{"id":3087,"date":"2013-07-13T01:45:51","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3087"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:45:51","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:51","slug":"12-aesthetic-and-ethical-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\/12-aesthetic-and-ethical-culture-vol-25-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-12_Aesthetic and Ethical Culture.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAesthetic and Ethical Culture <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tT<\/font>HE IDEA<\/b> of culture begins to define itself for us a little more clearly, or at least it has put away from it in a
\n clear contrast its natural opposites. The unmental, the
\npurely physical life is very obviously its opposite, it is barbarism; the unintellectualised vital, the crude economic or the
\ngrossly domestic life which looks only to money-getting, the procreation of a family and its maintenance, are equally its opposites; they are another and even uglier barbarism. We agree to regard the individual who is dominated by them and has
\nno thought of higher things as an uncultured and undeveloped human being, a prolongation of the savage, essentially a barbarian even if he lives in a civilised nation and in a society which has arrived at the general idea and at some ordered
\npractice of culture and refinement. The societies or nations which bear this stamp we agree to call barbarous or semibarbarous. Even when a nation or an age has developed within itself knowledge and science and arts, but still in its general
\noutlook, its habits of life and thought is content to be governed not by knowledge and truth and beauty and high ideals
\nof living, but by the gross vital, commercial, economic view of existence, we say that that nation or age may be civilised
\nin a sense, but for all its abundant or even redundant appliances and apparatus of civilisation it is not the realisation
\nor the promise of a cultured humanity. Therefore upon even the European civilisation of the nineteenth century with all its
\ntriumphant and teeming production, its great developments of science, its achievement in the works of the intellect we pass
\na certain condemnation, because it has turned all these things to commercialism and to gross uses of vitalistic success. We
\nsay of it that this was not the perfection to which humanity ought to aspire and that this trend travels away from and not
\n \t\t\ttowards the higher curve of human evolution.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u201392<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

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

It must be our definite verdict upon it that it was inferior as an age of culture
\nto ancient Athens, to Italy of the Renascence, to ancient or classical India. For great as might be the deficiencies of social
\norganisation in those eras and though their range of scientific knowledge and material achievement was immensely inferior,
\nyet they were more advanced in the art of life, knew better its object and aimed more powerfully at some clear ideal of human
\nperfection. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn the range of the mind’s life itself, to live in its merely
\npractical and dynamic activity or in the mentalised emotional or sensational current, a life of conventional conduct, average
\nfeelings, customary ideas, opinions and prejudices which are not one’s own but those of the environment, to have no free
\nand open play of mind, but to live grossly and unthinkingly by the unintelligent rule of the many, to live besides according
\nto the senses and sensations controlled by certain conventions, but neither purified nor enlightened nor chastened by any law
\nof beauty, \u2014 all this too is contrary to the ideal of culture. A man may so live with all the appearance or all the pretensions
\nof a civilised existence, enjoy successfully all the plethora of its appurtenances, but he is not in the real sense a developed
\nhuman being. A society following such a rule of life may be anything else you will, vigorous, decent, well-ordered, successful,
\nreligious, moral, but it is a Philistine society; it is a prison which the human soul has to break. For so long as it dwells there, it
\ndwells in an inferior, uninspired and unexpanding mental status; it vegetates infructuously in the lower stratum and is governed
\nnot by the higher faculties of man, but by the crudities of the unuplifted sense-mind. Nor is it enough for it to open windows
\nin this prison by which it may get draughts of agreeable fresh air, something of the free light of the intellect, something of the
\nfragrance of art and beauty, something of the large breath of wider interests and higher ideals. It has yet to break out of its
\nprison altogether and live in that free light, in that fragrance and large breath; only then does it breathe the natural atmosphere
\nof the developed mental being.    <\/p>\n

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\n

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

\n\t\t\tNot to live principally in the
\nactivities of the sense-mind, but in the activities of knowledge and reason and a wide intellectual curiosity, the activities of the
\ncultivated aesthetic being, the activities of the enlightened will which make for character and high ethical ideals and a large
\nhuman action, not to be governed by our lower or our average mentality but by truth and beauty and the self-ruling will is the
\nideal of a true culture and the beginning of an accomplished humanity. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWe get then by elimination to a positive idea and definition of culture. But still on this higher plane of the mental life we
\nare apt to be pursued by old exclusivenesses and misunderstandings. We see that in the past there seems often to have
\nbeen a quarrel between culture and conduct; yet according to our definition conduct also is a part of the cultured life and
\nthe ethical ideality one of the master impulses of the cultured being. The opposition which puts on one side the pursuit of
\nideas and knowledge and beauty and calls that culture and on the other the pursuit of character and conduct and exalts that
\nas the moral life must start evidently from an imperfect view of human possibility and perfection. Yet that opposition has not
\nonly existed, but is a naturally strong tendency of the human mind and therefore must answer to some real and important
\ndivergence in the very composite elements of our being. It is the opposition which Arnold drew between Hebraism and Hellenism. The trend of the Jewish nation which gave us the severe ethical religion of the Old Testament,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 crude, conventional and
\nbarbarous enough in the Mosaic law, but rising to undeniable heights of moral exaltation when to the Law were added the
\nProphets, and finally exceeding itself and blossoming into a fine flower of spirituality in Judaic Christianity,1
\n\t\t\t\u2014 was dominated
\nby the preoccupation of a terrestrial and ethical righteousness and the promised rewards of right worship and right doing,
\nbut innocent of science and philosophy, careless of knowledge, <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t1The epithet is needed, for European Christianity has been something different, even at its best of another temperament, Latinised, Graecised, Celticised or else only a rough
\nTeutonic imitation of the old-world Hebraism.indifferent to beauty.    <\/p>\n

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\n

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The Hellenic mind was less exclusively but still largely dominated by a love of the play of reason for its
\nown sake, but even more powerfully by a high sense of beauty, a clear aesthetic sensibility and a worship of the beautiful in every
\nactivity, in every creation, in thought, in art, in life, in religion. So strong was this sense that not only manners, but ethics were
\nseen by it to a very remarkable extent in the light of its master idea of beauty; the good was to its instinct largely the becoming
\nand the beautiful. In philosophy itself it succeeded in arriving at the conception of the Divine as Beauty, a truth which the
\nmetaphysician very readily misses and impoverishes his thought by missing it. But still, striking as is this great historical contrast
\nand powerful as were its results on European culture, we have to go beyond its outward manifestation if we would understand
\nin its source this psychological opposition. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe conflict arises from that sort of triangular
\n\t\t\tdisposition of the higher or more subtle mentality which we have
\n\t\t\talready had occasion to indicate. There is in our mentality a side
\n\t\t\tof will, conduct, character which creates the ethical man; there is
\n\t\t\tanother side of sensibility to the beautiful, \u2014 understanding beauty
\n\t\t\tin no narrow or hyper-artistic sense, \u2014 which creates the artistic
\n\t\t\tand aesthetic man. Therefore there can be such a thing as a
\n\t\t\tpredominantly or even exclusively ethical culture; there can be too,
\n\t\t\tevidently, a predominantly or even exclusively aesthetic culture.
\n\t\t\tThere are at once created two conflicting ideals which must
\n\t\t\tnaturally stand opposed and look askance at each other with a mutual
\n\t\t\tdistrust or even reprobation. The aesthetic man tends to be
\n\t\t\timpatient of the ethical rule; he feels it to be a barrier to his
\n\t\t\taesthetic freedom and an oppression on the play of his artistic
\n\t\t\tsense and his artistic faculty; he is naturally hedonistic, \u2014 for
\n\t\t\tbeauty and delight are inseparable powers, \u2014 and the ethical rule
\n\t\t\ttramples on pleasure, even very often on quite innocent pleasures,
\n\t\t\tand tries to put a strait waistcoat on the human impulse to delight.
\n\t\t\tHe may accept the ethical rule when it makes itself beautiful or
\n\t\t\teven seize on it as one of his instruments for creating beauty, but
\n\t\t\tonly when he can subordinate it to the aesthetic principle of his
\n\t\t\tnature, \u2014 just as
\nhe is often drawn to religion by its side of beauty, pomp, magnificent ritual, emotional satisfaction, repose or poetic ideality
\n\t\t\tand aspiration, \u2014 we might almost say, by the hedonistic aspects of
\n\t\t\treligion.   <\/p>\n

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\n

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

\n\t\t\tEven when fully accepted, it is not for their own
\nsake that he accepts them. The ethical man repays this natural repulsion with interest. He tends to distrust art and the aesthetic
\nsense as something lax and emollient, something in its nature undisciplined and by its attractive appeals to the passions and
\nemotions destructive of a high and strict self-control. He sees that it is hedonistic and he finds that the hedonistic impulse is
\nnon-moral and often immoral. It is difficult for him to see how the indulgence of the aesthetic impulse beyond a very narrow
\nand carefully guarded limit can be combined with a strict ethical life. He evolves the puritan who objects to pleasure on principle;
\nnot only in his extremes \u2014 and a predominant impulse tends to become absorbing and leads towards extremes
\n\t\t\t\u2014 but in the core
\nof his temperament he remains fundamentally the puritan. The misunderstanding between these two sides of our nature is an
\ninevitable circumstance of our human growth which must try them to their fullest separate possibilities and experiment in
\nextremes in order that it may understand the whole range of its capacities. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSociety is only an enlargement of the individual; therefore this contrast and opposition between individual types reproduces itself in a like contrast and opposition between social and national types. We must not go for the best examples to social
\nformulas which do not really illustrate these tendencies but are depravations, deformations or deceptive conformities. We must
\nnot take as an instance of the ethical turn the middle-class puritanism touched with a narrow, tepid and conventional religiosity
\nwhich was so marked an element in nineteenth-century England; that was not an ethical culture, but simply a local variation of the
\ngeneral type of bourgeois respectability you will find everywhere at a certain stage of civilisation,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 it was Philistinism pure and
\nsimple. Nor should we take as an instance of the aesthetic any merely Bohemian society or such examples as London of the
\nRestoration or Paris in certain brief periods of its history; that, whatever
\n\t\t\tsome of its pretensions, had for its principle, always, the
\n\t\t\tindulgence of the average sensational and sensuous man freed from
\n\t\t\tthe conventions of morality by a superficial intellectualism and
\n\t\t\taestheticism.    <\/p>\n

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\n

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

Nor even can we take Puritan England
\nas the ethical type; for although there was there a strenuous, an exaggerated culture of character and the ethical being, the
\ndetermining tendency was religious, and the religious impulse is a phenomenon quite apart from our other subjective tendencies,
\nthough it influences them all; it is sui generis <\/i>and must be treated separately. To get at real, if not always quite pure examples of
\nthe type we must go back a little farther in time and contrast early republican Rome or, in Greece itself, Sparta with Periclean
\nAthens. For as we come down the stream of Time in its present curve of evolution, humanity in the mass, carrying in it its past
\ncollective experience, becomes more and more complex and the old distinct types do not recur or recur precariously and with
\ndifficulty. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tRepublican Rome \u2014 before it was touched and finally taken
\ncaptive by conquered Greece \u2014 stands out in relief as one of the most striking psychological phenomena of human history. From
\nthe point of view of human development it presents itself as an almost unique experiment in high and strong character-building
\ndivorced as far as may be from the sweetness which the sense of beauty and the light which the play of the reason brings into
\ncharacter and uninspired by the religious temperament; for the early Roman creed was a superstition, a superficial religiosity
\nand had nothing in it of the true religious spirit. Rome was the human will oppressing and disciplining the emotional and
\nsensational mind in order to arrive at the self-mastery of a definite ethical type; and it was this self-mastery which enabled the
\nRoman republic to arrive also at the mastery of its environing world and impose on the nations its public order and law. All
\nsupremely successful imperial nations have had in their culture or in their nature, in their formative or expansive periods, this
\npredominance of the will, the character, the impulse to selfdiscipline and self-mastery which constitutes the very basis of the
\nethical tendency. Rome and Sparta like other ethical civilisations had their
\n\t\t\tconsiderable moral deficiencies, tolerated or deliberately
\n\t\t\tencouraged customs and practices which we should call immoral,
\n\t\t\tfailed to develop the gentler and more delicate side of moral
\n\t\t\tcharacter, but this is of no essential importance.  <\/p>\n

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\n

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

\n\t\t\tThe
\nethical idea in man changes and enlarges its scope, but the kernel of the true ethical being remains always the same,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 will,
\ncharacter, self-discipline, self-mastery. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIts limitations at once appear, when we look back at its
\nprominent examples. Early Rome and Sparta were barren of thought, art, poetry, literature, the larger mental life, all the
\namenity and pleasure of human existence; their art of life excluded or discouraged the delight of living. They were distrustful, as the exclusively ethical man is always distrustful, of free and flexible thought and the aesthetic impulse. The earlier spirit
\nof republican Rome held at arm’s length as long as possible the Greek influences that invaded her, closed the schools of the
\nGreek teachers, banished the philosophers, and her most typical minds looked upon the Greek language as a peril and Greek
\nculture as an abomination: she felt instinctively the arrival at her gates of an enemy, divined a hostile and destructive force
\nfatal to her principle of living. Sparta, though a Hellenic city, admitted as almost the sole aesthetic element of her deliberate
\nethical training and education a martial music and poetry, and even then, when she wanted a poet of war, she had to import an
\nAthenian. We have a curious example of the repercussion of this instinctive distrust even on a large and aesthetic Athenian mind
\nin the utopian speculations of Plato who felt himself obliged in his Republic first to censure and then to banish the poets from his
\nideal polity. The end of these purely ethical cultures bears witness to their insufficiency. Either they pass away leaving nothing or
\nlittle behind them by which the future can be attracted and satisfied, as Sparta passed, or they collapse in a revolt of the complex
\nnature of man against an unnatural restriction and repression, as the early Roman type collapsed into the egoistic and often
\norgiastic licence of later republican and imperial Rome. The human mind needs to think, feel, enjoy, expand; expansion is its
\nvery nature and restriction is only useful to it in so far as it helps to
\n\t\t\tsteady, guide and strengthen its expansion.   <\/p>\n

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\n

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

It readily refuses the name of culture to those civilisations or periods, however
\nnoble their aim or even however beautiful in itself their order, which have not allowed an intelligent freedom of development.\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOn the other hand, we are tempted to give the name of a full culture to all those periods and civilisations, whatever their
\ndefects, which have encouraged a freely human development and like ancient Athens have concentrated on thought and beauty
\nand the delight of living. But there were in the Athenian development two distinct periods, one of art and beauty, the Athens
\nof Phidias and Sophocles, and one of thought, the Athens of the philosophers. In the first period the sense of beauty and the need
\nof freedom of life and the enjoyment of life are the determining forces. This Athens thought, but it thought in the terms of art
\nand poetry, in figures of music and drama and architecture and sculpture; it delighted in intellectual discussion, but not so much
\nwith any will to arrive at truth as for the pleasure of thinking and the beauty of ideas. It had its moral order, for without
\nthat no society can exist, but it had no true ethical impulse or ethical type, only a conventional and customary morality; and
\nwhen it thought about ethics, it tended to express it in the terms of beauty,
\nto kalon<\/i>, to epieikes<\/i>, the beautiful, the becoming. Its very
\n\t\t\treligion was a religion of beauty and an occasion for pleasant
\n\t\t\tritual and festivals and for artistic creation, an aesthetic
\n\t\t\tenjoyment touched with a superficial religious sense. But without
\n\t\t\tcharacter, without some kind of high or strong discipline there is
\n\t\t\tno enduring power of life. Athens exhausted its vitality within one
\n\t\t\twonderful century which left it enervated, will-less, unable to
\n\t\t\tsucceed in the struggle of life, uncreative. It turned indeed for a
\n\t\t\ttime precisely to that which had been lacking to it, the serious
\n\t\t\tpursuit of truth and the evolution of systems of ethical
\n\t\t\tself-discipline; but it could only think, it could not successfully
\n\t\t\tpractise. The later Hellenic mind and Athenian centre of culture
\n\t\t\tgave to Rome the great Stoic system of ethical discipline which
\n\t\t\tsaved her in the midst of the orgies of her first imperial century,
\n\t\t\tbut could not itself be stoical in its practice; for to Athens and
\n\t\t\tto the characteristic temperament of Hellas, this thought was a
\nstraining to something it had not and could not have; it was the opposite of its nature and not its fulfilment. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013<\/font>99<\/p>\n

\n

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

\n\t\t\tThis insufficiency of the aesthetic view of life becomes yet more evident when we come down to its other great example,
\nItaly of the Renascence. The Renascence was regarded at one time as pre-eminently a revival of learning, but in its Mediterranean birth-place it was rather the efflorescence of art and poetry and the beauty of life. Much more than was possible
\neven in the laxest times of Hellas, aesthetic culture was divorced from the ethical impulse and at times was even anti-ethical and
\nreminiscent of the licence of imperial Rome. It had learning and curiosity, but gave very little of itself to high thought and truth
\nand the more finished achievements of the reason, although it helped to make free the way for philosophy and science. It so
\ncorrupted religion as to provoke in the ethically minded Teutonic nations the violent revolt of the Reformation, which, though it
\nvindicated the freedom of the religious mind, was an insurgence not so much of the reason,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 that was left to Science, \u2014 but of
\nthe moral instinct and its ethical need. The subsequent prostration and loose weakness of Italy was the inevitable result of the
\ngreat defect of its period of fine culture, and it needed for its revival the new impulse of thought and will and character given
\nto it by Mazzini. If the ethical impulse is not sufficient by itself for the development of the human being, yet are will, character,
\nself-discipline, self-mastery indispensable to that development. They are the backbone of the mental body. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNeither the ethical being nor the aesthetic being is the whole man, nor can either be his sovereign principle; they are merely
\ntwo powerful elements. Ethical conduct is not the whole of life; even to say that it is three-fourths of life is to indulge in a very
\ndoubtful mathematics. We cannot assign to it its position in any such definite language, but can at best say that its kernel of
\nwill, character and self-discipline are almost the first condition for human self-perfection. The aesthetic sense is equally indispensable, for without that the self-perfection of the mental being cannot arrive at its object, which is on the mental plane the right
\nand harmonious possession and enjoyment of the truth, power, beauty and delight
\n\t\t\tof human existence.   <\/p>\n

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\n

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

But neither can be the highest principle of the human order. We can combine them; we
\ncan enlarge the sense of ethics by the sense of beauty and delight and introduce into it to correct its tendency of hardness and
\nausterity the element of gentleness, love, amenity, the hedonistic side of morals; we can steady, guide and strengthen the delight of
\nlife by the introduction of the necessary will and austerity and self-discipline which will give it endurance and purity. These
\ntwo powers of our psychological being, which represent in us the essential principle of energy and the essential principle of
\ndelight, \u2014 the Indian terms are more profound and expressive, Tapas and Ananda,2
\n\t\t\t\u2014 can be thus helped by each other, the
\none to a richer, the other to a greater self-expression. But that even this much reconciliation may come about they must be
\ntaken up and enlightened by a higher principle which must be capable of understanding and comprehending both equally and
\nof disengaging and combining disinterestedly their purposes and potentialities. That higher principle seems to be provided for us
\nby the human faculty of reason and intelligent will. Our crowning capacity, it would seem to be by right the crowned sovereign
\nof our nature. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t2Tapas is the energising conscious-power of cosmic being by which the world is created, maintained and governed; it includes all concepts of force, will, energy, power,
\neverything dynamic and dynamising. Ananda is the essential nature of bliss of the cosmic consciousness and, in activity, its delight of self-creation and self-experience.
\n   <\/p>\n

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

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