Can evil be absolute?
An Aurobindonian perspective on a recent article by Nicolas Tenzer, along with some links
In 2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years ago, I published the following pieces:
The present article is divided in three parts. In the first, I reproduce some key passages from these posts. The second part contains excerpts from a recent piece by Nicolas Tenzer. In the third part I offer some comments on Tenzer’s excellent piece from an Aurobindonian perspective.
1 Recap
In the first of those four posts I quoted — for the first but not the last time -— what Sri Aurobindo had to say on the potential need for a third World War:
If the third war ... does come, it is likely to precipitate as inevitably a further step and perhaps the final outcome of this great world-endeavour [towards Human Unity]. Nature uses such means, apparently opposed and dangerous to her intended purpose, to bring about the fruition of that purpose. As in the practice of the spiritual science and art of Yoga one has to raise up the psychological possibilities which are there in the nature and stand in the way of its spiritual perfection and fulfilment so as to eliminate them, even, it may be, the sleeping possibilities which might arise in future to break the work that has been done, so too Nature acts with the world-forces that meet her on her way, not only calling up those which will assist her but raising too, so as to finish with them, those that she knows to be the normal or even the unavoidable obstacles which cannot but start up to impede her secret will. [HC 580‒81]
In the second post I quoted passages from articles written by Sri Aurobindo between 1916 and 1920, including the following:
So long as war does not become psychologically impossible, it will remain or, if banished for a while, return. War itself, it is hoped, will end war; the expense, the horror, the butchery, the disturbance of tranquil life, the whole confused sanguinary madness of the thing has reached or will reach such colossal proportions that the human race willing the monstrosity behind it in weariness and disgust. But weariness and disgust, horror and pity, even the opening of the eyes to reason by the practical fact of the waste of human life and energy and the harm and extravagance are not permanent factors; they last only while the lesson is fresh. Afterwards, there is forgetfulness; human nature recuperates itself and recovers the instincts that were temporarily dominated. A long peace, even a certain organisation of peace may conceivably result, but so long as the heart of man remains what it is, the peace will come to an end, the organisation will break down under the stress of human passions. War is no longer, perhaps, a biological necessity, but it is still a psychological necessity; what is within us, must manifest itself outside.
Meanwhile it is well that every false hope and confident prediction should be answered as soon as may well be by the irony of the gods; for only so can we be driven to the perception of the real remedy. Only when man has developed not merely a fellow-feeling with all men, but a dominant sense of unity and commonalty, only when he is aware of them not merely as brothers,—that is a fragile bond,—but as parts of himself, only when he has learned to live not in his separate personal and communal ego-sense, but in a larger universal consciousness can the phenomenon of war, with whatever weapons, pass out of his life without the possibility of return. [“The Passing of War?” HC 610‒11]
Men fight for their personal or communal or national interests or for ideas and principles of which they make watchwords and battle-cries. But the largest human interests are only means and instruments which some Force greater than themselves breaks or uses in its inconscient impulse or else for its conscious purposes.... For who that has eyes at all to see cannot see this, that in what has happened, immense Powers have been at work which nourish a vaster world-purpose than the egoistic mind of individual or nation could mete with their yard-measure of narrow personal idea or communal interest and for which the motives and passions of governments and peoples were only tools or opportunities?... It is surely the kingdom of another and higher dharma [than that of materialistic commercialism with its ideal of utilitarian law and justice] that is in preparation. What that dharma is we can only know if we know this Power whose being and whose thought are at work behind all that we attempt and suffer, conceive and strive for. [“The Unseen Power” HC 613‒17]
In the third post I quoted passages from Sri Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita, among them these:
We will use only soul-force and never destroy by war or any even defensive employment of physical violence? Good, though until soul-force is effective, the Asuric force in men and nations tramples down, breaks, slaughters, burns, pollutes, as we see it doing today, but then at its ease and unhindered, and you have perhaps caused as much destruction of life by your abstinence as others by resort to violence.... But even soul-force, when it is effective, destroys.... Evil cannot perish without the destruction of much that lives by the evil.... It is not enough that our own hands should remain clean and our souls unstained for the law of strife and destruction to die out of the world; that which is its root must first disappear out of humanity. Much less will mere immobility and inertia unwilling to use or incapable of using any kind of resistance to evil, abrogate the law....
We must look existence in the face if our aim is to arrive at a right solution, whatever that solution may be. And to look existence in the face is to look God in the face; for the two cannot be separated, nor the responsibility for the laws of world-existence be shifted away from Him who created them or from That which constituted it. Yet here too we love to palliate and equivocate. We erect a God of Love and Mercy, a God of good, a God just, righteous and virtuous according to our own moral conceptions of justice, virtue and righteousness, and all the rest, we say, is not He or is not His, but was made by some diabolical Power which He suffered for some reason to work out its wicked will or by some dark Ahriman counterbalancing our gracious Ormuzd, or was even the fault of selfish and sinful man who has spoiled what was made originally perfect by God. [EG 42‒45]
In the fourth post I again quoted passages from Essays on the Gita, as well as a statement by Sri Aurobindo on World War 2. The following excerpts are of particular relevance to the current situation.
No real peace can be till the heart of man deserves peace; the law of Vishnu cannot prevail till the debt to Rudra is paid. To turn aside then and preach to a still unevolved mankind the law of love and oneness? Teachers of the law of love and oneness there must be, for by that way must come the ultimate salvation. But not till the Time-Spirit in man is ready, can the inner and ultimate prevail over the outer and immediate reality. Christ and Buddha have come and gone, but it is Rudra who still holds the world in the hollow of his hand. [EG 368]
It is ceasing to be possible for national egoisms to entrench themselves in their isolated independence and be sufficient for themselves, for all are now dependent on the whole…. [N]ations which tried to isolate themselves in a self-regarding neutrality have paid the penalty of their blindness and the others who still maintain that attitude are likely sooner or later to share the same fate; either they must become the slaves or subservient vassals of three or four greater Powers, or a world-order must be found in which all can be safe in their freedom and yet united for the common good…. If the totalitarian Powers win, there will indeed be a new world-order, — it may be in the end, a unification; but it will be a new order of naked brute Force, repression and exploitation....
No doubt, in a spiritualised life of humanity or in a perfect civilisation there would be no room for war or violence, — it is clear that this is the highest ideal state. But mankind is psychologically and materially still far from this ideal state. To bring it to that state needs either an immediate spiritual change of which there is no present evidence or a change of mentality and habits which the victory of the totalitarian idea and its system would render impossible; for it would impose quite the opposite mentality, the mentality and habits on one side of a dominant brute force and violence and on the other a servile and prostrate non-resistance. [ABN 459‒62]
2 Excerpts from a recent piece by Nicolas Tenzer
In this excellent piece, Tenzer “tried to understand the reasons why some people support Putin’s propaganda abroad—to call them bastards is certainly true, but the money paid does not explain the depth of their ignominy, because supporting Russian crimes, even through pure corruption, exceeds, in its ignominy, the understanding of a normal person.” He “strove to explain why some others, even today, still dream of some form of future normalization with Russia, despite the indescribable barbaric acts committed by hundreds of thousands of Russians.” He “wanted to grasp why some people close their eyes, when the cries of the tortured should keep everyone awake in the face of this nightmare.” He “explored the possible causes of our inaction, which will forever be a source of guilt for centuries to come.”
I think I have explained everything rationally, revealed the nihilism inherent in the project to annihilate Ukraine, dissected the stupidity of our leaders, elaborated at length on the uncertainty attached to morality, which means that not everyone sees themselves in the same way when they look in the mirror; I have discussed good and evil; I have examined all possible theories on human cruelty; I have, like others far more knowledgeable than myself, explored the many crude ideologies that drive Putin and his minions; I have shown the path that led from Sobibor, Majdanek, and Treblinka to Bucha, Mariupol, and Izyum, via Srebrenica and the mass graves where hundreds of thousands of Tutsis lie forever.
And I will not even mention the so-called “geopolitical” theories that seek to explain Russian revanchism or their “feeling” of being threatened, without even mentioning the theories of “Slavic identity” and “language” which, in their emptiness, serve only to excuse the unforgivable.
Like others, I have analyzed and dissected everything, I was going to say “understood.” But in reality, I know that I have understood nothing, that no one can understand, that murder without limit never has a reason, neither yesterday nor today. Here, there is no “why,” just crime in its absoluteness—impregnable evil.
What we must understand is that there is no why....
And “when there is no why, there is no thought either.”
Most Western leaders do not think because they would then have to descend into the abyss of evil and endless crime, which is itself unthinkable. As a result, they do not think about war in its fundamental reality, that of absolute destruction....
Faced with the unspeakable in the literal sense of the word, the unthinkable, the unjustifiable, in short, absolute evil—for there is no other term to describe what the Russians are doing in Ukraine—there is no other logical, moral, strategic, or humane option but to put an end to it.
3 Beyond reason and good and evil
Homo sapiens is far from being the crown and culmination of Nature’s evolutionary nisus, and neither is reason or the intellect. Homo sapiens is a “transitional being” which, according to Sri Aurobindo, “stands at the turning-point of the whole movement”:
After the evolution of mentally conscious homo sapiens, the evolution of a supramentally conscious species of gnostic beings. They will be in possession of the only “superintelligence” that rightfully deserves this name. A gnostic being does not seek to know; it knows by identity, and by identity it knows the universe and all that the universe contains.
The human mind, on the other hand, seeks to know because it doesn’t know. It doesn’t understand what is behind that which it regards as evil, but neither does it understand what is behind that which it regards as good. Where evil exceeds comprehension, it sees a black hole of absolute evil, yet there is no such thing, as there is no such thing as absolute good.1 There is only one Absolute, Sachchidananda, and this is beyond good and evil. Good and evil are relative terms, intended to lead the evolving conscious being out of a purely instinctual behavior through the mind’s ignorant way of acting to a way of acting based on genuine knowledge.
The ethical impulse and attitude, so all-important to humanity, is a means by which it struggles out of the lower harmony and universality based upon inconscience and broken up by Life into individual discords towards a higher harmony and universality based upon conscient oneness with all existences. Arriving at that goal, this means will no longer be necessary or even possible, since the qualities and oppositions on which it depends will naturally dissolve and disappear in the final reconciliation. [LD 104]
While I deny the existence of absolute evil, I do of course fully agree with Tenzer when he says that “there is no other logical, moral, strategic, or humane option but to put an end to what the Russians are doing in Ukraine.”