{"id":3084,"date":"2013-07-13T01:45:50","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3084"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:45:50","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:50","slug":"16-the-suprarational-beauty-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\/16-the-suprarational-beauty-vol-25-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-16_The Suprarational Beauty.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Suprarational Beauty <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tR<\/font>ELIGION<\/b> is the seeking after the spiritual, the suprarational and therefore in this sphere the intellectual reason may well be an insufficient help and find itself, not
\nonly at the end but from the beginning, out of its province and condemned to tread either diffidently or else with a stumbling
\npresumptuousness in the realm of a power and a light higher than its own. But in the other spheres of human consciousness
\nand human activity it may be thought that it has the right to the sovereign place, since these move on the lower plane of the
\nrational and the finite or belong to that border-land where the rational and the infrarational meet and the impulses and the
\ninstincts of man stand in need above all of the light and the control of the reason. In its own sphere of finite knowledge,
\nscience, philosophy, the useful arts, its right, one would think, must be indisputable. But this does not turn out in the end to
\nbe true. Its province may be larger, its powers more ample, its action more justly self-confident, but in the end everywhere it
\nfinds itself standing between the two other powers of our being and fulfilling in greater or less degree the same function of an
\nintermediary. On one side it is an enlightener \u2014 not always the chief enlightener
\n\t\t\t\u2014 and the corrector of our life-impulses and
\nfirst mental seekings, on the other it is only one minister of the veiled Spirit and a preparer of the paths for the coming of its
\nrule. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis is especially evident in the two realms which in the
\nordinary scale of our powers stand nearest to the reason and on either side of it, the aesthetic and the ethical being, the search
\nfor Beauty and the search for Good. Man’s seeking after beauty reaches its most intense and satisfying expression in the great creative arts, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, but in its full extension there is no activity of his nature or his life from which it
\n\t\t\tneed or ought to be excluded, \u2014 provided we understand beauty both
\n\t\t\tin its widest and its truest sense.<\/p>\n

Page \u2013136<\/font><\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t A complete and universal appreciation of beauty and the making entirely beautiful our
\nwhole life and being must surely be a necessary character of the perfect individual and the perfect society. But in its origin this
\nseeking for beauty is not rational; it springs from the roots of our life, it is an instinct and an impulse, an instinct of aesthetic
\nsatisfaction and an impulse of aesthetic creation and enjoyment. Starting from the infrarational parts of our being, this instinct
\nand impulse begin with much imperfection and impurity and with great crudities both in creation and in appreciation. It is
\nhere that the reason comes in to distinguish, to enlighten, to correct, to point out the deficiencies and the crudities, to lay
\ndown laws of aesthetics and to purify our appreciation and our creation by improved taste and right knowledge. While we are
\nthus striving to learn and correct ourselves, it may seem to be the true law-giver both for the artist and the admirer and, though
\nnot the creator of our aesthetic instinct and impulse, yet the creator in us of an aesthetic conscience and its vigilant judge
\nand guide. That which was an obscure and erratic activity, it makes self-conscious and rationally discriminative in its work
\nand enjoyment. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut again this is true only in restricted bounds or, if anywhere entirely true, then only on a middle plane of our aesthetic seeking and activity. Where the greatest and most powerful
\ncreation of beauty is accomplished and its appreciation and enjoyment rise to the highest pitch, the rational is always surpassed
\nand left behind. The creation of beauty in poetry and art does not fall within the sovereignty or even within the sphere of the
\nreason. The intellect is not the poet, the artist, the creator within us; creation comes by a suprarational influx of light and power
\nwhich must work always, if it is to do its best, by vision and inspiration. It may use the intellect for certain of its operations,
\nbut in proportion as it subjects itself to the intellect, it loses in power and force of vision and diminishes the splendour and
\ntruth of the beauty it creates. The intellect may take hold of the influx, moderate and repress the divine enthusiasm of creation
\n  <\/p>\n

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\n

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\nand force it to obey the prudence of its dictates, but in doing so it brings down the work to its own inferior level, and the lowering
\nis in proportion to the intellectual interference. For by itself the intelligence can only achieve talent, though it may be a high
\nand even, if sufficiently helped from above, a surpassing talent. Genius, the true creator, is always suprarational in its nature and
\nits instrumentation even when it seems to be doing the work of the reason; it is most itself, most exalted in its work, most sustained in the power, depth, height and beauty of its achievement when it is least touched by, least mixed with any control of
\nthe mere intellectuality and least often drops from its heights of vision and inspiration into reliance upon the always mechanical
\nprocess of intellectual construction. Art-creation which accepts the canons of the reason and works within the limits laid down
\nby it, may be great, beautiful and powerful; for genius can preserve its power even when it labours in shackles and refuses to
\nput forth all its resources: but when it proceeds by means of the intellect, it constructs, but does not create. It may construct
\nwell and with a good and faultless workmanship, but its success is formal and not of the spirit, a success of technique and not
\nthe embodiment of the imperishable truth of beauty seized in its inner reality, its divine delight, its appeal to a supreme source of
\necstasy, Ananda. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThere have been periods of artistic creation, ages of reason,
\nin which the rational and intellectual tendency has prevailed in poetry and art; there have even been nations which in their great
\nformative periods of art and literature have set up reason and a meticulous taste as the sovereign powers of their aesthetic activity. At their best these periods have achieved work of a certain greatness, but predominantly of an intellectual greatness and
\nperfection of technique rather than achievements of a supreme inspired and revealing beauty; indeed their very aim has been
\nnot the discovery of the deeper truth of beauty, but truth of ideas and truth of reason, a critical rather than a true creative
\naim. Their leading object has been an intellectual criticism of life and nature elevated by a consummate poetical rhythm and
\ndiction rather than a revelation of God and man and life and  <\/p>\n

\n

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nature in inspired forms of artistic beauty. But great art is not satisfied with representing the intellectual truth of things, which
\nis always their superficial or exterior truth; it seeks for a deeper and original truth which escapes the eye of the mere sense or the
\nmere reason, the soul in them, the unseen reality which is not that of their form and process but of their spirit. This it seizes
\nand expresses by form and idea, but a significant form, which is not merely a faithful and just or a harmonious reproduction
\nof outward Nature, and a revelatory idea, not the idea which is merely correct, elegantly right or fully satisfying to the reason
\nand taste. Always the truth it seeks is first and foremost the truth of beauty,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 not, again, the formal beauty alone or the beauty
\nof proportion and right process which is what the sense and the reason seek, but the soul of beauty which is hidden from the
\nordinary eye and the ordinary mind and revealed in its fullness only to the unsealed vision of the poet and artist in man who can
\nseize the secret significances of the universal poet and artist, the divine creator who dwells as their soul and spirit in the forms
\nhe has created. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe art-creation which lays a supreme stress on reason and taste and
\n\t\t\ton perfection and purity of a technique constructed in obedience to
\n\t\t\tthe canons of reason and taste, claimed for itself the name of
\n\t\t\tclassical art; but the claim, like the too trenchant distinction on
\n\t\t\twhich it rests, is of doubtful validity. The spirit of the real, the
\n\t\t\tgreat classical art and poetry is to bring out what is universal and
\n\t\t\tsubordinate individual expression to universal truth and beauty,
\n\t\t\tjust as the spirit of romantic art and poetry is to bring out what
\n\t\t\tis striking and individual and this it often does so powerfully or
\n\t\t\twith so vivid an emphasis as to throw into the background of its
\n\t\t\tcreation the universal, on which yet all true art romantic or
\n\t\t\tclassical builds and fills in its forms. In truth, all great art has
\n\t\t\tcarried in it both a classical and a romantic as well as a realistic
\n\t\t\telement, \u2014 understanding realism in the sense of the prominent
\n\t\t\tbringing out of the external truth of things, not the perverse
\n\t\t\tinverted romanticism of the "real" which brings into exaggerated
\n\t\t\tprominence the ugly, common or morbid and puts that forward as the
\n\t\t\twhole truth of life. The <\/p>\n

\n

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\n\t139<\/p>\n

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\ntype of art to which a great creative work belongs is determined by the prominence it gives to one element and the subdual of the
\nothers into subordination to its reigning spirit. But classical art also works by a large vision and inspiration, not by the process
\nof the intellect. The lower kind of classical art and literature, \u2014 if classical it be and not rather, as it often is, pseudo-classical,
\nintellectually imitative of the external form and process of the classical, \u2014 may achieve work of considerable, though a much
\nlesser power, but of an essentially inferior scope and nature; for to that inferiority it is self-condemned by its principle of
\nintellectual construction. Almost always it speedily degenerates into the formal or academic, empty of real beauty, void of life
\nand power, imprisoned in its slavery to form and imagining that when a certain form has been followed, certain canons of construction satisfied, certain rhetorical rules or technical principles obeyed, all has been achieved. It ceases to be art and becomes a
\ncold and mechanical workmanship. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis predominance given to reason and taste first and foremost, sometimes even almost alone, in the creation and appreciation of beauty arises from a temper of mind which is critical
\nrather than creative; and in regard to creation its theory falls into a capital error. All artistic work in order to be perfect must
\nindeed have in the very act of creation the guidance of an inner power of discrimination constantly selecting and rejecting in
\naccordance with a principle of truth and beauty which remains always faithful to a harmony, a proportion, an intimate relation
\nof the form to the idea; there is at the same time an exact fidelity of the idea to the spirit, nature and inner body of the
\nthing of beauty which has been revealed to the soul and the \u00af<\/i>
\n\u00af<\/i> mind, its svarupa <\/i>and svabhava<\/i>. Therefore this discriminating
\ninner sense rejects all that is foreign, superfluous, otiose, all that is a mere diversion distractive and deformative, excessive
\nor defective, while it selects and finds sovereignly all that can bring out the full truth, the utter beauty, the inmost power.
\nBut this discrimination is not that of the critical intellect, nor is the harmony, proportion, relation it observes that which can
\nbe fixed by any set law of the critical reason; it exists in the  <\/p>\n

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very nature and truth of the thing itself, the creation itself, in its secret inner law of beauty and harmony which can be seized
\nby vision, not by intellectual analysis. The discrimination which works in the creator is therefore not an intellectual self-criticism
\nor an obedience to rules imposed on him from outside by any intellectual canons, but itself creative, intuitive, a part of the
\nvision, involved in and inseparable from the act of creation. It comes as part of that influx of power and light from above
\nwhich by its divine enthusiasm lifts the faculties into their intense suprarational working. When it fails, when it is betrayed by the
\nlower executive instruments rational or infrarational, \u2014 and this happens when these cease to be passive and insist on obtruding
\ntheir own demands or vagaries, \u2014 the work is flawed and a subsequent act of self-criticism becomes necessary. But in correcting
\nhis work the artist who attempts to do it by rule and intellectual process, uses a false or at any rate an inferior method and cannot
\ndo his best. He ought rather to call to his aid the intuitive critical vision and embody it in a fresh act of inspired creation or recreation after bringing himself back by its means into harmony with the light and law of his original creative initiation. The
\ncritical intellect has no direct or independent part in the means of the inspired creator of beauty.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn the appreciation of beauty it has a part, but it is not even there the supreme judge or law-giver. The business of the
\nintellect is to analyse the elements, parts, external processes, apparent principles of that which it studies and explain their
\nrelations and workings; in doing this it instructs and enlightens the lower mentality which has, if left to itself, the habit of doing
\nthings or seeing what is done and taking all for granted without proper observation and fruitful understanding. But as with truth
\nof religion, so with the highest and deepest truth of beauty, the intellectual reason cannot seize its inner sense and reality, not
\neven the inner truth of its apparent principles and processes, unless it is aided by a higher insight not its own. As it cannot
\ngive a method, process or rule by which beauty can or ought to be created, so also it cannot give to the appreciation of beauty
\nthat deeper insight which it needs; it can only help to remove   <\/p>\n

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\nthe dullness and vagueness of the habitual perceptions and conceptions of the lower mind which prevent it from seeing beauty
\nor which give it false and crude aesthetic habits: it does this by giving to the mind an external idea and rule of the elements
\nof the thing it has to perceive and appreciate. What is farther needed is the awakening of a certain vision, an insight and an
\nintuitive response in the soul. Reason which studies always from outside, cannot give this inner and more intimate contact; it has
\nto aid itself by a more direct insight springing from the soul itself and to call at every step on the intuitive mind to fill up the gap
\nof its own deficiencies. We see this in the history of the development of literary
\nand artistic criticism. In its earliest stages the appreciation of beauty is instinctive, natural, inborn, a response of the aesthetic
\nsensitiveness of the soul which does not attempt to give any account of itself to the thinking intelligence. When the rational
\nintelligence applies itself to this task, it is not satisfied with recording faithfully the nature of the response and the thing it
\nhas felt, but it attempts to analyse, to lay down what is necessary in order to create a just aesthetic gratification, it prepares a
\ngrammar of technique, an artistic law and canon of construction, a sort of mechanical rule of process for the creation of beauty, a
\nfixed code or Shastra. This brings in the long reign of academic criticism superficial, technical, artificial, governed by the false
\nidea that technique, of which alone critical reason can give an entirely adequate account, is the most important part of creation
\nand that to every art there can correspond an exhaustive science which will tell us how the thing is done and give us the whole
\nsecret and process of its doing. A time comes when the creator of beauty revolts and declares the charter of his own freedom,
\ngenerally in the shape of a new law or principle of creation, and this freedom once vindicated begins to widen itself and to
\ncarry with it the critical reason out of all its familiar bounds. A more developed appreciation emerges which begins to seek
\nfor new principles of criticism, to search for the soul of the work itself and explain the form in relation to the soul or to
\nstudy the creator himself or the spirit, nature and ideas of the age he lived in
\n\t\t\tand so to arrive at a right understanding of his work.  <\/p>\n

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The intellect has begun to see that its highest business
\nis not to lay down laws for the creator of beauty, but to help us to understand himself and his work, not only its form and
\nelements but the mind from which it sprang and the impressions its effects create in the mind that receives. Here criticism is on
\nits right road, but on a road to a consummation in which the rational understanding is overpassed and a higher faculty opens,
\nsuprarational in its origin and nature. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFor the conscious appreciation of beauty reaches its height
\nof enlightenment and enjoyment not by analysis of the beauty enjoyed or even by a right and intelligent understanding of it,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 these things are only a preliminary clarifying of our first unenlightened sense of the beautiful,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 but by an exaltation of the
\nsoul in which it opens itself entirely to the light and power and joy of the creation. The soul of beauty in us identifies itself with
\nthe soul of beauty in the thing created and feels in appreciation the same divine intoxication and uplifting which the artist felt
\nin creation. Criticism reaches its highest point when it becomes the record, account, right description of this response; it must
\nbecome itself inspired, intuitive, revealing. In other words, the action of the intuitive mind must complete the action of the
\nrational intelligence and it may even wholly replace it and do more powerfully the peculiar and proper work of the intellect
\nitself; it may explain more intimately to us the secret of the form, the strands of the process, the inner cause, essence, mechanism of
\nthe defects and limitations of the work as well as of its qualities. For the intuitive intelligence when it has been sufficiently trained
\nand developed, can take up always the work of the intellect and do it with a power and light and insight greater and surer than
\nthe power and light of the intellectual judgment in its widest scope. There is an intuitive discrimination which is more keen
\nand precise in its sight than the reasoning intelligence. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhat has been said of great creative art, that being the form
\nin which normally our highest and intensest aesthetic satisfaction is achieved, applies to all beauty, beauty in Nature, beauty in
\nlife as well as beauty in art. We find that in the end the place  <\/p>\n

\n

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\nof reason and the limits of its achievement are precisely of the same kind in regard to beauty as in regard to religion. It helps
\nto enlighten and purify the aesthetic instincts and impulses, but it cannot give them their highest satisfaction or guide them to
\na complete insight. It shapes and fulfils to a certain extent the aesthetic intelligence, but it cannot justly pretend to give the
\ndefinitive law for the creation of beauty or for the appreciation and enjoyment of beauty. It can only lead the aesthetic instinct,
\nimpulse, intelligence towards a greatest possible conscious satisfaction, but not to it; it has in the end to hand them over to
\na higher faculty which is in direct touch with the suprarational and in its nature and workings exceeds the intellect. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnd for the same reason, because that which we are seeking through beauty is in the end that which we are seeking through
\nreligion, the Absolute, the Divine. The search for beauty is only in its beginning a satisfaction in the beauty of form, the beauty
\nwhich appeals to the physical senses and the vital impressions, impulsions, desires. It is only in the middle a satisfaction in the
\nbeauty of the ideas seized, the emotions aroused, the perception of perfect process and harmonious combination. Behind them
\nthe soul of beauty in us desires the contact, the revelation, the uplifting delight of an absolute beauty in all things which it
\nfeels to be present, but which neither the senses and instincts by themselves can give, though they may be its channels,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 for it is
\nsuprasensuous, \u2014 nor the reason and intelligence, though they too are a channel,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 for it is suprarational, supra-intellectual, \u2014
\nbut to which through all these veils the soul itself seeks to arrive. When it can get the touch of this universal, absolute beauty, this
\nsoul of beauty, this sense of its revelation in any slightest or greatest thing, the beauty of a flower, a form, the beauty and
\npower of a character, an action, an event, a human life, an idea, a stroke of the brush or the chisel or a scintillation of the mind,
\nthe colours of a sunset or the grandeur of the tempest, it is then that the sense of beauty in us is really, powerfully, entirely
\nsatisfied. It is in truth seeking, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God
\nis Beauty and Delight hidden in the variation of his masks and forms.  <\/p>\n

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\n

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When, fulfilled in our growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for beauty, we are
\nable to identify ourselves in soul with this Absolute and Divine in all the forms and activities of the world and shape an image of
\nour inner and our outer life in the highest image we can perceive and embody of the All-Beautiful, then the aesthetic being in us
\nwho was born for this end, has fulfilled himself and risen to his divine consummation. To find highest beauty is to find God; to
\nreveal, to embody, to create, as we say, highest beauty is to bring out of our souls the living image and power of God.
\n   <\/p>\n

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

Chapter XIV   The Suprarational Beauty   RELIGION is the seeking after the spiritual, the suprarational and therefore in this sphere the intellectual reason may…<\/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-3084","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\/3084","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=3084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3084\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}