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The Intuition of the Age
ALL movements—whether of thought or of life, whether in the individual or in the mass—proceed from a fundamental intuition which lies in the background as the logical presupposition, the psychological motive and the spiritual force. A certain attitude of the soul, a certain angle of vision is what is posited first; all other things—all thoughts and feelings and activities are but necessary attempts to express, to demonstrate, to realise on the conscious and dynamic levels, in the outer world, the truth which has thus already been seized in some secret core of our being. The intuition may not, of course, be present to the conscious mind, it may not be ostensibly sought for, one may even deny the existence of such a preconceived notion and proceed to establish truth on a tabula rasa; none the less it is this hidden bias that judges, this secret consciousness that formulates, this unknown power that fashions. Now, what is the intuition that lies behind the movements of the new age ? What is the intimate realisation, the underlying viewpoint which is guiding and modelling all our efforts and achievements—our science and art, our poetry and philosophy, our religion and society? For, there is such a common and fundamental note which is being voiced forth by the human spirit through all the multitude of its present day activities. A new impulse is there, no one can deny, and it has vast possibilities before it, that also one need not hesitate to accept. But in order that we may best fructuate what has been spontaneously sown, we must first recognise it, be luminously conscious of it and develop it along its proper line of .growth. For, also certain it is that this new impulse or intuition, however true and strong in itself, is still groping and erring and miscarrying; it is still wasting much of its energy in tentative Page 69 things, in mere experiments, in even clear failures. The fact is that the intuition has not yet become an enlightened one, it is still moving, as we shall presently explain, in the dark vital regions of man. And vitalism is naturally and closely affianced to pragmatism, that is to say, the mere vital impulse seeks immediately to execute itself, it looks for external effects, for changes in the form, in the machinery only. Thus it is that we see in art and literature discussions centred upon the scheme of composition, as whether the new poetry should be lyrical or dramatic, popular or aristocratic, metrical or free of metre, and in practical life we talk of remodelling the state by new methods of representation and governance, of purging society by bills and legislation, of reforming humanity by a business pact. All this may be good and necessary, but there is the danger of leaving altogether out of account the one thing needful. We must then pause and turn back, look behind the apparent impulsion that effectuates to the Will that drives, behind the ideas and ideals of the mind to the soul that informs and inspires; we must carry ourselves up the stream and concentrate upon the original source, the creative intuition that lies hidden somewhere. And then only all the new stirrings .that we feel in our heart—our urges and ideals and visions will attain an effective clarity, an unshaken purpose and an inevitable achievement. That is to say, the change has been in the "soul of man himself, the being has veered round and taken a new orientation. It is this which one must envisage, recognise and consciously possess, in order that one may best fulfil the call of the age. But what we are doing instead is to observe the mere external signs and symbols and symptoms, to fix upon the distant quiverings, the echoes on the outermost rim, which are not always faithful representations, but very often distorted images of the truth and life at the centre and source and matrix. We must know that if there has been going on a redistribution and new marshalling of forces, it is because the fiat has come from the Etat Major. Now, in order to understand the new orientation of the spirit of the present age, we may profitably ask what was the inspiration of the past age, the characteristic note which has failed to Page 70 satisfy us and which we are endeavouring to transform. We know that that age was the Scientific age or the age of Reason. Its great prophets were Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists or if you mount further up in time, we may begin from Bacon and the humanists. Its motto was first, "The proper study of mankind is man" and secondly, Reason is the supreme organon of knowledge, the highest deity in man—la Deesse Raison. And it is precisely against these two basic principles that the new, age has entered its protest. In face of Humanism, Nietzsche has posited the Superman and in face of Reason; Bergson has posited Intuition. The worship of man as something essentially and exclusively human necessitates as a corollary, the other doctrine, viz. the deification of Reason; and vice versa. Humanism and Scientism go together and the whole spirit and mentality of the age that is passing may be summed up in those two words. So Nietzsche says, "All our modern world is captured in the net of the Alexandrine culture and has, for its ideal, the theoretical man, armed with the most powerful instruments of knowledge, toiling in the service of science and whose prototype and original ancestor is Socrates." Indeed, it may be generally asserted that the nation whose prophet and sage claimed to have brought down Philosophia from heaven to dwell upon earth among men was precisely the nation, endowed with a clear and logical intellect, that was the very embodiment of rationality and reasonableness. As a matter of fact, it would not be far wrong to say that it is the Hellenic culture which has been moulding humanity for ages; at least, it is this which has been the predominating factor, the vital and dynamic element in man's nature. Greece when it died was reborn in Rome; Rome, in its return, found new life in France; and France means Europe. What Europe has been and still is for the world and humanity one knows only too much. And yet, the Hellenic genius has not been the sole motive power and constituent element; there has been another leaven which worked constantly within, if intermittently without. If Europe represented mind and man and this side of existence, Asia always reflected that which transcends the mind—the spirit, the Gods and the Beyonds. However, we are concerned more with the immediate past, Page 71 the mentality that laid its supreme stress upon the human rationality. What that epoch did not understand was that Reason could be overstepped, that there was something higher, something greater than Reason; Reason being the sovereign faculty, it was thought there could be nothing beyond, unless it were deraison. The human attribute par excellence is Reason. Exactly so. But the fact is that man is not bound by his humanity and that reason can be transformed and sublimated into other more powerful faculties. Now, the question is, what is the insufficiency of Reason? How does it limit man ? And what is the Superman into which man is asked or is being impelled to grow ? Reason is insufficient and unsatisfactory because, as Bergson explains, it does not and cannot embrace life as a whole, seize man and the world in an integral realisation/The greater part of the vast mystery of existence escapes its envergure. Reason is that faculty which is for analysing, defining, classifying and fixing things. It is a power that has grown in man in order that he may best manipulate the things of the world. It is utilitarian, practical in its nature and outlook. And as practical dealing requires that things should be stable and separate entities, therefore Reason cannot but see things in solid and in the fragments of a solid. It cuts up existence into distinct parts and diverse elements; and these again it seeks to relate and aggregate, in accordance with what it calls "laws". Such a process has been necessary for man in conducting life and action successfully. Originally a bye-product of active life. Reason gradually separated itself and came finally to have an independent status and function, became or sought to become the instrument of knowledge, of Truth. But although Reason has been and is useful for the practical, we may say almost, the manual aspect of life, life itself it leaves unexplained and uncomprehended. For life is mobility, a continuous flow that has nowhere any gap or stop and things have in reality no isolated or separate existence, they merge and mingle into one another and form an indissoluble whole. Therefore the forms and categories that Reason imposes upon existence are more or less arbitrary; they are shackles that seek to bind up and limit life, but are often rent asunder in the very effort. So the civilisation that has its origin in Reason and Page 72 progresses with discoveries and inventions—devices for artfully manipulating nature—has been essentially and preeminently mechanical in its structure and outlook. It has become more and more efficient perhaps, but less and less soul-inspired, less and less endowed with the free-flowing sap of organic growth and vitality. So instead of the rational principle, the new age wants the principle of Nature or Life. Even as regards knowledge Reason is not the only, nor the best instrument. For animals have properly no reason; the nature-principle of knowledge in the animal is Instinct—the faculty that acts so faultlessly, so marvellously where Reason can only pause and be perplexed. This is not to say that man is to or can go back to this primitive and animal function; but certainly he can replace it by something akin which is as natural and yet purified and self conscious—illumined instinct, we may say or Intuition, as Bergson terms it. And Nietzsche's definition of the Superman has also a similar orientation and significance; for, according to him, the Superman is man who has outgrown his Reason, who is not bound by the standards and the conventions determined by Reason for a special purpose. The Superman is one who has gone beyond "good and evil," who has shaken off from his nature and character elements that are "human, all too human"—who is the embodiment of life-force in its absolute purity and strength and freedom. This then is the mantra of the new age—Life with Intuition as its guide and not Reason and mechanical efficiency, not Man but Superman. The right mantra has been found, the principle itself is irreproachable. But the interpretation, the application, does not seem to have been always happy. For, Nietzsche's conception of the Superman is full of obvious lacunae. If we have so long been adoring the intellectual man, Nietzsche asks us, on the other hand, to deify the vital man. According to him the superman is he who has (1) the supreme sense of the ego, (2) the sovereign will to power and (3) who lives dangerously. All this means an Asura, that is to say, one who has, it may be, dominion over his animal and vital impulsions in order, of course, that he may best gratify them—but who has not purified them. Purification does not necessarily mean annihilation but it does mean sublimation and trans Page 73 formation. So if you have to transcend man, you have to transcend egoism also. For a conscious egoism is the very characteristic of man and by increasing your sense of egoism you do not supersede man but simply aggrandise your humanity, fashion it on a larger, a titanic scale. And then the will to power is not the only will that requires fulfilment, there is also the will to knowledge and the will to love. In man these three fundamental constitutive elements coexist, although they do it, more often than not, at the expense of each other and in a state of continual disharmony. The superman, if he is to be the man "who has surmounted himself", must embody a poise of being in which all the three find a fusion and harmony—a perfect synthesis. Again, to live dangerously may be heroic, but it is not divine. To live dangerously means to have eternal opponents, that is to say, to live ever on the same level with the forces you want to dominate. To have the sense that one has to fight and control means that one is not as yet the sovereign lord, for one has to strive and strain and attain. The supreme lord is he who is perfectly equanimous with himself and with the world. He has not to batter things into a shape in order to create. He creates means, he manifests. He wills and he achieves—"God said 'let there be light' and there was light.'' As a matter of fact, the superman is not, as Nietzsche thinks him to be, the highest embodiment of the biological force of Nature, not even as modified and refined by the aesthetic and aristocratic virtues of which the higher reaches of humanity seem capable. For that is after all humanity only accentuated in certain other fundamentally human modes of existence. It does not carry far enough the process of surmounting. In reality it is not a surmounting but a new channelling. Instead of the ethical and intellectual man, we get the vital and aesthetic man. It may be a change but not a transfiguration. And the faculty of Intuition said to be the characteristic of the New Man does not mean all that it should, if we confine ourselves to Bergson's definition of it. Bergson says that Intuition is a sort of sympathy, a community of feeling or sensibility with the urge of the life-reality. The difference between the sympathy of Instinct and the sympathy of Intuition being that while the former is an unconscious or semiconscious power, the latter is illumined and self-conscious. Now this view Page 7 4 emphasises only the feeling-tone of Intuition, the vital sensibility that attends the direct communion with the life movement. But Intuition is not only purified feeling and sensibility, it is also purified vision and knowledge. It unites us not only with the movement of life, but also opens out to our sight the Truths, the fundamental realities behind that movement. Bergson does not, of course, point to any existence behind the continuous flux of life-power—the elan vital. He seems to deny any static truth or truths to be seen and seized in any scheme of knowledge. To him the dynamic flow—the Heraclitian panta reei is the ultimate reality. It is precisely to this view of things that Bergson owes his conception of Intuition. Since existence is a continuum of Mind-Energy, the only way to know it is to be in harmony or unison with it, to move along its current. The conception of knowledge as a fixing and delimiting of things is necessarily an anomaly in this scheme. But the question is, is matter the only static and separative reality? Is the flux of vital Mind-Energy the ultimate truth ? Matter forms the lowest level of reality. Above it is the elan vital. Above the elan vital there is yet the domain of the Spirit. And the Spirit is a static substance and at the same a dynamic creative power. It is Being (Sat) that realises or expresses itself through certain typal nuclei or nodi of consciousness (chit) in a continuous becoming, in a flow of creative activity (ananda). The dynamism of the vital energy is only a refraction or precipitation of the dynamism of the spirit; and so also static matter is only the substance of the spirit concretised and solidified. It is in an uplift both of matter and vital force to their prototypes—swarupa and swabhava—in the Spirit that lies the real transformation and transfiguration of the humanity of man.
This is the truth that is trying to dawn upon the new age.
Not matter but that which forms the substance of matter, not
intellect but a vaster consciousness that informs the intellect,
not man as he is, an aberration in the cosmic order, but as he
may and shall be the embodiment and fulfilment of that order—
this is the secret Intuition which, as yet dimly envisaged,
nevertheless secretly inspires all the human activities of today.
Only, the truth is being interpreted, as we have said, in terms Page 75
the complete reality. The one acquisition of this shifting of the
viewpoint has been that we are now in touch with the natural
and deeper movement of humanity and not as before merely
with its artificial scaffolding. The Alexandrine civilisation of
humanity, in Nietzsche's phrase, was a sort of divagation from
nature, it was following a loop away from the direct path of
natural evolution. And the new Renaissance of today has
precisely corrected this aberration of humanity and brought
Certainly this does not go far enough into the motive of the
change. The cosmic order does not mean mentalised vitalism
which is also in its turn a section of the integral reality. It means
the order of the spirit, it means the transfiguration of the
physical, the vital and the intellectual into the supernal Substance, Power and Light of that Spirit. The real transcendence
of humanity is not the transcendence of one or other of its
levels but the total transcendence to an altogether different Page 76 |