{"id":3080,"date":"2013-07-13T01:45:48","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3080"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:45:48","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:48","slug":"11-civilisation-and-culture-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\/11-civilisation-and-culture-vol-25-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-11_Civilisation and Culture.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tCivilisation and Culture
\n<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tN<\/font>ATURE<\/b> starts from Matter, develops out of it its hidden Life,
\n\t\t\treleases out of involution in life all the crude material of Mind
\n\t\t\tand, when she is ready, turns Mind upon itself and upon Life and
\n\t\t\tMatter in a great mental effort to understand all three in their
\n\t\t\tphenomena, their obvious action, their secret laws, their normal and
\n\t\t\tabnormal possibilities and powers so that they may be turned to the
\n\t\t\trichest account, used in the best and most harmonious way, elevated
\n\t\t\tto their highest as well as extended to their widest potential aims
\n\t\t\tby the action of that faculty which man alone of terrestrial
\n\t\t\tcreatures clearly possesses, the intelligent will. It is only in
\n\t\t\tthis fourth stage of her progress that she arrives at humanity. The
\n\t\t\tatoms and the elements organise brute Matter, the plant develops the
\n\t\t\tliving being, the animal prepares and brings to a certain kind of
\n\t\t\tmechanical organisation the crude material of Mind, but the last
\n\t\t\twork of all, the knowledge and control of all these things and
\n\t\t\tself-knowledge and self-control, \u2014 that has been reserved for Man,
\n\t\t\tNature’s mental being. That he may better do the work she has given
\n\t\t\thim, she compels him to repeat physically and to some extent
\n\t\t\tmentally stages of her animal evolution and, even when he is in
\n\t\t\tpossession of his mental being, she induces him continually to dwell
\n\t\t\twith an interest and even a kind of absorption upon Matter and Life
\n\t\t\tand his own body and vital existence. This is necessary to the
\n\t\t\tlargeness of her purpose in him. His first natural absorption in the
\n\t\t\tbody and the life is narrow and unintelligent; as his intelligence
\n\t\t\tand mental force increase, he disengages himself to some extent, is
\n\t\t\table to mount higher, but is still tied to his vital and material
\n\t\t\troots by need and desire and has to return upon them with a larger
\n\t\t\tcuriosity, a greater power of utilisation, a more and more highly
\n\t\t\tmental and, in the end, a more and more spiritual aim in the return.  <\/p>\n

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\n

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\n\t\t\tFor his cycles are circles of 
\na growing, but still imperfect harmony and synthesis, and she brings him back violently to her original principles, sometimes
\neven to something like her earlier conditions so that he may start afresh on a larger curve of progress and self-fulfilment. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt would seem at first sight that since man is pre-eminently the
\n\t\t\tmental being, the development of the mental faculties and the
\n\t\t\trichness of the mental life should be his highest aim, \u2014 his
\n\t\t\tpreoccupying aim, even, as soon as he has got rid of the obsession
\n\t\t\tof the life and body and provided for the indispensable satisfaction
\n\t\t\tof the gross needs which our physical and animal nature imposes on
\n\t\t\tus. Knowledge, science, art, thought, ethics, philosophy, religion,
\n\t\t\tthis is man’s real business, these are his true affairs. To be is
\n\t\t\tfor him not merely to be born, grow up, marry, get his livelihood,
\n\t\t\tsupport a family and then die, \u2014 the vital and physical life, a
\n\t\t\thuman edition of the animal round, a human enlargement of the little
\n\t\t\tanimal sector and arc of the divine circle; rather to become and
\n\t\t\tgrow mentally and live with knowledge and power within himself as
\n\t\t\twell as from within outward is his manhood. But there is here a
\n\t\t\tdouble motive of Nature, an insistent duality in her human purpose.
\n\t\t\tMan is here to learn from her how to control and create; but she
\n\t\t\tevidently means him not only to control, create and constantly
\n\t\t\tre-create in new and better forms himself, his own inner existence,
\n\t\t\this mentality, but also to control and re-create correspondingly his
\n\t\t\tenvironment. He has to turn Mind not only on itself, but on Life and
\n\t\t\tMatter and the material existence; that is very clear not only from
\n\t\t\tthe law and nature of the terrestrial evolution, but from his own
\n\t\t\tpast and present history. And there comes from the observation of
\n\t\t\tthese conditions and of his highest aspirations and impulses the
\n\t\t\tquestion whether he is not intended, not only to expand inwardly and
\n\t\t\toutwardly, but to grow upward, wonderfully exceeding himself as he
\n\t\t\thas wonderfully exceeded his animal beginnings, into something more
\n\t\t\tthan mental, more than human, into a being spiritual and divine.
\n\t\t\tEven if he cannot do that, yet he may have to open his mind to what
\n\t\t\tis beyond it and to govern his life more and more by the light and
\n\t\t\tpower that he receives from something greater than himself. Man’s
\n\t\t\tconsciousness of the divine within himself and the world is the
\n\t\t\tsupreme fact of his existence and to grow into that may very well be
\n\t\t\tthe intention of his nature. <\/p>\n

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\nIn any case the fullness of Life is his evident object, the widest life and the highest life possible to
\nhim, whether that be a complete humanity or a new and divine race. We must recognise both his need of integrality and his
\nimpulse of self-exceeding if we would fix rightly the meaning of his individual existence and the perfect aim and norm of his
\nsociety. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe pursuit of the mental life for its own sake is what we
\nordinarily mean by culture; but the word is still a little equivocal and capable of a wider or a narrower sense according to
\nour ideas and predilections. For our mental existence is a very complex matter and is made up of many elements. First, we
\nhave its lower and fundamental stratum, which is in the scale of evolution nearest to the vital. And we have in that stratum two
\nsides, the mental life of the senses, sensations and emotions in which the subjective purpose of Nature predominates although
\nwith the objective as its occasion, and the active or dynamic life of the mental being concerned with the organs of action and the
\nfield of conduct in which her objective purpose predominates although with the subjective as its occasion. We have next in
\nthe scale, more sublimated, on one side the moral being and its ethical life, on the other the aesthetic; each of them attempts to
\npossess and dominate the fundamental mind stratum and turn its experiences and activities to its own benefit, one for the culture
\nand worship of Right, the other for the culture and worship of Beauty. And we have, above all these, taking advantage of
\nthem, helping, forming, trying often to govern them entirely, the intellectual being. Man’s highest accomplished range is the
\nlife of the reason or ordered and harmonised intelligence with its dynamic power of intelligent will, the
\nbuddhi<\/i>, which is or
\nshould be the driver of man’s chariot. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut the intelligence of man is not composed entirely and
\nexclusively of the rational intellect and the rational will; there enters into it a deeper, more intuitive, more splendid and powerful, but much less clear, much less developed and as yet hardly
\n\t\t\tat all self-possessing light and force for which we have not even a
\n\t\t\tname.   <\/p>\n

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\n

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

\n\t\t\tBut, at any rate, its character is to drive at a kind of
\nillumination, \u2014 not the dry light of the reason, nor the moist and suffused light of the heart, but a lightning and a solar splendour.
\nIt may indeed subordinate itself and merely help the reason and heart with its flashes; but there is another urge in it, its
\nnatural urge, which exceeds the reason. It tries to illuminate the intellectual being, to illuminate the ethical and aesthetic, to
\nilluminate the emotional and the active, to illuminate even the senses and the sensations. It offers in words of revelation, it
\nunveils as if by lightning flashes, it shows in a sort of mystic or psychic glamour or brings out into a settled but for mental man almost a supernatural light a Truth greater and truer than the knowledge given by Reason and Science, a Right larger
\nand more divine than the moralist’s scheme of virtues, a Beauty more profound, universal and entrancing than the sensuous or
\nimaginative beauty worshipped by the artist, a joy and divine sensibility which leaves the ordinary emotions poor and pallid,
\na Sense beyond the senses and sensations, the possibility of a diviner Life and action which man’s ordinary conduct of life
\nhides away from his impulses and from his vision. Very various, very fragmentary, often very confused and misleading are its
\neffects upon all the lower members from the reason downward, but this in the end is what it is driving at in the midst of a hundred
\ndeformations. It is caught and killed or at least diminished and stifled in formal creeds and pious observances; it is unmercifully
\ntraded in and turned into poor and base coin by the vulgarity of conventional religions; but it is still the light of which the
\nreligious spirit and the spirituality of man is in pursuit and some pale glow of it lingers even in their worst degradations. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis very complexity of his mental being, with the absence of any one principle which can safely dominate the others, the
\nabsence of any sure and certain light which can guide and fix in their vacillations the reason and the intelligent will, is
\nman’s great embarrassment and stumbling-block.    <\/p>\n

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\nAll the hostile distinctions, oppositions, antagonisms, struggles, conversions,
\nreversions, perversions of his mentality, all the chaotic war of
\nideas and impulses and tendencies which perplex his efforts, have arisen from the natural misunderstandings and conflicting
\nclaims of his many members. His reason is a judge who gives conflicting verdicts and is bribed and influenced by the suitors;
\nhis intelligent will is an administrator harassed by the conflicts 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 certain large ideas of culture and the mental life,
\nand his conflicting notions about them follow certain definite lines determined by the divisions of his nature and shaped into
\na general system of curves by his many attempts to arrive either at an exclusive standard or an integral harmony. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWe have first the distinction between civilisation and barbarism. In its ordinary, popular sense civilisation means the
\nstate of civil society, governed, policed, organised, educated, possessed of knowledge and appliances as opposed to that which
\nhas not or is not supposed to have these advantages. In a certain sense the Red Indian, the Basuto, the Fiji islander had their civilisation; they possessed a rigorously, if simply organised society, a social law, some ethical ideas, a religion, a kind of training, a
\ngood many virtues in some of which, it is said, civilisation is sadly lacking; but we are agreed to call them savages and barbarians,
\nmainly it seems, because of their crude and limited knowledge, the primitive rudeness of their appliances and the bare simplicity
\nof their social organisation. In the more developed states of society we have such epithets as semi-civilised and semi-barbarous
\nwhich are applied by different types of civilisation to each other, \u2014 the one which is for a time dominant and physically successful has naturally the loudest and most self-confident say in the matter. Formerly men were more straightforward and simpleminded and frankly expressed their standpoint by stigmatising all peoples different in general culture from themselves as barbarians or Mlechchhas.
\n\t\t\tThe word civilisation so used comes to have a merely relative
\n\t\t\tsignificance or hardly any fixed sense at all. <\/p>\n

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\n

<\/font>
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t We must therefore get rid in it of all that is
\n\t\t\ttemporary or accidental and fix it upon this distinction that
\n\t\t\tbarbarism is the state of society in which man is almost entirely
\n\t\t\tpreoccupied with his life and body, his economic and physical existence, \u2014
\nat first with their sufficient maintenance, not as yet their greater or richer well-being,
\n\t\u2014 and has few means and little inclination
\nto develop his mentality, while civilisation is the more evolved state of society in which to a sufficient social and economic
\norganisation is added the activity of the mental life in most if not all of its parts; for sometimes some of these parts are left
\naside or discouraged or temporarily atrophied by their inactivity, yet the society may be very obviously civilised and even
\nhighly civilised. This conception will bring in all the civilisations historic and prehistoric and put aside all the barbarism,
\nwhether of Africa or Europe or Asia, Hun or Goth or Vandal or Turcoman. It is obvious that in a state of barbarism the
\nrude beginnings of civilisation may exist; it is obvious too that in a civilised society a great mass of barbarism or numerous
\nrelics of it may exist. In that sense all societies are semi-civilised. How much of our present-day civilisation will be looked back
\nupon with wonder and disgust by a more developed humanity as the superstitions and atrocities of an imperfectly civilised era!
\nBut the main point is this that in any society which we can call civilised the mentality of man must be active, the mental
\npursuits developed and the regulation and improvement of his life by the mental being a clearly self-conscious concept in his
\nbetter mind. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut in a civilised society there is still the
\n\t\t\tdistinction between the partially, crudely, conventionally civilised
\n\t\t\tand the cultured. It would seem therefore that the mere
\n\t\t\tparticipation in the ordinary benefits of civilisation is not enough
\n\t\t\tto raise a man into the mental life proper; a farther development, a
\n\t\t\thigher elevation is needed. The last generation drew emphatically
\n\t\t\tthe distinction between the cultured man and the Philistine and got
\n\t\t\ta fairly clear idea of what was meant by it. Roughly, the Philistine
\n\t\t\twas for them the man who lives outwardly the civilised life,
\n\t\t\tpossesses all its paraphernalia, has and mouths the current stock of
\n\t\t\topinions, prejudices, conventions, sentiments, but is impervious to
\n\t\t\tideas, exercises no free intelligence, is innocent of beauty and
\n\t\t\tart, vulgarises everything that he touches, religion, ethics,
\n\t\t\tliterature, life. <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tThe Philistine is in fact the modern civilised barbarian; he is often the half-civilised physical and vital barbarian by his
\nunintelligent attachment to the life of the body, the life of the vital needs and impulses and the ideal of the merely domestic
\nand economic human animal; but essentially and commonly he is the mental barbarian, the average sensational man. That is
\nto say, his mental life is that of the lower substratum of the mind, the life of the senses, the life of the sensations, the life
\nof the emotions, the life of practical conduct \u2014 the first status of the mental being. In all these he may be very active, very
\nvigorous, but he does not govern them by a higher light or seek to uplift them to a freer and nobler eminence; rather he pulls the
\nhigher faculties down to the level of his senses, his sensations, his unenlightened and unchastened emotions, his gross utilitarian
\npracticality. His aesthetic side is little developed; either he cares nothing for beauty or has the crudest aesthetic tastes which help
\nto lower and vulgarise the general standard of aesthetic creation and the aesthetic sense. He is often strong about morals, far more
\nparticular usually about moral conduct than the man of culture, but his moral being is as crude and undeveloped as the rest of
\nhim; it is conventional, unchastened, unintelligent, a mass of likes and dislikes, prejudices and current opinions, attachment
\nto social conventions and respectabilities and an obscure dislike \u2014 rooted in the mind of sensations and not in the intelligence
\n\t\t\t\u2014
\nof any open defiance or departure from the generally accepted standard of conduct. His ethical bent is a habit of the sensemind;
\n\t\t\tit is the morality of the average sensational man. He has a reason
\n\t\t\tand the appearance of an intelligent will, but they are not his own,
\n\t\t\tthey are part of the group-mind, received from his environment; or
\n\t\t\tso far as they are his own, merely a practical, sensational,
\n\t\t\temotional reason and will, a mechanical repetition of habitual
\n\t\t\tnotions and rules of conduct, not a play of real thought and
\n\t\t\tintelligent determination. His use of them no more makes him a
\n\t\t\tdeveloped mental being than the daily movement to and from his place
\n\t\t\tof business makes the average Londoner a developed physical being or
\n\t\t\this quotidian contributions to the economic life of the country make
\n\t\t\tthe bank-clerk a developed
\neconomic man. He is not mentally active, but mentally reactive, \u2014 a very different matter. <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tThe Philistine is not dead, \u2014 quite the contrary, he abounds,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 but he no longer reigns. The sons of Culture have not exactly
\nconquered, but they have got rid of the old Goliath and replaced him by a new giant. This is the sensational man who has got
\nawakened to the necessity at least of some intelligent use of the higher faculties and is trying to be mentally active. He has been
\nwhipped and censured and educated into that activity and he lives besides in a maelstrom of new information, new intellectual fashions, new ideas and new movements to which he can no longer be obstinately impervious. He is open to new ideas,
\nhe can catch at them and hurl them about in a rather confused fashion; he can understand or misunderstand ideals, organise to
\nget them carried out and even, it would appear, fight and die for them. He knows he has to think about ethical problems,
\nsocial problems, problems of science and religion, to welcome new political developments, to look with as understanding an
\neye as he can attain to at all the new movements of thought and inquiry and action that chase each other across the modern
\nfield or clash upon it. He is a reader of poetry as well as a devourer of fiction and periodical literature,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 you will find in
\nhim perhaps a student of Tagore or an admirer of Whitman; he has perhaps no very clear ideas about beauty and aesthetics, but
\nhe has heard that Art is a not altogether unimportant part of life. The shadow of this new colossus is everywhere. He is the
\ngreat reading public; the newspapers and weekly and monthly reviews are his; fiction and poetry and art are his mental caterers,
\nthe theatre and the cinema and the radio exist for him: Science hastens to bring her knowledge and discoveries to his doors
\nand equip his life with endless machinery; politics are 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 of classes, the uprising of labour, waging
\nwhat we are told are wars of ideas or of cultures, \u2014 a ferocious type of conflict made in the very image of this new barbarism,
\n\t\t\t\u2014
\nor bringing about in a few days Russian revolutions which the century-long
\n\t\t\tefforts and sufferings of the intelligentsia failed to achieve. <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tIt is his coming which has been the precipitative agent
\nfor the reshaping of the modern world. If a Lenin, a Mussolini, a Hitler have achieved their rapid and almost stupefying success,
\nit was because this driving force, this responsive quick-acting mass was there to carry them to victory
\n\t\t\t\u2014 a force lacking to
\ntheir less fortunate predecessors. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe first results of this momentous change have been inspiriting to our desire of movement, but a little disconcerting to the thinker and to the lover of a high and fine culture; for if it has to
\nsome extent democratised culture or the semblance of culture, it does not seem at first sight to have elevated or strengthened it by
\nthis large accession of the half-redeemed from below. Nor does the world seem to be guided any more directly by the reason and
\nintelligent will of her best minds than before. Commercialism is still the heart of modern civilisation; a sensational activism is
\nstill its driving force. Modern education has not in the mass redeemed the sensational man; it has only made necessary to
\nhim things to which he was not formerly accustomed, mental activity and occupations, intellectual and even aesthetic sensations, emotions of idealism. He still lives in the vital substratum, but he wants it stimulated from above. He requires an army
\nof writers to keep him mentally occupied and provide some sort of intellectual pabulum for him; he has a thirst for general
\ninformation of all kinds which he does not care or has not time to coordinate or assimilate, for popularised scientific knowledge,
\nfor such new ideas as he can catch, provided they are put before him with force or brilliance, for mental sensations and excitation
\nof many kinds, for ideals which he likes to think of as actuating his conduct and which do give it sometimes a certain colour.
\nIt is still the activism and sensationalism of the crude mental being, but much more open and free. And the cultured, the
\nintelligentsia find that they can get a hearing from him such as they never had from the pure Philistine, provided they can first
\nstimulate or amuse him; their ideas have now a chance of getting executed such as they never had before. <\/p>\n

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\n

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

\n\t\t\tThe result has been to cheapen thought and art and literature, to
\n\t\t\tmake talent and even
\ngenius run in the grooves of popular success, to put the writer and thinker and scientist very much in a position like that of
\nthe cultured Greek slave in a Roman household where he has to work for, please, amuse and instruct his master while keeping a
\ncareful eye on his tastes and preferences and repeating trickily the manner and the points that have caught his fancy. The higher
\nmental life, in a word, has been democratised, sensationalised, activised with both good and bad results. Through it all the
\neye of faith can see perhaps that a yet crude but an enormous change has begun. Thought and Knowledge, if not yet Beauty,
\ncan get a hearing and even produce rapidly some large, vague, yet in the end effective will for their results; the mass of culture
\nand of men who think and strive seriously to appreciate and to know has enormously increased behind all this surface veil
\nof sensationalism, and even the sensational man has begun to undergo a process of transformation. Especially, new methods
\nof education, new principles of society are beginning to come into the range of practical possibility which will create perhaps
\none day that as yet unknown phenomenon, a race of men \u2014 not only a class \u2014 who have to some extent found and developed
\ntheir mental selves, a cultured humanity.   <\/p>\n

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

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