{"id":3516,"date":"2013-07-13T01:49:04","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:49:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3516"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:49:04","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:49:04","slug":"12-aesthetic-and-ethical-culture-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\/12-aesthetic-and-ethical-culture-vol-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-12_Aesthetic and Ethical Culture.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

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

\nAESTHETIC AND ETHICAL CULTURE<\/b> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nT<\/font>HE<\/b> idea of culture begins to define itself for us a little
\nmore clearly, or at least it has put away from it in a clear contrast
\nits natural opposites. The unmental, the purely physical life is
\nvery obviously its opposite, it is barbarism; the unintellectualised
\nvital, the crude economic or the grossly domestic life which looks only to
\nmoney-getting, the procreation of a family and its maintenance, are equally its opposites; they are another and even
\nuglier barbarism. We agree to regard the individual who is dominated by them and has no thought of higher things as an
\nuncultured and undeveloped human being, a prolongation of the
\nsavage, essentially a barbarian even if he lives in a civilised nation and in a society which has arrived at the general idea and
\nat some ordered practice of culture and refinement. The societies
\nor nations which bear this stamp we agree to call barbarous or
\nsemi-barbarous. Even when a nation or an age has developed
\nwithin itself knowledge and science and arts, but still in its general outlook, 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
\nexistence, we say that that nation or age may be civilised in a
\nsense, but for all its abundant or even redundant appliances and
\napparatus of civilisation it is not the realisation or the promise
\nof a cultured humanity. Therefore upon even the European <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 100<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\ncivilisation of the nineteenth century with all its triumphant
\nand teeming production, its great developments of science, its
\nachievement in the works of the intellect we pass a certain condemnation, because it has turned all these things to commercialism and to gross uses of vitalistic success. We say of it that this
\nwas not the perfection to which humanity ought to aspire and
\nthat this trend travels away from and not towards the higher
\ncurve of human evolution. It must be our definite verdict upon
\nit that it was inferior as an age of culture to ancient Athens, to
\nItaly of the Renascence, to ancient or classical India. For great
\nas might be the deficiencies of social organisation in those eras
\nand though their range of scientific knowledge and material achievement was
\nimmensely inferior, yet they were more advanced in the art of life, knew better its object and aimed more
\npowerfully at some clear ideal of human perfection. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nIn the range of the mind’s life itself, to live in its merely
\npractical and dynamic activity or in the mentalised emotional or
\nsensational current, a life of conventional conduct, average feelings, customary ideas, opinions and prejudices which are not
\none’s own but those of the environment, to have no free and
\nopen play of mind, but to live grossly and unthinkingly by the
\nunintelligent rule of the many, to live besides according to the
\nsenses and sensations controlled by certain conventions, but
\nneither purified nor enlightened nor chastened by any law of
\nbeauty,\u2014all this too is contrary to the ideal of culture. A man
\nmay so live with all the appearance or all the pretensions of a
\ncivilised existence, enjoy successfully all the plethora of its appurtenances, but he is not in the real sense a developed human
\nbeing. A society following such a rule of life may be anything
\nelse you will, vigorous, decent, well-ordered, successful, religious,
\nmoral, but it is a Philistine society; it is a prison which the
\nhuman soul has to break. For so long as it dwells there, it dwells
\nm an inferior, uninspired and unexpanding mental status; it <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 101<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nvegetates infructuously in the lower stratum and is governed not
\nby the higher faculties of man, but by the crudities of the unuplifted sense-mind. Nor is it enough for it to open windows in
\nthis prison by which it may get draughts of agreeable fresh air,
\nsomething of the free light of the intellect, something of the
\nfragrance of art and beauty, something of the large breath
\nof wider interests and higher ideals. It has yet to break out of its
\nprison altogether and live in that free light, in that fragrance
\nand large breath; only then does it breathe the natural atmosphere of the developed mental being. Not to live principally in
\nthe activities of the sense-mind, but in the activities of knowledge and reason and a wide intellectual curiosity, the activities
\nof the cultivated aesthetic being, the activities of the enlightened
\nwill which make for character and high ethical ideals and a large
\nhuman action, not to be governed by our lower or our average
\nmentality but by truth and beauty and the self-ruling will is the
\nideal of a true culture and the beginning of an accomplished humanity. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nWe 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 been a
\nquarrel between culture and conduct; yet according to our definition conduct also is a part of the cultured life and the ethical
\nideality one of the master impulses of the cultured being. The
\nopposition which puts on one side the pursuit of ideas and
\nknowledge and beauty and calls that culture and on the other
\nthe pursuit of character and conduct and exalts that as the moral life must
\nstart evidently from an imperfect view of human possibility and perfection. Yet that opposition has not only existed,
\nbut is a naturally strong tendency of the human mind and therefore must answer to some real and important divergence in the
\nvery composite elements of our being. It is the opposition which <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 102<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nArnold drew between Hebraism and Hellenism. The trend of
\nthe Jewish nation which gave us the severe ethical religion of the
\nOld Testament,\u2014crude, conventional and barbarous enough
\nin the Mosaic law, but rising to undeniable heights of moral exaltation when to the Law were added the Prophets, and finally
\nexceeding itself and blossoming into a fine flower of spirituality
\nin Judaic Christianity,*\u2014was dominated by the preoccupation
\nof a terrestrial and ethical righteousness and the promised rewards of right worship and right doing, but innocent of science
\nand philosophy, careless of knowledge, indifferent to beauty.
\nThe Hellenic mind was less exclusively but still largely dominated by a love of the play of reason for its own sake, but even
\nmore powerfully by a high sense of beauty, a clear aesthetic sensibility and a worship of the beautiful in every activity, in every
\ncreation, in thought, in art, in life, in religion. So strong was this
\nsense that not only manners, but ethics were seen by it to a very
\nremarkable extent in the light of its master idea of beauty; the
\ngood was to its instinct largely the becoming and the beautiful.
\nIn philosophy itself it succeeded in arriving at the conception
\nof the Divine as Beauty, a truth which the metaphysician very
\nreadily misses and impoverishes his thought by missing it. But
\nstill, striking as is this great historical contrast and powerful as
\nwere its results on European culture, we have to go beyond its
\noutward manifestation if we would understand in its source this
\npsychological opposition. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe conflict arises from that sort of triangular disposition
\nof the higher or more subtle mentality which we have already
\nhad occasion to indicate. There is in our mentality a side of will,
\nconduct, character which creates the ethical man; there is another side of sensibility to the beautiful,\u2014understanding beauty <\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n* The epithet is needed, for European Christianity has been something
\ndifferent, even at its best of another temperament, Latinised, Graecised, <\/b>Celticised or else only a rough Teutonic imitation of the old-world Hebraism. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 103<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nin no narrow or hyper-artistic sense,\u2014which creates the artistic
\nand aesthetic man. Therefore there can be such a thing as a predominantly or even exclusively ethical culture; there can be too,
\nevidently, a predominantly or even exclusively aesthetic culture.
\nThere are at once created two conflicting ideals which must naturally stand opposed and look askance at each other with a mutual
\ndistrust or even reprobation. The aesthetic man tends to be
\nimpatient of the ethical rule; he feels it to be a barrier to his
\naesthetic freedom and an oppression on the play of his artistic
\nsense and his artistic faculty; he is naturally hedonistic,\u2014for
\nbeauty and delight are inseparable powers,\u2014and the ethical rule tramples on
\npleasure, even very often on quite innocent pleasures, and tries to put a strait-waistcoat on the human impulse
\nto delight. He may accept the ethical rule when it makes itself
\nbeautiful or even seize on it as one of his instruments for creating
\nbeauty, but only when he can subordinate it to the aesthetic
\nprinciple of his nature,\u2014just as he is often drawn to religion by
\nits side of beauty, pomp, magnificent ritual, emotional satisfaction, repose or poetic ideality and aspiration,\u2014we might almost
\nsay, by the hedonistic aspects of religion. Even when fully accepted, it is not for their own sake that he accepts them. The
\nethical man repays this natural repulsion with interest. He tends
\nto distrust art and the aesthetic sense as something lax and emollient, something in its nature undisciplined and by its attractive
\nappeals to the passions and emotions destructive of a high and
\nstrict self-control. He sees that it is hedonistic and he finds that
\nthe hedonistic impulse is non-moral and often immoral. It is
\ndifficult for him to see how the indulgence of the aesthetic impulse beyond a very narrow and carefully guarded limit can be
\ncombined with a strict ethical life. He evolves the puritan who
\nobjects to pleasure on principle; not only in his extremes\u2014and a
\npredominant impulse tends to become absorbing and leads towards extremes\u2014but in the core of his temperament he remains
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 104<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nfundamentally the puritan. ‘The misunderstanding between
\nthese two sides of our nature is an inevitable circumstance of our
\nhuman growth which must try them to their fullest separate
\npossibilities and experiment in extremes in order that it may
\nunderstand the whole range of its capacities. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nSociety is only an enlargement of the individual; therefore
\nthis contrast and opposition between individual types reproduces
\nitself 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
\ndepravations, 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
\nof the general type of bourgeois respectability you will find everywhere at a certain stage of civilisation,\u2014it was Philistinism pure
\nand simple. Nor should we take as an instance of the aesthetic
\nany merely Bohemian society or such examples as London of
\nthe Restoration or Paris in certain brief periods of its history; that, whatever some of its pretensions, had for its principle,
\nalways, the indulgence of the average sensational and sensuous
\nman freed from the conventions of morality by a superficial intellectualism and aestheticism. Nor even can we take Puritan
\nEngland as the ethical type; for although there was there a strenuous, an exaggerated culture of, character and the ethical being,
\nthe determining tendency was religious, and the religious impulse is a phenomenon quite apart from our other subjective
\ntendencies, though it influences them all; it is sui generis<\/i> and
\nmust be treated separately. To get at real, if not always quite pure
\nexamples of the type we must go back a little farther in time and
\ncontrast early republican Rome or, in Greece itself, Sparta with
\nPericlean Athens. For as we come down the stream of Time in
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 105<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nits present curve of evolution, humanity in the mass, carrying
\nin it its past collective experience, becomes more and more complex and the old distinct types do not recur or recur precariously and with difficulty. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nRepublican Rome\u2014before it was touched and finally taken captive by conquered Greece\u2014stands out in relief as one of the
\nmost striking psychological phenomena of human history. From
\nthe point of view of human development it presents itself as an
\nalmost unique experiment in high and strong character-building
\ndivorced as far as may be from the sweetness which the sense of
\nbeauty and the light which the play of the reason brings into
\ncharacter and uninspired by the religious temperament; for the
\nearly Roman creed was a superstition, a superficial religiosity
\nand had nothing in it of the true religious spirit. Rome was the
\nhuman will oppressing and disciplining the emotional and sensational mind in order to arrive at the self-mastery of a definite
\nethical type; and it was this self-mastery which enabled the
\nRoman republic to arrive also at the mastery of its environing
\nworld and impose on the nations its public order and law. All
\nsupremely successful imperial nations have had in their culture
\nor in their nature, in their formative or expansive periods, this
\npredominance of the will, the character, the impulse to self-discipline and self-mastery which constitutes the very basis of
\nthe ethical tendency. Rome and Sparta like other ethical civilisations had their
\nconsiderable moral deficiencies, tolerated or deliberately encouraged customs and practices which we should
\ncall immoral, failed to develop the gentler and more delicate side
\nof moral character, but this is of no essential importance. The
\nethical idea in man changes and enlarges its scope, but the kernel
\nof the true ethical being remains always the same,\u2014will, character, self-discipline, self-mastery. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nIts limitations at once appear, when we look back at its
\nprominent examples. Early Rome and Sparta were barren of
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 106<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nthought, 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
\nand flexible thought and the aesthetic impulse. The earlier spirit
\nof republican Rome held at arm’s length as long as possible the
\nGreek influences that invaded her, closed the schools of the Greek
\nteachers, banished the philosophers, and her most typical minds
\nlooked upon the Greek language as a peril and Greek culture as an
\nabomination: she felt instinctively the arrival at her gates of an
\nenemy, divined a hostile and destructive force fatal to her principle of living. Sparta, though a Hellenic city, admitted as almost the sole aesthetic element of her deliberate ethical training
\nand education a martial music and poetry, and even then, when
\nshe wanted a poet of war, she had to import an Athenian. We
\nhave a curious example of the repercussion of this instinctive
\ndistrust even on a large and aesthetic Athenian mind in the
\nUtopian speculations of Plato who felt himself obliged in his
\nRepublic 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
\nor little behind them by which the future can be attracted and satisfied, as
\nSparta passed, or they collapse in a revolt of the complex nature of man against an unnatural restriction and repression, as the early Roman type collapsed into the egoistic and
\noften orgiastic license of later republican and imperial Rome.
\nThe human mind needs to think, feel, enjoy, expand; expansion
\nis its very nature and restriction is only useful to it in so far as it
\nhelps to steady, guide and strengthen its expansion. It readily
\nrefuses the name of culture to those civilisations or periods, however noble their aim or even however beautiful in itself their
\norder, which have not allowed an intelligent freedom of development. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 107<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nOn the other hand we are tempted to give the name of a
\nfull culture to all those periods and civilisations, whatever their
\ndefects, which have encouraged a freely human development and
\nlike 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 of
\nPhidias and Sophocles, and one of thought, the Athens of the
\nphilosophers. In the first period the sense of beauty and the need
\nof freedom of life and the enjoyment of life are the determining
\nforces. This Athens thought, but it thought in the terms of art
\nand poetry, in figures of music and drama and architecture and
\nsculpture; it delighted in intellectual discussion, but not so much
\nwith any will to arrive at truth as for the pleasure of thinking
\nand the beauty of ideas. It had its moral order, for without that
\nno society can exist, but it had no true ethical impulse or ethical
\ntype, only a conventional and customary morality; and when it
\nthought about ethics, it tended to express it in the terms of
\nbeauty, to kalon, to epieikes,<\/i> the beautiful, the becoming. Its
\nvery religion was a religion of beauty and an occasion for pleasant ritual and
\nfestivals and for artistic creation, an aesthetic enjoyment touched with a superficial religious sense. But without
\ncharacter, without some kind of high or strong discipline there is
\nno enduring power of life. Athens exhausted its vitality within
\none wonderful century which left it enervated, will-less, unable
\nto succeed in the struggle of life, uncreative. It turned indeed for
\na time precisely to that which had been lacking to it, the serious
\npursuit of truth and the evolution of systems of ethical self-discipline; but it could only think, it could not successfully
\npractise. The later Hellenic mind and Athenian centre of culture
\ngave to Rome the great Stoic system of ethical discipline which
\nsaved her in the midst of the orgies of her first imperial century,
\nbut could not itself be stoical in its practice; for to Athens and to
\nthe characteristic temperament of Hellas, this thought was a
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 108<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nstraining to something it had not and could not have; it was the
\nopposite of its nature and not its fulfilment. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThis insufficiency of the aesthetic view of life becomes yet
\nmore evident when we come down to its other great example,
\nItaly of the Renascence. The Renascence was regarded at one
\ntime 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 even
\nin the laxest times of Hellas aesthetic culture was divorced from
\nthe ethical impulse and at times was even anti-ethical and reminiscent of the license of imperial Rome. It had learning and
\ncuriosity, but gave very little of itself to high thought and truth
\nand the more finished achievements of the reason, although it
\nhelped to make free the way for philosophy and science. It so
\ncorrupted religion as to provoke in the ethically minded Teutonic
\nnations the violent revolt of the Reformation, which, though it
\nvindicated the freedom of the religious mind, was an insurgence
\nnot so much of the reason,\u2014that was left to Science,\u2014but of the
\nmoral instinct and its ethical need. The subsequent prostration
\nand loose weakness of Italy was the inevitable result of the great
\ndefect of its period of fine culture, and it needed for its revival
\nthe new impulse of thought and will and character given to it
\nby Mazzini. If the ethical impulse is not sufficient by itself for
\nthe development of the human being, yet are will, character, self-discipline, self-mastery indispensable to that development. They
\nare the backbone of the mental body. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nNeither the ethical being nor the aesthetic being is the
\nwhole man, nor can either be his sovereign principle; they are
\nmerely two powerful elements. Ethical conduct is not the whole
\nof life; even to say that it is three fourths of life is to indulge in
\na very doubtful mathematics. We cannot assign to it its position
\nin any such definite language, but can at best say that its kernel
\nof will, character and self-discipline are almost the first condition<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 109<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n for human self-perfection. The aesthetic sense is equally
\nindispensable, for without that the self-perfection of the mental
\nbeing cannot arrive at its object, which is on the mental plane
\nthe right and harmonious possession and enjoyment of the truth,
\npower, beauty and delight of human existence. But neither can
\nbe the highest principle of the human order. We can combine
\nthem; we can enlarge the sense of ethics by the sense of beauty
\nand delight and introduce into it to correct its tendency of hardness and austerity the element of gentleness, love, amenity, the
\nhedonistic side of morals; we can steady, guide and strengthen
\nthe delight of life by the introduction of the necessary will and
\nausterity and self-discipline which will give it endurance and
\npurity. These two powers of our psychological being, which represent in us the essential principle of energy and the essential
\nprinciple of delight,\u2014the Indian terms are more profound and
\nexpressive, Tapas and Ananda.\u2014can be thus helped by each
\nother, the one to a richer, the other to a greater self-expression.
\nBut that even this much reconciliation may come about they
\nmust be taken up and enlightened by a higher principle which
\nmust be capable of understanding and comprehending both
\nequally and of disengaging and combining disinterestedly their
\npurposes and potentialities. That higher principle seems to be
\nprovided for us by the human faculty of reason and intelligent
\nwill. Our crowning capacity, it would seem to be by right the
\ncrowned sovereign of our nature. <\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n* Tapas is the energising conscious-power of cosmic being by which the
\nWorld is created, maintained and governed; it includes all concepts of force, will,
\nenergy, power, everything dynamic and dynamising. Ananda is the essential
\nnature of bliss of the cosmic consciousness and, in activity, its delight of self-creation and self-experience. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 110<\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHAPTER X AESTHETIC AND ETHICAL CULTURE   THE idea of culture begins to define itself for us a little more clearly, or at least it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-human-cycle","wpcat-81-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}