Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Himself and the Ashram
The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35
His Life and Attempts to Write about It
Writing for
Publication
Writing Philosophy [3]
As to Radhakrishnan, I
don’t care whether he is right or wrong in his eagerness to get the blessed
contribution from me. But the first fact is that it is quite impossible for me
to write philosophy to order. If something comes to me of itself, I can write,
if I have time. But I have not time. I had some thought of writing to Adhar Das
pointing out that he was mistaken in his criticism of my ideas about
consciousness and intuition and developing briefly what were my real views about
these things. But I have never been able to do it — I might as well think of
putting the moon under my arm, Hanuman-like,— though in his case it was the sun
— and going for a walk! The moon is not available and the walk is not possible.
It would be the same if I promised anything to Radhakrishnan — it would not get
done, and that would be much worse than a refusal.
And the second fact is that I do not care a button
about my having my name in any blessed place. I was never ardent about fame even
in my political days; I preferred to remain behind the curtain, push people
without their knowing it and get things done. It was the confounded British
Government that spoiled my game by prosecuting me and forcing me to be publicly
known and a “leader”. Then again I don’t believe in advertisement except for
books etc., and in propaganda except for politics and patent medicines. But for
serious work it is a poison. It means either a stunt or a boom — and stunts and
booms exhaust the thing they carry on their crest and leave it lifeless and
broken high and dry on the shores of nowhere — or it means a movement. A
movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a
sect or some other damned nonsense. It means that hundreds or thousands of
useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from
which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence. It is
what has happened to the “religions” and is the reason of their failure. If I
tolerate a little writing about myself, it is only to have a sufficient
counterweight in that amorphous chaos, the public mind, to balance the hostility
that is always aroused by the presence of a new dynamic Truth in this world of
ignorance. But the utility ends there and too much advertisement would 
defeat that object. I am perfectly “rational”, I assure you, in my
methods and I do not proceed merely on any personal dislike of fame. If and so
far as publicity serves the Truth, I am quite ready to tolerate it; but I do not
find publicity for its own sake desirable.
This “Contemporary Philosophy”, British or Indian,
looks to me very much like bookmaking and, though the “vulgarisation” of
knowledge — to use the French term — by bookmaking may have its use, I prefer to
do solid work and leave that to others. You may say that I can write a solid
thing in philosophy and let it be bookmade. But even the solid tends to look
shoddy in such surroundings. And besides my solid work at present is not
philosophy but something less wordy and more to the point. If that work gets
done, then it will propagate itself so far as propagation is necessary — if it
were not to get done, propagation would be useless.
These are my reasons. However let us wait till the book
is there and see what kind of stuff it is.
2 October 1934