled individualism. Nevertheless, the age of individualism and reason has resulted in certain sure gains: firstly, the democratic ideal of equality and equality of opportunity, and, secondly, the realisation of the importance of the individual by himself (and not merely as a microcosmic social unit):

He is not merely a member of a human pack, hive or ant-hill; he is something in himself, a soul, a being, who has to fulfil his own individual truth and law as well as his natural or his assigned part in the truth and law of the collective existence.¹³

The rake's progress of individualism towards collectivist death can be - and indeed should be - arrested, and the higher human endeavour should be directed towards a life-giving subjectivism.

During the transitional individualistic age, then, there is just a chance that mankind might abandon before it becomes too late the suicidal race towards collectivism, and discover the truth and law of the individual being as well as of the social group to which he belongs. The war of 1914-18, and the even more sanguinary war of 1939-45, were the result of a combination of causes: the nation's vitalistic motive-power, a servile intelligence ready to obey it, and an accomplished materialistic Science, the Djinn, the "giant worker of huge, gross and soulless miracles".¹⁴ But the two wars have stopped just short of the total annihilation of the human race, thus giving a chance of survival and recovery for Man. In modem times, man's awakened subjectivism has tried to put forth its first promising results in art, music, literature, education, and there has also been - as in Ireland and in Bengal - an attempt at the discovery of a nation's or of a sub-nation's soul. Sri Aurobindo rightly points out that it was not her soldiers and empire-builders like Bismark and Moltke and Kaiser Wilhelm II but her thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Nietzsche and her great musicians, Beethoven and Wagner, who represented Germany's great subjective force that has ushered in the modem renaissance. And yet it is the soldier and the racist who have repeatedly seized power and tried to give a wrong turn to history, and the cult of the soulless collectivity has tried to poison the source of all life and growth, the divine individuality in Man which at that level of consciousness is in solidarity with all of its kind, if not with other kinds as well.

As regards the issue between individualism and collectivism, Sri Aurobindo writes:

Subjectivism and objectivism start from the same data, the individual and the collectivity, the complex nature of each with its various powers of the mind,

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life and body and the search for the law of their self-fulfilment and harmony. But objectivism proceeding by the analytical reason takes an external and mechanical view of the whole problem..., Subjectivism proceeds from within and regards everything from the point of view of a containing and developing self-consciousness. The law here is within ourselves; life is a self-creating process... the principle of its progress is an increasing self-recognition, self-realisation and a resultant self-shaping.... The whole impulse of subjectivism is to get at the self... to see by the self, to live out the truth of the self internally and externally but always from an internal initiation and centre.¹⁵

The crux of the matter is that Man, although he is in many superficial respects like an animal, is not mere animal. What a piece of work is a 'man', exclaims Hamlet; "How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!" Deep within him, there is a fount of Truth that asks to be tapped, and unless this is done, man will be condemned to go round and round the prickly pear of his futile egoisms and Cain-and-Abel racial antagonisms:

The individual animal is dominated entirely by his type, subordinated to his group when he does group himself; individual man has already begun to share something of the infinity, complexity, free variation of the Self we see manifested in the world....

Thus the community stands as a mid-term and intermediary value between the individual and humanity and it exists not merely for itself, but for the one and the other and to help them to fulfil each other.... Therefore the community has to stand for a time to the individual for humanity even at the cost of standing between him and it and limiting the reach of his universality and the wideness of his sympathies.¹⁶

The individual has to grow from within, but without interfering with the growth of others in his group and immediate milieu; his law is to harmonise his life with the life of the social aggregate, and the law of the latter is to harmonious its life with the life of other and bigger aggregates, and ultimately humanity as a whole.

In the annals of human history, always the pull towards civilisation has been countered by the opposite pull towards barbarism on account of the perversion of the means and the complete ignoration of the ends. Science has been a power of enlightenment, and it has enlarged the common man's intellectual horizons and "sharpened and intensified powerfully the general intellectual capacity of mankind". But science has also facilitated the eruption of the new barbarism of our times. The physical barbarian of old aimed at excellence of body and the development of personal prowess; the new vitalistic and economic barbarian seeks the satisfaction of his appetites and the accumulation of possessions; the successful man is the new ideal man, and sweetness and light and beauty and moral grandeur and aesthetic values are of no account. The supermen of the commercial age are the captain of industry, the tycoon, the financial wizard and the mammoth capitalist; and the men with political power both control and are controlled by the plutocrats

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and the other occult rulers of the society. If such a state of affairs should persist too long, "Life would become clogged and perish of its own plethora or burst in its straining to a gross expansion. Like the two massive Titan it will collapse by its own mass, mole met sua"¹⁷

If barbarism is below civilisation or is soured civilisation, philistinism is civilisation grown hypocritical and soulless and lifeless, petrified before it could flower into culture. The Philistine, against whom Matthew Arnold raised his voice, "is not dead, - quite the contrary, he abounds, - but he no longer reigns".¹⁸ And there is the recent emergent, the "sensational man", the Jack-of-all-ideas and new intellectual fashions, the man of imprecisions and enthusiasms, the peddler of panaceas and the user of scientific gadgets, the alert gymnast who lands himself on every new bandwagon, the Forsythe class (so to say) or the great inchoate patron of the mass communication media. And the result has been "to cheapen thought and art and literature, to make talent and even genius run in the grooves of popular success... ."¹⁹ For true culture, however, we have to go beyond sensationalism and philistinism and even civilisation. Culture is the cultivation of the inner countries of the mind and sensibility. But the ethical man and the aesthetic man - who flower in an age of culture - themselves need a sovereign third power to sustain and greaten them. This couldn't be Reason and the intelligent Will, although it has its importance; for Reason finds itself stopped by a stubborn barrier. Checkmated, Reason sees its occupation concluded and now tells unfinished Man:

"There is a Soul, a Self, a God in the world and in man who works concealed and all is his self-concealing and gradual self-unfolding. His minister I have been, slowly to unseal your eyes, remove the thick integuments of your vision until there is only my own luminous veil between you and him. Remove that and make the soul of man one in fact and nature with this Divine..."²⁰*

This brings us to the role of religion in the life of man and society. In one of the later chapters of The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo refers to the four main lines followed by Nature - religion, occultism, spiritual thought and spiritual experience and realisation - in her attempt to open up the inner being.²¹ These are really interlinked lines and answer the needs of man's self-expansion and bring about his slow unfolding. Religion is quite simply "the search for God and the finding of God", and in this adventure reason is but a poor aid. Men with God-experience start or sustain religions, but when' dogma and ritual and scholastic systematisation become cancerous growths around religion, in other words when religion degenerates into religionism, it becomes a source of strife, a feeder of war, a veil for ambition, an instrument of oppression and a cloak for obscurantism. The search for the good life, for beauty, for God begins obscurely even at the infrarational level but finds its fulfilment only at the suprarational or supramental level; and reason is the necessary realm between, though not the secure resting place. Even

* Cf. Isha Upanishad: "The face of Truth is covered with a brilliant golden lid; that do thou remove, O Fosterer, for the law of the Truth, for sight."

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in a predominantly infrarational period, Calibans might occasionally speculate on their godhead, Setebos, and make a show of reason. The chequered reign of reason that follows the infrarational age must witness a steady diffusion of its beneficial influence, ushering in democracy and socialism; but these too could easily get corrupted, as they have in the recent past:

In Fascist countries the swing away from Rationalism is marked and open; a surface vital subjectivism has taken its place and it is in the name of the national soul and its self-expression and manifestation that the leaders and prophets teach and violently enforce their totalitarian mystique. The essential features are the same in Russia and in Fascist countries, so that to the eye of the outsider their deadly quarrel seems to be a blood-feud of kinsmen fighting for the inheritance of their slaughtered parents - Democracy and the Age of Reason.²²

In its search for self-knowledge, then. Life must ultimately rely only on the Light of the Spirit, and India's ideal man, the Rishi, is one who has found the supraintellectual and supramental spiritual truth. Such a man can "guide the world humanly as God guides it divinely, because like the Divine he is in the life of the world and yet above it".²³ This is not very different from the Platonic view, expressed in the Republic, that "until philosophers are kings... and political greatness and wisdom meet in one... cities will never have rest from their evils".* These considerations lead to the conclusion that in spirituality alone lies our ultimate and only hope for perfection of Man as well as Collective or Communal Man - a spirituality that would take up into itself all his manifold urges and faculties and "reveal to these ill-accorded forces their divine sense and the conditions of their godhead, reconcile them all to each other... ."²⁴

Man and Collective Man: the Individual and Society - must a firm reconciliation, a healthy and creative partnership between the two elude us for ever? The mystic, in his moments of self-transcendence, experiences a dissolution of the individual in the totality or the convergence of the totality in the individual. At the other extreme, the prophets of historical materialism, Marx and Engels, declare in their Communist Manifesto:

In the place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.²⁵

But as against this Communist dream and hope and assurance, the hard reality - wherever it has so far been tried - has turned out to be different. But this needn't always be so, for it is not as though the principle of Communism itself requires the minimisation of the individual and the rearing up of a "termite civilisation"; and Sri Aurobindo posits the possibility of the Communist principle becoming a means "at once of the fulfilment of the individual and the perfect harmony of a

* Plato's idea of a philosopher was that he should have a true vision of Reality and that he should possess utter truthfulness.  

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collective being".²⁶ But if that is ever to happen, "it must be on a foundation of soul's brotherhood and the death of egoism. A forced association and a mechanical comradeship would end in a world-wide fiasco".²⁷ Marx, Engels and Lenin after them thought that, through the abolition of class differences and by means of socialised production, it would be possible to secure for every member of society an existence materially sufficient, and ultimately, even an existence permitting and indeed guaranteeing the full development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties. But just as the old revolutionary of the time of landed aristocracy became the new bourgeois of the capitalistic age, the new Marxist revolutionary too has tended to become the new philistine, the new commissar of the Communist Super-State. Dictatorship of whatever description can hardly ever be expected voluntarily to relinquish the power it has won and enjoyed exercising. Socialism is a worthy ideal, but it is impossible of complete realisation so long as man remains a slave to his own inveterate egoism. As matters stand, we cannot think of a political or social order that will be altogether free from the depredations of egoism, and the destructive play of selfishness, jealousy, division and strife. "A deeper brotherhood, a yet unfound law of love," says Sri Aurobindo, "is the only sure foundation possible for a perfect social evolution, no other can replace it."²⁸ Thus, although Marx and Lenin have been significant milestones in the history of social evolution, the future must go beyond Marx, and beyond Lenin, and beyond Mao, and ordain and carry out a spiritual revolution that may crack the ego, end the malignant fevers of the ages, and bind man and society and humanity into a single brotherhood conscious of its spiritual unity.

In the last four chapters of The Human Cycle, Sri Aurobindo considers the question of a truly subjective or spiritual turn to individual and communal life in ampler elaboration and in the accents of prophetic authority. It is as though he seems to say: Communism, yes, but beyond religion to a spiritual view and way of life. It was Karl Marx, again, who had said about religion that "it is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation". Religion may have long been (Marx said) the "opium of the people"; but true religion, grounded on spirituality, would prove to be, not the opium, but the elixir of the people. When religion learns to equate the love of God with the love of one's fellow human beings; when man hearkens indeed to Jesus' commandment:

A new commandment I give unto you,

That ye love one another;

as I have loved you,

that ye also love one another;²⁹

when man takes to heart Sri Aurobindo's admonition:

This is a miracle that men can love God,

yet fail to love humanity.

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With whom are they in love then?"³⁰

then "religion" can be passive no more in the face of antagonism of interests, clash of egos, man becoming wolf to man, but will fight all evil with the infallible weapon of the deeper law of love by identity. Not science merely, not the vague notion of "progress", not formalised dogmatic creed, not regimentation or computerisation, but the bold cultivation of spiritual thought and the progressive experience of psychological and spiritual oneness can achieve the conquest of the Kingdom of God and the establishment of the reign of the Spirit over mind and life and body. Freedom and unity - desirable things both and apparently incompatible - can be reconciled only in God or at the level of spiritual consciousness. And so Sri Aurobindo gathers his insights and intuitions into a final statement about the future man and the future human society. For individual and collective man alike there is one common work, one supreme goal, - namely, the finding of the divine Self and its realisation here upon earth in all segments and directions of life:

That will mean the turning of the cycle of social development... out of its incomplete repetitions on a new upward line towards goal. For having set out... with a symbolic age, an age in which man felt a great Reality behind all life which he sought through symbols, it will reach an age in which it will begin to live in that Reality, not through the symbol, not by the power of the type or of the convention or of the individual reason and intellectual will, but in our own highest nature which will be the nature of that Reality fulfilled in the conditions - not necessarily the same as now - of terrestrial existence.³¹

The coming of such a spiritual age cannot, of course, be taken for granted, or prepared for institutionally. Much would depend upon those - not just an isolated Gnostic Being or Mahatma or Mahayogi, but a number of them - who by their self-evolution or self-transcendence into a higher mould have qualified to be leaders of the spiritual march. But although these first few may by their own exertions have won the leadership of the spiritual age, it will not be for themselves alone, but for all; they will take all human life for their province and strive to regenerate the life of humanity as a whole to fit the conditions of the spiritual age. If the number of these spiritual men - these samurai in the service of the Divine, these Rishis and Mahapurushas - is sufficiently large to make a critical mass, "then the Spirit who is here in man, now a concealed divinity, a developing light and power, will descend more fully as the Avatar of a yet unseen and unguessed Godhead from above into the soul of mankind and into the great individualities in whom the light and power are the strongest. There will then be fulfilled the change that will prepare the transition of human life from its present limits into those larger and purer horizons...."³²*

* For more detailed discussions of Sri Aurobindo's social philosophy, the reader is referred to Kishor Gandhi's essays in his Social Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo; Jitendra Nath Mohanty's 'Subjectivism and the Ideal Social Order' in Loving Homage (1958) and "Integralism and Modem Philosophical Anthropology' in The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo (1960).  

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III

The Ideal of Human Unity, First issued as a book-in 1919, was published in a second revised edition in 195O. The main revision had been done before the second world war, but the important Postscript chapter was written shortly before the publication and some of the footnotes too were written after the war. Like The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity also examines the problem of 'collective man', but in political rather than sociological terms, in the global rather than in the narrower context of group or region. Each inquiry throws light on the other, and together the two treatises project a plausible and prophetic vision of future possibilities for the human race.

In simple terms, the question may be stated thus: if individual man can transmit something of his vision and spirit-born strength to the communal group around him and help it to realise its higher potentialities, cannot this process be extended still further from community to community and from nation to nation, till this sense of spiritual oneness embraces the human race itself in its global entirety? The individual wants freedom, the fullest possible freedom, for without freedom life would lose all its flavour and vitality for growth; but the individual also wants security and a richer life in a collectivity, for man is a social and communal being too. But a reconciliation between the two divergent desires hasn't been easy. Man has only too often played wolf to man, and humanity has purblindly see-sawed in the past between sanguinary war and uneasy peace. History has taught us nothing, sociology hasn't been of much use. Our thought and action in collective life has been "shallow and empirical", and has not sought, much less based itself upon, "a firm, profound and complete knowledge".³³

Further, if past experience is to be trusted, it is not vast collectivities like empires but little nations - the Hebrew tribes, the Greek city states, the small medieval Italian cities, the modest-sized kingdoms of the Indian Heroic Age, the later (and not much bigger) kingdoms of the Pallavas, Chalukyas, Pandyas, Cholas, Cheras - that have given to humanity its most cherished glories. A monstrously forbidding concentration of humanity in capital cities like London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, New Delhi raises its own problems, not easy to understand and much less to solve. The general drift of human experience seems to be that "collective life is more at ease with itself, more genial, varied, fruitful when it can concentrate itself in small spaces and simpler organisms".³⁴

Indeed, the whole process of Nature seems to be based on a poise between the individual and the aggregate, a mutuality of interdependence and a harmony of the whole. As the aggregate increases in size or comes to be more and more widely extended, the problem of harmony too raises newer and newer elements of complexity. Between the individual and the totality of mankind, there must be many milestones of aggregation and partial integration:

Between himself and this too immense whole there erect themselves, partly as aids, partly as barriers to the final unity, the lesser aggregates which it has

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been necessary to form in the progressive stages of human culture.... The family, the commune, the clan or tribe, the class, the city state or congeries of tribes, the nation, the empire are so many stages in this progress and constant enlargement... at every step humanity is confronted with various problems which arise not only from the difficulty of accord between the interests of the individual and those of the immediate aggregate, the community, but between the need and interests of the smaller integralities and the growth of that larger whole which is to ensphere them all."³⁵

In an ideal condition, neither a dominant minority would exploit the vast majority (the "dumb millions", as we usually call them), nor a ruling majority (in our democracies) oppress the minorities. But it also means that a cultural minority must give up, in the larger interests of integration, the inessential elements in its separative existence. And, ultimately, however perfect the social, administrative or cultural framework of the aggregate, the individual can fulfil himself best only if the collective ordering doesn't coerce him into a prescribed mould or "the rigidity of a narrow culture or petty class or national interest".³⁶

Taking a large view of the evolutionary march, Sri Aurobindo sees that uniformity is the law in Matter, while free variation and individual development are characteristic of Life and Mind. From this he concludes that man too, being evolved out of Matter and Life, "begins with uniformity and subservience of the individual and proceeds towards variety and freedom of the individual".³⁷ In The Human Cycle, Sri Aurobindo viewed social development as a movement from the symbolic to the subjective (or spiritual) age: from an age that was governed by the reflected light of an obscurely felt Reality to a future age that would actually live in that Reality, the wheel of the 'human cycle' thereby coming full circle. In the present treatise, Sri Aurobindo sees a like circular movement:

...there is also the ancient tradition... of a golden age in which he [man] was freely social without society... it is also possible that our progress has not been a development in a straight line, but in cycles.... It is even possible that our original state was an instinctive animal spontaneity of free and fluid association. ... Our destiny may be the conversion of an original animal association into a community of the gods. Our progress may be a devious round leading from the easy and spontaneous uniformity and harmony which reflects Nature to the self-possessed unity which reflects the Divine.³⁸

But it is not easy to peer so far into the dim vistas of the remotest past. Sri Aurobindo therefore confines his inquiry to the historic period when, with whatever vicissitudes, the 'state' idea has been trying to live with or contain or suppress individualist urges and stances. 'Society', it must be remembered, is not the same thing as 'State', for the latter is a more deliberate, and hence a more artificial, contrivance or creation:

The organised State is neither the best mind of the nation nor is it even the sum of the communal energies.... It is a collective egoism much inferior to the best of which the community is capable. What that egoism is in its relation  

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to other collective egoisms we know... the State is an entity which, with the greatest amount of power, is the least hampered by internal scruples or external checks. It has no soul or only a rudimentary one. It is a military, political and economic force... the chief use it makes of its undeveloped intellect is to blunt by fictions, catchwords and recently by State philosophies, its ill-developed ethical conscience.³⁹

How unreasonable, then, to ask the individual - who, after all, has a soul, an intellect, a sensibility, a conscience, a vibrating life - to immolate himself at the altar of the State? State egoism may be a larger, a more powerful and ruthless egoism, but not a superior one; "rather in many ways inferior to the best individual egoism". The "egoism" of Socrates, for example, was far, far superior to that of the State that condemned him to death. "Man lives by the community," says Sri Aurobindo; "he needs it to develop himself individually as well as collectively."⁴⁰ But the chief role of the State is only "to provide all possible facilities for cooperative action, to remove obstacles, to prevent all really harmful waste and friction".⁴¹

But the "egoism" of the national State dies hard. The war of 1914-18 was itself the resultant of the violent clash of several national egoisms:

From Morocco to Tripoli, from Tripoli to Thrace and Macedonia, from Macedonia to Herzegovina the electric chain ran with that inevitable logic of causes and results, actions and their fruits which we call Karma, creating minor detonations on its way till it found the inflammable point and created the vast explosion which has filled Europe with blood and ruins.... The tree must bear its own proper fruit, and Nature is always a diligent gardener.⁴²

Under these circumstances, would the unification of mankind through the bringing together of the several existing national egoisms be ever possible? And if possible, would such a "union" be desirable? With all its limitations and perversions, the 'nation' seems to be on the whole a viable enough collective unit, - and this, even before it gets transformed into a political unit. With scores of such national units in existence, which is a more desirable consummation, - a federation of free nations, or a few empires and imperial hegemonies? With a wealth of illustration drawn from history, Sri Aurobindo considers the different possibilities, and some of the footnotes - added later - modify or reinforce the points made in the text. For example, a reference to the British Empire is qualified in the footnote that takes cognisance of the fact that the Empire has since become a "free commonwealth". History has seen the rise and fall of empires, but no single formula will fit all of them. The example of the Roman Empire imposing its culture on the conquered people hasn't been always repeated - or to the same extent - by later empires. In the movement and clash of peoples and cultures, history has witnessed all kinds of minglings and assimilations and suppressions. The modem Western impact on the East, for instance, has followed a course of its own. India, Japan and China have received readily things of the mind from the West - "its science, its curiosity, its ideal of universal education and uplift, its abolition of privilege,

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 its broadening, liberalising democratic tendency, its instinct of freedom and equality, its call for the breaking down of narrow and oppressive forms, for air, space, light" - but resisted any interference with "the things of the soul, the profound things of the mind and temperament".⁴³ It is not so much "conquest" of the East by the West, but a matter of "mutual understanding and interchange, mutual adaptation and new formation".

Taking his cue from Nature's way of building up her physical aggregates - first a body, next a common life and vital interest for the constituents of the body, and last a conscious mind or sense as the centre of governance - Sri Aurobindo argues that in the building up of human aggregates too this sequence of conditions must prevail. As we read in the Bande Mataram, the conditions of national identity are geographical unity, a common past and a current motivation towards unity.⁴⁴ The point is further amplified in the present work:

But we have a mark that this national ego owes its life to the coalescence of the separative instinct and the instinct of unity; for the nation feels itself one as distinguished from other nations .... there is a deeper factor.. a sort of religion of country, a constant even if not always explicit recognition not only of the sacredness of the physical mother, the land, but also, in however obscure a way, of the nation as a collective soul which it is the first duty and need of every man to keep alive, to defend from suppression or mortal attaint or, if suppressed, then to watch, wait and struggle for its release and rehabilitation, if sicklied over with the touch of any fatal spiritual ailment, then to labour always to heal and revivify and save alive.⁴⁵

This is the very religion of nationalism, the religion Sri Aurobindo preached in his political days. But can we expect a religion of globalism to supersede the reign of the many ruling localisms and nationalisms? Even an empire hasn't been able to secure the same allegiance from all its territories, and a heterogeneous empire usually carries the seeds of its own decay and disintegration, unless the bonds of empire are voluntarily relaxed so as to make them tolerable, and also unless there is a spirit of give and take among the constituents of the empire or federation or confederation.

The idea of unity - whether in smaller or larger aggregates - has sought in the past to realise itself, first, by the development of a central authority, second, by bringing about a measure of uniformity in the administration, and third, by achieving to a greater or lesser extent the transformation of that authority from an autocrat or a ruling class into a body whose function was to represent the thought and will of the whole community, the whole process of change representing the evolution from a natural and organic to a mechanically organised society. A free association and unity would be preferable always to any external compulsion or arbitrary creation, but Nature's way has been a spiralling movement through trial and error and partial success. Sri Aurobindo refers in a footnote to the "practical possibility" of a United States of Europe, almost anticipating the European Common Market and the fuller union that seems to be set towards self-accomplishment.

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There might arise too, Sri Aurobindo thinks, "a system of large imperial empires", in this again projecting a fearful possibility like the three monsters - Eastasia, Eurasia and Oceania - described by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet another Aurobindonian "hypothetical forecast"⁴⁶ - a nation being rent by civil war - has since been justified by subsequent events like the civil war in Spain, the horrors of the partition of India, the Korean War and the prolonged agony of Vietnam.

In Part Two of The Ideal of Human Unity, Sri Aurobindo views the social revolution of the human race as a development of the relations between the three constant factors - individuals, communities and mankind:

Each seeks its own fulfilment and satisfaction, but each is compelled to develop them not independently but in relation to the others.... Mankind as a whole has at present no consciously organised common life; it has only an inchoate organisation determined much more by circumstances than by human intelligence and will. And yet the idea and the fact of our common human existence, nature, destiny has always exercised its strong influence on human thought and action.⁴⁷

Things have, however, changed during the last fifty years, especially since the coming of the Jet age and the Space age. The whole adventure of Apollo flights and moon-landings is shared by hundreds of millions on TV all over the globe, and a new generation is growing up that will surely make mock of the narrow loyalties of their progenitors. In the history of nations, economic centralisation has usually preceded legislative, social, administrative and political centralisation. Cannot a world-union too come into existence in much the same way and develop in due course into a world-state? But, then, will not a world-state prove a veritable Frankenstein monster for individuals and individual nations alike? The tyranny of the majority can be odious enough, "but what the future promises us is something more formidable still, the tyranny of the whole, of the self-hypnotised mass over its constituent groups and units"⁴⁸ - and this would apply to national and international situations alike.

In The Human Cycle, Sri Aurobindo saw the curve of the present 'subjective' age culminating in a spiritual age, human thought and action transfigured by the infusion of the consciousness of oneness and harmony. The grand argument of The Ideal of Human Unity leads to a similar conclusion. In a world-union or a world-state, it is not 'administrative' or 'military' support that will sustain the world community; a "religion of humanity" may, perhaps, produce better results, but what is basic to any religion is not a set of ethical rules but the ambience of the Spirit. Eighteenth-century Europe, by intuition as it were, sought to define the "religion of humanity" as the efflorescence of liberty, equality and fraternity. But Sri Aurobindo would go further:

Freedom, equality, brotherhood are three godheads of the soul; they cannot be really achieved through the external machinery of society or by man so long as he lives only in the individual and the communal ego.... Yet is brotherhood  

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the real key to the triple gospel of the idea of humanity... freedom, equality, unity are the eternal attributes of the Spirit. It is the practical recognition of this truth, it is the awakening of the soul in man and the attempt to get him to live from his soul and not from his ego which is the inner meaning of religion, and it is that to which the religion of humanity also must arrive before it can fulfil itself in the life of the race.⁴⁹

The many favourable factors towards world-union - an appreciation of the closeness of common interests; the force of increasing cosmopolitanism, the move for an international framework for consultation, deliberation and arbitration, the psychological impulsion provided by the desire for a religion of humanity - would nevertheless not be strong enough to ensure human unity so long as man or collective man refused to see the spiritual reality behind the brilliant and bewildering facades of material life:

A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future.... A religion of humanity means the growing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth.... A spiritual oneness which would create a psychological oneness not dependent upon any intellectual or outward uniformity and compel a oneness of life not bound up with its mechanical means of unification, but ready always to enrich its secure unity by a free inner variation and a freely varied outer self-expression, this would be the basis for a higher type of human existence.⁵⁰

It is all of a piece, the argument of The Life Divine, The Human Cycle and of The Ideal of Human Unity. Other - mechanistic, vitalistic, intellectual, legal or ethical - solutions can only be palliatives or makeshifts; the spiritual solution alone can really solve the obstreperous problem of freedom, unity and fulfilment, whether in relation to man or collective man or global humanity.

Over a decade after Sri Aurobindo had concluded his series of articles on Human Unity in the Arya, Rabindranath Tagore said in the course of his Hibbert Lectures: "On the surface of our being we have the ever-changing phases of the individual self, but in the depth there dwells the Eternal Spirit of human unity beyond our direct knowledge."⁵¹ Still later, Arnold Toynbee ventured to see a "divine plan" behind the rise and fall of civilisation and discover a kind of progress in spiritual terms, resulting in "a cumulative increase in the means of Grace at man's disposal", making it possible for human souls, while still in this world, "to come' to know God better and to come to love Him more nearly in His own way".⁵² And Radhakrishnan has declared in a lecture: "In spite of racial and national differences, we must evolve a relationship, a unity of mind and heart, a feeling which will bring us intimately close to one another.... Every truly religious man whose nature is freed from dogmatic rigidity realises that all prayers flow into one Supreme."⁵³ It was Sri Aurobindo's view that to realise freedom and unity you have

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first to realise and possess God "at once your highest self and the self of all creatures".⁵⁴ There is a superficial resemblance between these utterances, and yet the difference in emphasis is not less important. What is inferred as a possibility by Toynbee is to Sri Aurobindo a certainty in the light of his Yoga, a thing as good as decreed, a condition of supermanhood in a background of supernature now in the first stages of its process of terrestrial fulfilment. Where the historian, the philosopher and the poet are guarded, vague or intuitively perceptive, Sri Aurobindo the Yogin-Seer is definitive, but it is surely most significant that all of them should see tomorrow's world and the future humanity growing dimensions essentially spiritual.*

IV

Since the life of the Arya synchronised with the course of the first world war and the months of peace-making, it was inevitable that Sri Aurobindo should occasionally make that ghastly global tragedy the subject of formal discussion in his journal. Some of these articles appeared as a book in 1920, and it has since been reprinted more than once. Whether a war is going on or not, thinking men cannot help probing the causes of war and speculating about the possibility of the permanent outlawry of war. In the Foreword to the first published edition of War and' Self-Determination, Sri Aurobindo underlined the idea behind the collection - "the obvious but practically quite forgotten truth that the destiny of the race in this age of crisis and revolution will depend much more on the spirit which we are than on the machinery we shall use". ⁵⁵ Although the subjects discussed seem various on the surface, the frame of reference - the point of view - is the same. In 'The Passing of War' (written in the early months of the war), Sri Aurobindo points out that, not being a mere machine in his constitution or functioning, man (or mankind for that matter) cannot be saved by machinery; "only by an entire change which shall affect all the members of his being can he be liberated from his discords and imperfections".⁵⁶ The egoistic craving for power and dominion, the scramble of competitive commercialism for markets and the periodic unloosening of the dogs of war form a fatally logical sequence, and only the spiritual solution can prove to be an effective and a lasting one:

Only when man has developed not merely a fellow-feeling with all men, but a dominant sense of unity and commonality, only when he is aware of them not merely as brothers, - that is a fragile bond, - but as parts of himself, only when he has learned to live, not in his separate personal and communal ego-sense, but in a large universal consciousness, can the phenomenon of war, with whatever weapons, pass out of his life without the possibility of return.⁵⁷

* The reader is also referred to Nolini Kanta Gupta's Towards a New Society (1947), Sisirkuamr Mitra's 'History as Future' (Loving Homage, 1968) and the present writer's 'Tomorrow's World' (Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual, 1947)  

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'The Unseen Power' was written when, although in a literal sense the war had ended, it was being continued in other ways. Peace-making was in progress, an era of revolutions had begun, the old maps were being redrawn, and new political alignments were coming into existence. In this essay wrung by the compulsion of the hour, Sri Aurobindo is at his impassioned best, and the writing has a prophetic cast. He sees the phantasmagoria of the world crisis with unflinching eyes, and he sees behind it the glimpse of a preordained drift of events - "a meaning and the promise of a new creation". When Sri Aurobindo sees the terrible havoc and ruin and suffering caused by the war, he is reminded of Arjuna's words in the Gita which provokes Krishna's answer: "I am the Time-Spirit, destroyer of the world, arisen huge-statured for the destruction of the nations"; and Sri Aurobindo concludes that it is not human reason or human science but a greater spirit that is the sūtradhara behind the blood-stained scenes:

It is the wrath of Rudra that has swept over the earth and the track of his foot-prints can be seen in these ruins. There has come as a result upon the race the sense of having lived in many falsehoods and the need of building according to an ideal.... Two great words of the divine Truth... freedom and unity. But everything depends, first, upon the truth of our vision of them, secondly, upon the sincerity with which we apply it, last and especially on the inwardness of our realisation.⁵⁸

In the essay 'After the War', Sri Aurobindo refers to the "continued existence, success, unbroken progress of the Russian revolution":

This event promises to be as significant in human history as the great overturn of established ideas and institutions initiated in France in the eighteenth century, and to posterity it may well be this and not the downfall of Germany for which the Great War will be ever memorable.... The achievements of this extraordinary government have been of a sufficiently astonishing character.... It is acts of faith and audacities of this scale that change or hasten the course of human progress. It does not follow necessarily that what is being attempted now is the desirable or the definite form of the future society, but is a certain sign that a phase of civilisation is beginning to pass and the Time-Spirit preparing a new phase and a new order.⁵⁹ *

Sri Aurobindo also notes, as the second striking feature of the situation, the wave of unrest sweeping over the East from Egypt to China. For the time being, at any rate, the rise of socialism and the Asiatic resurgence seemed (in Sri Aurobindo's eyes) to form "a moral alliance"; but he saw too that they might not, after all, "realise the larger human hope".⁶⁰ And in this he had correctly read the future with a Yogi's clear gift of vision.

In his essay on 'Self-Determination', again, Sri Aurobindo differentiates between

* In a conversation or 9 December 1925, Sri Aurobindo is reported to have said: "...I worked for the success of the Russian Revolution for three years. I was one of the influences that worked to make it a success" (Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo, Second Series, p. 26).  

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the popular idea which is but a half-truth and the right idea that would give 'self-determination' the true spiritual meaning:

The recognition and fulfilment of the divine being in oneself and in man, the kingdom of God within and in the race is the basis on which man must come in the end to the possession of himself as a free self-determining being and of mankind too in a mutually possessing self-expansion as a harmoniously self-determining united existence.⁶¹

If Sri Aurobindo was not swept off his feet by the much-extolled principle of 'self-determination' (and he has been amply justified by future events), neither was he impressed by the mountainous labour that was then in progress in the act of producing the mouse of the League of Nations. He has no difficulty in exposing the paltry insufficiency of its aims and the total inadequacy of its means: its selective and its oligarchic character: its shameful compromise with the bigger national egoisms: its brazen enunciation of a new theory of trusteeship: and, in sum, its being "a leaky and ill-balanced ship launched on waters of tempest and chaos without a chart or compass or sailing instructions".⁶² He saw clearly that if it was to serve humanity, the League must be "cast in another mould and animated by another spirit", and so he comes back to the plea that "salvation for individual or community comes not by the Law but by the Spirit".⁶³ Pending such a radical' spiritual solution to the world's ills, even so imperfect an instrument like the League of Nations might serve humanity's "turn for practice and for a far-off expectation".⁶⁴

Finally, in an article in the Arya after the war, Sri Aurobindo took a quick backward glance as well as a sharp forward look, and either way his findings are important. There is reference to the collapse of Imperial Germany ("a composite godhead of Moloch and Mammon seated between the guardian figures of Intelligence and Science"), the half-headed peace of Versailles that was but a prolongation of the war, and the feeble and mutilated hope of the League of Nations; but the end of the affair was indicated by none of these, but would be a denouement yet to be played out and concluded:

Meanwhile much is gone that had to go, though relics and dregs of it remain for destruction, and the agony of a sanguinary struggle is ended, and for that there may well be rejoicing. But if something is ended, all has yet to be begun. The human spirit has still to find itself, its idea and its greater orientation.⁶⁵

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