The Aesthetic Experience According To Abhinavagupta

Abstract

In India, the study of aesthetics — which was at first restricted to the drama—draws its origin from no abstract or disinterested desire for knowledge but from motives of a purely empirical order. The most ancient text that has come down to us is the Natyashastra (4th or 5th Century A. D. ?), ascribed to the mythical Bharata. This is a voluminous collection of observations and rules concerned in the main with the production of drama and the training of actors and poets. The author, or the authors, with a certain sententiousness and pedantry typical of Indian thought, classify the various mental states or emotions of the human soul and treat of their transition from the practical to the aesthetic plane. The Natyashastra is a work of deep psychological insight. Drama appeals to sight and hearing at the same time (the only senses that are capable, according to some Indian thinkers, of rising above the boundaries of the limited “ I †) and is then considered the highest form of art. In it both sight and hearing collaborate in arousing in the spectator, more easily and forcibly than by any other form of art, a state of consciousness sui generis , conceived intuitively and concretely as a juice or flavour, called Rasa. This typically Indian conception of aesthetic experience as a juice or a taste savoured by the reader or spectator should not surprise us. In India, and elsewhere, sensations proper to the senses of taste and touch, almost devoid of any noetic representation, are easily taken to designate states of consciousness more intimate and removed from abstract representations than the ordinary one—that is the aesthetic experience and various forms of religious ones.