The Human Cycle

Aurobindo's 1949 'Human Cycle' — philosophy of history through psychological stages of human collective development

Tradition: Integral Yoga / Indian philosophical history / philosophy of social development

Aurobindo's 1949 'Human Cycle' — psychological stages of human collective development (Symbolic, Typal, Conventional, Individualist, Subjective)

Serialised in Aurobindo's monthly Arya from 1916 to 1918 under the title 'The Psychology of Social Development' (across 32 monthly installments) and published as a book in 1949 (after substantial revision — Aurobindo had revised the serialisation during the 1940s when reviewing the Arya material for publication), 'The Human Cycle' applies Aurobindo's integral-evolutionary framework to philosophy of history. The book identifies five psychological stages of collective human development. Stage I: the Symbolic Age — the original stage in which collective life is organised around symbol-systems whose adequacy is taken for granted (the Vedic age in India, the Egyptian and Babylonian theocratic civilisations). Stage II: the Typal Age — the differentiation of social types whose justification rests on the symbolic-religious system but whose function is increasingly social-pragmatic (the four-fold varna system in classical India as type, the medieval European social orders). Stage III: the Conventional Age — the typal arrangements ossify into conventional structures whose original justification has been lost or forgotten (late-classical orthodoxies in many cultures). Stage IV: the Individualist Age — the conventional structures are challenged by the rise of individual reason (the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, modern Europe). Stage V: the Subjective Age — the rise of inner-spiritual subjectivity as the basis of collective life; Aurobindo identified this as the stage emerging in his own time (post-1900 spiritual and aesthetic movements). The Subjective Age opens toward what Aurobindo called the spiritualisation of society — the integration of individual spiritual realisation with collective social-political life. The book is one of the major twentieth-century philosophy-of-history works from outside the European tradition and the principal Aurobindonian application of his integral-yoga framework to political-social philosophy.