{"id":3513,"date":"2013-07-13T01:49:03","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:49:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3513"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:49:03","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:49:03","slug":"03-the-cycle-of-society-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\/03-the-cycle-of-society-vol-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-03_The Cycle of Society.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

\nCHAPTER  I<\/b> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nTHE CYCLE OF SOCIETY<\/b> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nM<\/font>ODERN<\/b> SCIENCE,<\/b> obsessed with the greatness of its
\nphysical discoveries and the idea of the sole existence of Matter,
\nhas long attempted to base upon physical data even its study of
\nSoul and Mind and of those workings of Nature in man and
\nanimal in which a knowledge of psychology is as important as
\nany of the physical sciences. Its very psychology founded itself
\nupon physiology and the scrutiny of the brain and nervous system. It is not
\nsurprising therefore that in history and sociology attention should have been concentrated on the external data, laws,
\ninstitutions, rites, customs, economic factors and developments,
\nwhile the deeper psychological elements so important in the
\nactivities of a mental, emotional, ideative being like man have
\nbeen very much neglected. This kind of science would explain
\neverything in history and social development as much as possible
\nby economic necessity or motive\u2014by economy understood in its
\nwidest sense. There are even historians who deny or put aside
\nas of a very subsidiary importance the working of the idea and
\nthe influence of the thinker in the development of human institutions. The
\nFrench Revolution, it is thought, would have happened just as it did and when it did, by economic necessity, even
\nif Rousseau and Voltaire had never written and the eighteenth
\ncentury philosophic movement in the world of thought had
\nnever worked out its bold and radical speculations.<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 3<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nRecently, however, the all-sufficiency of Matter to explain
\nMind and Soul has begun to be doubted and a movement of
\nemancipation from the obsession of physical science has set in,
\nalthough as yet it has not gone beyond a few awkward and rudimentary stumblings. Still there is the beginning of a perception
\nthat behind the economic motives and causes of, social and historical development there are profound psychological, even perhaps soul factors; and in pre-war* Germany, the metropolis of
\nrationalism and materialism but the home also, for a century and
\na half, of new thought and original tendencies good and bad,
\nbeneficent and disastrous, a first psychological theory of history
\nwas conceived and presented by an original intelligence. The
\nearliest attempts in a new field are seldom entirely successful,
\nand a German historian, originator of this theory, seized on a
\nluminous idea, but was not able to carry it very far or probe very
\ndeep. He was still haunted by a sense of the greater importance
\nof the economic factor, and like most European Science his
\ntheory related, classified and organised phenomena much more
\nsuccessfully than it explained them. Nevertheless its basic idea
\nformulated a suggestive and illuminating truth, and it is worth
\nwhile following up some of the suggestions it opens out in the
\nlight especially of Eastern thought and experience. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe theorist, Lamprecht, basing himself on European and
\nparticularly on German history, supposed that human society
\nprogresses through certain distinct psychological stages which he
\nterms respectively symbolic, typal and conventional, individualist and subjective. This development forms, then, a sort of psychological cycle through which a nation or a civilisation is bound
\nto proceed. Obviously, such classifications are likely to err by
\nrigidity and to substitute a mental straight line for the coils and
\nzigzags of Nature. The psychology of man and his societies is too
\ncomplex, too synthetical of many-sided and intermixed tendencies to satisfy any such rigorous and formal analysis. Nor
\ndoes <\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n*World War I. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 4<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nthis theory of a psychological cycle tell us what is the inner
\nmeaning of its successive phases or the necessity of their succession or the term and end towards which they are driving. But
\nstill to understand natural laws whether of Mind or Matter it is
\nnecessary to analyse their working into its discoverable elements,
\nmain constituents, dominant forces, though these may not actually be found
\nanywhere in isolation. I will leave aside the western thinker’s own dealings with his idea. The suggestive names
\nhe has offered us if we examine their intrinsic sense and value may yet throw
\nsome light on the thickly veiled secret of our historic evolution, and this is the line on which it would be most
\nuseful to investigate. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nUndoubtedly, wherever we can seize human society in what
\nto us seems its primitive beginnings or early stages,\u2014no matter
\nwhether the race is comparatively cultured or savage or economically advanced or
\nbackward,\u2014we do find a strongly symbolic mentality that governs or at least pervades its thought, customs and
\ninstitutions. Symbolic, but of what? We find that this social stage
\nis always religious and actively imaginative in its religion; for
\nsymbolism and a widespread imaginative or intuitive religious feeling have a
\nnatural kinship and especially in earlier or primitive formations they have gone always together. When man
\nbegins to be predominantly intellectual, sceptical, ratiocinative
\nhe is already preparing for an individualist society and the age
\nof symbols and the age of conventions have passed or are losing
\ntheir virtue. The symbol then is of something which man feels
\nto be present behind himself and his life and his activities―the
\nDivine, the Gods, the vast and deep unnameable, a hidden, living and mysterious
\nnature of things. All his religious and social institutions, all the moments and
\nphases of his life are to him symbols in which he seeks to express what he knows or guesses of the
\nmystic influences that are behind his life and shape and govern
\nor at the least intervene in its movements. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 5<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nIf we look at the beginnings of Indian society, the far-off
\nVedic age which we no longer understand, for we have lost that
\nmentality, we see that everything is symbolic. The religious institution of sacrifice governs the whole society and all its hours and
\nmoments, and the ritual of the sacrifice is at every turn and in
\nevery detail, as even a cursory study of the Brahmanas and
\nUpanishads ought to show us, mystically symbolic. The theory
\nthat there was nothing in the sacrifice except a propitiation of
\nNature-gods for the gaining of worldly prosperity and of Paradise,
\nis a misunderstanding by a later humanity which had already
\nbecome profoundly affected by an intellectual and practical bent
\nof mind, practical even in its religion and even in its own mysticism and symbolism, and therefore could no longer enter into
\nthe ancient spirit. Not only the actual religious worship but also
\nthe social institutions of the time were penetrated through and
\nthrough with the symbolic spirit. Take the hymn of the Rig Veda
\nwhich is supposed to be a marriage hymn for the union of a human couple and was certainly used as such in the later Vedic
\nages. Yet the whole sense of the hymn turns about the successive
\nmarriages of Surya, daughter of the Sun, with different gods and
\nthe human marriage is quite a subordinate matter overshadowed
\nand governed entirely by the divine and mystic figure and is
\nspoken of in the terms of that figure. Mark, however, that the
\ndivine marriage here is not, as it would be in later ancient poetry,
\na decorative image or poetical ornamentation used to set off and
\nembellish the human union; on the contrary, the human is an
\ninferior figure and image of the divine. The distinction marks off
\nthe entire contrast between that more ancient mentality and our
\nmodern regard upon things. This symbolism influenced for a long
\ntime Indian ideas of marriage and is even now conventionally
\nremembered though no longer understood or effective. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nWe may note also in passing that the Indian ideal of the
\nrelation between man and woman has always been governed
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 6<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nby the symbolism of the relation between the Purusha and
\nPrakriti (in the Veda Nri<\/i> and Gna),<\/i> the male and female divine
\nPrinciples in the universe. Even, there is to some degree a practical correlation between the position of the female sex and this
\nidea. In the earlier Vedic times when the female principle stood
\non a sort of equality with the male in the symbolic cult, though
\nwith a certain predominance for the latter, woman was as much
\nthe mate as the adjunct of man; in later times when the Prakriti has become
\nsubject in idea to the Purusha, the woman also depends entirely on the man, exists only for him and has hardly
\neven a separate spiritual existence. In the Tantrik Shakta religion
\nwhich puts the female principle highest, there is an attempt
\nwhich could not get itself translated into social practice,\u2014even
\nas this Tantrik cult could never entirely shake off the subjugation of the Vedantic idea,\u2014to elevate woman and make her an
\nobject of profound respect and even of worship. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nOr let us take, for this example will serve us best, the Vedic
\ninstitution of the fourfold order, chaturvarna,<\/i> miscalled the
\nsystem of the four castes,\u2014for caste is a conventional, varna<\/i> a
\nsymbolic and typal institution. We are told that the institution
\nof the four orders of society was the result of an economic evolution complicated by political causes. Very possibly;* but the important point is that it was not so regarded and could not be so
\nregarded by the men of that age. For while we are satisfied when
\nwe have found the practical and material causes of a social phenomenon and do not care to look farther, they cared little or only
\nsubordinately for its material factors and looked always first and
\nforemost for its symbolic, religious or psychological significance.
\nThis appears in the Purusha-sukta of the Veda where the four
\norders are described as having sprung from the body of the creative<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n*It is at least doubtful. The Brahmin class at first seem to have exercised
\nau sorts of economic functions and not to have confined themselves to those <\/b> of
\nthe priesthood. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 7<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nDeity, from his head, arms, thighs and feet. To us this is
\nmerely a poetical image and its sense is that the Brahmins were
\nthe men of knowledge, the Kshatriyas the men of power, the
\nVaishyas the producers and support of society, the Shudras its
\nservants. As if that were all, as if the men of those days would
\nhave so profound a reverence for mere poetical figures like this
\nof the body of Brahma or that other of the marriages of Surya,
\nwould have built upon them elaborate systems of ritual and
\nsacred ceremony, enduring institutions, great demarcations of
\nsocial type and ethical discipline. We read always our own mentality into that of these ancient forefathers and it is therefore
\nthat we can find in them nothing but imaginative barbarians. To
\nus poetry is a revel of intellect and fancy, imagination a plaything
\nand caterer for our amusement, our entertainer, the nautch-girl
\nof the mind. But to the men of old the poet was a seer, a revealer of hidden
\ntruths, imagination no dancing courtesan but a priestess in God’s house commissioned not to spin fictions but to image
\ndifficult and hidden truths; even the metaphor or simile in the
\nVedic style is used with a serious purpose and expected to convey
\na reality, not to suggest a pleasing artifice of thought. The image
\nwas to these seers a revelative symbol of the unrevealed and it
\nwas used because it could hint luminously to the mind what the
\nprecise intellectual word, apt only for logical or practical thought
\nor to express the physical and the superficial, could not at all
\nhope to manifest. To them this symbol of the Creator’s body was
\nmore than an image, it expressed a divine reality. Human society
\nwas for them an attempt to express in life the cosmic Purusha
\nwho has expressed himself otherwise in the material and the
\nsupra-physical universe. Man and the cosmos are both of them
\nsymbols and expressions of the same hidden Reality. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nFrom this symbolic attitude came the tendency to make
\neverything in society a sacrament, religious and sacrosanct, but as yet with a
\nlarge and vigorous freedom in all its forms,\u2014a freedom<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 8<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n which we do not find in the rigidity of "savage" communities because these have already passed out of the symbolic into
\nthe conventional stage though on a curve of degeneration instead
\nof a curve of growth. The spiritual idea governs all; the symbolic
\nreligious forms which support it are fixed in principle; the social
\nforms are lax, free and capable of infinite development. One
\nthing however begins to progress towards a firm fixity and this is
\nthe psychological type. Thus we have first the symbolic idea of
\nthe four orders, expressing\u2014to employ an abstractly figurative
\nlanguage which the Vedic thinkers would not have used nor
\nperhaps understood, but which helps best our modem understanding\u2014the Divine as knowledge in man, the Divine as power,
\nthe Divine as production, enjoyment and mutuality, the Divine
\nas service, obedience and work. These divisions answer to four
\ncosmic principles, the Wisdom that conceives the order and principle of things, the Power that sanctions, upholds and enforces
\nit, the Harmony that creates the arrangement of its parts, the
\nWork that carries out what the rest direct. Next, out of this
\nidea there developed a firm but not yet rigid social order based
\nprimarily upon temperament and psychic type* with a corresponding ethical discipline and secondarily upon the social and
\neconomic\u2020 function. But the function was determined by its
\nsuitability to the type and its helpfulness to the discipline; it was
\nnot the primary or sole factor. The first, the symbolic stage of
\nthis evolution is predominantly religious and spiritual; the other
\nelements, psychological, ethical, economic, physical are there
\nbut subordinated to the spiritual and religious ideas. The second
\nstage, which we may call the typal, is predominantly psychological and ethical; all else, even the spiritual and religious, is subordinate to the psychological idea and to the ethical ideal which
\nexpresses it. Religion becomes then a mystic sanction for the ethical<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n* Guna.
\n<\/i> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\u2020Karma.<\/i> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 9<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nmotive and discipline, Dharma; that becomes its chief social
\nutility, and for the rest it takes a more and more other-worldly turn. The idea of the direct expression of the divine Being or
\ncosmic Principle in man ceases to dominate or to he the leader
\nand in the forefront; it recedes, stands in the background and
\nfinally disappears from the practice and in the end even from the theory of life. <\/font><\/p>\n

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

\nFor the typal passes naturally into the conventional stage. The conventional stage of human society is born
\nwhen the external supports, the outward expressions of the spirit or the ideal
\nbecome more important than the ideal, the body or even the
\nclothes more important than the person. Thus in the evolution
\nof caste, the outward supports of the ethical fourfold order\u2014 <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 10<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nbirth economic function, religious ritual and sacrament, family
\ncustom-each began to exaggerate enormously its proportions
\nand its importance in the scheme. At first, birth does not seem
\nto have been of the first importance in the social order, for faculty and capacity prevailed; but afterwards, as the type fixed
\nitself its maintenance by education and tradition became necessary and education and tradition naturally fixed themselves in a
\nhereditary groove. Thus the son of a Brahmin came always to be
\nlooked upon conventionally as a Brahmin; birth and profession
\nwere together the double bond of the hereditary convention at
\nthe time when it was most firm and faithful to its own character.
\nThis rigidity once established, the maintenance of the ethical
\ntype passed from the first place to a secondary or even a quite
\ntertiary importance. Once the very basis of the system, it came
\nnow to be a not indispensable crown or pendent tassel, insisted
\nupon indeed by the thinker and the ideal code-maker but not by
\nthe actual rule of society or its practice. Once ceasing to be indispensable, it came inevitably to be dispensed with except as
\nan ornamental fiction. Finally, even the economic basis began
\nto disintegrate; birth, family custom and remnants, deformations,
\nnew accretions of meaningless or fanciful religious sign and ritual, the very
\nscarecrow and caricature of the old profound symbolism, became the riveting links of the system of caste in the
\niron age of the old society. In the full economic period of caste
\nthe priest and the Pundit masquerade under the name of the
\nBrahmin, the aristocrat and feudal baron under the name of
\nthe Kshatriya, the trader and money-getter under the name of the
\nVaishya, the half-fed labourer and economic serf under the name
\nof the Shudra. When the economic basis also breaks down, then the unclean and
\ndiseased decrepitude of the old system has begun; it has become a name, a shell, a sham and must either
\nbe dissolved in the crucible of an individualist period of society <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 11<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nor else fatally affect with weakness and falsehood the system of
\nlife that clings to it. That in visible fact is the last and present state of the caste system in India. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe tendency of the conventional age of society is to fix, to
\narrange firmly, to formalise, to erect a system of rigid grades and
\nhierarchies, to stereotype religion, to hind education and training
\nto a traditional and unchangeable form, to subject thought to
\ninfallible authorities, to cast a stamp of finality on what seems
\nto it the finished life of man. The conventional period of society
\nhas its golden age when the spirit and thought that inspired its
\nforms are confined but yet living, not yet altogether walled
\nin, not yet stifled to death and petrified by the growing hardness
\nof the structure in which they are cased. That golden age is often
\nvery beautiful and attractive to the distant view of posterity by
\nits precise order, symmetry, fine social architecture, the admirable subordination of its parts to a general and noble plan. Thus
\nat one time the modem litterateur, artist or thinker looked back
\noften with admiration and with something like longing to the
\nmediaeval age of Europe; he forgot in its distant appearance of
\npoetry, nobility, spirituality the much folly, ignorance, iniquity,
\ncruelty and oppression of those harsh ages, the suffering and
\nrevolt that simmered below these fine surfaces, the misery and
\nsqualor that was hidden behind that splendid facade. So too the Hindu orthodox
\nidealist looks back to a perfectly regulated society devoutly obedient to the wise yoke of the Shastra, and that
\nis his golden age,\u2014a nobler one than the European in which
\nthe apparent gold was mostly hard burnished copper with a thin
\ngold-leaf covering it, but still of an alloyed metal, not the true
\nSatya Yuga. In these conventional periods of society there is
\nmuch indeed that is really fine and sound and helpful to human
\nprogress, but still they are its copper age and not the true golden; they are the age when the Truth we strive to arrive at is not <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 12<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nrealised, not accomplished, *<\/i> but the exiguity of it eked out or its
\nfull appearance imitated by an artistic form and what we have of the reality has begun to fossilise and is doomed to be lost
\n<\/b>in a
\n<\/b>hard mass of rule and order and convention. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nFor always the form prevails and the spirit recedes and diminishes. It attempts indeed to return, to revive the form,
\n<\/b>to
\n<\/b>modify it, anyhow to survive and even to make the form survive; but the time-tendency is too strong. This is visible in the history
\nof religion; the efforts of the saints and religious reformers become progressively more scattered, brief and superficial in their
\nactual effects, however strong and vital the impulse. We see this
\nrecession in the growing darkness and weakness of India in her last millennium;
\nthe constant effort of the most powerful spiritual personalities kept the soul of the people alive but failed to
\nresuscitate the ancient free force and truth and vigour or permanently revivify a conventionalised and stagnating society; in a
\ngeneration or two the iron grip of that conventionalism has
\nalways fallen on the new movement and annexed the names
\nof its founders. We see it in Europe in the repeated moral tragedy
\nof ecclesiasticism and Catholic monasticism. Then there arrives
\na period when the gulf between the convention and the truth
\nbecomes intolerable and the men of intellectual power arise,
\nthe great "swallowers of formulas," who rejecting robustly or
\nfiercely or with the calm light of reason symbol and type and
\nconvention strike at the walls of the prison-house and seek by
\nthe individual reason, moral sense or emotional desire the Truth
\nthat society has lost or buried in its whited sepulchres. It is then
\nthat the individualistic age of religion and thought and society
\nis created; the Age of Protestantism has begun, the Age of Reason, the Age of Revolt, Progress, Freedom. A partial and external and <\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n* The Indian names of the golden age are Satya, the Age <\/b> of the Truth,
\nKrita, the Age when the law of the Truth is accomplished. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 13<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tfreedom, still betrayed by the conventional age that preceded it
\n\t\t\tinto the idea that the Truth can be found in outsides, dreaming
\n\t\t\tvainly that perfection can be determined by machinery, but still a
\n\t\t\tnecessary passage to the subjective period of humanity through which
\n\t\t\tman has to circle back towards the recovery of his deeper self and a
\n\t\t\tnew upward line or a new revolving cycle of civilisation.<\/p>\n

\nPage – 14<\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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