The Materialist Denial

A Divine life on earth requires a harmonizing of Spirit and Matter. It is important to note that Sri Aurobindo does not define Spirit as everything that is "not matter". He posits an ascending range of consciousness broadly distinguished as Life, Mind, and Supermind (with several gradations between Mind and Supermind). These levels stand between Matter and Spirit, and form a bridging continuum.

The human mind, working as it does, produces a strong tendency to resolve the apparent Spirit-Matter gulf by asserting only one pole to be real and denying the other. Sri Aurobindo terms these "The Two Negations", with the first being "The Materialist Denial", and the second "The Refusal of the Ascetic".

Materialism, with its conception of consciousness as only a peculiar property of the physical brain somehow developed via random processes of physical nature, would seem to be the antithesis of any spiritual philosophy. Sri Aurobindo however expresses appreciation for the intellectual methods of science that have accompanied the ascendancy of materialism. He notes that contained in its genuine spirit of inquiry and agnosticism is the seed of its own eventual self-exceeding, as it inevitably extends beyond the arbitrary limits of the physical senses into the direct investigation of consciousness and all its phenomena.

Sri Aurobindo also remarks on the service done by scientific materialism in helping sweep away the "perverting superstitions and irrationalising dogmas" that have accompanied the pursuit of supra-physical knowledge in the past. He feels it is important that "the intellect has been severely trained to a clear austerity" before safely entering into the pursuit of such knowledge, otherwise "it lends itself to the most perilous distortions and misleading imaginations".

On a historical note, one might comment that materialism has continued to be quite resilient in resisting its own self-exceeding during the 70 or so years since Sri Aurobindo last revised The Life Divine. If he were writing it today, would he perhaps have spent more time elaborating arguments against materialism?

The Human Aspiration

In this first chapter, Sri Aurobindo begins with the largest possible questions and ideals that are repeatedly posed by the “awakened thoughts” of humanity: God, Light, Freedom, Immortality. These deep and recurrent ideals are constantly met by their apparent opposites in the “normal experience” of everyday life. But they are also affirmed by certain higher experiences, rarely achieved by human beings, but still powerful enough to affect the entire backdrop of human psychology.

The tension between the persistent seeking for Bliss and Freedom, and the relentless daily experience of pain and incapacity, is readily taken as evidence for the invalidity of any such seeking. But Sri Aurobindo suggests that, seen in another way, this tension will be revealed as the expedient method used by Nature to arrive ultimately at a highest and widest harmony of all apparent discords.

He previews the key role a concept of evolution will play in his exposition. Coupled with the idea of a prior involution, the progressive evolution across time of an ever increasing Consciousness - in conditions that initially appear to be its very opposite (inert matter) – will be shown to provide a rich explanatory and synthesizing conceptual model when applied to the cosmos, life, and human beings.

Sri Aurobindo notes that the seeking for a fundamental solution to the problems posed by life survives all periods of skepticism. It gives birth to religions and mysticism, which often take form as superstitions and crude faiths. But denying the truth behind such seeking because of the obscure outer forms it has so far produced, "is itself a kind of obscurantism". Better to accept what Nature "will not allow us as a race to reject", and lift it "into the light of reason", while also not fearing to aspire to whatever higher light of cognition might exceed reason on the grand upward arc of evolution.