“Rasa and Eros: Abhinavagupta’s Rasa Theory Compared to Psyche’s Response to Beauty in Plotinus”

This paper will compare Abhinavagupta's theory of rasa, or aesthetic contemplation, and his notion of camatkāra, or aesthetic relishing, to Plotinus’s descriptions and explanations of the soul’s erotic responses to beauty. Abhinavagupta (ca. 950–1020) was one of the most influential masters of the Pratyabhijna School of nondual Saiva philosophy of Kashmir. He is famous for his synthesis of several schools of Indian tantric practice and philosophy, as well as for his writings on aesthetics, mostly concerning Indian literature and theater. His formulation of the theory of rasa influenced Indian aesthetics for centuries. According to this theory, a suitably prepared spectator will experience certain feelings (rasas) evoked by the performance of a play, in a special way: they are universalized, divested of any relation to the place and time of the spectator or the actor. Thus they are not the feeling responses, which might be disturbing or unpleasant, we would have if actually faced with the situation depicted in the play. This freedom from our own reactions enables the feeling to be experienced in a more spacious, free, and disinterested manner, that is, as a rasa. If this attitude could be engendered in the midst of everyday life, we could experience all of our life aesthetically, as does the tantric sage.

Another key element in Abhinavagupta’s theory is that of camatkāra, or aesthetic relish. His account of camatkāra connects his aesthetic theory to his metaphysics because camatkāra is possible only because ultimate reality is a union of Śiva, illuminating awareness (prakāśa), and Śakti, reflective awareness (vimarśa). Ultimately, the experience of beauty is an experience of our own deepest nature.

Plotinus has several striking descriptions of the soul’s erotic responses to beauty, many drawn from Plato’s descriptions of the lover in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus. These descriptions of the soul’s experience of delight, yearning, and becoming erotically stirred are comparable to Abhinavagupta’s descriptions of rasa and camatkāra. But unlike Abhinavagupta’s seamless integration of aesthetics and metaphysics, there are difficulties in fitting Plotinus’s account of the soul’s response to beauty into his overall account of the soul because he holds that the soul is unaffectable. Plotinus defends this claim in 3.6.1–5, tackling the hard cases of human emotion, which seem to show that soul undergoes affections. Plotinus argues that even the phase of soul that is most closely associated with the body, i.e., the nutritive faculty, actively forms fully fledged emotions as transitions to energeia (activity) rather than passively undergoing an experience (affection), and is thus unaffected.