On Sublimation and other things

   I recently renamed this blog, "Sublimation, et alia" and the title deserves a short word of explanation.  "El alia" is the Latin for "and other things" as you might or might not have guessed.  "Sublimation" is a word that generally means one of three things to people: either it means nothing (of course), it means a special sort of reaction in chemistry (a phase change--solid to gas without going to liquid first), or it means something in psychology, related originally to Freudian thought.  (The usage in psychology being derived from the term in chemistry.)  When I say sublimation, what I mean is something similar to the Freudian term, which probably has its own history in study of aesthetics.  I mean this: sublimation is the act of taking some raw bit of human experience and making it beautiful or beneficial to others by means of reflection and some attempt at word craft or conceptual art.  If you do not believe in or have not been exposed to "conceptual" art--or the art of making thought beautiful, pleasing, and useful, I will ask you to consider reading Boethius' definition of eternity, or to make a study of some work of Thomas Aquinas or Plato.  There are people (commonly called philosophers, although there are certainly other kinds of people who do this work too) who do know how to make thinking beautiful.  I imagine that is why Aristotle thought thinking itself was the highest pleasure of the mind.