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| Sunday, 22 August 2004 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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127th birth anniversary of Ananda Coomaraswamy : Some thoughts and comments on his work by Gai Eaton New Coomaraswamy volume
A magnificent set of three volumes - one of them a biography - was published many years ago to mark his Centenary by the Bollingen Press of Princeton University. The present volume, edited by his son, Dr. Rama Coomaraswamy, is called The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and contains selected extracts from his most important writings. If Ananda Coomaraswamy had been a less modest man, he might well have reversed Pandit Nehru's famous confession of being 'a queer mixture of East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere' and claimed, with every justification, to be out of place nowhere, at home everywhere; no one could have been better fitted, by birth and by training, to bridge in his own person the gulf between East and West. Although, in such books as A New Approach to the Vedas and Elements of Buddhist Iconography Coomaraswamy interprets certain aspects of the Oriental doctrines with great learning and subtlety, the main theme of all his work was the traditional philosophy of art, chiefly associated with the East, but prominent in Plato and the Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages. But since the division which we now make between life and art is strange to the traditional teaching, Coomaraswamy, even when discussing the complexities of Buddhist iconography, is writing about human life in its post-practical sense. For human life is human labour, and human labour is art (labour without art is no longer human). The chief function of human art must be, as Coomaraswamy reminds us, to express, as clearly and as precisely as possible, a meaning that transcends the sphere of our ordinary, practical life. The work of art is, in essence, a reminder - it recalls to our minds that which we have forgotten while occupied in the business of the world. Aestheticism, on the other hand, as coomaraswamy points out, with all the modern philosophies of art which hang upon the word, knows nothing of this doctrine; it has to do only with a titillation of the senses and the enjoyment of emotional excitement for its own sake, whereas, Coomaraswamy says, "the purpose of art is always one of effective communication". Art for art's sake The doctrine of art for art's sake is but another example of the terrible violation for modern life, in which every activity is cut off from its source and its significance. Hand in hand with this doctrine goes 'Industry without art' whereby the vast majority of people are condemned to a labour which may justly be called 'unfit for free men' intended not to achieve any valid end, but to produce utilities which are not truly useful and of which men have no need until an artificial one is created, so that, with every rise in the minimum standard of living which seems essential to us, our lives become more burdened - what Coomaraswamy calls our "exaggerated standards of living and equally depreciated standards of life". Coomaraswamy defines the chief characteristics of the modern world as "disorder, uncertainty, sentimentality and despair"; it is, he says, a "world of impoverished reality" in which we go on living as if life were an end in itself and had no meaning. "Our boasted standard of living is qualitatively beneath contempt. And we (the Western peoples) have destroyed the vocational and artistic foundation for whatever traditional cultures our touch has infected". Obviously, a traditional or vocational society is not, in our sense, a democratic one, nor does it offer what we are pleased to call 'equality of opportunity'. Coomaraswamy defines the political alternatives of the modern world in these terms: "A democracy is a government of all by a majority of proletarians; a Soviet a government by a small group of proletarians; and a dictatorship a government by a single proletarian". It must, of course, be understood that, by 'proletarian', he means any individual who has no place in any of the social orders into which a vocational society is divided. "In the traditional and unanimous society there is a government by a hereditary aristocracy", Coomaraswamy explains, "the function of which is to maintain an existing order, based on eternal (by which he means metaphysical) principles, rather than to impose the views or arbitrary will of any party or interest". In such a society, "the life of the community as a whole and of the individual whatever his special function may be, conforms to recognised patterns of which no one questions the validity". It is the aim of the various forms of proletarian government, on the other hand, to achieve a rigid and inflexible uniformity, and all the forms of education are directed to this end, (whereas) in a 'promotive' society, education is not compulsory but inevitable, just because the past is there 'present, experienced and fell as an effective part of daily life, not just taught by schoolmasters'. Modern civilisation "The bases of modern civilisation are", says Coomaraswamy, "to such an extent rotten to the core that it has been forgotten even by the learned that man ever attempted to live otherwise than by "bread alone" and 'bread alone' is, in fact, what we (the West) offer to the 'primitive', in place of his sacred lore and ritual. Coomaraswamy insists that what seems to us irrational in the life of 'savages' and may be 'unpractical, since it renders them unfit to compete with our material force', represents the vestiges of a primordial state of metaphysical understanding. And if the 'savage' himself no longer comprehends his own 'divine inheritance', this ignorance on his part is no more shameful than ours, who do not recognise the intrinsic nature of his lore. "We do not say", Coomaraswamy goes on, "that the modern "savage" exemplifies the "primordial state" itself, but that his beliefs, and the whole content of his folklore, bear witness to such a state". It was Coomaraswamy's life-work to expound the doctrines upon which, in the past, and even to some extent today, a unified and truly human life has been based. "All of his "myriad-minded" concentration", wrote R. A. Parker, "together with an almost fabulous self-discipline and purposive "drive", have been yoked together to demonstrate the single voice of human aspiration. It is we, the contemporaries, with our genius for fission and division, who are lost ..." unless, of course, we are prepared, even at this late hour, to see our error and to submit, in all humility, to the ancient and for too long forgotten rule. |
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| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
Once again, a collection of Ananda Coomaraswamy's writings has been
published in the United States and marks the anniversary of his birth in
Colombo 127 years ago on August 22, 1877.
