Smith, Nietzsche, Shaw, Wells, Wilde, Orwell, Lucas, & Sri Aurobindo

Art, Faith, and The Koko Lion: Tales: Backtrack to Aurobindo on ... By rjk MONDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2010

Backtracking a little bit to the earlier posts concerning meditation, I came across these quotes from the Super-Guru, Sri Aurobindo. Have you ever heard of him? This Aurobindo Wiki entry is a good introduction, but needless to say, he seemed to know just about everything about everything, and wrote prolifically about it with such amazing acuity, insight, wisdom, and supreme knowledge, that one wonders whether one might possibly overcome his propensity for sentences that run-on in the extreme, in a prosaic style which could only be described as dated, beyond what any reasonable reader may be willing to continue concentrating upon, or even caring about, so that one (in this case the aforementioned reader) might eventually have to give up to the simple fact, arising from the intricate convolutions of his grammatical style and intensely profound and esoteric subject matter, that one has forgotten what he (being The Super-Guru Aurobindo) was talking about in the first place.

But bear with him and you'll find he really knew everything about everything. It's best to tackle his small, edited collections first, like: The Future Evolution of Man, and Bases of Yoga. What was I talking about again? Oh yes- Aurobindo"s observations on meditation...Dig how concise and amazing these bits from Bases of Yoga:[…]

He continues on (and on) in the generous and helpful manner that was his trademark. His teachings on the spiritual evolution of humankind are truly profound and essential. As you see from the above quote, he may very well have influenced George Lucas, and definitely others including Ram Dass, Sri Chinmoy, and Michael Murphy, founder of the Esalen Institute, and author of Golf in the Kingdom. POSTED BY RJK AT 12:40 PM 

H.G. Wells and Adam Smith. [This article is chapter 6 of Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture.] Mises Daily: Friday, September 17, 2010 by Paul A. Cantor

[3] It is surprising how few critics have explored the economic dimension of The Invisible Man. The only one I have been able to find is Roslynn D. Haynes, who, in her H.G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future: The Influence of Science on His Thought (London: Macmillan, 1980), makes a passing comment on Griffin's "bourgeois mania for financial gain" (p. 203).

[4] The phrase "invisible hand" actually occurs four times in Wells's narrative (see pp. 76, 84, 85, and 90). Given the situation Wells was dealing with, this may have been inevitable, but it might be a covert reference to what is after all Adam Smith's most famous phrase. That Wells was familiar with Smith is evident from the fact that he mentions him in his A Modern Utopia (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1905), p. 85. The only critic I have found who mentions Smith in connection with The Invisible Man is Frank McConnell, The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 114, but he is simply making a general point about the nineteenth-century novel "as capitalist fable." A precedent for using invisibility to symbolize the power of capitalism can be found in Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold. There the villain Alberich uses the magic of the Tarn-helm to make himself invisible and tyrannize over his fellow dwarves in Nibelheim, forcing them to amass treasure for him. Alberich thus becomes a symbol of the capitalist boss enslaving and exploiting the working class. That this interpretation of Wagner was circulating in Wells's England is evident from George Bernard Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite, first published in 1898. [...]

[80] See Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, Life, Illustration 12 (discussed on p. 63), for a remarkable cartoon Wells drew when he was twenty of himself "meditating on his future," which includes placards proclaiming: "How I Could Save The Nation" and "Wells's Design for a New Framework for Society."

[81] I analyze these developments in the specific case of Oscar Wilde in "Man of Soul," pp. 74–93. For the connection between Wilde and Wells, see McConnell, Science Fiction, pp. 42–43.

[82] See Haynes, Wells, p. 83. That is why Wells defines his samurai in A Modern Utopia as an order of "voluntary noblemen" (p. 121). Wells stresses the openness of his aristocratic order, and yet eventually he comes around to admitting that the samurai will become "something of a hereditary class" (p. 299). This is just one more sign that Wells's socialism would take us out of capitalism only to return us to medieval conditions.

[83] On Nietzsche and Wells, see Sutherland's "Introduction" in Luke, ed., Invisible Man, p. xxv, Carey, Intellectuals, p. 140, Bergonzi, Wells, pp. 9–12, 153, Vallentin, Wells, p. 124, John Reed, The Natural History of H.G. Wells (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982), pp. 238–39, and John Batchelor, H.G. Wells (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 5. In In the Days of the Comet, Wells's narrator, who in many respects is an autobiographical figure, proclaims: "I'm a disciple of Nietzsche" (Seven Science Fiction Novels of H.G. Wells [New York: Dover, 1934], p. 909; bk. I, chap. 4, sec. 4).

[84] Wells's attraction to supermen as leaders of the common herd often gives a fascist cast to his socialism. Although Wells opposed National Socialism as it developed in Germany, the liberal socialist George Orwell detected affinities between Wells's vision of the perfect state and Hitler's: "Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there." See "Wells, Hitler and the World State" in George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), vol. 2, p. 143.

What is Unseen from Cafe Hayek by Don Boudreaux

Each American, as both consumer and producer, is connected to hundreds of millions of other persons across the nation and the globe in a web of commercial relationships so vast, intricate, and nuanced that it is impossible to trace out and quantify in detail how changes in one part of this web affect other parts of the web.

Moreover, changes within this global web of commercial relationships are incessant, with changes in consumers’ demands for imports being simply one among a gazillion changes that occur each year. […]

It bears repeating again and again: there is nothing economically special about international trade as compared to intranational trade – save, of course, for the sorry fact that politicians and rent-seeking producers find it easy to demagogue for their own greedy, narrow purposes.

Agonda & Malta

a small taste of Malta from Object-Oriented Philosophy - Sep 10, 2010

The built-in MacBook camera simply isn’t very good, and for various reasons I’m not in the habit of traveling with a real camera. However, this will at least get you in the ballpark of what the view from this room looks like. The sea is a lot more beautiful than that right now, however. It’s sparkling with different shades of green and blue at vari... 

waves from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

The waves were really crashing tonight, at least in a few places. Malta is better when it’s like that. 

Agonda - or Why I Stress ROADS from ANTIDOTE by Sauvik

There are many lovely beaches in South Goa - and Agonda is one of them. This evening, we drove there. Truly a beautiful place, with green hills bordering both sides. … However, today, we did not walk along the beach as we have always done. We ended up walking along an internal road, parallel to the beach - a road on which there were at least a hundred homes, just metres from the beach, a beach that tourists really enjoy staying on. The road was tarred for just a 200 yards or so, and for the rest, a couple of kilometres, it did not exist!

It took about half-an-hour to cover the entire length of the non-road - and it ended at a narrow bridge about 10 yards long. On the other side was the "main road." But the bridge was too narrow for cars - only scooters and motorcycles could cross. All along, I saw signs of POVERTY - so rare in Goa.

Now, think of what happens to the prices of Property right upon a beautiful beach if there is no road. Obviously, these prices would shoot if a road was built - and a new bridge installed. Within no time, poverty would vanish. This is, in reality, PRIME REAL ESTATE! [Antidote: For Liberal Governance Sauvik Chakraverti (Hardcover - Jan 2003)]

Harmony of Virtue & Rose of God

Volume 1		PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 Early Cultural Writings Early essays and other prose writings on literature, education, art and other cultural subjects. The volume includes The Harmony of Virtue, Bankim Chandra Chat terji, essays on Kalidasa and the Mahabharata, The National Value of Art, Conversations of the Dead, the "Chandernagore Manuscript", book reviews, "Epistles from Abroad", Bankim – Tilak – Dayananda, and Baroda speeches and reports. Most of these pieces were written between 1890 and 1910, a few between 1910 and 1920. (Much of this material was formerly published under the title The Harmony of Virtue.)	2.79MB
Volume 2		PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 Collected Poems All short poems and narrative poems in English. This volume consists of sonnets, lyrical poems, narrative poems, and metrical experiments in various forms. All such poems pub lished by Sri Aurobindo during his lifetime are included here, as well as poems found among his manuscripts after his passing. Sri Aurobindo worked on these poems over the course of seven decades. The first one was published in 1883 when he was ten; a number of poems were written or revised more than sixty years later, in the late 1940s.	1.93MB
Volumes 3-4		PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 Collected Plays and Stories — I–II All original dramatic works and works of prose fiction. Volume 1: The Viziers of Bassora, Rodogune, and Perseus the Deliverer. Volume II: Eric and Vasavadutta; seven incomplete or fragmentary plays; and six stories, two of them complete.	1.94MB
Volume 5		PDF last updated: 15 Aug 09 Translations All translations from Sanskrit, Bengali, Tamil, Greek and Latin into English, with the exception of translations of Vedic and Upanishadic literature. The volume includes translations from Sanskrit of parts of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and works of Kalidasa and Bhartri hari; translations from Bengali of Vaishnava devotional poetry and works of Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Chittaranjan Das and others; translations from Tamil of poems of Andal, Nammalwar, Kulesekhara Alwar and Tiruvalluvar; and translations from Greek and Latin. Sri Aurobindo made most of these translations while living in Baroda and Bengal; some were done later in Pondicherry.	1.59MB

Sri Aurobindo’s critical ideas come from Matthew Arnold, Keats and Coleridge

Sri Aurobindo and the Indian Critical Tradition 

Vivek Kumar Dwivedi

Professor of English, University of Allahabad, India 

IRWLE VOL. 6 No. II, July 2010

Matthew Arnold is one of those rare English critics whose humanistic and cultural ideas have scarcely been surpassed. Fortunately, he has not been ignored by critics and theorists coming

after him. In the age of Derrida, Foucault and Lacan it may seem unfashionable and unnecessary to pay attention to such early critical ideas as Arnold’s, but it was the views represented by critics like Arnold along with Coleridge, Keats and Eliot that the post-structuralists largely stood against. The Western philosophical tradition that grew out of Rousseau, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, etc. and from which the English critical tradition emerged and to which it must have contributed, however indirectly, must be connected with or opposed to the humanistic strain of thought that Arnold upheld.

For Matthew Arnold the future of poetry was immense (Arnold 11) because it based everything on ideas rather than on facts (which are the bases of science). Hence poetry had a tremendous future for Arnold and would even serve as a substitute for religion (Arnold 11). In Sri Aurobindo’s criticism there is reference to “The Future Poetry” which is the title of his treatise on poetic theory. The bringing together of poetry and the future seems to be something Aurobindo learnt from Arnold. “Future” and “Poetry” are words that Arnold puts into the very first sentence of his essay, “The Study of Poetry”, quoting from his own earlier writing:

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, nor a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry (Arnold 11).

Sri Aurobindo’s critical ideas come not only from Matthew Arnold, to whom he owes much, but also from the British Romantics. He imbibed literary ideas from the British literary world, of the nineteenth and earlier centuries, to complement and complete his own theory of poetry and then gave back to it what he considered necessary to complement and complete the knowledge of the West.

A very significant feature of Sri Aurobindo’s criticism is that in it there is the co-existence of a spiritual and romantic strain. The influence of Matthew Arnold on Sri Aurobindo is obvious. But this influence can be traced back to writings of earlier romantic poet-critics like Keats and Coleridge. For Sri Aurobindo “beauty” and “truth” are criteria with great relevance. To scholars of our times, such criteria are somewhat vague.

But for Sri Aurobindo these are valid criteria deserving our serious attention. Coleridge-like, Sri Aurobindo also speaks about the relevance of the imagination in the creative process. He speaks with a sense of authority as though what he says is the final truth. This could be a result of his study of Sanskrit poetics and otherwise spiritual concerns which often grapple with a sense of right and wrong and sometimes deal in absolutes.

Sri Aurobindo seems to have taken certain literary concepts from Coleridge. The passage that follows contains echoes from Coleridge: [...] It could be a concern of the post-colonial critic today to investigate reasons for why the Western critic becomes well known and the Indian, who anticipates him, less known. It cannot be denied that Sri Aurobindo’s contribution to literary criticism was phenomenal and needs greater attention. One of the few Indians who worked hard in this direction is C. D. Narasimhaiah.

Bankim was fond of female protagonists

Bankimchandra Chatterji's Debi Chaudhurani, Hindu nationalism, and Hinduism in the Indian novel from The Middle Stage by Chandrahas

The political rise of Hindu nationalism over the last three decades has generated many persuasive ideologues, but the movement does not, in English at any rate, have a house novelist, someone to turn ideas and abstractions into characters and plots. 

This is a shame. Firstly, it allows Indian novelists of a certain ideological disposition a free run of the land. The result is often a facile secularism, a kind of reflexive celebration of India’s diversity, that borrows its vocabulary and its tropes from well-worn ideas, and thus has no linguistic or narrative energy to call its own. Tellingly, when Hindu nationalists appear in such novels, they are condemned from first sight by the narrator as zealots, driven by anger, hate, and lust (Arya in Manil Suri’s The Age of Shiva, or the cartoonish Minister Prasad in Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay).

Secondly, it would appear that there is a want of serious engagement in the Indian novel in English not just with Hindu nationalism, but with the immense weight of Hinduism itself. Not only is Hindu nationalism artistically unfashionable (except as a convenient source of villainy and conflict), its absence points to a deeper failing that ironically might be seen as lending credence to the Hindu nationalists’ complaint about the falling away of Hinduism from the wellsprings of culture. Barring exceptions such as Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, Hinduism itself is rarely explored or interrogated in an extended way in modern Indian novels in English.

This suggests a narrative orientation in the Indian novel in English that is not just politically centrist or left-of-centre, but which engages with religion more at the level of observation and backdrop than of sympathetic immersion or experience. Hinduism’s massive repository of ideas, fables, images, exemplars, proverbs, aphorisms and narrative structures have left an impression on the Indian novel in English far smaller than the one that it exerts on public and private life in India. One might say that, while Hinduism should be part of the Indian novelist’s wealth, the challenges of realising a mainly Sanskritic worldview persuasively in English are such that it is usually treated as a tax.

This background makes all the more significant the appearance of an English translation of Debi Chaudhurani, a late work by the Bengali writer Bankimchandra Chatterji (1838-1894), India’s first major novelist. One of the earliest recruits of the Indian Civil Service established in the middle of the 19th century by the British, Bankim – so familiar a name in Indian letters, across linguistic traditions, that he is usually referred to by his first name – spent his working life as a deputy magistrate in the colonial administration. But, even though he represented the vanguard of a new class of anglicised Indians (going so far as to write his first novel, Rajmohan’s Wife, in a sonorous English), Bankim’s ear remained close to the ground.

His novels, particularly those of his late “nationalist” phase, are preoccupied with contemplating the future (and reprising and sometimes reimagining the past) of a predominantly Hindu Bengali society hobbled, from without, by the martial superiority first of Muslim rulers and then the British, and from within, by a stagnation of thought, social structure and gender roles. Debi Chaudhurani (1884), loosely based on the story of a real-life female bandit in 18th-century Bengal, offers the reader a deeply felt vision of “the Hindu way of life” – one that celebrates but also interrogates Hindu tradition. If one were to imagine contemporary Hindu nationalism as its best and most intellectually coherent (something it is mostly not), this might be the kind of reading of Hinduism it would offer.

Like many 19th-century realists (Hardy, Flaubert, Zola), Bankim was fond of female protagonists, the better to portray the constraints and inquities of the patriarchal society that was, as much as the individual, the subject of his enquiry. When we first see his heroine, a young woman called Prafulla, it is as the victim of the neglect of society and “the pinchings of poverty” (this is one of Bankim’s lovely phrases from his one and only English novel).

Hasan, Sliema, Marseille, Rishikesh

On The Road, Again from ANTIDOTE by Sauvik

Hasan should be on the tourist map. It is the closest city to Halebid, Belur and Sravanabelagola. Nestled in the hills of the Western Ghats, "the weather here suits my clothes." I love the monsoon, anyway.

I took the Konkan Railway to Mangalore and then the bus to Hasan. The railway urgently needs competition from buses - for which a Coastal Expressway is a must. The seats were hard and horrible. The bus had excellent reclining seats but I couldn't sleep a wink because of the bumpy road. It was a government bus from a government bus station 10 kms from the rail station. The auto-rickshaw from the railway station to the bus station cost more than double the railfare. Guess our government hasn't heard too much about "multi-modal transport." It has been a tragedy that wee the sheeple handed all transport over to The State. Everything needs to be privatized.

The highway from Mangalore to Hasan is terrible. Our Tata bus groaned and moaned all the way, not possessing the power to take on the climb. The road was jam-packed with heavy vehicles and progress was excruciatingly slow. [Antidote: For Liberal Governance Sauvik Chakraverti - Jan 2003]

philosophy trips from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman)

Nietzsche thinks the value of places varies widely from person to person, but there is no longer any question that I myself need seaside, sea air, and long seaside walks to do my best thinking. (And I was cruelly deprived of these things well into adulthood– having grown up in Iowa, nearly as far from any sea as one can get.)

… I mentioned in January, that stretch of corniche west of the capital, running between Sliema and Paceville, though only a few miles long and heavily developed with quasi-suburban residential property, is about as intellectually stimulating a stretch of pavement as I have ever encountered. I think I had 15-20 good new ideas in 3 or 4 days there the last time. It’s almost hard to manage the flood of thoughts that can be generated by that sort of atmosphere.

The map below doesn’t quite explain what I’m talking about, but at least it sketches the physical geography well enough. If you find Sliema Point on this map, and go westward all the way to where it says Spinola Palace, that’s just about the most charming and captivating walk of several miles that can be imagined. Powerful ocean waves crash beneath you most of the time, but there’s still a comfortable domestic feel to the route: sublimity to your right, and a nice cup of coffee to your left whenever you need one.

Walter Benjamin & Travel as Collecting

Benjamin writes in Unpacking my Library, about the relationship between a collector and the things he or she collects, figuring that relationship as an extreme intimacy. This figuration extends into much of his other writing. His massive Arcades Project is in part an accounting that turns Paris into a collection, numbered, categorized, recorded and kept permanent. The same intimacy between a collector and his things characterizes Benjamin’s relationship to the places he visits and then describes. [...]

Conquest of one kind or another has forever been one human answer to the looming truths of impermanence. Collection, particularly as Benjamin figures collection, is a sort of small-scale conquest. If you collect shoes or books or records, you want to conquer shoes or books or records by having the most of them, by having enough of them (though, of course, there’s never such thing as enough). Benjamin’s pieces recounting Marseille or Spain or Naples have always seemed to me reminiscent of early American explorers’ journals, in which trees and birds and animals and everything else are written down in minute detail. JUNE 24, 2010, 9:14PM 

The Shatabdi: A metaphor for the new middle class India Rama Bijapurkar, leader on market strategy, and consumer related issues ... Economic Times - March 30, 2009

Many of us have trouble picturing exactly who the members of the Great Indian urban middle class are. Though we talk about them all the time, it still is like pornography “know it when I see it but can’t exactly describe it”. When visiting western businessmen talk, with a gleam in their eye, of investing in India because of the growing middle class, one is a bit worried about what images they carry in their heads about this group. The trouble is that our consumer base is so variegated, that even field research, away from meeting rooms, provides every kind of anecdotal evidence, to confirm any kind of mental picture that anyone might have, on any count.

A recent trip from Delhi to Rishikesh on the Shatabdi was a “eureka” moment. The Shatabdi is definitely the perfect metaphor for the middle class. Santosh Desai of Future Brands wrote once that the autoricksha is a metaphor for India. It can weave its way in and out of utter confusion, is ugly, noisy and inconvenient, but it serves the purpose quite well, at an incredible low price.  …

The chair car is definitely like an upper middle class drawing room, and though the air conditioning works well, there is a cocktail of many strong smells in the air. Some of them you soon get used to, even welcome, partly because the strong smell of the cleaner assures you that cleaning has actually been done. Having not been on a Shatabdi for many years, one was struck by how “upwardly mobile” it had gradually become. And yet, how it has stayed the same on many counts too. 

Looking at the overhead baggage racks (open racks still), it is clear that a luggage revolution has happened. Smart suitcases (when compared to what we used to see earlier), lots of soft luggage, nylon backpacks - but the same old coolie system, even their uniforms unchanged! The luggage rack definitely made a statement about what progress Consumer India has made and the attitude it now sported, based on what luggage they were ‘wearing’. No uniformity here, no herd mentality, lots of individualism. No boring single brand here, this was the full blown variety of the gray market, importing from around the world! (The same, by the way, can be said for the winter wear of the passengers. No more aunt knitted hand made sweaters. Wind cheaters of all hues, and machine made sweaters and caps. And also of the closed footwear. No cumbersome heavy leather shoes in sight anymore.) [We Are Like That Only: Understanding the Logic of Consumer India Rama Bijapurkar - Jan 2007]

Dr. V.M. Madge came down heavily upon unjust criticism of Sri Aurobindo

The Literary criterion 2002
Speaking on "Contemporary Indian Poetry" Dr. VM Madge not only came down heavily upon some contemporary poets like Ezekiel, Parthasarathy and others for their unjust criticism of Aurobindo but also felt that our contemporary poetry can...

The perennial quest for a psychology with a soul: an inquiry into ... - Page 337 Joseph Vrinte - 2002 - 568 pages
Actually, Ken Wilber's criticism of Sri Aurobindo is not a repudiation of Sri Aurobindo's vision but a refinement. Ken Wilber states that Sri Aurobindo's 'individual' integral Yoga and practice is "especially focused on integrating the ...

Sri Aurobindo Ghose: the dweller in the lands of silence William Kluback, Michael Finkenthal - 2001 - 167 pages
I wonder if this awakening spirit is anything more than a child of goodness and beauty. It does not create them. It is a child of their nurture, of their power over chaos. I saw in my words a potential criticism of Sri Aurobindo. ...

Tradition and the rhetoric of right: popular political argument in ... - Page 85 David J. Lorenzo - 1999 - 339 pages
... the Ashram's program was the abolition of religious, caste, and gender disabilities, achievements for which traditional Hindus and even some conservative members of the movement criticized Aurobindo and the Mother.66 The structured...

Continuities in Indian English poetry: nation language form G. J. V. Prasad - 1999 - 198 pages
... poetry echoes the post-Independence criticism of Aurobindo-like mystical poetry! Sarang praises Daruwalla for precisely these qualities. Daruwalla stands out amongst Indian English poets for bringing to poetry a range of experience ...

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research Indian Council of Philosophical Research - 1995
Though he rejects root-based study as unsound on page 9, he very quickly reverses his position on page 15, while criticizing Sri Aurobindo, and speaks as if that study is a sound method of interpreting the Vedic terms. ...

Mao Zedong and the Communist Policies 1927-1978 - Page 137 B.E. Shinde - 1993 - 183 pages
Man has always oscillated between the extremes, the fabric of the mind itself is of such peculiar composition. The Gita does not merely deal with the mind as thecriticism of Aurobindo Ghosh would suggest. It is as well not wholly the ...

Nissim Ezekiel, poet of human balance Harish Raizada - 1992 - 196 pages
He is highly critical of Sri Aurobindo both as a poet and critic. He dislikes his "Asiatic vague immensities" or mighty abstractions and finds his magnum opus Savitri "embarrassingly bad." He criticizes Sri Aurobindo's The Future of ...

The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo - Page 323 V. P. Varma - 1990 - 494 pages
This second criticism of Aurobindo reminds us of the attacks made by TH Green on utilitarianism. Green led the idealist attack against the ethics of utilitarianism. He candidly admitted that the utilitarian creed aims to improve the ... Modern Indian political thought Vishwanath Prasad Varma - 1971 - 640 pages
In 1928, however, while criticizing the political ideas and technics of Gandhi (the thought of the Ashram of Sabarmati), Bose also criticized Aurobindo (the thought of the Pondi- cherry Ashram). 4 Subhas Chandra Bose, Tarun ke Swapna ...

Seven studies in Sri Aurobindo V. Madhusudan Reddy - 1989 - 239 pages
... in the study of the creative and multi-dimensional use of language and its mystical and metaphysical implications one aspect of the literary criticism of Sri Aurobindo which has a direct bearing on their concerns and conclusions. ...

The politics of philosophy: a Marxian analysis A. Pampapathy Rao - 1983 - 118 pages
... Marxist criticism of Sri Aurobindo? "The conceptual affinity between Hegel and Sri Aurobindo is much closer than that between Marx and any one of them", p. 208. One of whom? "Of all forms of justice perhaps the most important one is ...

The Heritage of India: L. N. Mishra commemoration volume 1978 - 616 pages
Yoga and Literary Criticism Dr. S. K. Prasad Department of English, Magadh University On the publication of my book on the literary criticism of Sri Aurobindosome months back, a quite pertinent question was raised by a distinguished ...

Indian literature Sāhitya Akademi - 1977
SK Prasad's The Literary Criticism of Sri Aurobindo (Bharati Bhavan, Patna) is an exhaustive study of Sri Aurobindo the literary critic, and there are comparative glances at Western critics like TS Eliot, Middleton Murry and Herbert ...

The Journal of Asian studies Far Eastern Association (U.S.), Association ... - 1976
The essayists in this volume are not judgmental or critical of Aurobindo from an out-of-context perspective. But this is not to suggest that they avoid questions of comparison or relevance in Aurobindo's writings. ...

The quest for political and spiritual liberation: a study in the ... June O'Connor - 1977 - 153 pages
... criticizes Aurobindo on this issue, naming the problem of evil to be "the most questionable element" in his system (World, pp. 270-71). In The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1960), p. ...

The literary criticism of Sri Aurobindo, with special reference to ... Shree Krishna Prasad, Aurobindo Ghose - 1974 - 487 pages
Hazlitt, it appears, only echoes them when he calls poetry "the language of the imagination and the passions".1 The typical Romantic critical standard for poets is well expressed by Leigh Hunt, who, like Shelley, calls poetry ...

age. of. the soul of man in Odysseus".1 The. same is true of the Iliad. It is "not merely the action and stir of battle" in it which explains its greatness but "the clash of great and strong spirits with the gods leaning down to …

falls are,— when the needed energy is within, — an obscure condition for unprecedented elevations".1 "In the recoil", continues Sri Aurobindo, "....some discovery is made which would otherwise have been long postponed or not at all have ...

Nissim Ezekiel Chetan Karnani, Nissim Ezekiel - 1974 - 192 pages
Ezekiel has courageously exposed the pretensions in poetry and criticism of Aurobindo Ghosh. It is curious that Ezekiel himself did not escape the stranglehold of this tradition. He has too often lapsed into ...

Contemporary relevance of Sri Aurobindo Kishor Gandhi - 1973 - 343 pages
It was with thoughts and feelings of this sort that I came to read the literarycriticism of Sri Aurobindo. That criticism is to be found for the most part in The Future Poetry, (published originally as a series of articles in the Arya, ...

Literature east & west Modern Language Association of America ... - 1969
... the Age," helped to demonstrate the close relationships which even the writer in English has with the old and meaningful traditions. Professor S. Nagarajan, of Poona University, in discussing the literary criticism of Sri Aurobindo, ...

Contemporary Indian literature: a symposium Sahitya Akademi - 1968 - 338 pages
The literary criticism of Sri Aurobindo (The Future Poetry) and the art criticism of Ananda Coomaraswamy (History of Indian and Indonesian Art, The Dance of Shiva and An Introduction to Indian Art) are in a category apart. ...

Main currents of social & political thought in modern India Jyoti Prasad Suda - 1963
The criticism of Sri Aurobindo •was motivated by two considerations. Firstly, he wanted to undermine the faith of the Indians in the superiority of the British political organisation. ...