On the 'Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art'

My Reading of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

I first encountered Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy while researching Perrenialism and European esotericism, and its influence on certain modernists, for an academic book I finished writing in 2022 but have yet to publish. He was one of that disparate movement’s more scholarly and retiring figures, an Englishman, but – like myself - also of Sri Lankan heritage. Perrenialism has more well-known personages: René Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, Julius Evola, Mircea Eliade, and as testament to how its occluded intellectual genealogy reaches into the present, we can also include the contemporary figure of Alexander Dugin. Noted as one of the earliest champions of Indian Art in the West, he had some success in introducing Indian aesthetic sensbilities into English early modernist art through his freindship with figures such as Jacob Epstein, and latterly served as curator of the Indian Art section of the Boston Museum of Fine Art.

I was drawn to Coomaraswamy’s work because of the breadth of his interests, his extensive knowledge of Eastern languages, and also for more sentimental reasons. Looking at his photographs reminded me of the middle-aged photos my father, to whom he has a passing resemblance, and pictures of Coomaraswamy with his second wife, the American artist and dancer Stella Bloch, reminded me of my own wife. I also thoroughly enjoyed his writing on Buddhism, my mother’s religion, which I had very little exposure to during my Catholic (mostly secular) upbringing. However, living in Japan for three years invigorated a still developing interest in Buddhism, and expanded my reading into Buddhist theology and its attendant aesthetic philosophy. I discovered Japanese culture to be much more syncretic than I had anticipated, and complex in many ways. Nevertheless, the complementary influence of Shintoeism and Buddhism remain, to my mind, the most significant aspects of Japanese culture, even though these are often obscured by its over-saturated technological (now admittedly retro-futuristic) patina, and by Japan’s constant engagement with, and reinterpreting or re-purposing of, foreign cultural phenomena. Most importantly, both influences inculcate a fundamental aestheticism to the national consciousness that frequently becomes something of a cliché.

Though not specifically related to Japanese culture, I found some interesting points regarding the principal differences between the oriental and occidental philosophies of art in this slim volume, a collection of essays originally published under the title ‘Why Exhibit Works of Art’? The work is less concerned with specificities and, perhaps unsurprisingly, more concerned with the holistic, traditional, and perennial overview of ‘traditional’ aesthetic judgement.

Coomaraswamy begins by asserting that the very modern language we use to describe art and culture were not used within the Philosophia Perrenis:

We shall have to begin by discarding the term aesthetic altogether. For these arts were not produced for the delectation of the senses. The Greek original of this modern word means nothing but sensation or reaction to external stimuli; the sensibility implied by the word aesthesis is present in plants, animals, and man […] These sensations, which are the passions or emotions of the psychologist, are the driving forces of instinct. Plato asks us to stand up like men against the pulls of pleasure and pain. For these, as the word passion implies, are pleasant and unpleasant experiences to which we are subjected; they are not acts on our part, but things done to us; only the judgement and appreciation of art is an activity. Aesthetic experience is of the skin you love to touch, or the fruit you love to taste. “Disinterested aesthetic contemplation” is a contradiction in terms and a pure non-sense. Art is an intellectual, not a physical virtue; beauty has to do with knowledge and goodness, of which it is precisely the attractive aspect; and since it is by its beauty that we are attracted to a work, its beauty is evidently a means to an end, and not itself the end of art; the purpose of art is always effective communication.’

The above is interesting to me in light of my work on the theory of the ideological aesthetic, which in the contemporary moment is something that is quite apart from the traditional Kantian doxa of aesthetic judgement, and where I too suggested a return in the present – where everything has become an ‘aesthetic’ – to the practical realm of perception embodied within the term’s etymological origins in the Greek word aisthetikos, and its related term aesthesis.

The main distinction which Coomaraswamy makes between the Christian and the Oriental philosophies of art is between Christian universalism, and its noted absence in the stratified social orders and caste systems of Eastern societies and religions, which he holds to be more ‘true’, as they tend cohere with the Perennial philosophical worldview. Nevertheless, Coomaraswamy finds many points of continuity as well as similarity.

I’ve collected below some insights from this work that may prove interesting and insightful for some.

With regards to the role of the artist/artisan

The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man who is not an artist in some field, every man without a vocation, is an idler. The kind of artist that a man should be, carpenter, painter, lawyer, farmer, or priest, is determined by his nature and by his nativity. The only man who has a right to abstain from all constructive activities is the monk, who has also surrendered all those uses that depend on things than can be made and is no longer a member of society. No man has a right to a social status that is not an artist.

The utility of art and the notion of social good, the distinction and nobility given to certain arts and not others, and the seperation of ‘artistic’ and ‘moral’ sin, present in both the traditonal Christian and oriental artistic worldviews.

We are thus introduced at the outset to the problem of the use of art and the worth of the artist to a serious society. This use is in general the good of man, the good of society, and in particular the occasional good of an individual requirement. All of these goods correspond to the desires of men: so that what is actually made in a given society is a key to the governing conception of the purpose of life in that society, which can be judged by its works in that sense, and better than in any other way.

In our traditional view of art, in folk-art, Christian and Oriental art, there is no essential distinction of a fine and useless art from a utilitarian craftsmanship. There is no distinction in principle of orator from carpenter, but only a distinction of things well and truly made from things not so made and of what is beautiful from what is ugly in terms of formality and informality. But, you may object, do not some things serve the uses of the sprit or the intellect, and others those of the body; is not a symphony nobler than a bomb, an icon than a fireplace? Let us first of all beware of confusing art with ethics. “Noble” is an ethical value, and pertains to the a priori censorship of what ought or ought not to be made at all. The judgement of works of art from this point of view is not merely legitimate, but essential to a good life and the welfare of humanity. But it is not a judgment of the work of art as such. The bomb, for example, is only bad as a work of art if it fails to destroy and kill to the required extent. The distinction of artistic from moral sin which is so sharply drawn in Christian philosophy can be recognized again in Confucius, who speaks of a Succession Dance as being “at the same time perfect beauty and perfect goodness”, and of the War Dance as being “perfect beauty but not perfect goodness”

This particular line of thinking continues with what is perhaps the crux of the argument, concerning the autonomy of moral and aesthetic judgements:

It will be obvious that there can be no moral judgement of art itself, since it is not an act but a kind of knowledge or power by which things can be well made, whether for good or evil use: the art by which utilities are produced cannot be judged morally, because it is not a kind of willing, but a kind of knowing.

This point is, in some respects, consistent with many other writers and thinkers of the Perrenial school, for whom the true nature of human existence is found in man’s two natures, often communicated through a series of dyads; traditional and modern, physical and metaphysical, mortal and immortal. The former categories are often represented by an inferior realm of becoming; the latter by a superior one of ‘being.’ This was the primary thematic undercurrent of two noted works within the Traditonalist movement, René Guenon’s The Crisis of the Modern World and Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World. Both works proposed that the absence of traditional knowledge – still to be found within the Eastern esoteric religions and societies – could explain the widespread anomie of the Western world from the fin de siècle onwards.

Interesting also are Coomerswamy’s comments on the very modern concept of artistic genius, and the cult of personality surrounding the indviudual artist:

Where we see “Genius as a peculiarly developed “personality” to be exploited, traditional philosophy sees the immanent Spirit, beside which the individual personality is relatively nil: “Thou madest” as Augustine says, “that ingenium whereby the artificer may take his art, and may see within what he had to do without.” It is the light of this Spirit that becomes “the light of a mechanical art.” What Augustine calls ingenium  corresponds to Philo’s Hegemon, the Sanskrit “Inner Controller”, and to what is called in medieval theology the Synteresis, the immanent speculative conscience, both as we use the word and in its older sense of “consciousness.” Augustin’s ingenium corresponds to Greek daimon, but not to what we mean to-day by “genius.” No man, considered as So-and-so, can be a genius: but all men have a genius, to be served or disobeyed at their own peril. There can be no property in ideas, because these are gifts of the Spirit, and not to be confused with talents: ideas are never made, but can only be “invented”, that is “found” and entertained.

The point of intrisinsic genius present in every man strikes an unexpectedly democratic note, though we should bear in mind that this is perhaps meant within the strictures of a stratified caste system, wherein there exists a ‘genius’ for every vocation.

On the very modern notion of authorship in art:

The anonymity of the artist belongs to a type of culture dominated by the longing to be liberated from oneself. All the force of this philosophy is directed against the delusion “I am the doer.” “I” am not in fact the doer, but the instrument; human individuality is not an end but only a means. The supreme achievement of individual consciousness is to lose or find (both words mean the same) itself in what is both its first beginning and its last end […] All that is required of the instrument is efficiency and obedience; it is not for the subject to aspire to the throne; the constitution of man is not a democracy, but the hierarchy of body, soul and spirit. It hardly occurred to the individual artist to sign his works […] It is under such conditions that a really living art, unlike what Plato calls the arts of the flattery, flourishes; and where the artist exploits his own personality and becomes an exhibitionist that art declines.

The course of art reflects the course of thought. The artist, asserting a specious liberty, expresses himself; our age commends the man who thinks for himself, and therefore of himself. We can see in the hero only an imperfectly remembered historical figure, around which there have gathered mythical and miraculous accretions; the hero’s manhood interests us more than his divinity; and this applies as much to our conception of Christ or Kirshna or Buddha as it does to our conceptions of Cuchallain or Sigurd or Gilgamesh. We treat the mythical elements of the story, which are its essence, as its accidents, and substitute anecdote for meaning. The secularisation of art and the rationalisation  of religion are inseparably connected, however unaware of it we may be […] the artistic humanisation of the Son or of the Mother of God is as much a denial  of Christian truth as any form of verbal rationalism or other heretical position.

Finally there is, again unsuprisingly, a final comment on decay and decadence - a ‘perrenial’ concern for the Perrenialists. They were, after all, completely opposed to the very notion of progress - seeing instead within the march of history only comparable cyclical movements; the ebb and flow of decline and re-birth. Yet we can also sense within Coomaraswamy’s analysis how the ‘traditional’ philsophy of art differs in character from our modern - and relatively short-lived - conception of Art, particularly as it relates to the equivalency of the ideological and the aesthetic, which is perhaps the result of a mutation from the philosophical to the sentimental, from an anonymous collective consciousness to the narcisstic projection of subjective ego:

In speaking of the decadence of art, it is really the decadence of man from intellectual to sentimental interests that we mean. For the artist’s skill may remain the same throughout: he is able to do what he intends. It is the mental image to which he works that changes [..] we judge the traditional works, not by their actual accomplishment, but by our own intentions, and so inevitably come to believe in a progress of art, as we do in the progress of man.

Coomaraswamy with his third wife Stella Bloch