{"id":3498,"date":"2013-07-13T01:48:57","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:48:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3498"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:48:57","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:48:57","slug":"14-the-office-and-limitations-of-the-reason-vol-the-human-cycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/02-other-editions\/the-human-cycle\/14-the-office-and-limitations-of-the-reason-vol-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-14_The office and limitations of the reason.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

\nCHAPTER XII<\/b> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nTHE OFFICE AND LIMITATIONS OF THE REASON<\/b> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nI<\/font>F<\/font><\/b>
\nTHE reason is not the sovereign master of our being nor even intended to be more
\nthan an intermediary or minister, it cannot succeed in giving a perfect law to
\nthe other estates of the realm, although it may impose on them a temporary and
\nimperfect order as a passage to a higher perfection. The rational or
\nintellectual man is not the last and highest ideal of manhood, nor would a
\nrational society be the last and highest expression of the possibilities of an
\naggregate human life,\u2014unless indeed we give to the word, "reason," a wider
\nmeaning than it now possesses and include in it the combined wisdom of all our
\npowers of knowledge, those which stand below and above the understanding and
\nlogical mind as well as this strictly rational part of our nature. The Spirit
\nthat manifests itself in man and dominates secretly the phases of his
\ndevelopment, is greater and profounder than his intellect and drives towards a
\nperfection that cannot be shut in by the arbitrary constructions of the human
\nreason. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nMeanwhile the intellect performs its function; it
\nleads man to the gates of a greater self-consciousness and places him with
\nunbandaged eyes on that wide threshold where a more luminous Angel has to take
\nhim by the hand. It takes first the lower powers of his existence, each absorbed
\nin its own urge, each <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 124<\/font>  <\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nstriving with a blind self-sufficiency towards the
\nfulfilment of its own instincts and primary impulses; it teaches them to
\nunderstand themselves and to look through the reflecting eyes of the
\nintelligence on the laws of their own action. It enables them to discern
\nintelligently the high in themselves from the low, the pure from the impure and
\nout of a crude confusion to arrive at more and more luminous formulas of their
\npossibilities. It gives them self-knowledge and is a guide, teacher, purifier,
\nliberator. For it enables them also to look beyond themselves and at each other
\nand to draw upon each other for fresh motives and a richer working. It
\nstrengthens and purifies the hedonistic and the aesthetic activities and softens
\ntheir quarrel with the ethical mind and instinct; it gives them solidity and
\nseriousness, brings them to the support of the practical and dynamic powers and
\nallies them more closely to the strong actualities of life. It sweetens the
\nethical will by infusing into it psychic, hedonistic and aesthetic elements and
\nennobles by all these separately or together the practical, dynamic and
\nutilitarian temperament of the human being. At the same time it plays the part
\nof a judge and legislator, seeks to fix rules, provide systems and regularised
\ncombinations which shall enable the powers of the human soul to walk by a
\nsettled path and act according to a sure law, an ascertained measure and in a
\nbalanced rhythm. Here it finds after a time that its legislative action becomes
\na force for limitation and turns into a bondage and that the regularised system
\nwhich it has imposed in the interests of order and conservation becomes a cause
\nof petrifaction and the sealing up of the fountains of life. It has to bring in
\nits own saving faculty of doubt. Under the impulse of the intelligence warned by
\nthe obscure revolt of the oppressed springs of life, ethics, aesthetics, the
\nsocial, political, economic rule begin to question themselves and, it this at
\nfirst brings in again some confusion, disorder and uncertainty,<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 125<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n yet it awakens new movements of
\nimagination, insight, self-knowledge and self-realisation by which old systems
\nand formulas are transformed or disappear, new experiments are made and in the
\nend larger potentialities and combinations are brought into play. By this double
\naction of the intelligence, affirming and imposing what it has seen and again in
\ndue season questioning what has been accomplished in order to make a new
\naffirmation, fixing a rule and order and liberating from rule and order, the
\nprogress of the race is assured, however uncertain may seem its steps and
\nstages. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nBut the action of the intelligence is not only
\nturned down- ward and outward upon our subjective and external life to
\nunderstand it and determine the law and order of its present movement and its
\nfuture potentialities. It has also an upward and inward eye and a more luminous
\nfunctioning by which it accepts divinations from the hidden eternities. It is
\nopened in this power of vision to a Truth above it from which it derives,
\nhowever imperfectly and as from behind a veil, an indirect knowledge of the
\nuniversal principles of our existence and its possibilities; it receives and
\nturns what it can seize of them into intellectual forms and these provide us
\nwith large governing ideas by which our efforts can be shaped and around which
\nthey can be concentrated or massed; it defines the ideals which we seek to
\naccomplish. It provides us with the great ideas that are forces (id\u00e9es
\nforces),<\/i> ideas which in their own strength impose themselves upon our life
\nand compel it into their moulds. Only the forms we give these ideas are
\nintellectual; they themselves descend from a plane of truth of being where
\nknowledge and force are on, the idea and the power of self-fulfilment in the
\nidea are inseparable. Unfortunately, when translated into the forms or our
\nintelligence which acts only by a separating and combining analysis and
\nsynthesis and into the effort of our life which advances<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 126<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n by a sort of experimental and empirical
\nseeking, these powers become disparate and conflicting ideals which we have all
\nthe difficulty in the world to bring into any kind of satisfactory harmony. Such
\nare the primary principles of liberty and order, good, beauty and truth, the
\nideal of power and the ideal of love, individualism and collectivism,
\nself-denial and self-fulfilment and a hundred others. In each sphere of human
\nlife, in each part of our being and our action the intellect presents us with
\nthe opposition of a number of such master ideas and such conflicting principles.
\nIt finds each to be a truth to which something essential in our being
\nresponds,\u2014in our higher nature a law, in our lower nature an instinct. It seeks
\nto fulfil each in turn, builds a system of action round it and goes from one to
\nthe other and back again to what it has left. Or it tries to combine them but is
\ncontented with none of the combinations it has made because none brings about
\ntheir perfect reconciliation or their satisfied oneness. That indeed belongs to
\na larger and higher consciousness, not yet attained by mankind, where these
\nopposites are ever harmonised and even unified because in their origin they are
\neternally one. But still every enlarged attempt of the intelligence thus dealing
\nwith our inner and outer life increases the width and wealth of our nature,
\nopens it to larger possibilities of self-knowledge and self-realisation and
\nbrings us nearer to our awakening into that greater consciousness. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe individual and social progress of man has been
\nthus a double movement of self-illumination and self-harmonising with the
\nintelligence and the intelligent will as the intermediaries between his soul and
\nits works. He has had to bring out numberless possibilities of
\nself-understanding, self-mastery, self-formation out of his first crude life of
\ninstincts and impulses; he has been constantly impelled to convert that lower
\nanimal or half- animal existence with its imperfect self-conscience into the
\nstuff <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 127<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nof intelligent being, instincts into ideas,
\nimpulses into ordered) movements of an intelligent will. But as he has to
\nproceed out of ignorance into knowledge by a slow labour of self-recognition and
\nmastery of his surroundings and his material and his intelligence is incapable
\nof seizing comprehensively the whole of himself in knowledge, unable to work out
\ncomprehensively the mass of his possibilities in action, he has had to proceed
\npiece-meal, by partial experiments, by creation of different types, by a
\nconstant swinging backward and forward between the various possibilities before
\nhim and the different elements he has to harmonise. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nIt is not only that he has to contrive continually
\nsome nevi harmony between the various elements of his being, physical vitalistic,
\npractical and dynamic, aesthetic, emotional and hedonistic, ethical,
\nintellectual, but each of them again has to arrive at some order of its own
\ndisparate materials. In his ethics he is divided by different moral tendencies,
\njustice and charity, self help and altruism, self-increase and self-abnegation,
\nthe tendencies of strength and the tendencies of love, the moral rule activism and the
\nmoral rule of quietism. His emotions a necessary to his development and their
\nindulgence essential the out-flowering of his rich humanity; yet is he constant!
\ncalled upon to coerce and deny them, nor is there any sure rule to guide him in
\nthe perplexity of this twofold need. His hedonistic impulse is called many ways
\nby different fields, objects, ideals of self-satisfaction. His aesthetic
\nenjoyment, hi’ aesthetic creation forms for itself under the stress of the
\nintelligence different laws and forms; each seeks to impose itself as the best
\nand the standard, yet each, if its claim were allowed, would by its unjust
\nvictory impoverish and imprison his faculty and his felicity in its exercise. His
\npolitics and society are series of adventures and experiments among various
\npossibility of autocracy, monarchism, military aristocracy, mercantile oligarchy, <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 128<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nopen or veiled plutocracy, pseudo-democracy
\nof various kinds, bourgeois or proletarian, individualistic or collectivist or
\nbureaucratic, socialism awaiting him, anarchism looming beyond it: and all these
\ncorrespond to some truth of his social being, some need of his complex social
\nnature, some instinct or force in it which demands that form for its
\neffectuation. Mankind works out these difficulties under the stress of the
\nspirit within it by throwing out a constant variation of types, types of
\ncharacter and temperament, types of practical activity, aesthetic creation,
\npolity, society, ethical order, intellectual system, which vary from the pure to
\nthe mixed, from the simple harmony to the complex; each and all of these are so
\nmany experiments of individual and collective self-formation in the light of a
\nprogressive and increasing knowledge. That knowledge is governed by a number of
\nconflicting ideas and ideals around which these experiments group themselves:
\neach of them is gradually pushed as far as possible in its purity and again
\nmixed and combined as much as possible with others so that there may be a more
\ncomplex form and an enriched action. Each type has to be broken in turn to yield
\nplace to new types and each combination has to give way to the possibility of a
\nnew combination. Through it all there is growing an accumulating stock of
\nself-experience and self-actualisation of which the ordinary man accepts some
\ncurrent formulation conventionally as if it were an absolute law and
\ntruth,\u2014often enough he even thinks it to be that,\u2014but which the more developed
\nhuman being seeks always either to break or to enlarge and make more profound or
\nsubtle in order to increase or make room for an increase of human capacity,
\nperfectibility, happiness. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThis view of human life and of the process of our
\ndevelopment, to which subjectivism readily leads us, gives us a truer vision of
\nthe place of the intellect in the human movement. We have seen that the
\nintellect has a double working, dispassionate <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 129<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nand interested, self-centered or subservient to
\nmovements not its own. The one is a disinterested pursuit of truth for the sake
\nof Truth and of knowledge for the sake of knowledge without any ulterior motive,
\nwith every consideration put away except the rule of keeping the eye on the
\nobject, on the fact under enquiry and finding out its truth, its process, its
\nlaw. The other is coloured by the passion for practice, the desire to govern
\nlife by the truth discovered or the fascination of an idea which we labour to
\nestablish as the sovereign law of our life and action. We have seen indeed that
\nthis is the superiority of reason over the other faculties of man that it is not
\nconfined to a separate absorbed action of its own, but plays upon all the
\nothers, discovers their law and truth, makes its discoveries serviceable to them
\nand even in pursuing its own bent and end serves also their ends and arrives at
\na catholic utility. Man in fact does not live for knowledge alone; life in its
\nwidest sense is his principal preoccupation and he seeks knowledge for its
\nutility to life much more than for the pure pleasure of acquiring knowledge. But
\nit is precisely in this putting of knowledge at the service of life that the
\nhuman intellect falls into that confusion and imperfection which pursues all
\nhuman action. So long as we pursue knowledge for its own sake, there is nothing
\nto be said: the reason is performing its natural function; it is exercising
\nsecurely its highest right. In the work of the philosopher, the scientist, the
\nsavant labouring to add something to the stock of our ascertainable knowledge,
\nthere is as perfect a purity and satisfaction as in that of the poet and artist
\ncreating forms of beauty for the aesthetic delight of the race. Whatever
\nindividual error and limitation there may be, does not matter; for the
\ncollective and progressive knowledge of the race has gained the truth that has
\nbeen discovered and may be trusted in time to get rid of the error. It is when
\nit tries to apply ideas to life that the human intellect stumbles and finds itself
\nat fault. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 130<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nOrdinarily, this is because in concerning itself
\nwith action the intelligence of man becomes at once partial and passionate and
\nmakes itself the servant of something other than the pure truth. But even if the
\nintellect keeps itself as impartial and disinterested as possible,\u2014and
\naltogether impartial, altogether disinterested die human intellect cannot be
\nunless it is content to arrive at an entire divorce from practice or a sort of
\nlarge but ineffective tolerantism, eclecticism or sceptical curiosity,\u2014still the
\ntruths it discovers or the ideas it promulgates become, the moment they are
\napplied to life, the plaything of forces over which the reason has little
\ncontrol. Science pursuing its cold and even way has made discoveries which have
\nserved on one side a practical humanitarianism, on the other supplied monstrous
\nweapons to egoism and mutual destruction; it has made possible a gigantic
\nefficiency of organisation which has been used on one side for the economic and
\nsocial amelioration of the nations and on the other for turning each into a
\ncolossal battering-ram of aggression, ruin and slaughter. It has given rise on
\nthe one side to a large rationalistic and altruistic humanitarianism, on the
\nother it has justified a godless egoism, vitalism, vulgar will to power and
\nsuccess. It has drawn mankind together and given it a new hope and at the same
\ntime crushed it with the burden of a monstrous commercialism. Nor is this due,
\nas is so often asserted, to its divorce from religion or to any lack of
\nidealism. Idealistic philosophy has been equally at the service of the powers of
\ngood and evil and provided an intellectual conviction both for reaction and for
\nprogress. Organised religion itself has often enough in the past hounded men to
\ncrime and massacre and justified obscurantism and oppression. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe truth is that upon which we are now insisting,
\nthat reason is in its nature an imperfect light with a large but still
\nrestricted mission and that once it applies itself to life and action it becomes
\nsubject to what it studies and the servant and <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 131<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\ncounsellor of the forces in whose obscure and
\nill-understood struggle it intervenes. It can in its nature be used and has
\nalways been used to justify any idea, theory of life, system of society or
\ngovernment, ideal of individual or collective action to which the will of man
\nattaches itself for the moment or through the centuries. In philosophy it gives
\nequally good reasons for monism and pluralism or for any halting-place between
\nthem, for the belief in Being or for the belief in Becoming, for optimism and
\npessimism, for activism and quietism. It can justify the most mystic religionism
\nand the most positive atheism, get rid of God or see nothing else. In aesthetics
\nit supplies the basis equally for classicism and romanticism, for an idealistic,
\nreligious or mystic theory of art or for the most earthy realism. It can with
\nequal power base auterely a strict and narrow moralism or prove triumphantly the
\nthesis of the antinomian. It has been the sufficient and convincing prophet of
\nevery kind of autocracy or oligarchy and of every species of democracy; it
\nsupplies excellent and satisfying reasons for competitive individualism and
\nequally excellent and satisfying reasons for competitive individualism and
\nequally excellent and satisfying reasons for communism or against communism and
\nfor State socialism or for one variety of socialism against another. It can
\nplace itself with equal effectivity at the service of utilitarianism, economism,
\nhedonism, aestheticism, sensualism, ethicism, idealism or any other essential
\nneed or activity of man and build around it a philosophy, a political and social
\nsystem, a theory of conduct and life. Ask it not to lean to one idea alone, but
\nto make an eclectic combination or a synthetic harmony and it will satisfy you;
\nonly, there being any number of possible combinations or harmonies, it will
\nequally well justify the one or the other and set up or throw down any one of
\nthem according as the spirit in man is attracted to or withdraws from it. For it
\nis really that which decides and <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 132<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nthe reason is only a brilliant servant and minister
\nof this
\n<\/b>veiled
\n<\/b>and secret sovereign. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThis truth is hidden from the rationalist because
\nhe is supported by two constant articles of faith, first that his own reason is
\nright and the reason of others who differ from him is wrong, and secondly that
\nwhatever may be the present deficiencies of the human intellect, the collective
\nhuman reason will eventually arrive at purity and be able to found human thought
\nand life securely on a clear rational basis entirely satisfying to the
\nintelligence. His first article of faith is no doubt the common expression of
\nour egoism and arrogant fallibility, but it is also something more; it expresses
\nthis truth that it is the legitimate function of the reason to justify to man
\nhis action and his hope and the faith that is in him and to give him that idea
\nand knowledge, however restricted, and that dynamic conviction, however narrow
\nand intolerant, which he needs in order that he may live, act and grow in the
\nhighest light available to him. The reason cannot grasp all truth in its embrace
\nbecause truth is too infinite for it; but still it does grasp the something of
\nit which we immediately need, and its insufficiency does not detract from the
\nvalue of its work, but is rather the measure of its value. For man is not
\nintended to grasp the whole truth of his being at once, but to move towards it
\nthrough a succession of experiences and a constant, though not by any means
\nperfectly continuous self-enlargement. The first business of reason then is to
\njustify and enlighten to him his various experiences and to give him faith and
\nconviction in holding on to his self-enlargings. It justifies to him now this,
\nnow that, the experiences of the moment, the receding light of the past, the
\nhalf-seen vision of the future. Its inconstancy, its divisibility against
\nitself, its power of sustaining opposite views are the whole secret of its
\nvalue. It would not do indeed for it to support too conflicting views in the
\nsame individual,<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 133<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nexcept at moments of awakening and
\ntransition, but in the collective body of men and in the successions of Time
\nthat is its whole business. For so man moves towards the infinity of the Truth
\nby die experience of its variety; so his reason helps him to build, change,
\ndestroy what he has built and prepare a new construction, in a word to progress,
\ngrow, enlarge himself in his self-knowledge and world-knowledge and their works. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe second article of faith of the believer in
\nreason is also an error and yet contains a truth. The reason cannot arrive at
\nany final truth because it can neither get to the root of things nor embrace the
\ntotality of their secrets; it deals with the finite, the separate, the limited
\naggregate, and has no measure for the all and the infinite. Nor can reason found
\na perfect life for man or a perfect society. A purely rational human life would
\nbe a life baulked and deprived of its most powerful dynamic sources; it would be a substitution of the minister for the
\nsovereign. A purely rational society could not come into being and, if it could
\nbe born, either could not live or would sterilise and petrify human existence.
\nThe root powers of human life, its intimate causes are below, irrational, and
\nthey are above, suprarational. But this is true that by constant enlargement,
\npurification, openness the reason of man is bound to arrive at an intelligent
\nsense even of that which is hidden from it, a power of passive yet sympathetic
\nreflection of the Light that surpasses it. Its limit is reached, its function is
\nfinished when it can say to man, "There is a Soul, a Self, a God in the world
\nand in man who works concealed and all is his self-concealing and gradual
\nself-unfolding. His minister I have been, slowly to unseal your eyes, remove the
\nthick integuments of your vision until there is only my own luminous veil
\nbetween you and him. Remove that and make the soul of man one in fact and nature
\nwith this Divine; then you will know yourself, discover the highest and widest
\nlaw of your <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 134<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nbeing, become the possessors or at least the
\nreceivers and instruments of a higher will and knowledge than mine and lay hold
\nat last on the true secret and the whole sense of a human and yet divine
\nliving." <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 135<\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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