Between Mental
Manufacture and Pure Transcript The Viability of a Theory of Poetry in
the Letters of Sri Aurobindo - Vinod
Valiathakidi Balakrishnan Associate
Professor, National Institute of Technology,
Tiruchirappalli, 620 015, Tamilnadu, India Email: winokrish@yahoo.co.uk Published
April 18, 2012
It
is a matter of amusement that a person like Sri Aurobindo who has substantially
contributed to the understanding, consolidation, propagation, and furthering of
Indian thought should still be a marginal figure in academia. Sri Aurobindo’s
contribution to the many aspects of Indian Culture makes him a cultural
institution whose value must be cherished and merits critical revaluations from
time to time. This study is a response to that perceived need…
So,
there is an engagement, a dialogue, an interaction between the well-considered
question and the appropriate response. There is also the possibility of keener
application to problems because at the time of replying to each of his
interlocutors, Sri Aurobindo was responding to a given problem where all the
other issues would be kept in abeyance. Perhaps, even he was unaware of the
multitude of issues identified and attended while the beautiful conversation on
poetry, with multiple interlocutors, was unfolding. In this respect, the Letters may
be seen to resemble Plato’s Republic or Sir Philip
Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry.
Koenraad
Elst’s book suffers from occasional ignorance of recent developments. Readers
need to separate the wheat from the chaff to benefit from his criticisms,
writes Navaratna Rajaram
Where
the author goes wrong is when he ventures into unfamiliar territory like
science (genetics) where he fails to distinguish between transient opinion and
fact. It
is not easy to do full justice to a book that covers such a large territory.
There are discussions of karma and rebirth, humour in Hinduism, Macaulay,
historicity of the Vedas and the like in which he expresses opinions on these
and other topics where the reader has to accept or reject them based on one’s
own beliefs and prejudices. (This reviewer found most of them to be familiar
and a few, like his interpretation of apauresheya, to be plain wrong.
Philosophy, metaphysics in particular, is not the author’s strength.) All told,
the patient reader will find the book provocative even if the author’s
positions are not always sound. The reviewer is the author of several
books on Indian history and his current interest is history and philosophy of
science
Who
Milks This Cow? Ramachandra Guha - Outlook MAGAZINE NOV
19, 2012
I
was born in a home of broad-minded Hindus. My father, though by caste a
Brahmin, never wore a thread. His own father’s brother was a lifelong opponent
of the caste system; a hostel he opened for Dalit students still functions in Bangalore city. My
mother went from time to time to a temple, but was happy to eat with or make
food for humans of any background or creed. Two of her brothers had married out
of caste; a third had married a German.
I
am not, and never have been a religious person. My parents were Protestant
Christians, though neither was religious. I was sent to Sunday school in order
to satisfy my grandmother, but took no interest at all in what was taught
there, and never entered a church or any other place of worship as a
worshipper. If I ever stepped into a church (or synagogue or mosque or temple)
it was to admire the architecture and artworks, and perhaps also to enjoy the
atmosphere of peace that sometimes fills such places. But I found the beliefs
and practices of every religion I encountered to be pointless and
uninteresting. The search for truth was important to me; but it never crossed
my mind that religion could be any help in this. Rather I turned to poetry,
philosophy and psychological experimentation in my search for enlightenment.
These interests led me to yoga and, because yoga usually is taught by people
who come from the Hindu tradition, I was exposed to the literature and some of
the practices of the Hindu religion. I found, and still find, the literature
profound and significant. As for the practices, I found them colourful and
charming, though certainly not the sort of thing I could incorporate into my
life.
Now
you may well ask, why should I, a non-Hindu, choose to speak about Sri
Aurobindo and Hinduism? … What he offered in his major works was a means to
achieve an experiential truth that surpasses the doctrines and practices any
religion of the past or present. He did not prohibit religious expression, but
he expected those who needed it to rise above sectarianism and conventionality.
For such things can only act against the full expression of his work. At the
same time he offered those who were proud of their Hindu heritage an unusual
opportunity. They could serve as links between an ancient religion and the new
possibilities offered by his path of yoga. A Hinduism open to the
transformative power of this yoga could become a force for transformation in
the world.
“Freedom”
is among the most central concepts in our political vocabulary. I think it is
deservedly so. But it’s also a concept with a notoriously large number of
meanings. Libertarians identify freedom simply with the absence of state
coercion; by contrast, the most widely used Sanskrit term with an equivalence
to freedom is probably mokṣa,
liberation from the suffering of worldly existence. And the most common use of
“freedom” today is something different again: the ability to make
unrestricted choices, to decide for oneself what one will do.
Freedom
in this sense of choice played a fairly limited role in premodern political
thought, and I think this is because the ancients understood its
limitations. Human beings often do not make the best decisions for
themselves. At a large scale, we get addicted to alcohol and other drugs; we
fall into paralyzing depression and even suicide; we get misled by demagogues
into murderous hatreds. At a smaller level, we lash out in anger at minor
annoyances; we procrastinate the things we know it would be best for us to do;
we get bitter and vain about matters of social status and material possessions.
Given all this, the ability to make choices can be bad for us, since the
choices themselves are so often bad.
All
this is the view, shared by Xunzi, Augustine,
and Freud, which I have referred to in the past as chastened intellectualism. (I have tempered my enthusiasm for chastened intellectualism
on the grounds that the good elements to human nature should not be ignored,
but the bad ones remain there as well.) It is well known that Xunzi also
endorsed a political system which greatly restricted freedom (in the sense of
choice). Looking at all the terrible things people do, how can you trust them
to make decisions for themselves? …
The
view I have just articulated has some affinities with political libertarianism,
which is similarly suspicious of government attempts to make decisions in the
name of people’s individual best interests. It is not the same, however. A
critique of libertarianism could take its own post. Suffice it to say here that
given the importance of money and property in creating possibilities for
action, insofar as individual choice is a good, that good is not actually best
realized by a social system that keeps many people in abject poverty.
Eamonn
Butler: “Friedrich Hayek: the ideas and influence of the libertarian
economist”
Holding
to his unfashionable convictions for decades led Hayek into intellectual
isolation. He was, albeit, politely tolerated rather than listened to by
faculty in the universities he taught at. Mainstream economics passed him by
during the Keynesian years. Nobody, for example, mentioned him
during my undergraduate years from 1965-69…
Hayek’s
life and legacy testify to the lasting power of ideas over the fleeting
influence of individual politicians who, because they misunderstand the
dynamics of human societies, normally promote the wrong ideas. Radicals of Left
and Right believe they can change society by capturing the legislature to
correct what they regard as society’s systemic errors. Hayek noted,
sardonically, that if designed changes tried to change the world, we cannot be
sure that the outcome would please either its designers or those affected by
their changes.
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