I am interested in the relationship between aesthetics and emotions in the pre-modern, or more particularly the Sanskrit, literary and philosophical traditions. Emotions have become a particular point of inquiry in the contemporary world. They’ve arisen particularly because of the increased scientific capacity to scan brains and to follow our intellectual and emotional activities through patterns in our brain. This goes back to a longer history of Western philosophical interest in the relationship between emotions and cognitions. More particularly, the contrast between reason, judgement, cognition – the rational side of the human intellect and the emotions which seem to seize us, the whole of us, throughout our lives. This contrastive relationship between reason and emotion, led in the modern scientific era, to ask what the relationship between them could be, and perhaps to some extent, this goes back even further to Aristotle and the Greek philosophical tradition.
Aristotle talked about emotions primarily in the context of rhetoric. That is to say, what is the relationship between argument to persuade people, which is the use of reason, and rhetoric, which is the mobilisation of emotion to persuade people? So already in Aristotle, you see this interesting and dynamic tension between emotion on the one side, and reason and cognition on the other. Now, this relationship was also found in the classical Indian traditions. It was observed that when people lose their temper, they don't always argue clearly or that in the grip of jealousy or love, people do crazy things.
However, that was not the context in which the systematic understanding of emotion rose in classical India. It did, around the start of the common era, in the somewhat surprising context of dramaturgy. That is to say, the overarching rules and regulations and theory of how to mount plays. This was done in a work called the Nāṭya Shāstra, or the treatise on drama, by an author who's called Bharata, although we don't know anything particular about him. In the treatise on drama, apart from talking about costumes and stage craft and the depiction of characters and so on, Bharata very interestingly set aside two chapters to talk about the underlying theoretical or aesthetic foundation of a good play. One was on the concept of ‘Rasa’, which literally means juice or essence. And in this, he articulated the idea that every play conveyed certain dominant aesthetic essences, most important of them being the erotic and the tragic, but also including others like the comic and so on.
In another chapter, he then tackled the question of how this aesthetic essence was depicted by the actors, and he made the case that: correlated with these aesthetic essences of Rasa were things that were called ‘bhāvas’. ‘Bhāva’ literally means a condition, but when you see what the bhavas are, you could see why in modern translations we almost always use the word emotion. He talked about ‘Rati’, which is broadly romantic love, or ‘Shoka’, which means grief and so on. He then said that the aesthetic essence of a play was conveyed through the dominance of a particular emotion. But it was not only that. It's also that conveying such a thing as love or grief required also a huge ecology of affect. Transient emotions, physical displays or behaviour, mental proclivities. All of these were seen as aspects of the depiction of an emotion. Such things as eyes flitting sideways, or blushing, or lips throbbing and so forth might all be different aspects of the occurrence of the emotion of love, which would be the dominant emotion in a play whose aesthetic essence was the erotic.
So Bharata created, what I'm calling, an ecology of affect. He ran through the whole gamut of the human being’s physical and other types of responses, what was both inward and outward, as well as the environment in which these things happened. For example, it was seen as aesthetically impossible to convey the occurrence of love in an unpleasant setting like a graveyard full of corpses. It had to include evocative environments such as beautiful gardens or a wet and rainy night and so forth. So, in this ostensibly dramaturgical composition, Bharata introduced the variety of ways in which a human being is an emotional being. In the centuries thereafter, this interplay between the aesthetic and the emotional also came to be applied by theorists not only to plays and their production and performance, but also to poetry in other forms of the written word. Questions arose, considering: how do you convey through words, through sentences, the resonances of a particular kind of emotion and the construction of an aesthetic?
Even more importantly, later theorists, chief among them the 11th-century Kashmiri polymath Abhinava Gupta, highlighted that the question of the relationship between aesthetics and emotion was not only in the work of the playwright or the poet, and not only in the performance of the actor or the interrelationship between words, but in how they were received by the reader, by the viewer. It was the transformation of our experience upon contact with a play or a poem that is the aesthetic moment. So our consciousness, Abhinava argued, is transformed – provided we are prepared for it when we watch a play or read a poem. In order to do that, he mentioned he saw a very fruitful circulation between the consciousness of the connoisseur, the reader or the viewer, and the artistic product which was meant to convey the aesthetic essence. Because, Abhinava pointed out the playwright, the actor, the poet, but also the viewer or the reader, needed to know what love was or grief was in order to appreciate its aesthetic possibilities.
In other words, we need to live that life. Why would it make sense to think there is something romantic about the rain, but not about a swarm of mosquitoes? It's because in our world, our effective environment prepares us, gives us, as it were, an implicit philosophical anthropology of emotions. We already have, tacitly in us, an understanding of what emotions are, which allows us, our consciousness, to be suitably transformed in contact with the play or the poem. And you can't just wander in and do it, you have to cultivate it, which is why you might have in an audience a huge variety of responses to a fine performance. The more cultivated the person – that is to say: the more prepared they were, the more they had disciplined their own self understanding of their affective environment – the more open they were to having their consciousness transformed by the wonder of the performance or the wonder of the words.
But Abhinava argued that was only one side of it. The other was in being affected by that aesthetic moment – in having our consciousness transformed – we become more sensitive to our own emotional lives. We are able to deal with what happens to us because we have opened ourselves to the world of the poem or the play, therefore there’s a circulation of affect between the viewer or the reader on the one hand and the play or the poem on the other. Now seen this way, you have an explicit theoretical understanding of something that has, of course, always been known in all cultures, which is that it's in great literature and other forms of art that we encounter the full richness of emotional possibilities as a human being. But whereas literary theory in the West and the kind of understanding of the moral psychology and the emotional environment of human beings were drawn through the reading of literary work, you had that as a separate development from the study of emotion philosophically and laterally, psychologically or neurologically in its relationship to the mind and the brain.
How do you bring them together? Well, in the Indian tradition, you have an alternative way. You have explicitly an account by which it is in the poem or the play that emotions are both encountered and learned from. Seen that way, I believe that we can go back to this tradition and lay out how we might approach the complexity of that ecology of the affect, how the interaction between palpitations and love might actually be something that has always been recognised by the great poets and the great playwrights. So when we reach now towards a multidisciplinary but also multicultural understanding of emotions, when we try and better understand ourselves through all the modes of knowledge in our understanding and in our reach, it might be, I think, a potentially fruitful way to go back to Indian aesthetic theory and ask ourselves what we might learn from it. Because in the aesthetic world of classical India is a mirror to hold up to our face of emotions.
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad FBA is the Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University.
