Parallel to the controversy about the poetic use of language that went on from about the fourth century onwards and culminated in the ninth century, in Anandavardhana's work, the Dhvanyaloka, and Abhinavagupta's commentary on it, the Locana, a similar controversy went on in India among aestheticians during the ninth and the tenth centuries about the response to and experience of emotions represented or expressed in drama andpoetry, which culminated in Abhinavagupta's phenomenology of aesthetic experience. The controversy was carried on in the commentaries on Bharata's Natyasastra which are themselves lost or still hidden undiscovered in manuscript liberaries. But Abhinavagupta summarises the controversy with amazing detachment and objectivity before presenting his own doctrine of aesthetic experience (The Abhinavabharati, second edition, Gaekwad's Oriental Series, 1956, Vol I, pp. 272 - 285). R. Gnoli has edited this summary in his book, "The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta", Second edition, pp. 3 - 22. The same controversy is presented in a few other mediaeval Sanskrit texts too. I have followed Gnoli's edition. This thesis is an exposition and an interpretation, in the light of contemporary British and American philosophical aesthetics, of the above controversy. My own comment and criticism are interspersed with exposition and interpretation. At the end of the thesis it is hoped that there emerges reasonably clearly an important analysis of, if not the, a way of experiencing emotions represented or expressed in art, and this analysis is contrasted with that implicit or presented in the contemporary philosophical literature on the topic which I have called the "orthodox" contemporary position. Finally, on the basis of my presentation of this aspect of Indian aesthetics, it is hoped that if other aspects of Indian aesthetics are also interpreted in a Western language with the help of recently developed techniques of Western philosophy a fruitful collaboration between Western and Indian aesthetics will follow and bring about a further healthy cross-fertilization of ideas.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:568807 |
| Date | January 1970 |
| Creators | Gamlath, S. |
| Publisher | Birkbeck (University of London) |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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