Sublime

The idea that the world we experience is a solipsistic delusion projected from the interior of our mind consoles rather than disturbs us, since it conforms with our infantile fantasies of omnipotence; but the thought that our so-called interiority owe its existence to a fictionalized consensus will always carry an uncanny charge.

“Nothing does us as much good as the fool’s cap: we need it against ourselves,”1 writes the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). The “fool” destroys by laughing at values and truths, showing the chaotic and senseless world behind them. The fool is a manifestation of the Dionysian, an essential chaotic and destructive drive, but one

Yet the contents of our hidden depths seem to remain perpetually elusive. Freudian psychoanalysts can speculate about our hidden fears and desires; psychologists and neuroscientists can attempt to draw subtle and highly indirect conclusions from actions, heart-rate, skin conductance, pupil dilation and the rate of blood flow in the brain. But no

‘A life without temporal boundaries,’ writes the philosopher Samuel Scheffler, ‘would be no more a life than a circle without a circumference would be a circle.’