Sri Aurobindo and William James
By Pariksith Singh, MD
Sri Aurobindo might perhaps be called a pragmatic Vedanti. I use the word pragmatic in the sense it was used by William James and before him Charles Pierce. That is, the value of a truth is not some abstract sufficient in itself but in its practical utility or ‘cash value.’ Or rather, its use in our life. Sri Aurobindo would not have put his vision in such a business-like manner; however, he sought to grow in yoga to use its powers to help liberate his country. While Sri Aurobindo accepted the value of nirvana or the static aspect of the Brahman in its own right, he also emphasized its dynamic aspect which to our consciousness appears impracticable and untranslatable into action.
One of the most significant achievements of Sri Aurobindo is that he accepted all aspects of existence as the truth, from the most spiritual or transcendental to the most material or earthy. His Vedanta might be called poorna or integral since it did not reject the world but accepted it as a manifestation of the Real or the True. In fact, Sri Aurobindo insisted that the yogi or spiritual man not shirk away from the vyavharic or practical but embrace it and transform it in light of the highest Truth-Consciousness he called the Supermind. The first three chapters of The Life Divine are an urgent and insistent meditation on this acceptance of both materialism and spirituality as two aspects of an unknowable reality.
The ancient understanding of Vedanta states that all reality is Brahman, sarvam brahma. While the original insight of Vedanta was life-affirming, somehow it was replaced by the doctrine of Universal Illusionism attributed to Adi Sankaracharya. Sri Aurobindo brought to the fore once again the synthetic approach of Vedanta that accepted all dimensions of existence as equally a manifestation of the Divine. He termed the bridge between the polar opposites of inconscient and Sat-Chit-Ananda as the Supermind, that unifies the most contradictory and paradoxical expressions of life.
Before Sri Aurobindo it was Sri Ramakrishna, who with the example of his life showed that all religions are reflections of the same Divinity. And all schools of spirituality too are but gleams of its Light. Swami Vivekananda, the disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, brought this dynamic and strong synoptic spirituality to the attention of the world in his famous address to the World Congress of Religions in 1872. But it was Sri Aurobindo who articulated clearly that Indian spirituality is not divorced from the world and life on earth needs to be transformed by opening oneself to the higher ranges of consciousness that are available to each human being.
When we look at William James, we see a similar preoccupation. How to make Western Philosophy that had grown disconnected from real life pragmatic and useful once again? He stated clearly in his lectures on Pragmatism that Truths are goods because “they lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini.” And that “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot.” For him, “reality is still in the making while for rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity.” To the last statement above, Sri Aurobindo would have said that both rationalists and pragmatists are correct: that Brahman is complete from all eternity, but the manifest Universe is an emanation of its Shakti that is evolving and in the making.
What I find refreshing in William James is his openness and liberalism. But even more importantly, his faith in the future possibility for man. He says in The Will to Believe, “If this life not be a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatrics from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight — as if there were something really wild in the universe which we … are needed to redeem.” Sri Aurobindo would have agreed although he would have perhaps substituted the word fight with evolution.
James also brought a scientific outlook to the study of metaphysics. While his commitment to see metaphysics in action is laudable, his insistence that the test for the validity of a truth is in its practical application is life may seem muddled and confusing. For if we say that a belief in God is valid if it is good due to the results it brings in real life, we create a new difficulty in defining what we mean by ‘results’ and what is ‘good.’ Bertrand Russel in A History of Western Philosophy brings out this conundrum and criticizes pragmatism as unverifiable ‘subjectivistic madness’ and one would have to agree with Russel in his obloquy if pragmatism were so nebulous in its application.
Sri Aurobindo did not insist that the test for a truth is in its practical application only. However, he went about the same practical utility of truth by applying it rigorously in his life, with thoroughness and in granular detail. And he described his experiments in The Records of Yoga with scientific detail such that one may directly see how his philosophy was no armchair, lotus-eating, ivory tower abstraction but rooted in direct execution.
James, a brilliant Harvard psychologist and a physician, lamented the human condition in the Energies of Man, “The human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in coordination, in power of inhibition and control, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject — but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us, it is only an inveterate habit — the habit of inferiority to our full self — that is bad.” What he attempted to point out that we are not living up to our truest potential and in this he would have found a ready agreement with Sri Aurobindo. For the great master from Pondicherry, an unlocking and unleashing of the locked human energies to their fullest capacity was crucial to the future growth of mankind. In fact, Sri Aurobindo declined to return to a public life until he had figured out the ‘formula’ by which he could transform himself and possibly other humans to their highest capability. For he believed that only the highest spiritual development would cure the world of its present and gathering ills.
James believed in the hidden reservoirs of energy in man. In a speech delivered to the American Philosophical Association titled as The Energies of Man, he spoke, “The existence of reservoirs of energy that habitually are not tapped is most familiar to us as the phenomenon of “second wind.” Ordinarily we stop when we meet the first effective layer, so to call it, of fatigue. We have then walked, played or worked “enough,” and desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction, on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thin occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a new level of energy. There may be layer after layer of this experience. A third and a fourth “wind” may supervene. Mental activity shows the phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own — sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass through those early critical points.”
In the Indic terminology we might call the latent energy the kundalini which signifies the subliminal powers that lay coiled in the various chakras or physiological centers along the spine of each individual. Sri Aurobindo went even deeper to the cellular depths where the hidden powers are asleep and need to be awakened. As he says in Book Four, Canto Three of Savitri, his epic poem,
O Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race,
O petty adventurers in an infinite world
And prisoners of a dwarf humanity,
How long will you tread the circling tracks of mind
Around your little self and petty things?
But not for a changeless littleness were you meant,
Not for vain repetition were you built;
Out of the Immortal’s substance you were made;
Your actions can be swift revealing steps,
Your life a changeful mould for growing gods.
A Seer, a strong Creator, is within,
The immaculate Grandeur broods upon your days,
Almighty powers are shut in Nature’s cells.
And he says also in Book One, Canto Three of Savitri,
In hands sustained by a transfiguring Might
He caught up lightly like a giant’s bow
Left slumbering in a sealed and secret cave
The powers that sleep unused in man within.
“Everything real must be experienceable somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real,” says William James in Essays in Radical Empiricism. This is perhaps his most important insight. It is precisely what Sri Aurobindo stood for. Everything that appears to be abstraction in his vast synthesis is actually an experience and every experience becomes a part of his vision. Reality is not divorced from experience, since experience is the crucible where all the theories and concepts are tested, verified, explored, and confirmed in Sri Aurobindo’s methods.
In his essay Does Consciousness Exist? James denied that the subject-object relation is fundamental. “Thoughts and things are names for two sorts of objects … I believe that consciousness when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy. During the past year, I have read a number of articles whose authors seemed just on the point of abandoning the notion of consciousness, and substituting for it that of an absolute experience not due to two factors. But they were not quite radical enough, not quite daring enough in their negations. For twenty years past I have mistrusted ‘consciousness’ as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded.”
“To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists seems so absurd on the face of it — for undeniably ‘thoughts’ do exist — that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. ‘Consciousness’ is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known. Whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his list of first principles must still provide in some way for that function’s being carried on.”
This doctrine of radical empiricism, influential and subtle, is penetrating enough for us to realize that there is no such thing as consciousness. It is only a function. In ancient Sankhya, the Purusha is the principle of pure consciousness, completely passive, unobjectifiable and formless. The function of thought and analysis is in the realm of Prakriti, the principle of manifestation, seamlessly intertwining thought and senses, elements and action, intelligence, and ego. James’ insight of the ‘stream of consciousness’ profoundly influenced modern literature, especially with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and was his great contribution to western philosophy and psychology giving them a decisive turn towards phenomenology and existentialism.
Sri Aurobindo, of course, takes his investigation of consciousness even further. He wrote in a letter to a disciple, “Ordinarily we mean by it [consciousness] our first obvious idea of a mental waking consciousness such as is possessed by the human being during the major part of his bodily existence, when he is not asleep, stunned or otherwise deprived of his physical and superfical methods of sensation. In this sense it is plain enough that consciousness is the exception and not the rule in the order of the material universe. We ourselves do not always possess it. But this vulgar and shallow idea of the nature of consciousness, though it still colours our ordinary thought and associations, must now definitely disappear out of philosophical thinking. For we know that there is something in us which is conscious when we sleep, when we are stunned or drugged or in a swoon, in all apparently unconscious states of our physical being Necessarily, in such a view, the word consciousness changes its meaning. It is no longer synonymous with mentality but indicates a self-aware force of existence of which mentality is a middle term; below mentality it sinks into vital and material movements which are for us subconscient; above, it rises into the supramental which is for us the superconscient. But in all it is one and the same thing organising itself differently. This is …the Indian conception of Chit which, as energy, creates the worlds.”
Thus, consciousness is an essential principle of being. In another letter to a disciple, Sri Aurobindo wrote, “Consciousness is a fundamental thing, the fundamental thing in existence — it is the energy, the motion, the movement of consciousness that creates the universe and all that is in it -not only the macrocosm but the microcosm is nothing but consciousness arranging itself. For instance, when consciousness in its movement or rather a certain stress of movement forgets itself in the action it becomes an apparently “unconscious” energy; when it forgets itself in the form it becomes the electron, the atom, the material object. In reality it is still consciousness that works in the energy and determines the form and the evolution of form. When it wants to liberate itself, slowly, evolutionarily, out of Matter, but still in the form, it emerges as life, as animal, as man and it can go on evolving itself still farther out of its involution and become something more than mere man.”
It was perhaps not possible for William James to proceed any further in his philosophical and psychological explorations at that time. But without him, no Husserl would have been possible. Nor would have Sartre or Camus, Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty gone further in their breakthroughs. William James was also influential in spreading a greater awareness of the Creative Evolution of Bergson which was significantly advanced by Sri Aurobindo later from a greater and more comprehensive vantage point of Vedanta.
The radical empiricism introduced by James broke the artificial demarcations of idealism and empiricism. And opened western philosophy to a new kind of subjectivism, that of consciousness turning upon itself and observing its own movements. In a remarkable essay A Pragmatic Approach to the Human Cycle by Eugene Fontinell, we study the parallels between pragmatism and Sri Aurobindo and find some remarkable concordances between the two. Fontinell shows that both Sri Aurobindo and James concur that “the human, as a manifestation of this universe, is … unfinished and hence has the possibility of participating in his own transformation.”
In A Pluralistic Universe, Lecture VII, James hit upon a remarkable insight that shows his openness to different modes of awareness other than our normal mental cognition, “Every bit of us at every moment is part and parcel of a wider self, it quivers along various radii like the wind-rose on a compass, and the actual in it is continuously one with possibles not yet in our present sight. And just as we are co-conscious with our own momentary margin, may not we ourselves form the margin of some more really central self in things which is co-conscious with the whole of us? May not you and I be confluent in a higher consciousness, and confluently active there, though we now know it not?” Sir Aurobindo, of course, has based his entire philosophy upon the fact that there are domains of consciousness normally not available to the average human and exploring and mastering them is not only possible to each human but also his higher possibility and responsibility.
Yet, as Fontinell points out that neither held out “hope for any shortcut to a higher level of consciousness …Politics, art, science, education and all other human activities, therefore, must be utilized if we are to move to a higher level of consciousness.”
In Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo emphasizes the central importance of work in the great scripture and translates it thus, “…the Gita goes so far as to make works the distinctive characteristic of Yoga. Action to Patanjali is only a preliminary, in the Gita it is the permanent foundation; in the Rajayoga it has practically to be put aside when its result has been attained or at any rate ceases very soon to be a means for the Yoga, for the Gita it is a means of the highest ascent and continues even after the complete liberation of the soul.” In The Will to Believe, James avers that “Perception and thinking are only there for behavior’s sake.”
According to Eugene Fontinell, “Pragmatism, of course, does not claim that it has any abstract, litmus-paper test for determining the “quality of life” embodied in every particular situation. Only a continuing process of evaluation which endeavors to include all possible relevant factors and their consequences … pragmatism never claims more than a tentative judgment concerning the” quality of life” … Its overriding concern is nor for definitive, once-and-for-all judgments but for guidelines which will enable human beings to live more fully … “life” or “experience” is deeper, richer and more extensive than knowledge.”
Pragmatism does not exalt idea over action. And in its worldview, ideas are not an end but the means. While for Sri Aurobindo spiritual truths and experiences are immediate and incontrovertible, James allows for their possibility and agrees with Sri Aurobindo when he states in The Human Cycle that “truth is of no avail for humanity here, it does not become truth on earth, truth of life until it is lived.”
William James in The Continuity of Experience clarifies what he means by pure experience, “My present field of consciousness is a center surrounded by a fringe that shades insensibly into a subconscious more … What we conceptually indentify ourselves with and say we are thinking of at any time is the centre; but our full self is the whole field, with all those indefinitely radiating subconscious possibilities of increase that we only feel without conceiving and can hardly begin to analyze. The collective and the distributive ways of being coexist here, for each part functions distinctly, makes connexion with its own peculiar region in the still wider rest of experience and tends to draw us into that line, and yet the whole is somehow felt as one pulse of our life, — not conceived so, but felt so.” Eugene Fontinell in A Pragmatic Approach to the Human Cycle is not surprised that “James acknowledged the possibility of grasping a reality which transcends human consciousness … and his famous work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, gives ample evidence of his sympathy for those whose experiences take them beyond the limits of the mundane.” The only difference according to Fontinell was that Sri Aurobindo lived such a transcendental truth and for James it was “not merely a subjectivistic projection of an illusory reality but a creative act.”
Both Sri Aurobindo and Henry James realized and elaborated on the importance of the individual and the collective equally. Not for them a cloistered individuality or suffocating collectivism but a humanity where both had equal and mutually enhancing significance. Both accepted the importance of institutions in human life, but no institution had an inherent superiority to the individual freedom, creativity, integration and wholeness. Sri Aurobindo declared in The Human Cycle that “man does not actually live as an isolated being, nor can he grow by an isolated freedom … (society is needed) as a field of relations which afford to the individual the occasion for growing towards greater perfection.”
And Fontinell concludes that “perhaps the most important similarity … is that they both affirm the reality and importance of a human future … the later half of the twentieth century is characterized by a profound threat of meaninglessness … Only if human beings are energized by a deep sense of expectance — by a belief that their activities do count for something…are they likely to make the increasingly difficult effort to bring forth a better, more human world … Sri Aurobindo and the pragmatists resoundingly reject any “tale told by an idiot” interpretation of human life. At the same time they are “tough-minded” since neither suggests that the human condition can be transformed without a sustained effort which inevitably will involve its tragic dimension…Both believe that humanity has a future … the possibilities for such realization are decidedly real … This alone would justify a dialogue between the traditions manifested in the thought of Sri Aurobindo and pragmatism.”
William James triggered a revolution in western philosophy with his insights, contemporaneous to Sri Aurobindo who was feeling his own way from a life of nationalistic revolution in India to that of deep spiritual research and its profound impact on human existence. Both accepted life in its entirety, rejecting no aspect or domain, while insisting that the proof of the philosophy is in the living. Both initiated a radical and transformative shift in the general and prevailing mind of their countries, each reflecting the national thought and genius. Both are yet impacting philosophy more than a century after their departure, each in his own indelible and unique way. Sri Aurobindo, of course, if far more comprehensive and integral. But James somehow touches the essence of Sri Aurobindo when he opens philosophy to new possibilities. This in itself is sufficient contribution to be honored in this age.