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some works, even representations of deity. The aesthetic value of ugliness is discussed in the essay "The Beautiful and the Ugly." Beauty is objective: “the aesthetic attitude does not create but only discovers beauty or ugliness" (1 358). It is also subjective: "what particular symmetrical form is beautiful depends on the intuition of the artist." In Indian art, which "is prevailingly abstractive or contemplative in character and not dynamically creative,” the aesthetic essence is conceived as a subjective absolute or rasa rather than an objective absolute or beauty (I 357).114 Even when discovered, the aesthetic quality is discovered not by cognition but by feeling, which implies identification of subject and object (I 358). But their distinction is also felt-not at all in primary feeling, explicitly in sympathetic feeling, merged with identity in contemplative feeling. Where enjoyment, the feeling of identity, is subordinate to pain, the feeling of difference, a feeling of ugliness emerges (I 359). It is a power, not necessarily actualized, of the artistic spirit to transmute painful feelings into enjoyment (1 360). Aesthetic effort deepens the feeling of ugliness into enjoyment and so realizes the ugly, in the perspective of its infinite setting, as beautiful (1 362). The emergence of Beauty from the ugly, Bhattacharyya remarks, does credit both to Indian art itself and to its theory (I 363).
Value, the content of feeling, is analyzed in the article “The Concept of Value” published in 1934. The analysis reflects the influence, but nowise a mere following, of Kant:115 “the feeling that I reflectively feel is not taken as any one's feeling in particular: it is unappropriated or impersonalised rather than universalised” (II 287). Unlike known object, which is completely distinct from the knowing, felt value is only imperfectly distinct from the feeling (II 285) and cannot be spoken without reference to the feeling. The value is identified with the object, although the object is not identified with the value. Speaking of a value in an object indicates the objectivity of value resulting from the impersonalization of the feeling (II 288). Value is objective, independent of valuation (II 290); the object is beautiful, not merely to me (II 287). But it is not an adjective of the object (II 289)—although by a necessary illusion it is spoken of as if it were. Expression of felt character (It is a cool breeze) leads to expression of feeling
114 Compare P. J. Chaudhury, Studies in Aesthetics (Calcutta, 1964), 23: "Indian aestheticians do not consider beauty as an objective reality so much. They deal with the perception of the beautiful which is an enjoyed characteristic like taste or flavour (rasa) rather than a substantive entity."
115 Studies in Kant were published the following year.
