What is an Antinomic Emotion?

Abstract In his Symphony n. 94 (1792), Haydn has a movement entitled “mit einem Paukenschlag,” which surprises the audience with a fortissimo timpani strike. This symphony, thus nicknamed “Die Überraschung,” offers a nice artistic example of fulguration against the background of imminence. Works of art offer a snapshot that unites beauty and novelty and evoke in us - in the artist as much as in the lover of music - the feeling of losing all control in a fraction of a second: I call it the art of release [ déprise ]. The aim of my paper is to show the complexity of the emotional dynamic while identifying under the expression of “antinomic emotion,” and to dismantle thereby the current and naive understanding of emotions as being merely “uni-valent” (love is positive, hate is negative) or even as being “ambiguous” or “ambivalent” (e.g., the pleasure I have to see somebody suffer). With “antinomic emotions,” of which I will give and describe three main exemplary situations, there remains an open tension between opposed moves, like in the case of a painful joy (Diadochos of Photicea), of a dreadful beauty (Plato) or in the case of a drunken soberness (Gregorius of Nyssa). Such expressions have the particularity not to be immediately and obviously understandable, which is the heart of their interest and complexity and will precisely require the analysis that follows in the article. In order to reach the threshold of experiential emotional complexity, I will benefit from useful philosophical and phenomenological resources in Kant and his binary distinctive analysis of the feelings of beauty and sublime, in Max Scheler in his fine experiential distinctions between positive and negative empathy and his descriptions of pathological ambiguous emotions (e.g., the pleasure to see someone suffer), but also in some less well-known Husserl’s about intense emotional movements combining for example in multifarious microphase-time taste, disgust, and euphoria. We will show how such analyses are at the same time useful as thresholds of understanding and limited in their descriptive potentiality. To open up the discussion, I will state that the structure of open tension inherent in antinomic emotions is complemented by a specific dynamic of reversal of the opposed emotional polarities, which can take the form either of inversion or of annulment.