Sri Aurobindo orients us toward care of the world

[Sri Aurobindo and Evolution: A Critical Perspective : 2008 (occult slippages and cultural considerations) by Rich on Fri 08 Feb 2008 12:04 PM PST Permanent Link

Sri Aurobindo and Evolution (occult slippages and cultural considerations) by Richard Carlson

Notes: 1) Sri Aurobindo...seems to largely accept the genetic theory (hereditary) as a solution to the question of physical evolution. In doing so he does not seem to envisage this as necessarily reductive and refers instead to a cryptic psychical potentiality in matter, which we would now probably call genetic mutation. Moreover, he is astute enough to also comment on the demise of Lamarckian theory of acquired traits which contrasts genetic inheritance...

Sri Aurobindo’s view of evolution also does not suffer from the misunderstanding of the positivist gradualism of his day in which Darwinian evolution is ordered according to a symmetrical progression of species. More remarkably he seems already aware of a view of species evolution which only first began to be articulated in the scientific literature by Ernest Mayr in his theory of peropatric speciation and only gained widely acceptance in the 1970s as conceived in the theory of punctuated equilibrium as stated forcefully in the pioneering work of Stephen J Gould, Niles Eldridge in 1971...

Additionally he also speaks of the misuse of the Hobbesean notion of survival of the fittest as the result of natural selection, but rather 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 also proves himself to be 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 an explanation of poverty or servitude...

It is certainly striking the manner which in 1915 Sri Aurobindo both intuits developments of evolutionary biology and proves himself an astute cultural critic by 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...

3) Sri Aurobindo of course does not naively conceive of progress of evolution without acknowledging the reversals of history and the practice of power for domination...The notion of “progress” in progressive evolution concerns valorising certain social processes of development. Progress is a construction of cultural values whose success in manufacturing instruments or conditions of power ensures survival and the pursuit of happiness. But such pursuits of individual happiness do not often square with Adam Smith's ideas of enlightened self-interest benefiting everyone. In pursuing our enlightened self-interest and breaking out from the imprisonment of space/time we have exponentially improved technologies of motion. For example, the development of the airplane has been in all our enlightened self-interest. That is all our self-interest except for those of the Environment which sustains us. Of all transportation technologies the airplane is by far the leading contributor of green house gases that threaten to tip the planet into catastrophic warming. Additionally, most of the aviation technology we use to empower our mobility and conquest of distances were developed as the airplane was being concieved as ominous weapon; hailing down mass death and destruction from the sky we have conquered...

8) Indeed Heidegger suggest that caring is our ontology. Our being in the world is preceded by a view or intentionality toward caring for its things. What is unique in Sri Aurobindo yoga is a simultaneous turning toward the world even while plummeting into meditative practice... Rather than charting an ascetic path through a forest of renunciation Sri Aurobindo orients us toward care of the world. To make comparisons between Sri Aurobindo and Heidegger is also something one must take care with, because there are certainly ruptures and discontinuities in their philosophical presentment, even as there are certain similarities. In their view of caring for the world however, I believe that one can make certain correspondences between them both.