This course examines how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century in European philosophy and literature, and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change. Are we still in modernity, or have we moved beyond the modern to the postmodern?
Intensity and the Ordinary: Sex, Death, Aggression and Guilt IV
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Do curso por Wesleyan University
Período Moderno e Pós Moderno (Parte 2)
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Intensity and the Ordinary: Sex, Death, Aggression and Guilt
With a focus on Civilization and its Discontents, we examine how Freud’s theories tried to expose profound instincts as they appeared in daily life.
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Michael S. Roth
For Freud and civilizations discontents, guilt is a modern problem.
The problem that emerges as we become more sophisticated,
more likely to live according to a middle class code or morality.
Fewer and fewer occasions to really let loose, and more and
more occasions to turn all of that impulse inward.
He calls the part of the psyche,
as you might remember from the book, that insists on these ideals, the Superego.
We haven't spent time in these course lectures talking about
Freud's Id which is the center of instinct,
the Ego which negotiates the world and the Superego which is the sense of morality.
So I don't know, that's really so important these days for
thinking about Freud.
What is important for us thinking about Freud is as we have modernization.
As we have a more and more sophisticated society,
we have for Freud, a greater and greater chance
of the explosion of unsatisfied, even repressed instincts.
This is what he's pointing out, in civilization, is discontents.
And so towards the end of the book, he discusses some of the alternatives
people have urged or suggested.
And he talks briefly about socialism, he talks about some other things Freud is
no friend of Anarchism, he's no friend of
hyper morality and he's no friend of socialism because he thinks
all of these are introducing new ideals that will be very difficult to live by.
And he doesn't think we should have ideals that we strive to live by.
What we should strive to do is understand who we are and
where our desires come from, and how we might satisfy them while living together.
There's no one answer to that.
[LAUGH] There's no one answer to that.
There's no one road for everyone.
And there's no perfect solution.
There are negotiated modes of life that allow us more or less satisfaction.
Because he's not interested in the purpose of life, remember?
He's not interested in some meta principle,
some religious doctrine or moral ideal.
He's interested in how we can deny ourselves less.
He'd deny ourselves less so that
we are more likely to find meaning in what we do, and satisfaction in what we do.
And less likely to have these crazy explosions of violence and rage.
So at the end of the book you can ask the question, so
why write civilizations discontents?
Who does he think he's going to be helping or what is he offering?
What is Freud offering?
And I guess in a way you can say he's offering what psychoanalysis offers.
That is a way of thinking about the past.
A way of thinking about the history of our desires so
that we can be more aware of how we make ourselves suffer.
Freud writes very close to the end of the book on page 92 in our translation
that he has no consolation to offer.
Thus I have not the courage, he says, to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet,
and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation.
For at bottom that is what they are demanding, the wildest revolutionaries no
less passionately than the most virtuous believers.
Freud is denying the wildest revolutionaries and
he's denying the virtuous believers.
He's an enlightment guy.
He's down the middle, if you will, on this.
But, he's down the middle while digging deeply.
He's not just saying we can just keep the lid on and how everybody should be
in the middle of the road and not worry too much about what's deep in ourselves.
No, no, no, Freud thinks that we have these deep sexual and
aggressive impulses that need some form of gratification.
But what he wants to escape is the pursuit of consolation through ideals.
I want to just really emphasize that cuz it's so close to Nietzsche,
and it really is related to Darwin and Bowdler too.
Freud wants to escape the pursuit of meaning through ideals.
He doesn't want us to strive to live on a plane
that is divorced from our animal natures, divorced from instinct.
He doesn't want us to strive to find a mode of consolation that obscures
who we are, because if we obscure who we are,
then we create another source of suffering.
Remember that's how we started early in the book.
Freud's concerned with the sources of suffering.
He wants us to see how we make ourselves suffer in hopes,
not that we can live a perfect life but that we can make ourselves suffer less.
There is no perfect life for Freud,
because there's no one good way of living for Freud.
He doesn't have that kind of track, but we can figure
out how to make ourselves suffer less, and that would be a significant achievement.
So in one respect, you could say Freud has no really real, use the terms we've
used in class before, because he has no goal of the perfect life.
No ideal way of being in the world.
But Freud does have a really real in the sense that he does think instinct or
impulse is more fundamental
than the disguises, and the compromises we make.
He has something that he uses to ground his analysis.
This is his mythology, his Eros versus Thanatos, Sex versus Aggression.
Those things are, for him, fundamental.
If they don't lead you to some ideal finale but
they do give you grounding in analysis.
So Freud, in that sense, is a modernist.
He does look for
something that is at the foundation of his analysis and of the way we live.
Let's call it Instinct, that's the way it's translated.
That conflict of desires.
Sometimes you can call that Ambivalence.
Right?
All our desires are ambivalent, that's really real.
But it results in no ideal.
It results in no perfect way of living.
For Freud, all our desires are full of conflict.
That is, you should never think for Freud that desires go in one direction.
They're always tied in knots or always complexly intertwined.
And that means you can never have complete satisfaction
because the desires that you have are mutually exclusive.
Not always, but at least in the important ways.
The most important example there is the desire to kill
your father because you also love your father.
And to act on that desire would of course contradict another desire.
All we can do for Freud is be more aware of the history of our civilization, so
we can reduce its discontents.
Be more aware of our own histories, so
that we can figure out how to live in accord with some of our desires.
All we can do is make meaning of our past so
we have a better chance of living a life that feels like our own in the future.
That's Freud's hope, it's not a utopia but
it is a mode of trying to live so
that we reduce sufferings, especially the sufferings that we cause ourselves.
Next time we'll move on to a great work of fiction,
Virginia Woolf's to the Lighthouse and see how Woolf, who certainly knew her Freud.
She and her husband were publishing Freud in English at the Hogarth Press,
we'll go on to that in our next lecture.
See you then.
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