Integral theory may very well amount to a conversation about Aurobindo

A Second Response to Daniel Gustav Anderson: "Of Syntheses and Surprises: Towards a Critical Integral Theory," as published in the peer reviewed journal The Integral Review. The article in question: Of Syntheses and Surprises: Toward a Critical Integral Theory Response by Debashish Banerji by Debashish on Mon 11 Dec 2006 12:30 AM PST Permanent Link

Anderson attempts here to formulate an “Integral Theory” as a theory which is socially relevant in its interventions against late global capitalism (in this sense critical) and at the same time open to experiences of “transhistoricality,” (and in this sense integral). He does this in the face of what he represents as an existing “Integral Theory” which he does not quite define but which from his invectives can be characterized in terms of a Theory of Everything (TOE) which achieves its grand narrative through an appeal to universal causality and syntheses in the Hegelian spirit.

It is not clear who the several inhabitants of the House of Being of this existing Integral Theory are except for Ken Wilber, Joe Subbiando and the CIIS and, in Anderson’s words, “its foundational thinker, Aurobindo Ghose.” Though seeing Sri Aurobindo’s name as a foundational thinker for “Integral Theory” provided the first of the “surprises” that I believe appears in the title of this article, this was soon outdone by the joy-ride of “surprises” I found myself in for. I realized soon enough that I had made no reading mistake. Sri Aurobindo is not just the foundational thinker of Integral Theory – in Anderson’s back-handed compliment “To adapt a meme attributed to Whitehead: if European philosophy amounts to a footnoting of Plato, Integral theory may very well amount to a conversation about Aurobindo.” As I proceeded I could see how it was possible to come to this conclusion if one took Sri Aurobindo’s Vedantic darshan, Purnadvaita Vedanta (inseparable from its corresponding yoga, Purna Yoga) as a western style speculative metaphysics purporting to be a Theory of Everything, an ideology which maintains itself as Truth through the Will-to-Power and becomes the defining hegemonic ideology of late Enlightenment Neoliberalism through the production of its world-subjects, something perhaps possible. But to attribute the foundation of such an ideological field to Sri Aurobindo is, certainly a new wrinkle to the abuses/misuses of his text which seem to be multiplying lately (as for instance through left and right perceptions of it as the foundational text for Hindutva).

Anderson invokes Slavoj Zizek and Michel Foucault as his two main “authorities” in his politically-correct academic assimilation (doxa) of poststructuralism against “Integral Theory” as structure/mythology/ideology. He quotes Zizek from his 2001 publication On Belief as saying – “the onslaught of the New Age ‘Asiatic’ thought, which, in its different guises, from the ‘Western Buddhism’ (today’s counterpoint to Western Marxism, as opposed to the ‘Asiatic’ Marxism-Leninism) to different ‘Taos,’ is establishing itself as the hegemonic1 ideology of global capitalism” (p. 12). And he invokes Foucault from his late (1984) text “What is Enlightenment?” about the necessity of critical thinking in acts of genealogical excavation against universal structures masquerading as truth. He then invokes Deleuze and Guattari to provide a “savior” solution for Integral Theory which would allow it to withstand the historical critique of genealogy and at the same time inscribe a reflexive critical consciousness into its self-representation. He proposes a theory of practice embedded in “becoming” as this solution.

Anderson refers back repeatedly to his formulation of Zizek’s claim that “integral thinkers" are the latest leaders of neoliberal globalization. In itself this is an interesting idea and certainly warrants some reflection.. The spin Anderson gives to this seems like the sugar-coated "lifestyle" orientations of contemporary capitalism - the yuppie takeover of the hippie nomos as the new age, if one may call it so. But I suspect what Zizek is getting at is more the Management assimilation of "Asian practices" as forms of subjective control and mastery for enhanced global business operations. Certainly, “Integral Theory,” whatever it may mean, if it lends itself in its formulation to such assimilations, needs the eye of suspicion to deconstruct and clarify its intent. But Sri Aurobindo’s text does not lend itself to such co-optations unless one is willing to do violence to it (as in this case). Any reading of the Life Divine, of even limited adequacy will make it clear that the subjective transformations relating to a divine life that as introduced there cannot be objectified as global capitalism or as any form of hegemonic ideology for that matter.

To bring Sri Aurobnindo into this discussion is absurd if Anderson had read even just skin-deep into any of his major texts. Looked at from the social point of view, the chapter on Economic Barbarism (Civilization and Barbarism) in the Human Cycle is just one obvious example of where Sri Aurobindo stands in his orientation towards Neoliberalism/global capitalism.This, indeed, characterizes the problem with Anderson's readings of Sri Aurobindo and it points to a problem in his reading practice in general – what it sorely lacks is a disciplined hermeneutics, particularly of the cross-cultural and cross-epochal varieties. When looking at the discursive products of a different space-time it is necessary to familiarize oneself at the outset with the language and then learn to understand the inflections, traces, subtleties of location and subversion through close readings of texts, otherwise one will hear merely repetitions of the same through every mouth. (In the land of Eskimos the only thing you heard everyone saying all the time was "snow").

This indeed is also how Andeson’s “Foucauldian genealogical reading” makes him jump with little or no evidence to the arbitrary conclusions that Sri Aurobindo got his "racist literary theory" from Matthew Arnold, his civilizational teleology from Hegel and his poetry from Victorian translations of Plato, or that his minor text on Poetic Theory is the basis of his “Integral Theory” (whatever that may mean). I must say it speaks poorly for his academic disciplining. Moreover to conjure a theory about lack and supplement and apply this to Sri Aurobindo as if it were the truth (ideologically) to someone who makes a different claim for the origin of his text is exactly what Anderson’s political correctness should have asked him to avoid. Sri Aurobindo's loose use of racial/ethnic/national essentialisms (in certain texts) need to be read in the context of the discourse of his time and place (which was interpellating him and which he was interpellating) and its meanings derived from more serious textual practice than the sorry excuse that Anderson provides. This is a good example of the need for formulating some ground-rules for cross-epochal hermeneutics. Even notions like "nation-soul" are neither permanent nor originary leave alone "blood-based" in Sri Aurobindo as any reading of The Ideal of Human Unity or the Secret of the Veda will make clear. "Nation-soul" or loosely "race" or “ethnology,” for Sri Aurobindo is a cultural formation that has gathered ontological characteristics through historical discursive accumulations around certain philosophemes. Coupled to his "evolutionary teleology" (yes, he does have an evolutionary teleology but this too needs close reading rather than essentializing or reifying as done by Anderson) these formations become evolving orientations moving towards a destiny of hybridizing diversity-in-unity.

The more general issue of integrality/synthesis/teleology as metaphysics in Sri Aurobindois addressed similarly by Anderson by seeing it as a Hegelian/Bradleyan derivative. Here is where a cross-cultural perspective is sorely needed and Sri Aurobindo's alternate genealogies of Vedantic knowledge with their required methods need to be given their due. Here metaphysics should more properly be seen as practical epistemology - following darshanic phenomenology and generated by/leading to yogic practice. In the Vedantic discourse, within which Sri Aurobindo’s texts are more properly embedded darshan (inadequately translated by Orienatlist Indologists as “philosophy” and even more distorted here by Anderson as “theory” or “ideology”) is a cognitive phenomenology inseparable from yoga, a practice leading to ontological transformation. This is the proper and legitimate use of the text and not as a metaphysical mythology for gathering adherents or hegemonizing the world objectivity or subjectivity. Be it noted that the “authorities” of post-structuralist practice that Anderson invokes, neither Foucault nor Zizek are addressing a culture or discourse where ontological transformations are the uses of epistemological texts. But if Anderson is interested in an Integral Theory which is not a metaphysics but a theory of practice leading to ontological change (as he seems to imply) then to assess Sri Aurobindo’s text for its legitimate uses and abuses/misuses should have been at least part of his hermeneutic practice.

Moreover, even the teleology of Sri Aurobindo needs to be taken for what it is - not a continuous linearity of expanding divine immanence (as in Hegel) but a dynamic of discontinuities and interruptions to which the human is a participant through accumulating aspiration and transforming agency but to whom the linearity is not a "given." Thus, when Anderson makes believe that Sri Aurobindo, by dint of his assumption of a Universal Subject of History, is a fatalist who backs the status-quo and the trajectory of global capital as Divine Will, he could not be more mistaken and again reveals either his lack of familiarity with Sri Aurobindo’s text or the shoddiness of his reading practice. In terms of the universal or terrestrial dimension of the “Life Divine,” Sri Aurobindo is talking about a supramental realization of the Infinite One as the evolutionary destiny of the earth – but he is at pains to show that this supramenalization does not compromise either the Unity or the Infinity of this state and nor is it a fruit that will fall from the sky into the lap of untransformed humans without their critical and creative choices and practices of aspiration and will. A radical Unity and a radical Infinity coexist in it – a mental paradox which can only be solved by ontic and ontological transformation for which the practice of yoga as becoming is the imperative, not the mental synthesis of an integrality, which he persistently discourages. So if that is what Integral Theory is all about (and it may be so in certain cases, as in Wilber) then Sri Aurobindo should be kindly excused from this company.

But this said I have to concede to Anderson - and his own abuse of the Sri Aurobindo text leads me to this - that the language of metaphysics and structure needs to be given serious attention and renewed/transformed if necessary in our own contemporary understanding and discursive practice of Integral Yoga because the critical solvents of poststructuralism have effected a discursive change in the contemporary regime of language. Anderson’s proposal is to recontextualize the Integral Theory in terms of Deleuze and Guattari's phenomenology and praxis of becoming - basically integrality not as religion but as improvization. I agree with this in general except for the fact that integrality as improvisation includes transformations of ontology and hence of phenomenology. And one cannot be expected not to state "what one sees" unless one makes an ideology of poststrucutralism, a paradox in terms. And "what one sees" may very well be "metaphysical" to those who don't see it but take it on faith. So the solution to the problem is not as simple as Anderson suggests. It points to a new methodology for the discourse of a transformative becoming, one which can learn a thing or two from other cultures which have developed such a discourse and the need to creatively establish the nomos for the new field through collective practice.DB