A response to "bald racism" comment by Daniel Gustav Anderson

The bald racism of Sri Aurobindo? A response to Toward a Critical Integral Theory by Daniel Gustav Anderson by Rich on Sun 10 Dec 2006 07:59 PM PST Permanent Link The following link goes to the peer reviewed journal The Integral Review: http://integral-review.org/current_issue/index.asp. The review is a scholarly publication whose editors are seeking to further a discipline of Integral Theory. The next link is to an article entitled of Syntheses and Surprises: Toward a Critical Integral Theory: http://integralreview.org/current_issue/documents/Anderson,%20Of%20Syntheses%20and%20Surprises%203,%202006.pdf

In the article the author Daniel Gustav Anderson asserts that Integral theory following its founder Sri Aurobindo is founded on bald racism! Of course that called for an interrogation of his text which follows below. I want to thank Deb for feedback and well taken suggestions. I would also urge everyone to check out the article itself and The Integral Review.
In Daniel Gustav Anderson’s review entitled “Toward a Critical Integral Theory” he proposes that the manner in which Integral Theory couches its texts need to be reconstructed following the insights and innovations of certain post-modernist authors such as Zizek, Deleuze and Guattari. These authors have undermined the validity claims of a wide range of metaphysical systems through critical interventions which deconstruct the ideological impulses inherent within their language regimes.
Anderson asserts that if integral theory is to continue to meaningfully evolve it must revision itself in terms that embody the changes in language use necessitated by the metaphysical solvent of post-structural criticism. This criticism is rooted in the understanding that presencing any metaphysical proposition is subject to an endless series of differences (spatial) and deferrals (temporal) of meaning evoked by its initial assertion. The notion is not only found in post-structuralism but is similar to the Mahayana Buddhist formulation of pratitya samutpada, or co-dependent arising. To instance another post-modern French philosopher, not mentioned in the review, one could say we would best be served to consider any authoritative or metaphysical assertions of an “Integral Reality”, as revelatory and luminous as they maybe, as traces under constant erasure of “differance”, in the sense given to the word by the late Jacques Derrida. When one is mindful that language is continually under erasure, both spatially and temporally, one facilitates setting up a resistance to its reification in ideological proclamations of onto-theology.
Anderson’s own solution is to follow the de-centering praxis of becoming begun by Nietzsche and further developed in the works of Zizek, Deleuze and Guattari. By following this method “Integral Theory” works itself out through a process of improvisation rather than through fossilized ideological structures. This is certainly a welcome re-contextualization of Integral Theory which suffers from the same ideological pitfalls which eventually beset all metaphysical discourses. A painful recent example of this was Ken Wilber’s application of spiral dynamics (an integral theory) as he asserted, in the run up to the current Iraq War, that Tony Blair was a "2nd tier thinker" whose judgments about diplomacy and the need for action were superior to any other Western leader at the time. http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/misc/iraq.cfm.

In fact, Wilber’s assertion may not be too surprising when considering that the authors of the book called “Spiral Dynamics” considered Colin Powell and Norman Schwartzkopf to be “Spiral Masters” in the first Gulf war. I take it such spiral mastery is achieved by the use of smart bombs and collateral damage! When considering such obvious gaffs in judgment which claim to be integral theories, Anderson’s arguments are well taken and certainly should be further explored.
In his article however, Anderson himself falls victim to what is perhaps his own ideological blind spot when he fails to provide a critical reading of the works of Sri Aurobindo, who he considers the father of Integral Theory. In short, Anderson accuses Aurobindo of racism and in so doing he betrays a serious misunderstanding of the great Yogi’s works and cultural heritage, as well as his own interpretive cultural bias.
At the outset of his article Anderson quotes W.I. Thompson’s book “Passages About Earth” in which he states: “there is a unique contribution to the New Age that America not India can make and that contribution is politics, namely the politics of Washington and Jefferson”. Anderson claims that Thompson’s statement gets at the spirit of a critical integral theory itself.
If one reads more deeply into “Passages About Earth”, they will find that W.I. Thompson identifies an Indian, namely Sri Aurobindo as that rare guru who comprehends and embraces Jeffersonian democracy. In fact, Sri Aurobindo not only championed Jeffersonian democracy but the humanist proclamations of the French Revolution namely, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. If one engages with Sri Aurobindo’s social treatises “The Ideal of Human Unity” and “The Human Cycle” one gathers that Aurobindo is a Jeffersonian in matters of Liberty, a Marxist in matters of Equality, and a Gandhian in matters of Fraternity. It is therefore quite disconcerting to read in Anderson the allegation that Integral Theory following Sri Aurobindo’s writing was founded upon “bald racism”!

Before addressing the substance of his claim one must begin by clarifying that it was not Sri Aurobindo’s intent to found a discipline called “Integral Theory”. The term “integral theory” is a recent phenomenon which stems largely from the works of Ken Wilber and those who have taken up the spirit of his writing as an academic discipline. If Sri Aurobindo founded any discipline it was “Purna Yoga” ( he translated the Sanskrit purna into the English integral) which integrated the three yogic disciplines of Jnana (knowledge), Bhakti (love), and Karma (works) as a praxis meant for transformation of mental, emotional, and physical subjectivities and ontologies. In fact, the term “integral theory” is a western invention and does not directly follow from the Indic darshan discourses which greatly informed Sri Aurobindo’s work.
Integral yoga is also “praxis” not theory and it is here where one can level criticism at the very notion of “integral theory” itself. In this critique integral theory could be construed as even oxymoronic and “critical integral theory” a completed oxymoron! To use the language of critical theorist themselves, "Theory" is something one constructs at the formal operational (Piaget) level of development, and it constitutes a mental representation of phenomena and not the lived experience of a praxis which integrates head, heart and hands. In short “theory” is not in and of itself integral, theory is very “mental”.
Integral theory can also be shown to make certain totalizing claims of wholism based on the territorialization of consciousness as instanced in Ken Wilber's endless map making and four quadrant topography. To insert Sri Aurobindo as the father of this theory, that he had no intention of creating, which in fact is foreign to the spirit of praxis in his purna yoga, is to set him up as a straw man for which he is an easy target for Daniel Gustav Anderson’s deconstruction. In fact, what Anderson is doing here is to assimilate Sri Aurobindo into his own westernized notions of integral theory as an integral ideologue, while completely ignoring Sri Aurobindo’s own objection to this process which likens it to being “murdered in cold print”.
From here Anderson chooses to ignore the major opus of Sri Aurobindo’s writings on human unity and the oneness of all beings, to which he literally devotes thousands of pages, and chooses instead to narrowly focus on a text of literary criticism entitled The Future Poetry and a few sentences from the Synthesis of Yoga which state the following:
“For if the actuality of intellectual achievement is unevenly distributed the capacity is spread everywhere It has been seen that in individual cases even the racial type considered by us the lowest, the negro fresh from the perennial barbarism of Central Africa, is capable without admixture of blood without waiting for future generations of the intellectual culture, if not yet of the intellectual accomplishment of the European”. (Synthesis of Yoga p10)
He then points to passages in the Future Poetry which seem to betray racial and ethnic stereotypes which are employed to describe differing cultural characteristics. While this form of stereotyping is disconcerting to the ears of the politically correct champions of postmodernism on the Academy, to judge Sri Aurobindo’s language for political correctness by the normative assumptions of post modernism - which represents an exponential leap and a completely different episteme from the WWI era Edwardian language found in the Future Poetry - is at the very least unfair and even can even be construed as non-integral. In fact, Aurobindo at the time of writing the Future Poetry was himself, being very much stereotyped by the British as a dangerous, dark skinned, Indian revolutionary.
To fail to recognize that one is culturally and historically embedded in a system of thinking or influenced by the Zeitgeist of one’s own times is just one of the flaws in this article, the other problem is that the author does not sufficiently develop an interpenetrative cross-cultural hermeneutics to locate the subtle differences of meaning when parsing works from different cultures. To fail to account for the episteme of the era in which an author was writing or consider cross cultural complexity is I believe, contrary to the very spirit of an integral review.
The collective world view is constantly evolving and one must account for this in any act of historical criticism, especially one which purports to be integral. To undertake a reading of a text of a different era calls for a much more rigorous hermeneutic method than Anderson provides. To parse the meaning of a text from another historical period one must first establish histories of common usage and then look for specificities of meaning within the text which differentiates itself from the language of the times. This demands a close comparative reading and nuanced understanding of a much more serious kind then is instanced in the obvious reified assumptions of essentialism in early 20th century texts.

Interestingly, Anderson points to both Washington and Jefferson as giving a political dimension to his “Critical Integral Theory” and Nietzsche as providing its basis in “becoming” rather than ontology. Indeed if he would hold these historical figures up to the same light of a the post-modern critique, he subjects Sri Aurobindo to, he would have to mention that Washington and Jefferson were both slave holders, and that Nietzsche made some horrendous comments stereotyping both Christians and Jews. That Anderson does not hold these historical figures to the same scrutiny in his review as he does Sri Aurobindo implies that he is holding him to a much different standard of judgment.
When we consider the important figures of history today we largely overlook their shortcomings as men of their times, because it is assumed that they are all writing according to the way of conceiving the world in their era. It is certainly not expected by historians that someone transcends the Zeitgeist which structures consideration of social issues.
Unfortunately for Anderson he does not have a historian’s sensibility and the example of the Aurobindo text Anderson provides regarding the Central African is a case and point. After the offending passage Anderson cites in the Synthesis of Yoga, when Aurobindo states: “ For if the actuality of intellectual achievement is unevenly distributed the capacity is spread everywhere. It has been seen that in individual cases even the racial type considered by us the lowest…” - he is speaking in terms of “Us” (e.g. you and me), the collective at the time of his writing this passage in the 1920s. The 1920s was a period when segregation, anti-Semitism, colonialism, and eugenics were in full swing. What is abhorrent for our times was in fact the common prejudice of his era. And although the fact remains that racism in any form is from our perspective abhorrent, whenever we attempt to understand historicity (or stages of social developmental) we have to take into consideration the collective understanding of the time period when statements was made before condemning an author for political incorrectness, Shakespeare for being an anti-Semite, or any individual of being guilty for “bald racism”.

In regards to the citation Anderson instances in the Synthesis of Yoga we also have to take stock of the fact that in the previous sentences leading up to this one that Sri Aurobindo identifies the Central African as the remnant of a higher civilization and not as a step up from any Simian origins. When Aurobindo goes on to state that the Central African: “is capable without admixture of blood without waiting for future generations of the intellectual culture, if not yet of the intellectual accomplishment of the European,” he is actually going well beyond the racist rhetoric of the times which by in large equated the negro with the subhuman, and incapable of ever achieving any stature equal to a European. Anderson for his part completely misconstrues this passage making it read that “the subaltern may be able to read but the subaltern may not write.” This is a skewed interpretation, since “intellectual accomplishment” is a vague term which could equally be referring to the material culture of western civilization based on accumulated histories of technology not available to the Central African of the time.

Moreover, Anderson chooses to ignore, or has not read, statements such as the following from “The Secret of the Veda” in which Sri Aurobindo declares: “I prefer not to use the term race, for race is a thing much more obscure and difficult to determine than is usually imagined. In dealing with it, the trenchant distinctions current in the popular mind are wholly out of place”. (Secret of the Veda p35)

In this work and others Sri Aurobindo also condemns the racist notion of the Aryan which he claims to be an invention of philologist. It should also be remembered that unlike other Indian nationalist leaders of the times who in resistance to the British Raj failed to condemn Hitler, that Sri Aurobindo’s condemnation of Nazi Germany was absolute, and if one accepts such notions he also undertook “occult interventions” to undermine its mystical structures.
If Sri Aurobindo’s writings were presented by following the pattern of deferrals and differences within the whole system of his text (or at least his major works) Anderson, would have perhaps arrived at a very different interpretation of Aurobindo’s intent regarding the meanings he ascribes to his characterizations of race and the equality of everyone and everything.
The Hegelian context which the author uses for much of his interpretive framework also lacks an appropriate hermeneutic interpenetration of the cultural contexts in which Sri Aurobindo was situated. Moreover, he claims to excavate a Foucauldian genealogy for Sri Aurobindo’s so-called (non-existent) “integral theory” and conjures up by sheer assertion that Matthew Arnold provided the inspiration to Aurobindo’s “racist” literary theory, Hegel for his evolutionary philosophy and Plato (reflected through Victorian translations) for his poetic practice. This is at the very least a poor application of genealogy.
Anderson never mentions the fact that Sri Aurobindo’s, who was a leader of the Indian resistance movement against the British, main inspiration for “Integral Yoga” comes from the darshanic discourses of India, which places him firmly within a discipline with its own unique cultural history which need be considered on its own merits. In this respect Anderson betrays an exclusivist Western interpretation of Aurobindo’s work and is himself guilty of not acknowledging the validity of subaltern discourses differing from his own orientation.
Should we assume that Aurobindo a revolutionary leader in the Indian independence movement against England and an aspirant of integral yogic experience shares the exact same cultural habitus of the Victorian era and/or with Arnold; who served the English House of Commons as a librarian? Is it not conceivable that the meanings and usage of language by one not only educated according to the ideas of late 19th century Europe, but also steeped in a language of Indic yogic discourse, and the historical resistance to colonialist occupation, bespeaks a hybridity that also resists the totalizing tendency of an essentialist racial taxonomy associated with neo-Hegelian thought? In fact, it is clear from Aurobindo’s works that all human beings are constitutionally and spiritually equal, although they may express different cultural and educational propensities due to the play of Spirit in its manifestation through historical forces and social constructions.
Finally, I wish to return to the idea of an “Integral Theory”, which I believe to be something of an oxymoron. Once again the sense Anderson wields the term integral theory invokes for me associations with Ken Wilber and such institutions as the California Institute of Integral Studies. The word “integral” according to such associations is identical with a certain totalizing claim of wholism based on the territorialization of consciousness, which can be construed itself as ideological.

In my opinion, if one if one is trying to incorporate the insights of post-modernism in a new (post-post-modern) theory, in the light of the ideological ruins wrought by deconstructionism, one perhaps ought use the term “reconstruction” or “reconstructive theory”. Reconstruction implies the re-visioning of metaphysics after their deconstruction by postmodernism. Reconstructive theory refrains from uttering any central ideological claims. Implicit in it’s understanding is that it will arrive at no final construction, for the reconstruction itself is always under erasure; always a work in progress.
I believe “Integral Theory” can be equated with a central ideological claim. Integral theory asserts that the “level of integration” is hierarchically superior to the differentiated levels below the point where it situates itself. In contrast the term reconstruction implies just the kind of usage I think Anderson is trying to arrive at for it invokes notions of collage or works of assemblage not predicated on superior validity claims of integration, but rather of harmonious rhizomic co-existence, the communion of differance, the recovery of authenticity, and the clearing of a horizon (e.g. metaphysical cobwebs) for the apprehension and coming of the “Other”.
I would like to also to refer the reader to an article in the Journal of Post Colonial Studies by Peter Heehs, a contemporary biographer of Sri Aurobindo, entitled: Sri Aurobindo, Mascot, Whipping Boy or what? In which he details the history of misappropriation of Sri Aurobindo by both the political right (mostly Hindu nationalist) and left (mostly Marxist professors) http://www.citeulike.org/article/621823
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