The extraneous pain and the transitory beautiful: Nietzschean and Freudian perspective

Abstract

This paper develops the idea that the experience of the Beautiful necessarily implies the dimension of pain, out of the works of Freud and Nietzsche. In the first author we investigate the pain of anticipated mourning related to the transience of beauty, the importance of the concept of sublimation and the analysis of Freud's disturbing experience before the statue of Moses by Michelangelo. In the second author, we develop the main ideas of the book The Birth of Tragedy in order to demonstrate how art has the power to transform emptiness in vitality, as the sublime displaces the nausea and horror of existence into livable representations. The tragic assumes that the aesthetics underlies the disharmonious, the ugly and the dissonant, being thus an aesthetic path in which the beautiful necessarily includes the dimensions of pain and horror.