{"id":1183,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:07","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1183"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:07","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:07","slug":"11-civilisation-and-culture-vol-15-social-and-political-thought-volume-15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/15-social-and-political-thought-volume-15\/11-civilisation-and-culture-vol-15-social-and-political-thought-volume-15","title":{"rendered":"-11_Civilisation and Culture.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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\n


\n\t\tCHAPTER <\/font><\/b>
\nIX<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>
\nCivilisation and Culture<\/font><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0                        
\n<\/font> <\/span>NATURE
\nstarts from Matter, develops out of it its hidden Life, releases out of
\ninvolution in life all the crude material of Mind and, when she is ready, turns
\nMind upon itself and upon Life and Matter in a -great mental effort to
\nunderstand all three in their phenomena, their obvious action, their secret
\nlaws, their normal and abnormal possibilities and powers so that they may be
\nturned to the richest account, used in the best and most harmonious way,
\nelevated to their highest as well as extended to their widest potential aims by
\nthe action of that faculty which man alone of terrestrial creatures clearly
\npossesses, the intelligent will. It is only in this fourth stage of her
\nprogress that she arrives at humanity. The atoms and the elements organise
\nbrute Matter, the plant develops the living being, the animal prepares and
\nbrings to a certain kind of mechanical organisation the crude material of Mind,
\nbut the last work of all, the knowledge and control of all these things and
\nself-knowledge and self- control, – that has been reserved for Man, Nature’s
\nmental being.’ That he may better do the work she has given him, she compels
\nhim to repeat physically and to some extent mentally stages of her animal
\nevolution and, even when he is in possession of his mental being, she induces
\nhim continually to dwell with an interest and even a kind of absorption upon
\nMatter and Life and his own body and vital existence. This is necessary to the
\nlarge- ness of her purpose in him. His first natural absorption in the body and
\nthe life is narrow and unintelligent; as his intelligence and mental force
\nincrease, he disengages himself to some extent, is able to mount higher, but is
\nstill tied to his vital and material roots by need and desire and has to return
\nupon them with a larger curiosity, a greater power of utilisation, a more and
\nmore highly mental and, in the end, a more and more spiritual aim in the
\nreturn. For his cycles are circles of a growing, but still im-<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/font>Page \u2013 74<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

perfect harmony and synthesis, and she brings him back
\nviolently to her original principles, sometimes even to something like her
\nearlier conditions so that he may start afresh on a larger curve of progress and
\nself-fulfilment.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>It would seem at first sight that
\nsince man is pre-eminently the mental being, the development of the mental
\nfaculties and the richness of the mental life should be his highest aim,- his
\npreoccupying aim, even, as soon as he has got rid of the obsession of the life
\nand body and provided for the indispensable satisfaction of the gross needs
\nwhich our physical and animal nature imposes on us. Knowledge, science, art,
\nthought, ethics, philosophy, religion, this is man’s real business, these are
\nhis true affairs. To be is for him not merely to be born, grow up, marry, get
\nhis livelihood, support a family and then die, –
\nthe vital and physical life, a human edition of the animal round, a human
\nenlargement of the little animal sector and arc of the divine circle; rather to
\nbecome and grow mentally and live with knowledge and power within himself as
\nwell as from within outward is his manhood. But there is here a double motive
\nof Nature, an insistent duality in her human purpose. Man is here to learn from
\nher how to control and create; but she evidently means him not only to control,
\ncreate and constantly re-create in new and better forms himself, his own inner
\nexistence, his mentality, but also to control and re-create correspondingly his
\nenvironment. He has to turn Mind not only on itself, but on Life and Matter and
\nthe material existence; that is very clear not only from the law and nature of
\nthe terrestrial evolution, but from his own past and present history. And there
\ncomes from the observation of these conditions and of his highest aspirations
\nand impulses the question whether he is not intended, not only to expand
\ninwardly and outwardly, but to grow upward, wonderfully exceeding himself as he
\nhas wonderfully exceeded his animal beginnings, into something more than
\nmental, more than human, into a being spiritual and divine. Even if he cannot
\ndo that, yet he may have to open his mind to what is beyond it and to govern
\nhis life more and more by the light and power that he receives from something
\ngreater than himself. Man’s consciousness of the divine within himself and the
\nworld is the supreme fact of his<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/font>Page \u2013 75<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

existence and to grow into that may very well be the
\nintention of his nature. In any case the fullness of Life is his evident
\nobject, the widest life and the highest life possible to him, whether that be a
\ncomplete humanity or a new and divine race. We must recognise both his need of
\nintegrality and his impulse of self-exceeding if we would fix rightly the
\nmeaning of his individual existence and the perfect aim and norm of his
\nsociety.<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n


\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>The pursuit
\nof the mental life for its own sake is what we ordinarily mean by culture; but
\nthe word is still a little equivocal and capable of a wider or a narrower sense
\naccording to our ideas and predilections. For our mental existence is a very
\ncomplex matter and is made up of many elements. First, we have its lower and
\nfundamental stratum, which is in the scale of evolution nearest to the vital.
\nAnd we have in that stratum two sides, the mental life of the senses,
\nsensations and emotions in which the subjective purpose of Nature predominates
\nalthough with the objective as its occasion, and the active or dynamic life of
\nthe mental being concerned with the organs of action and the field of conduct
\nin which her objective purpose predominates although with the subjective as its
\noccasion. We have next in the scale, more sublimated, on one side the moral
\nbeing and its ethical life, on the other the aesthetic; each of them attempts
\nto possess and dominate the fundamental mind stratum and turn its experiences
\nand activities to its own benefit, one for the culture and worship of Right,
\nthe other for the culture and worship of Beauty. And we have, above all these,
\ntaking advantage of them, helping, forming, trying often to govern them
\nentirely, the intellectual being. Man’s highest accomplished range is the life
\nof the reason or ordered and harmonised intelligence with its dynamic power of
\nintelligent will, the buddhi, <\/i>which
\nis or should be the driver of man’s chariot.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But the intelligence of man is not
\ncomposed entirely and exclusively of the rational intellect and the rational
\nwill; there enters into it a deeper, more intuitive, more splendid and
\npowerful, but much less clear, much less developed and as yet hardly at all
\nself-possessing light and force for which we have not even a name. But, at any
\nrate, its character is to drive at a kind of illumination, – not the dry light
\nof the reason, nor the moist and<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 76<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

suffused light of the heart, but a lightning and a solar
\nsplendour. It may indeed subordinate itself and merely help the reason and
\nheart with its flashes; but there is another urge in it, its natural urge,
\nwhich exceeds the reason. It tries to illuminate the intellectual being, to
\nilluminate the ethical and aesthetic, to illuminate the emotional and the
\nactive, to illuminate even the senses and the sensations. It offers in words of
\nrevelation, it unveils as if by lightning flashes, it shows in a sort of mystic
\nor psychic glamour or brings out into a settled but for mental man almost a
\nsuper- natural light, a Truth greater and truer than the knowledge given by
\nReason and Science, a Right larger and more divine than the moralist’s scheme
\nof virtues, a Beauty more profound, universal and entrancing than the sensuous
\nor imaginative beauty worshipped by the artist, a joy and divine sensibility
\nwhich leaves the ordinary emotions poor and pallid, a Sense beyond the senses
\nand sensations, the possibility of a diviner Life and action which man’s ordinary conduct of life hides<\/span>
\naway from his impulses and <\/span>from
\nhis vision. Very various, very fragmentary, often very confused and misleading
\nare its effects upon all the lower members from the reason downward, but this
\nin the end is what it is driving at in the midst of a hundred deformations. It
\nis caught and killed or at least diminished and stifled in formal creeds and
\npious observances; it is unmercifully traded in and turned into poor and base
\ncoin by the vulgarity of conventional religions; but it is still the light of
\nwhich the religious spirit and the spirituality of man is in pursuit and some
\npale glow of it lingers even in their worst degradations.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This very complexity of his mental
\nbeing, with the absence of anyone principle which can safely dominate the
\nothers, the absence of any sure and certain light which can guide and fix in
\ntheir vacillations the reason and the intelligent will, is man’s great
\nembarrassment and stumbling-block. All the hostile distinctions, oppositions,
\nantagonisms, struggles, conversions, reversions, perversions of his mentality,
\nall the chaotic war of ideas and impulses and tendencies which perplex his
\nefforts, have arisen from the natural misunderstandings and conflicting claims
\nof his many members. His reason is a judge who gives conflicting verdicts and
\nis bribed and influenced by the suitors;<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/font>Page \u2013 77<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

his intelligent will is an administrator harassed by the
\nconflicts of the different estates of his realm and by the sense of his own
\npartiality and final incompetence. Still in the midst of it all he has formed
\ncertain large ideas of culture and the mental life, and his conflicting notions
\nabout them follow certain definite lines determined by the divisions of his
\nnature and shaped into a general system of curves by his many attempts to
\narrive either at an exclusive standard or an integral harmony.<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n


\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>We have
\nfirst the distinction between civilisation and barbarism. In its ordinary
\n,popular sense civilisation means the state of civil society, governed,
\npoliced, organised, educated, possessed of knowledge and appliances as opposed
\nto that which has not or is not supposed to have these advantages. In a certain
\nsense the Red Indian, the Basuto, the Fiji islander had their civilisation;
\nthey possessed a rigorously, if simply organised society, a social law, some
\nethical ideas, a religion, a kind of training, a good many virtues in some of
\nwhich, it is said, civilisation is sadly lacking; but we are agreed to call
\nthem savages and barbarians, mainly it seems, because of their crude and
\nlimited knowledge, the primitive rudeness of their appliances and the bare
\nsimplicity of their social organisation. In the more developed states of
\nsociety we have such epithets ‘as semi-civilised and semi-barbarous which are
\napplied. by different types of civilisation to each other, – the one which is for a time dominant and
\nphysically successful has naturally the loudest and most self- confident say in
\nthe matter. Formerly men were more straight- forward and simple-minded and
\nfrankly expressed their stand- point by stigmatising all peoples different in
\ngeneral culture from themselves as barbarians or Mlechchhas. The word
\ncivilisation so used comes to have a merely relative significance or hardly any
\nfixed sense at all. We must therefore get rid in it of all that is temporary or
\naccidental and fix it upon this distinction that barbarism is the state of
\nsociety in which man is almost entirely preoccupied with his life and body, his
\neconomic and physical existence, – at first with their sufficient maintenance,
\nnot as yet their greater or richer well-being, – and has few means and little
\ninclination to develop his mentality, while civilisation is the more evolved
\nstate of society in which to a<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 78<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

sufficient
\nsocial and economic organisation is added the activity of the mental life in
\nmost if not all of its parts; for sometimes some of these parts are left aside
\nor discouraged or temporarily atrophied by their inactivity, yet the society
\nmay be very obviously civilised and even highly civilised. This conception will
\nbring in all the civilisations historic and prehistoric and put aside all the
\nbarbarism, whether of Africa or Europe or Asia, Hun or Goth or Vandal or
\nTurcoman. It is obvious that in a state of barbarism the rude beginnings of
\ncivilisation may exist; it is obvious too that in a civilised society a great
\nmass of barbarism or numerous relics of it may exist. In that sense all
\nsocieties are semi- civilised. How much of our present-day civilisation will be
\nlooked back upon with wonder and disgust by a more developed humanity as the
\nsuperstitions and atrocities of an imperfectly civilised era! But the main
\npoint is this that in any society which we can call civilised the mentality of
\nman must be active, the mental pursuits developed and the regulation and
\nimprovement of his life by the mental being a clearly self-conscious concept in
\nhis better mind.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>But in a civilised society there is
\nstill the distinction between the partially, crudely, conventionally civillsed
\nand the cultured. It would seem therefore that the mere participation in the
\nordinary benefits of civilisation is not enough to raise a man into the mental
\nlife proper; a farther development, a higher elevation is needed. The last
\ngeneration drew emphatically the distinction between the cultured man and the
\nPhilistine and got a fairly clear idea of what was meant by it. Roughly, the
\nPhilistine was for them the man who lives outwardly the civilised life,
\npossesses all its paraphernalia, has and mouths the current stock of opinions,
\nprejudices; conventions, sentiments, but is impervious to ideas, exercises no
\nfree intelligence, is innocent of beauty and art, vulgarises everything that he
\ntouches, religion, ethics, literature, life. The Philistine is in fact the
\nmodern civilised barbarian; he is often the half-civilised physical and vital
\nbarbarian by his unintelligent attachment to the life of the body, the life of
\nthe vital needs and impulses and the ideal of the merely domestic and economic
\nhuman animal; but essentially and commonly he is the mental barbarian, the
\naverage sensational man. That is to<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 79<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

say, his mental
\nlife is that of the lower substratum of the mind, the life of the sensations,
\nthe life of the emotions, the life of practical conduct – the first status of
\nthe mental being. In all these he may be very active, very vigorous, but he
\ndoes not govern them by a higher light or seek to uplift them to a freer and
\nnobler eminence; rather he pulls the higher faculties down to the level of his
\nsenses, his sensations, his unenlightened and unchastened emotions, his gross
\nutilitarian practicality. His aesthetic side is little developed; either he
\ncares nothing for beauty or has the crudest aesthetic tastes which help to
\nlower and vulgarise the general standard of aesthetic creation and the
\naesthetic sense. He is often strong about morals, far more particular usually
\nabout moral conduct than the man of culture, but Ills moral being is as crude
\nand undeveloped as the rest of him; it is conventional, unchastened,
\nunintelligent, a mass of likes and dislikes, prejudices and current opinions,
\nattachment to social conventions and respectabilities and an obscure dislike
\n– rooted in the mind of sensations and not in the
\nintelligence – of any open defiance or
\ndeparture from the generally accepted standard of conduct. His ethical bent is
\na habit of the sense- mind; it is the morality of the average sensational man.
\nHe has a reason and the appearance of an intelligent will, but they are not his
\nown, they are part of the group-mind, received from his environment; or so far
\nas they are his own, merely a practical, sensational, emotional reason and
\nwill, a mechanical repetition of habitual notions and rules of conduct, not a
\nplay of real thought and intelligent determination. His use of them no more
\nmakes him a developed mental being than the daily movement to and from his
\nplace of business makes the average Londoner a developed physical being or his
\nquotidian contributions to the economic life of the country make the bank-clerk
\na developed economic man. He is not mentally active, but mentally reactive,
\n<\/font> – a very different matter.<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\n\u00a0<\/span>The Philistine is not dead, – quite the
\ncontrary, he abounds, <\/span>– but he no longer reigns. The sons of Culture
\nhave not exactly conquered, but they have got rid of the old Goliath and
\nreplaced him by a new giant. This is the sensational man who has got awakened
\nto the necessity at least of some intelligent use of the<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 80<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

higher faculties and is trying to be mentally active. He
\nhas been whipped and censured and educated into that activity and he lives
\nbesides in a maelstrom of new information, new intellectual fashions, new ideas
\nand new movements to which he can no longer be obstinately impervious. He is
\nopen to new ideas, he can catch at them and hurl them about in a rather
\nconfused fashion; he can understand, or misunderstand ideals, organise to get
\nthem carried out and even, it would appear, fight and die for them. He knows he
\nhas to think about ethical problems, social problems, problems of science and
\nreligion, to welcome new political developments, to look with as understanding
\nan eye as he can attain to at all the new movements of thought and inquiry and
\naction that chase each other across the modem field or clash upon it. He is a
\nreader of poetry as well as a devourer of fiction and periodical literature, – you will find in him perhaps a student of
\nTagore or an admirer of Whitman; he has perhaps no very clear ideas about
\nbeauty and aesthetics, but he has heard that Art is a not altogether
\nunimportant part of life. The shadow of this new colossus is everywhere. He is
\nthe great reading public; the newspapers and weekly and monthly reviews are
\nhis; fiction and poetry and art are his mental caterers, the theatre and the
\ncinema and the radio exist for him: Science hastens to bring her knowledge and
\ndiscoveries to his doors and equip his life with endless machinery; politics
\nare shaped in his image. It is he who opposed and then brought about the
\nenfranchisement of women, who has been evolving syndicalism, anarchism, the war
\nof classes, the uprising of labour, waging what we are told are wars of ideas,
\nor of cultures, – a ferocious type of conflict made in the very image of this
\nnew barbarism, – or bringing about in a few days Russian revolutions which the
\ncentury-long efforts and sufferings of the intelligentsia failed to achieve. It
\nis his coming which has been the precipitative agent for the reshaping of the
\nmodem world. If a Lenin, a Mussolini, a Hitler have achieved their rapid and
\nalmost stupefying success, it was because this driving force, this quick
\nresponsive acting mass was there to carry them to victory – a force lacking to
\ntheir less fortunate predecessors.
\n<\/font>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>
\nThe first results of this
\nmomentous change have been<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t <\/font>Page \u2013 81<\/font><\/p>\n

\n


\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>inspiriting to our desire of movement, but a little disconcerting to the
\nthinker and to the lover of a high and fine culture; for if it has to some
\nextent democratised culture or the semblance of culture, it does not seem at
\nfirst sight to have elevated or strengthened it by this large accession of the
\nhalf-redeemed from below. Nor does the world seem to be guided any more
\ndirectly by the reason and intelligent will of her best minds than before.
\nCommercialism is still the heart of modem civilisation; a sensational activism
\nis still its driving force. Modern education has not in the mass redeemed the
\nsensational man; it has only made necessary to him things to which he was not
\nformerly accustomed, mental activity and occupations, intellectual and even
\naesthetic sensations, emotions of idealism. He still lives in the vital
\nsubstratum, but he wants it stimulated from above. He requires an army of
\nwriters to keep him mentally occupied and provide some sort of intellectual
\npabulum for him; he has a thirst for general information of all kinds which he
\ndoes not care or has not time to co-ordinate or assimilate, for popularised
\nscientific knowledge, for such new ideas as he can catch, provided they are put
\nbefore him with force or brilliance, for mental sensations and excitation of
\nmany kinds, for ideals which he likes to think of as actuating his conduct and
\nwhich do give it sometimes a certain colour. It is still the activism and
\nsensationalism of the crude mental being, but much more open and free. And the
\ncultured, the intelligentsia find that they can get a hearing from him such as
\nthey never had from the pure Philistine, provided they can first stimulate or
\namuse him; their ideas have now a chance of getting executed such as they never
\nhad before. The result has been to cheapen thought and art and literature, to
\nmake talent and even genius run in the grooves of popular suc- cess, to put the
\nwriter and thinker and scientist very much in a position like that of the
\ncultured Greek slave in a Roman house- hold where he has to work for, please
\namuse and instruct his master while keeping a careful eye on his tastes and
\npreferences and repeating trickily the manner and the points that have caught
\nhis fancy. The higher mental life, in a word, has been democratised,
\nsensationalised, activised with both good and bad results. Through it all the
\neye of faith can see perhaps that a yet crude<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 82<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

but an enormous change has begun. Thought and Knowledge,
\nif <\/i>not yet Beauty, can get a hearing
\nand even produce rapidly some large, vague, yet in the end effective will for
\ntheir results; the mass of culture and of men who think and strive seriously to
\nappreciate and to know has enormously increased behind all this <\/i>surface veil of sensationalism, and even the sensational man
\nhas begun to undergo a process of transformation. Especially, new methods of
\neducation, new principles of society are beginning to come into the range of
\npractical possibility which will create perhaps one day that as yet unknown
\nphenomenon, a race of men – not only a class – who have to some extent found
\nand developed their mental selves, a cultured humanity.<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 83<\/font><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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