Their concerns are complimentary, and a dialog between these thinkers is urgently required

At the ends of man: Sri Aurobindo and Michel Foucault
by Rich on Thu 27 Mar 2008 04:07 PM PDT Permanent Link

Although the particular thinkers (Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault) referenced in the preceding article I posted on Death and Reckoning may on the surface seem to be pursuing a different manner of inquiry than Sri Aurobindo, in that they are separated by cultures and styles of discourse, but in spite of this I believe that their concerns are complimentary, and a dialog between these thinkers is urgently required as a response to our contemporary aporia. After two thousand years of western philosophy in Foucault and Derrida one witnesses thought and language as it approaches its margins. Humanity has reached the limits of its representations, against the vast field of the “unthought” (unconsciousness), and the codependent arising of phenomena or “differance.” In our era the dictum “I think therefore I am” no longer applies. Humanism and the particular rational structure from which it emerged have only one destiny, and that is to vanish at the precipice of thought as it attempts to comprehend its “other”. To elucidate this in the Order of Things Foucault writes:

"As knowledge reaches towards its origins, its "accidentally" disrupts its foundations and shows that our limits of knowledge are caught up in their own dissolution. "[B]y rediscovering finitude in its interrogation of the origin, modern thought closes the great quadrilateral it began to outline when the Western episteme broke up at the end of the eighteenth century: the connection of the positivities with finitude, the reduplication of the empirical and the transcendental, the perpetual relation of the cogito with the unthought, the retreat and return of the origin, define for us man's mode of being." (335) By uncovering knowledge's own finitudes, one discovers that historical inquiry has constituted a subject called "humanity" on the limits of its own limits, that is, the finitudes themselves make humanity possible. The modern cogito addresses itself not in what it thinks, but what it does not think, what thought is unthought, and articulates itself in the elsewhere of thinking. Humanity finds the limits of its knowledge and the constitution of its being not in what is thought, but what is unthought."

And it is at the other side of the unthought where we would do well to introduce the work of Sri Aurobindo. Although we must make some distinctions in how we parse Sri Aurobindo's writing with respect to Western Scholarship and even recognize some of the limitations we may encounter when confronting its metaphysical assertions. Except for Heidegger , Derrida and Foucault sought to studiously avoid making metaphysical truth claims, -and this is why so much of their writing seems enigmatic and often reads like a riddle- because such truth claims reached their limits in the late 20th century. The reason for this is not only in their culpability as the organizing ideas for totalitarian regimes both Religious and Secular, but much more for the fact that the linguistic turn in philosophy demonstrated that all metaphysical assertions could ultimately be reduced to language.

To this extent one has to also recognize the limits of discourse in Sri Aurobindo as he to was influenced by the European modernist tradition. In fact since his main concerns are with evolution and the coming superman he can not avoid being in dialog with certain prominent Western scientist and philosophers, most notably Darwin, and Nietzsche,. Additionally because he conceives of progressive evolution he is also in an extended conversation with historical theorist such as Georg Hegel, social thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, and intuitive philosophers like Henri Bergson, all whose view of evolution was progressive. Although his relationship to these philosophers clearly indicate the influence of modernism on Sri Aurobindo, he is far too complex to simply be categorized as such. In his deconstruction of the Enlightenment value of rationality, his decentering of human personality, and open ended commitment to experience could all be see as adding a distinctly post-modern flair to his work.

However, to critically interrogate his writing on yoga as one would works of European scholarship would be inappropriate – since these are more properly rooted in the Darshanic tradition of India – and one would be measuring what is essentially a specific Indian worldview, a perspective rooted in experience, according to the analysis and language regimes of Western discourse.

Therefore one must distinguish his discourse on yoga from that on evolution and society, one must take a critical turn and parse the difference between what he sees (darshan) from what he theorizes (discourse). And it is Darshanic writings on the practice of yoga and yogic experience which I believe furnishes a proper response to the questions the postmodernist pose on the limits of thought and language. Because here one encounters the bridge of experience which delivers us from the ends of thought, the margins of philosophy, the absolute reduction to language

That said in order to build a bridge across the precipice of postmodernism, beyond the certainties of the Enlightenment and the limits of thought, to that luminosity of Being which Sri Aurobindo heralds, one must first establish a platform for the dialog to occur. My own feeling is that since the death or vanishing of man is a common theme in both Sri Aurobindo and Michel Foucault that any conversation which can be facilitated between them would be rewarding. Additionally I will list below why I believe that a dialog between the two would be quite complimentary:

For all their seeming incommeasurablity in uncanny ways Sri Aurobindo and Foucault have certain styles of thinking in a consonance. Both straddled the ruptures of the transitory thought movements referred to as modernism and post modernism*. Sri Aurobindo an early visionary of a coming episteme interrogated the objective certainty of the Enlightenment conceiving a phenomenological praxis to unlock the subjective depths whose portals reveal the limits of our species epistemology, in an evolution beyond man; Foucault who dissected the representations of the Enlightenment revealing those psychological mutations which became modernism, an epoch whose end he forecast by proclaiming the death of man.

Both explorers of uncharted cultural topographies, who plunged into the depths of the human psyche to excavate the various strata of historical consciousness locating their corresponding experiences by tracing their separate veins of epistemology and power along an integral axis. Both committed to a triune analysis of phenomena, Foucault collectively assessing, language, economics, and natural history, Sri Aurobindo uncovering the physical, vital , mental, structures which comprise our species past and present. Both visionaries of a future in which man becomes something else, an other standing on the far side of our next epochal rupture, which can only be known through a radical epistemology. Sri Aurobindo conceives man as a transitional being, Foucault as a phenomena to vanish in the sands of time. Both re-imagined or re-visioned man Sri Aurobindo accordingly to the practice of sadhana and Foucault through the method called archeology. Both comprehend man as a transitional phenomena and here both Foucault and Sri Aurobindo converge in developing methodologies that make transparent the heritage we conceive of as human nature. Both conceive man as having a dual nature Sri Aurobindo a surface personality with psychic depths and Foucault as an empirical/transcendental doublet.

This is not at all to say that both were alike or shared participation in a cultural milieu which defined similarities in their vision. Rather, there are significant divergences of approach which distinguish them as does their lives lived on two sides of early and late Modernism, East and West, teleology and randomness, metaphysics and post-structuralism as well as their personal commitments to ascetic or sexual practice. The primary referents in their discourses are separated at times by eras and cultures far away, yet they both return to a common principle of self-organization and that is Nietzsche. Although Foucault's archeology methods and Sri Aurobindonian praxis of sadhana differ in their reconstruction of the Superman (Ubermensch) as primarily epistemological or ontological, sociological or individual, both practices have important consequences for the future bodies of "man" the transitional being.

* (Foucault early work generally considered structuralist while his later work is post-structural)
rich 3/27/08 Posted to: Main Page PHILOSOPHY .. Critical Theory & Postmodernism (The Death of Man) Death Reckoning in Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida by Joshua Schuster Science, Culture and Integral Yoga