Bloodless ballet of categories

Sri Aurobindo and Hegel on the Involution-Evolution of Absolute Spirit

Steve Odin Philosophy of East and West, April 1981

Hegel later appropriated this notion of an impersonal unity of self consciousness, which was for Kant a purely logical principle, and transformed it into the supreme metaphysical category of highest generality at the base of actuality, reifying it as the ‘Absolute Spirit’, or God, a self positing universal consciousness which entirely creates and projects its own experiential contents, only to reabsorb them again into a self mediated identity in difference. Hegel’s category of the Absolute was itself derived as the culminating product of his dialectical process, which functions to sublate (aufheben) all abstract opposites, that is to overcome all one sided thought determinations yet preserving them as ideal moments of a concrete totality.

Epistemologically, the notion of the Absolute represented for Hegel the unification of the knowing subject with the object known, making possible a true knowledge of “things-in-themselves,” a knowledge which Kant had denied. And theologically, the notion of the Absolute represented a philosophical explication of the mystery of the Holy Trinity, which involves, according to Hegel’s interpretation, the self-differentiated identification of nature and God or man and the divine, as propounded by such Christian mystics as Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme.

The twentieth century Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo, who framed his own full scale metaphysical synthesis, appropriated Hegel’s notion of an Absolute Spirit and employed it to radically restructure the architectonic framework of the ancient Hindu Vedanta system in contemporary terms. However, before considering this functional resemblance between Sri Aurobindo’s doctrine of the Absolute of that of Hegel’s, first some of the central distinctions between their respective doctrines must be grasped. Sri Aurobindo first critiques the Hegelian concept of the Absolute conceived as a totalistic system of dialectical reason, what F. H. Bradley has called the “bloodless ballet of categories.” Sri Aurobindo’s concept of the Absolute is not deduced product of a dialectical logic, as Hegel’s, but rather a...