{"id":1189,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:09","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1189"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:09","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:09","slug":"12-aesthetic-and-ethical-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\/12-aesthetic-and-ethical-culture-vol-15-social-and-political-thought-volume-15","title":{"rendered":"-12_Aesthetic and Ethical Culture.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n


\nCHAPTER <\/font><\/b> X<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


\n <\/font><\/span>Aesthetic and Ethical Culture<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

                        THE idea of culture begins to define itself for us a little more
\nclearly, or at least it has put away from it in a clear contrast its natural
\nopposites. The unmental, the purely physical life is very obviously its
\nopposite, it is barbarism; the unintellectualised vital, the crude economic or
\nthe grossly domestic life which looks only to money-getting, the procreation of
\na family and its maintenance, are equally its opposites; they are another and
\neven uglier barbarism. We agree to regard the individual who is dominated by
\nthem and has no thought of higher things as an uncultured and undeveloped human
\nbeing, a prolongation of the savage, essentially a barbarian even if he lives
\nin a civilised nation and in a society which has arrived at the general idea
\nand at some ordered practice of culture and refinement. The societies or
\nnations which bear this stamp we agree to call barbarous or semi-barbarous.
\nEven when a nation or an age has developed within itself knowledge and science
\nand arts, but still in its general outlook, its habits of life and thought is
\ncontent to be governed not by knowledge and truth and beauty and high ideals of
\nliving, but by the gross vital, commercial, economic view of existence, we say
\nthat that nation or age may be civilised in a sense, but for all its abundant
\nor even redundant appliances and apparatus of civilisation it is not the
\nrealisation or the promise of a cultured humanity. Therefore upon even the
\nEuropean civilisation of the nineteenth century with all its triumphant and
\nteeming production, its great developments of science, its achievement in the
\nworks of the intellect we pass a certain condemnation, because it has turned
\nall these things to commercialism and to gross uses of vitalistic success. We
\nsay of it that this was not the perfection to which humanity ought to aspire
\nand that this trend travels away from and not towards the higher curve of human
\nevolution. It must be our definite verdict<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 84<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

upon it that it was inferior as an age of culture to
\nancient Athens, to Italy of the Renascence, to ancient or classical India. For
\ngreat as might be the deficiencies of social organisation in those eras and
\nthough their range of scientific knowledge and material achievement was
\nimmensely inferior, yet they were more advanced in the art of life, knew better
\nits object and aimed more powerfully at some clear ideal of human perfection.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>In the range of the mind’s life
\nitself, to live in its merely practical and dynamic activity or in the
\nmentalised emotional or sensational current, a life of conventional conduct,
\naverage feelings, customary ideas, opinions and prejudices which are not one’s
\nown but those of the environment, to have no free and open play of mind, but to
\nlive grossly and unthinkingly by the unintelligent rule’ of the many, to live
\nbesides according to the senses and sensations controlled by certain
\nconventions, but neither purified nor enlightened nor chastened by any law of beauty,<\/span> –<\/span> all this too is
\ncontrary to the ideal of culture.<\/span> A-
\n<\/span>man may so live with all the appearance or all the pretensions of a
\ncivilised existence, enjoy successfully all the plethora of its appurtenances,
\nbut he is not in the real sense a developed human being. A society following
\nsuch a rule of life may be anything else you will, vigorous, decent,
\nwell-ordered, successful, religious, moral, but it is a Philistine society; it
\nis a prison which the human soul has to break. For so long as it dwells there,
\nit dwells in an inferior, uninspired and unexpandjng mental status; it
\nvegetates infructuously in the lower stratum and is governed not by the higher
\nfaculties of man, but by the crudities of the un- uplifted sense-mind. Nor is
\nit enough for it to open windows in this prison by which it may get draughts of
\nagreeable fresh air, something of the free light of the intellect, something of
\nthe fragrance of art and beauty, something of the large breath of wider
\ninterests and higher ideals. It has yet to break out of its prison altogether
\nand live in that free light, in that fragrance and large breath; only then does
\nit breathe the natural atmosphere of the developed mental being. Not to live
\nprincipally in the activities of the sense-mind, but in the activities of
\nknowledge and reason and a wide intellectual curiosity, the activities of the
\ncultivated aesthetic being, the activities of the enlightened will which make<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 85<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

for character and high ethical ideals and a large human
\naction, not to be governed by our lower or our average mentality but by truth
\nand beauty and the self-ruling will is the ideal of a true culture and the
\nbeginning of an accomplished humanity;
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>We get then by elimination to a
\npositive idea and definition of culture. But still on still on the higher plane
\nof the mental life we are apt to be pursued by old exc1usivenesses and
\nmisunderstandings. We see that in the past there seems often to have been a
\nquarrel between culture and conduct; yet according to our definition conduct
\nalso is a part of the cultured life and the ethical ideality one of the master
\nimpulses of the cultured being. The opposition which puts on one side the
\npursuit of ideas and knowledge and beauty and calls that culture and on the
\nother the pursuit of character and conduct and exalts that as the moral life
\nmust start evidently from an imperfect view of human possibility and
\nperfection. Yet that opposition has not only existed, but is a naturally strong
\ntendency of the human mind and therefore must answer to some real and important
\ndivergence in the very composite elements of our being. It is the opposition
\nwhich Arnold drew between Hebraism and Hellenism. The trend of the Jewish
\nnation which gave us the severe ethical religion of the Old Testament, – crude,
\nconventional and barbarous enough in the Mosaic law, but rising to undeniable
\nheights of moral exaltation when to the Law were added the Prophets, and
\nfinally exceeding itself and blossoming into a fine flower of spirituality in
\nJudaic Christianity, (<\/font>)<\/font><\/span> –<\/span> was dominated
\nby the preoccupation of a terrestrial and ethical righteousness and the
\npromised rewards of right worship and right doing, but innocent of science and
\nphilosophy, careless of knowledge, indifferent to beauty. The Hellenic mind was
\nless exclusively but still largely dominated by a love of the play of reason
\nfor its own sake, but even more powerfully by a high sense of beauty, a clear
\naesthetic sensibility and a worship of the beautiful in every activity, in
\nevery creation, in thought, in art, in life, in religion. So strong was this
\nsense that not only manners, but ethics were seen by it to a very remark-<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1 <\/font>
\n<\/sup>The
\nepithet is needed, for European Christianity has been something different, even
\nat its best of another temperament, Latinised, Graecised, Celticised or else
\nonly a rough<\/font><\/span>
\nTeutonic imitation of the old-world Hebraism.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 86<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

able extent in the light of its master idea of beauty;
\nthe good was to its instinct largely the becoming and the beautiful. In
\nphilosophy itself it succeeded in arriving at the conception of the Divine as
\nBeauty, a truth ‘which the metaphysician very readily misses and impoverishes
\nhis thought by missing it. But still, striking as is this great historical
\ncontrast and powerful as were its results on European culture, we have to go
\nbeyond its outward manifestation if we would understand in its source this
\npsycho- logical opposition.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The conflict arises from that sort
\nof triangular disposition of the higher or more subtle mentality which we have
\nalready had occasion to indicate. There is in our mentality a side of will,
\nconduct, character which creates the ethical man; there is another side of
\nsensibility to the beautiful, –<\/span>
\nunderstanding beauty in no narrow or hyperartistic sense, –<\/span> which creates the artistic and
\naesthetic man. Therefore there can be such a thing as a predominantly or even
\nexclusively ethical culture; there can be too, evidently, a predominantly or
\neven exclusively aesthetic culture. There are at once created two conflicting
\nideals which must naturally stand opposed and look askance at each other with a
\nmutual distrust or even reprobation. The aesthetic man tends to be impatient of
\nthe ethical rule; he feels it to be a barrier to his aesthetic freedom and an
\noppression on the play of his artistic sense and his artistic faculty; he is
\nnaturally hedonistic, –<\/span> for beauty and delight are inseparable
\npowers, – and <\/span>the ethical rule tramples on pleasure, even very often on
\nquite innocent pleasures, and tries to put a strait waistcoat on the human
\nimpulse to delight. He may accept the ethical rule when it makes itself
\nbeautiful or even seize on it as one of his instruments for creating beauty,
\nbut only when he can subordinate it to the aesthetic principle of his nature, –
\njust as he is often drawn to religion by its side of beauty, pomp, magnificent
\nritual, emotional satisfaction, repose or poetic ideality and aspiration, – we
\nmight almost say, by the hedonistic aspects of religion. Even when fully
\naccepted, it is not for their own sake that he accepts them. The ethical man
\nrepays this natural repulsion with interest. He tends to distrust art and the
\naesthetic sense as some- thing lax and emollient, something in its nature
\nundisciplined and<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 87<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

by its attractive appeals to the passions and emotions
\ndestructive of a high and strict self-control. He sees that it is hedonistic
\nand he finds that the hedonistic impulse is non-moral and often immoral. It is
\ndifficult for him to see how the indulgence of the aesthetic impulse beyond a
\nvery narrow and carefully guarded limit can be combined with a strict ethical
\nlife. He evolves the puritan who objects to pleasure on principle; not only in
\nhis extremes – and a predominant impulse tends to become absorbing and leads
\ntowards extremes – but in the core of his temperament he remains fundamentally
\nthe puritan. The misunderstanding between these two sides of our nature is an
\ninevitable circumstance of our human growth which must try them to their
\nfullest separate possibilities and experiment in extremes in order that it may
\nunderstand the whole range of its capacities.
\n       
\nSociety is only an enlargement of the individual; therefore this contrast and
\nopposition between individual types reproduces itself in a like contrast and
\nopposition between social and national types. We must not go for the best
\nexamples to social formulas which do not really illustrate these tendencies but
\nare depravations, deformations or deceptive conformities. We must not take as
\nan instance of the ethical turn the middle-class puritanism touched with a
\nnarrow, tepid and conventional religiosity which was so marked an element in
\nnineteenth-century England; that was not an ethical culture, but simply a local
\nvariation of the general type of bourgeois respectability you will find every-
\nwhere at a certain stage of civilisation, – it was Philistinism pure and
\nsimple. Nor should we take as an instance of the aesthetic any merely Bohemian
\nsociety or such examples as London of the Restoration or Paris in certain brief
\nperiods of its history; that, whatever some of its pretensions, had for its
\nprinciple, always, the indulgence of the average sensational and sensuous man
\nfreed from the conventions of morality by a superficial intellectualism and
\naestheticism. Nor even can we take Puritan England as the ethical type; for
\nalthough there was there a strenuous, an exaggerated culture of character and
\nthe ethical being, the determining tendency was religious, and the religious
\nimpulse is a phenomenon quite apart from our other subjective tendencies,<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 88<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

though it influences them all; it is sui generis <\/i>and must be treated
\nseparately. To get at real, if not always quite pure examples of the type we
\nmust go back a little farther in time and contrast early republican Rome or, in
\nGreece itself, Sparta with Periclean Athens. For as we come down the stream of Time
\nin its present curve of evolution, humanity in the mass, carrying in it its
\npast collective experience, becomes more and more complex and the old distinct
\ntypes do not recur or recur precariously and with difficulty.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Republican Rome –<\/span> before it was touched and finally
\ntaken captive by conquered Greece –
\nstands out in relief as one of the <\/span>most striking psychological phenomena
\nof human history. From the point of view of human development it presents
\nitself as an almost unique experiment in high and strong character-building
\ndivorced as far as may be from the sweetness which the sense of beauty and the
\nlight which the play of the reason brings into character and uninspired by the
\nreligious temperament; for the early Roman creed was a superstition, a superficial
\nreligiosity and had nothing in it of the true religious spirit. Rome was the
\nhuman will oppressing and disciplining the emotional and sensational mind in
\norder to arrive at the self-mastery of a definite ethical type; and it was this
\nself-mastery which enabled the Roman republic to arrive also at the mastery of
\nits environing world and impose on the nations its public order and law. All
\nsupremely successful imperial nations have had in their culture or in their
\nnature, in their formative or expansive periods, this predominance of the will,
\nthe character, the impulse to self- discipline and self-mastery which
\nconstitutes the very basis of the ethical tendency. Rome and Sparta like other
\nethical civilisations had their considerable moral deficiencies, tolerated or
\ndeliberately encouraged customs and practices which we should call immoral,
\nfailed to develop the gentler and more delicate side of moral character, but
\nthis is of no essential importance. The ethical idea in man changes and
\nenlarges its scope, but the kernel of the true ethical being remains always the
\nsame, –<\/span> will, character,
\nself-discipline, self-mastery.<\/font>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span><\/p>\n


\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>Its limitations
\nat once appear, when we look back at its prominent examples. Early Rome and
\nSparta were barren of<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 89<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

thought, art, poetry, literature, the larger mental
\nlife, all the amenity and pleasure. of human existence; their art of life
\nexcluded or discouraged the delight of living. They were distrustful, as the
\nexclusively ethical man is always distrustful, of free and flexible thought and
\nthe aesthetic impulse. The earlier spirit of republican Rome held at arm’s
\nlength as long as possible the Greek influences that invaded her, closed the
\nschools of the Greek teachers, banished the philosophers, and her most typical
\nminds looked upon the Greek language as a peril and Greek culture as an
\nabomination: she felt instinctively the arrival at her gates of an enemy,
\ndivined a hostile and destructive force fatal to her principle of living.
\nSparta, though a Hellenic city, admitted as almost the sole aesthetic element
\nof her deliberate ethical training and education a martial music and poetry,
\nand even then, when she wanted a poet of war, she had to import an Athenian. We
\nhave a curious example of the repercussion of this instinctive distrust even on
\na large and aesthetic Athenian mind in the utopian speculations of Plato who
\nfelt himself obliged in his Republic first to censure and then to banish the
\npoets from his ideal polity. The end of these purely ethical cultures bears witness to their insufficiency. Either they
\npass<\/span> away<\/span> leaving <\/span>nothing or little behind them by which the future can be
\nattracted and satisfied, as Sparta passed, or they collapse in a revolt of the
\ncomplex nature of man against an unnatural restriction and repression, as the
\nearly Roman type collapsed into the egoistic and often orgiastic license of
\nlater republican and imperial Rome. The human mind needs to think, feel, enjoy,
\nexpand; expansion is its very nature and restriction is only useful to it in so
\nfar as it helps to steady, guide and strengthen its expansion. It readily
\nrefuses the name of culture to those civilisations or periods, however noble
\ntheir aim or even however ‘beautiful in itself their order, which have not
\nallowed an intelligent freedom of development.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>On the other hand, we are tempted
\nto give the name of a full culture to all those periods and civilisations,
\nwhatever their defects, which have encouraged a freely human development and
\nlike ancient Athens have concentrated on thought and beauty and the delight of
\nliving. But there were in the’ Athenian deve-<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-90<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

lopment two distinct periods, one of art and beauty, the
\nAthens of Phidias and Sophocles, and one of thought, the Athens of the
\nphilosophers. In the first period the sense of beauty and the need of freedom
\nof life and the enjoyment of life are the determining forces. This Athens
\nthought, but it thought in the terms of art and poetry, in figures of music and
\ndrama and architecture and sculpture; it delighted in intellectual discussion,
\nbut not so much with any will to arrive at truth as for the pleasure of
\nthinking and the beauty of ideas. It had its moral order, for<\/font>\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>with out
\nthat no society can exist, but it had no true ethical impulse or ethical type,
\nonly a conventional and customary morality; and when it thought about ethics,
\nit tended to express it in the terms of beauty, to kalon, to epieikes, <\/i>the beautiful, the becoming. Its very
\nreligion was a religion of beauty and an occasion for pleasant ritual and
\nfestivals and for artistic creation, an aesthetic enjoyment touched with a
\nsuperficial religious sense. But without character, without some kind of high
\nor strong discipline there is no enduring power of life. Athens exhausted its
\nvitality within one wonderful century which left it enervated, will-less,
\nunable to succeed in the struggle of life, uncreative. It turned indeed for a
\ntime precisely to that which had been lacking to it, the serious pursuit of
\ntruth and the evolution of systems of ethical self-discipline; but it could
\nonly think, it could not successfully practise. The later Hellenic mind and
\nAthenian centre of culture gave to Rome the great Stoic system of ethical
\ndiscipline which saved her in the midst of the orgies of her first imperial
\ncentury, but could not itself be stoical in its practice; for to Athens and to
\nthe characteristic temperament of Hellas, this thought was a straining to
\nsomething it had not and could not have; it was the opposite of its nature and
\nnot its fulfilment.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>This insufficiency of the aesthetic
\nview of life becomes yet more evident when we come down to its other great
\nexample, Italy of the Renascence. The Renascence was regarded at one time as
\npre-eminently a revival of learning, but in its Mediterranean birth-place it was
\nrather the efflorescence of art and poetry and the beauty of life. Much more
\nthan was possible even in the laxest times of Hellas, aesthetic culture was
\ndivorced from the ethical impulse and at times was even anti-ethical and re-<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-91<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

miniscent of the license of imperial Rome. It had
\nlearning and curiosity, but gave very little of itself to high thought and
\ntruth and the more finished achievements of the reason, although it helped to
\nmake free the way for philosophy and science. It so corrupted religion as to
\nprovoke in the ethically minded Teutonic nations the violent revolt of the
\nReformation, which, though it vindicated the freedom of the religious mind, was
\nan insurgence not so much of the reason, – that was left to Science, – but of the moral instinct and its ethical
\nneed. The subsequent prostration and loose weakness of Italy was the inevitable
\nresult of the great defect of its period of fine culture, and it needed for its
\nrevival the new impulse of thought and will and character given to it by
\nMazzini. If the ethical impulse is not sufficient by itself for the development
\nof the human being, yet are will, character, self- discipline; self-mastery
\nindispensable to that development. They are the backbone of the mental body.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Neither the ethical being nor the
\naesthetic being is the whole man, nor can either be his sovereign principle;
\nthey are merely two powerful elements. Ethical conduct is not the whole of
\nlife; even to say that it is three-fourths of life is to indulge in a very
\ndoubtful mathematics. We cannot assign to it its position in any such definite
\nlanguage, but can at best say that its kernel of will, character and
\nself-discipline are almost the first condition for human self-perfection. The
\naesthetic sense is equally indispensable, for without that the self-perfection
\nof the mental being cannot arrive at its object, which is on the mental plane
\nthe right and harmonious possession and enjoyment of the truth, power, beauty
\nand delight of human existence. But neither can be the highest principle of the
\nhuman order. We can combine them; we can enlarge the sense of ethics by the
\nsense of beauty and delight and introduce into it to correct its tendency of
\nhardness and austerity the element of gentleness, love, amenity, the hedonistic
\nside of morals; we can steady, guide and strengthen the delight of life by the
\nintroduction of the necessary will and austerity and self-discipline which will
\ngive it endurance and purity. These two powers of our psychological being,
\nwhich represent in us the essential principle of energy and the essential
\nprinciple of delight, – the Indian terms
\nare more profound and expressive, Tapas and<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-92<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nAnanda<\/font><\/span>,1<\/sup>
\n– can be thus helped by each
\nother, the one to a richer, the other to a greater self-expression. But that
\neven this much re- conciliation may come about they must be taken up and
\nenlightened by a higher principle which must be capable of understanding and
\ncomprehending both equally and of disengaging and combining disinterestedly
\ntheir purposes and potentialities. That higher principle seems to be provided
\nfor us by the human faculty of reason and intelligent will. Our crowning
\ncapacity, it would seem to be by right the crowned sovereign of our nature.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n1 <\/sup> Tapas is the energising
\nconscious-power of cosmic being by which the world is created, <\/font> <\/span>
\nmaintained and governed; it
\nincludes all concepts of force, will, energy, power, everything dynamic and
\ndynamising. Ananda is the essential nature of bliss of the cosmic consciousness
\nand, in activity, its delight of self-creation and self-experience.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

Page – 93<\/font><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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