[I should note that while my interest in Indian philosophy of art was first awakened upon learning about rasa (a port of entry, as it were), there is much more to Indian/Indic philosophy of art and aesthetics than this concept.]
rasa: taste; flavor, savor; nectar of delight; aesthetic emotion; a central concept in Indian or Sanskrit aesthetics. The earliest systematic treatment of this concept is found in Bharata’s Nātyaśastra (2nd century BCE), the oldest surviving treatise on music and dance. The properly aesthetic portions of the treatise, however, were added several centuries later. Rasa characterizes the audience’s affective response to the drama. It is dependent upon situationally particular personal emotional experience or bhāva (here, ‘basic’ and durable emotions as well as transitory and ‘accessory’ emotional states, with a focus on the significance of the former). Thus the love I feel for my spouse is in some sense the basis of, but not identical to, the ‘love’ I sense when viewing a dramatic performance of Romeo falling for Juliet (in keeping with the fact that in the time of Bharata the theater-going rasika was the prototype of the aesthete).
In contrast to a direct emotional experience or state, aesthetic rasa is more contemplative and vicarious, a ‘fictive’ emotional state that is shared and universal, all features that contribute to making its experience delightful or enjoyable. According to Bharata, rasa is the product of three objective, interacting elements (i.e., they are its ‘efficient’ cause): 1) vibhāva, the understanding that makes ‘representations’ (words, gestures, and internal feelings) capable of being sensed, or the indicative signs of the emotions; 2) anubhāva, the actual sensing of these elements as evidenced in their physiological effects or manifestations, most of which are immediate and involuntary; and 3) vyabhicāribhāva, subsidiary emotional elements or feelings that reinforce one’s experience. These objective factors combine with a subjective factor (the ‘material’ cause) to arouse rasa. The subjective factor is the essence of the (basic) emotion(s) at the heart of a work of art that is at the same time latent in the spectator (sahrdaya) the qualified appreciator or aesthete) as a powerful disposition(s) or impression(s) (cf. samskāra). A play, for instance, heightens, celebrates and crystallizes the truths of emotional experience through idealized representations or embodiments of generalized types in a way that effaces the distance between what is witnessed in the performance and the spectator’s own life. This effacement of distance (spatial, temporal, psychological, etc.) allows the spectator to ‘objectify’ what is otherwise subjectively experienced (one reason we can speak of ‘losing ourselves’ in a book, play or piece of music). It is this process of ‘objectification’ that raises an emotional tone to the status of a ‘delectation, that is, an enjoyable or delightful experience more contemplative and ‘distanced’—hence more objective—than our direct (and egocentric) emotional experiences. Ideally speaking, the emotions treated in, say, a poem, are not the private feelings of the poet nor are they dominated by the emotional projections of the reader’s own mental states, rather they objectively abide in the poem as its cognitive content (rasa objectified). As the great Kashmiri Śaiva philosopher Abhinavagupta (c. 950-1015) noted, it is the poem’s cognitive content that allows our own mental states to be objectively perceived by awakening latent memories, impressions or dispositions. The resulting rasa experience is said to be self-validating (or –certifying) (svatah prāmana, the notion that the validity of a cognitive episode or knowledge is present in the material that creates the object and that the awareness of this validity arises spontaneously with that episode or knowledge itself; compare, for example, Advaita Vedānta philosophy of mind and metaphysics, wherein awareness is said to be self-validating—and self-illuminating—such that the doubt ‘Am I aware or not?’ cannot occur). The self-validating character of rasa experience appears to countenance the idea that, in the end, such experience is a species of self-knowledge, in Abhinavagupta’s words, ‘a form of self-contemplation.’ Thus ‘rasa as “aesthetic flavour” comprehends both the arousal and development of an aesthetic emotion in the mind of the aesthete, as well as the objective components of the art object, which arouse and sustain that emotion’ (Harsha Dehejia).
Rasa theory claims there are eight—and after Abhinavagupta, nine—basic (aesthetic?) emotions: sexual love, comic laughter, grief (includes pity), rage or anger, courage (the ‘heroic emotion’), fear, revulsion (or disgust), wonder (or amazement), and tranquility (‘the rasa of rasas’). It is such basic emotions, rather than the more numerous and simply occurrent or transient emotions (e.g., envy, intoxication, shame, and anxiety) that are capable of being expressed as corresponding aesthetic moods or rasas, although occurrent emotions or mental states can accompany, intensify, support, or contrast more basic, stable, and dispositional emotions. It can be argued that Abhinavagupta’s metaphysical preoccupations took his rasa theory beyond aesthetics proper insofar as such delectation or profoundly joyful experience is said to serve as a foretaste of the bliss of emancipation or moksa (as formulated within the terms of the ‘integral monism’ of Kashmir Shaivism). In Sanskrit poetic criticism, the Rasa school was one of four major schools: the ‘Figurationists,’ the Rīti or ‘Stylists,’ and the Dhvani (‘suggestion’). The rasa aesthetic was soon applied beyond the literary arts (of drama and poetry) to music and dance, the fine arts in general, and later the plastic arts as well (e.g. temple construction).
Suggested Reading
- Deutsch, Eliot. Studies in Comparative Aesthetics. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1975.
- Bilimoria, Purushottama and Aleksandra Wenta, eds. Emotions in Indian Thought-Systems. New Delhi: Routledge, 2015.
- Chakrabarti, Arindam, ed. The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
- Chari, V.K. Sanskrit Criticism. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.
- Masson, J.L. and M.V. Patwardhan. Śāntarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy of Aesthetics. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1969.*
- Masson, J.L. and M.V. Patwardhan. Aesthetic Rapture: the Rasādhyāya of the Nātyaśāstra. Poona: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute, 1970.
- Pollock, Sheldon, trans. and ed. A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
- Schwartz, Susan L. Rasa: Performing the Divine in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
* Some intellectual trivia: One of the authors here is Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (b. March 28, 1941 as Jeffrey Lloyd Masson), perhaps now better known for his controversial and somewhat perfervid (and I believe mistaken) views on Freud’s putative “abandonment” of his seduction theory. His early work, such as the two titles here, reflects his background in Sanskrit and Indian Studies. Masson, like yours truly, happens to be a vegan, and has co-written a book with Susan McCarthy that should interest anyone who cares about our relations with our nonhuman animal kin: When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (Delta, 1995). He’s since published a number of books about animals. I rather belatedly came to the realization that Masson’s intellectual pursuits and passions roughly coincide with some of mine: Indic philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and animal ethics and rights, although of course I am nowhere close to the scholar and writer Masson is!
See too this podcast: https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2017/05/23/indian-aesthetics-rasa-theory/
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