Euphoria

‘Stepping outside the Self’: Differences in the Representation of Euphoria by Péter Molnár

Last week’s discussion hosted by the National Gallery in its brilliant ‘Friday Night Lates’ event series saw the age-old problem of the mundane’s clash with the professional reinforced. The extent to which colloquial usage of once specialised terms simplifies, if not flat out changes, intricate meanings is no surprise for anyone; realising, however, that euphoria doesn’t require joy, or that it is more opposing of hedonism as it is kindred to it does shed a new light on the artworks said to convey it.  

One of the perks of the ‘Friday Night Lates’ events, other than the evident charm of getting to stay in a museum after hours, consists in the variegation of the invited experts. This Friday’s speakers, ranging from philosophers to practising artists, though approaching the problem from entirely different perspectives agreed on the one thing; to be in a state of euphoria is, simply put, to transgress the boundaries of the self. Siobhán Jolley, the Ahmanson Fellow in Religion and Art at the National Gallery, spoke of said transgression as a communion with the divine. As such, her understanding of the term echoes the predominant philosophical tradition of the West, laid down in The World of Ideas by the divine Plato and reinforced by Descartes’ Mind- Body Dualism. The diminishing of the body by torture could hardly be described as joyous or pleasant, and may yet be ecstatic and transcendental for the soul.
Another aspect agreed on by all set emphasis on the hyper-alert, truly present, and essentially collective/collectivist experience of the euphoric state. Evoking the Dionysian delirium of wine and dance, one would be inclined to think of such a behaviour hedonistic. In order to transgress the self, however, one must first lose it, and self-interested sensationalism neither weakens, nor transcends the ‘I’.  

It may sound paradoxical that wanting to experience a richer, fuller life/self it is explicitly one’s life/self that must be left behind. To me that seems a small price to pay for transcendence. Let us also not forget that openness to new experience and the temporal overshadowing of the self by the whole carries in it an indescribable sense of freedom. Letting one’s imagination roam free of constraint, and engaging with those of others; perhaps this is euphoria. 

What is Euphoria? Review by Mathilde Prietzel Nielsen

What is euphoria? That was the question presented in the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing one night in October. Here’s what four experts answered.

But first, to motivate the question, The Centre for Philosophy and Arts introduced the puzzling nature of euphoria in a video exploring three different paintings depicting and two experiences of euphoria. The first painting depicted euphoria as religious devotion, the second as a dispersed, tickling, literally, all over the place experience, and the third as a dozed off and into nature relief. The one experience, a rave, took it to be an out-of-body experience, and the second, a very ‘in-body’ experience: swimming in ice cold water with the temperature (re)centering your sense of self in your skin and bones, and for the lucky ones, in a muscle cramp.

Despite difference, all five works included selflessness in one form or other, and thus, on common ground, the night’s four experts entered the stage.

The Virgin in praryer, Sassoferrato, 1640-50

First, Joachim Aufderheide, philosopher at King’ College London, noted that the Greek word ‘euphoria’ might be translated as ‘the power of enduring’ which would explain the euphoria depicted in the first painting. Furthermore, Plato suggested in his Symposium that from philosophy, or the love of wisdom, one could see things as they truly were, that is, not besmudged with one’s self(oriented glasses).

Next up, researcher at the National Gallery X mentioned how suffering in religion was offered as a means to selflessness. Suffering, if intense enough, could simply drown out the sense of self. Thought thus, selflessness as one immersive instance of pain, suddenly made painting no. 2 available as a stinging pain into which one could be dissolved, rather than as as gleeful dots illustrating a tickling happiness. Contrary to the stark light that philosophy could shed on things and the intensity of suffering, Sikela Owen, artist, dwelled on the quiet moments, the angelic spirit and the ‘illusion of freedom’ characteristic of childhood as she remembered it and as she sees it in her younger cousins growing up and into less quiet forms of lifestyle, in which the euphoric sense of freedom gets knackered by 9-5s.

Pietro Perugino, Saint Sebastian, 1495, Louvre, Paris

Finally, Vanessa Brassey, artist and philosopher at King’s College London, developed Sikela’s idea of freedom of selflessness, as freedom from our consumerist ego. Maybe euphoria is the liberating feel of losing one’s ego and giving into whatever, be it religious devotion, a tickling feel of either happiness or icy water, or even a rave party, anything that, even if just for a while, can free one from this ego that we, constantly and insistently, are nudged to entertain, satisfy, keep busy in our contemporary metropolitan societies, which might be great fun, but not, at least not according to the nights experts, euphoric, for euphoria, whatever it may be, is not self-indulging.