{"id":3082,"date":"2013-07-13T01:45:49","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3082"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:45:49","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:49","slug":"03-the-cycle-of-society-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\/03-the-cycle-of-society-vol-25-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-03_The Cycle of Society.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Human Cycle<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n

\n

\n

\n

\n

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

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Cycle of Society <\/font> <\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tM<\/font>ODERN<\/b> Science, obsessed with the greatness of its physical discoveries and the idea of the sole existence
\n of Matter, has long attempted to base upon physical
\ndata even its study of Soul and Mind and of those workings of Nature in man and animal in which a knowledge of psychology
\nis as important as any of the physical sciences. Its very psychology founded itself upon physiology and the scrutiny of the brain
\nand nervous system. It is not surprising therefore that in history and sociology attention should have been concentrated on the
\nexternal data, laws, institutions, rites, customs, economic factors and developments, while the deeper psychological elements
\nso important in the activities of a mental, emotional, ideative being like man have been very much neglected. This kind of
\nscience would explain history and social development as much as possible by economic necessity or motive, \u2014 by economy understood in its widest sense. There are even historians who deny or put aside as of a very subsidiary importance the working
\nof the idea and the influence of the thinker in the development of human institutions. The French Revolution, it is thought,
\nwould have happened just as it did and when it did, by economic necessity, even if Rousseau and Voltaire had never written and
\nthe eighteenth-century philosophic movement in the world of thought had never worked out its bold and radical speculations. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tRecently, however, the all-sufficiency of Matter to explain Mind and Soul has begun to be doubted and a movement of
\nemancipation from the obsession of physical science has set in, although as yet it has not gone beyond a few awkward and
\nrudimentary stumblings. Still there is the beginning of a perception that behind
\n\t\t\tthe economic motives and causes of social and historical development
\n\t\t\tthere are profound psychological, even perhaps soul factors; and in
\n\t\t\tpre-war Germany, the metropolis of rationalism and materialism but
\n\t\t\tthe home also, for a century and a half, of new thought and original
\n\t\t\ttendencies good and bad, beneficent and disastrous, a first
\n\t\t\tpsychological theory of history was conceived and presented by an
\n\t\t\toriginal intelligence. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 05<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nThe
\nearliest attempts in a new field are seldom entirely successful, and the German historian, originator of this theory, seized on
\na luminous idea, but was not able to carry it very far or probe very deep. He was still haunted by a sense of the greater importance of the economic factor, and like most European science his theory related, classified and organised phenomena much more
\nsuccessfully than it explained them. Nevertheless, its basic idea formulated a suggestive and illuminating truth, and it is worth
\nwhile following up some of the suggestions it opens out in the light especially of Eastern thought and experience.
\nThe theorist, Lamprecht, basing himself on European and particularly on German history, supposed that human society
\nprogresses through certain distinct psychological stages which he terms respectively symbolic, typal and conventional, individualist and subjective. This development forms, then, a sort of psychological cycle through which a nation or a civilisation is
\nbound to proceed. Obviously, such classifications are likely to err by rigidity and to substitute a mental straight line for the coils
\nand zigzags of Nature. The psychology of man and his societies is too complex, too synthetical of many-sided and intermixed
\ntendencies to satisfy any such rigorous and formal analysis. Nor does this theory of a psychological cycle tell us what is the
\ninner meaning of its successive phases or the necessity of their succession or the term and end towards which they are driving.
\nBut still to understand natural laws whether of Mind or Matter it is necessary to analyse their working into its discoverable
\nelements, main constituents, dominant forces, though these may not actually be found anywhere in isolation. I will leave aside
\nthe Western thinker’s own dealings with his idea. The suggestive names he has offered us, if we examine their intrinsic sense and
\nvalue, may yet throw some light on the thickly veiled secret of our historic evolution, and this is the line on which it would be
\nmost useful to investigate.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>06<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tUndoubtedly, wherever we can seize human society in what to us seems its primitive beginnings or early stages, \u2014 no matter
\nwhether the race is comparatively cultured or savage or economically advanced or backward, \u2014 we do find a strongly symbolic
\nmentality that governs or at least pervades its thought, customs and institutions. Symbolic, but of what? We find that this social
\nstage is always religious and actively imaginative in its religion; for symbolism and a widespread imaginative or intuitive reli
\ngious feeling have a natural kinship and especially in earlier or primitive formations they have gone always together. When man
\nbegins to be predominantly intellectual, sceptical, ratiocinative he is already preparing for an individualist society and the age
\nof symbols and the age of conventions have passed or are losing their virtue. The symbol then is of something which man feels
\nto be present behind himself and his life and his activities, \u2014 the Divine, the Gods, the vast and deep unnameable, a hidden,
\nliving and mysterious nature of things. All his religious and social institutions, all the moments and phases of his life are to him
\nsymbols in which he seeks to express what he knows or guesses of the mystic influences that are behind his life and shape and
\ngovern or at the least intervene in its movements. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIf we look at the beginnings of Indian society, the far-off
\nVedic age which we no longer understand, for we have lost that mentality, we see that everything is symbolic. The religious
\ninstitution of sacrifice governs the whole society and all its hours and moments, and the ritual of the sacrifice is at every turn
\nand in every detail, as even a cursory study of the Brahmanas and Upanishads
\n\t\t\tought to show us, mystically symbolic. The theory that there was
\n\t\t\tnothing in the sacrifice except a propitiation of Nature-gods for
\n\t\t\tthe gaining of worldly prosperity and of Paradise, is a
\n\t\t\tmisunderstanding by a later humanity which had already become
\n\t\t\tprofoundly affected by an intellectual and practical bent of mind,
\n\t\t\tpractical even in its religion and even in its own mysticism and
\n\t\t\tsymbolism, and therefore could no longer enter into the ancient
\n\t\t\tspirit. Not only the actual religious worship but also the social
\n\t\t\tinstitutions of the time were penetrated through and through with
\n\t\t\tthe symbolic spirit. Take the hymn of the Rig <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 07<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nVeda which is supposed to be a marriage hymn for the union of a human couple and was certainly used
\nas such in the later Vedic ages. Yet the whole sense of the hymn
\nturns about the successive marriages of Surya, daughter of the Sun, with different gods and the human marriage is quite a
\nsubordinate matter overshadowed and governed entirely by the divine and mystic figure and is spoken of in the terms of that
\nfigure. Mark, however, that the divine marriage here is not, as it would be in later ancient poetry, a decorative image or poetical
\nornamentation used to set off and embellish the human union; on the contrary, the human is an inferior figure and image of the
\ndivine. The distinction marks off the entire contrast between that more ancient mentality and our modern regard upon things. This
\nsymbolism influenced for a long time Indian ideas of marriage and is even now conventionally remembered though no longer
\nunderstood or effective. We may note also in passing that the Indian ideal of the
\nrelation between man and woman has always been governed by the symbolism of the relation between the Purusha and Prakriti
\n(in the Veda Nri and Gna), the male and female divine Principles in the universe. Even, there is to some degree a practical correla
\ntion between the position of the female sex and this idea. In the earlier Vedic times when the female principle stood on a sort of
\nequality with the male in the symbolic cult, though with a certain predominance for the latter, woman was as much the mate as
\nthe adjunct of man; in later times when the Prakriti has become subject in idea to the Purusha, the woman also depends entirely
\non the man, exists only for him and has hardly even a separate spiritual existence. In the Tantrik Shakta religion which puts the
\nfemale principle highest, there is an attempt which could not get itself translated into social practice, \u2014 even as this Tantrik cult
\ncould never entirely shake off the subjugation of the Vedantic idea, \u2014 to elevate woman and make her an object of profound
\nrespect and even of worship. Or let us take, for this example will serve us best, the Vedic
\ninstitution of the fourfold order, caturvarna<\/i>, miscalled the sys.<\/i>
\ntem of the four castes, \u2014 for caste is a conventional, varna <\/i>a
\nsymbolic and typal institution. 
\n   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>08<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tWe are told that the institution of the four orders of society was the result of an economic
\nevolution complicated by political causes. Very possibly;1 but the important point is that it was not so regarded and could
\nnot be so regarded by the men of that age. For while we are satisfied when we have found the practical and material causes
\nof a social phenomenon and do not care to look farther, they cared little or only subordinately for its material factors and
\nlooked always first and foremost for its symbolic, religious or psychological significance. This appears in the Purushasukta of
\nthe Veda, where the four orders are described as having sprung from the body of the creative Deity, from his head, arms, thighs
\nand feet. To us this is merely a poetical image and its sense is that the Brahmins were the men of knowledge, the Kshatriyas
\nthe men of power, the Vaishyas the producers and support of society, the Shudras its servants. As if that were all, as if the
\nmen of those days would have so profound a reverence for mere poetical figures like this of the body of Brahma or that other of
\n\u00af the marriages of Surya, would have built upon them elaborate
\nsystems of ritual and sacred ceremony, enduring institutions, great demarcations of social type and ethical discipline. We read
\nalways our own mentality into that of these ancient forefathers and it is therefore that we can find in them nothing but imagi
\nnative barbarians. To us poetry is a revel of intellect and fancy, imagination a plaything and caterer for our amusement, our
\nentertainer, the nautch-girl of the mind. But to the men of old the poet was a seer, a revealer of hidden truths, imagination no
\ndancing courtesan but a priestess in God’s house commissioned not to spin fictions but to image difficult and hidden truths;
\neven the metaphor or simile in the Vedic style is used with a serious purpose and expected to convey a reality, not to suggest
\na pleasing artifice of thought. The image was to these seers a revelative symbol of the unrevealed and it was used because it
\ncould hint luminously to the mind what the precise intellectual word, apt only
\n\t\t\tfor logical or practical thought or to express the physical and the
\n\t\t\tsuperficial, could not at all hope to manifest. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t1 It is at least doubtful. The Brahmin class at first
\n\t\t\tseem to have exercised all sorts of economic functions and not to
\n\t\t\thave confined themselves to those of the priesthood.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>09<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nTo
\nthem this symbol of the Creator’s body was more than an image, it expressed a divine reality. Human society was for them an
\nattempt to express in life the cosmic Purusha who has expressed himself otherwise in the material and the supraphysical universe.
\nMan and the cosmos are both of them symbols and expressions of the same hidden Reality.
\nFrom this symbolic attitude came the tendency to make everything in society a sacrament, religious and sacrosanct, but
\nas yet with a large and vigorous freedom in all its forms, \u2014 a freedom which we do not find in the rigidity of “savage” commu
\nnities because these have already passed out of the symbolic into the conventional stage though on a curve of degeneration instead
\nof a curve of growth. The spiritual idea governs all; the symbolic religious forms which support it are fixed in principle; the social
\nforms are lax, free and capable of infinite development. One thing, however, begins to progress towards a firm fixity and this
\nis the psychological type. Thus we have first the symbolic idea of the four orders, expressing \u2014 to employ an abstractly figurative
\nlanguage which the Vedic thinkers would not have used nor perhaps understood, but which helps best our modern understand
\ning \u2014 the Divine as knowledge in man, the Divine as power, the Divine as production, enjoyment and mutuality, the Divine
\nas service, obedience and work. These divisions answer to four cosmic principles, the Wisdom that conceives the order and prin
\nciple of things, the Power that sanctions, upholds and enforces it, the Harmony that creates the arrangement of its parts, the Work
\nthat carries out what the rest direct. Next, out of this idea there developed a firm but not yet rigid social order based primar
\nily upon temperament and psychic type2 with a corresponding ethical discipline and secondarily upon the social and economic
\nfunction.3 But the function was determined by its suitability to the type and its helpfulness to the discipline; it was not the
\nprimary or sole factor.  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t2<\/sup> guna<\/i>..<\/i> 3karma<\/i>.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>10<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tThe first, the symbolic stage of this evolution is predominantly religious and spiritual; the other elements,
\npsychological, ethical, economic, physical are there but subordinated to the spiritual and religious idea. The second stage,
\nwhich we may call the typal, is predominantly psychological and ethical; all else, even the spiritual and religious, is subordinate to
\nthe psychological idea and to the ethical ideal which expresses it. Religion becomes then a mystic sanction for the ethical motive
\nand discipline, Dharma; that becomes its chief social utility, and for the rest it takes a more and more other-worldly turn. The idea
\nof the direct expression of the divine Being or cosmic Principle in man ceases to dominate or to be the leader and in the forefront;
\nit recedes, stands in the background and finally disappears from the practice and in the end even from the theory of life. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis typal stage creates the great social ideals which remain impressed upon the human mind even when the stage itself is
\npassed. The principal active contribution it leaves behind when it is dead is the idea of social honour; the honour of the Brahmin
\nwhich resides in purity, in piety, in a high reverence for the things of the mind and spirit and a disinterested possession and
\nexclusive pursuit of learning and knowledge; the honour of the Kshatriya which lives in courage, chivalry, strength, a certain
\nproud self-restraint and self-mastery, nobility of character and the obligations of that nobility; the honour of the Vaishya which
\nmaintains itself by rectitude of dealing, mercantile fidelity, sound production, order, liberality and philanthropy; the honour of the
\nShudra which gives itself in obedience, subordination, faithful service, a disinterested attachment. But these more and more
\ncease to have a living root in the clear psychological idea or to spring naturally out of the inner life of the man; they become a
\nconvention, though the most noble of conventions. In the end they remain more as a tradition in the thought and on the lips
\nthan a reality of the life. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFor the typal passes naturally into the conventional stage.
\nThe conventional stage of human society is born when the external supports, the outward expressions of the spirit or the ideal
\nbecome more important than the ideal, the body or even the clothes more
\n\t\t\timportant than the person.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/font>11<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nThus in the evolution of caste, the outward supports of the ethical fourfold order, \u2014
\nbirth, economic function, religious ritual and sacrament, family custom, \u2014 each began to exaggerate enormously its proportions
\nand its importance in the scheme. At first, birth does not seem to have been of the first importance in the social order, for faculty
\nand capacity prevailed; but afterwards, as the type fixed itself, its maintenance by education and tradition became necessary and
\neducation and tradition naturally fixed themselves in a hereditary groove. Thus the son of a Brahmin came always to be
\nlooked upon conventionally as a Brahmin; birth and profession were together the double bond of the hereditary convention at
\nthe time when it was most firm and faithful to its own character. This rigidity once established, the maintenance of the ethical
\ntype passed from the first place to a secondary or even a quite tertiary importance. Once the very basis of the system, it came
\nnow to be a not indispensable crown or pendent tassel, insisted upon indeed by the thinker and the ideal code-maker but not
\nby the actual rule of society or its practice. Once ceasing to be indispensable, it came inevitably to be dispensed with except as
\nan ornamental fiction. Finally, even the economic basis began to disintegrate; birth, family custom and remnants, deformations,
\nnew accretions of meaningless or fanciful religious sign and ritual, the very scarecrow and caricature of the old profound
\nsymbolism, became the riveting links of the system of caste in the iron age of the old society. In the full economic period of
\ncaste the priest and the Pundit masquerade under the name of the Brahmin, the aristocrat and feudal baron under the name of
\nthe Kshatriya, the trader and money-getter under the name of the Vaishya, the half-fed labourer and economic serf under the
\nname of the Shudra. When the economic basis also breaks down, then the unclean and diseased decrepitude of the old system has
\nbegun; it has become a name, a shell, a sham and must either be dissolved in the crucible of an individualist period of society or
\nelse fatally affect with weakness and falsehood the system of life that clings to it. That in visible fact is the last and present state
\nof the caste system in India.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 12<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tThe tendency of the conventional age of society is to fix, to arrange firmly, to formalise, to erect a system of rigid grades and
\nhierarchies, to stereotype religion, to bind education and training to a traditional and unchangeable form, to subject thought to
\ninfallible authorities, to cast a stamp of finality on what seems to it the finished life of man. The conventional period of society has
\nits golden age when the spirit and thought that inspired its forms are confined but yet living, not yet altogether walled in, not yet
\nstifled to death and petrified by the growing hardness of the structure in which they are cased. That golden age is often very
\nbeautiful and attractive to the distant view of posterity by its precise order, symmetry, fine social architecture, the admirable
\nsubordination of its parts to a general and noble plan. Thus at one time the modern litterateur, artist or thinker looked back
\noften with admiration and with something like longing to the mediaeval age of Europe; he forgot in its distant appearance of
\npoetry, nobility, spirituality the much folly, ignorance, iniquity, cruelty and oppression of those harsh ages, the suffering and
\nrevolt that simmered below these fine surfaces, the misery and squalor that was hidden behind that splendid facade. So too
\n\u00b8 the Hindu orthodox idealist looks back to a perfectly regulated
\nsociety devoutly obedient to the wise yoke of the Shastra, and that is his golden age, \u2014 a nobler one than the European in
\nwhich the apparent gold was mostly hard burnished copper with a thin gold-leaf covering it, but still of an alloyed metal,
\nnot the true Satya Yuga. In these conventional periods of society there is much indeed that is really fine and sound and helpful
\nto human progress, but still they are its copper age and not the true golden; they are the age when the Truth we strive to arrive
\nat is not realised, not accomplished,4<\/sup> but the exiguity of it eked out or its full appearance imitated by an artistic form, and what
\nwe have of the reality has begun to fossilise and is doomed to be lost in a hard mass of rule and order and convention. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFor always the form prevails and the spirit recedes and diminishes. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t4  
\n<\/sup>The Indian names of the golden age are Satya, the Age of the Truth, and Krita, the Age when the law of the Truth is accomplished.
\n \t\t\t<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 1<\/font>3<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nIt attempts indeed to return, to revive the form, to modify it, anyhow to survive and even to make the form
\nsurvive; but the time-tendency is too strong. This is visible in the history of religion; the efforts of the saints and religious reform ers become progressively more scattered, brief and superficial in their actual effects, however strong and vital the impulse. We
\nsee this recession in the growing darkness and weakness of India in her last millennium; the constant effort of the most powerful
\nspiritual personalities kept the soul of the people alive but failed to resuscitate the ancient free force and truth and vigour or
\npermanently revivify a conventionalised and stagnating society; in a generation or two the iron grip of that conventionalism has
\nalways fallen on the new movement and annexed the names of its founders. We see it in Europe in the repeated moral tragedy
\nof ecclesiasticism and Catholic monasticism. Then there arrives a period when the gulf between the convention and the truth
\nbecomes intolerable and the men of intellectual power arise, the great “swallowers of formulas”, who, rejecting robustly or
\nfiercely or with the calm light of reason symbol and type and convention, strike at the walls of the prison-house and seek
\nby the individual reason, moral sense or emotional desire the Truth that society has lost or buried in its whited sepulchres. It
\nis then that the individualistic age of religion and thought and society is created; the Age of Protestantism has begun, the Age
\nof Reason, the Age of Revolt, Progress, Freedom. A partial and external freedom, still betrayed by the conventional age that
\npreceded it into the idea that the Truth can be found in outsides, dreaming vainly that perfection can be determined by machinery,
\nbut still a necessary passage to the subjective period of humanity through which man has to circle back towards the recovery of
\nhis deeper self and a new upward line or a new revolving cycle of civilisation.
\n   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 14<\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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