>>12681566>entire cult of religious nuts>nitwits who are willing to defend Ben at a moment's notice without realizing the shit any of them are sayingBoth true of Greta too. Catastrophism is psychologically potent. See Schopenhauer's theory of the sublime:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer-aesthetics/#SubSchopenhauer identifies two varieties of the sublime, the dynamical and the mathematical. They are distinguished by the nature of the threat posed to human willing in general: if physical, then, for Schopenhauer, it is a case of the dynamical sublime; if psychological, then it is a case of the mathematical sublime. Although the sublime may be experienced with works of art—notably with tragedy—most of Schopenhauer’s examples come from nature and include a variety of landscapes and natural phenomena ranging from a frozen winter landscape which affords very little warmth and light to a violent storm at sea. He arrays them in terms of degrees of the sublime feeling they are likely to afford. The higher the magnitude of the threat posed, the higher the degree of sublime feeling.
Schopenhauer offers a phenomenologically-complex account of how we may take aesthetic pleasure in such fearsome or overwhelming scenes. In order to contemplate the Ideas in hostile objects aesthetically, the subject must first acknowledge the fearsomeness or the sheer vastness of the object, but then “consciously turn away” from the threat, “violently wrenching himself free from his will” (WWR I, 226). If the subject can do this, and achieves will-less contemplation of the Ideas which express themselves in these threatening things, then the subject experiences a “state of elevation”—this is the feeling of the sublime.
The beautiful is characterized by a loss of self-consciousness whereas the sublime is characterized by two moments of self-consciousness; the beautiful is wholly pleasurable, but the sublime is mixed with pain.
