Nirvana

    It is feasible to assume that a part of the interest we have in art has to do with beauty, pleasure, and aesthetics. Immanuel Kant, the philosopher who has written one of the most influential contributions to aesthetics in art, argued that our cognitive and sensory faculties entertain a form of an object in a pleasurable way, yet some aesthetics are mixed with pain. In other words, we have the capacity to entertain from fear and pain, just as we enjoy looking at Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas even it is more likely to inspire the tragic emotion of fear. Although Freud didn’t approach the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, he followed it to the extent that he thought artistic creation and our experience of art are bound up with the pleasure principle.

                                                                    The Flaying of Marsyas, 1575 by Titian

    While Freud was working on masochism, he concluded that masochism contradicts the Eros by having unpleasurable feelings as its goal. When the act that should be classified in the death instinct plays a role in pleasure, he needed to re-interpret the relation between life and death drives. He invented the Nirvana principle that expresses the death drive (the wish to return to an inorganic state) whilst the life drive expresses the demands of the libido (sex and self-preservation). Freud described the principle of Nirvana as the ‘’oceanic feeling’’: ‘’a feeling of indissoluble connection, of belonging inseparably to the external world as a whole’’. Thus, the Nirvana state reduces inner tensions and approaches to an inorganic state that contains both the Thanatos and Eros. I conceive that in the Nirvana state, the formation of a balance between life and death is somehow covering yet veiling the idea of death.