![]() ![]() Brief consideration is also given to Heidegger's death analysis, which corroborates Nietzsche's insights concerning tragic ancient Dionysian-Apollinian culture. The paper concludes with a consideration of contemporary culture in light of Nietzsche's early diagnosis of the malady of 'Socratism' as that which fatally infects a culture's ability to deal with human finitude. A brief excursion to the scene of Freud's Eros and Thanatos is undertaken to provide tentative insight into the similarity between Freud and the early Greek tragedians, and the difference between Freud and Plato (as well as the rationalist Platonist tradition). According to Nietzsche, this was what made existence bearable for the Greeks, but the development of philosophical reason undermined this tragic spirit of a kind of equilibrium between reason and passion. Nietzsche offers the intellectual means to make sense of this striking difference through his insight into the triumph of 'Socratism' over Greek tragedy's elaboration on the tension between Apollinian cultural creativity through form, and Dionysian surrender to the obliteration of form and individuality in favour of ecstatic union with others. ![]() This paper therefore addresses the question of the significance of the differences between the ancient (Platonic) and the modern (Freudian) conceptions of the soul or psyche/subject. ![]() In Freud's structural model, this comprises the ego, the id and the superego, but while Plato seems to have trusted the ability of reason to control passion, Freud appears less sanguine about the ego's (reason's) ability to master the id (instinct, passion). Plato's conception of the human soul as comprising an uneasy union of reason (the charioteer), spirit (the white horse) and appetite or passion (the black horse), where reason has to depend on, or enlist, the support of spirit to be able to restrain and control passion, seems, at first blush, to correspond, or at least to be compatible with Freud's psychoanalytical conception of the psyche. ![]()
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