9 Comments

Everything that is is as object. I have only two small objections against this, the most extraordinary of modern views. You are not and object, and you are all that is.

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Who says that "everything that is is as object"?

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Not you certainly!

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You are and you are not. You are all and you are nothing. You are both subject and object and you are neither subject nor object. Truth is the synthesis of all these statements.

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I wasn’t referring to the personal “I” (which is a subject) but to the “I” which is self-reflective, that which has the power o seeing itself within itself, and in fact it becomes only an act, it is an act. This “I” is not an object, but the predicate that subsumes any universal judgment, including those of natural science of course, inside its own domain (all that there is). It is a “place” of predication, and as such is never synthetically resolved either.

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The Self which has the power of seeing itself within itself also has the power of seeing itself outside itself. These two powers, according to Sri Aurobindo, correspond to different poises of the One. But it is only in the second poise that differentiation into subject and object takes place. The distinction doesn't apply to the first poise in which seeing=being.

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Correct. The self-negation of the universal is what renders the world of individuals possible, “from the one to the many” (FOTM); that is the one that sees itself outside of itself. And inversely, the inter-relations of individuals are the self-determination of the universal, “from the many to the one” (FMTO); that is the one that sees itself inside of itself, and in fact, it becomes itself by those acts of creative relation.

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There is no need for that kind of self-negation. The universal can become the individual without ceasing to be the universal. The real self-negation is involution — supermind in mind, mind in life, life in matter, matter in the indeterminate substance Sri Aurobindo calls inconscience or the Inconscient. Evolution is the Houdiniesque breaking out of these things from their respective prisons or hiding places (in reverse order).

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Oh the universal never ceases to be universal, it becomes concrete. An often cited example (“Problemi fondamentali della filosofia”, p.134) is the field of colour. Colour mirrors itself in “red”, as in “red is a colour”, and therefore sees itself in “not-red” at the same time obviously. “Il concetto universale deve avere il senso di singolarizzare se stesso”. This last sentence, as such, is an intuition which can never be part of a grammatical subject on that field of discourse. Colour is never the subject of judgement here, it is “the predicate that can never become subject” (paraphrasing Aristotle). Of course, this is not a dialectical twist or a linguistic curiosity, but a generic statement about concrete reality.

Evolution and involution is tricky for me, as much as I love Teilhard de Chardin, can hardly ever go beyond Gould on that! But we can do “movement”, and end up talking about the same thing.

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