Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Archive

 

 

Volume 14 Number 3, December 2013

___________________________________________________________________

 

On the Transdisciplinarity of Freudian Sublimation

 

by 

 

 Jonathan Michael Dickstein

Claremont Graduate University

 

Abstract

The present article argues that Sigmund Freud’s definition and deployment of the term sublimation is transdisciplinary. That is, the term indicates the cooperation of several fields of knowledge. I trace the history of the usage of this term’s cognates (such as ὕψους (hupsous), sublime, sublimirt, Sublimierung) through Greek, Latin, English, and German texts in order to defend this thesis. I conclude that, for Freud, the process of sublimation amounts to the coincidence of irreconcilable categories—in particular, psychical and physical, real and ideal, abstract and concrete, waking life and dream. In this way, the process also denotes both the way in which qualitative and quantitative disciplines depend on each other for their own operations and also the way in which such disciplines operate as one.

 

Keywords: sublime, sublimation, transdisciplinary, Freud, discipline, disciplines

Transdisciplinary studies ventures both to preserve and unite methodological diversities in an age of globalization. In the “Charter of Transdisciplinarity,” Lima de Freitas, Edgar Morin and Basarab Nicolescu together explain: “[transdisciplinary studies] occasions the emergence of new data and new interactions from out of the encounter between disciplines” (Freitas, Morin and Nicolescu, 1994, n.p.). Transdisciplinary studies thus founds concepts that indicate the cooperation of several fields of knowledge.

Insofar as Sigmund Freud’s account of sublimation (in German, Sublimierung) evokes a history of discussions of etymologically similar and identical terms from disciplines as diverse as alchemy, aesthetics, theology, psychology, philosophy, and biology, it represents a transdisciplinary concept. To support this thesis, the present paper examines the usage of sublimation and/or its etymological relatives in the writings of Roger Bacon, Basilius Valentinus, Longinus, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Novalis, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche in order to judge them against Freud’s account. It concludes that the lattermost maintains the diversity of its predecessors’ disciplinary-specific interests without privileging any one of them and, for that reason, demonstrates an unbiased means to unify distinct methodologies.

 

The earliest usage of cognates of the term sublimation involves two distinct strands: one alchemical and the other aesthetical. However, while distinct, these strands also relate through their mutual dependence on theology. The first strand (the alchemical one) includes texts from the Middle Ages—composed roughly between the fifth and fifteenth centuries. In general, such texts use Latin cognates such as the verb “sublimi” or the noun “sublimatio” to describe one of many processes whereby metals assume divine and thereby curative properties. Roger Bacon’s thirteenth-century piece “Of the Medicine or Tincture of Antimony” demonstrates this point, albeit in a negative fashion:

But some ignorant and indiscreet people think, that when they had Antimony, they would deal well enough with it by Calcination, others by Sublimation, and some by Reverberation, thereby to obtain its great Mystery and perfect Medicine. But I tell you, that here in this place it availes not in the least, either Calcination, Sublimation, or Reverberation, whereby afterwards a perfect extraction can or might be done or effected with profit, to transmute the meaner into a better Metallick virtue; for it is impossible for you. (Bacon, 1671, pp. 154-5)

 

Here Bacon identifies “Sublimation” as a process that could make metals celestial and medicinal. But for Bacon sublimation is not the only process to do so. He also lists “Calcination” and “Reverberation.” Moreover, the metal antimony demands a fourth unnamed process. Nevertheless, Bacon’s passage, in a negative way, defines sublimation as one of many theologically-infused alchemical processes.

 

In his fifteenth-century work Of Natural and Supernatural Things, Basilius Valentinus clarifies this definition. He writes:

 

Many one may here demand . . . how such a Spirit of Mercury may be procured[.] . . . Take a Red Quick-silver Ore which is like unto Sinople (or Vermilion) and the best Gold Ore you can get; grind of each a like quantity both together, before they partake of any fire, poure an Oyl of Mercury, upon it made per se, of common, purified and sublimed Quicksilver. (Valentinus, 1671, p. 55)

 

As the term sublimation did for Bacon, the term sublime for Valentinus denotes a process, through which the metal mercury obtains spiritual and thereby salutary properties. Being sublimed, the metal assumes a divine status, which makes it useful “for [the] prevention of Diseases” (p. 57). Like this then, Bacon and Valentinus infuse the alchemical process of sublimation with theological ideas.

 

The second strand of the early history of the term sublimation (namely, the aesthetic one) measures the meaning of the word in a similar way. In general, relevant texts employ a cognate, the noun sublime, to designate a godlike—both wonderful and frightening—state of being of perceived objects. This meaning derives from a first-century Greek treatise on rhetoric entitled περὶ ὕψους (peri hupsous), the author of which, though uncertain, was likely a man named Longinus, “the Greek tutor and political adviser of Zenobia” (Lang, 1890, n.p.). Its Latin form sublimi and English cognate sublime derive from Pietro Pagano’s sixteenth-century translation of the Greek text: Dionysii Longini De Sublimi dicendi genere liber a Petro Pagano latinitate donates (Venice, Vincenzo Valgrisi: 1572) (Refini, 2012, p. 35). Since this translation, most scholars have renamed the original source De Sublimitate or On the Sublime.[1] Moreover, following Longinus’ text, all aesthetic interpretations of the sublime repeat the literal meaning of the original title—which in English denotes ‘about height’—and its explicit connection to the divine.

 

Indeed Longinus’ treatise itself delimits the Greek word ὕψους with regard to elevation and God. He writes: “the Sublime [ὕψους], wherever it occurs, consists in a certain loftiness and excellence of language, and that it is by this, and this only, that the greatest poets and prose-writers have gained eminence, and won themselves a lasting place in the Temple of Fame” (Longinus, 1890, p. 2). Longinus thus employs the term ὕψους to describe a mode of discourse. For him it represents language of an elevated character. He distinguishes it from persuasive language insofar as the latter merely “confounds our judgment . . . To believe [in it] or not is usually in our own power” (p. 2). Conversely, ὕψους exceeds reason; “[it acts] with an imperious and irresistible force” (p. 2). It is by nature beyond belief. Witnesses have no choice whether to accept it or not. They must and do fall subject to it. Later in his work Longinus connects this indomitable power of ὕψους to God. He writes: “[ὕψους] bursts out with a kind of ‘fine madness’ and divine inspiration, and falls on our ears like the voice of a god” (p. 14). The original Greek term for the sublime thus classifies a type of discourse, which compels reaction, stifles sense, and above all manifests divinity. It functions as both a term to describe the aesthetics of rhetoric and also a term to indicate the presence of the divine in human-made creations.

 

During the Middle Ages this aesthetic usage assumed an even more explicit theological function in both religious texts and poetry. Like the work of the alchemists, these texts employed the term as a verb to denote a process whereby something acquires divine properties. However, unlike the alchemists’ view and in the spirit of Longinus, this something for poets and priests of the Middle Ages was human-made (like language or thought) rather than material (like metal). The Oxford English Dictionaries’ fifth definition of the verb sublime cites Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella: “Those words which doe sublime the quintessence of blisse” (Sidney, approx. 1580, qtd. in OED, 2012, n.p.). The dictionary also cites a seventeenth-century sermon by George Benson: “Let your thoughts be sublimed by the spirit of God” (Benson qtd. in OED, 2012, n.p.). Indeed Sidney’s passage develops Longinus’ definition of ὕψους—as an ideal quality of discourse. Benson’s passage further reveals the divine nature of this quality. Both passages thus indicate the increasing connection between the aesthetic and theological notions of the sublime.

 

Edmund Burke’s seminal work on the aesthetics of the sublime, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, further maintains this connection. In it Burke expands Longinus’ notion of ὕψους, now the English word sublime, to include not only discourse but all perceptible objects. He does so by developing his theory around a philosophy of the human being and its relationship to society. He recapitulates his argument as follows:

 

The passions which belong to self-preservation [as opposed to society] turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime. (Burke, 2008, p. 85)

 

The sublime for Burke involves the presentation of something which could cause pain or death, but does not. It represents the source of “pain” or “danger” without producing it. The sublime for him is not specific to rhetoric. Rather it reveals itself in sundry perceptible objects. Burke offers examples of things as diverse as silence, loudness, darkness, brightness, and the idea of infinity (pp. 96-100, 129-32, and 144-47). Throughout these he maintains a theological ground—insofar as God functions as the standard for and source of such qualities (p. 117). In this way Burke’s text illuminates the essence of the aesthetic strand of the history of the sublime: its insistence on the divine properties of perceptible objects.

 

Burke’s interpretation of the sublime in general completes the term’s early history. After him then its meaning undergoes a series of transformations, which correspond to both the gradual merger of the aesthetic and alchemical strands and also the introduction of new disciplines for its interpretation. Significantly, these transformations take place in German writings, which up to this point reserved the Latin term sublimi and the French and English term sublime for alchemical topics alone. In “The Sublime: In Alchemy, Aesthetics and Psychoanalysis,” Jan Cohn and Thomas H. Miles explain that this reservation “is evidenced in the German translations of Longinus’s περὶ ὕψους that postdate [both Pagano’s early Latin translation and] Boileau’s [more famous] 1674 [French translation] Traite du sublime . . . [such as] Verhandeling over de Verheventheit en Deftigheit des Styls … (Amsterdam, 1719); Longin vom Erhabenen … (Leipzig, 1781); Dionysios oder Longinos, ueber das Erhabene … (Kempton, 1895)” (Cohn an Miles, 1977, p. 293). These translations, which all come after Pagano’s and Boileau’s, replace the respectively Latin word “sublimi” and French word “sublime” with the German nominalized adjective “Erhaben,” which means exalted thing. Thus, in spite of foreign interpretations of the Longinus’ Greek text, contemporaneous German writings set aside the term sublime for non-aesthetic purposes only.

 

Nevertheless, in the Critique of Judgment (German 1794), Immanuel Kant employs the term in an aesthetic fashion—like Burke, to describe a quality of things. However, at the same time, he introduces a psychological dimension that forever transforms its Burkean and inadvertently its alchemical meanings. He writes: “We must seek a ground external to ourselves for the Beautiful in nature; but seek it for the Sublime merely in ourselves and in our attitude of thought which introduces sublimity into the representation of nature” (Kant, 2005, p. 43). For Kant, unlike both for Burke and for the alchemists, the sublime is subjective not objective. The human mind projects the sublime onto objects. Objects do not possess and bestow it. Nor do alchemical processes form it. For Kant the sublime amounts to an idea rather than material quality. In this sense his interpretation is neither alchemical nor purely aesthetic but psychologically aesthetic: the sublime becomes a property not of things but of the mind.

 

Beside this psychological dimension, Kant also introduces metaphysical and epistemological ones. Like the theological dimension, which conditioned both early alchemical and aesthetic interpretations of the sublime, Kant’s metaphysical dimension conditions his psychological interpretation of the sublime. But his metaphysics, unlike classical metaphysics, is not simply another theology. In general both classical theology (i.e., that of St. Augustine) and classical metaphysics (i.e., that of Aristotle) index worldly things according to an extra-worldly standard. For classical theology, this standard is God. For classical metaphysics this standard is a theory of substances (i.e., a theory of the basic units of all existence). Unlike both the God of classical theologians and the substances of classical metaphysicians, Kant’s metaphysics does not entail transcendence—a force which emanates from beyond both the human being and the natural world. Rather, it involves immanence—forces which emanate only from within the human being. In this sense, rather than index worldly things, Kant’s metaphysics indexes mental activities. That is to say, his metaphysics conditions not physical reality but psychology.

 

With regard to the sublime, Kant positions two mental processes: the faculty of cognition and the faculty of desire. Unlike the more basic faculties of sensibility and understanding from his Critique of Pure Reason (German first ed. 1781, German second ed. 1787), which involve non-relational truths about a human being’s capacities to know objects, the faculties from the Critique of Judgment have to do with relational truths about how a human being might react to and reflect on her or his individual capacities to know such objects. Because of this, Kant’s descriptions of these latter faculties (namely, of cognition and desire) amount to an aesthetic epistemology: a science of the processes by which human beings deliberate knowledge of sensible things. This aesthetic epistemology then becomes psychology when he describes its particular operations. He thereby grounds the later (his psychology) in both epistemology and metaphysics.

 

The sublime, a psychological quality, thus has its basis in both Kant’s epistemology and metaphysics. His metaphysics first indexes the psychological components (i.e., the faculties of cognition and desire). Then his epistemology delimits the operations of these components: whereas the faculty of cognition involves one’s relation to logical truths (i.e., a is a) (pp. 3-4), the faculty of desire involves one’s relation to conceptual possibilities (i.e., goodness) (p. 8). Lastly, his psychology determines the nature of the objects of these operations. For instance, with regard to the sublime, Kant calls that which affects the faculty of cognition the “mathematical” sublime and that which affects the faculty of desire the “dynamical” sublime (p. 44). The mathematical sublime derives from instances in which a human being’s capacity to think abstractly surmounts her or his sensible knowledge (that is, one may think an infinite number but cannot perceive it) (p. 47). Conversely, the dynamical sublime derives from instances in which a conceptual possibility challenges but does not defeat a human being’s capacity to act rationally (for instance, overhanging rocks, lightning flashes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and “the boundless ocean in a state of tumult”) (p. 58). While these natural phenomena could destroy a human being, one’s intelligence warns one to thwart their influence; one’s pleased awareness of this intelligence amounts to the dynamical sublime. In this way, for Kant, the sublime assumes metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological dimensions insofar as it involves the distinct features of the human mind, their connection to the production of knowledge, and also their affect on the individual person.

 

These additional dimensions act in a manner similar to the classical theological dimension of the early alchemical and aesthetical interpretations of the sublime. For like it, they determine the sublime’s essential character—albeit mental rather than supernatural. However, their inclusion results in not a substitution of the theological dimension but rather a deprivileging of it. Indeed, for Kant, the fear of God is sublime (p. 57). But since the sublime represents a mental construct rather than a property of physical things, God and God’s effects lose their objective status—that is, their direct and immediate relation to the world. In consequence of Kant’s inclusion of the metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological dimensions, the classical theological dimension no longer founds either the aesthetical or alchemical dimensions. Rather, like the latter two, the classical theological dimension for Kant amounts to a mere idea. Some transcendent divinity no longer grounds these dimensions; instead the human mind does. Thus, Kant’s interpretation of the sublime situates theology at par with aesthetics and alchemy in order to give preference to psychology and its operations.

 

After Kant the term sublime experiences two chief changes: one formal, the other definitional. In different ways both of these changes relate to its alchemical tradition. First, in the latter’s spirit, writings after Kant employ the term sublime as a verb (to sublimate) and an abstract noun (sublimation). For example, in “Blütenstaub” (The pollen of flowers) (1798), Novalis writes: “As the world is quasi a deposit of human nature, thus the world of gods is its sublimation. Both happen uno actu” (Novalis, 1798, p. 346 qtd. in Kauffman, 1974, p. 219). Then, like Novalis, in “Die Tochter der Lust” (The Daughter of Pleasure) (1822), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe declares:

 

Nun gesteht man bei einigem Nachdenken, das menschliche Zustände, Gefühle , Ereignisse in ursprünglicher Natürlichkeit sich nicht . . . aufs Theater bringen lassen, sie müssen schon verarbeitet, zubereitet, sublimirt sein. [Now, one confesses in reflection that human conditions, feelings, and events cannot be brought . . . to the stage in their original naturalness; they must be processed, prepared, and sublimated already.] (Goethe, 1902, p. 353 partial trans. qtd. in Kaufman, 1974, p. 219)

 

Reminiscent of the alchemical writings, both Novalis’ and Goethe’s works conjugate the word sublime—in Novalis’ as an abstract noun, in Goethe’s as a verb. Both nonetheless maintain the Kantian interpretation of the term: namely, the sublimated thing (for for Novalis religious beliefs and for Goethe artistic creations) represents a mental construct rather than a natural or supernatural property.[2]

 

But this tendency to reduce the sublime to something psychological soon changes. For around the same time Goethe is writing, his lover’s son Arthur Schopenhauer composes a philosophical treatise, which reintroduces topics from alchemical writings to discuss and uncover the natural ground of sublimation. This treatise is The World as Will and Representation (1818). In it Schopenhauer writes:

 

[T]he material of everything that appears in our thought must be capable of verification in our perception, for otherwise it would be an empty thought. Although this material is variously manipulated and transformed by thought, it must yet be capable of being reduced to perception, and the thought traced back to this just as a piece of gold can be reduced from all its solutions, oxides, sublimates, and combinations, and present [itself] pure and undimished. (Schopenhauer, Vol. I., 1966, p. 475)

 

For Schopenhauer the process of sublimating gold, to which the works of Roger Bacon and Basilius Valentinus refer, doubles as an analogy for the relationship between sense perception and abstract thoughts. Perceptions relate to thoughts in the same way that pure gold relates to sublimated gold. In this way Schopenhauer incorporates the alchemical notion in Kant’s psychological interpretation of the sublime. However, by doing so, against Kant, he suggests that the sublime is reducible to physical things (i.e., perceptions), which are more fundamental than psychological constructs (i.e., ideas).

 

Thus, like Kant’s sublime, Schopenhauer’s sublime inheres in the mind and not matter. But unlike Kant’s, Schopenhauer’s sublime possesses a material basis. Schopenhauer thereby introduces the first biological dimension of the sublime. For him, like the alchemists, the sublime quality of things depends on a process. However, unlike the alchemists and like Kant, this process derives from the mind rather than objects. Still, this mental process has a corporeal basis. Later in The World as Will and Representation he writes: “[If sexual] desire outlives the capacity to enjoy, and we then regret particular pleasures missed in life, instead of seeing the emptiness and vanity of it all . . . then the will has been sublimated and etherealized in avarice and ambition” (Schopenhauer, Vol. II., 1958, p. 638). As it did for the alchemists, sublimation for Schopenhauer denotes a process whereby a material thing assumes foreign properties. For Schopenhauer, however, these foreign properties do not entail the supernatural. Rather they involve human beings’ natural functions. While Schopenhauer censures the process whereby external objects assume the properties of such functions, he at the same time founds this process on a biological dimension. Thus, he suggests that an unrelenting “sexual impulse”—a biological fact—determines sublimation (p. 637). That is to say, only the sexually unsatisfied have the ability to sublimate—to project properties of themselves onto the world.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche’s militant interpretation of sublimation expands and revaluates this position. Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche grounds sublimation with the biological fact of sexuality. However, unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche deems sublimation a creative process and thereby both beneficial and maleficent. From his early work Human, All Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits (German 1878) to his latter works Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (German 1886) and The Will to Power (German 1870-1888) he preserved these points. In the priormost one he writes: “[according to certain philosophers] there exists neither a selfless act nor a completely disinterested observation: both are merely sublimations. In them the basic element appears to be virtually dispersed and proves to be present only to the most careful observer” (Nietzsche, 1984, p. 13). This passage indicates an interpretation of sublimation both like and unlike Schopenhauer’s. On the one hand, like Schopenhauer’s, Nietzsche’s early interpretation presents the idea that “fundamental elements” ground mental constructs. On the other hand, unlike Schopenhauer’s, this interpretation suggests that these fundamental elements are neither “disinterested” nor dispassionate, that such disinterestedness itself amounts to a sublimation. Thus for Nietzsche the process takes place in both the sexually satisfied and unsatisfied alike. For him then something more original than sexuality conditions it.

 

Later in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche furthers this point—both his debt to and break from Schopenhauer’s interpretation of the process of sublimation. In it he writes: “it was precisely . . . under the pressure of Christian value judgments that the sex drive sublimated into love (amour-passion)” (Nietzsche, 2000, p. 292). Indeed this passage evokes Schopenhauer’s interpretation of sublimation. For like Schopenhauer’s “sexual impulse,” Nietzsche’s “sex drive” plays a key role in the process of sublimation. But Nietzsche, unlike Schopenhauer, does not endorse an ascetic point of view. Rather he locates in the notion of the sublimated sex drive a double bind: “Love one’s enemies? . . . this has been learned well. . . . Indeed, at times something higher and more sublime is done: we learn to despise when we love, and precisely when we love best—but all of this unconsciously, without noise, without pomp, with that modesty and concealed goodness which forbids the mouth solemn words and virtue formulas” (p. 336). For Nietzsche both the sublimation of the sex drive into love and its Schopenhauerean renunciation represent mental, that is moral, constructs. In Nietzsche’s view then both sublimation and its reverse are derivative, not fundamental; in a word they are both “sublime.”

 

Nietzsche thus resolves not that one must try to overcome sublimation, but rather that one must embrace and take control of it. For the process itself establishes not the distinction between reality and fantasy but the human being’s capacity to create both, to construct the nature of the world. This capacity, however, entails something more fundamental than the sex drive—something more original than the sublimation of carnal desire and its denial. Nietzsche names this something the will to power. In his eponymous book on this topic, in a note from 1887, he explains: “All ‘purposes,’ ‘aims,’ ‘meaning’ are only modes of expression and metamorphoses of one will that is inherent in all events: the will to power. To have purposes, aims, intentions, willing in general, is the same thing as will to be stronger, willing to grow—and, in addition, willing the means to this” (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 356). For Nietzsche the will to power makes possible sexuality and its sublimation. In consequence it represents the ground for the various past interpretations of the sublime, from the alchemical to the psychological to the biological ones. Indeed it denotes the human being’s vital principle—something always and already embedded in biology, psychology, epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and alchemy.

 

Freud’s transdisciplinary interpretation of the sublime develops out of this principle and its predecessors. Like Nietzsche and his German influences (namely, Schopenhauer and Kant), Freud establishes a multi-disciplinary character of the sublime. However, unlike Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant and also the early alchemical and aesthetical interpreters of the sublime, Freud situates not one discipline or principle above and beyond the rest. In the alchemical and the early aesthetic traditions, this principle was theological: God and religious values determined the nature of the sublime. In the Kantian tradition, this principle involved a metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological mixture: the human beings’ faculties determined the term’s nature. Schopenhauer then delimited these faculties to a biological principle—sexuality—which made possible its own sublimation. Lastly, Nietzsche located underneath the biological dimension a vital human force—the will to power—which made possible both sexuality and its sublimation. Unlike all of these interpretations, Freud’s favors neither the ground nor consequents of sublimation.

 

This point, however, takes him several years to develop. His first reference to the sublime occurs in Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) (German 1899). It recalls both Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s interpretation of the term—as respectively a psychological and biological effect. He writes:

 

Whatever strange results they [dreams] may achieve, they can never in fact get free from the real world; and their most sublime as well as their most ridiculous structures must always borrow their basic material either from what has passed before our eyes in the world of the senses or from what has already found a place somewhere in the course of our waking thoughts—in other words from what we have already experienced either externally or internally. (Freud, 1969, p. 44)

 

While topically different than all writers on the sublime before him (no one yet discussed the relationship between the sublime and dreams), Freud nonetheless bases the concept of the term on “what has passed before our eyes in the world of the senses” (our perceptions) and “what has already found a place somewhere in the course of our waking thoughts” (our ideas). The first source (perceptions) recalls Schopenhauer’s interpretation of the sublime: it is reducible to perceptions. The second source (ideas) recalls Kant’s interpretation of the sublime: it is reducible to psychological processes. Freud’s first account of the sublime thereby sets up a problem: how do these two sources of the sublime relate?

 

While Freud’s next major work Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (German 1905) again locates the sublime at the crossroads of biology and psychology, he begins to favor the latter as its origin. In a section of the book’s final chapter, “Jokes and the Species of the Comic,” a section in which Freud makes explicit reference to Kant, he writes:

 

What is sublime is something large in the figurative, psychical sense; and I should like to suggest, or rather to repeat my suggestion, that, like what is somatically large, it is represented by an increased expenditure. . . . [W]hen I speak of something sublime I innervate my speech in a different way, I make different facial expressions, and I try to bring the whole way in which I hold myself into harmony with the dignity of what I am having an idea of. (Freud, 1989, p. 248)

 

In this passage the sublime represents somatic things, namely, large ones. This psychic representation nonetheless produces physical effects—what Freud calls “expenditure[s].” The contortions of one’s face in the presence of “an exalted personality, a monarch, or a prince of science” all refer to this psychosomatic process (p. 248). Indeed, given the above passage, the sublime, as it was for Kant, is ideational; it is a thought. But, unlike Kant’s sublime, Freud’s assumes the unique status of being a thought that affects the physical world.

 

This point sets the stage for Freud’s transdisciplinary interpretation of the concept by way of his description of the process of sublimation. Shortly after Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud composed his now seminal Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (German 1905) and therewith introduced this latter term and its definition. The relevant passage proceeds:

 

Historians of civilization appear to be at one in assuming that powerful components are acquired for every kind of cultural achievement by this diversion of sexual instinctual forces from sexual aims and their direction to new ones—a process which deserves the name of ‘sublimation’. To this we would add, accordingly, that the same process plays a part in the development of the individual and we would place its beginnings in the period of sexual latency.

 

It is possible further to form some idea of the mechanism of this process of sublimation. On the one hand, it would seem, the sexual impulses cannot be utilized during these years of childhood, since the reproductive functions have been deferred—a fact which constitutes the main feature of the period of latency. On the other hand, these impulses would seem in themselves to be perverse—that is to arise from the erotogenic zones and to derive their activity from instincts which, in view of the direction of the subject’s development, can only arouse unpleasureable feelings. They consequently evoke opposing mental forces (reacting impulses) which, in order to suppress this unpleasure effectively, build up the mental dams that I have already mentioned—disgust, shame and morality. (Freud, 2000, p. 44)

 

For Freud the role of sublimation is not minor. As he says, it helps form the “individual.” Like Schopenhauer, Freud grounds it in “sexual impulses.” But unlike Schopenhauer, Freud locates these impulses in early rather than late life. In consequence the absence of “reproductive functions,” which here amount to the female and male orgasms, bars the fulfillment of these sexual impulses. Freud’s sublimation, like Nietzsche’s, thereby takes place for everyone—not simply the sexually insatiable. Its effects, “the mental dams,” always manifest themselves.

In view of these points one may evaluate Freud’s description of the process of sublimation from the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in three ways. Firstly, his interpretation appears fatalistic because it suggests that an intelligent design ordains some children to sublimate the wrong way and others the right way. But this reading of Freud’s text ignores the pre-moral dimension of the process. Insofar as Freudian sublimation produces ethics, distinguishes the good from the evil, it cannot itself be either good or evil; it cannot be ethical. Secondly, Freud’s interpretation of sublimation appears naturalistic because it suggests that all mental states are reducible to the biological force of sexuality. But this reading of Freud’s text disregards the teleological dimension of the process. Yes, sublimation stems from biological states (i.e., infantile sexuality). However, it also tends toward psychological ones (i.e., mental dams). The process thus entails both the biological ground and the psychological end. They condition each other. For Freud one is not more essential than the other. Thus, thirdly, Freud’s interpretation of sublimation, like Nietzsche’s, appears vitalistic because it seems to invoke a single underlying irreducible force, which grounds both the operations of sexuality and the latency of reproductive functions.

 

The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality does not explicitly contradict this last evaluation. Moreover, by way of its discussion of the instinct (in German, das Triebe), this early work seems to endorse it. Like Nietzsche, if sublimation amounts to a term of reference for the relationship between people’s social views and pre-social functions, the process does not exclude the possibility of a third, more primary determining factor—for Freud the instinct. He explains: “By an ‘instinct’ is provisionally to be understood the psychical representative of an endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation, as contrasted with a ‘stimulus’, which I set up by single excitations coming from without” (p. 34). This passage indicates both the psychological and biological properties of the instinct. Freud himself notes that it lies “on the frontier between the mental and the physical” (p. 34). In this light the instinct, unlike Nietzsche’s will to power, appears to be a mere reference term for the relationship between such mental and physical functions.

 

At the same time, however, the instinct is neither physical nor mental. It thereby appears to be the condition of possibility for both of their functions. The instinct connects psychical to the mental functions. In this way it has “somatic sources” and psychic aims: “The source of an instinct is a process of excitation occurring in an organ and the immediate aim of the instinct lies in the removal of this organic stimulus” (p. 34). But while an instinct’s sources may be different (oral, scopic, anal, or invocatory), its aim seems to be singular—the cancellation of the source. Thus, just as Nietzsche’s will tends toward power, for Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality all instincts seem to tend toward this psychic cancellation of the physical source. In this regard Freud, like Nietzsche, appears to privilege the instincts end as the necessary vital condition for the process of sublimation.

 

But the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality does not represent the last word of Freud’s theory of the instincts and his definition of sublimation. Rather this early work inaugurates but does not conclude the discussions of both. Thus, unlike Nietzsche’s, Freud’s interpretation of sublimation does not introduce a vitalistic principle (i.e., the will to power) as the process’s ground. Rather, in the final analysis Freud’s interpretation escapes the inverted pyramidal structure of all pre-Freudian accounts of the sublime and sublimation (including Nietzsche’s), in which one discipline or idea grounds all the rest. For instead of this inverted pyramidal structure, Freud introduces a coherent circular one, in which all disciplines and ideas determine each other and cooperate non-exclusively.

 

Freud delineates this structure most clearly in his later work on the nature of the instincts entitled Beyond the Pleasure Principle (German 1920). After the chapter in which Freud introduces his speculative hypothesis about the origin of organic life, he writes in passage in seeming dialogue with Nietzsche’s philosophy:

 

It may be difficult, too, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development into supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I cannot see how the benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. What appears in a minority of human individuals as untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization. The repressed instinct never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction . . . no sublimations will suffice to remove the repressed instinct’s persisting tension . . . The backward path that leads to complete satisfaction is as a rule obstructed by the resistances which maintain the repressions. (Freud, 1989, p. 50)

 

The beginning of this passage evokes Nietzsche’s concept of the superman (in German Übermensch), which denotes a person who, rather than submitting to supernatural conditions, embraces her or his will to power or vital force of life. Freud explicitly rejects the primacy of this principle, since, according to Freud, the process of sublimation never terminates. The somatic stimulations never cease, and the psychic walls never vanish. The tensions between the mental and the physical, the real and the ideal, the abstract and the concrete, the waking life and the dream never resolve themselves. Freud’s account of the process of sublimation entails the coincidence of these irreconcilable categories, not the privileging of one over and against the others.

 

In this way, his account establishes the nonhierarchical cooperation of the disciplines, which throughout history determined the various meanings of the word sublime, its cognates, and its conjugates. For, while each of the historical disciplinary understandings of the term privileges one of the abovementioned categories, Freud’s account levels all of these categories and, in doing so, eliminates the status of a first or fundamental discipline. That is, taking his account into consideration, each of the historical disciplinary understandings of the term presupposes some other historical disciplinary understanding of it: one finds a little aesthetical in the alchemical sublime and a little alchemical in the aesthetical one, a little theological in the metaphysical sublime and a little metaphysical in the theological one, a little psychological in the biological sublime and a little biological in the psychological one, and so on.

 

In this respect, Freud’s account of the process of sublimation is transdisciplinary. It explains “the semantic and practical unification of the meanings that traverse and lay beyond different disciplines” (“Charter,” 1994, n.p.). In other words, it embraces the diversity of its predecessors’ disciplinary-specific values without privileging any one of them. As such Freud’s account of the process of sublimation indicates both the way in which all disciplines depend on each other for their own operations and also the way in which all disciplines operate as one.

 

Works Cited