Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy

From an early age, Sri Aurobindo (1872 – 1950) was brought up in England. But the spirit of Indian nationalism dawned on him as soon as he returned from England, and he joined the political movement to free India from the shackles of the outside rulers. He was soon sentenced to jail, where, it is said, he had the vision of the Lord Krsna, a Hindu deity. This vision revolutionalised his life. On being freed from jail, he went to Pondicherry and sat in deep meditation for years. The truth that dawned on him was subsequently expressed in all his writings.

In Sri Aurobindo the two currents of intellectualism and spiritualism intermingled. He wrote about philosophy, no doubt. But all his philosophical writings were governed by his spiritual outlook. As he himself said, when he was left alone to fill up the sixty pages of the magazine Arya every month, he did not find the task difficult. He simply expressed in a rational, intellectual form what he had experienced in his practice of Yoga. It follows, therefore, that he was primarily a Yogi who turned his hand to philosophy from the viewpoint of a yogi. In other words, his philosophy was nothing but a thought-construction out of his unique conception of Yoga.

The guiding principle of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy is to avoid two extremes: materialism ignoring spirit, which was prevalent in the West; and spiritualism neglecting matter, which was dominant in the East. True philosophy must rise out of a harmony or synthesis between the two… Sri Aurobindo firmly believed that there could not be any ascent of the world into the spirit without the complementary process of the descent of the spirit into the world. [Tapan Kumar Chakrabarti, Blackwell Companion, 1999; 621]