{"id":3505,"date":"2013-07-13T01:48:59","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:48:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3505"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:48:59","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:48:59","slug":"04-the-age-of-individualism-and-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\/04-the-age-of-individualism-and-reason-vol-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-04_The age of Individualism and Reason.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

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

\nTHE AGE OF INDIVIDUALISM AND REASON<\/b> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nA<\/font>N<\/b> INDIVIDUALISTIC age of human society comes as a
\nresult of the corruption and failure of the conventional, as a
\nrevolt against the reign of the petrified typal figure. Before it can
\nbe born it is necessary that the old truths shall have been lost
\nin the soul and practice of the race and that even the conventions which ape and replace them shall have become devoid of
\nreal sense and intelligence: stripped of all practical justification,
\nthey exist only mechanically by fixed idea, by the force of custom, by attachment to the form. It is then that men in spite of
\nthe natural conservatism of the social mind are compelled at last
\nto perceive that the Truth is dead in them and that they are
\nliving by a lie. The individualism of the new age is an attempt
\nto get back from conventionalism of belief and practice to some
\nsolid bed-rock, no matter what, of real and tangible Truth. And it is
\nnecessarily individualistic because all the old general standards have become bankrupt and can no longer give any inner
\nhelp; it is therefore the individual who has to become a discoverer, a pioneer, and to search out by his individual reason,
\nintuition, idealism, desire, claim upon life or whatever other
\nlight he finds in himself the true law of the world and of his own
\nbeing. By that, when he has found or thinks he has found it, he
\nwill strive to rebase on a firm foundation and remould in a more
\nvital even if a poorer form religion, society, ethics, political institutions,<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 15<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n his relations with his fellows, his strivings for his own perfection and his labour for mankind. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nIt is in Europe that the age of individualism has taken birth
\nand exercised its full sway; the East has entered into it only by
\ncontact and influence, not from an original impulse. And it is to
\nits passion for the discovery of the actual truth of things and for
\nthe governing of human life by whatever law of the truth it has
\nfound that the West owes its centuries of strength, vigour, light,
\nprogress, irresistible expansion. Equally, it is due not to any original falsehood in the ideals on which its life was founded, but to
\nthe loss of the living sense of the Truth it once held and its long contented
\nslumber in the cramping bonds of a mechanical conventionalism that the East has found itself helpless in the hour
\nof its awakening, a giant empty of strength, inert masses of men
\nwho had forgotten how to deal freely with facts and forces because they had learned only how to live in a world of stereotyped
\nthought and customary action. Yet the truths which Europe has
\nfound by its individualistic age covered only the first more obvious, physical and outward facts of life and only such of their
\nmore hidden realities and powers as the habit of analytical reason and the
\npursuit of practical utility can give to man. If its rationalistic civilisation has swept so triumphantly over the world, it is
\nbecause it found no deeper and more powerful truth to confront
\nit; for all the rest of mankind was still in the inactivity of the last dark hours of the conventional age. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe individualistic age of Europe was in its beginning a
\nrevolt of reason, in its culmination a triumphal progress of physical Science. Such an evolution was historically inevitable. The
\ndawn of individualism is always a questioning, a denial. The individual finds a religion imposed upon him which does not base its dogma and
\npractice upon a living sense of ever verifiable spiritual Truth, but on the letter of an ancient book, the infallible
\ndictum of a Pope, the tradition of a Church, the learned casuistry<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 16<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nof schoolmen and Pundits, conclaves of ecclesiastics, heads
\nof monastic orders, doctors of all sorts, all of them unquestionable
\ntribunals whose sole function is to judge and pronounce but none of whom seems to think it necessary or even allowable
\nto search, test, prove, inquire, discover. He finds that, as is inevitable under such a regime, true science and knowledge are
\neither banned, punished and persecuted or else rendered obsolete by the habit of blind reliance on fixed authorities; even what is
\ntrue in old authorities is no longer of any value, because its words
\nare learnedly or ignorantly repeated but its real sense is no longer
\nlived except at most by a few. In politics he finds everywhere
\ndivine rights, established privileges, sanctified tyrannies which
\nare evidently armed with an oppressive power and justify themselves by long prescription, but seem to have no real claim or
\ntitle to exist. In the social order he finds an equally stereotyped
\nreign of convention, fixed disabilities, fixed privileges, the self- regarding arrogance of the high, the blind prostration of the low,
\nwhile the old functions which might have justified at one time
\nsuch a distribution of status are either not performed at all or
\nbadly performed without any sense of obligation and merely as a
\npart of caste pride. He has to rise in revolt; on every claim of
\nauthority he has to turn the eye of a resolute inquisition; when
\nhe is told that this is the sacred truth of things or the command
\nof God or the immemorial order of human life, he has to reply,
\n"But is it really so? How shall I know that this is the truth of things and
\nnot superstition and falsehood? When did God command it, or how do I know that
\nthis was the sense of His command and not your error or invention, or that the book on which
\nyou found yourself is His word at all, or that He has ever spoken
\nHis will to mankind? This immemorial order of which you
\nspeak, is it really immemorial, really a law of Nature or an imperfect result of Time and at present a most false convention?
\nAnd of all you say, still I must ask, does it agree with the facts <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 17<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nof the world, with my sense of right, with my judgment of truth,
\nwith my experience of reality?" And if it does not, the revolting
\nindividual flings off the yoke, declares the truth as he sees it and
\nin doing so strikes inevitably at the root of the religious, the
\nsocial, the political, momentarily perhaps even the moral order
\nof the community as it stands, because it stands upon the authority he discredits and the convention he destroys and not upon a
\nliving truth which can be successfully opposed to his own. The
\nchampions of the old order may be right when they seek to suppress him as a destructive agency perilous to social security,
\npolitical order or religious tradition; but he stands there and can
\nno other, because to destroy is his mission, to destroy falsehood and lay bare a new foundation of truth. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nBut by what individual faculty or standard shall the innovator find out his new foundation or establish his new measures?
\nEvidently it will depend upon the available enlightenment of
\nthe time and the possible forms of knowledge to which he has
\naccess. At first it was in religion a personal illumination supported in the West by a theological, in the East by a philosophical reasoning. In society and politics it started with a crude primitive perception of natural right and justice which took its origin
\nfrom the exasperation of suffering or from an awakened sense of
\ngeneral oppression, wrong, injustice and the indefensibility of
\nthe existing order when brought to any other test than that
\nof privilege and established convention. The religious motive led
\nat first; the social and political, moderating itself after the swift
\nsuppression of its first crude and vehement movements, took
\nadvantage of the upheaval of religious reformation, followed
\nbehind it as a useful ally and waited its time to assume the lead
\nwhen the spiritual momentum had been spent and, perhaps by
\nthe very force of the secular influences it called to its aid, had
\nmissed its way. The movement of religious freedom in Europe
\ntook its stand first on a limited, then on an absolute right of the <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 18<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nindividual  experience and illumined reason to determine the
\n‘"true sense of inspired Scripture and the true Christian ritual and order of the Church. The vehemence of its claim was measured
\nby the vehemence of its revolt from the usurpations, pretensions and brutalities of the ecclesiastical power which claimed to
\nwithhold the Scripture from general knowledge and impose by moral
\nauthority and physical violence its own arbitrary interpretation
\nof Sacred Writ, if not indeed another and substituted doctrine,
\non the recalcitrant individual conscience. In its more tepid and
\nmoderate forms the revolt engendered such compromises as the episcopalian Churches, at a higher degree of fervour Calvinistic
\nPuritanism, at white heat a riot of individual religious judgment
\nand imagination in such sects as the Anabaptist, Independent,
\nSocinian and countless others. In the East such a movement
\ndivorced from all political or any strongly iconoclastic social
\nsignificance would have produced simply a series of religious
\nreformers, illumined saints, new bodies of belief with their appropriate cultural and social practice; in the West atheism and
\nsecularism were its inevitable and predestined goal. At first questioning the conventional forms of religion, the mediation of the
\npriesthood between God and the soul and the substitution of the
\nPapal authority for the authority of the Scripture, it could not
\nfail to go forward and question the Scripture itself and then all
\nsupernaturalism, religious belief or supra-rational truth no less
\nthan outward creed and institute. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nFor eventually the evolution of Europe was determined
\nless by the Reformation than by the Renascence; it flowered by
\nthe vigorous return of the ancient Graeco-Roman mentality of the
\none rather than by the Hebraic and religio-ethical temperament of the other. The
\nRenascence gave back to Europe on one hand the free curiosity of the Greek mind,
\nits eager search for first principles and rational laws, its delighted
\nintellectual scrutiny of the facts of life by the force of direct observation
\nand individual <\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/font>Page
\n– 19<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nreasoning, on the other the Roman’s large practicality and his I
\nsense for the ordering of life in harmony with a robust utility 
\nand the just principles of things. But both these tendencies were B
\npursued with a passion, a seriousness, a moral and almost religious ardour which, lacking in the ancient Graeco-Roman mentality, Europe owed to her long centuries of Judaeo-Christian discipline. It was from these sources that the individualistic age
\nof Western society sought ultimately for that principle of order and control
\nwhich all human society needs and which more ancient times attempted to realise first by the materialisation of
\nfixed symbols of truth, then by ethical type and discipline, finally
\nby infallible authority or stereotyped convention. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nManifestly, the unrestrained use of individual
\nillumination or judgment without either any outer standard or any generally
\nrecognisable source of truth is a perilous experiment for our
\nimperfect race. It is likely to lead rather to a continual fluctuation and disorder of opinion than to a progressive unfolding of
\nthe truth of things. No less, the pursuit of social justice through
\nthe stark assertion of individual rights or class interests and desires must be a source of continual struggle and revolution and
\nmay end in an exaggerated assertion of the will in each to live
\nhis own life and to satisfy his own ideas and desires which will
\nproduce a serious malaise or a radical trouble in the social body.
\nTherefore on every individualistic age of mankind there is imperative the search
\nfor two supreme desiderata. It must find a
\ngeneral standard of Truth to which the individual judgment
\nof all will be inwardly compelled to subscribe without physical
\nconstraint or imposition of irrational authority. And it must
\nreach too some principle of social order which shall be equally
\nfounded on a universally recognisable truth of things; an order
\nis needed that will put a rein on desire and interest by providing  <\/i>at least some intellectual and moral test which these two powerful and dangerous forces must satisfy before they can feel justified <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 20<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nin asserting their claims on life. Speculative and scientific
\nreason for their means, the pursuit of a practicable social justice and  <\/i>sound utility for their spirit, the progressive nations of
\n<\/b>Europe set out on their search for this light and this law. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThey found and held it with enthusiasm in the discoveries
\nof physical Science. The triumphant domination, the all-shattering and irresistible victory of Science in nineteenth century
\nEurope is explained by the absolute perfection with which it at
\nleast seemed for a time to satisfy these great psychological wants
\nof the western mind. Science seemed to it to fulfil impeccably
\nits search for the two supreme desiderata of an individualistic
\nage. Here at last was a truth of things which depended on
\nno doubtful Scripture or fallible human authority but which
\nMother Nature herself had written in her eternal book for all to
\nread who had patience to observe and intellectual honesty to
\njudge. Here were laws, principles, fundamental facts of the
\nworld and of our being which all could verify at once for themselves and which
\nmust therefore satisfy and guide the free individual judgment, delivering it equally from alien compulsion
\nand from erratic self-will. Here were laws and truths which justified and yet controlled the claims and desires of the individual
\nhuman being; here a science which provided a standard, a norm
\nof knowledge, a rational basis for life, a clear outline and sovereign means for the progress and perfection of the individual and
\nthe race. The attempt to govern and organise human life by verifiable Science, by a law, a truth of things, an order and principles
\nwhich all can observe and verify in their ground and fact and to
\nwhich therefore all may freely and must rationally subscribe,
\nis the culminating movement of European civilisation. It has
\nbeen the fulfilment and triumph of the individualistic age of
\nhuman society; it has seemed likely also to be its end, the cause
\nor the death of individualism and its putting away and burial
\namong the monuments of the past. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 21<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nFor this discovery by individual free-thought of universal
\nlaws of which the individual is almost a by-product and by which
\nhe must necessarily be governed, this attempt actually to govern
\nthe social life of humanity in conscious accordance with the
\nmechanism of these laws seems to lead logically to the suppression of that very individual freedom which made the discovery
\nand the attempt at all possible. In seeking the truth and law of
\nhis own being the individual seems to have discovered a truth
\nand law which is not of his own individual being at all, but of
\nthe collectivity, the pack, the hive, the mass. The result to which
\nthis points and to which it still seems irresistibly to be driving
\nus is a new ordering of society by a rigid economic or governmental Socialism in which the individual, deprived again of his
\nfreedom in his own interest and that of humanity, must have
\nhis whole life and action determined for him at every step and
\nin every point from birth to old age by the well-ordered mechanism of the State.* We might then have a curious new version,
\nwith very important differences, of the old Asiatic or even of the
\nold Indian order of society. In place of the religio-ethical sanction
\nthere will be a scientific and rational or naturalistic motive and
\nrule; instead of the Brahmin Shastrakara the scientific, economic
\nand administrative expert. In the place of the King himself observing the law and compelling with the aid and consent of the
\nsociety all to tread without deviation the line marked out for
\nthem, the line of the Dharma, there will stand the collectivist
\nState similarly guided and empowered. Instead of a hierarchical
\narrangement of classes, each with its powers, privileges and duties there will
\nbe established an initial equality of education and opportunity, ultimately perhaps with a subsequent determination <\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n* We already see a violent though incomplete beginning of this line of
\nsocial evolution in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Communist Russia. The trend is for more and more nations to accept this beginning of a new order, and
\nthe’
\nresistance of the old order is more passive than active\u2014it lacks the file, enthusiasm and self-confidence which animates the innovating Idea. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 22<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nof function by experts who shall know us better than ourselves
\nand choose for us our work and quality. Marriage, generation
\nand the education of the child may be fixed by the scientific State as of old by the Shastra. For each man there will be a long stage
\nof work for the State superintended by collectivist authorities  and perhaps in the end a period of liberation, not for action but
\nfor enjoyment of leisure and personal self-improvement, answering to the Vanaprastha<\/i> and Sannyasa asramas<\/i> of the old Aryan
\nsociety. The rigidity of such a social state would greatly surpass
\nthat of its Asiatic forerunner; for there at least there were for the
\nrebel the innovator two important concessions. There was for
\nthe individual the freedom of an early Sannyasa, a renunciation
\nof the social for the free spiritual life, and there was for the group
\nthe liberty to form a sub-society governed by new conceptions
\nlike the Sikh or the Vaishnava. But neither of these violent departures from the norm could be tolerated by a strictly economic
\nand rigorously scientific and unitarian society. Obviously, too,
\nthere would grow up a fixed system of social morality and custom
\nand a body of socialistic doctrine which one could not be allowed
\nto question practically, and perhaps not even intellectually, since
\nthat would soon shatter or else undermine the system. Thus we
\nshould have a new typal order based upon purely economic
\ncapacity and function, gunakarma,<\/i> and rapidly petrifying by the
\ninhibition of individual liberty into a system of rationalistic conventions. And quite certainly this static order would at long and
\nlast be broken by a new individualist age of revolt, led, probably,
\nby the principles of an extreme philosophical Anarchism. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nOn the other hand, there are in operation forces which
\nseem likely to frustrate or modify this development before it can
\nreach its menaced consummation. In the first place rationalistic
\nand physical Science has overpassed itself and must before long
\nbe overtaken by a mounting Hood of psychological and psychic
\nknowledge which cannot fail to compel quite a new view of the <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 23<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nhuman being and open a new vista before mankind. At the same
\ntime the Age of Reason is visibly drawing to an end; novel ideas
\nare sweeping over the world and are being accepted with a significant rapidity, ideas inevitably subversive of any premature typal order of economic rationalism, dynamic ideas such
\nNietzsche’s Will-to-live, Bergson’s exaltation of Intuition above
\nintellect or the latest German philosophical tendency to acknowledge a supra-rational faculty and a supra-rational order of truths,
\nAlready another mental poise is beginning to settle and conceptions are on the way to apply themselves in the field of practice
\nwhich promise to give the succession of the individualistic age
\nof society not to a new typal order, but to a subjective age which
\nmay well be a great and momentous passage to a very different goal. It may be
\ndoubted whether we are not already in the morning twilight of a new period of the human cycle. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nSecondly, the West in its triumphant conquest of the world
\nhas awakened the slumbering East and has produced in its midst
\nan increasing struggle between an imported Western individualism and the old conventional principle of society. The latter is
\nhere rapidly, there slowly breaking down, but something quite
\ndifferent from Western individualism may very well take its
\nplace. Some opine indeed that Asia will reproduce Europe’s Age
\nof Reason with all its materialism and secularist individualism while Europe itself is pushing onward into new forms and ideas; but this is in the last degree improbable. On the contrary, the
\nsigns are that the individualistic period in the East will be
\nneither of long duration nor predominantly rationalistic and
\n<\/i>secularist in its character. If then the East, as the result of
\nawakening, follows its own bent and evolves a novel social tendency  and culture, that is bound to have an enormous effect
\nthe direction of the world’s civilisation; we can measure its pr
\nable influence by the profound results of the first remix of <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 24<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nideas even of the unawakened East upon Europe. Whatever
\nthat effect may be, it will not be in favour of any re-ordering of society on
\nthe lines of the still current tendency towards a mechanical economism which has not ceased to dominate mind
\nand life in the Occident. The influence of the East is likely to be
\nrather in the direction of subjectivism and practical spirituality,
\na greater opening of our physical existence to the realisation of
\nideals other than the strong but limited aims suggested by the life
\nand the body in their own gross nature. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nBut, most important of all, the individualistic age of Europe
\nhas in its discovery of the individual fixed among the idea\u2014forces
\nof the future two of a master potency which cannot be entirely
\neliminated by any temporary reaction. The first of these, now
\nuniversally accepted, is the democratic conception of the right
\nof all individuals as members of the society to the full life and
\nthe full development of which they are individually capable. It
\nis no longer possible that we should accept as an ideal any arrangement by which certain classes of society should arrogate
\ndevelopment and full social fruition to themselves while assigning a bare and barren function of service alone to others. It is
\nnow fixed that social development and well-being mean the development and well-being of all the individuals in the society
\nand not merely a flourishing of the community in the mass which
\nresolves itself really into the splendour and power of one or two
\nclasses. This conception has been accepted in full by all progressive nations and is the basis of the present socialistic tendency
\nof the world. But in addition there is this deeper truth which
\nindividualism has discovered, that the individual is not merely
\na social unit; his existence, his right and claim to live and grow
\nare not founded solely on his social work and function. He is not
\nmerely a member of a human pack, hive or ant-hill; he is something m himself, a soul, a being, who has to fulfil
\nhis own individual<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 25<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n truth and law as well as his natural or his assigned part
\nin the truth and law of the collective existence,* He demands
\nfreedom, space, initiative for his soul, for his nature, for that
\npuissant and tremendous thing which society so much distrusts
\nand has laboured in the past either to suppress altogether or to
\nrelegate to the purely spiritual field, an individual thought, will
\nand conscience. If he is to merge these eventually, it cannot be
\ninto the dominating thought, will and conscience of others, but
\ninto something beyond into which he and all must be both allowed and helped freely to grow. That is an idea, a truth which,
\nintellectually recognised and given its full exterior and superficial
\nsignificance by Europe, agrees at its root with the profoundest
\nand highest spiritual conceptions of Asia and has a large part to play in the moulding of the future. <\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n* This is no longer recognised by the new order. Fascist or Communistic,
\n\u2014here the individual is reduced to a cell or atom of the social body. "We have
\ndestroyed" proclaims a German exponent "the false view that men are individual
\nbeings; there is no liberty of individuals, there is only liberty of nations or races."<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 26<\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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