***Reason
: its office and limitations :
'For
always the form prevails and the spirit recedes or diminishes. (p9) It attempts
to anyway revive form, return to it but the time tendency is too strong. So in
history of religions efforts of saints, sages, religious reformers became
progressively more scattered, brief and superficial. –though vital impulse was
strong. Then the gulf between conventions and truth becomes too intolerant and
men of intellectual power arise, they are the swallowers of formula- - they
reject robustly or fiercely or with calm light of reason symbol, type and
convention. These are seekers of reason, discoverers.
‘The champions of old order may be right’ when they try to suppress the individual and his rebellious attempts, but he is Rudra, and to destroy old worn
out things, to lay down foundation of the new is his mission. However[1] , individual has to work with his available enlightenment of the time, within some possible forms of knowledge to which he has access. Thus, the unrestrained use of individual reason and insights can be dangerous for the ultimate aim of finding truth and happiness for the mankind.
.
On[2]
every individual age there are two general decisions: 1 General standard of
truth to which all can subscribe. 2. Some principle of social order to put rein to desire and interest by providing
at least some intellectual and moral test (p16) and enthusiasm in discoveries,
social justice and sound utility. Triumph of physical science was due to
satisfying of these psychological wants.
However,
these laws seem to lead logically to the suppression of that very individual
freedom which made the discovery and attempt at all possible[3] . The laws were those of pack, herd, of mass
and not that of an individual. This is what is happening by new government
socialism and rigid economic socialism. Rationalistic science overpassed
itself, a flood of psychological and psychic knowledge which compels new view
of humanity / human being which opens new vistas before mankind[4] .
1) Age
of Reason drawing an end, novel ideas sweeping – will to live by Nitschez,
Intuition by Bergson, Suprarational by German,…Therefore, success of individual
and rational with respect to new typal but subjective[5] ……
2) East
is awakened from its slumber, latter is breaking down from old conventions but
will not repeat west’s individualism. It
will follow its own bent may be of practical spirituality.
3) Office
and Limitations of Reason:
4) ‘Intellect leads man to gates of greater self
consciousness and places and places him with unbandaged eyes on that wide
threshold where more luminous angel has to take him by hand.’ It is guide,
teacher, purifier and liberator The intellect takes lower nature, each in their
own area, teaches them, to discern intelligently the high in them from low, pure from impure, from crude confusion
to luminous formulae, to look beyond, to look at each other. P105~
5) Intellect
strengthens hedonistic and aesthetic ... Soften their quarrel with ethics,
gives them solidity, at the same tone, it also sweetens ethics and will. Data
is practical or powers supported with actualities…..? By infusing psychic,
hedonistic, aesthetic and ennobles by all- practical, dynamic, utilitarian.
6) It
works like judge, provides rules, provides systems, human soul to walk by
assumed settled path and law with as ascertained measure and balanced rhythm.
Double action of intelligence: fixing a rule and liberating from a rule.( and
in due season questioning what is accomplished. ) In this double action progress of the race is
assured. Action of individual not only 1[6]
downward and outward about external life sub life law and order of it present
and future potential. 2. Upward and inward –more luminous function accept
divinations from the hidden eternities –opened to power above derives from
behind the veil, an indirect knowledge of universal principles. Seize intelligent form: Ideas-intellect-forms and moulds is the
transmission. They descend for it separation, combination, analysis and
synthesis. Therefore, disparate and conflicting ideals. Which we have all difficulty in the world to bring. Each is
true and something essential in us responds to it –law or instinct. Each
attempt is important for it, increases width and wealth of our nature. Opens to
larger possibilities of self understanding and self mastery. (p108) Constantly
convert the lower half animal to stuff of intelligence through available
imperfect self conscience. It has to progress in steps piecemeal with back and
forth moves partial experiments always contrive new harmony. If claims of
intelligence are allowed each is unjust victory
impoverish and imprison his faculty. Politics and society are series of
adventures from autocracy to monarchy, democracy, etc. each pushed to extreme
in its purity and again mixed and combined as possible. Mankind works out by
stress of spirit. (p109)
7) Each
type leads to new type, each combination to new combination-growing self
experience and self actualization –break to enlarge to make room for an
increase of human capacity and perfectabiltiy. Intellect is double worker: 1.
dispassionate Lucifera 2. Passionate Fruitifera[7]
8) Advantage of intellect is that it is not
absorbed on its own but plays on all others.-discover their laws, truth, makes
discoveries serviceable. Man does not live for knowledge alone. But to serve
life, here it falls in confusion and imperfection. Because it becomes servant
of something else. Even if intellect works by mode 1, i.e. 100% impartial and
dispassionate, though it is impossible
to be so, still truths it finds are playthings of forces as they are applied on
which reason has no control.
9) Truth
is hidden due to two faiths 1. Reason of me is right and that of others is
wrong. 2. Collective reason is always right. Even if individual reasons are wrong[8] .
10) Man
should grasp little at a time and move to a succession of experiences.
11) Justify
and enlighten to him various experiences and give him faith and conviction in
holding on to his self enlarging- its inconstancy holding opposites is whole of
its value
12) Build
change destroy what is in succession of Time, to build and prepare for new
means progress, to enlarge.
13) Reason
cannot substitute sovereign if it tries perfection of life, life will be
baulked and deprived of its most powerful sources, becomes sterile. Root power
of life are below, irrational and above suprarational. But by constant
enlarging Reason can come /arrive at an intelligent sense of that which is
hidden from it: a passive yet sympathetic reflection of Light.
14) “There
is a soul., a God, I am his minister, I can remove thick integument>..? Then
you will know yourself -1. Discover the highest and widest law of your being.
2. Become possessor or atleast receivers and instruments of higher will and
knowledge than mine. 3. Lay hold at least on the true secret and the whole sense
of a human and yet divine living.” To attain divine reality is the aim of the reason[9]
15) A.
Neither a. Hellenic ideal of all round philosophy, physical, aesthetic. ‘sound
mind in sound body’, wise men and free society. Well trained mind, trained in
the sense of ancient and not modern education.: Philosophy, Aesthetic,
Political …pursuit of beauty. : Physical level
16) B.
Nor modern efficient successful economic civilization. Science, economics,
Utilitarianism..pursuit of Utility.:
Mental level.
17) But
if we follow Subjective age, we are led to a still ancient ideal that
overtops both Hellenic and modern
levels. Man[10]
is developing spirit trying here to find and fulfill itself in the
form of mind, life and body and we shall perceive luminously growing before us
a greater ideal of a deeply conscious self illumined self possessing self
mastering soul in a pure and perfect
mind and body. Not metalized physical life but new spiritualized life. Our aim of self –fulfillment is an integral
unfolding of the Divine- within us, and a complete evolution of the hidden
divinity in the individual soul and the collective soul. Each man is born with and reflects one
element of the divine nature. His character, ethics, training, occupation
perfection to seek in this life is as per that law. There was fourfold order:
Barhman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra. This is Typal, not of highest Ideal
Satyuga age or Krityuga age. Nor it is so in the iron age or Kaliyuga (Life of
instincts, impulses, desires, reason is servant of lower in Kaliyuga.)
18) P118:
Sat by dharma
19) Treta by will power and force of character
20) Dwapar by law, arrangement, fixed
conventions
21) Each
man is containing full divinity and so Shudra is not completely Shudra, nor
Kshatriya completely Kshatriya.. that is dominant trait not the only trait in
the person. Each contains some part of other.
22) Study
dealing with suprarational (turned to Absolute) and infrarational where reason
is mediator.
23) Relative
influence in finite. Unity in all divisions and differentiate realities… relative and absolute, divisions and oneness.
–finite attempts to express and while expressing deny it.
24) Suprarational: The aim is reconciliation between secret and
eternal reality and the finite appearances. Therefore, our highest faculty are
those which make it possible.
25) Infrarational: Origin and basis of the infinite of the
inconscient. Crude and haphazard intuitions of the subcoinscious, physical,
vital and emotional, sensational mind and will in us. Finding some finite order
, struggle to self create…?or (p119)
26) But because it proceeds by ignorance and
not by knowledge, it cannot truly succeed in this most vehement endeavour. The
life of reason and intelligence will stand between that upper and this nether
power. 1. Enlightens life of the
instincts and impulses and help them to find on the higher plane the finite order for which it gropes. 2.
Looks up towards the absolute, out towards the infinite, in towards the One.
But without able to grip or hold their realities.
27) *
28) Reason
is excellent but only as a servant, it is not sovereign. It is an intermediate
minister. It can give a correct law for other faculties, can provide some order
for the journey , but thats all. It is not the highest ideal nor rationalist
society is the highest type of society. For such individual or society will be
arid, too mechanical and will crush or siphon all the other springs of life.
That definitely is not the intention behind existence.
Yet one cannot overlook unique utilities of Reason[11] :
1.Reason can guide the lower faculties in understanding, reflecting, in
detached observation, this is especially important for these faculties are too
indulged in their own play. It is this ability to detach, stand back and
observe, infer which gives the reason its supremacy among human faculties.
2.It also makes human faculties to look beyond themselves and try to get
enriched from each other. For example the perpetual conflict in Ethical and
hedonist i.e. pursuit of right v/s pursuit of beauty. Reason can provide a
plane for reconciliation.
3.It can be Viveka : discriminator between higher and lower, truth and false,
ugly and pleasing and thus is indispensable in the path to perfection.
4.It provides laws and acts as a judge to make sure that they are practiced or
at least pinching the human beings.
Of course these laws are temporary and they become too taxing, like a prison
after some time. Then reason itself makes the man to question and break the
laws to replace them by new set of laws.
This double current of fixing a law and replacing it by another is what is at
the root of human civilization's progress. Intellect can act only by
dissection, by division, classification, organizing and by synthesis. It cannot
take the Truth by roots nor can it take it as a whole in one stroke. Reason
does have a capacity of upward and inward turn as well, though used less as
compared to the other one. It is able to reach the upper realm of Ideas where
knowledge and force are one. But as it tries to bring the ideas down to some
form or expression, they are diluted and corrupted. Take for example our ideals
like liberty, brotherhood, equality, profit sharing, benevolent dictator,
socialism, back to Nature as so on, they all have some element of truth.
Because of that element they still persist, are pursued, are systematized,
formalized, theorized, but that is only an element of truth, not the complete
truth.
One has to proceed from ignorance to knowledge by slow and patient self
recognition, by self analysis and self organization. Physical, Vital,
emotional, aesthetic, hedonist, ethical, all have to reconcile with each other.
Not only that they also have to reconcile within themselves for there are many
layers and factions even within each of them. Reason cannot do it for most of
the time, for its very limitation is working in bits and pieces, in
reductionist way.
Pursuit of Truth for its own sake, whether in Science or in Philosophy is the
right use for reason. But mostly it is not that way. The pursuit by reason /
intellect is for understanding life, how it can serve life. The discoveries of
science done originally for dispassionate search for truth are later used to
satisfy vital and animal needs of the people. Intellect serving the lower
elements, intellectuals serving the ignorants is perhaps the biggest tragedy of
the modern age. It has served, practical humanitarianism, egoism, monstrous
weapons for mutual destruction. On one side it has drawn humanity close enough
with hope of global village, but then crushed it with the burden of monstrous
commercialism. It has not occurred only because science divorced itself from
religion. Religion itself is equally responsible for most horrendous crimes.
The problem is basically with the nature of reason itself. Reason can prove the
opposite things with equal felicity. It can support opposite philosophies,
isms, theories with equal force and power of conviction. As said earlier, it is
excellent as a tool, as a servant. So allows itself for any purpose and use.
Reason assumes that his view is correct and others are wrong and is able to
justify it.
But there again lies its value.
Several experiments of such reconciliation and perfection are carried out by
individuals and societies , through time cycles, and thus diverse self actualization,
self recognition experiences are gathered. Ordinary man generally accepts some
formulation and stops. But the more developed minds try to expand human horizon
through that new knowledge. Subjective[12]
age is very useful for such efforts. Though individually the experiments have
limitation, there combined effect in collective life ensures the enriching of
the race. For it is the variety of experience and its truth seeking elements in
diverse directions which laboriously chisel layers of ignorance from the hidden
luminescence of Truth.
By constant enlargement, opening, purifying reason can arrive at even that
which is hidden from it. This is the uniqueness and therefore the importance of
reason.
29) To
reieterate in order to get it very clear, following is role, importance and limitation of reason:
30) 1.
Reason is an intermediate minister and not sovereign power, but it can create a
temporary order in the passage to a higher illumination. It should organize the
life as it aims towards a greater truth, beauty and harmony.
31) 2.
Intellect should guide the lower faculties of emotion and desire in
understanding and reflecting, because they are now too absorbed in their own
urges. It should teach and guide the lower faculties to liberate and separate
the pure from impure, the high from the low and lead them from crude confusion
to more luminous formulae.
32) 3.
It should guide the lower human faculties to look beyond themselves and benefit
from each other.
33) 4.
The laws given by the intellect become a prison after some time, so the
intellect is to be used to challenge as well as to replace its own
formulations. This double current of fixing a rule and overcoming it ensures progress[13] .
34) 5.
Reason is necessary until higher consciousness is available in the evolutionary
process of individuals and humanity as a whole.
35) Apart
from these activities, intellect must also become receptive to ideas that
descend from higher levels of consciousness and are to be given a shape and
expression in some form. The highest ideas come from a plane where Knowledge
and Force are one and should lead towards self illumination and self
harmonization. How this receptive faculty could be facilitated with AI is yet to
be studied, though studies of brain images of experienced meditators and
experiments with biofeedback training may be promising directions.
36) For
Sri Aurobindo, the rational mind can be an efficient instrument for ordering
life, but it cannot truly know. It is hampered by a division from what it seeks
to know, He asserts the importance of the rational mind in the development of
the individual, and regards it as necessary for discrimination and intelligent
action. It strengthens one’s capacities for effective life in the world. He
clarifies that though it is true that intellectual deliberation and right
discrimination are an important part of the Yoga of knowledge; but their object
is rather to remove a difficulty than to arrive at the final and positive result
of this path. Once one has purified the understanding by removing sense-error
and desire and old association and intellectual prejudgment, only then is the
intellect free to do its work of analysis and arrangement of conceptions.
Reason according to him is shot through
with threads of Prana (Life energy[14] ).
This means that due to its preoccupation with the body, indulgence in sense
experiences and their associated desires, passions, attachments, etc., very
often the intellect of a person is unable to do its intended function of
dispassionate enquiry, analysis and logical inference from objective facts.
There is a positive and essential role to be played by Mind in life and if that
is missed then it leads to error.
So
long as we live without Self-knowledge we can do no other thing. Men and
nations must live and act egoistically or perish. But subjectivism is to live
so, attempt at Self-knowledge and living by true knowledge. There is no gain if
we repeat the old error. True ‘I’ is not ego but divine and is emerging in us.
He is not only himself but all of his kind. Vyashti and Samashti.
A[15]
society cannot crush individual for her benefit. Individual cannot disregard
his fellow beings. By helping them he
also grows, his isolation stalks and diminishes. This is what subjective age
teaches: we are not ego, we are all others also.
- Our real ‘I’ is the Supreme Being
and we have to discover Him.
- This being is one in all and only
by admitting our unity with others can we entirely fulfil our true self
being.
Present
human life departs from these truths nine tenth of the time. This is where the
German error was. (p40) It was as follows:
Individual
will be entirely subservient to collectivity -like cog in a machine or a
disciplined instrument. State became collective ago all pervading, all seeing,
the plus side was perfection, scientific development, adjustment of means to
ends, social, intellectual efficiency. What was lost in the bargain was ‘deeper
life, vision, intuitive power-force of personality, psychic sweetness, largeness.’(p42) Secondly as State is supreme
, divine, service to state is only morality, which in turn was war and success
by all means as per this thought. Peace in such model is only preparation for
the next war. Trade and commerce is also other kind of war. Vital and Physical
are the whole of existence as per Science. Survival of the best is highest good
and is through elimination of the unfit and assimilation of less fit. Culture
is life governed by ideas-ideas based on truths of life and organised to bring
it to the highest. All life not capable of this culture is to be eliminated.
German
ideal is to be defeated not only in war but in mind of man[16] .
– by less perverse honesty and equal sincerity to arrive at a better law. The
prevalence of that ideal still in minds of mankind at large means ‘Germans lost
battle but won in after war.’ (p45) It threatens to sweep over all Europe.
German gospel has two sides :
- Internally a cult of State;
Germany secured moral victory as State is equated to Nation in most of the
nations.
- Externally international egoism.
Germany has systematised certain strong actual tendencies and principles
in international action to the exclusion of all. Today State sponsored
massacres of other states is seen all over the world.
‘Woe
to the race if it blinds its conscience and buttresses up its animal egoism
with the old justification, for the gods have shown that karma is not a jest.’
(p46) [17]
Germany
is not just reversion to ancient barbarism, it is a new and modern gospel born
of the application of a metaphysical logic to the conclusions of materialistic
Science, of philosophical subjectivism to objective pragmatic positivism. The
result is a bastard creed, an objective subjectivism which is miles away from
the true goal of subjective age. It is not in Physical, Vital, economic and
even intellectual, but in something deeper whose roots are not in ego- for good
of all in the world. ‘Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinaha.’
True
and false Subjectivism must be clearly distinguished and the old error of
following false subjectivism must be avoided. (Ch. VI[18] )
In
true sense it means liberty of me and all others. Growth of Science created two opposite ideals[19] :
- Exaggerated individualism vital
egoism leading to Self-Affirmation
- Collectivism leading to
Self-Abnegation
(p49)
This led to a philosophy of survival of fittest and right to live even at the
expense of the others. Also Science found that the Nature wants to preserve not
individual but the class or type and this is done by securing individual to the
type or to collectivity. This in turn led to ideal of pack, beehive or swarm as
apt model for human aggregate, with no individuality or freedom for the
individual. Individual was asked to sacrifice himself for the growth of the
race. The new ideal appearing now is universalism. The continental cultural
unity or economic unity can be seen in EU and other experiments[20] .
Objective
and Subjective start from the same data. (p51) Objective view looks from analytical reason and proposes a
mechanical view world as articulate
mechanism. The aim is to find laws of nature and apply them. State is
seen as an entity. Life is to be harmonised, managed, perfected by an infinite
adjustment, to be a manipulation, a
machinery according to this thought[21] .
Subjective
view is large and complex with more powers of knowledge and powers of
effectuation. It proceeds from within and regards everything from the point of
view of a containing and developing
consciousness. The law is within ourselves and life Self-creating process.
Consciousness grows from subconscious to half conscious to conscious. Reason (a
process in Self recognition) and Will (a process in Self affirmation) are only
effective movement. Progress is
increasing Self recognition, Self-realization, and Self shaping. It works by
intuition and not just reason. It sees the whole and sees in harmony and in a
holistic profoundity. Subjective view is to get to the Self, to live in the
Self, to see by the Self, to live out from internal as starting point to external
to transcend both. ‘Atmanastu[22] ’
Individual
has law of his own being, Swadharma, freedom of thought, to err, to act. He has
truth of his own, independent self-realization, Universal force, being,
fulfilling himself through individual in the universe. All, such own truths
harmonise to make the universal truth. These two are only reverse sides of one,
they meet each other on return in harmony for a richer and larger unity.
Individuality and Collectivity may identify with physical beings /vital beings/mental
beings/ moral beings and set as true aim of our exist. A subjective
materialism, is pragmatic and outward
going is possible but cannot long linger.
Recent case of vitalism played big role and is still influencing.
Subjective idealism is the new emerging idea now[23] .
(p54)
It
seeks fulfilment of man in satisfaction of his inmost religion, aesthetic,
infinite, intellectual, ethical, --deepest sympathies and emotions and regards
it as fullness of being. Physical and Vital are subject to ethical, sympathetic
and emotional. Some tendency of mysticism and occultism which is new to modern
life after the reign of individualism and objective intellectualism. Again
Subjectivism can go further, discover the true self, greater than mind. Mind,
vital and physical are only instruments in the process. Not equal in hierarchy
but in necessity. The aim is not to perfect them for themselves but as fit
basis and instruments for revealing in our inner and outer life of the luminous
Self, the secret godhead. Who is one and still various in every being and
existing thing and creature. (p55)
The
ideal of human individual and collective existence is in 1. A progressive
transformation 2. Into conscious outflowering 3. Of joy, power, love and light
4. Of the Transcendent and Universal spirit[24] ..
***
Man's
seeking after beauty reaches its most intense and
satisfying expression in the great creative arts, poetry, painting,
sculpture, architecture, but in its full extension there is no activity of
his nature or his life from which it[p.136] need or
ought to be excluded,—provided we understand beauty both in its widest and its
truest sense. A complete and universal appreciation of beauty and the making
entirely beautiful our whole life and being must surely be a
necessary character of the perfect individual and the
perfect society. But in its origin this seeking for beauty is not rational; it
springs from the roots of our life, it is an instinct and an impulse, an
instinct of aesthetic satisfaction and an impulse of aesthetic creation
and enjoyment. Starting from the infrarational parts of our being, this
instinct and impulse begin with much imperfection and impurity and with great
crudities both in creation and in appreciation. It is here that the reason
comes in to distinguish, to enlighten, to correct, to point out the
deficiencies and the crudities, to lay down laws of aesthetics and to
purify our appreciation and our creation by improved taste and right knowledge.
While we are thus striving to learn and correct ourselves, it may seem to be
the true law-giver both for the artist and the admirer and, though not the
creator of our aesthetic instinct and impulse, yet the creator in us of an
aesthetic conscience and its vigilant judge and guide. That
which was an obscure and erratic activity, it makes self-conscious and
rationally discriminative in its work and enjoyment.
But again
this is true only in restricted bounds or, if anywhere entirely true, then only
on a middle plane of our aesthetic seeking and activity. Where the greatest and
most powerful creation of beauty is accomplished and its appreciation and
enjoyment rise to the highest pitch, the rational is always surpassed and left
behind. The creation of beauty in poetry and art does not fall within
the sovereignty or even within the sphere of the reason.
The intellect is not the poet, the artist, the creator within us;
creation comes by a suprarational influx of light and power which must work
always, if it is to do its best, by vision and inspiration. It may use the
intellect for certain of its operations, but in proportion as it subjects
itself to the intellect, it loses in power and force of vision and
diminishes the splendour and truth of the beauty it creates. The intellect may
take hold of the influx, moderate and repress the divine enthusiasm of
creation[p.137] and force it to obey the prudence of its dictates, but in
doing so it brings down the work to its own inferior level, and the lowering is
in proportion to the intellectual interference. For by itself
the intelligence can only achieve talent, though it may be a high and
even, if sufficiently helped from above, a surpassing talent. Genius, the
true creator, is always suprarational in its nature and its instrumentation
even when it seems to be doing the work of the reason; it is most itself, most
exalted in its work, most sustained in the power, depth, height and beauty of
its achievement when it is least touched by, least mixed with any control of
the mere intellectuality and least often drops from its heights of
vision and inspiration into reliance upon the always mechanical process of
intellectual construction. Art-creation which accepts the canons of the reason
and works within the limits laid down by it, may be great, beautiful and
powerful; for genius can preserve its power even when it labours in shackles
and refuses to put forth all its resources: but when it proceeds by means of
the intellect, it constructs, but does not create. It may construct well and
with a good and faultless workmanship, but its success is formal and not of the
spirit, a success of technique and not the embodiment of the imperishable
truth of beauty seized in its inner reality, its divine delight, its
appeal to a supreme source of ecstasy, Ananda.
reason
There have been periods of artistic creation, ages of reason, in which the
rational and intellectual tendency has prevailed in poetry and art; there have
even been nations which in their great formative periods of art
and literature have set up reason and a meticulous taste as the
sovereign powers of their aesthetic activity. At their best these periods have
achieved work of a certain greatness, but predominantly of an intellectual
greatness and perfection of technique rather than achievements of a supreme
inspired and revealing beauty; indeed their very aim has been not the discovery
of the deeper truth of beauty, but truth of ideas and truth of, a critical
rather than a true creative aim. Their leading object has been an
intellectual criticism of life and nature elevated by a consummate
poetical rhythm and diction rather than a revelation of God and man
and life and[p.138] nature in inspired forms of artistic beauty.
But great art is not satisfied with representing the intellectual truth of
things, which is always their superficial or exterior truth; it seeks for a
deeper and original truth which escapes the eye of the mere sense or the mere reason,
the soul in them, the unseen reality which is not that of their form and
process but of their spirit. This it seizes and expresses by form and idea, but
a significant form, which is not merely a faithful and just or a harmonious
reproduction of outward Nature, and a revelatory idea, not the idea which is
merely correct, elegantly right or fully satisfying to the reason and taste.
Always the truth it seeks is first and foremost the truth of beauty,—not,
again, the formal beauty alone or the beauty of proportion and right process
which is what the sense and the reason seek, but the soul of beauty which is
hidden from the ordinary eye and the ordinary mind and revealed in
its fullness only to the unsealed vision of the poet and artist in man who can
seize the secret significances of the universal poet and artist, the divine
creator who dwells as their soul and spirit in the forms he has created.
The
art-creation which lays a supreme stress on reason and taste and on perfection
and purity of a technique constructed in obedience to the canons of
reason and taste, claimed for itself the name of classical art; but the claim,
like the too trenchant distinction on which it rests, is of doubtful validity.
The spirit of the real, the great classical art and poetry is to bring out what
is universal and subordinate individual expression to universal truth and
beauty, just as the spirit of romantic art and poetry is to bring out what is
striking and individual and this it often does so powerfully or with so vivid
an emphasis as to throw into the background of its creation the universal, on
which yet all true art romantic or classical builds and fills in its forms. In
truth, all great art has carried in it both a classical and a romantic as well
as a realistic element,—understanding realism in the sense of the prominent
bringing out of the external truth of things, not the perverse inverted
romanticism of the "real" which brings into exaggerated prominence
the ugly, common or morbid and puts that forward as the whole truth of life.
The[p.139] type of art to which a great creative work belongs is
determined by the prominence it gives to one element and the subdual of the
others into subordination to its reigning spirit. But classical art also works
by a large vision and inspiration, not by the process of the intellect. The
lower kind of classical art and literature,—if classical it be and not rather,
as it often is, pseudo-classical, intellectually imitative of the external form
and process of the classical,—may achieve work of considerable, though a much
lesser power, but of an essentially inferior scope and nature; for to that
inferiority it is self-condemned by its principle of intellectual construction.
Almost always it speedily degenerates into the formal or academic, empty of
real beauty, void of life and power, imprisoned in its slavery to form and
imagining that when a certain form has been followed, certain canons of
construction satisfied, certain rhetorical rules or technical principles
obeyed, all has been achieved. It ceases to be art and becomes a cold and
mechanical workmanship.
This
predominance given to reason and taste first and foremost, sometimes even
almost alone, in the creation and appreciation of beauty arises from a temper
of mind which is critical rather than creative; and in regard to creation its
theory falls into a capital error. All artistic work in order to be
perfect must indeed have in the very act of creation the guidance of
an inner power of discrimination constantly selecting and rejecting
in accordance with a principle of truth and beauty which remains always
faithful to a harmony, a proportion, an intimate relation of the form to
the idea; there is at the same time an exact fidelity of the idea to the
spirit, nature and inner body of the thing of beauty which has been
revealed to the soul and the mind, its svarūpa and svabhāva. Therefore this discriminating
inner sense rejects all that is foreign, superfluous, otiose, all that is a
mere diversion distractive and deformative, excessive or defective, while it
selects and finds sovereignly all that can bring out the full truth, the utter
beauty, the inmost power. But this discrimination is not that of
the critical intellect, nor is the harmony, proportion, relation it
observes that which can be fixed by any set law of the critical reason; it
exists in the[p.140] very nature and truth of the thing itself, the
creation itself, in its secret inner law of beauty and harmony which can be
seized by vision, not by intellectual analysis. The discrimination which works
in the creator is therefore not an intellectual self-criticism or an obedience
to rules imposed on him from outside by any intellectual canons, but itself
creative, intuitive, a part of the vision, involved in and inseparable from the
act of creation. It comes as part of that influx of power and light from above
which by its divine enthusiasm lifts the faculties into their intense
suprarational working. When it fails, when it is betrayed by the lower
executive instruments rational or infrarational,—and this happens when these
cease to be passive and insist on obtruding their own demands or vagaries,—the
work is flawed and a subsequent act of self-criticism becomes necessary. But in
correcting his work the artist who attempts to do it by rule and intellectual
process, uses a false or at any rate an inferior method and cannot do his best.
He ought rather to call to his aid the intuitive critical vision and
embody it in a fresh act of inspired creation or recreation after bringing
himself back by its means into harmony with the light and law of his original
creative initiation. The critical intellect has no direct or independent
part in the means of the inspired creator of beauty.
In the
appreciation of beauty it has a part, but it is not even there the supreme
judge or law-giver. The business of the intellect is to analyse
the elements, parts, external processes, apparent principles of that which
it studies and explain their relations and workings; in doing this it instructs
and enlightens the lower mentality which has, if left to itself, the
habit of doing things or seeing what is done and taking all for granted without
proper observation and fruitful understanding. But as with truth of
religion, so with the highest and deepest truth of beauty, the intellectual
reason cannot seize its inner sense and reality, not even the inner truth of
its apparent principles and processes, unless it is aided by a higher insight
not its own. As it cannot give a method, process or rule by which beauty can or
ought to be created, so also it cannot give to the appreciation of beauty that
deeper insight which it needs; it can only help to remove[p.141] the
dullness and vagueness of the habitual perceptions and conceptions of the lower
mind which prevent it from seeing beauty or which give it false and crude
aesthetic habits: it does this by givingto the mind an external idea
and rule of the elements of the thing it has to perceive and appreciate. What
is farther needed is the awakening of a certain vision, an insight and an
intuitive response in the soul. Reason which studies always from outside,
cannot give this inner and more intimate contact; it has to aid itself by a
more direct insight springing from the soul itself and to call at every step on
the intuitive mindto fill up the gap of its own deficiencies.
We see
this in the history of the development of literary and artistic
criticism. In its earliest stages the appreciation of beauty is instinctive,
natural, inborn, a response of the aesthetic sensitiveness of the soul which
does not attempt to give any account of itself to the thinking intelligence.
When the rational intelligence applies itself to this task, it is not satisfied
with recording faithfully the nature of the response and the thing it has felt,
but it attempts to analyse, to lay down what is necessary in order to create a
just aesthetic gratification, it prepares a grammar of technique, an artistic
law and canon of construction, a sort of mechanical rule of process for the
creation of beauty, a fixed code or Shastra. This brings in the long reign of
academic criticism superficial, technical, artificial, governed by the false
idea that technique, of which alone critical reason can give an entirely
adequate account, is the most important part of creation and that to every art
there can correspond an exhaustive science which will tell us how the thing is
done and give us the whole secret and process of its doing. A time comes when
the creator of beauty revolts and declares the charter of his own freedom,
generally in the shape of a new law or principle of creation, and this freedom
once vindicated begins to widen itself and to carry with it the critical reason
out of all its familiar bounds. A more developed appreciation emerges which
begins to seek for new principles of criticism, to search for the soul of the
work itself and explain the form in relation to the soul or to study the
creator himself or the spirit, nature and [p.142] ideas of the age he
lived in and so to arrive at a right understanding of his work. The intellect
has begun to see that its highest business is not to lay down laws for the
creator of beauty, but to help us to understand himself and his work, not only
its form and elements but the mind from which it sprang and the impressions its
effects create in the mind that receives. Here criticism is on its right road,
but on a road to a consummation in which the rational understanding is
overpassed and a higher faculty opens, suprarational in its origin and nature.
For the
conscious appreciation of beauty reaches its height of enlightenment and
enjoyment not by analysis of the beauty enjoyed or even by a right and
intelligent understanding of it,—these things are only a preliminary clarifying
of our first unenlightened sense of the beautiful,—but by an exaltation of the
soul in which it opens itself entirely to the light and power
and joy of the creation. The soul of beauty in us identifies itself
with the soul of beauty in the thing created and feels in appreciation the same
divine intoxication and uplifting which the artist felt in creation. Criticism
reaches its highest point when it becomes the record, account, right
description of this response; it must become itself inspired, intuitive,
revealing. In other words, the action of the intuitive mind must complete the
action of the rational intelligence and it may even wholly replace it and do
more powerfully the peculiar and proper work of the intellect itself; it may
explain more intimately to us the secret of the form, the strands of the process,
the inner cause, essence, mechanism of the defects and limitations of the
work as well as of its qualities. For the intuitive intelligence when it has
been sufficiently trained and developed, can take up always the work of the
intellect and do it with a power and light and insight greater and surer than
the power and light of the intellectual judgment in its widest scope.
There is an intuitive discrimination which is more keen and precise in its
sight than the reasoning intelligence.
What has
been said of great creative art, that being the form in which normally our
highest and intensest aesthetic satisfaction is achieved, applies to all
beauty, beauty in Nature, beauty in life as well as beauty in art. We find that
in the end the place[p.143] of reason and the limits of its achievement
are precisely of the same kind in regard to beauty as in regard to religion. It
helps to enlighten and purify the aesthetic instincts and impulses, but it
cannot give them their highest satisfaction or guide them to a complete
insight. It shapes and fulfils to a certain extent the aesthetic intelligence,
but it cannot justly pretend to give the definitive law for the creation of
beauty or for the appreciation and enjoyment of beauty. It can only lead the
aesthetic instinct, impulse, intelligence towards a greatest possible conscious
satisfaction, but not to it; it has in the end to hand them over to a higher
faculty which is in direct touch with the suprarational and in its nature and
workings exceeds the intellect.
And for the same reason, because that which we are seeking
through beauty is in the end that which we are seeking through religion,
the Absolute, the Divine. The search for beauty is only in its beginning a
satisfaction in the beauty of form, the beauty which appeals to the physical
senses and the vital impressions, impulsions, desires. It is only in the
middle a satisfaction in the beauty of the ideas seized,
the emotions aroused, the perception of perfect process and
harmonious combination. Behind them the soul of beauty in us desires the
contact, the revelation, the uplifting delight of an absolute beauty in all
things which it feels to be present, but which neither the senses and instincts
by themselves can give, though they may be its channels,—for it is suprasensuous,—nor
the reason and intelligence, though they too are a channel,—for it is
suprarational, supra-intellectual,—but to which through all these veils the
soul itself seeks to arrive. When it can get the touch of this universal,
absolute beauty, this soul of beauty, this sense of its revelation in any
slightest or greatest thing, the beauty of a flower, a form, the beauty and
power of a character, an action, an event, a human life, an idea, a stroke of
the brush or the chisel or a scintillation of the mind,
the colours of a sunset or the grandeur of the tempest, it is then
that the sense of beauty in us is really, powerfully, entirely satisfied. It is
in truth seeking, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in
nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in
the variation of his masks and[p.144] forms. When, fulfilled in our
growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for
beauty, we are able to identify ourselves in soul with this Absolute and Divine
in all the forms and activities of the world and shape an image of our inner
and our outer life in the highest image we can perceive and embody of the
All-Beautiful, then the aesthetic being in us who was born for this
end, has fulfilled himself and risen to his divine consummation. To find
highest beauty is to find God; to reveal, to embody, to create, as we say,
highest beauty is to bring out of our souls the living image and power of
God.[p.145]
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