I am delighted to write this foreword for Shyamala Gupta's book. The book is an attempt, among other things, to bring together Indian and Western theories of art, and engage them in a constructive debate with one another. In recent philosophical thinking about art, it has been suggested that the concept of art is a local institutional concept. It is institutions located within a culture that determine so the argument goes whether is to be treated as an object of art something an artifact and whether it is good or bad art. While this may be true of the concept of art, as it has taken the shape in modern west, there is, surely, a larger, more global concept of art which links it with our concern, the beauty, which is common to all mankind. This concern is almost a part of the natural history of man. Art, in this larger sense, may be treated as relating itself to a universal human responsive framework within which we can understand the intelligibility, of a non-utilitarian kind, of art as a distinct human activity. Art would have intelligibility, born not merely of fashionable culture-phase, but, of a universal mode of communication relating to some universally shared human sensibility.
Shyamala Gupta's book takes this universal notion of art as a foundational concept. While major theories of art, both in the west and in the east, receive detailed authentic representation in the book, the treatment is punctuated by critical insights, which contribute much towards the originality of the book. The book will be of enormous interest to all those who are interested in the east-west philosophical dialogue in the history of mankind's thinking about art and beauty, and in research in some of the traditional problem areas of aesthetics.
WHEN the eighteenth-century German philosopher A.G. Baumgarten introduced 'Aesthetics' as a philosophy of beauty, he was not aware of the controversies which were to arise in the twentieth century particularly. There is no doubt that there is beauty in nature and that the encounter with beauty is a source of joy and delight. The controversy however is whether a philosopher can dwell upon it and treat it as an objective factor and a meaningful term at all which can be analysed philosophically. In other words, does the concept of beauty fall within the scope of philosophy at all?
The later thinkers emphasised art as a human activity as a more appropriate subject for aesthetics and tried to analyse the concept and generalise theories about it. There is a challenge to this attempt of the philosopher in view of the autonomy and an immense creativity involved in the activity of making art objects. How could such an u predictable urge to create art be bound by set definitions and theories?
Whether aesthetics as a philosophical inquiry is possible at all is a major issue in the literature of aesthetics of the later part of the twentieth century writings on the subject. It is the analytical schools and the logical positivists who raised these objections and the linguistic approach to the subject tried to cut down the scope of aesthetics to merely deliberating on the meanings of various terms used in this context.
However, we should remember that aesthetics is not just what we read about it in the twentieth century writings, but that it has a long history dating from the Greek philosophy itself. Greek philosophers prior to Socrates and Plato had laid down the norms of beauty and the theory of art as imitation of nature. Socrates and Plato were critical about such theories of their predecessors and brought out the implications of such theories about art. They were talking as philosophers and not the laymen who were interested in art and beauty. It was Socrates who drew the attention of his contemporaries to the fact that art as an imitative activity could at the most make a copy of the external nature of man or any other natural object but failed to portray the soul or the essence of anything. Plato followed this line of thinking and developed a mature philosophy of beauty and art. Aristotle gave further dimensions to the entire subject in his famous work Poetics. It is thus clear that aesthetics has its birth in the ancient philosophy and the very genesis of the word 'aesthetics' is in the Greek word aesthesis, though the coinage of the word Aesthetics is attributed to Baumgarten, who carved out a separate status and place for aesthetics in philosophy. Aesthetics is a science and philosophy of the world contained in the perceptual realm of human experience and this is how it is related to 'aesthesis', an awareness caused by the sense perception.
The later philosophers in the mediaeval and recent times made valuable contributions to the subject and various theories of art were offered during this period. We shall show an outline of this historical development of pre- and post-Baumgarten aesthetics in later chapters.
In India, we do have very vitally important theories of art and aesthetic experience, a theory of rasa, in the context of poetry and performing arts, and many related issues which could be considered common to Western and Indian aesthetics. Conspicuously, the philosophers were silent on this subject though the culmination of some of the theories like sadharanikarana can be traced only in a philosophical level of thinking. The Indian theory of dhvani has a lot of potential for the contemporary linguistic analysis in the West. This can be an independent subject for research, and for the time being we can only say that there is a full-fledged Indian Aesthetics, which has been named wrongly as Saundarya Sastra in the present-day writings on Indian aesthetics.
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