Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Sun 23 Mar 2008 09:56 PM PDT
III) Anticipating Science & Society
One thing that can be said
non-metaphorically about that the way Sri Aurobindo practiced yoga
was that it was scientific. The perfection of his sadhana was a feat
that required experimentation and one in which he sought demonstrable
results. It should reasonably follow that his perspective on science
would be one in which its truth claims were open to critical
interrogation, just as were his experiments in yoga.
Given
his penetrating intellectual insights into cultural change, his
understanding of history as both progressive and cyclic, his
multivocal criticisms of society, his integrative encounter with
other voices and texts, his ability to effortlessly traverse the
subjectivities of Europe and India and to transit freely between both
ancient and modern zeitgeists, it seems reasonable to assume that he
would size up science with a critical gaze.
While naturally
rejecting the reductionism of evolutionary biology that goes as far
as to suggest that all of evolution can be reduced to a single
algorithm, he does not seem to have rejected some of the organizing
ideas derived of Darwinian evolution. In general he does not
seem to have discarded the necessity of scientific explanations on
evolution. To restate a paragraph from his essay on Materialism
(1915) he seems to understand perfectly well why science reasons as
it does :
Materialistic science had the courage to
look at this universal truth with level eyes, to accept it calmly as
a starting point and to inquire whether it was not after all the
whole formula of universal being. Physical science must necessarily
to its own first view be materialistic, because so long as it deals
with the physical, it has for its own truth's sake to be physical
both in its standpoint and methodâ€
In the above quotes he is obviously
instancing scientific reason as helper rather than on reason as bar.
That said before attempting to analyze his scientific world view one
must admit that there are real problems with simply selectively
quoting Sri Aurobindo, someone whose intellectual project involved
constantly integrating binary perspectives and synthesizing ways of
knowing that seem entirely contradictory. If we are not alert to the
complexity that his stylistic approach presents we will fail
altogether to understand him by simply referencing selected
quotations from his text. Isolated quotations will almost inevitably
appear in other parts of his text in other contexts, that to the
untrained eye, would seem to contradict or cancel each other out .
So we should not be surprised that while praising the
scientific method in his 1915 essay on Materialism he appears to
contradict himself in his essay of the same year entitled Evolution:
“the materialistic view of the world is now rapidly collapsing
and with it the materialistic statement of the evolution theory must
disappear†. It is only when one assumes an integrative stance
visa vie his text, that implicitly contextualizes any
statement by admitting the possibility of its opposite under
different circumstances that one can fully appreciate his integral
approach. So when one finds that in one place he extols the virtues
of science yet in another he seems to denounce it, one must avail
oneself of the essential element of context to be able to understand
the integrative meaning he is trying to get at.
If we take the above the quotation
regards the collapse of the “materialistic statement†as
envisaging a future of science we have to equally understand the
respect he accorded it in his own day:
“it must
interpret the material universe first in the language and tokens of
the material Brahman, because these are its primary and its general
terms and all others come second, subsequently, are a special
syllabary. To follow a self-indulgent course from the beginning would
lead at once towards fancies and falsities. Initially, science is
justified in resenting any call on it to indulge in another kind of
imagination and intuition. Anything that draws it out of the circle
of the phenomena of objects, as they are represented to the senses
and their instrumental prolongations, and away from the dealings of
the reason with them by a rigorous testing of experience and
experimentation, must distract it from its task and is inadmissible.â€
(Aurobindo1915)
His prophecy concerning the collapse of a materialistic science seems to clearly not to have come to pass some eighty four years after his forecast. This is especially true if one regards the reductionist formulas of evolutionary biology and most traditional neo-Darwinian accounts of evolution as paradigmatic. In fact, some may argue after reading the works of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett that we may now be farther away from a non-material science than when Sri Aurobindo penned his prophecy. In fact, we maybe farther away from the logical proof that begins the Life Divine, then when he wrote:.
“We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind.†(Aurobindo 1949 p3)
Indeed the most recent contemporary
narratives that scientific tells points back to materialism as its
first and final cause. But things might be changing.
Reductionism is no longer the only scientific game in town and
in fact other evolutionary narratives are being written that move in
an opposite direction, from simple reductionism to principles of
complexity and emergence to help explain nature. Such narratives can
be gathered from the new science of complexity.
Complexity
theorist such as Stuart Kaufmann (2007) and others at the Sante Fe
Institute offer a new scientific paradigm that posits emergence
instead of reduction, self-organization instead of natural selection
in a complex reorientation from materialism to a view of nature that
may resacramentalize her. While their new vision of the sacred
does not conform to traditional spiritual narratives the approach of
complexity theorist at least promises to lead us in a direction that
over time may collapses the house of cards that materialist reduction
is built on and toward an emergent conception of life, mind, and
perhaps spirit as well.
An analysis of complexity theory is
beyond the scope of this paper although it will prove useful in
helping to conceptualize Sri Aurobindo's later thoughts on the
process of physical and vital evolution, which will be done in the
next section of this paper..Before getting into complexity theory
however, lets consider his thoughts on the mechanisms of evolutionary
biology and in so doing we will discover that in fact he seems to
have anticipated some of the more recent developments in our current
understanding of evolution.
Sri Aurobindo complex
understanding and his particular way of articulating truth
correspondences between matter, life, mind and the particular moment
in history under pressure of transformation would not have
necessarily avoided narratives of biological evolution that include
natural selection, so long as everything is not reduced to natural
selection.
In fact, there is evidence in his essay on
Evolution (1915) that suggest that although he isn't buying into
orthodox Darwinism, he does accept its claims of natural selections
as a dismissal of Lamarck evolution (evolution by acquired traits),
with an interesting caveat..
“Equally important are the
conclusions arrived at by investigators into the phenomena of
heredity that acquired characteristics are not handed down to the
posterity and the theory that it is chiefly predispositions that are
inherited;â€
and:
“The propagation of
acquired characteristics by heredity was too hastily and completely
asserted; “
so even when he adds:
“it is
now perhaps in danger of being too summarily denied. Not Matter
alone, but Life and Mind working upon Matter help to determine
evolution.â€
it could be interpreted to reference the role culture has come to play in human evolution. Because it is certainly true that cultural processes of development -the passing on of cultural heritage from one generation to the next-are Lamarckian, especially if one considers the exponential developments of science that builds rapidly on past scientific knowledge.
But of course one can not decouple
Sri Aurobindo's perspective of physical evolution (visible) from the
evolution of the soul through rebirth (invisible) and he writes in
the same essay on evolution: “Heredity is only a material shadow
of soul-reproduction, of the rebirth of Life and Mind into new
forms.â€
When Sri Aurobindo references what he calls “invisible evolution†his view of the matter are incommensurable with any empirical discipline of science. Confronted with this incommensurable way of knowing the world one could decide either to leave the matter here, if one wishes to satisfy oneself solely with a spiritual perspective (invisible evolution) and make a religion of his teaching or, if one wishes to understand him in a more integral manner could simply restate Sri Aurobindo's assertion from the same year in his essay on Materialism (1915) that to understand (visible) evolution science by necessity must:
“it (science) must interpret
the material universe first in the language and tokens of the
material Brahman, because these are its primary and its general terms
and all others come second, subsequently, are a special syllabary. To
follow a self-indulgent course from the beginning would lead at once
towards fancies and falsities. “
Sri Aurobindo's
project can be said to be a valiant attempt to find ways to integrate
various levels of understanding and seemingly incommensurable
experiences by respecting each ones particular articulation of truth
while simultaneously harmonizing their unique claims to truth. But he also seems to have anticipated several recent scientific claims
on the role punctuated equilibrium, symbiosis, complexity and
emergence play in evolution as well as to have held perspectives that
most social theorist share today. These social theories dismiss
positivist arguments for reductive epistemology and highlight how
biology can be used as an ideological tool. Additionally, early on at
a time it was still popular, Sri Aurobindo discounted the more
extreme implications of Spencer's Social Darwinism “survival of
the fittest†strategy and clearly was repelled by the social
engineering program of eugenics.
For example, Sri Aurobindo’s
view of evolution does not suffer from the positivist gradualism of
his day in which Darwinian evolution is ordered. He protests the
linearity “the
materialist theory supposes a rigid chain of material necessity; each
previous condition is a co-ordination of so many manifest forces and
conditions; each resulting condition is its manifest resultâ€
the simple “one way transmission of heredity†(1915) If
anything the progression of species proceeds by broken symmetry
He also seems to anticipate a view of species evolution which first became articulated in the scientific literature of Ernest Mary's Kirkpatrick speciation in 1954 but which only gained widespread recognition in the 1970s in the theory of punctuated equilibrium in the pioneering work of Stephen J Gould, and Niles Eldridge in 1971.
Sri Aurobindo writes in his essay on
Evolution:
“Instead of slow, steady, minute gradations
it is now suggested that the new steps in evolution are rather
effected by rapid and sudden outbursts, outbreaks, as it were, of
manifestation from the unmanifest. “
Additionally, he
also speaks of the misuse of the Hobbesean notion of nature tooth and
claw applied to natural selection as the survival of the fittest
rather, he speaks of symbiosis or co-operation and the co-evolution
of phenomena which only emerged in a mature theory in Biology in the
1980s through the writing of Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan on
endosymbiosis. Sri Aurobindo writes:
“And her material
means ? Not the struggle for life only. The real law, it is now
suggested, is rather mutual help or at least mutual accommodation.
Struggle exists, mutual destruction exists, but as a subordinate
movement, a red minor chord, and only becomes acute when the movement
of mutual accommodation fails and elbow-room has to be made for a
fresh attempt, a new combination.â€
Sri Aurobindo is
most critically adept in his analysis of the misapplication of the
scientific theory of evolution when applied to cultural phenomena. At
the time he was writing survival of the fittest was often invoked as
a metaphor for free market capitalism:
“The theory of
evolution has been the key-note of the thought of the nineteenth
century. It has not only affected all its science and its
thought-attitude, but powerfully influenced its moral temperaments,
its politics and its society. Without it there could not have been
that entire victory of the materialistic notion of life and the
universe which has been the general characteristic of the age that is
now passing, - a victory which for a time even claimed to be
definitive, - nor such important corollary effects of this great
change as the failure of the religious spirit and the breaking-up of
religious beliefs.
In society and politics it has led to the substitution of the evolutionary for the moral idea of progress and the consequent materialization of social ideas and social progress, the victory of the economic man over the idealist. The scientific dogma of heredity, the theory of the recent emergence of the thinking human animal, the popular notion of the all-pervading struggle for life and the aid it has given to an exaggerated development of the competitive instinctâ€, (1915)
yet, he also knows
that the metaphor could be as easily invoked by Communist to imagine
the ideal state
the idea of the social organism and the aid it has given to the contrary development of economic socialism and the increasing victory of the organized Sate or community over the free individual, - all these are outflowings from the same source.†(1915)
Already
in 1915 Sri Aurobindo intuits developments of biology based
ideologies interrogating the claims of those who would forge a theory
of culture based on the metaphor of survival of the fittest and
advance arguments in support of eugenics. Sri Aurobindo was very
suspicious about the field of eugenics. Here he writes:
“Where
then lies the hope that mind will repair its errors and guide itself
according to the truth of things ? The hope lies in Science, in the
intelligent observation, utilizing, initiation of the forces and
workings of the Inconscient. To take only one instance, - the
Inconscient operates by the law of heredity and, left to itself,
works faultlessly to ensure the survival of good and healthy types.
Man misuses heredity in the false conditions of his social life to
transmit and perpetuate degeneracy. We must study the law of
heredity, develop a science of Eugenics and use it wisely and
remorselessly, - with the remorseless wisdom of Nature, - so as to
ensure by intelligence the result that the Inconscient assures by
instinctive adaptation. We can see where this idea and this spirit
will lead us, - to the replacement of the emotional and spiritual
idealism which the human mind has developed by a cold, sane,
materialistic idealism and to an amelioration of mankind attempted by
the rigorous mechanism of the scientific expert, no longer by the
profound inspiration of genius and the supple aspiration of puissant
character and personality.†(1915)
But the most striking similarities between Sri Aurobindo's view of evolution and contemporary science are perhaps to be found in the field known as complexity theory. The following section will introduce Sri Aurobindo's ideas of inner (invisible) and outer (visible evolution) while drawing analogies with the current science of complexity theory.
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