Many debates oppose Westerners on identity, the thurifers of the “universalism” of Human Rights clashing vigorously with those nostalgic for rooting in the particular. However, in his Metaphysical Essays collected by Max Dardevet at L’Harmattan, the art historian and metaphysician Ananda K. Coomaraswamy deploys, in the light of traditional doctrines and a privileged comparison of Christianity and Vedānta, another way of conceiving identity, through the realization of being through knowledge.
When it comes to identity, the Moderns often make the mistake of opposing the individual to the collective, the former to value the rights and interests of the former, the latter to recognize the precedence of culture and sociability over the self. However, individuality actually relates to both the singular and the collective: these two terms are inseparable, they are the two forms that individuality takes in all its extension. By confusing the individual and the singular, liberals and holists actually appear as two twin opposites: they reduce a reality to what is only one of its two necessarily inseparable modalities. Roughly speaking, the singular is in fact an elementary component indispensable to the collective which is its repetition n number of times, while the collective is, in turn, the necessary condition for the existence, in time, of the singular. The individualism characteristic of the modern conception of identity therefore does not only apply to the partisans of the self: it also applies to collectivists of all stripes, nationalists or internationalists, who allow themselves to be reduced to this ontological confusion postulated at the outset. This error into which the conventional right and left throw themselves pell-mell is nevertheless resolved by reading the metaphysical teachings of the Guénonian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Fifteen of his numerous academic contributions have been collected and translated by Max Dardevet, all forming Metaphysical Essays from which emerges a teaching that is both anthropological and ontological on the problem of identity, which can be summarized by these words taken from René Guénon’s Sorbonne lecture on “Oriental Metaphysics” (1925): “The human individual is at once much more and much less than is usually thought in the West.”
The alternative: property and ipseity
The individualism characteristic of modern thought consists in reducing all knowledge and all authority to the individual domain alone, of which we have just indicated the two inseparable modalities that are the singular and the collective. The way out of individualism can therefore only be a recognition of identity beyond what defines it singularly (me) and collectively (us), by the discovery of what defines it transcendentally (Self). This transcendental constitution (in the traditional and non-Kantian sense of the term) of identity is taught to us by traditional, ternary anthropology, forming “the Christian definition of man: ‘body, soul and Spirit'”. Comparing the principles of Christianity with those of Vedanta, Coomaraswamy recalls that “the only true being of man is spiritual, and that this being is not “in” someone or in one of his “parts” […] but that it extends from this field to its center, whatever the enclosures it crosses.” Now what is this center? This center is the principle unity of all that exists, the first cause of all things and a fortiori of man: God, that is to say, as Saint Thomas Aquinas defines it, the Being subsisting by itself ( esse per se subsistens ). Without his action, man would not exist; without his participation, he would not be capable of knowing anything. Thus, the center of identity, “is the Spirit, as the Vedantic texts express it, which “remains” when the body and the soul are defeated.”
In this perspective, there are two ways of relating to one’s identity, which the metaphysics of Ādi Śaṅkara, in India, has examined through the two divergent meanings of the personal pronoun “self” ( atman in Sanskrit): either this self (with a lower case) identifies itself with Me, that is to say with the way in which I define myself by separating myself from others, by what is “mine” to the exclusion of what is “yours” (the “We” being only the numerical extension of this ontological narcissism), or this self identifies itself with the Self (with a capital letter), pure of any distinctive determination, purity by virtue of which we include both ourselves and others, and consider our true being in its rootedness with the natural and supernatural environment which ultimately identifies us with the unique Principle of all things. Indeed, what is “oneself” or what is “one’s” does not have the same meaning as what is “me” or what is “mine”, since this possessive pronoun can grammatically designate both the first and third persons. The reality of identity is therefore not proper: it is based neither on this narcissism of small differences of which the identitarians of race or gender pride themselves, nor even on the exclusive humanism of the non-human and the Divine which is the true source of our identity.
When we relate to ourselves, “we are therefore dealing with two very different ‘selves'” which were distinguished in the West “by Saint Bernard”. Indeed, the Abbot of Clairvaux (1090-1153), reformer of the Cistercian order and doctor of the Church, makes the distinction, Coomaraswamy informs us, “between what is my property ( proprium ) and what is my being ( esse )”. Thus, property is not ipseity: what I am is not what is mine, any more than what is proper to me is my whole being. To convince us of this, Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) points out that the two fundamental things of our existence, namely life and being, instead of being our own, are only legacies that we share if not with everything that exists (being), at least with a large part of it (life), and which has its ultimate and insurmountable foundation in the universal Being that provides all existence and all life. The ethical scope of this redefinition of identity is summed up by the mystical philosopher Simone Weil in a lapidary formula: “to be proud is to forget that one is God.” In other words, pride is to forget that we have our sufficient reason only in God. Only God, in fact, has neither beginning nor end; we other creatures are born and die, caused and conditioned by what is prior to us. We have no being outside of Being: what we are is not our own, but is given to us. The spiritual rediscovery of our identity, as ipseity rather than as property, is therefore fundamentally nothing other than the experience of infinite gratitude.
Truth as a state
Coomaraswamy draws from this metaphysical teaching on identity consequences for the intelligibility of religion. What does this “repentance” to which the sacred texts exhort us mean? To answer this question, the English-speaking historian relies on numerous references, such as the “reform in newness of mind” of Saint Augustine ( Confessions XIII, 13), the “renewal of judgment” of Saint Paul ( Ephesians IV, 23) or the definition given by the venerable Pastor of Hermas: “repentance is great understanding” ( to metamelomai […] sûnesis estin megalè ).” What understanding are we talking about? Of our true identity, the knowledge of which precisely engenders the passage from the old man to the new man, from unsightly property to the grace of ipseity: “What ‘repentance’ really means is a ‘change of mind’ and the birth of a ‘new man’ who, far from being crushed by the weight of past errors, is no longer the man who committed them.” Compared to the original Greek concepts, Coomaraswamy thus bases repentance on metanoia ( “conversion”) rather than on metamelomai (“regret”): “The truly ‘converted’ man, that is, turned back (trépô , stréphō ) does not have time to punish himself, and if he imposes deprivations on himself, it is not as a form of penance,” as is clearly taught by the Bible: “Though your sins be like scarlet, says the Lord, they shall be white as snow; though they be red as crimson, they shall be as wool” (Isaiah 1:18). Spiritually there is no room for the sinner’s resentment: instead of remaining stuck in the twists and turns of his inauthentic and proprietary identity, characteristic of the “old man”, the repentant-convert, renewed in his very identity, having become a “new man”, can impose privations on himself only as “1°) discipline, like that of an athlete in training, and 2°) in imitation of divine poverty. At this level of reference, there is no room for the memory or sorrow of past errors, to which the words “Let the dead bury their dead” ( Matthew 8:22) properly apply, the “dead” being the “old man”, who is no longer for those who can say with Saint Paul, vivo autem , jam non ego (“it is no longer I who live – but Christ who lives in me”)
Ādi Śaṅkara (8th century BC) teaching his disciples, by Raja Ravi Varma (1904). This detour, or rather this return to religion, thus allows us to redefine identity in the light of a redefinition of truth. When, in the Gospel, Jesus does not say that he knows but is the truth ( John XIV, 16) and that he teaches not to learn it but to be of the truth ( John XVIII, 37), the Koran also, for its part, regularly praises the “truthful” ( siddiq ). While it is certainly not inaccurate to say, following Avicenna, that truth is an “adequation” of the intellect with the thing ( adequatio rei et intellectus ), Saint Thomas Aquinas nevertheless gives a more metaphysically exact definition: this adequation is a “conformity” ( conformitatem ), that is to say that the form of the intelligence takes the form of all the objects that it knows. There is therefore not what I am on the one hand, and what the object is on the other, as if being and knowing were two separate things: on the contrary, what is known becomes a state of the knowing being. To the extent that the intellect is “informed” by what it knows, its subject is “transformed” by what it learns and discovers. Truth, in short, is not just an individual judgment, but a state, which makes Aristotle say that “the soul is, in a certain way, all that it knows.” The seeker intellectually becomes all that he knows: “Metaphysics is further distinguished from philosophy by its purely pragmatic finality. It is no more a search for truth than the related arts are a search for art for art’s sake […]. There is indeed a quest, but […] the quest is only accomplished when [the seeker] has himself become the object of his search.” This is why “according to the Indian, European scholars, whose methods of study are openly objective and detached, have never really understood the Vedantic texts except verbally and grammatically. Vedānta can only be known to the extent that it has been experienced. The Indian cannot therefore trust a master whose doctrine is not directly reflected in his very being. This is something very far removed from the modern concept of erudition.”
The rectification of arts and politics
This identification through knowledge is a way of denying individuality in order to assert one’s identity on another level, higher than the individualistic separation of subject and object that Cartesian modernity takes to be insurmountable. This explains why art is traditionally conceived as that in which the artist objectifies himself by conferring a personality on matter: “as H. Swarzenski has pointed out, ‘it is in the very nature of medieval art that very few artists’ names have been handed down to us […], the mania for relating the few names preserved by tradition to known masterpieces […], all this is characteristic of the cult of individualism of the 19th century, based on the ideals of the Renaissance.'” The traditional craftsman has a positive experience of anonymity: if there is a signature, as on the stones of the churches built by the Compagnons, it is less like an advertisement than like “a hallmark, a simple guarantee of quality and acceptance of responsibility. “In a traditional context, the artist knows that his engineering is not the fruit of his individual fantasy, but of a knowledge which, being transmitted to him and having a value of universal teaching on the symbolic nature of things, contains and surpasses his individuality. Consequently, “it is ideas and the power of invention that one can properly say, if one thinks in terms of psycho-physical ego: which is not ‘mine’.”
In the practical order, what is true of the arts is also true of politics. For the Ancients, the aim of knowledge was not to transform nature but to contemplate it, in order to draw from it the laws necessary for the establishment of harmony in the city. Thus taking up the Platonic teaching according to which “no city can ever be happy if its plans have not been drawn by designers who refer to [the] divine model” ( Republic , 500e), Coomaraswamy teaches, at the antipodes of Machiavelli, that the just exercise of political power must not be motivated by the individual’s own interests, but on the contrary by his knowledge of the nature of things. “The inspired tradition rejects ambition, competition and quantitative standards, [while] our modern “civilization” is based on the notions of social promotion, free enterprise and quantitative production. One considers man’s needs, which are “but few things here below”, the other considers his desires, to which no limit can be set, and whose number is artificially multiplied by advertising”. This is why the refoundation of politics must be done on the basis of a “rectification ( pratividhi ) relative to this elementary self”, which translates into the abandonment of one’s own will: the political mission can only be experienced as a vocation if the man who accomplishes it no longer does so out of ambition. Abandoning one’s own will must therefore consist politically in “the accomplishment of one’s duty ( svadharma )”, the Greek equivalent of which is none other than Plato’s “justice”, that is to say, the fact of accomplishing the task to which one is naturally predisposed”.