“Philosophy is the critical examination of the grounds for fundamental beliefs and analysis of the basic concepts employed in their expression.” This is at least one good definition of what philosophy means. And another from Encyclopedia Britannica: “The philosophy of nature, in particular, is the exploration of the features of natural reality, and their implications for metaphysics or a theory of reality or one’s world view.” What are the features of natural reality that we base our general theories upon? How do we arrive at an understanding of those features?
These are subtexts of philosophy. What do we observe in the natural world that leads us to formulate our theories and principles? Then we come to another essential axiom of philosophy from A. N. Whitehead: “The assemblage of philosophic ideas is more than a specialist’s study. It moulds our type of civilization.” It is important to note, I think, that in both the intuitive spiritual direction of mental development and the scientific and analytical direction of mental development, especially in the last 150 years, the idea of evolution has been very prominent and continues to be more and more prominent. It has, in fact, moulded our civilization in extraordinary ways. The ideas of evolution were fundamental to Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and Yoga. In the publication called The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings (1970), there are hundreds of pages dwelling on the topic of evolution, and not just the spiritual view of evolution, but also detailed discussions of the scientific view of evolution. There are extensive commentaries on the theory of natural selection, there and elsewhere in his writings. Before Sri Aurobindo became a student in London and at Cambridge, Spencer published his Synthetic Philosophy (1st Ed. 1862, 2nd Ed. 1867), and it became a popularly read thesis. It was first published (in part) around 1857 and it was a precursor of (actually contemporaneous with) the Origin of Species (1st Ed. 1859, 6th Ed. 1867). At the time that Sri Aurobindo was there (1878-1893), T.H. Huxley was the President of the Royal Society. And he was publishing articles in magazines and newspapers very actively during the period of the 1870s, 80s, and 90s.
We will find in the writings of Spencer and Huxley many clues to Sri Aurobindo’s ideas, many sources of his interest. And then Bergson published Creative Evolution around 1907, and his earlier treatise on Mind and Matter around 1893, about the same time that Sri Aurobindo became a professor of French in Baroda. Bergson received the Nobel Prize for his work on the philosophy of evolution around 1928. The work of Ernst Haeckel was also published in the 1890s and the early 20th Century, and he is the one philosopher of evolution whose work is actually cited by Sri Aurobindo and by the Mother. These philosophers were their contemporaries both historically and intellectually. The fact that Sri Aurobindo, the master of the Supramental Knowledge and Yoga, made the exploration of this subject a very prominent feature of his writings, and at the same time that it has been the most prominent topic of study in biology, physics and psychology in the last century, means that for our civilization – if Whitehead is correct – this way of thinking, this emergent understanding can be seen as the basis of our civilization’s progress, its values, and what it can become. When I posed the proposition of creating a philosophy of evolution, what I meant is that we have the possibility of exploring an aspect of ourselves, nature and reality in such a way that it forms the foundation of our civilization.
Philosophy, according to Whitehead, is first of all the assemblage of ideas of importance. And an extraordinary aspect of human consciousness is that, throughout its history, it has identified and focused on such ideas of importance, which constitute its values. By focusing on these ideas of importance it decides and selects where to put its energies. It defines and refines its project. At various stages of the psychological development of the human being we can see evidence of this pattern. The ideas of religion and ethics and law and science and the organization of human communities are evidence of this assemblage of values and the organization of society and peoples’ understanding around these values. The progress of civilization moves from structure to structure of commonly understood values. When Vladimir was speaking earlier (in his linguistics class) about consciousness being behind certain forms of expression, I’m sure some of us recognized the theme of phenomenology. Husserl’s work was focused on discovering the intentionality behind the expressions of things. He identified the possibility of discovering the intentions of things as a way of getting out of the conventional rational limitations of mind back to the original nature of things themselves. And he called this realm of possible consciousness an inter-subjective reality. This is not the inter-subjective reality of Habermas and sociology, but it is a prior inter-subjective reality. It assumes an inter-subjective ground of being from which the nature of everything emanates.
Then Whitehead, in his philosophy, said that there is also an expressive side of philosophy, which is the other side of its assemblage of ideas, experiences and values. There is the gathering of important ideas, values and truths, then there is the possibility of their creative expression. For Whitehead philosophy is the assembling and expressing in form of those things which are of most importance to us. He, among a few other modern philosophers, therefore says that poetry and philosophy are closely related. But while philosophy struggles to express the unity and interconnectedness of the ideas and realities that are most valuable, poetry at its height does exactly that, with a high degree of clarity. As we pursue the assemblage of ideas of evolution, both scientific and intuitive – because both the scientific and intuitive streams of evolutionary ideas have been very strong in the last hundred years, – we may focus on the possibility that, as Sri Aurobindo says, these two streams must converge. The intuitive stream gives us a kind of ecstatic grasp of the unity and interconnectedness of things, but it doesn’t really tell us how that consciousness and knowledge of the creative realm transmits its forms to the phenotypes of species, how those forms are communicated and embodied in living structures from age to age.
The scientific stream which tracks the incremental emergence of qualities and divergence of structures and functions doesn’t tell us anything about their relationship to the realm of values, meaning, and creative emergence or novelty. They constitute the two mysteriously corresponding realms identified by Whitehead as reality and process, and by Sri Aurobindo as Spirit and Matter. The scientific stream, with which we are very familiar, is able to deduce from the ages of incrementally unfolding life its forms and their continuity. There is a continuum of body plans and there are actually very few, a finite number, which have been evolving for a billion years. Now that the so-called new synthesis in biology between genetics and natural selection theories has been accomplished, we can also see the genetic connectedness of all species. But that doesn’t tell us how the transitions were made from species to species. It only gives us very sound evidence of the unity and inter-connectedness of all species, which is now beyond question.
But how nature’s processes happen to remain within the constraints of established design space and manage to find optimal solutions to the problems of survival is not known; it simply is so, and it is explained by such concepts as homeostasis, variation and natural selection. If we follow Sri Aurobindo’s thinking in the direction of solving the mind-body problem by the theory of the three worlds – the physical, vital, and mental – and we come to understand that these are three levels of consciousness, they each have their characteristic formations and expressions, for example the carbon atom, the reproductive and digestive systems, and the organization of patterns of behavior, which are not separate but they are independent with respect to their principles and levels of energy – still we don’t understand how these different levels of structure and function in the life world happen to be so intelligent and precise and meaningful. And these processes don’t give us any evidence of being aware. Then mind emerges within this context of matter and life as a self-awareness of the processes. As such, it is not separate from those processes. At the higher levels of mind, we find at the top intuitive creative spiritual mind, then rational analytic practical mind, (and it understands itself well enough), and then sense mind. Thus, Sri Aurobindo solves the mind-body problem. But, at the highest levels of that emerging mentality there is an intuitive grasp of the duality of Purusa and Prakriti, and of a creative mind above the rational mind, a higher mind, intuitive mind and overmind where Purusa and Prakriti are united. Roger Penrose, the physicist, has suggested that science may evolve beyond its present methods and understand more about these ultimate things. Sri Aurobindo goes even further and explains that Purusa is not actually Mind, but Self, involved in mind, life and body, from which it can become detached and liberated.
Then it knows itself as pure existence. It can also rise beyond this spiritual liberation to the integration of the Self and Prakriti. Then the Parampurusha is identified with its three levels of the lower Prakriti – mind, life, and matter, while being at the same time the liberated Master of the three worlds of form. He then explains that this higher, Supramental being is a plane of consciousness which presses down on the plane of Mind to bring forth its expressions in nature, the Mental world presses down on the Life plane to bring forth its forms of expression, and the Life world presses down on the plane of Matter to bring forth its energies and structures, thus effecting the upward dynamics of evolutionary emergence. This is a vision that is unique to Sri Aurobindo, as far as I can tell. We find, however, that philosophers of nature such as Konrad Lorenz and Karl Popper, and a few others in the past forty years, have accepted the idea of the threefold complex, the mental, vital and physical, each operating according to its own principles within a unified evolutionary context. Lorenz’s Behind the Mirror which was published in the 1970s, when he also received the Nobel Prize in biology, is a work of biological philosophy that we will explore in some detail later. So, Sri Aurobindo predicted in the 1920s that science would recognize this threefold nature of the world. Fritz Capra’s philosophy of life is based on the principles of self-replication or autopoiesis, the dissipation of energy to maintain forms in an unchanging state, and cognition, as also recognized by Lorenz, which is the processing of information that goes on even at the most basic level of material life. Both Lorenz and Capra add consciousness (or cognition) to the triad.
Both say that the transmission of impulses at the cellular level which lead to behavioral choices is in fact a mental process. We can observe these ideas in Neo-Darwinian thought, generally. For example, as Lorenz writes in 1973: “The scientist sees man as a creature who owes his qualities and functions, including his highly developed powers of cognition, to evolution, that age-long process of genesis in the course of which all organisms have come to terms with external reality, and as we say, adapt to it. This process is one of knowledge. For any adaptation to a particular circumstance of external reality presupposes that a measure of information about that circumstance has already been absorbed.” Today the field of biological evolution is very closely related to the field of information technology. And the behavior of genes is interpreted in terms of information theory. This perception of Sri Aurobindo of the threefold lower Prakriti is in fact being widely accepted today. If we begin to assemble the early Darwinian ideas and the early intuitive, spiritual ideas of evolution, and follow their development through the early to the mid-20th Century, and then observe their development in the latter 20th Century up to the present, and allow that field of development of ideas to organize itself in our consciousness, we may realize this to be the most important way of understanding reality yet to have emerged in human consciousness.
And if it begins to inspire us, and we begin to resonate with that grasp of the nature of reality, we may approach Sri Aurobindo’s idea that it’s possible for human beings to become participants in the evolutionary process, and begin to interpret our own energies and actions in relation to the threefold Prakriti around us, as an active participation in that most fundamental reality – so that life begins to be very consciously the process of evolution, and not just a scientific understanding or mental awareness that there is such a process. At some point we should expect there to emerge another way of perceiving and energizing our reality which is evolutionary. My proposition is that a philosophy of evolution can emerge in which a philosophic understanding and intention discovers the way to an active participation in the creative evolution of consciousness and becomes the basis of a more meaningful and enlightened civilization. As Whitehead suggested, and as Sri Aurobindo demonstrated, this can be a very important and meaningful process.