Karl Marx said that matter determines consciousness, that is, the material conditions of existence determine who we are, how we are, what we are. Right down to the platitude that you are what you eat. This material basis follows the rules of economics. As long as the economy rests on capital, its accumulation produces a superstructure that ideologically dominates the base.
Marx lived in Soho, London, from 1849 to 1883. Also in London, or rather a little outside London, about twenty kilometers away, Charles Darwin lived at almost the same time, from 1842 to 1882. Darwin thought less economically or philosophically; he thought more biologically and proposed a theory of evolution. Variations in reproduction (the concept of DNA did not yet exist) are exposed to nature’s competitive struggle, and those that confer an advantage for survival prevail. He called this natural selection.
These two thinkers decisively shaped the worldview of the capitalist West and the communist Eastern Bloc in the twentieth century. Their ideas were born at the center of the British Empire, which owed its power and wealth to the exploitation of India. There, in India, the wisdom of Indian philosophy had been suppressed for centuries, chiefly by the British (the French and Portuguese were probably a little more tolerant).
Teatime
While Marx and Darwin were therefore probably drinking Darjeeling from India, the ‘Indian Renaissance’ was emerging there, chiefly in Bengal. A movement that tried to free itself from colonial shackles and wanted to revive India’s own body of thought. Here the wisdom of the Rishis, the spirituality of the Vedas, became part of modern discussions again. What the British very ignorantly called Hinduism reduced the complexity of Indian philosophy, culture, and spirituality to a geographical ‘religion.’
Before Darwin died in London in 1882 and Marx in 1883, a little seven-year-old boy named Sri Aurobindo arrived from Bengal in Cambridge in 1879, a good eighty kilometers north of London. Arthur Schopenhauer, who found solace in the Upanishads, had died in Frankfurt in 1860; in the year of Aurobindo’s arrival in England, Friedrich Nietzsche had to give up his professorship in Basel for health reasons and succumbed to madness ten years later. Sigmund Freud was studying medicine, Carl Jung was of kindergarten age, and Albert Einstein was born that year. In the United States, Charles S. Peirce had just published “How to make our ideas clear”. Pierce writes there:
“It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty. “
And finally, in 1879, Gottlob Frege published his first book, “Concept-Script, a Formula Language of Pure Thought Modeled on That of Arithmetic,” in Jena. Pierce and Frege laid the foundations of analytic philosophy of language. But whether they really contributed to making ideas clear is open to doubt. For there is a reductionist approach here too. One could object that although consciousness quite clearly benefits from language, it cannot be reduced to it.
In 1893, the year Mahatma Gandhi went to South Africa as a lawyer for twenty-one years, Aurobindo returned to India at the age of twenty-one and taught in Baroda. His philosophy, his yoga, will become the antithesis of the materialist-reductionist philosophy of the West.
