Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches — 1909-1910
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 3rd July 1909 — No.3
Opinion and Comments
The Highest Synthesis
In the Bengalee's issue of the 29th June there is a very interesting article on Nationalism and Expediency, which seems to us to call for some comment.
The object of the article is to modify or water the strong wine of Nationalism by a dash of expediency.
Nationalism is a faith, the writer admits; he even goes much farther1 than we are prepared to go and claims for Nationalism that it is the highest of all syntheses.
This is a conclusion we are not prepared to accept; it is, we know, the highest which European thought has arrived at so far as that thought has expressed itself in the actual life and ideals of the average European.
In Positivism Europe has attempted to arrive at a higher synthesis, the synthesis of humanity; and Socialism and philosophical Anarchism, the Anarchism of Tolstoy and Spencer, have even envisaged the application of the higher intellectual synthesis to life.
In India we do not recognise the nation as the highest synthesis to which we can rise.
There is a higher synthesis, humanity; beyond that there is a still higher synthesis, this living, suffering, aspiring world of creatures, the synthesis of Buddhism; there is a highest of all, the synthesis of God, and that is the Hindu synthesis, the synthesis of Vedanta.
With us today Nationalism is our immediate practical faith and gospel not because it is the highest possible synthesis, but because it must be realised in life if we are to have the chance of realising the others.
We must live as a nation before we can live in humanity.
It is for this reason that Nationalist thinkers have always urged the necessity of realising our separateness from other nations and living to ourselves for the present, not in order to shut out humanity, but that we may get that individual strength, unity and wholeness which will help us to live as a nation for humanity.
A man must be strong and free in himself before he can live usefully for others, so must a nation.
But 
that does not justify us in forgetting the ultimate aim of evolution.
God in the nation becomes the realisation of the first moment to us because the nation is the chosen means or condition through which we rise to the higher syntheses2, God in humanity, God in all creatures, God in Himself and ourself.