Are you a musician, IJ?
I remember a conversation about music on Firetalk once and you were there.
Schiller tried his best in believing the happy harmony between reason and the passions (On the Aesthetic Education of Man), a harmony Bloom espouses as an ideal. It's a struggle for order, internal for Aristotle, externalized into a sacred world by St. Paul, and secularized and internalized again by Kant. Schiller follows Kant.
Perhaps Nietzsche's orientation to the Dionysian potencies--reaching back beyond Greek rationalism--is too often confused with the spark of divinity. This is all very German, very French, very European after the sunset of Scholasticism. And then over the graves of Locke and Hobbes the English gave us the Beatles and their children who turned the tension into a schizophrenia: seriously singing of love--our highest joy--by demoting it to unseriousness.
Roberto Benigni in "Life is Beautiful" presents a triumphant joy in the face of tragedy, although its very frenetic and exhausting--only the vibrant could keep it up. Have you seen it?
Aside from occasionally torturing a piano, sadly, no.
the happy harmony between reason and the passions
I believe any harmony starts with a recognition of prime forces, and that freude is that force. It is the fire that fuels both passion AND reason.
Have you seen [Roberto Benigni's "Life is Beautiful"]?
No, I haven't. But I'll be on the lookout for it.