{"id":3036,"date":"2013-07-13T01:45:32","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3036"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:45:32","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:32","slug":"05-the-coming-of-the-subjective-age-vol-25-the-human-cycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/25-the-human-cycle\/05-the-coming-of-the-subjective-age-vol-25-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-05_The Coming of the Subjective Age.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tChapter III <\/font> <\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Coming of the Subjective Age
\n<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tT<\/font>HE INHERENT<\/b> aim and effort and justification, the
\npsychological seed-cause, the whole tendency of development of an individualistic age of mankind, all go back
\nto the one dominant need of rediscovering the substantial truths of life, thought and action which have been overlaid by the
\nfalsehood of conventional standards no longer alive to the truth of the ideas from which their conventions started. It would seem
\nat first that the shortest way would be to return to the original ideas themselves for light, to rescue the kernel of their truth from
\nthe shell of convention in which it has become incrusted. But to this course there is a great practical obstacle; and there is another
\nwhich reaches beyond the surface of things, nearer to the deeper principles of the development of the soul in human society. The
\nrecovery of the old original ideas now travestied by convention is open to the practical disadvantage that it tends after a time to
\nrestore force to the conventions which the Time-Spirit is seeking to outgrow and, if or when the deeper truth-seeking tendency
\nslackens in its impulse, the conventions re-establish their sway. They revive, modified, no doubt, but still powerful; a new incrus
\ntation sets in, the truth of things is overlaid by a more complex falsity. And even if it were otherwise, the need of a developing
\nhumanity is not to return always to its old ideas. Its need is to progress to a larger fulfilment in which, if the old is taken up,
\nit must be transformed and exceeded. For the underlying truth of things is constant and eternal, but its mental figures, its life
\nforms, its physical embodiments call constantly for growth and change. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt is this principle and necessity that justify an age of individualism and rationalism and make it, however short it may be, an
\ninevitable period in the cycle. A temporary reign of the critical reason largely destructive in its action is an imperative need for
\n \t\t\thuman progress.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013<\/font>26<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn India, since the great Buddhistic upheaval of the national thought and life, there has been a series of re
\ncurrent attempts to rediscover the truth of the soul and life and get behind the veil of stifling conventions; but these have been
\nconducted by a wide and tolerant spiritual reason, a plastic soulintuition and deep subjective seeking, insufficiently militant and
\ndestructive. Although productive of great internal and considerable external changes, they have never succeeded in getting rid
\nof the predominant conventional order. The work of a dissolvent and destructive intellectual criticism, though not entirely absent
\nfrom some of these movements, has never gone far enough; the constructive force, insufficiently aided by the destructive, has not
\nbeen able to make a wide and free space for its new formation. It is only with the period of European influence and impact that
\ncircumstances and tendencies powerful enough to enforce the beginnings of a new age of radical and effective revaluation of
\nideas and things have come into existence. The characteristic power of these influences has been throughout \u2014 or at any rate
\ntill quite recently \u2014 rationalistic, utilitarian and individualistic. It has compelled the national mind to view everything from
\na new, searching and critical standpoint, and even those who seek to preserve the present or restore the past are obliged un
\nconsciously or half-consciously to justify their endeavour from the novel point of view and by its appropriate standards of
\nreasoning. Throughout the East, the subjective Asiatic mind is being driven to adapt itself to the need for changed values of
\nlife and thought. It has been forced to turn upon itself both by the pressure of Western knowledge and by the compulsion of a
\nquite changed life-need and life-environment. What it did not do from within, has come on it as a necessity from without and
\nthis externality has carried with it an immense advantage as well as great dangers. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe individualistic age is, then, a radical attempt of mankind to
\n\t\t\tdiscover the truth and law both of the individual being and of the
\n\t\t\tworld to which the individual belongs. It may begin, as it began in
\n\t\t\tEurope, with the endeavour to get back, more especially in the
\n\t\t\tsphere of religion, to the original truth which convention has
\n\t\t\toverlaid, defaced or distorted; but from that first step it must
\n\t\t\tproceed to others and in the end to a general questioning of the
\n\t\t\tfoundations of thought and practice in all the spheres of human life
\n\t\t\tand action. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013<\/font>27<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nA revolutionary reconstruction of religion, philosophy, science, art and society is the last inevitable outcome. It
\n\t\t\tproceeds at first by the light of the individual mind and reason, by
\n\t\t\tits demand on life and its experience of life; but it must go from
\n\t\t\tthe individual to the universal. For the effort of the individual
\n\t\t\tsoon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth and law of
\n\t\t\this own being without discovering some universal law and truth to
\n\t\t\twhich he can relate it. Of the universe he is a part; in all but his
\n\t\t\tdeepest spirit he is its subject, a small cell in that tremendous
\n\t\t\torganic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance and by the
\n\t\t\tlaw of its life the law of his life is determined and governed. From
\n\t\t\ta new view and knowledge of the world must proceed his new view and
\n\t\t\tknowledge of him self, of his power and capacity and limitations, of
\n\t\t\this claim on existence and the high road and the distant or
\n\t\t\timmediate goal of his individual and social destiny. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn Europe and in modern times this has taken the form of a clear and
\n\t\t\tpotent physical Science: it has proceeded by the discovery of the
\n\t\t\tlaws of the physical universe and the economic and sociological
\n\t\t\tconditions of human life as determined by the physical being of man,
\n\t\t\this environment, his evolutionary history, his physical and vital,
\n\t\t\this individual and collective need. But after a time it must become
\n\t\t\tapparent that the knowledge of the physical world is not the whole
\n\t\t\tof knowledge; it must appear that man is a mental as well as a
\n\t\t\tphysical and vital being and even much more essentially mental than
\n\t\t\tphysical or vital. Even though his psychology is strongly affected
\n\t\t\tand limited by his physical being and environment, it is not at its
\n\t\t\troots determined by them, but constantly reacts, subtly determines
\n\t\t\ttheir action, effects even their new-shaping by the force of his
\n\t\t\tpsychological demand on life. His economic state and social
\n\t\t\tinstitutions are themselves governed by his psychological demand on
\n\t\t\tthe possibilities, circumstances, tendencies created by the relation
\n\t\t\tbetween the mind and soul of humanity and its life and body. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013<\/font>28<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTherefore to find the
\ntruth of things and the law of his being in relation to that truth he must go deeper and fathom the subjective secret of himself
\nand things as well as their objective forms and surroundings. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis he may attempt to do for a time by the power of the
\ncritical and analytic reason which has already carried him so far; but not for very long. For in his study of himself and the world he
\ncannot but come face to face with the soul in himself and the soul in the world and find it to be an entity so profound, so complex,
\nso full of hidden secrets and powers that his intellectual reason betrays itself as an insufficient light and a fumbling seeker: it
\nis successfully analytical only of superficialities and of what lies just behind the superficies. The need of a deeper knowledge must
\nthen turn him to the discovery of new powers and means within himself. He finds that he can only know himself entirely by
\nbecoming actively self-conscious and not merely self-critical, by more and more living in his soul and acting out of it rather than
\nfloundering on surfaces, by putting himself into conscious harmony with that which lies behind his superficial mentality and
\npsychology and by enlightening his reason and making dynamic his action through this deeper light and power to which he thus
\nopens. In this process the rationalistic ideal begins to subject itself to the ideal of intuitional knowledge and a deeper self
\nawareness; the utilitarian standard gives way to the aspiration towards self-consciousness and self-realisation; the rule of living
\naccording to the manifest laws of physical Nature is replaced by the effort towards living according to the veiled Law and Will
\nand Power active in the life of the world and in the inner and outer life of humanity. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAll these tendencies, though in a crude, initial and illdeveloped form, are manifest now in the world and are growing
\nfrom day to day with a significant rapidity. And their emergence and greater dominance means the transition from the ratio
\nnalistic and utilitarian period of human development which individualism has created to a greater subjective age of society.
\nThe change began by a rapid turning of the current of thought into large and profound movements contradictory of the old
\nintellectual standards, a swift breaking of the old tables.  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u201329<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe
\nmaterialism of the nineteenth century gave place first to a novel and profound vitalism which has taken various forms from
\nNietzsche’s theory of the Will to be and Will to Power as the root and law of life to the new pluralistic and pragmatic
\nphilosophy which is pluralistic because it has its eye fixed on life rather than on the soul and pragmatic because it seeks to
\ninterpret being in the terms of force and action rather than of light and knowledge. These tendencies of thought, which had
\nuntil yesterday a profound influence on the life and thought of Europe prior to the outbreak of the great War, especially in
\nFrance and Germany, were not a mere superficial recoil from intellectualism to life and action, \u2014 although in their application
\nby lesser minds they often assumed that aspect; they were an attempt to read profoundly and live by the Life-Soul of the
\nuniverse and tended to be deeply psychological and subjective in their method. From behind them, arising in the void created
\nby the discrediting of the old rationalistic intellectualism, there had begun to arise a new Intuitionalism, not yet clearly aware
\nof its own drive and nature, which seeks through the forms and powers of Life for that which is behind Life and sometimes even
\nlays as yet uncertain hands on the sealed doors of the Spirit. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe art, music and literature of the world, always a sure
\nindex of the vital tendencies of the age, have also undergone a profound revolution in the direction of an ever-deepening sub
\njectivism. The great objective art and literature of the past no longer commands the mind of the new age. The first tendency
\nwas, as in thought so in literature, an increasing psychological vitalism which sought to represent penetratingly the most subtle
\npsychological impulses and tendencies of man as they started to the surface in his emotional, aesthetic and vitalistic cravings and
\nactivities. Composed with great skill and subtlety but without any real insight into the law of man’s being, these creations
\nseldom got behind the reverse side of our surface emotions, sensations and actions which they minutely analysed in their details
\nbut without any wide or profound light of knowledge; they were perhaps more immediately interesting but ordinarily inferior as
\nart to the old literature which at least seized firmly and with a large and
\n\t\t\tpowerful mastery on its province.    <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013<\/font>30<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOften they described the malady of Life rather than its health and power, or the
\nriot and revolt of its cravings, vehement and therefore impotent and unsatisfied, rather than its dynamis of self-expression and
\nself-possession. But to this movement which reached its highest creative power in Russia, there succeeded a turn towards a more
\ntruly psychological art, music and literature, mental, intuitional, psychic rather than vitalistic, departing in fact from a superficial
\nvitalism as much as its predecessors departed from the objective mind of the past. This new movement aimed like the new philo
\nsophic Intuitionalism at a real rending of the veil, the seizure by the human mind of that which does not overtly express itself, the
\ntouch and penetration into the hidden soul of things. Much of it was still infirm, unsubstantial in its grasp on what it pursued,
\nrudimentary in its forms, but it initiated a decisive departure of the human mind from its old moorings and pointed the direction
\nin which it is being piloted on a momentous voyage of discovery, the discovery of a new world within which must eventually bring
\nabout the creation of a new world without in life and society. Art and literature seem definitely to have taken a turn towards
\na subjective search into what may be called the hidden inside of things and away from the rational and objective canon or
\nmotive. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAlready in the practical dealing with life there are advanced
\nprogressive tendencies which take their inspiration from this profounder subjectivism. Nothing indeed has yet been firmly
\naccomplished, all is as yet tentative initiation and the first feeling out towards a material shape for this new spirit. The dominant
\nactivities of the world, the great recent events such as the enormous clash of nations in Europe and the stirrings and changes
\nwithin the nations which preceded and followed it, were rather the result of a confused half struggle half effort at accommoda
\ntion between the old intellectual and materialistic and the new still superficial subjective and vitalistic
\n\t\t\timpulses in the West. The latter unenlightened by a true inner
\n\t\t\tgrowth of the soul were necessarily impelled to seize upon the
\n\t\t\tformer and utilise them for their unbridled demand upon life; the
\n\t\t\tworld was moving towards a monstrously perfect organisation of the
\n\t\t\tWill-to-live and the Will-to-power and it was this that threw itself
\n\t\t\tout in the clash of War and has now found or is finding new forms of
\n\t\t\tlife for itself which show better its governing idea and motive. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013<\/font>31<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe Asuric or even Rakshasic character of the recent world-collision was due to this formidable combination of a falsely enlightened
\nvitalistic motive-power with a great force of servile intelligence and reasoning contrivance subjected to it as instrument and the
\ngenius of an accomplished materialistic Science as its Djinn, its giant worker of huge, gross and soulless miracles. The War was
\nthe bursting of the explosive force so created and, even though it strewed the world with ruins, its after results may well have
\nprepared the collapse, as they have certainly produced a disintegrating chaos or at least poignant disorder, of the monstrous
\ncombination which produced it, and by that salutary ruin are emptying the field of human life of the principal obstacles to a
\ntruer development towards a higher goal. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBehind it all the hope of the race lies in those infant and
\nas yet subordinate tendencies which carry in them the seed of a new subjective and psychic dealing of man with his own being,
\nwith his fellow-men and with the ordering of his individual and social life. The characteristic note of these tendencies may be
\nseen in the new ideas about the education and upbringing of the child that became strongly current in the pre-war era. Formerly,
\neducation was merely a mechanical forcing of the child’s nature into arbitrary grooves of training and knowledge in which his
\nindividual subjectivity was the last thing considered, and his family upbringing was a constant repression and compulsory
\nshaping of his habits, his thoughts, his character into the mould fixed for them by the conventional ideas or individual interests
\nand ideals of the teachers and parents. The discovery that education must be a bringing out of the child’s own intellectual
\nand moral capacities to their highest possible value and must be based on the psychology of the child-nature was a step forward
\ntowards a more healthy because a more subjective system; but it still fell short because it still regarded him as an object to be
\nhandled and moulded by the teacher, to be educated.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013<\/font>32<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut at least
\nthere was a glimmering of the realisation that each human being is a self-developing soul and that the business of both parent
\nand teacher is to enable and to help the child to educate himself, to develop his own intellectual, moral, aesthetic and practical
\ncapacities and to grow freely as an organic being, not to be kneaded and pressured into form like an inert plastic material.
\nIt is not yet realised what this soul is or that the true secret, whether with child or man, is to help him to find his deeper self,
\nthe real psychic entity within. That, if we ever give it a chance to come forward, and still more if we call it into the foreground
\nas “the leader of the march set in our front”, will itself take up most of the business of education out of our hands and develop
\nthe capacity of the psychological being towards a realisation of its potentialities of which our present mechanical view of life
\nand man and external routine methods of dealing with them prevent us from having any experience or forming any concep
\ntion. These new educational methods are on the straight way to this truer dealing. The closer touch attempted with the psychical
\nentity behind the vital and physical mentality and an increasing reliance on its possibilities must lead to the ultimate discovery
\nthat man is inwardly a soul and a conscious power of the Divine and that the evocation of this real man within is the right object
\nof education and indeed of all human life if it would find and live according to the hidden Truth and deepest law of its own being.
\nThat was the knowledge which the ancients sought to express through religious and social symbolism, and subjectivism is a
\nroad of return to the lost knowledge. First deepening man’s inner experience, restoring perhaps on an unprecedented scale insight
\nand self-knowledge to the race, it must end by revolutionising his social and collective self-expression. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tMeanwhile, the nascent subjectivism preparative of the new age has
\n\t\t\tshown itself not so much in the relations of individuals or in the
\n\t\t\tdominant ideas and tendencies of social development, which are still
\n\t\t\tlargely rationalistic and materialistic and only vaguely touched by
\n\t\t\tthe deeper subjective tendency, but in the new collective
\n\t\t\tself-consciousness of man in that organic mass of his life which he
\n\t\t\thas most firmly developed in the past, the nation.  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 33<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nIt is here that it has already begun to produce powerful results whether as a vitalistic or as a psychical subjectivism,
\nand it is here that we shall see most clearly what is its actual drift, its deficiencies, its dangers as well as the true purpose and
\nconditions of a subjective age of humanity and the goal towards which the social cycle, entering this phase, is intended to arrive
\nin its wide revolution.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 34<\/p>\n

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

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