{"id":3037,"date":"2013-07-13T01:45:33","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3037"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:45:33","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:33","slug":"14-the-office-and-limitations-of-the-reason-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\/14-the-office-and-limitations-of-the-reason-vol-25-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-14_The Office and Limitations of the Reason.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tThe Office and Limitations
\nof the Reason <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tI<\/font>F THE<\/b> reason is not the sovereign master of our being nor even intended to be more than an intermediary or minister,
\nit cannot succeed in giving a perfect law to the other estates of the realm, although it may impose on them a temporary
\nand imperfect order as a passage to a higher perfection. The rational or intellectual man is not the last and highest ideal of
\nmanhood, nor would a rational society be the last and highest expression of the possibilities of an aggregate human life,
\n\t\t\t\u2014
\nunless indeed we give to this word, reason, a wider meaning than it now possesses and include in it the combined wisdom
\nof all our powers of knowledge, those which stand below and above the understanding and logical mind as well as this strictly
\nrational part of our nature. The Spirit that manifests itself in man and dominates secretly the phases of his development, is
\ngreater and profounder than his intellect and drives towards a perfection that cannot be shut in by the arbitrary constructions
\nof the human reason. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tMeanwhile, the intellect performs its function; it leads man
\nto the gates of a greater self-consciousness and places him with unbandaged eyes
\n\t\t\ton that wide threshold where a more luminous Angel has to take him
\n\t\t\tby the hand. It takes first the lower powers of his existence, each
\n\t\t\tabsorbed in its own urge, each striving with a blind
\n\t\t\tself-sufficiency towards the fulfilment of its own instincts and
\n\t\t\tprimary impulses; it teaches them to understand themselves and to
\n\t\t\tlook through the reflecting eyes of the intelligence on the laws of
\n\t\t\ttheir own action. It enables them to discern intelligently the high
\n\t\t\tin themselves from the low, the pure from the impure and out of a
\n\t\t\tcrude confusion to arrive at more and more luminous formulas of
\n\t\t\ttheir possibilities. It gives them self-knowledge and is a guide,
\n\t\t\tteacher, purifier, liberator.  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013114<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

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

For it enables them also to look beyond themselves and at each
\nother and to draw upon each other for fresh motives and a richer working. It strengthens and purifies the hedonistic and the
\naesthetic activities and softens their quarrel with the ethical mind and instinct; it gives them solidity and seriousness, brings them
\nto the support of the practical and dynamic powers and allies them more closely to the strong actualities of life. It sweetens the
\nethical will by infusing into it psychic, hedonistic and aesthetic elements and ennobles by all these separately or together the
\npractical, dynamic and utilitarian temperament of the human being. At the same time it plays the part of a judge and legislator,
\nseeks to fix rules, provide systems and regularised combinations which shall enable the powers of the human soul to walk by
\na settled path and act according to a sure law, an ascertained measure and in a balanced rhythm. Here it finds after a time that
\nits legislative action becomes a force for limitation and turns into a bondage and that the regularised system which it has imposed
\nin the interests of order and conservation becomes a cause of petrifaction and the sealing up of the fountains of life. It has to
\nbring in its own saving faculty of doubt. Under the impulse of the intelligence warned by the obscure revolt of the oppressed
\nsprings of life, ethics, aesthetics, the social, political, economic rule begin to question themselves and, if this at first brings in
\nagain some confusion, disorder and uncertainty, yet it awakens new movements of imagination, insight, self-knowledge and selfrealisation by which old systems and formulas are transformed or disappear, new experiments are made and in the end larger
\npotentialities and combinations are brought into play. By this double action of the intelligence, affirming and imposing what
\nit has seen and again in due season questioning what has been accomplished in order to make a new affirmation, fixing a rule
\nand order and liberating from rule and order, the progress of the race is assured, however uncertain may seem its steps and
\nstages. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut the action of the intelligence is not only turned downward and outward upon our subjective and external life to
\n\t\t\tunderstand it and determine the law and order of its present
\n\t\t\tmovement and its future potentialities.    <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013115<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

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

\n\t\t\tIt has also an upward
\nand inward eye and a more luminous functioning by which it accepts divinations from the hidden eternities. It is opened
\nin this power of vision to a Truth above it from which it derives, however imperfectly and as from behind a veil, an indirect
\nknowledge of the universal principles of our existence and its possibilities; it receives and turns what it can seize of them into
\nintellectual forms and these provide us with large governing ideas by which our efforts can be shaped and around which
\nthey can be concentrated or massed; it defines the ideals which we seek to accomplish. It provides us with the great ideas that are
\n\u00b4<\/i> forces (idees forces<\/i>), ideas which in their own strength impose
\nthemselves upon our life and compel it into their moulds. Only the forms we give these ideas are intellectual; they themselves
\ndescend from a plane of truth of being where knowledge and force are one, the idea and the power of self-fulfilment in the
\nidea are inseparable. Unfortunately, when translated into the forms of our intelligence which acts only by a separating and
\ncombining analysis and synthesis and into the effort of our life which advances by a sort of experimental and empirical
\nseeking, these powers become disparate and conflicting ideals which we have all the difficulty in the world to bring into
\nany kind of satisfactory harmony. Such are the primary principles of liberty and order, good, beauty and truth, the ideal of
\npower and the ideal of love, individualism and collectivism, selfdenial and
\n\t\t\tself-fulfilment and a hundred others. In each sphere of human life,
\n\t\t\tin each part of our being and our action the intellect presents us
\n\t\t\twith the opposition of a number of such master ideas and such
\n\t\t\tconflicting principles. It finds each to be a truth to which
\n\t\t\tsomething essential in our being responds, \u2014 in our higher nature a
\n\t\t\tlaw, in our lower nature an instinct. It seeks to fulfil each in
\n\t\t\tturn, builds a system of action round it and goes from one to the
\n\t\t\tother and back again to what it has left. Or it tries to combine
\n\t\t\tthem but is contented with none of the combinations it has made
\n\t\t\tbecause none brings about their perfect reconciliation or their
\n\t\t\tsatisfied oneness. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013116<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

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

That indeed
\nbelongs to a larger and higher consciousness, not yet attained by mankind, where these opposites are ever harmonised and
\neven unified because in their origin they are eternally one. But still every enlarged attempt of the intelligence thus dealing with
\nour inner and outer life increases the width and wealth of our nature, opens it to larger possibilities of self-knowledge and
\nself-realisation and brings us nearer to our awakening into that greater consciousness.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe individual and social progress of man has been thus a double movement of self-illumination and self-harmonising
\nwith the intelligence and the intelligent will as the intermediaries between his soul and its works. He has had to bring out
\nnumberless possibilities of self-understanding, self-mastery, selfformation out of his first crude life of instincts and impulses;
\nhe has been constantly impelled to convert that lower animal or half-animal existence with its imperfect self-conscience into
\nthe stuff of intelligent being, instincts into ideas, impulses into ordered movements of an intelligent will. But as he has to proceed out of ignorance into knowledge by a slow labour of selfrecognition and mastery of his surroundings and his material
\nand as his intelligence is incapable of seizing comprehensively the whole of himself in knowledge, unable to work out comprehensively the mass of his possibilities in action, he has had to proceed piecemeal, by partial experiments, by creation of
\ndifferent types, by a constant swinging backward and forward between the various possibilities before him and the different
\nelements he has to harmonise. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt is not only that he has to contrive continually some new
\nharmony between the various elements of his being, physical, vitalistic, practical and dynamic, aesthetic, emotional and hedonistic, ethical, intellectual, but each of them again has to arrive at some order of its own disparate materials. In his ethics
\nhe is divided by different moral tendencies, justice and charity, self-help and altruism, self-increase and self-abnegation, the
\ntendencies of strength and the tendencies of love, the moral rule of activism and the moral rule of quietism.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013<\/font>117<\/p>\n

\n

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

\n\t\t\tHis emotions are necessary to his development and their indulgence
\n\t\t\tessential
\nto the outflowering of his rich humanity; yet is he constantly called upon to coerce and deny them, nor is there any sure rule
\nto guide him in the perplexity of this twofold need. His hedonistic impulse is called many ways by different fields, objects,
\nideals of self-satisfaction. His aesthetic enjoyment, his aesthetic creation forms for itself under the stress of the intelligence different laws and forms; each seeks to impose itself as the best and the standard, yet each, if its claim were allowed, would by
\nits unjust victory impoverish and imprison his faculty and his felicity in its exercise. His politics and society are a series of
\nadventures and experiments among various possibilities of autocracy, monarchism, military aristocracy, mercantile oligarchy,
\nopen or veiled plutocracy, pseudo-democracy of various kinds, bourgeois or proletarian, individualistic or collectivist or bureaucratic, socialism awaiting him, anarchism looming beyond it; and all these correspond to some truth of his social being,
\nsome need of his complex social nature, some instinct or force in it which demands that form for its effectuation. Mankind
\nworks out these difficulties under the stress of the spirit within it by throwing out a constant variation of types, types of character
\nand temperament, types of practical activity, aesthetic creation, polity, society, ethical order, intellectual system, which vary from
\nthe pure to the mixed, from the simple harmony to the complex; each and all of these are so many experiments of individual
\nand collective self-formation in the light of a progressive and increasing knowledge. That knowledge is governed by a number
\nof conflicting ideas and ideals around which these experiments group themselves: each of them is gradually pushed as far as
\npossible in its purity and again mixed and combined as much as possible with others so that there may be a more complex
\nform and an enriched action. Each type has to be broken in turn to yield place to new types and each combination has to
\ngive way to the possibility of a new combination. Through it all there is growing an accumulating stock of self-experience
\nand self-actualisation of which the ordinary man accepts some current formulation conventionally as if it were an absolute law
\nand truth, \u2014 often enough he even thinks it to be that, \u2014 but which the more developed human being seeks always either to break or to enlarge and make more profound or subtle in order
\nto increase or make room for an increase of human capacity, perfectibility, happiness.
\n  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013118<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis view of human life and of the process of our development, to which subjectivism readily leads us, gives us a truer
\nvision of the place of the intellect in the human movement. We have seen that the intellect has a double working, dispassionate
\nand interested, self-centred or subservient to movements not its own. The one is a disinterested pursuit of truth for the sake
\nof Truth and of knowledge for the sake of Knowledge without any ulterior motive, with every consideration put away except
\nthe rule of keeping the eye on the object, on the fact under enquiry and finding out its truth, its process, its law. The other
\nis coloured by the passion for practice, the desire to govern life by the truth discovered or the fascination of an idea which we
\nlabour to establish as the sovereign law of our life and action. We have seen indeed that this is the superiority of reason over
\nthe other faculties of man that it is not confined to a separate absorbed action of its own, but plays upon all the others, discovers their law and truth, makes its discoveries serviceable to them and even in pursuing its own bent and end serves also
\ntheir ends and arrives at a catholic utility. Man in fact does not live for knowledge alone; life in its widest sense is his principal
\npreoccupation and he seeks knowledge for its utility to life much more than for the pure pleasure of acquiring knowledge. But it is
\nprecisely in this putting of knowledge at the service of life that the human intellect falls into that confusion and imperfection which
\npursues all human action. So long as we pursue knowledge for its own sake, there is nothing to be said: the reason is performing
\nits natural function; it is exercising securely its highest right. In the work of the philosopher, the scientist, the savant labouring
\nto add something to the stock of our ascertainable knowledge, there is as perfect a purity and satisfaction as in that of the poet
\nand artist creating forms of beauty for the aesthetic delight of the race. Whatever individual error and limitation there may be,
\ndoes not matter; for the collective and progressive knowledge of  the race has gained the truth that has been discovered and may be trusted in time to get rid of the error. It is when it tries to
\napply ideas to life that the human intellect stumbles and finds itself at fault. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013119<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

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

\n\t\t\tOrdinarily, this is because in concerning itself with action the intelligence of man becomes at once partial and passionate and makes itself the servant of something other than the pure truth. But even if the intellect keeps itself as impartial and
\ndisinterested as possible, \u2014 and altogether impartial, altogether disinterested the human intellect cannot be unless it is content
\nto arrive at an entire divorce from practice or a sort of large but ineffective tolerantism, eclecticism or sceptical curiosity,
\n\t\t\t\u2014
\nstill the truths it discovers or the ideas it promulgates become, the moment they are applied to life, the plaything of forces over
\nwhich the reason has little control. Science pursuing its cold and even way has made discoveries which have served on one side
\na practical humanitarianism, on the other supplied monstrous weapons to egoism and mutual destruction; it has made possible
\na gigantic efficiency of organisation which has been used on one side for the economic and social amelioration of the nations and
\non the other for turning each into a colossal battering-ram of aggression, ruin and slaughter. It has given rise on the one side
\nto a large rationalistic and altruistic humanitarianism, on the other it has justified a godless egoism, vitalism, vulgar will to
\npower and success. It has drawn mankind together and given it a new hope and at the same time crushed it with the burden
\nof a monstrous commercialism. Nor is this due, as is so often asserted, to its divorce from religion or to any lack of idealism. Idealistic philosophy has been equally at the service of the powers of good and evil and provided an intellectual conviction
\nboth for reaction and for progress. Organised religion itself has often enough in the past hounded men to crime and massacre
\nand justified obscurantism and oppression. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe truth is that upon which we are now insisting, that
\nreason is in its nature an imperfect light with a large but still restricted mission and that once it applies itself to life and action it becomes subject to what it studies and the servant and
\n\t\t\tcounsellor of the forces in whose obscure and ill-understood
\n\t\t\tstruggle it intervenes.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013120<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

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

It can in its nature be used and has always
\nbeen used to justify any idea, theory of life, system of society or government, ideal of individual or collective action to which the
\nwill of man attaches itself for the moment or through the centuries. In philosophy it gives equally good reasons for monism
\nand pluralism or for any halting-place between them, for the belief in Being or for the belief in Becoming, for optimism and
\npessimism, for activism and quietism. It can justify the most mystic religionism and the most positive atheism, get rid of God
\nor see nothing else. In aesthetics it supplies the basis equally for classicism and romanticism, for an idealistic, religious or
\nmystic theory of art or for the most earthy realism. It can with equal power base austerely a strict and narrow moralism or
\nprove triumphantly the thesis of the antinomian. It has been the sufficient and convincing prophet of every kind of autocracy or
\noligarchy and of every species of democracy; it supplies excellent and satisfying reasons for competitive individualism and equally
\nexcellent and satisfying reasons for communism or against communism and for State socialism or for one variety of socialism
\nagainst another. It can place itself with equal effectivity at the service of utilitarianism, economism, hedonism, aestheticism,
\nsensualism, ethicism, idealism or any other essential need or activity of man and build around it a philosophy, a political and
\nsocial system, a theory of conduct and life. Ask it not to lean to one idea alone, but to make an eclectic combination or a
\nsynthetic harmony and it will satisfy you; only, there being any number of possible combinations or harmonies, it will equally
\nwell justify the one or the other and set up or throw down any one of them according as the spirit in man is attracted to or
\nwithdraws from it. For it is really that which decides and the reason is only a brilliant servant and minister of this veiled and
\nsecret sovereign. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis truth is hidden from the rationalist because he is supported by two constant articles of faith, first that his own reason is right and the reason of others who differ from him is wrong,
\nand secondly that whatever may be the present deficiencies of the human
\n\t\t\tintellect, the collective human reason will eventually arrive at
\n\t\t\tpurity and be able to found human thought and life securely on a
\n\t\t\tclear rational basis entirely satisfying to the intelligence.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013<\/font>121<\/p>\n

\n

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

\n\t\t\tHis first article of faith is no doubt the common
\nexpression of our egoism and arrogant fallibility, but it is also something more; it expresses this truth that it is the legitimate
\nfunction of the reason to justify to man his action and his hope and the faith that is in him and to give him that idea and knowledge, however restricted, and that dynamic conviction, however narrow and intolerant, which he needs in order that he may
\nlive, act and grow in the highest light available to him. The reason cannot grasp all truth in its embrace because truth is too
\ninfinite for it; but still it does grasp the something of it which we immediately need, and its insufficiency does not detract from the
\nvalue of its work, but is rather the measure of its value. For man is not intended to grasp the whole truth of his being at once, but
\nto move towards it through a succession of experiences and a constant, though not by any means a perfectly continuous selfenlargement. The first business of reason then is to justify and enlighten to him his various experiences and to give him faith
\nand conviction in holding on to his self-enlargings. It justifies to him now this, now that, the experience of the moment, the
\nreceding light of the past, the half-seen vision of the future. Its inconstancy, its divisibility against itself, its power of sustaining
\nopposite views are the whole secret of its value. It would not do indeed for it to support too conflicting views in the same
\nindividual, except at moments of awakening and transition, but in the collective body of men and in the successions of Time that
\nis its whole business. For so man moves towards the infinity of the Truth by the experience of its variety; so his reason helps
\nhim to build, change, destroy what he has built and prepare a new construction, in a word, to progress, grow, enlarge himself
\nin his self-knowledge and world-knowledge and their works. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe second article of faith of the believer in reason is also
\nan error and yet contains a truth. The reason cannot arrive at any final truth because it can neither get to the root of things
\nnor embrace the totality of their secrets; it deals with the finite, the
\n\t\t\tseparate, the limited aggregate, and has no measure for the all and
\n\t\t\tthe infinite.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013122<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

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

Nor can reason found a perfect life for man
\nor a perfect society. A purely rational human life would be a life baulked and deprived of its most powerful dynamic sources;
\nit would be a substitution of the minister for the sovereign. A purely rational society could not come into being and, if it could
\nbe born, either could not live or would sterilise and petrify human existence. The root powers of human life, its intimate causes
\nare below, irrational, and they are above, suprarational. But this is true that by constant enlargement, purification, openness the
\nreason of man is bound to arrive at an intelligent sense even of that which is hidden from it, a power of passive, yet sympathetic
\nreflection of the Light that surpasses it. Its limit is reached, its function is finished when it can say to man, “There is a Soul,
\na Self, a God in the world and in man who works concealed and all is his self-concealing and gradual self-unfolding. His
\nminister I have been, slowly to unseal your eyes, remove the thick integuments of your vision until there is only my own
\nluminous veil between you and him. Remove that and make the soul of man one in fact and nature with this Divine; then
\nyou will know yourself, discover the highest and widest law of your being, become the possessors or at least the receivers and
\ninstruments of a higher will and knowledge than mine and lay hold at last on the true secret and the whole sense of a human
\nand yet divine living.”   <\/p>\n

Page \u2013123<\/font><\/p>\n

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

Chapter XII   The Office and Limitations of the Reason   IF THE reason is not the sovereign master of our being nor even intended…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-25-the-human-cycle","wpcat-58-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3037\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}