Proper and legitimate use of the text and not as a metaphysical mythology

Edward Berge Says: March 2nd, 2007 at 10:07 pm Debashish clarifies some of this in A Second Response to Daniel Gustav Anderson’s “Towards a Critical Integral Theory” at this link: http://www.sciy.org/blog/CULTURE/_archives/2006/12/11/2564494.html:

The more general issue of integrality/synthesis/teleology as metaphysics in Sri Aurobindo is 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 (and in its strict sense non-dual present-ation) 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 mediated by acts of consciousness 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. Open Integral Of Syntheses and Surprises: Toward a Critical Integral Theory