Rasa Unbound
A Socio-Political Reflection on Liberated Emotions
Gone are the days when emotions were largely considered something to be restrained. While the “stiff upper lip” – a disposition of remaining calm and unemotional in any situation (no matter the difficulty) – may still linger in the norms of some (especially British) classes, things have most definitely changed. By contrast to the ‘stiff upper lip’, perhaps the social value of this new state of things could be playfully described as the ‘limp lower lip.’ To over-regulate one’s emotions or those of another is largely considered anathema to a life well lived, in which the free expression of one’s emotions can be a sign of someone liberated from oppressive forces. The Victorian period marked the inverse of this era, when Sigmund Freud developed his practice of psychoanalysis (a precursor of modern psychology still practiced today), in which individuals investigate (sometimes ad nauseum) the experiences of their lives and the repressed emotions latent within them. Psychoanalysis and modern therapy allow emotions and traumas to be explored in a safe private container, allowing individuals to experience a kind of narrative catharsis of repressed emotions through an accounting of early childhood experiences. In recent years, personal issues and traumas have become the bedrock of a new kind of social currency. Rather than an orientation toward keeping emotions contained within the private sphere, many now share their traumas and personal challenges on social media platforms, a new cultural virtue that is perhaps implicitly justified by the feminist axiom ‘the personal is political (or at least social)’ and that every intimate personal consideration should be shared because it will help a community or audience.
When Freud made his paradigm-shifting proclamations about repressed emotions and the unconscious, he was working within a cultural milieu in which emotionless rationality was paramount. The philosophical defence of this attitude was that, while reason and rationality are capacities that must be cultivated through critical thinking and education, reason and rationality were objective human faculties, whereas emotions are subjective by nature. Of course, it turns out that rationality was born from a patriarchal ideological environment, where women were seen as rationally rudderless and overwhelmed by their emotions. As such, they were considered ill-suited to the matters of state, politics, and the level-headedness required for commerce. We see this earlier condition reflected in words that remain widely used today. A term that was coined by the ancient Greeks and adopted theoretically by Freud, the word “hysterical” (from the Greek “hystera”) means “womb”, and was initially imagined as the result of a ‘wandering uterus’, a medical or psychological condition said to cause women to become overly emotional. For Freud, hysterical became the name of a neurotic condition that he considered specific to women. This gendered meaning has since been critiqued and rejected by feminist thinkers, however the imperative statement “don’t get hysterical” is still used in modern parlance. Even the semantic shift toward its association with comedy (“that comedian was so hysterical!”) could perhaps be traced back to a patriarchal response to a fantasy of female hysteria, because ‘in the face of such silly, emotional women, all one can do is laugh.’
In today’s social marketplace, those emotions that would previously have been seen as features of a neurotic psychological condition have become rich and effective resource materials for the information economy. Keeping your emotions private is less respected than putting all your stuff out there for the world to see, which is labeled a kind of courageous – even radical – gesture of freedom and honesty. The burgeoning field of thought and practice around trauma will perhaps one day be considered the completion of Freud’s initial theory of repressed emotions. For if the public space of the ancient Greek polis was once considered a place of citizenship, debate and deliberation, it was characterized by the sequestering of emotions into a ‘private realm’ in the collective pursuit of a common good. From a picture of the common good supposedly deduced from a principle of ‘objective reason’, the tides have turned toward a generalized rejection – although not often made explicit – of a ‘common good’ and the embrace of something like the ‘emancipation of personal good’. In a late capitalist economy of individualism, the personal good is as valuable as what makes it different from the status quo. Hence, the battle cries of ‘tell your story’ and ‘speak your truth’ transform into a socially-sanctioned impulse to express yourself in all your beautiful and heart-breaking emotional complexity.
Insofar as the ‘common good’ is still prevalent as a political value, it is now dispersed into various social groups and identities that are often circumscribed by shared emotional, psychological, or socio-political experiences. The idea of a common good that would embrace and include all of these groups is now considered a suspicious – and to some people even a malevolent – privileging of one group’s particular good that will necessarily exclude or marginalize groups that do not buy into this notion of the good. We can see the ramifications of this ideology pervasive in our politics. The discourse and statements of politicians running for office focus on a collection of ‘single issues’ that will build a large enough coalition to win, and any talk of the common good is basically absent – discarded as a quaint relic of the colonial past. The single issues that bear the most political fruit are generally the ones that produce the most emotional capital; at least for the moment, those emotions that produce political benefits are seemingly that of fear and anger. The more a people’s fears, anxieties, and resentments can be harnessed, the more likely they will be to get off the couch and vote. Indeed, once considered an obstacle to citizenship and the art of persuasion, our politics have become almost entirely driven by two emotions that have a tendency to divide us.
Whether or not one agrees with the original ideology of an objective common good, it is not difficult to recognize the damage that is done by releasing the floodgates of emotion and manipulating them at the convenience of political power or social capital. But doesn’t this circumstance imply an opposite side of the same cultural coin? Those societies deriving from the intellectual history of Europe and the Anglo-American world are perhaps caught in a loop spawned by an early history of emotional repression. If emotions were for too long repressed and subjugated, then the inverse of that repression is a liberation of emotions. Instead of keeping things private, it becomes a kind of social responsibility to not repress your emotions. And since emotional experiences are deemed mostly individual or based on group identification, a common good that transcends personal or group identification is mostly imagined as a negative repression of individual emotions. The common good can then become, at best, a principle of ‘tolerance’ or ‘pluralism’; and while these are incredibly important virtues to be cultivated (especially in our times), what remains intact is the siloing of different identity and group-based emotions that – though necessary to creating a culture of mutual respect – amounts to a rather un-inspiring political project lacking in a newfound vision of emotional solidarity. In the face of our present cultural dichotomy between either repressed emotions or divisive emotions, an alternative presents itself: cultivating an alternative socio-political vision that mobilizes shared emotions not so as to drive a wedge between identities and groups, but rather to inspire and unite us around what we might call a ‘new political work of art’.
To even begin imagining such a contemplative political vision requires us to understand how we are situated, and to cultivate an awareness of the implicit theory of human emotions that is operating in the background. This implicit theory assumes a doctrine that emotions are subjective feelings that arise in the mind, and – from the perspective of trauma and somatic studies – are features of an embodied history that can only ever be specific to one particular body at a time. While we may share traumas and the disorientation of social marginalization with others, how we relate to others with regard to these experiences is as potentially variable as there are numbers of physical bodies in the world. While certainly not untrue from a certain perspective, what characterizes this picture of emotions is that it is ultimately contingent to autonomous bodies that are necessarily distinct from one another. Even after the personal became political, the dominant picture of emotions remains rooted in individualism and will by definition frustrate any vision of the collective if the notion of the ‘collective’ or the ‘common’ is purely rooted in individualistic affirmation. Since it is arguably pragmatically impossible to give political voice to every unique narrative and story of every individual life, a conception of emotions solely rooted in separation can contribute to the inevitable decline of shared norms, values, and commitments. Indeed, this fraying of social bonds has long been in motion, but in recent years we have watched – many of us with horror – as this circumstance comes to a fever pitch.
Augmenting our Understanding of Emotions through Rasa
Of course, we are not looking to dismantle this understanding of emotions, as certainly it has had a fruitful impact on society – often giving voice to the voiceless. Instead, an investigation of emotions as they are understood in the theory of rasa will augment our understanding of emotions with another level of knowing. Resultingly, the hope and intention is that we not only become wiser in our relationships and more skilful in our politics, but also that we learn how to use our emotions rather than simply make space for them. The theory of rasa as found in the work of 10th century philosopher Abhinavagupta and some of his contemporaries reveals a consideration of emotions that is, as far as I am aware, utterly absent from the Western intellectual landscape. As a philosophy that is focused on how drama and poetry produced certain effects in the reader or observer, it is typically studied by academic specialists exclusively with regards to these artistic practices. However, in Abhinavagupta, Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, and others, an ancient theory takes a “spiritual turn” and in so doing holds implications that extend far beyond the domains of theatre and literature. These theorists consider how our experience of art articulates something about experience in general. As a result, a philosophical understanding emerges that expands our understanding of aesthetic emotions into a metaphysics of emotions more broadly. Therefore, it could be a salve uniquely beneficial to a moment when our understanding of emotions has congealed around a limited range of assumptions, doctrines, and traditions of psychological knowledge.
A key feature of rasa theory is that the aestheticized emotions (rasas) are “universal” or “common”. Or, rather, when rasas are evoked through aesthetic experience, they participate in a set of “commonized” (sādhāraṇīkaraṇa) emotions. An idea of the universal that is necessarily emotional is in sharp contrast to an idea of the universal that is beyond the sphere of emotions. Extrapolating an implication of this view, even “objective reason” is not divorced from emotions but is rather what emerges from the emotions being organized in a particular way. People only participate in certain forms of reasoning because they are emotionally inclined to do so. Another way of expressing this is to say that all knowledge arises from a particular mood or temperament, so if we want to change our knowledge, we have to address the epistemological function of cultivating another mood and temperament. As being universally emotional beings, refusing to acknowledge that emotions inform our ability to engage in reasoning or ‘critical thinking’ is to sidestep an important contemplative process that would contribute to our ability to transcend the current impasse of social division and cultural distress.
In this sense, the “objective” or “universal” is something that has to be seen as interior to a particular emotional resonance. For Abhinavagupta’s theory, the resonance that is most universal is śānta-rasa – the rasa of peace and equanimity. It is a compact mass of embodied bliss that we all share and have the capacity to encounter through the right aesthetic conditions. While rasa theory in its textual sources is a theory of aesthetics – and especially drama, or theatre – its implications extend to the theatre of social and political life. The rasa-inspired prescription I’m suggesting is therefore three-fold: (1) we transform our relationship to the arts as something that has significant social and political implications by harnessing and refining our emotional capacities, (2) we develop a personal playhouse of contemplative sādhana that understands emotions not as obstacles to contemplative experience but its very foundation, and (3) we begin to construct a new socio-political theory that recognizes that our media, our public discourse, and the technologies we are attached to is a collective performance that is unconsciously evoking and animating certain emotions at the same time that it neglects other emotions. This last aspect of rasa’s implications is the furthest from our grasp, but perhaps the most important for our times. If we do not want to live in a world of hate, fear, and anger, we have to recognize the way certain narratives, mythologies, and stories that we cyclically repeat to ourselves are performances creating the conditions for the world we are living in. We are locked in a dialectic of political options that are unimaginative and assume the objective inevitability of the status quo.
One area in which we can leverage rasa theory in the service of a new social performance that evokes the equanimous rasa for a wider range of peoples is what is often referred to as the art of persuasion. The core of the prevailing idea is that, if we just reason with people, give them the right arguments and counter-arguments, and if we show them “the facts”, then they will ultimately become persuaded by the clarity and validity of one’s position. As a practice conceived in this way, the emotions are considered unimportant, because persuasion is intended to appeal to humanity’s capacity to reason. But again and again, those who desire to persuade others find themselves stumbling on the emotional rigidity of someone’s personal or political position. There increasingly seems to be no amount of persuasion that will shake someone free of their ideological commitments, unless those being persuaded are already emotionally responsive to persuasion articulated in a logical way. Alternatively, if we reimagine persuasion as a process that first understands the locus of emotions around which someone’s position is constructed, we can begin to discover how storytelling, narrative, and innovations of imagination are more effective at persuading others than the rigid norms of linear logic. Because reason, according to this view, is a faculty that necessarily includes emotion, a more pragmatic ‘art of persuasion’ will begin to acknowledge the truth revealed in the expression itself – that persuasion is an art. If persuasion is a form of art, and all art has a medium (the material an artist uses to create a work of art), then rasa theory inspires us to expand the medium of persuasion beyond its attachment to norms of intellectual debate toward an embrace of those experiential manifestations of creativity that persuade not just at an intellectual level, but at an emotional one. From a form of “objective reasoning” we shift to an “aesthetic reasoning” – a reasoning that transforms emotional stagnation and contraction into a reorganization of those liberative emotions that culminate in peace and equanimity.
This reflection was inspired by our Spring course of study in Embodied Philosophy’s Sādhana School exploring a tradition of aesthetic knowledge known as Rasa Theory. This Spring sādhana continues the work of building a new community of yoga practitioners, teachers, and deep spiritual practitioners who are committed to the deeper teachings and subtle practices of yoga. If you’re interested in learning more about the curriculum and schedule, go here.