As with my many other recent essays, the following reflections are not a high intellectual exercise, with academic ends in mind, but rather, just another attempt at making my meanderings more intelligible, to make them useful to any lucky reader who happens to stumble upon them, and in the same sense, this would also be the third entry on a (so far) three-part unofficial series of essays on love that I have been writing in the last month or so.

I intend to make it a preliminary conclussion to the ideas first stated in Madness, Geniality & Poetry and later expanded in Love, Lost & Found in Transition, but unlike the first, which was a study on some of my favorite poets and lyricists and their struggles with emotional stability, or the second, which was an exploration on the similar meanings love, greatness and sanctity have on our personal paths in history, this essay will focus on disclosing some elements in the philosophy of aesthetics that I consider relevant to understand when dealing with strong emotions such as love.

So first, let’s introduce some key concepts, all of them from different eras in the history of philosophy: on one hand, we have the Aristotelian “artistic proofs“, or rather, the modes of persuassion defined in his Rhetoric. These are logos, pathos and ethos, or more simply put, the reasonability, the emotion and the character of a discourse. So far so good.

On the other hand, from medieval scholasticism, we take the concept of the trascendentals, that is, the properties of being, and in particular, truth, beauty and goodness, or using the latin terminology, verum, pulchrum & bonum.

I can further disclose the meaning of being from the perspective of Martin Heiddeger’s Being & Time, but for now, I’ll stick to these elements for their simplicity in the foundation of my argument, since delving into metaphysics is quite hard already.

My first impression when looking at these two sets of concepts is that they are somehow perfectly paired: logos goes with verum, pathos goes with pulchrum, and ethos goes with bonum, that is, what is reasonable tends to be true, what drives our emotions tends to be beautiful, and what tends to be good pretty much defines its moral character as such. The metaphysical unity of being is thus comprised of these arrangements that makes for the Being itself, God as in the Thomistic tradition, Truth, Beauty and Goodness, Logos, Pathos and Ethos all in Himself.

Christianity has plenty of references to this manifestation in many ways, such as considering that “In the beginning there was the Word (Logos)”, from the start of Genesis, or the fact Christ was said to have suffered his Passion (pure pathos, even the etymology matches) to purge the sins of the world, as well as the classical view of God as pure Goodness, or that is, full ethos. This is pretty much just naive philosophy and theology at this point.

However, of all the pairs previously stated, the one that interests me the most for the object of this discussion in the pathos/pulchrum one, that is, emotion and beauty. Also, as the concept of passion, from pathos, was already mentioned, this will help in further analysis.

Let us begin, then, by considering some ideas from Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: for the Anglo-Irish conservative forefather, beauty is “a social quality“, giving “us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding” others and inspiring “us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons“. This Burkean concept of beauty seems to be intrinsically linked to the ones of joy and pleasure, of satisfying and gratifying experiences.

Now, if we take from the same text the definition of the sublime, we’ll find something similar in form, but not quite the same in essence: “whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling“, as “the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.“

For Burke, thus, the sublime is a higher state of beauty, one born not of the gratifying satisfaction that spawns affection, but one that submits the human will to emotions stronger than those of familiarity.

That does not mean, however, that neither beauty nor the sublime are not based nor guided by a certain pathos, but rather the opposite: both are their direct results, their only difference being the type of emotion driving them.

This distinction is based on a single idea, and that is the difference between love, and passion. A simple guess would be that passion in the higher, stronger form of love, but that is not quite right. Passion is usually the stronger form of simply any emotion, to the point of suffering. Love can lead to passion indeed, but so do other emotions.

In that sense, if our familiar love for the people and the things we closely hold dear drive our perception of their beauty (as in minimizing defects, considering better proportions, sensing more symmetry, closer colour matches, and so on and so forth), then our passion, derived from love, would make us suffer in search of the sublime. And the sublime would be nothing but what already is beautiful but expanded to the same extreme perceptions that are already hurting and making us suffer.

Enter the realm of limit-experiences.

in French postmodernist philosophy, there is one thinker called Georges Bataille, and aside from his contributions to Marxist materialism, theory of sovereignty and overall, a rather unpleasant perspective on literally criticism and the philosophy of eroticism, one of his most important developments was in the conception of what limit-experiences are.

In Bataille’s philosophy, limit-experiences are those of such intensity that transcend (there goes that word again) the limits of normal (that is acceptable, or regular, ordinary) possibilities and become a paradox. The clearest example of such limit-experiences happen in moments of ecstasy, where pleasure and pain become indistinguishable from the other.

Now, why would it be pertinent to talk about limit-experiences when the main focus of this inquiry is about aesthetics and emotions? Well, because the aesthetic percepetion, as far as most thinkers, artists and creators may recognize, is, in all senses, a limit experience, where the act of creating beauty, or achieving the sublime, to be more exact, is usually done by pushing through the acceptable limits of our capacity, mostly on emotional terms.

I tend to reflect quite a lot on Yukio Mishima’s Sun and Steel, and particularly on his obsession on Saint Sebastian, the Christian saint he almost died in martyrdom by getting bound to a stake to become the target of the arrows archers shot at him, but surviving miraculously. This image, where the pain of death becomes interwhined with the pleasure of martyrdom, became a staple in Christian art, and aside from the very Passion of Christ, has been universally accepted as an example of what a limit-experience is.

But now, back to the pure realm of philosophy, where beauty becomes the sublime through the intensification of emotions as they become passions. Where beauty represents a certain familiar pleasure, the more passionate such beauty is, it derails its perception to the point it causes pain, and even if such pain still produces beauty, it is no longer beauty itself, but rather the sublime, the ultimate form of aesthetic representation of a limit-experience, where there is no distinguishable difference between pleausure, pain, emotion and passion.

At this point, this should feel like a no-brainer, but the catch is that most creative processes invariably require such limit-experiences to become unhinged from the limitations and constrictions of regular discourse or acceptable art (please take here into consideration that I am not talking about transgressive art for the sake of transgression, such as obsenity or mere “hampart“, without any aesthetic value, lacking form, meaning, direction, tonality, and so on and so forth).

Instead, I want to disclose a certain phenomenon that becomes recurring in both poets and philosophers as they produce their crafts, and that is, heartbreak, and most importantly, the emotional pain love (or the lack thereof) produces, given that this is probably the single, most important passion at the center of limit-experiences, of the transformation from beauty into the sublime.

Let’s take the works of Søren Kierkegaard, for instance, and how his failed romance and engagement to his life-long beloved, Regine Olsen, became the main source of his inspiration for writing the bases of his existentialist philosophy. In a rather incoherent move for someone who pretty puch stayed forever infatuated with her, Kierkegaard broke off their engagement as he thought his melancholy (mostly likely what today would have been diagnosed as clinical depression) made him unsuit for marriage.

Nonetheless, he still dedicated all of his works to her name, even as his life dwelled in both the productivity of an admirable thinker, deeply touched by the mysteries of Christianity and its meaning in defining our human purposes, and the misery of a love eternally lost.

This reference to Kierkegaard, of course, was not casual, since he wrote and published a certain book called Works of Love in which he tried to explain the phenomenon of love from its contrasting perspectives of agape, eros and phileo while exemplifying them through Biblical scripture.

Love, in many ways, is the cornerstone of beauty. Like Roger Scruton said, “the love of beauty is really a signal to free ourselves from that sensory attachment, and to begin the ascent of the soul towards the world of ideas, there to participate in the divine version of reproduction, which is the understanding and the passing on of eternal truths.”

There cannot be beauty without love. To think otherwise would be silly at best, evil at worst. But this does not fully explain how beauty can still exist in the pain of heartbreak and the pain of falling in love, and aside from the concept of the sublime and its relation to limit-experiences, there could little we know to make sense of it.

I think about the Passion of Christ in that sense, from my naive knowlegde of theology. How can (divine) love be so strong so God-made-Man was willing to die just so He could purge his creation of their sins?

Then I realize that our small acts of love act in a way as sacrifices we make for those who are dear of our affections, and those acts of love that produce tangible beauty are thus creations of love, quite literally the result of a perfect combination of pathos and pulchrum. The right forms guided by emotion thowards the highest ends.

Think of this poem I wrote for a girl I met in church a while ago, for instance:

“I met a girl at church
I had to ask her for help
As I don’t speak Polish much
She agreed, her eyes green as kelp
I met a girl at Mass
We agreed to go for tea thereafter
She was beautifully dressed, such a class
As we went to share in laughter
I met a girl while praying
And you may think this was odd
But I’m sure my faith is displaying
I believe she was sent by God”

It may have been, and still be, a bit of infatuation on her from my part, but I am certainly aware this has been one of my best creations when it comes to my poetry, because every aspect of it was rightly guided in the most adequate ways, from the aesthetic space (St. Mary’s Basilica in Kraków, quite beautiful in my opinion), to the unwilling muse inspiring it (this beautiful girl I met during Mass), to my own beliefs and the context of the religious gathering (the homily that Sunday was about charity). Such would be an example of beauty through love.

Now let’s get to another composition, one I wrote as I was dealing through my last heartbreak:

“You loved me in love
But couldn’t love me in pain
And you didn’t love me in the end
You rather loved what you thought
An ideal infatuation on the spot
That you could not handle the fall
Closing a door, once for all
Now you’ve rejected me rightly
I love you truly, dearly, madly
As if your abandonment sparked
What you then hoped just started
By spending day and night together
In a week I wish lasted forever
But now it’s probably too late
Treasuring your memories with faith
Of a future uncertain, unknown
In an abyss I pushed to be thrown
You write with pain, you say
But even in pain, if I may
Hold some truth and beauty
Remembering your kiss, tasty, fruity
That I hope to give and return
This gift, my heart to be burnt“

Still as beautiful as the previous one, but there is a certain feeling of uneasiness, of pain itself that is very percievable in here. It is not quite beautiful though, but rather sublime. It is the result of letting pain free itselfin a form that could be creative rather than destructive. The person who inspired this poem, still very dear to my heart, was the same that told me “you love like you live: through pain“, and while it may have been true for her case, it is mostly a manifestation of the sublime what she received, of the results of my limit-experiences while dealing with love in ways I could barely understand or feel properly.

These poetry excerpts are not out of place in this discussion, given that Bataille himself realized the existence of limit-experiences out of his own study of poetry, in particular, of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, as this anthology contains a very specific poem that caught the eye of Bataille: You’d Entertain The Universe In Bed.

The composition, when translated from French, goes like this:

“You’d entertain the universe in bed,
Foul woman; ennui makes you mean of soul.
To exercise your jaws at this strange sport
Each day you work a heart between your teeth.
Your eyes, illuminated like boutiques
Or blazing stanchions at a public fair,
Use haughtily a power not their own,
With no awareness of their beauty’s law.

Blind, deaf machine, fertile in cruelties!
Valuable tool, that drinks the whole world’s blood,
Why are you not ashamed, how have you not
In mirrors seen your many charms turn pale?
The magnitude of all your evil schemes,
Has this, then, never shrunk your heart with fear,
When Nature, mighty in her secret plans,
Makes use of you, o woman! queen of sins!
Of you, vile beast – to mould a genius?

O filthy grandeur! o sublime disgrace!“

The importance of this poem lies in the contradiction of the last line, which by combining the opposing feelings of disgust and admiration, of pain and pleasure, concludes the whole point of explaining the feelings of the author towards someone, towards his beloved subject of inspiration.

At last, where am I trying to go with all of these philosophical-literary dump I went through before this point? I usually try to incorporate some personal reflections on my writing, but when it comes to love and beauty, to pain and the sublime, my emotions in whirlwind tend to pull me into different directions, making the task of simple meandering around ideas way more complicated that what it usually is.

It is also worth nothing that while for the first two entries in this series (as well as for most of my other texts), I have been able to write them in one sitting, just me in front of the white paper (or screen), putting sense into ideas and making those into coherent words, sentences, paragraphs.

But not this one. This one has been more intense, more slow, more thought than the others because it has also been a bit more painful as I dealt with my emotions in real time through them. In a quite fitting manner, the beauty and the pain of love, both love lost and love found, but also love interrupted, and love realigned, ended up getting in the way of my intellectual venting, maybe making me feel, in real-time, one of those limit-experiences from which the sublime is born.

And in the end, it may not even be love, but maybe just passion, an intense attraction for the still unknown or an intense attachment for the painful known. When it comes to this, there is little the mind or the heart can do to be guided right, for passions, as intense as they are, are also unstable.

My final thoughts on this would circle back all over the beginning of this essay, with the reference on Heidegger’s Being & Time becoming the cherry on top (or on the bottom?) of this argument: what is the being of love in time? What is love’s Dasein? And overall, how do we distinguish it from mere passion, especially as the aesthetic products of both, beauty and the sublime, are of the highest transcendance?

For Heidegger, Dasein meant the human experience itself, as in being human and becoming aware of what it meant in the sense of identity, self-awareness in place and most importantly in time, and in respect to others as social creatures and to ourselves as singular beings.

Part of this experience of being human is love, and love, as the emotion per excellence, is another paradox in itself. Most conservatives and most Catholics reintegrate the idea of love to that of attachment and to familiarity: we love what we know the most closely, and God loves us because He knows us so closely as our Creator that it would be impossible not to.

But as with any other part of human existence, love is bound by time. And time may be its greatest ally or its worst enemy. How can you become more aware of your attachment to others if not in time? How can you decide to rationally attach yourself, or get away from something, from someone that drives your passions, if not through time?

Emotions are not really bound by any other time than the present, but the highest of them, the ones that allow for beauty to thrive, are not only susceptible to time, but intrinsecally linked to it.

Love, in a sense, is time: the time we spend together, the time we spend apart, the time we devote to ourselves in relationship to the others and to the others themselves. Love is time because it gives us a clear sense of a beginning and an end of our human, finite attachments, hoping one of them will stick into eternity, just as we have faith such is God’s love for us.

In my final lines, I would also refer back to another personal essay of mine from earlier this year, Motorcycle-less Diaries in Vistula Land, where I compared my own experience to an adventure. I now see that part of the trip was falling, quite literally, in love, maybe once, twice, thrice or all the times needed so my emotions could begin to distinguish correctly pain from pleasure, love from passion, beauty from the sublime.

The idea of love is probably the most noble idea there is, and its implications in the highest transcendance need it to develop in the most sensible ways. Love is the attachment to our close and familiar sources of pleasure, driving our perceptions towards the highest aspects of reality. But love needs time to atune itself towards these goals. It needs to find its way among the noise of other emotions looking to become passions, and of the noise around existence.

Just as beauty can be found through love in the sacred, and the sublime can be found through passion in the mundane, the human experience lies in that grey limit between the two, with only time allowing us to distinguish between the pleasure of a familiar attachment and the pain of an unknown attraction. But as always, only time can tell.