Classical View of Passion in Hippolytus: Part Two

According to Friedrich Nietzsche, there are two kinds of people: those who are ‘in complete power of destiny’ and those who are victims. As we discussed in class, Phaedre belongs to the second kind of people – she is a victim who is trying to hide her feelings and emotions:

Lift me up! Lift my head up! All the muscles

are slack and useless. Here, you, take my hands.

They’re beautiful, my hands and arms!

Take away this hat! It is too heavy to wear.

Take it away! Let my hair fall free on my shoulders. (244)

As we discussed in class, we are people of ‘many masks’ as we often mask our feelings in order to hide something we do not want to show to others. Friedrich Nietzsche writes that ‘every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives’ (51) and then continues, ‘there are cases enough in which we perform actions of many colours’ (146) Phaedre also has a mask and tries to hide her real feelings under it. However, she does so only at the beginning of the play and takes it off somewhere in the middle of the play revealing all her feelings in a wish to love and to be loved.

The first feeling of Phaedre was love, ‘oceanic feeling’: ‘It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, ‘oceanic’. This feeling … is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by various Churches and religious systems, directed by them into particular channels, and doubtless also exhausted by them. One may, he thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion.‘ (Freud 11).