Abstract
The turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century saw a number of philosophers of conscious evolution emerging from different cultural backgrounds. This paper argues that this phenomenon, which has sometimes been seen as a philosophical consequence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory in the life sciences, is more importantly related to the enhanced scope of human subjectivity made possible by technology at this time. Yet technology remains the ‘unthought within the thought’ of its times, an ambiguous presence, derided for its alienating effects and praised for its enhancement of human capacities and comforts. A later generation of thinkers, belonging to the post-World War II era, renews the thought of conscious evolution, now in engagement with new technologies of a planet spanning scope. This essay considers the ideas of these two generations of thinkers, focusing on Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) from the earlier generation and Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989) from the more recent era, questioning the consequences of contemporary technology in their thoughts, goals and practices. In developing the historical continuity of ideas, it tracks the question of technology from the earlier to the later generation, highlighting the understanding of both its promise and its ills and engaging with it the possibilities of conscious evolution.
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Notes
- 1.
The Purusha Sukta is hymn 90 in Book X of the Rig Veda. It presents infinite conscious Being as transcendental Person who presents himself as cosmos and ‘sacrifices’ himself (becomes immanent) as the creatures and humans of various castes.
- 2.
"purusha, prakriti, consciousness, who and what are capitalized in this text wherever they are used in a transcendental sense.”
- 3.
Aligning this thought to that of Teilhard’s and Simondon’s, this may be thought of as a ‘cosmogenetic intensity’.
- 4.
It would be interesting to bring this viewpoint to bear on Michel Bauwens’ essay on P2P systems, which may be called a subject-oriented database model as opposed to a top-down algorithmic or horizontal object-oriented models implied in the ‘enframing’ of ‘standing reserve’.
- 5.
Simondon is also known to have quoted de Chardin favourably and an important commentator on Simondon, Jean-Hugues Barthelemy, has drawn attention to Simondon’s debt to Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin, especially to Chardin’s cosmogenetic individuation: https://fractalontology.wordpress.com/2007/10/22/translation-jean-hugues-barthelemy-on-simondon-bergson-and-teilhard-de-chardin/ (last accessed 04/10/2016).
- 6.
This passage is closely connected to McLuhan’s discussion of a passage by Teilhard de Chardin in his work The Phenomenon of Man.
- 7.
Simondon is concerned to reject the hylomorphic model which subordinates one principle to another in a dualistic master–slave or original–copy relation. Metaphysics, since Plato, has generally been conceived in this key, as, for example, spirit/matter, soul/body, mind/body, culture/nature. Sri Aurobindo’s panentheism also eschews this form of hylomorphic relationship, extending agency relationally along all heterogeneous orders, as may be viewed from the following quote: “In a sense, the whole of creation may be said to be a movement between two involutions, Spirit in which all is involved and out of which all evolves downward to the other pole of Matter, Matter in which also all is involved and out of which all evolves upward to the other pole of Spirit” (Aurobindo 2005: 137).
- 8.
As pointed out by Rich Carlson in this volume, it is the traditional understanding of ‘escape’ or ‘retreat’ from life that has made thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze reject Indian yoga as representative not of a life-transforming praxis leading to a mastery of the ‘folds’ of contemporaneity but rather of an ‘unfold’.
- 9.
In this sense, it is closer to the monism of Spinoza, and following him, Deleuze. This is what allows Deleuze to theorize extraordinary states of consciousness based on experimentation. Simondon, who is also deeply influenced by Spinoza, nevertheless, eschews the latter substantialism.
- 10.
Echoing Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo defines yoga in a number of places as ‘accelerated evolution’.
- 11.
See the discussion of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and the funambulist in Richard Carlson’s essay in this volume.
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Banerji, D. (2016). Individuation, Cosmogenesis and Technology: Sri Aurobindo and Gilbert Simondon. In: Banerji, D., Paranjape, M. (eds) Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures . Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3637-5_16
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