Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

Human Progress

CREATION has evolved. That is to say, there has been a growth and unfoldment and progress. From nebulae to humanity the march cannot but be called an advance, a progress, in more senses than one. But the question is about man. Has man advanced, progressed since his advent upon earth? If so, in what manner, to what extent? Man has been upon earth for the last two million years, they say. From what has happened before him in the course of Nature's evolution, it is legitimate to infer that man too, in his turn, has moved forward in the line towards growth and development. In fact, if we admit that man started life as a savage or jungle-man or ape-man, and look at him as he is today, we have perforce to acknow­ledge that he has not merely changed but progressed too. The question to be answered is in what sense this progress has been made.

Modern knowledge has taught us that what marks the growth of man is his use of tools. An animal has nothing else than its own limbs as its all-serving tool. Man emerged as man the day he knew how to use tools as an extension of his limbs. And the cycles of human growth have, in consequence, been marked off by the type of tools used. As we all know, anthropologists tell us, there have been four such cycles or ages: (1) the Old Stone Age, (2) the New Stone Age, (3) the Bronze Age and (4) the Iron Age.

In the first age, which is by far the longest period, a period of slow and difficult preparation, man had his first lessons in a conscious and victorious dealing with Nature. The day when he first started chipping a stone was a red-letter day for him; for, by that very gesture be began shredding his purely animal vesture. And when he not only chipped but succeeded in

grinding and polishing a piece of stone, he moved up one step further and acquired definitely his humanity. Again, ages afterwards when his hand could wield and manipulate as it liked not only a stone but a metal, his skill and dexterity showed a development unique in its kind, establishing and fixing man's manhood as a new emergent factor. In this phase also there was a first period of training and experiment, the period of craftsmanship in bronze; with the age of iron, man's arms and fingers attained a special deftness and a conscious control directed from a cranium centre which has become by now a model of rich growth and complex structure and marvel­lous organisation. The impetus towards more and more effi­ciency in the making and handling of tools has not ceased: the craftsmanship in iron soon led to the discovery of steel and steel industry. The temper and structure of steel are symbolic and symptomatic of the temper and structure of the brain that commands the weapon-strong, supple, resistant, resilient, capable of fineness and sharpness and trenchancy to an ex­traordinary degree.

This growing fineness and efficiency of the tool has served naturally to develop and enrich man's external possession and dominion. But this increasing power and dominion over Nature is not the most important consequence involved; it is only indicative of still greater values, something momentous, something subjective, pregnant with far-reaching possibilities. For the physical change is nothing compared with the psychological change, the change in the consciousness. In taking up his tool to chip a stone man has started hewing out and mould­ing entire Nature: he has become endowed with the sense of independence and agency. An animal is a part and parcel of Nature, has no life and movement apart from the life and movement of Nature – even like Wordsworth's child of Nature­ –

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees.¹

An animal does not separate itself from Nature, exteriorise it and then seek to fashion it as he wants, try to make it yield things he requires. Man is precisely man because he has just

¹ "A slumber did my spirit seal", Miscellaneous Poems

this sense of self and of not-self and his whole life is the conquest of the not-self by the self: this is the whole story of his evolution. In the early stages his sense of agency and selfhood is at its minimum. The rough-hewn flint instruments are symbolic of the first attempts of the brain to set its impress upon crude and brute nature. The history of man's artisan­ship, which is the history of his civilisation, is also the history of his growing self-consciousness. The consciousness in its attempt to react upon nature separated itself from Nature, and at first stood over against it and then sought to stand over and above it. In this process of extricating itself from the sheath in which it was involved and fused, it came back upon itself, became more and more aware of its freedom and indi­vidual identity and agency.

The question is now asked how far this self-consciousness – given to man by his progress from stone to steel – has advanced and what is its future. The crucial problem is whether man has progressed in historical times. Granted that man with an iron tool is a more advanced type of humanity than man with a chipped stone tool, it may still be enquired whether he has made any real advance since the day he learnt to manipulate metal. If by advance or progress we mean efficiency and multi­plication of tools, then surely there can be no doubt that Germany of today (perhaps now we have to say Germany of yesterday and America of today) is the most advanced type of humanity-indeed they do make the claim in that country.

that is to say, the outer paraphernalia; but as regards culture a Plato, a Lao-tse, a Yajnavalkya are names to which we still bow down.

One can answer, however, that even if in the last eight or ten thousand years which, they say, is the extent of the present cycle, the civilised or cultural life of humanity has not changed much, this does not mean that it cannot, will not change. The paleolithic age, it appears, covered a period of thirty to forty thousand years; the neolithic age also must have lasted some fifteen thousand years. The metal age is now not more than ten thousand years. So it does not seem to be too late; perhaps it is just time for another radical and crucial change to come as the chronological scheme would seem to demand.

We propose, however, to reopen the question and enquire if there has not been some kind of radical change or progress in the make-up of human nature and civilisation even within the span of historical times. This reminds us of the remarkable conclusion or discovery made by the much maligned and much adulated Psycho-analysts.

Jung speaks of two kinds or grades of thinking: (1) the directed thinking and (2) the wishful thinking; one conscious and objective, the other automatic and subjective. The first is the modern or scientific thinking, the second the old-world mythopoeic thinking. These two lines of mental movement mark off two definite stages in the cultural history of man. Down to the Middle Ages man's mental life was moved and coloured by his libido – desire soul; it is with the Renascence that he began to free his mind from, the libido and transfer and transform the libido into non-egoistic and realistic think­ing. In simpler psychological terms we can say that man's mentality was coloured and modulated by his biological make-up out of which it had emerged; the age of modernism and scientism began with the development of a rigorous rationalism which means a severance and transcendence of the biological antecedent.

In other words, it can be said that the older humanity was intuitive and instinctive, while modern humanity is rational­istic. Now it has been questioned whether this change or re­orientation is a sign of progress, whether it has not been at the most a mixed blessing. Many idealists and reformers frankly

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view the metamorphosis with anxiety. Gerald Heard vehe­mently declares that the rationalism of the modern age is a narrowing down of the consciousness to a superficial move­ment, a foreshortening, and a top-heavy specialisation which means stagnation, decay and death. He would rather release the tension in the strangulation of consciousness, even if it means a slight coming down to the anterior level of instinct and intuition, but of more plasticity and less specialisation: it is, he says, only in conditions of suppleness and variability, of life organised yet sufficiently free that the forces of evolution can act fruitfully. It has also been pointed out that homo sapiens is not a direct descendant of homo neanderthalis who was already a far too specialised being, but of a stock anterior to it which was still uncertain, wavering, groping towards a definite emergence.

Now, these two positions – of Jung and of Heard – offer us a good basis upon which we can try to estimate the nature of man's progress in historical times. Both refer to a crucial change in human consciousness, a far-reaching change having no parallel since it invented the metal tool. The change means the appearance of pure intelligence in man, a change, as we may say, in modern terms, in the system of reference, from biological co-ordinates to those of pure reason. Only Jung thinks that the reorganisation of the human consciousness is to happen precisely round the focus of pure reason, while Gerald Heard is doubtful about the efficacy of this faculty – ­of "directive thinking", as Jung puts it-if it is to lead to overspecialisation, which means the swelling of one member and atrophy of the rest; a greater and supreme direction he seeks elsewhere in a transcendence of intelligence and reason which, besides, is bound to happen in the course of evolution.

We characterise the change as a special degree or order of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness, we have seen, is the sine qua non of humanity. It is the faculty or power by and with which man appears on earth and maintains himself as such, as a distinct species. Thanks to this faculty man has become the tool-making animal, the artisan – homo faber. But on emer­ging from the original mythopoeic to the scientific status man has become doubly self-conscious. Self-consciousness means to be aware of oneself as standing separate from and against the

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environment and the world and acting upon it as a free agent, exercising one's deliberate will. Now the first degree of self-consciousness displayed itself in a creative activity by which consciousness remained no longer a suffering organon, but became a growing and directing, a reacting and new-creating agent. Man gained the power to shape the order of Nature according to the order of his inner will and consciousness. This creative activity, the activity of the artisan, developed along two lines: first, artisanship with regard to one's own self, one's inner nature and character, and secondly, with regard to the external nature, the not-self. The former gave rise to mysticism and Yoga and was especially cultivated in India, while the second has led us to Science, man's physical mastery, which is the especial field of European culture.

Now the second degree of self-consciousness to which we referred is the scientific consciousness par excellence. It can be described also as the spirit and power of experimentation, or more precisely, of scientific experimentation: it involves generically the process with which we are familiar in the domain of industry and is termed "synthetic", that is to say, it means the skill and capacity to create the conditions under which a given phenomenon can be repeated at will. Hence it means a perfect knowledge of the process of things – which again is a dual knowledge: (1) the knowledge of the steps gradually leading to the result and (2) the knowledge that has the power to resolve the result into its antecedent conditions. Thus the knowledge of the mechanism, the detailed working of things, is scientific knowledge, and therefore scientific knowledge can be truly said to be mechanistic knowledge, in the best sense of the term. Now the knowledge of the ends and the knowledge of the means (to use a phrase of Aldous Huxley) and the conscious control over either have given humanity a new degree of self-consciousness.

It can be mentioned here that there can be a knowledge of ends without a corresponding knowledge of means, even there can be a control over ends without a preliminary control over means-perhaps not to perfection, but to a sufficient degree of practical utility. Much of the knowledge – especially secular and scientific – in ancient times was of this order; what we mean to say is that the knowledge was more instinctive

or intuitive than rational or intellectual. In that know­ledge the result only, the end that it to say, was the chief aim and concern, the means for attaining the end was, one cannot perhaps say, ignored, but slurred or slipped over as it were: the process was thus involved or understood, not expressed or detailed out. Thus we know of some mathematical problems to which correct solutions were given of which the process is not extant or lost as some say. Our suggestion is that there was in fact very little of the process as we know it now – the solution was reached per saltum, that is to say, somehow, in the same manner as we find it happening even today in child prodigies.

One can point out however that even before the modern scientific age, there was an epoch of pure intellectual activity, as represented, for example, by scholasticism. The formal intellectualism which was the gift of the Greek sophists or the Mimansakas and grammarians in ancient India has to be re­cognised as a pure mental movement, freed from all life value or biological bias. What then is the difference? What is the new characteristic element brought in by the modern scientific intellectualism?

The old intellectualism generally and on the whole, was truly formal and even to a great extent verbal. In other words, it sought to find norms and categories in the mind itself and impose them upon, objects, objects of experience, external or internal. The first discovery of the pure mind, the joy of indulging in its own free formations led to an abstraction that brought about a cleavage between mind and nature, and when a harmony was again attempted between the two, it meant an imposition of one (the Mind) upon another (Matter), a subsumption of the latter under the former. Such scholastic formalism, although it has the appearance of a movement of pure intellect, free from the influence of instinctive or emotive reactions, cannot but be, at bottom, a mythopoeic operation, in the Jungian phraseology; it is not truly objective in the scientific sense. The scientific procedure is to find Nature's own categories – the constants, as they are called – and link up mind and intellect with that reality. This is the Copernican revolution that Science brought about in the modern outlook. Philosophers like Kant or Berkeley may say

another thing and even science itself just nowadays may appear hesitant in its bearings. But that is another story which it is not our purpose to consider here and which does not change the fundamental position. We say then that the objec­tivity of the scientific outlook, as distinguished from the abstract formalism of old-world intellectualism, has given a new degree of mental growth and is the basis of the "mechan­istic" methodology of which we have been speaking. '

Indeed, what we .lay stress upon is the methodology of modern scientific knowledge – the apparatus of criticism and experimentation.

We have said that this "methodologism" – the knowledge of means and the consequent control over means – the hall-mark of modern scientific knowledge – is a new degree of self-consciousness which is the special characteristic of the human consciousness. Put philosophically, we can say that the discovery of the subject and its growing affirmation as an independent factor in a subject-object relation marks the evolutionary course of the human consciousness.

A still further unveiling seems to be in progress now. The subject has discovered itself as separate from the observed object and still embracing it: but a given subject-object re­lationship in its turn again is being viewed as itself an object to another subject consciousness, a super-subject. That way lie the ever widening horizons of consciousness opened up by Yoga and spiritual discipline.

In other words, the self-consciousness which marks off man as the highest of living beings as yet evolved by Nature is still not her highest possible instrumentation. As has been ex­perienced and foreseen by Yogins in all ages and climes and as it is being borne in upon the modern mind more and more imperatively, this self-consciousness has to be consciously transcended, lifted, transmuted – worked out into the superconsciousness. Such is Nature's evolutionary nisus and such is the truth and fact man is being driven to face in his inner individual consciousness as well as outer collective life.

We can thus note, broadly speaking, three stages in the human cycle of Nature's evolution. The first was the period of emergence of self-consciousness and the trials and experiments it went through to establish and confirm itself. The ancient

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civilisations represented this character of the human spirit. The subject freeing itself more and more from its environ­mental tegument, still living and moving within it and dyna­mically reacting upon it – this was the character we speak of. Next came the period when the free and dynamic subject feeling itself no more tied down to its natural objective sphere sought lines of development and adventure on its own account. This was the age of speculation and of scholasticism in philo­sophy and intellectual inquiry and of alchemy in natural science – a period roughly equated with the Middle Ages. The Scientific Age coming last seeks to re-establish a junction and co-ordination between the free and dynamic self-consciousness and the mode and pattern of its objective field, involving a greater enrichment on one side – the subjective consciousness – and on the other, the objective environment, a correspond­ing change and effective reorganisation.

The present age which ushers a fourth stage – significantly called turiya or the transcendent, in Indian terminology – is pregnant with a fateful crisis. The stage of self-consciousness to which scientific development has arrived seems to land in a cul-de-sac, a blind alley: Science also is faced, almost help­lessly, with the antinomies of reason that Kant discovered long ago in the domain of speculative philosophy. The way out, for a further growth and development and evolution, lies in a supersession of the self-consciousness, an elevation into a superconsciousness – as already envisaged by Yogis and Mystics everywhere – which will give a new potential and harmony to the human consciousness.

This super consciousness is based upon a double movement of sublimation and integration which are precisely the two things basically aimed at by present-day psychology to meet the demands of new facts of consciousness. The rationalisation, specialisation or foreshortening of consciousness, mentioned above, is really an attempt at sublimation of the consciousness, its purification and ascension from baser – animal and vegetal – confines: only, ascension does not mean alienation, it must mean a gathering up of the lower elements also into their higher modes. Integration thus involves a descent, but it has to be pointed out, not merely or exclusively that, as Jung and his school seem to say. Certainly one has to see and recognise

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the aboriginal, the infra-rational elements imbedded in our nature and consciousness, the roots and foundations that lie buried under the super-structure that Evolution has erected. But that recognition must be accompanied by an upward look and sense: indeed it is healthy and fruitful only on condi­tion that it occurs in a consciousness open to an infiltration of light coming from summits not only of the mind but above the mind. If we go back, it must be with a light that is ahead of us; that is the sense of evolution.

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