Indian Logic Forum

tantidharo

1. The present post was roused in response to an apparently modest thought-intersection of Sunthar Visuvalingam and Ashok Chowgule.

S.V.: "I agree with [certain Orientalist scholars that Sufism is by and large an] appropriation of pre-existing spiritual traditions."

A.C.: "If that be the case, Sufism is not Islamic. Because Islam has always seriously attempted to destroy the spiritual traditions wherever it went."

Stated in brief, my own undeveloped notion on the matter is that sufistic products are essentially the fusion, confusion and conflation of Silk Route trade, only adding further that the righteous pursuit of any spiritual tradition is the retail destruction of every spiritual tradition. It's like the war on terror; would Washington only conduct it honourably. And bringing the pistol to its hallowed temple. . .

2. I should like to reelaborate what I touched upon recent in my Grafting Plato's Shadow Play: A Spray Can Version of Metaleptic MimГЄsis (Sritantra 2006). Now as applies to ars rhetorica (the 'art of persuasion'), mimГЄsis ("inventiveness" or "innovativeness") connotes at minimum a range of senses from the uncomplicated aping of verbal idiosyncrasies, to the studied emulation of linguistic patterns and the assimilation of discursive models and techniques (Corbett 1971: 243-50).

However in a general Platonic/Neo-Platonic sense, mimГЄsis contrastingly adopts a metaphysical frame. This draws on three to five вЂ“ depending how you parse them вЂ“ points: (i) an apparent noumenal-phenomenal dichotomy between (a) the contingent world of sense perception and (b) a centreless, far-flung sphere of perfection; (ii) the human faculty of apperceiving this ultimate, unchanging reality or being [(b) above]; and (iii) the added capacity for 'sharing' these apperceived sublimities with fellow inhabitants of the mundane world (Kennedy: 117). In fact, Plato's idea of a realm of being that is crystalline in character and infinitely centreless would later contribute to the Central Asian/Silk Route sufistic formulation of the Persian arabesque, i.e. a disaggrative frond-like link and line to the very fore structures of that far-flung sphere.

3. Now, tracking rasa's essential myth is the natural task of its auto-plot discernment console. Listen and I'll tell you. Here the protagonist/questioner/inquisitor begins self-seeding her personal conclusion through responding to a registry of obvious questions; though knowing the inquisitors will never be content and that she's fated to a barren, unrelenting search that only comes to closure with the hushing of authorial voice. Here we have the concept of self-liquidity: preconscious freedom without direction вЂ“ though not to be mistaken for a psychic dimension, neither a wily deduction of thought. Why? Wholly unconfined and devoid of direction, this is just the reason why it's not a happening, neither a result. It is the unreasoned aftermath of personal liquidation and vaporisation without a trace whose function as a cryptic dramaturgical figure is concealed in its own inner private sub-philosophy. This naturally includes a rule-ensemble that we trust metaleptically yields all essentials averred through the Vedic conception of mandala ('object-field'/'force-field'/'seed receptacle'/'unpierced thermal spring'). And in this way the play/act/object of the tragedy prompts the whole bazaar, indeed 'calls' the entire permeated public space 'to prayer,' i.e. to diaphanous regions of aesthetic sensibility where, bathed in the thus-pierced-springs of exfoliation, one resigns to the hand of a force far beyond, one dances to a score that is normally not perceived by the standard apparatus of cartilage, flesh and minuscule bone. And the prospect of returns gets thoroughly impeached, as does the very notion of taking leave. All that remains is the naked utensil reduced to its unadorned simplicity and beauty вЂ“ a living mythos retrieved from the sun (let's say).

4. Now let me turn briefly to the very early question that arose in the essentially Е›ДЃnta-rasasised nДЃtya-Е›ДЃstric Vajraccehedika-prajГ±ДЃpДЃramitДЃ-sЕ«tra of Nargajuna (4th c.), alluding if I may to the still wet fresco of my recent Diamond Splitter Discourse (2005). And as the Aletheial One's dialogist purports him to say:

Those who walk the path of the deeply centreless far-flung sphere called "intellect" should try to evolve an aesthetic sensibility (Е›ДЃnta-rasa). 'How?' I will explicate. By learning to abstract the half-dozen senses of sound, smell, sight, taste, tactility and time from each their contingent 'object-fields' of sense, there ensues the dawning of pratyДЃhДЃra, "the emancipation of the senses themselves from the domination external sense objects," and every other fantasized emission of sense. Next one downgrades the prods of logic in favour of the finely calibrated senses, as the newly far-flung aesthetic sensibility emerges from the decomposing pods of cognition, i.e. as an enigmatic instrument of absorption, infiltration, and extension beyond to the very fore structures of that deeply centreless far-flung sphere called also prajГ±ДЃ and/or bodhi.

5. Yet in the European context (Sritantra 2006), it was Aristotle's response to his teacher's aporia on the rise of literacy in sixth century Athens and 'the need to rethink its functions and consequences' (Harris 2000) that established the orthodox Western assumptions on the momentous nature and role of mimГЄmata, or "mimetic goods," in the arenas of art and rhetoric. And this reign would last for two millennia until Alexander Baumgarten (1773) finally dared to critique and stare down that mode of logic that had come to sustain the near archetypical view of mimГЄsis вЂ“ a perspective that hinged on two critical points: (i) the cheapening of sense and (ii) the dichotomous partitioning of beauty and art from genuine things.

Yet between these two our mammoth culture-heroic duo, the notion of mimГЄsis as "imitative theory" accorded little scope to "authorial inventiveness" (Burke: 6). And one really wonders 'why' when for tens-of-thousands of years already the human species had exercised its near neurological need to traffic and trade in dramatic narrative text вЂ“ this folk re-threading of the mundane yarns of peoples lives into compact frames (Mckee 2000) eliciting heroes, villains and fools вЂ“ and bicycle riders and their bloodied victims вЂ“ all shuttled and pressed to the rhythmic beat of the passions loomed in pursuits and their reprisals. And indeed it took two lengthy millennia before this view got thoroughly critiqued, and its hypothesized dichotomy between mimeticistic artefacts and genuine things rejected out of hand as wholly insufficient to the needs of getting real. It was thus that the likes of Alexander Baumgarten and others of early German aesthetic tradition choreographed their radical departure and established "aesthetics" as a separate discipline whose focus was the sensitive investigation of "mimetic goods," as typifies the modern academic sense of Fine Arts (SГ¶rbom 2002: 20). Yet Baumgarten's denotation of aesthetics is still something far beyond a mere philosophical scrutiny of the meaning beauty and art. It is 'a theory,' writes Hammermeister (2002), 'that substantiates the epistemological relevance of sensual perception based on a gnoseological faculty, and which in turn produces a distinct type of knowledge.' Yet furthermore 'unwilling to regard sense data as merely the stimuli for higher and more advanced cognitive processes, he founded a science of sensual cognition independent from cognition itself' (SГ¶rbom: 4, 8). And in doing so, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten strikingly stands as the first critical thinker in the conventional history of Western philosophy to present a vigorous and sustained defence of the up-till-then dispossessed vision of the poet-yogin. Through depreciation of the goads of logic in favour of the refined calibration of the senses rinsed of reason's vague ambitions, these daring exponents of a tantalizing science disclosed, dismayed and rejected out of hand the pooled presumptions and historical affixations of Europe's two principal cultural progenitors, between whom had furnished more than all put together the essential setting, pace and dГ©cor of Western philosophical rumination in particular regard to a sumptuous aesthetics.

References

Baumgarten, Alexandaer Gottlieb 1954 (1773). Reflections on Poetry (Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus), trans. introduction and notes by Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther, University of California Press.

Bullen, Matthew 2004. Review, Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association http://rmmla.wsu.edu/ereview/57.1/reviews/bullen.asp last updated October 28, 2004.

Burke, Sean 1995. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Chowgule, Ashok 2005. Re: "Muslim allegories on the taste of Love: becoming God's image" (for feedback) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Abhinavagupta/message/3233

Corbett, Edward P.J. 1971. The Theory and Practice of Imitation in Classical Rhetoric, in College Composition and Communication 22.

Hammermeister, Kai 2002. The German Aesthetic Tradition, Cambridge University Press.

Harris, Roy 2000. Rethinking Writing, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Kennedy, George A. 1980. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina.

Mckee, Francis 2000. A Pack of Lies, Glasgow: Tramway http://www.francismckee.com/pack.htm

SГ¶rbom, GГ¶ran 2002. The Classical Concept of Mimesis in A Companion to Art Theory. Eds. Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 2002, pp. 19-28 www.blackwellpublishing.com/pdf/smithwilde1.pdf

Sritantra 2005. Diamond Splitter Discourse (a sampled conveyance of exposed intimation) http://diamond-splitter-discourse.blogspot.com/

Sritantra 2006. Grafting Plato's Shadow Play: A Spray Can Version of Metaleptic MimГЄsis http://ashejournal.com/index.php?id=42

Visuvalingam, Sunthar 2005. Religious art as propaganda: trans-sectarian aesthetics of rasa" (for feedback), online post http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Abhinavagupta/message/3224