23 août 2018

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought? The Traditional View of Art (note de lectura)


2007, World Wisdom, Inc.

Chapter I. “A Figure of Speech, or a Figure of Thought?”
We have invented an “aesthetic” and think of art as a kind of feeling. The original of the word “aesthetic” means perception, and is irrational.
When we speak of a work of art as “significant”, it can be significant only of some thesis that was to be expressed.
My thesis will be that if we propose to use or understand any works of art, we ought to abandon the term “aesthetic” in its present application and return to “rhetoric”.
Art is a language, not a spectacle.
All the sources are conscious of the fundamental identity of all the arts.
What are the arts for? Always and only to supply a real or imagined need or deficiency on the part of the human patron.
Katharsis is a sacrificial purgation and purification “consisting in a separation, as far as that is possible, of the soul from the body”.
The Platonic katharsis implies an ecstasy.

The emotions are waste products.
All the arts are imitative. The work of art can only be judged as such by the degree to which the model has been correctly represented.
The forms of the simplest and severest kinds of art, the synoptic kind of art that we call “primitive”, are the natural language of all traditional philosophy; and it is for this very reason that Plato’s dialectic makes continual use of figures of speech, which are really figures of thought.
But such an imitation of the divine principles is only possible if we have known them “as they are”, for if we have hot ourselves seen them, our mimetic iconography, based upon opinion, will be at fault.
It is not by our reactions, pleasurable or otherwise, but by its perfect accuracy, beauty, or perfection, or truth that a work of art can be judged as such.
The distinction of beauty from utility is logical, not real.
It is neither advantageous, nor altogether possible, to separate spiritual from physical values, making some things sacred and other profane: the highest wisdom must be mixed with practical knowledge, the contemplative life combined with the active.
Manufacture for the needs of the body alone is the curse of modern civilization.
An act of imagination, in which the idea to be represented is first clothed in the imitable form or image of the thing to be made, must precede the operation in which this form impressed upon the actual material.
Inspiration implies the presence of a guiding “spirit” distinguished from but nevertheless “within” the agent who is in-spired.
We can properly say that not only “Love” but “Art” and “Law” are names of the Spirit.
The original intention of intelligible forms was not to entertain us, but literally to “re-mind” us.
The true philosophy of art is always and everywhere the same.
Voice – the whole end of the expressive faculty. The Voice is at once the daughter, bride, messenger, and instrument of the Intellect.
The production of the marriage of the player, Intellect, with the instrument, the Voice, is Truth.
The raison d’être of the Voice is to incarnate in a communicable form the concept of Truth.

Chapter II. The Mediaeval Theory of Beauty
The mediaeval artist is the channel through which the unanimous consciousness of an organic and international community found expression.

I. The Translations
The Scholastic doctrine of Beauty is fundamentally based on the brief treatment by Dionysius the Areopagite in the chapter of the De divinis nominibus entitled “De pulchro et bono”.
Every rational agent, and the artists in particular, is always working for determinate and singular, and not for indefinite and vague ends.
“And the super-beautiful is the principle of all things as being their efficient cause, and moving all of them, and maintaining all by love of its own Beauty. It is likewise the end of all, as being their final cause, since all things are made for the sake of the beautiful are the same; for all things desire the beautiful for every reason, nor is there anything existing that does not participate in the Beautiful and the Good.” (p. 35-36)

2. Ulrich Engelberti, De pulchro
Just as the form of anything whatever is its “goodness”, so also the beauty of everything is the same as its formal excellence.
The primary goodness of a natural thing is derived from its form, which gives it its species.
In general, the form, species, beauty, and perfection or goodness or truth of a thing are coincident and indivisible in it, although not in themselves synonymous in the sense of interchangeable terms.
Form – lat. forma – gr. eidos
In the first place, form as coincident with idea, image, species, similitude, reason, etc. is the purely intellectual and immaterial cause of the thing being what it is, as well as the means by which it is known. This exemplary form is called substantial or essential, because it is like a substance.
In the second place, over against the essential form or art in the artist as above defined, and constituting the exemplary or formal cause of the becoming of the work of art, is the accidental or actual form of the work itself, which as materially formed is determined not only by the idea or art as formal cause, but also by the efficient and material cause; and inasmuch as these introduce factors that are not essential to the idea nor inevitably annexed to it, the actual form or shape of the work of art is called its accidental form.
The ugly is “deformed” because of its privation of due form.
Scholastic philosophy in general, and when no qualifying adjectives are employed, employs the word “form” in the causal and exemplary sense. Modern speech more often in the other sense as equivalent to physical shape.
Dionysius defines beauty as harmony and illumination.
Form as perfection is the “goodness” of the thing, while form as possessing in itself the formal and intellectual light is “beauty”.
To be attached to the forms as they are in themselves is precisely what is meant by “idolatry”.
Beauty requires proportion of material to form.
Beauty adds to elegance an agreement of the mass with the character of the form, which form does not have the perfection of its virtue unless in a due amount of material.
Since nothing is altogether without a good nature, evil is rather an imperfect good. What in beauty is imperfectly beautiful is called “ugly”.
The worthy is an intelligible beauty.
Light assembles and unites all things that it illuminates.
Ignoratia divisiva est errantium.
All the contempt of the world which has been attributed to Christianity and to the Vedanta is directed not against the world as seen in its perfection, sub specie aeternitatis, and in the mirror of the speculative intellect, but against an empirical vision of the world as made up of independently self-subsistent parts to which we attribute an intrinsic goodness or badness based on our own liking or disliking.

3. St. Thomas Aquinas “On the Divine Beautiful, and how it is attributed to God”
In God, the beautiful and beauty are not divided as if in Him the beautiful was one thing, and beauty another. God in Himself embraces both, in unity, and identity.
In existing things, the beautiful is what participates in beauty, and beauty is the participation of the First Cause, which makes all things beautiful.
harmony – consonantia

Chapter III. Ornament
We say “this is an ornament”, therefore dead, because its living meaning had been lost. A divorce of utility and meaning.
In traditional philosophy, the work of art is a reminder.
“Ornament” is integral factor of the beauty of the work of art, certainly not in-significant part of it.
A related example of a degeneration of meaning can be cited in our words “artifice”, meaning “trick”, but originally artificium – “thing made by art”, “work of art”, and our “artificial”, meaning “false”, but originally artificialis – “of or for work”.
alamkara (sanskrit) – ornament
alamkara-sastra – science of poetic ornament (the art of effective communication)
kavya – poetry
Sanskrit l and r are often interchangeable.
“polar balance of physical and metaphysical”
Superstition is a symbol which has continued in use after its original meaning has been forgotten.
The Greek word cosmos is primarily “order”, and secondarily “ornament”.
It is universally true that terms which now imply an ornamentation of persons and things for aesthetic reasons alone originally implied their proper equipment in the sense of completion.

Chapter IV. Ars sine scientia nihil
These words of the Parisian Master Jean Mignot, enunciated in connection with the building of the Cathedral of Milan in 1398, were the answer to an opinion then beginning to take shape: “science is one and art another”.

Chapter V. The Meeting of the Eyes
In some portraits the eyes of the subject seem to be looking straight at the spectator, wether he faces the picture or moves to right or left of it.
If the eyes of an all-seeing God are to be iconostasized truly and correctly, they must appear to be all-seeing.
The purpose of the icon is to be support of a contemplation.
Guido d’Arezzo: “It is not art alone, but the doctrine that makes the true artist.”

Chapter VI. Shaker Furniture
The way of life and way of work are one and the same way.
Bhagavad Gita: “Man attains perfection by the intensity of his devotion to his own proper task”.
Just as we desire peace but not things that make for peace, so we desire art but not things that make for art.

Chapter VII. Literary Symbolism
Words are never meaningless by nature, though they can be used irrationally for merely aesthetic and nonartistic purposes.
For while words are signs of things, they can also be heard or read as symbols of what these things themselves imply.
In representing abstract ideas, the symbol is “imitating”, in the sense that all art is “mimetic”, something invisible.
Adequate symbolism may be defined as the representation of a reality on a certain level of reference by a corresponding reality on another.
There is no religion without symbols and symbolism.
The traditional symbols are not “conventional” but “given”.
A traditional episode was told, not primarily to amuse but originally to instruct. The telling of stories only to amuse belongs to later ages in which the life of pleasure is preferred to that of activity or contemplation.
Nothing can be more dangerous than a subjective interpretation of the traditional symbols, whether verbal or visual.

Chapter VIII. Intention
“Intention” covers “the whole meaning of the work”.
artha (sanskrit) – “meaning” and “use”
The most general case possible of the judgement of a work of art in terms of the ration of intention to result arises in connection with the judgment of the world itself. When God is said to have considered his finished work and found it “good”, the judgment was surely made in these terms: what he had willed, that he had done.
If the critic goes about to “evaluate” a work that actually fulfills its author’s intention and promise, in terms of what he thinks it “should have been”, it is not the work but the intention that he is criticizing.
The critic’s indirection is a consequence of the imperfection of the disciplines in which it is assumed that art is an affair of feelings and personalities, where the traditional criticism had assumed that “art is an intellectual virtue” and that what we now regard as figure of speech are really figures of thought.

Chapter IX. Imitation, Expression and Participation
The older view had been that the work of art is the demonstration of the invisible form that remains in the artist, whether human or divine, that beauty has to do with cognition, and that art is an intellectual virtue.
imitation – mimesis, anukrti, pratima
Imitation does not mean “counterfeiting”.
Traditionally, all the arts without exception are “imitative”. This “all” includes such arts as those of government and hunting no less those of painting and sculpture. True “imitation” is not a matter of illusory resemblance but of proportion, true analogy, or adequacy. It is a matter of “adequate symbolism”.
Likeness may be of three kinds:
1) absolute, amounting to sameness;
2) imitative, analogical sameness;
3) expressive likeness, the imitation is neither identical with, nor comparable to the original but is an adequate symbol (ex: the words are “images” of things).
Etymollogically, “heresy” is what we “choose” to think.
Symbols are projections of their referents, which are in them in the same sense that our three dimensional face is reflected in the plane mirror.
Nothing can be known, except in the mode of the knower.
Our term “aesthetics” and conviction that art is essentially an affair of the sensibilities and emotions rank us with the ignorant.

Chapter X. The Intellectual Operation in Indian Art
The Sukranitisara defines the initial procedure of the Indian imager: he is to be expert in contemplative vision (yoga-dhyana), for which the canonical prescriptions provide the basis, and only in this way, and not by direct observation, are the required results to be attained.
The emphasis that is laid upon the strict self-identification of the artist with the imagined form should be especially noted.
Understanding depends upon an assimilation of knower and known; this is indeed the divine manner of understanding, in which the knower is the known.
The artist must really have been whatever he is to represent.
Our modern attitude to art is actually fetishistic; we prefer the symbol to the reality; for us the picture is in the colors, the colors are the picture. To say that the work of art is its own meaning is the same as to say that it has no meaning.

Chapter XI. The Nature of Buddhist Art
In order to understand the nature of the Buddha image and its meaning for a Buddhist we must, to begin with, reconstruct its environment, trace its ancestry, and remodel our own personality.
The image is of one Awakened and for our awakening, who are still asleep.
Buddha is the form of humanity that has nothing to do with time.
An abstract art is adapted to contemplative uses and implies a gnosis; an anthropomorphic art evokes a religious emotion, and corresponds rather to prayer than to contemplation.
The spectator is not so much to be “pleased” as to be “transported”.
It is only one who has attained to an immediate Gnosis that can afford to dispense with theology, ritual and imagery.
The Buddha image really inherits the values of the Vedic altar.
By fetishism we understand an attribution to the physically tangible symbol of values that really belong to its referent or, in other words, a confusion of actual with essential form.
The chief iconodule contention: that pictures were an effective means of communication with the extra-terrestrial universe.
In the traditional view of art, there is no beauty that can be divided  from intelligibility.
The practice of an art is not traditionally, as it is for us, a secular activity, but a metaphysical rite.
No distinction can be drawn between art and contemplation.
Brahmanism is a revealed religion, a doctrine of supernatural origin.
Symbolism is of an immemorial antiquity, an antiquity as great as that of “folklore” itself. Many of the Vedic symbols imply a hunting culture antecedent to the beginning of the agriculture.
Symbolism is a language and a precise form of thought; a hieratic and a metaphysical language and not a language determined by somatic or psychological categories. Its foundation is in the analogical correspondence of all orders of reality and states of being or levels of reference.
What we have most to avoid is a subjective interpretation, and most to desire is a subjective realization.
The whole purpose of the ritual is to effect a translation, not only of the object, but of the man himself to another and no longer peripheral but central level of reference.
From the traditional point of view, the world itself, together with all things done or made in a manner conformable to the cosmic pattern, is a theophany.

Chapter XII. Samvega: Aesthetic Shock
The Pali word samvega is used to denote the shock or wonder that may be felt when the perception of a work of art becomes a serious experience.

Chapter XIII. An Early Passage On Indian Painting
In India, the human artist’s operation is assimilated to that of the divine Nature.

Chapter XIV. Some References To Pictorial Relief
A conspicuous aspect of this illusionistic effect is apparent in the fact that while the painted surface itself is flat, yet by the painter’s art we see it in three dimensions.

Chapter XV. Primitive Mentality
The opposition of religion to folklore is often a kind of rivalry set up as between a new dispensation and an older tradition, the gods of the older cult becoming the evil spirits of the newer.
The opposition of science to the content of both folklore and religion is based upon the view that “such knowledge as is not empirical is meaningless”.
The folklore is a cultural complex independent of national and even racial boundaries, and of remarkable similarity throughout the world; in other worlds, a culture of extraordinary vitality.
Compared to religion, folklore is more intellectual and less moralistic.
The destruction of superstitious invariably involves the premature death of the folk, or in any case the impoverishment of their lives.
The distinctive characteristic of a traditional society is order.
It is often supposed that in a traditional society, or under tribal or clan conditions, which are those in which a culture or the folk flourished most, the individual is arbitrarily compelled to conform to the patterns of life that he actually follows. Actually, it is only in democracies, soviets, and dictatorships that a way of life is imposed upon the individuals from without.
In the various kinds of proletarian government, we meet always with the intention to achieve a rigid and inflexible uniformity.
So long as the material of folklore is transmitted, so long is the ground available on which the superstructure of full initiatory understanding can be built.
Infinitely varied as it may be in detail, the folk literature has to do with the live of heroes, all of whom meet with essentially the same adventures and exhibit the same qualities.
The “primitive mentality” is characterized in the first place by a “collective ideation”. Ideas are held in common.
The next and most famous characteristic has been called “participation” – a thing is not only what it is visible, but also what it represents.
To have lost the art of thinking in images is precisely to have lost the proper linguistic of metaphysics.
We do not call folk art “abstract” because the forms are not arrived at by a process of omission; nor do we call it “conventional”, since its form have not been arrived at by experiment and agreement; nor do we call it “decorative” in the modern sense of the word, since it is not meaningless; it is properly speaking a principial art, and supernatural rather than naturalistic. The nature of folk art is, then, itself the sufficient demonstration of its intellectuality: it is, indeed, a “divine inheritance”.
The folklore ideas are the form in which metaphysical doctrines are received by the people and transmitted by them.

Chapter XVI. Notes On “Savage” Art
In nearly all ‘savage’ art the artist is essentially and foremost a craftsman.

Chapter XVII. Symptom, Diagnosis, and Regimen
Outstanding characteristics of our world in a state of chaos are disorder, uncertainty, sentimentality, and dispair. It is a world of “impoverished reality”, one in which we go on living as if life were an end in itself and had no meaning.
Symptomatic abnormalities in our collegiate point of view include the assumption that art is essentially an aesthetic, that is, sensational and emotional, behavior, a passion suffered rather than an act performed; our dominating interest in style, and indifference to the truth and meaning of works of art; the importance we attach to the artist’s personality; the notion that the artist is a special kind of man, rather than that every man is a special kind of artist; the distinction we make between fine art and applied art; and the idea that the nature to which art must be true is not Creative Nature, but our own immediate environment, and more especially, ourselves.
Primarily, the diagnosis must be that of ignorance, we do not mean an ignorance of the facts, with which our minds are cluttered, but an ignorance of the principles to which all operations can be reduced, and must be reduced if they are to be understood.
In the train of this fundamental ignorance follow egotism, greed, irresponsibility, and the notion that work is an evil and culture a fruit of idleness.
Our malady is one of schizophrenia. We are apt to ask about a work of art “What is it for?” and “What does it mean?” That is to divide shape from form, symbol from reference, and agriculture from culture.

Chapter XVIII. The Life of Symbols (by Walter Andrae – translated by Ananda Coomaraswamy)
A symbol can remain alive for millennia, and also spring into life again after an interruption of thousands of year.

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