I want to jot a few notes about the seminal John Gray’s article on Freud: Freud: the last great Enlightenment thinker – Sigmund Freud is out of fashion. The reason? His heroic refusal to flatter humankind.
This article has the span and the aphoristic distill of the “Straw Dogs”. The overarching goal is to put Freud in the context of the ideas that preceded him and by extension to probe Freud’s poor standing in the contemporary culture. John Gray writes that Freud central idea was the dualism of the love and destruction, unifying Eros and the death wish of Thanatos. And although erotic part of the Freudian legacy is etched into the popular culture, it’s Freud’s ideas about the destructive part of the human that put him in dissonance with the upbeat contemporary. The goal of the article is to explain Freud as the culmination of the Enlightenment. Fittingly John Gray finds this paradox:
“Freud’s ideas are today not simply rejected as false. They are repudiated as being dangerous or immoral; the “gloomy mythology” of warring instincts is condemned as a kind of slander on the species, the fundamental nobility of which it is sacrilege to deny. To be sure, righteous indignation has informed the response to Freud’s thought from the beginning. But its new strength helps explain one of the more remarkable features of intellectual life at the start of the 21st century, a time that in its own eyes is more enlightened than any other: the intense unpopularity of Freud, the last great Enlightenment thinker.”
***
“It is only recently that his ideas have been widely disparaged and dismissed. Initially rejected because of the central importance they gave to sexuality in the formation of personality, Freud’s ideas are rejected today because they imply that the human animal is ineradicable flawed. It is not Freud’s insistence on sexuality that is the source of scandal, but the claim that humans are afflicted by a destructive impulse.”
It has been suggested for almost two decades now that Freud pared his erotic impulse with the destructive impulse after he heard the lecture in 1911 at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society by the young Russian Jewish student Sabrina Spielrein (who might have been Carl Jung’s lover at the time). Sabrina Spielrein was eventually murdered by the Nazis in the town of Rostov. Gray continues with the theme of placing Freud’s ideas in the historical context:
“Spielrein’s account differs from Freud’s in some ways—notably the link she makes between the impulse of procreation and the destruction of the individual. These differences point to the influence of Schopenhauer, who shaped much of the central European intelligentsia’s thinking at the start of the 20th century. Schopenhauer’s impact on fin-de-siècle European culture can hardly be exaggerated. His view that human intelligence is the blind servant of unconscious will informs the writings of Tolstoy, Conrad, Hardy and Proust. Schopenhauer’s most lasting impact, however, was in questioning the prevailing view of the human mind—a view that had shaped western thought at least since Aristotle, continued to be formative throughout the Christian era and underpinned the European Enlightenment.
Schopenhauer posed a major challenge to the prevailing Enlightenment worldview. In much of the western tradition, consciousness and thought were treated as being virtually one and the same; the possibility that thought might be unconscious was excluded almost by definition. But for Schopenhauer the conscious part of the human mind was only the visible surface of inner life, which obeyed the non-rational imperatives of bodily desire rather than conscious deliberation. It was Schopenhauer who, in a celebrated chapter on “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love” in The World as Will and Idea, affirmed the primary importance of sexuality in human life, suggesting that the sexual impulse operates independently of the choices and intentions of individuals, without regard for—and often at the expense of—their freedom and well-being. Schopenhauer also examined the meaning of dreams and the role of slips of the tongue in revealing repressed thoughts and emotions, ideas that Freud would make his own. Though Freud rarely mentions him, there can be little doubt that he read the philosopher closely. So most likely did Spielrein, whose account of sexuality as a threat to individual autonomy resembles Schopenhauer’s more even than does Freud’s.”
John Gray finds the paradox in Freudian dualism but also in Freud role at the culmination of the Enlightenment. By the definition of the last act of an era Freud was affirming and rejecting the ideas of the Enlightenment. A good illustration of this paradox is Freud’s evolutionary approach to religion:
“It is a paradoxical position, as the development of Freud’s thought illustrates. If science is a system of human constructions, useful for practical purposes but not a literal account of reality, what makes it superior to other modes of thinking? If science is also a sort of mythology—as Freud suggested in his correspondence with Einstein—what becomes of the Enlightenment project of dispelling myth through scientific inquiry? These were questions that Freud faced, and in some measure resolved, in the account of religion he developed towards the end of his life. In The Future of an Illusion (1927), he had interpreted religion largely in the standard Enlightenment fashion that has been revived in recent years, and is now so wearisomely familiar: religion was an error born of ignorance, which was bound to retreat as knowledge advanced. Never placing too much trust in reason, Freud did not expect religion to vanish; but at this point he seemed convinced that the diminishing role of religion in human life would be an altogether good thing.
The account of religion he presented ten years later in Moses and Monotheism (1937) was more complex. In the earlier book he had recognised that, answering to enduring human needs—particularly the need for consolation—religious beliefs were not scientific theories; but neither were they necessarily false. While religions might be illusions, illusions were not just errors—they could contain truth. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud went further, arguing that religion had played an essential role in the development of human inquiry. The Jewish belief in an unseen God was not a relic of ignorance without any positive value. By affirming a hidden reality, the idea of an invisible deity had encouraged inquiry into what lay behind the world that is disclosed to the senses. More, the belief in an unseen god had allowed a new kind of self-examination to develop—one that aimed to explore the inner world by looking beneath the surface of conscious awareness. Freud’s attempt to gain insight into the invisible workings of the mind may have been an extension of scientific method into new areas; but this advance was possible, Freud came to think, only because religion had prepared the ground. Without ever surrendering his uncompromising atheism, Freud acknowledged that psychoanalysis owed its existence to faith.”
After framing Freud’s ideas as post-enlightenment and a post-religion, it’s inevitable for John Gray to draw the parallels to Nietzsche. Yet in the final “analysis” it’s the pessimism about the human that hides the Freudian from the contemporary cultural projections, the post-enlightenment idea that knowledge will not change the dark, irrational fusion of death into love (true Sabrina Spielrein’s reading).
P.S. John Gray seems to trace all interesting ideas to Schopenhauer. The centrality of Freudian dualism translates naturally into the Gnostic tradition, hence the silly chatter about Freud’s relation to the “kabbalsitic”, paradoxical and paranormal.
Further reading: Tagged as:
john n. gray,
nietzsche,
philosophy,
psychology,
religion,
sigmund freud
John Gray on the Freudian dualism of Eros and Thanatos
by Ben Atlas on 01.12.2012.10:34am · 0 comments
I want to jot a few notes about the seminal John Gray’s article on Freud: Freud: the last great Enlightenment thinker – Sigmund Freud is out of fashion. The reason? His heroic refusal to flatter humankind.
This article has the span and the aphoristic distill of the “Straw Dogs”. The overarching goal is to put Freud in the context of the ideas that preceded him and by extension to probe Freud’s poor standing in the contemporary culture. John Gray writes that Freud central idea was the dualism of the love and destruction, unifying Eros and the death wish of Thanatos. And although erotic part of the Freudian legacy is etched into the popular culture, it’s Freud’s ideas about the destructive part of the human that put him in dissonance with the upbeat contemporary. The goal of the article is to explain Freud as the culmination of the Enlightenment. Fittingly John Gray finds this paradox:
It has been suggested for almost two decades now that Freud pared his erotic impulse with the destructive impulse after he heard the lecture in 1911 at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society by the young Russian Jewish student Sabrina Spielrein (who might have been Carl Jung’s lover at the time). Sabrina Spielrein was eventually murdered by the Nazis in the town of Rostov. Gray continues with the theme of placing Freud’s ideas in the historical context:
John Gray finds the paradox in Freudian dualism but also in Freud role at the culmination of the Enlightenment. By the definition of the last act of an era Freud was affirming and rejecting the ideas of the Enlightenment. A good illustration of this paradox is Freud’s evolutionary approach to religion:
After framing Freud’s ideas as post-enlightenment and a post-religion, it’s inevitable for John Gray to draw the parallels to Nietzsche. Yet in the final “analysis” it’s the pessimism about the human that hides the Freudian from the contemporary cultural projections, the post-enlightenment idea that knowledge will not change the dark, irrational fusion of death into love (true Sabrina Spielrein’s reading).
P.S. John Gray seems to trace all interesting ideas to Schopenhauer. The centrality of Freudian dualism translates naturally into the Gnostic tradition, hence the silly chatter about Freud’s relation to the “kabbalsitic”, paradoxical and paranormal.
Further reading:Tagged as: john n. gray, nietzsche, philosophy, psychology, religion, sigmund freud