Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 3. Literature, Art, Beauty and Yoga
Section 3. Beauty and Its Appreciation
General Remarks on Beauty

Experience of Beauty

In a recent poem, Harin makes the following observation on Beauty:

Beauty is not an attitude of sense

Nor an inherent something everywhere,

But keen reality of experience

Of which even beauty is all unaware,

Adding to it a living truth; intense

And ever living, that were else, not there.

How far is it correct to say that Beauty has no objective existence in itself and that it consists only of the subjective experience of the observer?

All things are creations of the Universal Consciousness, Beauty also. The “experience” of the individual is his response or his awakening to the beauty which the Universal Consciousness has placed in things; that beauty is not created by the individual consciousness. The philosophy of these lines is not at all clear. It says that the experience of beauty is a living truth added to beauty, a truth of which beauty is unaware. But if beauty is only the experience itself, then the experience constitutes beauty, it does not add anything to beauty; for such addition would only be possible if beauty already existed in itself apart from the experience. What is meant by saying that beauty is unaware of the experience which creates it? The passage makes sense only if we suppose it to mean that beauty is a “reality” already existing apart from the experience, but unconscious of itself and the consciousness of experience is therefore a living truth added to the unconscious reality, something which brings into it consciousness and life.

6 January 1937