Separations of this kind might be somewhat conceptual in the West, here, in Sri Lanka, the separation is physical, social, and even political.
We have subdivided ourselves into groups: professions, nationalities, religions, sexes, and even intellectual sectors like artists and scientists”(1981, 21). “Along with the attempt to separate himself from Nature, man has also separated himself from his fellow man. In a striking paragraph in their Primordial Bond, Stephen Schneider and Lynn Morton state, Taking a cue from scientists like Damasio, I think that these new developments in natural sciences can be wisely used to create a new dialogue between sciences and the humanities, the latter being often regarded as fields that deal with human emotions. After all, it might not all that wrong to call, ” I feel, therefore, I am.” Damasio claims in the fields of neuroscience and biochemistry emotions have been given the due place they disserve: “Contrary to traditional scientific opinion, feelings are just as cognitive as percepts”(xxv). In fact, it is in the fertile ground of emotions that rational thought achieves its richest form. According to him, rational thoughts and emotions nurture and supplement each other. Professor Antonio Damasio has demonstrated in his excellent book, Descartes’ Error, maintains that the mind/body separation was a mistake made in the rationalist tradition. This is not a new theme in the scholarly discussions, of course, but in Sri Lanka this requires much more attention. My speech today is about creating points of contact across this divide. In the Western discussions about knowledge after Descartes, a tragic separation of the rational mind and emotional body takes place and it has continued to exist and widen despite numerous attempts to bridge it. Descartes or card-carrying Cartesians would never say, “I feel, therefore, I am.” But the ‘aesthetic cognition’ of Baumgarten was about bodily perception, about what we feel with our senses. Descartes’ has it that, “I think, therefore I am.” Here think means, logical thinking, the activity of the mind.
In his book, Aesthetica (1750), he famously said, ” Aesthetics is the sister of logic.” One can easily see the Cartesian separation of mind and body here. For him, only the rational mind can produce superior knowledge. This bodily perception he thought is inferior to rational knowledge. That knowledge is, he argued, acquired through our senses, eyes, ear, skin, tongue. Alexander Baumgarten, the first philosopher to open up the field what is now called “aesthetics”, thought that human beings gain a certain knowledge of themselves and the world through aesthetic objects. Visual arts appeal to our eyes and through that sensory agent, a painting creates a certain aesthetic effect on us. Getting something out of art is a tricky business. One of the difficulties I constantly have is to explain to my students what they gain from looking at a painting, watching a dance performance, or listening to a piece of music. In that, I discuss what we ‘get’ from visual art works such as painting. Amarakeerthi at the International Conference of Sabaragamuwa University, Sri Lanka, on 03 December)Įvery year I teach a course in aesthetics and non-linguistic arts. (A shortened version of a plenary speech given by Prof. Closer Connections among Different Branches of Human Knowledge: