Freud’s analysis proposes that beauty is aim-inhibited desire, that decency is the bandage of the incurably depraved. Our delight in the beautiful is forged in a crucible of erotic longing, our ideals the evaporating smoke of infelicitous passion. Yet whatever the significance or cogency of this might be, its ‘truth’ is never grasped by its simple acknowledgement. There is something unteachable here which is fully commensurate with its sublimated dynamic. Beauty – so ambivalently delicate and brutal – is an ideal which mysteriously thrives upon its own withholding. If the desire for the beautiful always conceals something that we cannot acknowledge, it is not because we ‘repress’ the truth, but simply that we cannot know it.

from After Nietzsche. (via ofresonance)