The sources of the theory of sublimation of Freud in the philosophy of Schopenhauer

Abstract

In agreement with the vision of world of Schopenhauer, the human being is characterized by being dominated by an essential lack, motivated by the eternal dissatisfaction of their desires and inclinations. That situation motivates in the human personality the displeasure for the existence, the development of terrible and violent feelings, shortly appeased when the man gets to supply that existential lack, the ones which, after a happy spirit peace, they surface again in the human life with maxim intensity. Schopenhauer elaborates his referred theory of the aesthetic contemplation, considering that the individual that is devoted to the artistic creation and to the act of to philosophize becomes indeed capable to appease for precious moments the desire of his unhappiness. Such perspective influences Freud when this develops the theory of the sublimation, and this is characterized by overcoming in some steps Schopenhauer's perspective, for the fact that Freud considers that not just in the art, but in any other activity, of intellectual character or even of labor, the human being would channel their voluptuous sexual pulses (that would be one in Schopenhauer's theory more of the expressions of the desire imposed by the human will) through the accomplishment of enterprises transforming that vital energy disperses through the sexual action in a concrete productive impulse.