ABSTRACT
The author offers a reading of The Human Cycle as Aurobindo's philosophy of history, arguing that it provides the larger narrative that supplies meaning for Aurobindo's enquiry into religion. With respect to traditionary enquiry, he has already shown that not only does it possess a tradition-constituted rationality, but also textuality, in that it progresses through the chain of interpretations of its authoritative texts through the mechanism of transcendence. In this chapter, the author argues that Aurobindo's traditionary-hermeneutics is demonstrated in The Human Cycle as a historical narrative that appropriates 'past meanings' in an open-ended narrative, the mechanism that generates tradition. With regard to the study of religion, he argues that religion is best understood as a narrative rather than as a category. With regard to dialogical hermeneutics, if imagination as the ontological ground for dialogue supplies the possibility to go beyond incommensurability between traditions, then 'different' interpretation-narratives can be engaged with one another in the 'act of interrogation' in dialogue.
