Towards a Spiritual Age

Abstract

We should not allow Edward Said’s groundbreaking work, Orientalism , to dissuade us from the fact that Asia and the Western world have had, from their origins, different epistemological foundations. In Asian epistemology (Indian, Chinese, and Japanese) there is no strict dichotomy between the material and the spiritual. The ontological basis of Indian philosophy, for example, lies in the understanding of the subject (Brahman) as primary, as sat-chit-ananda, Being-Consciousness-Bliss, the source of existence and non-existence, in which all apparent dualities are ultimately held. European epistemology, in contrast, stems originally from Plato and later Christianity, and is grounded in an immanence and transcendence split. A further bifurcation appeared in seventeenth-century Europe with the triumph of science and reason, between the subject, as a constructed ‘I’, and the objective world it represents. As a result, notwithstanding the revolutionary nature of the quest for reason in the European Enlightenment, the pursuit of objectivity took on a fetishistic status, where matter remained primary, and where the subject and its ‘prejudices’ were reduced to mere interference. Only in modernity has the subject returned as ‘subjectivity’ to compete with this asymmetry; however, it remains a ‘thing’ in a world of ‘things’, isolated within the dualism of the European episteme and its domination in the social and natural sciences, and indeed, in the way we imagine the world. Part One of this chapter gives a brief overview of the development of subjectivity in the West, from the European Enlightenment to the present. To do this, it utilises an alternative framework to Western historiography and philosophy, employed by the Indian mystic and yogi, Sri Aurobindo. The intention is to both demonstrate and problematise Sri Aurobindo’s view that the development of subjectivity in the West has the potential to lead to a post-conventional rediscovery of the deeper self, and a revolutionary re-articulation of it in its social and collective expression, leading the way to a spiritual age, and a new upward cycle of civilisation. Part Two considers what some of the first steps might be in interrogating the frontier of the subjective-objective divide. I highlight the work of Martin Heidegger initially . Heidegger, following Nietzsche, articulated the necessity for the West to break from its ‘metaphysical’ foundation and restore an ontology of ‘Being’ to humanity and the world. I look at some of the similarities of his thinking with the Eastern traditions. Finally, looking beyond theory, I explore the role of intersubjectivity in how a transpositional subjectobjectivity might work in practice. I argue that this is an approach that brings together the individual and the collective, in which the apparent subject-object divide is reconstituted as a field of interbeing relationality, a dynamic, creative reservoir of infinite potential.