Empathy, Ecstasy, and why Apollo is a bit of a "square."

While sifting through the 60-odd pages of assigned reading for this week, I found myself becoming very attached to Vischer’s ideas of empathy and its “striving for mutual understanding.”  I am attracted to pantheistic viewpoints and found Mundt’s reference to Vischer’s “pantheistic desire toward a union with the world”…as the..”basis for this symbolizing activity” which I assume to be art-making (or perhaps just being), something that kept my interest.  I also found Mundt’s reference to the Nietzschean ideas of the Apollonian vs. the Dionysian as a basis for the categorizing of the authors he discussed to be of particular interest.  The Dionysian attitude of losing yourself in the moment or the object at hand is far more interesting to me than the distant analysis of Apollonian categorization and hierarchies.  Mundt really got to the core of Vischer and saved me a lot of sifting and sorting.  Vischer’s mention of the idea that even “ the surface of a rock…may awaken and guide the transformation of feelings” is, I believe, the basis of Dionysian thought and the key to ecstasy itself.  I find that artwork that is overly analytical or scientific shares too much of this Apollonian attitude and lacks the empathy of the Dionysian approach.  Communication of the self is, to me, the impetus behind the work of art, not the relation of some distant process.  To quote Vischer, “The artist is the content of the work of art.”