Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Four. On Art
The National Value of Art [1]
There is a tendency in modern times to depreciate the value of the beautiful and overstress the value of the useful, a tendency curbed in Europe by the imperious insistence of an agelong tradition of culture and generous training of the aesthetic perceptions; but1 in India, where we have been cut off by a mercenary and soulless education from all our ancient roots of culture and tradition, it is corrected only by the stress of imagination, emotion and spiritual delicacy, submerged but not yet destroyed, in the temperament of the people.
The value attached by the ancients to music, art and poetry has become almost unintelligible to an age bent on depriving life of its meaning by turning earth into a sort of glorified antheap or beehive and confusing the lowest, though most primary in necessity, of the means of human progress with the aim of this great evolutionary process.
The first and lowest necessity of the race is that of self-preservation in the body by a sufficient supply and equable distribution of food, shelter and raiment.
This is a problem which the oldest communistic human societies solved to perfection, and without communism it cannot be solved except by a convenient but inequitable arrangement which makes of the majority slaves provided with these primary wants and necessities and ministering under compulsion to a few who rise higher and satisfy larger wants.
These are the wants of the vital instincts, called in our philosophy the prāṇa koṣa, which go beyond and dominate the mere animal wants, simple2, coarse and undiscriminating, shared by us with the lower creation.
It is these vital wants, the hunger for wealth, luxury, beautiful women, rich foods and drinks, which disturbed the first low but perfect economy of society and made the institution of private property, with its huge train of evils, inequality, injustice, violence, fraud, civil commotion and hatred, class selfishness, family selfishness and 
personal selfishness, an inevitable necessity of human progress.
The Mother of All works through evil as well as good, and through temporary evil she brings about a better and lasting good.
These disturbances were complicated by the heightening of the primitive animal emotions into more intense and complex forms.
Love, hatred, vindictiveness, anger, attachment, jealousy and the host of similar passions, — the citta or mind-stuff suffused by the vital wants of the prāṇa, that which the Europeans call the heart — ceased to be communal in their application and, as personal wants, clamoured for separate satisfaction.
It is for the satisfaction of the vital and emotional needs of humanity that modern nations and societies exist, that commerce grows and Science ministers to human luxury and convenience.
But for these new wants, the establishment of private property, first in the clan or family, then in the individual, the institution of slavery and other necessary devices the modern world would never have come into existence; for the satisfaction of the primary economic wants and bodily necessities would never have carried us beyond the small commune or tribe.
But these primary wants and necessities have to be satisfied and satisfied universally, or society becomes diseased and states convulsed with sedition and revolution.
The old arrangement of a mass of slaves well fed and provided and a select class or classes enjoying in greater or less quantity the higher wants of humanity broke down in the mediaeval ages, because the heart began to develop too powerfully in humanity and under the influence of philosophy, ethics and religion began to spread its claim beyond the person, the class, the family, the clan to the nation and to humanity or to all creation.
A temporary makeshift was invented to replace slavery, called free labour, by which men were paid and bribed to accept voluntarily the position of slaves, contenting themselves with the coarse satisfaction of the animal necessities and in return providing by their labour the higher wants of their masters now called superiors or higher classes.
This also has become a solution which will no longer serve.
The whole of humanity now demands not merely the satisfaction of the body, the anna, 
but the satisfaction also of the prāṇa and the citta, the vital and emotional desires.
Wealth, luxury, enjoyment for oneself and those dear to us, participation in the satisfaction of national wealth, pride, lordship, rivalry, war, alliance, peace, once the privilege of the few, the higher classes, of prince, burgess and noble are now claimed by all humanity.
Political, social and economic liberty and equality, two things difficult to harmonise3, must now be conceded to all men and harmonised4 as well as the present development of humanity will allow.
It is this claim that arose, red with fury and blinded with blood, in the French Revolution.
This is Democracy, this Socialism, this Anarchism; and, however fiercely the privileged and propertied classes may rage, curse and denounce these forerunners of Demogorgon, they can only temporarily resist.
Their interests may be hoary and venerable with the sanction of the ages, but the future is mightier than the past and evolution proceeds relentlessly in its course trampling to pieces all that it no longer needs.
Those who fight against her fight against the will of God, against a decree written from of old, and are already defeated and slain in the kāraṇa jagat, the world of types and causes where Nature fixes everything before she works it out in the visible world.
Nihatāḥ pūrvameva.
The mass of humanity has not risen beyond the bodily needs, the vital desires, the emotions and the current of thought-sensations created by these lower strata.
This current of thought-sensations is called in Hindu philosophy the manas or mind, it is the highest to which all but a few of the animals can rise, and it is the highest function that the mass of mankind has thoroughly perfected.
Beyond the manas is the buddhi, or thought proper, which, when perfected, is independent of the desires, the claims of the body and the interference of the emotions.
But only a minority of men have developed this organ, much less perfected it.
Only great thinkers in their hours of thought are able to use this organ independently of the lower strata, and even they are besieged by the latter in their ordinary life and their best thought suffers continually from these lower intrusions.
Only developed Yogins5 have a viśuddha-buddhi, a thought-organ cleared of the 
interference of the lower strata by cittaśuddhi or purification of the citta, the mind-stuff, from the prāṇa full of animal, vital and emotional disturbances.
With most men the buddhi is full of manas and the manas of the lower strata.
The majority of mankind do not think, they have only thought-sensations; a large minority think confusedly, mixing up desires, predilections, passions, prejudgments, old associations and prejudices with pure and disinterested thought.
Only a few, the rare aristocrats of the earth, can really and truly think.
That is now the true aristocracy, not the aristocracy of the body and birth, not the aristocracy of vital superiority, wealth, pride and luxury, not the aristocracy of higher emotions, courage, energy, successful political instinct and the habit of mastery and rule, — though these latter cannot be neglected, — but the aristocracy of knowledge, undisturbed insight and intellectual ability.
It emerges, though it has not yet emerged, and in any future arrangement of human society this natural inequality will play an important part.
Above the buddhi are other faculties which are now broadly included in the term spirituality.
This body of faculties is still rarer and more imperfectly developed even in the highest than the thought-organ.
Most men mistake intellectuality, imaginative inspiration or emotional fervour for spirituality, but this is a much higher function, the highest of all, of which all the others are coverings and veils.
Here we get to the fountain, the source to which we return, the goal of human evolution.
But although spirituality has often entered into humanity in great waves, it has done so merely to create a temporary impetus and retire into the souls of a few, leaving only its coverings and shadows behind to compose and inform the thing which is usually called religion.
Meanwhile the thought is the highest man has really attained and it is by the thought that the old society has been broken down.
And the thought is composed of two separate sides, judgment or reason and imagination, both of which are necessary to perfect ideation.
It is by science, philosophy and criticism on the one side, by art, poetry and idealism on the other that the old state of humanity has been undermined and is now collapsing, and the foundations have been laid for the 
new.
Of these science, philosophy and criticism have established their use to the mass of humanity by ministering to the luxury, comfort and convenience which all men desire and arming them with justification in the confused struggle of passions, interests, cravings and aspirations which are now working with solvent and corrosive effect throughout the world.
The value of the other side, more subtle and profound, has been clouded to the mass of men by the less visible and sensational character of its workings.