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“Catharsis and Rasa”
C. N. PATEL
beauty of not the West, called thecussion among
Catharsis and rasa are related concepts, in that they seek to explain the central feature of all aesthetic experience, namely, that it is so basically different from ordinry experience that, whatever the subject or object which stimulates it, it is always pleasurable. This feature of aesthetic experience arrests attention with striking vividness in our response to tragedy in which emotions which would be painful in real life are so transformed as to excite a pleasurable thrill ending in a feeling akin to "The still sad music of humanity" to which the beauty of nature opened Wordsworth's ears. Aristotle, the first systematic literary critic in the West, called this process catharsis. He did not define the term and there has been a long discussion among critics and students of poetry about what he may have meant. Similarly, in the Indian tradition, too, Bharata, the first systematic writer on poetics, merely mentions how rasa is generated without explaining what he means by rasa and how it differs from the pleasurable emotions of ordinary experience. Later writers took up the concept and made it the subject of an absorbing speculation about the nature of aesthetic experience.
Though Western and Indian writers on poetic experience thus deal with the same problem, their treatment of the subject differs completely from each other's. The difference springs from a more fundamental difference between the two philosophical attitudes, the transcendental and the empirical. The former looks upon the waking state as an aspect of a larger reality not accessible in full to that state. whereas the latter confines itself to man's experience in the waking state, and even when it concerns itself, as it does in some areas of modern psychology, with unconscious or subconscious levels of the human psyche which reveal themselves in dream experiences, it seeks to understand those experiences in terms of standards and principles derived from the waking state. The Western philosophical tradition oscillates between these two poles, Plato being the typical representative of the transcendental pole and Aristotle of the empirical. Indian tradition remained anchored to the transcendental framework and produced no thinker corresponding to the figure of Aristotle in the West.
This difference in approach reflected itself in the field of aesthetics. The transcendental view regards the experience of beauty as a reflection on the human plane of a spiritual state, whereas the empirical view of it regards it as one expression of man's emotional nature to be understood in terms of its other expressions. Plato, however, did not extend this aesthetic principle to the experience of poetry or the arts. On the contrary, he regarded them as obstacles to the realization of pure truth and spiritual freedom. Western poetics, beginning with Aristotle, has developed in reply to this view of Plato.
