Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Four. On Art
The National Value of Art [2]
The activity of human thought divides itself broadly into two groups of functions, those of the right hand, contemplation, creation, imagination, the centres that see the truth, and those of the left hand, criticism, reasoning, discrimination, inquiry, the centres that judge the truth when it is seen.
In education the latter are fostered by scientific and manual training, but the only quality of the right hand that this education fosters is observation.
For this reason a purely scientific education tends to make thought keen and clear-sighted within certain limits, but narrow, hard and cold.
Even in his own sphere the man without any training of the right hand can only progress in a settled groove; he cannot broaden the base of human culture or enlarge the bounds of science.
Tennyson describes him as an eye well practised in Nature, a spirit bounded and poor, and the description is just.
But a cultivated eye without a cultivated spirit makes by no means the highest type of man.
It is precisely the cultivation of the spirit that is the object of what is well called a liberal education, and the pursuits best calculated to cultivate the growth of the spirit are language, literature, the Arts, music, painting, sculpture or the study of these, philosophy, religion, history, the study and understanding of man through his works and of Nature and man through the interpretative as well as through the analytic faculties.
These are the pursuits which belong to the intellectual activities of the right hand, and while the importance of most of these will be acknowledged, there is a tendency to ignore Art and poetry as mere refinements, luxuries of the rich and leisurely rather than things that are necessary to the mass of men or useful to life.
This is largely due to the misuse of these great instruments by the luxurious few who held the world and its good things in their hands in the intermediate period of human progress.
But the aesthetic faculties entering into the enjoyment of the world and the satisfaction of the vital instincts, the love of the beautiful in men and women, in food, in things, in articles of use and articles of pleasure, have done more than anything else to raise man from the beast, to refine and purge his passions, to ennoble1 his emotions and to lead him up through the heart and the imagination to the state of the intellectual man.
That which has helped man upward, must be preserved in order that he may not sink below the level he has attained.
For man intellectually developed, mighty in scientific knowledge and the mastery of gross and subtle nature, using the elements as his servants and the world as his footstool, but undeveloped in heart and spirit, becomes only an inferior kind of Asura using the powers of a demigod to satisfy the nature of an animal.
According to dim traditions and memories of the old world, of such a nature was the civilisation2 of old Atlantis, submerged beneath the Ocean when its greatness and its wickedness became too heavy a load for the earth to bear, and our own legends of the Asuras represent a similar consciousness of a great but abortive development in humanity.
The first and lowest use of Art is the purely aesthetic, the second is the intellectual or educative, the third and highest the spiritual.
By speaking of the aesthetic use as the lowest, we do not wish to imply that it is not of immense value to humanity, but simply to assign to it its comparative value in relation to the higher uses.
The aesthetic is of immense importance and until it has done its work, mankind is not really fitted to make full use of Art on the higher planes of human development.
Aristotle assigns a high value to tragedy because of its purifying force.
He describes its effect as katharsis, a sacramental word of the Greek mysteries, which, in the secret discipline of the ancient Greek Tantrics, answered precisely to our cittaśuddhi, the purification of the citta or mass of established ideas, feelings and actional habits in a man either by saṃyama, rejection, or by bhoga, satisfaction, or by both.
Aristotle was speaking of the purification of feelings3, passions and emotions in the heart through imaginative treatment in poetry but the truth the idea 
contains is of much wider application and constitutes the justification of the aesthetic side of art.
It purifies by beauty.
The beautiful and the good are held by many thinkers to be the same and, though the idea may be wrongly stated, it is, when put from the right standpoint, not only a truth but the fundamental truth of existence.
According to our own philosophy the whole world came out of ānanda and returns into ānanda, and the triple term in which ānanda may be stated is Joy, Love, Beauty.
To see divine beauty in the whole world, man, life, nature, to love that which we have seen and to have pure unalloyed bliss in that love and that beauty is the appointed road by which mankind as a race must climb to God.
That is the reaching to vidyā through avidyā, to the One Pure and Divine through the manifold manifestation of Him, of which the Upanishad repeatedly speaks.
But the bliss must be pure and unalloyed, unalloyed by self-regarding emotions, unalloyed by pain and evil.
The sense of good and bad, beautiful and unbeautiful, which afflicts our understanding and our senses, must be replaced by akhaṇḍa rasa, undifferentiated and unabridged delight in the delightfulness of things, before the highest can be reached.
On the way to this goal full use must be made of the lower and abridged sense of beauty which seeks to replace the less beautiful by the more, the lower by the higher, the mean by the noble.
At a certain stage of human development the aesthetic sense is of infinite value in this direction.
It raises and purifies conduct by instilling a distaste for the coarse desires and passions of the savage, for the rough, uncouth and excessive in action and manner, and restraining both feeling and action by a striving after the decent, the beautiful, the fit and seemly which received its highest expression in the manners of cultivated European society, the elaborate ceremonious life of the Confucian, the careful ācāra and etiquette of Hinduism.
At the present stage of progress this element is losing much of its once all-important value and, when overstressed, tends to hamper a higher development by the obstruction of soulless ceremony and formalism.
Its great use was to discipline the savage animal instincts of the body, the vital instincts and the lower feelings in the heart.
Its disadvantage 
to progress is that it tends to trammel the play both of the higher feelings of the heart and the workings of originality in thought.
Born originally of a seeking after beauty, it degenerates into an attachment to form, to exterior uniformity, to precedent, to dead authority.
In the future development of humanity it must be given a much lower place than in the past.
Its limits must be recognised4 and the demands of a higher truth, sincerity and freedom of thought and feeling must be given priority.
Mankind is apt to bind itself by attachment to the means of its past progress forgetful5 of the aim.
The bondage to formulas has to be outgrown, and in this again it is the sense of a higher beauty and fitness which will be most powerful to correct the lower.
The art of life must be understood in more magnificent terms and must subordinate its more formal elements to the service of the master civilisers6, Love and Thought.