A gradual dividing line separates philosophy of the Enlightenment era (17th-18th c) from modern Continental philosophy of the 20th and now 21st c. The characteristics of this shift, seemingly hazy, are a turn from the attempt to arrive at a parsimonious relational description of reality based on knowledge gathered by the senses, the imagination and the memory aiding the operation of ideation and rational judgement (cogito) to an acknowledgment of the subjective nature of our experience of reality, the temporal and historical situation of our knowledge and the need for praxis in transforming ourselves and/or our worlds. It is Nietzsche (1844-1900) who stands at the head of the modernist turn. He foreshadows this shift through a displacement of the center of the subject from the rational ego (cogito) to the will (will-to-power), the change in perception from a transcendent or absolute valuation of reality to a politically constructed valuation; a participatory relation between the individual will and cosmic Time understood as the eternal return of Being; and a transitional essence to the human based on a self-exceeding towards the overhuman (ubermesch, commonly translated superman). These displacements challenged Enlightenment epistemology to privilege an “untimely” creativity perpetually remaking the world. Nietzsche also broke with the form of propositional logic used in philosophy, articulating his ideas in short intuitive insights presented in aphoristic and discursive fashion and sometimes in parables. This articulation blurred the dividing line between philosophy and poetry. It inaugurated a trend towards the collapse of disciplinary boundaries as well as the boundary between theory and praxis and opened the search for metalanguages straddling the psychological, the ontological, the sociological and the praxeological.
Almost a century before Nietzsche, Kant’s critique of the subjective access to reality problematized Enlightenment philosophy’s pretensions to an absolute epistemology founded on reason, leading progressively to a crisis in the scope of philosophy amounting either to a will to the destruction of metaphysics or the search for new grounds for overcoming the duality of subject and object. Nietzsche’s will-to-power and eternal return as ontogenetic principles enabling a power of praxis is an attempt at such an overcoming, leading to a philosophy of becoming as one of the most promising directions in modern Continental philosophy. This is more so because another key aspect to the crisis of Enlightenment philosophy is its increasing obsolescence with the hegemonic rise of natural philosophy normalized as science and its applied double, technology. In the telling of Heidegger (1889-1976) this was the natural consequence of the Enlightenment’s rational and objective epistemology, portending the end of philosophy: “The end of philosophy proves to be the triumph of the manipulable arrangement of a scientific-technological world and of the social order proper to this world. The end of philosophy means: the beginning of the world civilization based upon Western European thinking.”[1] This reduction of thinking to calculative thinking instrumentalizes the world but equally instrumentalizes the thinker. Through a creative use of language including neologisms Heidegger expressed the historically and spatially situated reality of the individual and was thus able to address the critical stakes for individual and society within the regime of technology in our times. However, though not subject to a metaphysical principle of determination as in Hegel, Heidegger’s historical horizon leads to an epistemic conditioning of the individual subject (Dasein) from which only the emergence of a new destiny can provide a point of exit. The power of “untimely” human agency in rupturing a temporal episteme is left largely unexplored by Heidegger.
It is here that Bergson’s philosophy of becoming makes a significant contribution. Bergson (1859-1941), like other philosophers of his time, was acutely conscious of the crisis of modern philosophy, both in terms of the materialist reduction of Science and the irresolvable division between subject and object that frames our historical experience. He set out to challenge both these epochal conditions. Like Nietzsche, he achieved this by a shift in the center of human attention from the cogito to a new epistemic sense, the intuition of duration. Bergson located our normal sense of reality, circumscribed by habitual conventions of social behavior as a spatiality in which the continuous process of becoming is interrupted by an objectified multiplicity, experienced by the cogito as the present in a succession of discrete time windows of participation. Instead of this surface, were we to awake to the sense of the process of continuous becoming, this would be an intuition of duration, the totality of our past which coexists with the present, which in fact, at its origin, is the totality of the cosmic past as a subjective multiplicity, differentiating itself under conditions of collective becoming. What may be experienced psychologically as individual duration can be pressed further to an ontological experience of cosmic duration. Our intuitive access to this “pure past” is stratified in terms of degrees of contraction or expansion of total memory, constituting a memory cone as described by Bergson in Matter and Memory. Our materialized spatial experience of the present is the most contracted form of memory, reduced to habitual automatisms. The mind defaults to a participant in this layer of habits. But it may disengage itself and experience a more expansive memory. Expanded strata of the memory cone allow for greater creative freedom in our responses to the present. Evolution, for Bergson is not merely a Darwinian natural selection but includes subjective solutions arrived at through creative access to the ontological past. Subjective here, for Bergson, does not refer merely to human consciousness, but indicates a kind of cosmopsychism in which all forms of reality are capable of experiencing, each in their own way, states of uncommon self-adaptation based on reorganization and integration of elements. Whereas this challenges the reductive materialism of Science, it also demonstrates Bergson’s notion of philosophy’s intimate relation with Science through the creation of concepts pertaining to subjective experience doubling the objective experimental empiricism of Science. In the case of evolution this is what made him posit a principle of intuitive saltus by which solutions to evolutionary problems were achieved. In Creative Evolution, he called this principle elan vital. One may thus conceive of a direct relation between the memory cone of Matter and Memory and the elan vital of Creative Evolution in the level of conscious access and creative freedom available to beings with different degrees of consciousness from material objects to the human. The concept of the elan vital allows Bergson to attribute an involuntary subjective aspect to evolution at non-living and non-human ranges of existence, through a limited window of access to the memory cone, but in comparison humans, with a conscious ability to detach their intellect can intuit universal durations in creative freedom. In the words of Gilles Deleuze,
It could be said that man is capable of rediscovering all the levels, all the degrees of expansion (détente) and contraction that coexist in the virtual Whole. As if he were capable of all the frenzies and brought about in himself everything that, elsewhere, can only be embodied in different species. Even in his dreams he rediscovers and prepares matter. And durations that are inferior or superior to him are still internal to him. Man therefore creates a differentiation that is valid for the Whole, and he alone traces out an open direction that is able to express a whole that is itself open. Whereas the other directions are closed and go round in circles, whereas a distinct “plane” of nature corresponds to each one, man is capable of scrambling the planes, of going beyond his own plane as his own condition, in order finally to express naturing nature. (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 106-107).
Though Bergson was explicitly cognizant of the epistemological overdetermination of science and though his notion of time-intuition sought to open a space for modernist philosophy challenging the hegemony of science and for conscious agency against mechanistic or statistical determination, his psychological philosophy was not aimed at the instrumentalization of human consciousness that Heidegger was talking about in his 1964 lecture “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” Heidegger’s critique in this vein belongs to a later phase of modernity, when capital, taking possession of the technological designs of science had begun to normalize itself across a post-second world war world. It is in the wake of this phase and this critique that philosophy became increasingly social critique and simultaneously political and psychological praxis. The continuing afterlife of Bergson finds a significant renewal in the thought of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), as a revolutionary foundation of “a new earth and people.” At the center of his 1968 text Difference and Repetition lies an analysis of time-experience implying a praxis based on Bergson’s decoupling from habitual time and opening to the virtuality of Memory combined or convergent with the Nietzschean image of time as an eternal return of pure difference. These operations are described by Deleuze as the three syntheses of time. It is in the transition from the second to the third synthesis, from the memory cone of the “pure past” to the eternal return of the “empty form of time,” that the unhinging of the cogito occurs shifting creative agency to a cosmic source. It is here that Deleuze engages with the Nietzschean notion of the Overhuman. While adapting this Bergsonian-Nietzschean psychological praxis, in his later writings, particularly the two Capitalism and Schizophrenia texts, Deleuze along with his co-author Felix Guattari, engages in prolific conceptual fertility to map the political conditions for an anarchistic social existence against the capitalistic capture of the world through the state apparatus and the world market.
If the technological instrumentalization of the human is an explicit danger in the West only from the mid-1960s, post-Enlightenment modernity has instrumentalized non-Western populations in the guise of colonialism from its beginnings. In fact colonialism may be defined as the instrumental reduction of native subjects, termed subaltern by Antonio Gramsci. As a result the critique of modernity from its anticolonial margins has explicitly anticipated the political turn in postmodern philosophy. It is for this reason that the thinking of several figures of this time remains contemporary far beyond their nationalist relevance. A particular example of this kind is Aurobindo Ghosh (later Sri Aurobindo) (1872-1950). Educated in England at St. Paul’s School, London and Cambridge University, he returned to India in 1893 and launched into the early nationalist movement for political independence. Though he left this movement in 1910 following powerful spiritual experiences, and wrote extensively on yoga philosophy and praxis, his roots in anticolonial revolution must not be lost sight of in relation to these teachings. It is the struggle for political liberation that drew him to yoga and the conditions for a society free from subjection continued to be a goal of his psychological experiments. Sri Aurobindo was a junior contemporary of Nietzsche and Bergson and a senior contemporary of Heidegger and Deleuze. He died before the world hegemony of technology which the latter two thinkers were engaged with and he wrote for an audience more attuned to the language styles of the former two – i.e. aimed at the cogito but indicating its replacement by other centers of existence that may be called posthuman. As a result his texts partake of the disciplinary specialization of post-Enlightenment modernity to the detriment of an integral view of his own “integral thought.” To do justice to his contribution to our time, his philosophical, psychological, social and political texts must be read in a complementary fashion to orient oneself towards an image of the divine life as he conceived it. This may be considered a posthuman existence founded in a polity of what he called spiritual anarchism and what his spiritual partner and collaborator the French-Turkish-Italian mystic Mirra Alfassa, aka the Mother, called divine anarchy. She has described this social condition more appropriately as follows:
“…[A] gnostic or supramental community – can exist only on the basis of the inner realisation of each of its members, each one realising his real, concrete unity and identity with all the other members of the community, that is, each one should feel not like just one member united in some way with all the others, but all as one, within himself. For each one the others must be himself as much as his own body, and not mentally and artificially, but by a fact of consciousness, by an inner realization.” (2004: pgs. 141-42).
This implies a power of consciousness capable of universalizing itself. It is also reminiscent of Spinoza’s “third kind of knowledge” that Deleuze often referred to, a knowledge by identity that overcomes the divide of subject and object. Finally it has temporal implications, since this is a dynamic state of “knowledge-action,” in which the whole and all its parts are realized in each part in real-time as the infinite potential of the whole manifesting itself as the eternal return of difference. Both the terms “gnostic” and “supramental” mentioned here are Sri Aurobindo’s uses referring to the posthuman condition that he outlined as the goal of his yoga, a process he also saw as conscious evolution. As a junior contemporary of Nietzsche and Bergson, he had read both these thinkers and his sojourn at Cambridge as a student of the classics no doubt brought him into contact with the thought of Hegel, Kant and Darwin. His use of the term superman is adopted from Nietzsche and his equation of yogic psychological praxis with conscious evolution may have been influenced by Bergson. Traditionally, yoga philosophy has not been known to voice the idea of evolution, though in Sri Aurobindo’s revisionary interpretations of Vedic hymns and the Upanishads, he draws out the metaphysics of evolution. Moreover, he is preceded in this by another senior contemporary, Vivekananda (1863-1902), who is one of the figures credited with introducing yoga philosophy to the modern West and who defined yoga as accelerated evolution. In a vein analogous to Bergson, cosmic time according to Sri Aurobindo may be thought of as a progressive remembrance of increasing degrees of involved creative freedom, from the habitual state of matter to the will to survival, enjoyment and power of life and further to the reflexivity and self-consciousness of mind. As in Bergson or in Deleuze’s adaptation of Bergson, this is the evolution of an ontogenetic being, being as infinite qualitative multiplicity, which in its becoming retains its infinity in the degrees of its self-emergence. Emergent properties in evolution reach intensive thresholds where they manifest a new plane of consciousness, such as that of life in matter or of mind in living matter. Each of these planes of consciousness carries all the others latent within it. In the human one may find individualized forms of all these evolutionary strata as discontinuous co-existing beings, physical, vital and mental.
Moreover, again as with Bergson or Deleuze, for Sri Aurobindo, evolution is not a mechanistic or accidental natural selection (as in Darwin) nor the act of an extra-cosmic “creator” or transcendent time-spirit (as in Hegel) but an immanent process of participation through which new properties of being are continuously manifest in experience. Again, as in Bergson, this process is at work in every instance of reality, but in the human it can become a conscious principle of accelerated evolution. Whereas in Bergson the principle that promoted this process at all levels was the elan vital, in Sri Aurobindo this was achieved through a self-gathering and a will to self-exceeding responded to by hidden transcendental sources catalyzing the emergence of a new self with new properties and organizations. In the human, he saw this process leading not merely to a replacement of the given center of individuality, the cogito, but posthuman states of transpersonal and supramental existence.
The similarity in principle between this and Deleuze’s third synthesis of time is noteworthy. In Deleuze’s third synthesis, Bergson’s “time cone” is ruptured resulting in a dissolution of the cogito and the operation of an “aleatory point” precipitating the future. Sri Aurobindo’s yogic praxis can be understood in analogous temporal terms. An intuition of duration may be achieved in Sri Aurobindo through a contact with the “innermost person” or psychic being in the human. Drawing on traditions both of Indian yoga and Western esoteric praxis, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother identified the psychic being as the reincarnating person in each individual, and as such, the form of durational becoming individualizing the pure past of cosmic memory. This is a hidden immanent dimension of human existence whose doors may be opened through focused concentration, bringing about a displacement of the cogito as the center of human existence. “Bringing to the front the psychic being” and “the psychic transformation” or “psychisization” are terms used by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to describe this replacement of the cogito by the psychic being and the integration of the physical, vital and mental nature around it. The aspiration or will to self-exceeding belongs naturally to the psychic being as the individualized being of nature’s becoming. It may thus be considered the living form of the pure past, with duration as its mode of existence. Alongside and beyond the psychic transformation Sri Aurobindo taught an experimental praxis leading to two other transformations, the achievement of a universal consciousness, a spiritual transformation and the overpassing of the mental ontology of cosmic existence in a supramental transformation. The psychic transformation holds the key to these further transformations. Its emergence is a new threshold of becoming, whose relational being-in-the-world could achieve what Bergson saw as the shift from an intuition of individual duration to that of universal or cosmic duration. Its will to self-exceeding structures time as the eternal return of Being manifesting ever-new qualities and powers of becoming.
Writing about the historical returns of culture, Sri Aurobindo says in the Synthesis of Yoga: “To be perpetually reborn is the condition of a material immortality.” This statement, which could also be said to be at the heart of Deleuze’s adaptation of Nietzsche’s eternal return, could sum up the whole of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s conscious and creative posthuman evolution. But where Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze intuit the philosophical principles of a psychological praxis towards conscious evolution and creative posthuman becoming, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother extend, stabilize and detail these ideas and practices through experimentation based on their access to vast though submerged traditions of Indian yoga and Western esoteric praxis. The emergence of the psychic being prepares the ground for a continuous process of evolutionary emergences leading to the establishment of cosmic planes of consciousness in the individual aiming to embody the united existence and action of the being of the becoming and the being in the becoming. This could be one definition of Sri Aurobindo’s superman or gnostic being, which the Mother invoked in her description of a realized spiritual anarchism as the polity of the future.
[1] Heidegger, The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.