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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