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Appendixes
The two pieces that follow are connected with The Ideal of Human Unity and War and Self-Determination. Appendix I is a note Sri Aurobindo wrote during the 1930s or 1940s with reference to a proposed solution of international problems on the basis of principles put forward in The Ideal of Human Unity. Appendix II consists of a fragment found in a notebook containing miscellaneous writings by Sri Aurobindo. It appears to be a draft for the opening of an essay like those included in War and Self-Determination. It is clear from its content that it was written not long after the end of World War I, perhaps in 1919.
Page – 682 APPENDIX I
We seem at the present moment to be very far away from such a rational solution1 and indeed at the opposite pole of human possibility; we have swung back to an extreme of international disorder and to an entire application of the vital and animal principle of the struggle for survival, not of the humanly fittest, but of the strongest. But the very intensity of this struggle and disorder may be the path Nature has chosen towards the true escape from it; for it is becoming more and more evident that a long continuance of the present international state of humanity will lead not to any survival, but to the destruction of civilisation and the relapse of the race towards barbarism, decadence, an evolutionary failure. The antipathy or hostility or distrust of nations, races, cultures, religions towards each other is due to the past habit of egoistic self-assertion, desire for domination, for encroachment upon the lebensraum one of another and the consequent sense of unfriendly pressure, the fear of subjugation or domination and the oppression of the individuality of one by the other. A state of things must be brought about in which mutual toleration is the law, an order in which many elements, racial, national, cultural, spiritual can exist side by side and form a multiple unity; in such an order all these antipathies, hostilities, distrusts would die from lack of nourishment. That would be a true state of perfectly developed human civilisation, a true basis for the higher progress of the race. In this new order India with her spiritual culture turned towards the highest aims of humanity would find her rightful place and would become one of the leaders of the human evolution by the greatness of her ideals and the capacity of her peoples for the spiritualisation of life.
1 The "rational solution" referred to was a proposal for solving international problems along the lines sketched by Sri Aurobindo in chapter 18 of The Ideal of Human Unity, "The Ideal Solution -A Free Grouping of Mankind". Page – 682 |