Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 3. Literature, Art, Beauty and Yoga
Section 3. Beauty and Its Appreciation
Appreciation of Beauty

Physical Beauty and Sex-Sensation [1]

Why should the pure sense of beauty have been so distorted by human beings as to be turned into desire for touch or sex?

It is part of the general degradation which things divine have been subjected to in the evolution out of the material Inconscience under the pressure of the Powers of the Ignorance.

Are there people who have not been affected by this vital impurity and who appreciate beauty in a subtle aesthetic way only?

Yes, certainly. Artists who have trained their mind to a purely aesthetic look at beauty and beautiful things — for one instance. There are many others also, who have a sufficiently developed refinement of the aesthetic sense not to associate it with the crude vital wish for possession, enjoyment or sensual contact.

6 April 1933