Thursday, July 14, 2011

Contemporary Indian Aesthetics

It is a pity that contemporary Indian philosophy is usually neglected. Contemporary Indian aesthetics is no exception, although it would have a lot to offer to the general discours on aesthetics, given the fact that it can benefit of the high level of reflection achieved in Classical Indian aesthetics.
I recently read Chaudury's Aesthetics Metaphysics. The author is acquainted with both Indian and Western aesthetic thought and claims, among other things, that there is a radical difference between the two:
Indian aesthetics has been in the main unaffected by any intellectual metaphysics. Aesthetic contemplation has been at the outset regarded as distinct from theoretic understanding and beauty distinct from intellectual truth. While Plato and the Scholastics hold artistic activity to be a feast of reason, the Indian aestheticians take it as a feast of feeling. (p. 192)

I am not sure I fully agree, but I certainly subscribe to the claim that Indian epistemology can accommodate within itself different sorts of "truths", and thus does not need to make the object it studies conform to a single (logical) standard.

Do you agree on this interpretation of Indian and Western aesthetics? If so, why was it so?

On the problem of the truth-value of whatever is not a description of a state of affairs, see here.

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