Abstract
Transition to sustainable community systems calls for re-envisioning human development. Human development does not only mean economic, political and ethical development; it also means artistic and spiritual development. All these dimensions of development are interlinked, but we have not paid sufficient attention to artistic and spiritual bases and horizons of human development and social transformations. In order to develop both individually and collectively, it is necessary to develop one’s artistic and spiritual potential. The essay explores relationships between art, spirituality and human development and describes examples from histories of ideas, art experiments and educational movements for creatively cultivating cross-fertilisation among them further.
Ananta Kumar Giri. Professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies, 79 Second Main Road, Gandhi Nagar, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India; Email: aumkrishna@gmail.com
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Notes
- 1.
Artistic transcendence in Nussbaum refers to these processes as she writes: “there is a great deal of room for transcendence of our ordinary humanity… transcendence, we might say, of an internal and human sort …. There is so much to do in this area of human transcending (which I also imagine as a transcending by descent, delving more deeply into oneself and one’s humanity, and becoming deeper and more spacious as a result) that if one really pursued that aim well and fully I suspect that there would be little time left to look about for any other sort” (Nussbaum 1990: 379).
- 2.
Imagination is an indispensable foundation and ever-present companion of life and it is linked to aspiration and the dynamics of creativity in self, culture and society. But our dominant models and methods of research in modernity, as in the linked larger field of modernity itself, have lacked cultivation of imagination and creativity. In many ways the predominance of mechanical models in science, scholarship, society and State has killed our wings of imagination and creativity. Imagination works at the interstices of body, mind, spirit, society, nature and the divine. Imagination is not confined to the individual in a narrow sense; it can begin with the vibration of silence and solitude of soul, but it also arises in our practices of co-beings, collaborations and points and pathways of contestations and confrontations. Creative imagination, as the linked pathway of moral and social imagination, has an indispensable collaborative dimension in which, as we walk, work, dream, sing, argue and fight together, our wings and roots of imagination get sharpened and deeper.
- 3.
Here the following reflections of S. N. Eisenstadt also deserve our careful consideration: While the term ‘parrhesia’ as used by Foucault goes beyond the simple emphasis on resistance as due mainly to the inconvenience of being confined within the coercive frameworks of an order and denotes the courageous act of disrupting dominant discourses, thereby opening a new space for another truth to emerge – not a discursive truth but rather a ‘truth of the self’, an authentication of the courageous speaker in this ‘eruptive truth-speaking’ – it does not systematically analyse the nature of the agency through which such other truth may emerge, or how the emergence of such ‘truth of the self’ may become interwoven with the process of social change and transformation (Eisenstadt 2002: 38).
- 4.
As Foucault writes, “The political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our day is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and its institutions but to liberate us both from the state and the type of individuality linked to state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity […]” (Foucault 2005: 526).
- 5.
As Alka Wali writes about her work with artists in New York city and Chicago: “We discovered that the desire to practise art led people to cross deep social boundaries of gender, class, and even, at times race. We discovered that the serious dedication to the crafts led people to overcome their fear of each other, to develop trust and engagement in many ways that were not possible in their work place or home place” (Wali 2015: 183). To make sense of this work of art, Wali presents us with the perspective of relational aesthetics cultivated by Bourriaud, an art critic. Here what Wali writes deserves our careful consideration: Bourriaud, an art critic and curator, attempts to characterise trends in conceptual arts that emerged in the 1990s, suggesting that certain artists are positioning art as a form of social activism in ways that emphasise social interaction and its context. Relational aesthetics is defined by art that is more participatory, collaborative and activist. Following Foucault and Guattari, Bourriaud posits that this type of art works at the ‘micro-political’ level, focusing on individual or localised transformation rather than striving for grander-scale social movements (Wali 2015: 185).
- 6.
The vision and pathways of multi-topial hermeneutics builds upon the idea of diatopical hermeneutics proposed by Raimundo Panikkar. Building upon the seminal work of Raimundo Panikkar, Boaventuara de Sousa Santos (2014: 92) elaborates diatopical hermeneutics thus: “The aim of diatopical hermeneutics is to maximize the awareness of the reciprocal incompleteness of cultures by engaging in a dialogue, as it were, with one foot in one culture and the other in another – hence its diatopical character. Diatopical hermeneutics is an exercise in reciprocity among cultures that consists in transforming the premises of argumentation in a given culture into intelligible and credible arguments in another.”
Santos here talks about putting one’s feet in cultures which resonates with my idea of footwork, footwork in landscapes of self, culture and society as part of creative research (Giri 2012). Hermeneutics does not mean only reading texts and cultures as texts but also foot-walking with texts and cultures as foot walks, and foot works resonating with what Heidegger calls a hermeneutics of facticity (cf. Mehta 2004). Santos talks about diatopical hermeneutics, but this need not be confined to our feet only in two cultures; it needs to move beyond two cultures and embrace many cultures. Spiritual traditions can also help us realise that though we have physically two feet, we can have many feet. In the Vedas it is considered that the Divine has a million feet, and similarly we can realise that humans also have a million feet, and with our million feet we can engage ourselves with not only creative foot work but also heart work (herzwerk, as it is called in German) in our acts of gathering knowledge and caring for self and the world. Supplementing Santos’s diatopical hermeneutics, we can cultivate multi-topial hermeneutics, which is accompanied by a multi-valued logic of autonomy and interpenetration going beyond either-or logic. Art and aesthetics play an important role in both multi-topial hermeneutics and multi-valued logic, as they help us to take gentle and careful artistic steps in difficult journeys across terrains and domains and make connections across fields usually construed as isolated and separate (see Giri 2016b).
- 7.
As distinct from Max Weber, for Hannah Arendt, power is the ability to work in concert rather than exercise one’s will over others.
- 8.
Memory work involves both work and meditation with memory as well as our roots and routes of life. The following poem by the author explores these entangled pathways of critique, creativity and transformations:
Roots and Routes: Memory Works and Meditations
Roots and Routes
Routes within Roots
Roots with Routes
Multiple Roots and Multiple Routes
Criss-crossing With Love
Care and Karuna
Criss-crossing and Cross-firing
Root work and Route Work
Footwork and Memory Work
Weaving threads
Amidst threats
Dancing in front of terror
Dancing with terrorists
Meditating with threat
Meditating with threads
Meditating with Roots and Routes
Root Meditation
Route Meditation
Memory Work as Meditating with Earth
Dancing with Soul, Cultures and Cosmos
[9 a.m., 13 February 2015, UNPAR Guest House, Bandung].
- 9.
In his dialogue with Tagore, Gandhi writes in his article, “The Great Sentinel”, published in Young India of 13 October 1921: “True to his poetical instinct the Poet lives for the morrow and would have us do likewise. He presents to our admiring gaze the beautiful picture of the birds early in the morning singing hymns of praise as they soar into the sky. These birds had their day’s food and soared with rested wings in whose veins new blood has flown during the previous nights. But I have had the pain of watching birds who, for want of strength, could not be coaxed even into a flutter of their wings. The human bird under Indian sky gets up weaker than when he pretended to retire” (in Bhattacharya 1997: 91).
Just as the above presents a glimpse of Gandhi’s mind, there are many aspects of Gandhi’s approach to beauty which can inspire us to think, meditate and walk further with him and the calling of beauty in life. The following glimpse from Gandhi’s visit to the Paris exhibition of 1890 can be instructive. As Hassan (1980: 52) writes: “He appreciated the wonderful construction of Notre Dame and the elaborate decoration of interior with its beautiful sculptures. There was much fashion and frivolity about the streets but inside churches, he found a different atmosphere as he saw people kneeling and praying before the image of the Virgin […] On the other hand, he found no beauty in the Eiffel Tower and like Tolstoy before him disparaged it: ‘It was the toy of the exhibition. So long as we are children we are attracted by toys.’”
- 10.
Here what Margaret Chatterjee writes deserves our careful consideration: “When Rabindranath Tagore writes of the spiritual, especially in his Herbert Lectures […] he expressed his dissatisfaction with ‘the solitary enjoyment of the infinite in meditation.’ He quoted approvingly Kabir’s opinion that to say the Supreme Reality dwells in the inner realm of the Spirit ‘shames out the outer world of matter.’ But how can the two pilgrimages be combined, the within and without? Tagore’s answer is clear – through artistic activity. The harmony of relationship created by the poet and musician can be mirrored in the nature of each individual, for each man is endowed with a perpetual surplus of powers which transcends the desultory facts about him (Chatterjee 2009: 107; also see Miri 2016).
- 11.
Renunciation in Gandhi can bring us to Foucault’s path of self-restraint in life as a work of art, though in his own life Foucault may not have followed this closely, as he enjoyed bodily pleasure without limits, as is evident from his visits to many bath houses in San Francisco when he was teaching at Berkeley.
- 12.
For Sri Aurobindo (1973: 40), aestheses can awaken us – even the soul in us – to something yet deeper and more fundamental than mere pleasure and enjoyment, to some form of the spirit’s delight in existence, Ananda. According to Sri Aurobindo (1973: 44), “There is not only physical beauty in the world – there is moral, intellectual and spiritual beauty too. There are not only aesthetic values but life values, mind values and soul values that enter into art. Beyond the ideals and idea forces even there are other presences more inner and inmost realities, a soul behind things and beings, the spirit and its powers, which could be subject matter of an art still more rich and deep and abundant in its interest than any of these.” Walking and meditating with Sri Aurobindo and some of his co-walkers, the following poem of the author explores different possibilities of art, collaboration and transcendence:
Half-Birth Day
This is my half-birth day
This is my friend’s birthday
We are friends
of soul, art and the world
We create art in the beach
A public art of aesthetics and aestheses
Aesthetics touching the visible
Aestheses embracing the deeper
We create murals in the streets
Not only in our drawing rooms
We create fusion of flags and music
A new art of border-crossing
Art becomes a call for transformation
Calling friends to break out of
Routines of repetition and reproduction
To discover the spring within and around
To sing again
We call people to their streets and souls
We become clean
We become green
We create beauty in our lips and cosmos
We have faith in each other
Faith in Nature, Human and Divine
When we sing
The donkey and divine
Come to listen
This is our joint birth day
Of co-birthing and co-breathing
Surrender and co-creation
[For and with Kirti and Lelya, Tasmai Art Gallery, 6.10 p.m., 17 July 2014.]
Sri Aurobindo’s pointer to aestheses as movement of beauty with and beyond sensuality is also reflected in the following passage on art and beauty by Andrew Harvey, a deep seeker of both art and spirituality: “Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in the Brothers Karamazov: ‘The world will be saved by beauty.’ What Dostoevsky meant by beauty was not mere aesthetic beauty but an illumined and initiatory radiance of a vision of holiness. This radiance is art’s highest and noblest function to represent, and when through art’s holy magic, the heart is awakened to a vision of the sacrality of all creation, beauty can become the fuel for a passion to transform the world” (Harvey: 60).
- 13.
The Mother herself was a creative artist and she was part of circle of creative artists and circles in Paris around the turn of the nineteenth century. She knew such famous artists and sculptors, such as Auguste Rodin.
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Giri, A.K. (2019). Re-envisioning Development for Sustainable Community Systems: Art, Spirituality and Social Transformations. In: Nayak, A. (eds) Transition Strategies for Sustainable Community Systems. The Anthropocene: Politik—Economics—Society—Science, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00356-2_7
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