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TULSI-PRAJNA
Sri Aurobindo is critical of conservative reason and rationality which always tend to confuse the law of the future with the law of the past and present as if the future is merely an extension or the repitition of the past or present. Positivistic reason, as D.P Chattopadhyay 15 observes, is more faithful to actualities than to possibilities and that is why even at its best, reason can think only of that future which is more of a reproduction of the past and the present than the integral totality of the future. The nature of scientific prediction is also this kind of reductionism a second order construcs tion, as it is always a conditional and selective prediction rather than a prediction of reality in its totality.
A positivisit: minded scientist or a social scientist in his reduc. tiopist understanding is biased when he attempts to explain "ought" in terms of "is" and "ideals” in terms of "actualities” It is to this effect that Sri Aurobindo 16 writes about scientific methodology that:
We seek to copstruct systems of knowledge and systems of life by which we can arrive at some perfection of our existence some order of right relations, right use of mind, right use and happiness and beauty of life. right use of the body But what we achieve is a constructed half-rightness mixed with much that is wrong and unlovely and unhappy...
With his concept of the evolutionary integral-man, Sri Aurobindo, abrogates the division created by Descaries between existence and its concept ie., essence, moreover he undoes the split created by the Sramanic and the Vedantic (Shankarite) philosopbical schools between life and spirit through the institutionalization of Sanyas, i.e., world renunciation. To him life or the existence of man is an integral whole and his development in the world of nature and society is a process of outwardly horizontal evolution as well as an inward vertical evolution of his self-awareness which taken together constitute an integral development of man in society.
To both Sri Aurobindo and Gandhi man forms the basic unit of social development and serves as the key agent for all kinds of social changes. They do not construe social reality as sui generis, i.e., independent of man's existential context; for without articulating the dimension of human consciousness significantly with the dimension of the institutional structure of the society, no viable model of social development is possible.
Like Sri Aurobindo, Gandhi does not offer any theoretical model of social development, but through his moral praxiology and the ideas expressed in different writings, a well-articulated system of
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