Thursday, April 25, 2013

Sublimity, Sublimation, Dionysian, Sexuality

In #39 of WWR, Schopenhauer characterizes the feeling of the Sublime as that of "the beautiful only by the addition, namely the exaltation beyond the known hostile relation of the contemplated object to the will in general."  So, in the few, and brief, allusions to Sublimity in Birth of Tragedy, e. g. section 4, Nietzsche seems to agree with Schopenhauer, i. e. that it is the production of Beauty via the overcoming of suffering, and, hence, is an Apollinian effect.  However, in what subsequently becomes the more significant characterization of it, because it seems to anticipate Freud, in #189 of Beyond Good and Evil, he observes how "the sex drive sublimated itself into love", which, in that context, is clearly an intimation that 'love' is a ruse of the sex drive.  In other words, in that passage, Sublimation is a Dionysian effect masquerading as an Apollinian device, or, as he puts it in #22 of BT, a "symbolization of Dionysian wisdom through Apollinian artifices."  While it is unclear if Freud analogously attributes Sublimation to the Id, the relevance of Nietzsche's analysis to contemporary notions of 'romantic love' is more obvious.

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