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Bindu Puri Editor Reading Sri Aurobindo Metaphysics, Ethics and Spirituality Reading Sri Aurobindo Bindu Puri Editor Reading Sri Aurobindo Metaphysics, Ethics and Spirituality Editor Bindu Puri Centre for Philosophy, SSS Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, India ISBN 978-981-19-3135-2 ISBN 978-981-19-3136-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3136-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Foreword It gives me great pleasure to write this brief foreword for the book Reading Sri Aurobindo—Metaphysics, Ethics and Spirituality. We are in the midst of cele- brating the birth centenary of Sri Aurobindo, the philosopher saint. To mark this occasion, there have been many conferences, seminars (most of it, if not all, “vir- tual,” thanks to the corona pandemic) and other events to revisit Sri Aurobindo’s life and work in order to assess his contribution to philosophical thought generally, and to the understanding of Indian culture and civilization. This is just as it should be. Sri Aurobindo’s contribution to India’s intellectual and spiritual life is unimaginably huge; but, it remains mostly hidden from our active, self-aware life of the mind. Efforts like putting imaginatively together the collection of essays in this book and many others that must have been made on the occasion of the centenary celebrations are therefore extremely important; we can only hope that they, and what may come as their sequel, will play their part in bringing Sri Aurobindo somewhat to the centre of our critical consciousness. In her Introduction to the book, Bindu Puri touches on several aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s thought. But her account of Savitri, as a philosophical poem, which takes up a large part of the Introduction is quite outstanding. The writing of Savitri was almost a life-long endeavour; in fact, the final version of it was published posthu- mously. Puri explores the idea of poetry as a philosopher’s tool with much agility and insight. The freedom that poetic language, (English in this case) enjoys, and, yet, the stringent limits within which it must be employed afford a medium of expression that is uniquely suited to the articulation of philosophical insights that prose is unable to unravel. Savitri’s poetic excellence matches its philosophical wisdom and spiritual vision. A comparison with TS Eliot’s Waste Land, might have been quite apt. I think the problem that the book sets before us—perhaps without any self- conscious setting forth—is that of Sri Aurobindo’s place in the history of philosophical thought. In India, academic philosophy engages with two distinct traditions of thought: the Indian with, until very recently, Sanskrit and Pali as its primary languages, and the Western which is available in English and in first order or second v vi Foreword order translations into English. Sri Aurobindo studied Classics in Cambridge Univer- sity. The degree in Classics encompassed the history, culture, archaeology, art, philosophy and linguistics of classical antiquity and the study of original texts (Greek and Latin) and artefacts. This ensured that Sri Aurobindo’s knowledge of the western intellectual and spiritual tradition was deep enough for him to engage in an insider’s arguments with it and that his felicity with philosophical thinking would support the claim that his interventions in the western tradition would have made a noticeable difference to it. We know that his essay on Heraclitus drew attention in the West; the reference in this essay to Plotinus, Plato, Nietzsche and Bergson shows his interest in what we might regard as the heart of Greek philosophy, and in some of the path- breaking interventions in modern western philosophy. Claims of the following sort have also been made about Sri Aurobindo: “has appropriated Hegel’s notion of an Absolute Spirit and employed it to radically restructure the architectonic framework of the ancient Hindu Vedanta system in contemporary terms.” (Odin 1981,183). By contrast, Sri Aurobindo himself did not acknowledge western influence on his own writings. My philosophy, he said, “was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita… They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga.” (Aurobindo 2006, 113). These readings led him to move on to the actual experience, on which later “I founded my philosophy, not on ideas themselves.” Our philosophical education has placed us in the advantageous position of having access to both western philosophy and the long tradition of Indian philosophy. Given Sri Aurobindo’s massive contribution to philosophy, our first task, then, is to see how it could have arisen out of his deep engagement with some of the central sources of the Indian philosophical tradition, and to assess the difference it makes to the tradition and how it takes the tradition forward, and most importantly, how it enables us to confront our own problems, here and now, of examined living and thinking. On the other hand, since we have, willy-nilly in our academia and in public life appropriated the western mode of thinking, it is equally important for us, given the contemporaneity of Sri Aurobindo’s writings, and his close familiarity with western thought, to seek parallels between his thought and the latest developments in western philosophy, and to find a place for him in it. The latter task is quite brilliantly performed, in this book, by Debashish Banerji (“Postmodernism and Sri Aurobindo”). Several of the other essays are also noteworthy in this respect. I have mentioned, in this connection, the papers by Bindu Puri and Jahanbegloo. The papers by Ananda Reddy, H.S. Prasad, R. Ghosh and N. Kumar are important contributions to our understanding of Sri Aurobindo within the framework of the great Indian tradition of philosophy. I have no doubt that this book will be a very significant step in our endeavour to creatively rediscover India’s own philosophical “soul.” New Delhi, India Prof. Mrinal Miri Foreword vii References Odin, S. (1981). Sri Aurobindo and Hegel on the involution-evolution of absolute spirit. Philosophy East and West, 31(2), 179–191. Sri Aurobindo. (2005). Family Letters, 1890–1919. Vol. 36 of The complete works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA). Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department. Electronic edition accessed online in November 2021 at https://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/sriaurobindo/writin gs.php Contents Introduction: Reading Sri Aurobindo. Towards a Svaraj in Ideas ...... 1 Bindu Puri Part I Sri Aurobindo and the Idea of Evolution Sri Aurobindo’s Hindu Philosophy: Spiritual Evolution of Human Consciousness ..................................................... 41 Hari Shankar Prasad Man—Towards Its Self-Transcendence—In the Light of Sri Aurobindo ........................................................ 83 Raghunath Ghosh Boons of Nachiketas and Savitri .................................... 91 V. Ananda Reddy Part II Sri Aurobindo: On Integral Yoga Evolution with Harmony: Integral Yoga and Its Transformational Potential in the Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo ......................... 105 Nishant Kumar Sri Aurobindo as Archetypal Guru: Toward a Theology of Liberation Through Integral Yoga ................................ 119 Sebastian Velassery Part III Situating Sri Aurobindo: Modernity and Post-Modernity Postmodernism and Sri Aurobindo .................................. 137 Debashish Banerji Harmonies of Light: Walking with Rohith Vemula and Sri Aurobindo ........................................................ 163 Monica Gupta ix x Contents Part IV Sri Aurobindo: On the Nation, the State and the Ideal of Human Unity Understanding Aurobindo’s Concept of Nationalism: An Integral Philosophy or a Religious Faith? .................................... 181 Reetu Jaiswal Sri Aurobindo and the Idea of Human Unity ......................... 189 Ramin Jahanbegloo Nation-Soul, State and Unity: Sri Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore on the Religion of Humanity ................................. 197 Bindu Puri Part V Sri Aurobindo: Philosophy and Practice Teaching Sri Aurobindo: The Descent of Consciousness ............... 223 Christopher Key Chapple Rethinking and Transforming Language, Knowledge, Self, Society and State and the Calling of Alternative Planetary Futures: Walking and Meditating with Sri Aurobindo ......................... 231 Ananta Kumar Giri Part VI Sri Aurobindo: On Emotions Sri Aurobindo on the Transformation of Emotions: Reflections on Divine Love and Absolute Devotion ............................... 249 Dipika Bhatia Part VII Sri Aurobindo: Towards an Ethics of the Environment Environmental Consciousness and Sri Aurobindo: Learnings for the Present .................................................... 261 Sujata Roy Abhijat Spiritualistic Ecologism in the Evolutionary Ideologies of Sri Aurobindo ........................................................ 271 Saji Varghese Part VIII Sri Aurobindo: On Philosophical Agnosticism Sri Aurobindo, Agnosticism, and the Unknowable .................... 285 Peter Heehs About the Editor Bindu Puri is a professor of contemporary Indian Philosophy at the Centre for Philosophy, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her main interests are in the areas of contemporary Indian philosophy and moral and polit- ical philosophy. Puri has over 56 papers in edited anthologies and philosophical and interdisciplinary journals; including Sophia, Philosophia and the Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research. She has authored three mono- graphs; Gandhi and the Moral Life (2004) The Tagore-Gandhi Debate: On Matters of Truth and Untruth (Sophia: Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, Vol. 9, Springer 2015); and The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate: On Identity, Community and Justice (Singapore:Springer Nature, 2022). She has seven edited volumes, the most recent being Rethinking Religious Pluralism: Moving Beyond Liberal Tolerance (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2020). She has presented over 160 papers and lectures at national and international forums. Professor Puri is a Fellow of the Australia India Institute, University of Melbourne and a member of the editorial boards of prestigious International journals of philosophy like Sophia and Philosophia. She delivered the prestigious annual ‘M K Gandhi lecture on Peace and the Humanities’ 2017 for the Mahatma Gandhi Peace Council of Ottawa, Canada as well as the Johnson and Hastings lectures at the University of Mount Allison in Canada for the same year. xi