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Title: Ananda Coomaraswamy
Author: Organic Radicals
Language: en
Topics: spirituality
Source: https://orgrad.wordpress.com/a-z-of-thinkers/ananda-coomaraswamy/

Organic Radicals

Ananda Coomaraswamy

“It is fundamentally the incubus of world trade that makes of industrial

‘civilisation’ a curse to humanity”

Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) was a metaphysical philosopher and

intellectual giant of the organic radical tradition.

Influenced by William Morris and friends with René Guénon, he developed

an anarchist critique of industrial capitalism and the Western

civilization from which it had emerged. He has been credited with having

invented, as early as 1913, the term “post-industrial”. (1)

Alan Antliff describes Coomaraswamy as having bridged the philosophical

gap between an Eastern religious ethos of enlightenment

(Hinduism-Buddhism) and a Western ideal of harmonious social

organization (anarchism).

He writes: “The anarchism of Coomaraswamy represents a compelling

instance of cross-cultural intermingling in which a European critique of

industrial capitalism founded on the arts-and-crafts was turned to

anti-colonial ends in a campaign against Eurocentric cultural

imperialism and its material corollary, industrial capitalism”. (2)

Born in Sri Lanka, Coomaraswamy was an anti-imperialist. While in India,

he was part of the literary circle around the great Bengali poet

Rabindranath Tagore and participated in the Swadeshi movement for Indian

independence.

This position was not based on nationalism, but on opposition to the

British empire and the way Western commercial civilization destroyed the

authenticity and autonomy of communities and cultures.

Coomaraswamy explicitly described himself as being involved in a battle

“against industrialism and world trade”. (3)

He added: “Few will deny that at the present day Western civilisation is

faced with the imminent possibility of total functional failure nor that

at the same time this civilisation has long acted and still continues to

act as a powerful agent of disorder and oppression throughout the rest

of the world”. (4)

He very clearly placed himself on the side of an opposing tradition: “On

the one hand the inspired tradition rejects ambition, competition and

quantitative standards; on the other, our modern ‘civilization’ is based

on the notions of social advancement, free enterprise (devil take the

hindmost) and production in quantity.

“The one considers man’s needs, which are ‘but little here below’; the

other considers his wants, to which no limits can be set and of which

the number is artificially multiplied by advertisement.

“The manufacturer for profits must, indeed, create an ever-expanding

world market for his surplus produced by those for whom Dr [Albert]

Schweitzer calls ‘over-occupied men’.

“It is fundamentally the incubus of world trade that makes of industrial

‘civilisation’ a ‘curse to humanity’, and from the industrial concept of

progress ‘in line with the manufacturing enterprise of civilisation’

that modern wars have arisen and will arise; it is on the same

impoverished soil that empires have grown and by the same greed that

innumerable civilisations have been destroyed”. (5)

Coomaraswamy was a Perennnialist, consciously following what he

described as “the universal metaphysical tradition that has been the

essential foundation of every past culture”. (6)

He stressed that spirituality, art and culture all flow from humankind’s

belonging (and our awareness of belonging) to the organic unity of

nature.

Western industrial society had become blind to this fundamental reality

of human identity, said Coomaraswamy, and he joined John Ruskin, Morris

and the Pre-Raphaelites in judging that this was very apparent in its

art.

Jacques Thomas says that for Coomaraswamy the modern world had gone

astray in the way it regarded art “as the ‘realisation’ of matter rather

than, as it should be, the materialisation of an ‘idea’”. (7)

Coomaraswamy said that “decadent” contemporary Western art was “art

which is no longer felt or energized”. (8)

He contrasted it with the Ch’an or Zen art of China and Japan, which

recognised its own organic origin by taking for its theme either

landscape or plant or animal life: “Ch’an-Zen art, seeking realization

of the divine being in man, proceeds by way of opening his eyes to a

like spiritual essence in the world of Nature external to himself; the

scripture of Zen is ‘written with the characters of heaven, of man, of

beasts, of demons, of hundreds of blades of grass and of thousands of

trees’ (Do-gen), ‘every flower exhibits the image of Buddha’ (Du-go)”.

(9)

Coomaraswamy wrote that in the Middle Ages, an artist had not been

regarded so much as an individual, but as a channel through which the

unanimous ideas of an organic international community could be

expressed.

Again echoing Morris, he described how in industrial society the act of

artistic creation had been divided between two separate concepts. An

“artist” was treated as a kind of individual genius working on their

own, while a craftsman was superfluous to requirements in the modern age

and could safely be replaced by unskilled labour or machinery.

He argued that this was effectively a “spiritual caste system”,

explaining: “Those who have lost most by this are the artists,

professionally speaking, on the one hand, and laymen generally on the

other. The artist (meaning such as would still be so called) loses by

his isolation and corresponding pride, and by the emasculation of his

art, no longer conceived as intellectual, but only as emotional in

motivation and significance; the workman (to whom the name of artist is

now denied) loses in that he is not called, but forced to labor

unintelligently, goods being valued above men”. (10)

Coomaraswamy’s intellectual interests were both deep and broad. In

addition to his studies in ancient Eastern art, culture and religion,

his enthusiasm for Morris’s work inspired him to follow in his footsteps

and learn Icelandic. He was also an admirer of William Blake’s

idiosyncratic brand of Romantic nature-worship and spirituality.

His closest affinity, however, was with Guénon. Coomaraswamy judged that

“no living writer in modern Europe is more significant than René

Guénon”. (11) He translated Guénon’s work and dedicated to him a chapter

of his 1947 book The Bugbear of Literacy.

Coomaraswamy shared Guénon’s belief in a timeless and universal human

metaphysics, the Philosophia Perennis.

For instance, he commented on the striking similarities between the

thinking of the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart and

traditional Indian metaphysics: “Eckhart presents an astonishingly close

parallel to Indian modes of thought; some whole passages and many single

sentences read like a direct translation from Sanskrit”. (12)

He also agreed with Guénon that each seeker of the truth had to take the

path of a particular spiritual discipline in order to progress.

He wrote: “There are many paths that lead to the summit of one and the

same mountain; their differences will be the more apparent the lower

down we are, but they vanish at the peak; each will naturally take the

one that starts from the point at which he finds himself; he who goes

round about the mountain looking for another is not climbing”. (13)

Coomaraswamy, like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, saw mythology and

folklore as presenting us with glimpses of the universal archetypes

within the human mind. He wrote: “The ‘catchwords’ of Folklore are, in

fact, the signs and symbols of the Philosophia Perennis“. (14)

As well as arising from his Hindu background, Coomaraswamy’s metaphysics

was inspired by Neoplatonism and its founder Plotinus.

Coomaraswamy emphasised the importance of form and its inseparability

from beauty and truth. All natural objects were beautiful, he said,

because of their essential form, whereas the beauty of artificial

objects depended on the input of the people who made them.

A post-Western, post-industrial future therefore had to be based on the

essential beauty and form that comes to us from nature.

“To reform what has been deformed means that we must take account of an

original ‘form’”, (15) he wrote. This original form, such as an organic,

anarchic, just, non-industrial, natural community, was a kind of

possibility-in-waiting, which always had the potential of becoming real.

“The work to be done is primarily one of purgation, to drive out the

money changers, all who desire power and office, and all representatives

of special interests; and secondly, when the city has been thus ‘cleaned

up’, one of considered imitation of the natural forms of justice,

beauty, wisdom and other civic virtues; amongst which we have considered

justice, or as the word dikaoisyne is commonly translated in Christian

contexts, righteousness”. (16)

It was important not to waste time and effort doubting whether the

battle could ever successful, he said: “Our concern is with the task and

not with its reward; our business is to be sure that in any conflict we

are on the side of Justice”. (17)

He added: “The impossible never happens; what happens is always the

realisation of a possibility”. (18)

References:

1. Armand Mattelart, The Information Society: An Introduction (London:

Sage, 2003), p. 44.

2. Alan Antliff, ‘Revolutionary Seer for Post-Industrial Age: Ananda

Coomaraswamy’s Nietzsche’, I Am Not A Man, I Am Dynamite: Friedrich

Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition, ed. by John Moore with Spencer

Sunshine, (Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia, 2004) p. 46.

3. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, What is Civilisation and Other Essays

(Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1989), p. 8.

4. Coomaraswamy, What is Civilisation, p. 19.

5. Coomaraswamy, What is Civilisation, p. 7.

6. Ananda Coomaraswamy, cit. Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World:

Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth

Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 34.

7. Jacques Thomas, Introduction, Ananda Coomaraswamy, La Théorie

Médiévale de la Beauté (Paris: Archè, Nef de Salomon, 1995), p.12.

8. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art (New

York: Dover, 1956), p. 25.

9. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art, pp. 40–41.

10. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art, p. 65.

11. Coomaraswamy, cit. Sedgwick, p. 34.

12. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art, p. 201.

13. Ananda Coomaraswamy, ‘Paths that Lead to the Same Summit’, The

Underlying Religion: An Introduction to the Perennial Philosophy, ed. by

Martin Lings and Clinton Minnaar (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom,

2007), p. 229.

14. Ananda Coomaraswamy, ‘Symplegades’, The Underlying Religion, p. 197.

15. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, What is Civilisation and Other Essays

(Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1989), p. 8.

16. Coomaraswamy, What is Civilisation and Other Essays, p. 12.

17. Coomaraswamy, What is Civilisation and Other Essays, p. 8.

18. Coomaraswamy, What is Civilisation and Other Essays, p. 70.