by Henry Piper (all rights reserved)
Introduction
In our consideration of Hobbes and Rousseau, we have seen radically competing views of human nature and the origins and basis of human society. Based on his materialist metaphysics, Hobbes views human beings as mechanical machines whose actions are determined, as they can only be in a purely material universe, by material motives and constraints. Thus human beings simply want to perpetuate the physical motion of their lives, maximizing physical pleasure, comfort and security, making them naturally greedy, selfish, violent, domineering and anti-social. Their natural, mutual antagonism, along with the natural liberty to do anything, to anyone, leads to a state of nature consisting of a war of all against all, which it can only be reasonable to wish to escape, since life under such conditions is sure to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Thus is justified Hobbes’s social contract theory, with which he props up his commitment to the Divine Right of Kings, wherein human beings have mutually agreed to surrender their natural liberty of unrestraint to the central power of the king in order to assure security and stability and so avoid the misery of nature.
By contrast, Rousseau asserts that Hobbes has it all wrong. To begin with, Hobbes, according to Rousseau, has based his view of human nature not on humans in nature, since we have no factual examples of that to go by; rather, argues Rousseau, Hobbes has observed human behavior in modern society and extrapolated backward, so to speak, to conclude that how we behave in society is reflective of our inborn nature. Rousseau denies this: he undertakes a rigorous course of philosophical speculation to assay how we might reasonably expect human beings to have behaved in nature, and concludes that we are naturally peaceful overall, but that baseless and unjust political and economic inequality have conditioned us, over time, to behave in an unnaturally greedy and violent way. Moreover, Rousseau differs dramatically from Hobbes on his metaphysics: Rousseau readily acknowledges the materiality of the world and of human beings themselves, and agrees that humans must be primarily concerned with physical survival and pleasure, but Rousseau denies that human beings are merely material, asserting rather that we have a spiritual dimension to our existence, lacking in plants and other animals, which gives us genuine freedom substantially to determine our own path in the world. For Rousseau, Hobbes’s view of natural “liberty” is a relatively insignificant reality compared with the genuine power of free will which Rousseau insists is the unique, natural birthright of every human being.
Freud’s Atheistic Materialism and the Subconscious
For his part, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) comes down firmly and unequivocally on the side of Hobbes, and though Freud, unlike Hobbes, offers little in the way of metaphysical speculation, nonetheless there are numerous hints and echoes of Hobbes throughout Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, as well as some direct criticism of the views of Rousseau.
Freud’s atheism is blatant, and we shall have occasion to consider it, but his materialist assumptions are not nearly as obvious. With due consideration, however, these assumptions should become fairly clear; thus, in general Freud emphasizes how our behavior is substantially determined by forces beyond our control and typically unknown to us, but which have their origin in the concrete, physical experience of our lives. However, whereas Hobbes’s view of the materialist forces governing human behavior is limited to the relatively visible dynamics of the mechanical deliberation between the endeavors of appetite and aversion, the forces shaping our behavior in Freud are primarily those of the subconscious, and are thus profoundly more subtle and, indeed, essentially invisible. It is, in fact, the opening up of the subconscious that distinguishes Freud as the revolutionary thinker that he is.
The Emergence of the Ego
Let’s consider, from a purely materialist perspective, how a human person develops. Initially one is in the womb, connected physically to the ground of one’s origin, in a condition of perfect comfort and lacking all pain, and lacking also any sense of self or consciousness.
Then one is born, ripped from the perfect serenity and unconsciousness of the womb into the reality of the physical world, where one almost instantly feels hunger, cold, general discomfort and separation from the secure connection to one’s mother, while yet lacking any sense of self. The infant, we can assume, feels only a pure and immediate desire for pleasure and lack of pain, for warmth, for the mother’s encirclement; in short, the infant essentially desires a return to the conditions of the womb, but this is not to be. For a while, the infant is simply held and suckled, when not asleep, and when separate from the mother for long cries reflexively for reconnection to the breast and mother’s arms. As time passes, however, the infant begins to recognize that there is a breast out there, and a mother, and that the infant is separate from those external objects. It is thus, says Freud, that the infant initially begins to discover that it is a separate entity; indeed, this recognition of objects of pleasure (and, later, pain) marks the beginning of the recognition of the self, that is, the emergence of the “ego.” So, says Freud, I am not born with an initial sense of self, and I don’t even develop it from within myself; rather, I develop a sense of myself as a separate self by reference to the external objects that I am not.
On reflection, we can readily see how sensible this view is, especially if we limit our consideration to the material world, which for a materialist like Freud is of course the only reality there is. So I find myself, as a material entity craving pleasure and comfort, and desiring to avoid displeasure and discomfort, in a physical world of objects that offer me such pleasure and comfort or the lack of which threaten the opposite; and the ego emerges as the consciousness of myself as an object in the world, separate from the objects of pleasure and pain.
The Division of the Psyche: The Inborn Id and the Development of the Ego
The “id” is Freud’s term for the innate drive or instinct for physical pleasure; as a matter of our basic inborn, physical nature, the id is all I really am, the sole basis of my initial existence. The ego, which designates my consciousness of myself, does not exist at birth, at least not as a separate sense of self, and only gradually develops as such after birth; at birth, in other words, the only sense of self I can be said to have is simply a self that is a part of the physical world, specifically my mother. Thus, in the womb, I have no ego at all, because I am literally connected to the world, without separation; at birth and in early infancy, lacking any separate sense of self, I simply want reconnection to the mother’s breast and have no sense of myself apart from that connection.
So at birth and in infancy I am naturally nothing but a little “id-machine” (my phrase), so to speak; indeed, it is solely the “pleasure principle,” says Freud, that motivates me. We need only briefly consider our own experience of infants to see the evident plausibility of this: what do infants want but to avoid the displeasure and discomfort of hunger and cold and separation from mom?; the simple pleasure of pleasure itself is all that’s needed to stop the crying. In this, we should note, Freud precisely follows Hobbes, at least implicitly, for whom physical pleasure is our only basic motive, and this is so for Freud as well, and for the same reason, namely that the physical world is all there is, so what else could motivate us?
As intimated above, before we are born we have perfect achievement of the pleasure principle, since in the womb there is perfect painlessness and comfort and connection. To be born, however, is to confront the reality of the external, physical world and so enters the “reality principle,” which indicates the necessity that the achievement of pleasure now, after birth, requires us to deal with the reality of the world outside us. The development of the ego and the gradual recognition of external reality are two sides of the same coin, for my ego develops as a response to the recognition of external reality as the source of pleasure and pain. So, says Freud, the pleasure principle “turns into” the reality principle, as my drive for pleasure increasingly involves the acknowledgement of and involvement with the reality of the external world.
In sum, in essence I am nothing but a drive for pleasure, I am nothing but id, whose only principle is pleasure; but upon birth, id confronts reality and gradually recognizes itself as an object in the world over and against other objects, which offer pleasure and pain. So the ego develops as the sense of my self as an object wanting pleasure in a world of objects offering and withholding it, and the ego becomes my external agent in the world on a mission to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. Thus my ego represents both my own self-consciousness―the sense of my own self to myself—as well as being my visible representative in the world, the self I present to the world as my “id-agent” (again, my phrase), so to speak, the agent out to get me pleasure and avoid pain.
The Division of the Psyche, Continued: Enter the Superego
The word “psyche” comes from the Greek word for “soul,” so “psychology” is literally “the science of the soul.” The term “soul,” of course, carries spiritual, that is non-material, connotations, thus it is ironic to associate the materialist Freud with the term. But for Freud, in any event, the term “psyche” refers generally to the human self, or the sense of self, most of which is subconscious. It is thus that Freud’s view of the psyche is compared to an iceberg, since most of what makes the iceberg what it is, and most of what explains why it behaves as it does, is submerged under water, just as most of what the human psyche is and most of what explains its behavior is submerged below the level of consciousness. Freud’s view of the psyche is complicated and, over the years, developed in many subtle ways, but for our purposes we can focus on its three basic components; to the id and ego, which we have already introduced, we can add a third, namely the superego.
The basic structure of the psyche is as follows. First, as indicated above, our single, innate reality and drive is for physical pleasure, and this drive is located in the subconscious id, which is always pushing us but is never overtly visible. When born, and as we grow up, our ego develops in reaction to physical reality; it is the one part of us that appears above the level of the subconscious, thus it is likened to “the tip of the iceberg.” In addition to the id, there is another part of us that is subconscious, called the superego, which most notably features the function of “conscience” (not to be confused with the term, usually an adjective, “conscious”).
So there is one small part of us that is conscious, namely the ego, just as only the tip of the iceberg is above water. Below the level of consciousness is the major part of our psyche, which consists of two basic parts, the id and the superego. But while id and superego are alike in their being both subconscious (though of course they manifest themselves to our conscious ego and in our outward behavior), it is vital to note that they are also dissimilar in that the id is a natural, innate or inborn part of us (indeed the only strictly natural, innate part of us), whereas the superego is a product of the external conditioning of society. We typically think of ourselves as naturally possessing a “conscience,” by which we might refer to an innate sense of right and wrong which guides us toward right behavior and, through guilt and remorse, away from wrong; however, according to Freud, following Hobbes and for the same, materialist reason, there is no natural “good” or “evil,” rather our sense of these terms is strictly a function of social conditioning.
The Superego and Taboos
There are some feelings we have, such as the disgust for our feces, that seem as though they must be utterly natural: we may have trouble imagining that we could possibly feel otherwise about our anal excretions but a sense of disgust at their smell, for example. But Freud claims, persuasively, that this feeling of disgust is in fact merely a “taboo” of society and not of nature. It seems natural to us because it has been conditioned into us from our first hours after birth, where we witness the disgust of our parents for our excretions, which we pick up on and “internalize”; but such feelings of disgust are not natural, says Freud, indeed it is our natural desire to retain and play with our feces, since they hold a particular fascination for us as being an essential product and part of our own bodies.
A taboo is thus Freud’s term for a social requirement fundamental to the maintenance of social order and stability. Thus in nature, where we all roam freely and independently, our feces do not present the threat to us they do where, in society, we all live together in common quarters and close proximity to one another. So it is essential to social hygiene and order that we get rid of our feces, and we are conditioned so deeply and so early on to regard them with disgust that we cannot separate such feeling of disgust from our own egos: we cannot remember a time when we did not feel such disgust, thus we naturally assume that the feeling was born with us, but Freud insists, persuasively, that it was not. Thus we can see how it is that the superego’s sense of right and wrong can seem to be natural and inborn, because of the extent to which we feel it to be part of us, the extent to which, that is, we have “internalized” the feeling and made it part of our basic psychic constitution or make-up; but in fact, we now see, it is not natural, but socially conditioned, a matter of “nurture” rather than nature, we might say.
Indeed, it is the general aim of society to mold our behavior into socially acceptable and beneficial channels. Unfortunately, this is not consistent with our id-driven nature, which, following Hobbes, is to seek pleasure for ourselves. It is thus that, again following Hobbes, our liberty is greatest in nature, but it is of little use to us, thus we surrender it to society as a condition for some measure of physical security. In other words, civilization by nature causes us “discontent” since it molds us in ways substantially contrary to our nature, through the rechanneling of our natural tendencies by “character formation,” or the transformation of our natural tendencies known as “sublimation” or even the outright “repression” of those tendencies. An example of this can be seen in our tendency to retain our feces, where society redirects the natural tendency to ordering and controlling our feces into socially beneficial forms of order and cleanliness. If taken to an extreme, however, we develop the neurosis of the “anal retentive,” one obsessed to an excessive degree with order and cleanliness. We can easily see how such neurotic obsession is an exaggerated extension of our natural tendency to retain and order what is close to us or part of us, but now redirected from the products of our bodies to the contents of our immediate environment; such a neurosis leads us to compensate for the socially-denied drive to retain and order our feces by the obsession to control and order our physical surroundings.
The “Oceanic Feeling”: Religious Sentiments and the Idea of God
A prime example for Freud of the subconscious at work can be observed in religious sentiments and the idea of God; here indeed is an example of an internal psychic state experienced by many people (though decidedly not by Freud himself), which the religious believer assumes to be part of his nature but which in fact, according to Freud, can only have some origin in actual physical, lived experience. Again, it is vital here to recall the materialist underpinnings of Freud’s thought: anything we experience must have some material basis, because everything in the universe, for the materialist Freud, is material. So, we must ask, as Freud does at the very beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents, what is the (experiential, material) basis for the feeling and idea of God?
Freud recounts that a very intelligent friend of his experiences what he refers to as an “oceanic feeling,” which refers to what this friend takes to be an inborn feeling of the existence and presence of God. Freud, as a materialist atheist, categorically rejects the notion that it could have anything to do with “God,” since Freud assumes that there is no God, but Freud does not doubt the reality of the feeling itself; in other words, Freud has no reason not to trust that his friend, and many people, have such a feeling, and, since nothing happens without a cause, the feeling must come from somewhere, that is from some experience in the world, and since it cannot come from God, since for Freud there is no God, it is left to Freud to figure out where it does come from.
The first chapter of Civilization and Its Discontents is devoted to the search for this cause, and Freud basically considers two possible sources for the religious sentiments experienced by many people, including this “oceanic feeling,” which he refers to as a feeling of “eternity,” and, we might add, a feeling of a perfect, selfless connection with the ground of our origin, of our creation, and a feeling of the perfect comfort, pleasure and security of that ground.
Freud first wonders whether this feeling might derive from a “primitive ego feeling,” that is, a feeling of our ego before we were even conscious of the ego, or ourselves, as such. Though it seems as though nothing is more obvious to us than the feeling of our separate selves, in fact, as we have noted above, this sense of ego is something that only develops over time. So might we not retain some primitive feeling of our lived experience prior to the ego’s “detaching” itself from the objects of the external world? This is clearly plausible, says Freud, since we retain a memory-trace of everything, at least in principle, that we have ever experienced, absent trauma to the brain or some like event. Freud suggests an analogy between our unconscious psyche and the buried ruins of an ancient city, suggesting that all our past experiences, while submerged in the unconscious, most of them never to emerge into the light of consciousness, still determine substantially our conscious selves, just as the ancient history of Rome, while largely buried under the modern city, nonetheless underlies and guides the nature of the city still. Though the analogy between the ancient city and the unconscious psyche has its limits, since the subconscious and conscious mind hold past experience together with the present in a uniquely preserved and close-knit way, it is a helpful metaphorical reminder of the depth and influence of the unconscious on our present psychic being and behavior.
Let me add here a further suggestion as to how this analogy might inform our understanding of the oceanic feeling. We might reasonably assume that, though we cannot have a conscious memory of the womb, since there could be no conscious sense of self at that time, still it is reasonable to assume that a trace of that experience exists deeply buried in our unconscious, a memory, that is, of perfect pleasure in the form of perfect comfort and painlessness, and a feeling moreover of a perfect connection to the literal, physical ground of our origin; and is this not precisely a description of one’s feeling of the existence and presence of God? Thus could it not be that our feeling of God is not simply a long-forgotten memory of the womb? Surely it could, and it is hard for me personally to believe that that is not at least a partial cause of god-consciousness.
Freud, however, is not prepared to commit himself to such a view, as it is clearly speculative and thus, however reasonable and convincing it might be, it presumably smacks too much of philosophy, lacking, that is, what Freud might view as the “rigor” of observable, empirical or scientific evidence. Thus for his part Freud hangs his hat, for an explanation of our feeling of God, on the more concrete sense of “infantile helplessness” that we can clearly trace to our early childhood experience, specifically that relating to our fathers.
In this regard we must consider how we typically characterize God, and, to draw on Old Testament depictions, we see God as a provider and protector, but also as one who disciplines and punishes and finally as a God who is jealous of our relations with other putative gods. Who, in our early childhood experience, can be observed to evidence these characteristics but our fathers? It is too obvious to be sincerely doubted, in other words, that there must be a relation between those Old Testament characteristics of God and our earliest experiences of our father. Indeed, as Freud will later discuss at more length, our feelings for our fathers are deeply ambivalent: we love our fathers for their provision and protection, but we also hate and fear our fathers for their punishment and discipline and we are jealous of our fathers in our mutual competition for our mothers’ attention. Thus, it is so plausible as to appear all but certain that the Old Testament descriptions of “God the Father” are in fact modeled on our earliest and most essential, subconscious feelings for our literal fathers.
Note on the Nature and Value of Philosophy
So, in this consideration of the source of the God-feeling and religious sentiments, we clearly observe the depth and mystery and influence of the subconscious, and how what may seem natural may in fact, like the deeply conditioned feelings that form the basis for social taboos, have their origin in concrete lived, physical experiences, now long submerged in subconscious forgetfulness. It is vital to note here, however, two things. First, I suggest that the basic outlines of Freud’s analysis are overwhelmingly convincing and undoubtedly contain a great deal of truth; that is, clearly the subconscious exists in each of us, clearly it has many sources in lived experience, clearly it shapes our feelings and behaviors and even our destinies. Moreover, more specifically, it seems to me undeniable to reasonable minds that Freud is at least substantially correct, though perhaps only in part, as to the origins of the God-feelings that many of us experience. But second, it is also vital to note, and cannot be overemphasized, that our endorsement of the apparent accuracy of Freud’s outline of the psyche, and even of his tracing of the God feelings, does not amount to or entail an acceptance of the atheistic and materialist assumptions on which Freud’s conclusions are in part based, and to acknowledge that our subconscious shapes our behavior and destinies is hardly to concede that it determines them with mechanical necessity. In other words, as is true with any serious and honest philosophical inquiry, we can learn a great deal from it, and learn to accept its insights, while still doubting its assumptions and even rejecting some if not all of its ultimate conclusions.
So Freud may be correct that the world is all material, as Hobbes also maintains, and Freud may be right that there is no God; but Freud may also be wrong about these ultimate questions. And the important thing for us to learn, as we consider the thought of all philosophers, is to recognize genuine insight and sound reasoning, and perhaps even truth, and be able to separate that from reasoned speculation, which while plausible and insightful may yet not be true in all its partculars. As always when we do philosophy, we must be content to accept the basic truth that the ultimate questions of the nature of reality and the existence of God, for example, must evade our solution; but we must also learn to appreciate how much we still might learn even in the absence of, and in part by virtue of, such lack of solution, for a great measure of wisdom is still and always to be found in knowing what we do not know, and in continuing to know it better, for, as we learn from Socrates, from the insight of ignorance is knowledge born.
Pleasure and Unpleasure
Briefly to review what we have discussed so far, for Freud we are essentially motivated by nothing but the pleasure principle, since it is a material world and we thus seek merely material pleasure, comfort and security, as in Hobbes. The id is our only innate being, for it is only at birth that it becomes possible for the ego to begin to discover itself and to exist as a separate entity. This ego develops in response to our entry into the reality of the physical world, where our hope for pleasure now resides, thus the pleasure principle turns into the reality principle, and the ego becomes our conscious sense of ourselves as well as our agent in the world; because it is the little part of us that is conscious, as well as the part that we present to the world, we liken it to the tip of the iceberg.
As we become individuals in the world, we must fit into society in order to survive and prosper, indeed our reality is very much a social reality. Our natural drive for pleasure cannot fit easily into society, as we have seen in Hobbes, moreover I am threatened with unhappiness by the external world generally and more specifically by my own bodily needs and the competition of others. Early on, as my ego is becoming more and more aware of itself, I begin to explore and to test the limits of that ego and its ability to achieve pleasure, thus “the terrible twos,” when I persist in the strategy of the infant to scream for what I want, which is now only partially effective. As I grow older, my efforts to achieve happiness, that is pleasure, become of course more sophisticated and subtle; but the aim is always the same. I learn that direct and intense pleasure is often unavailable or difficult to achieve and maintain, and it is thus often easier to resort to “deflections,” “substitute satisfactions” and various forms of physical and emotional intoxication when I cannot get exactly what I want; indeed, avoidance of unpleasure is simply the flip side of achieving pleasure. The ultimate pleasure is love, which in Freud’s purely material world is essentially sexual love, and though pleasure of this sort is the greatest and most intense, it also makes me vulnerable to the most acute pain, thus typically making avoidance of pain the safer course. Freud’s term “libido” is that aspect of the id which denotes the energy of the pleasure drive as directed toward objects in the world, notably love objects. In a general sense, as for Hobbes, all pleasure can be classified as love, understood as encompassing immediate pleasure as well as a feeling of connection and comfort as so fully realized in the womb.
There are various forms of unpleasure-avoidance. I can sublimate my desire for pleasure in work and the pursuit of beauty; sublimation transforms the energy of the libido from the pursuit of objects of instant gratification into more constructive, refined and socially acceptable avenues. I can deflect unhappiness with drugs and other forms of isolation and withdrawal from society. I can resort to illusion, including notably the “mass delusion” of religion. And an ultimate and extreme escape from the perils of reality in general and society in particular is psychosis. In any event, in a material world “all suffering is nothing else than sensation,” and when I cannot achieve pleasurable sensations, then I dull, flee or avoid unpleasurable ones by various means, including the dulling or evasion of consciousness itself.
The Conditions of Civilization
We have seen that we seek love, or Eros, which is in fact, as for Hobbes, just a fancy word for physical pleasure, or for unity with the objects of pleasure; we have noted also, however, that the achievement of love is highly problematic, since if all of us single-mindedly sought only that we would, if Hobbes is right, find ourselves back in a state of nature and a war of all against all. Civilization, for Freud as for Hobbes, constitutes humankind’s response to the reality of necessity, or Ananke, and offers us our best chance at maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Freud finds it “astonishing” that one might claim, as Rousseau so clearly does, that civilization “is largely responsible for our misery,” since Freud, following Hobbes, views it rather as a response to misery. Freud concedes, however, that “it is very difficult to form an opinion whether and in what degree men of an earlier age felt happier.” Moreover, the very title, Civilization and Its Discontents, serves to remind us that society does by its nature cause us discontent by limiting us in what would otherwise, in nature, be our unfettered opportunity to seek happiness, that is pleasure, however we please. In any event, for Freud, as for that matter for Rousseau, civilization is here to stay.
So we seek the love that consists in the connection with our beloved or with other sources of pleasure, but in terms of civilization, love is problematic. We have already noted that the unfettered pursuit of pleasure is the first thing that society requires us to surrender, and we might add here that this is especially true of matters sexual, since the power of sexual libido can clearly lead to destructive competition, thus the various taboos surrounding sex such as those traditional ones forbidding incest, adultery and homosexuality. (It might be noted here that in the case of homosexuality the taboo is a relatively weak one in itself, since psychologically the sexuality of all of us is clearly on a continuum somewhere between “gay” and “straight”; it is thus that “homophobia” denotes not strictly the fear of another person’s homosexuality, but of our own, repressed feelings, which manifest, in their extreme, in the bigotry of gay-bashing, which is presumably a mask for one’s own deep sense of sexual insecurity. But for social stability, in any event, the nuclear heterosexual family has traditionally been the basis of social stability since it has traditionally been where the kids are.)
Another problem with love is the tendency of the happy loving couple to shut out external society. From the point of view of civilization, which naturally strives to mold us to its purposes and against our natural inclinations, this will not do, since society demands cohesion and such anti-social love would tend to undermine it. Indeed, Freud says that civilization “aims at binding the members of the community together in a libidinal way,” that is, society seeks to direct the energy of the libido away from socially exclusive or destructive love and toward love for our community. Society’s “ideal demand” thus is, “love your neighbor as yourself.”
Society’s “Ideal Demand”
We should be immediately alert to Freud’s use of the term “ideal,” since, for Freud, as a materialist, “ideal” can only mean “unreal.” Indeed, as Freud promptly argues, to love our neighbor goes against what he views as the very essence of love, since (and we should again recall Hobbes here) we only love those, says Freud, who have done something to deserve it, and moreover we value love only to the extent that it is reserved for an exclusive few rather than offered freely to all. But the essential problem with this love of neighbor idea, and what makes it, in Freud’s view, impossibly “ideal,” that is unrealistic, is this: “Not merely is the stranger in general unworthy of my love; I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred.” Freud continues in this Hobbesian vein:
If it will do him any good he has no hesitation in injuring me, nor does he ask himself whether the amount of advantage he gains bears any proportion to the extent of the harm he does to me. Indeed, he need not even obtain an advantage; if he can satisfy any sort of desire by it, he thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me, slandering me and showing his superior power; and the more secure he feels and the more helpless I am, the more certainly I can expect him to behave like this to me.
Worse than having no intrinsic love for one another, says Freud, we are in fact inclined, as Hobbes also so plainly asserts, to violate one another if it is to our material advantage and even, it would seem, if it is not! And regarding “society’s ideal demand,” Freud’s observation is that “nothing else runs so strongly counter to the nature of man.”
In short, the commands of human ethics demand that we repress our basic natural desires, especially with regard to sex; however, Freud argues that such commands are altogether unreasonable since to follow them would, as a practical matter, put us at the mercy of those who are savvy enough to recognize that there is more positive profit in unethical behavior—that in a society of meek and deluded ethical individuals, crime really does pay, since the ethical person becomes easy prey for exploitation. As long as some people remain outside of ethical norms, therefore, “obedience to high ethical demands entails damage to the demands of civilization, for it puts a positive premium on being bad.” The bottom line, according to Freud, is that
men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?
We have already in Rousseau considered a serious dispute of precisely this; but in any event, we can see here in Freud an account of human nature that exceeds even the language of Hobbes for explicitness: to Freud, our natural desire toward our fellow human being is to assault, to enslave, to rape, to rob, “to humiliate, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill”! That, we must observe, leaves little to the imagination, and little doubt as to Freud’s Hobbesian point of view.
Love and Death
This instinctual aggressiveness, suggests Freud, is a “primary mutual hostility” which “constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.” Contrary to the arguments of Rousseau, according to Freud “aggressiveness was not created by property,” though Freud concedes that the abolition of private property would “deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments,” and Freud even seems to express sympathy toward “endeavors to fight against the inequality of wealth among men.” But there is in essence no solution to the problem of aggressiveness, since it is, to Freud, an intrinsic reality of human nature that therefore cannot be altogether repressed. Indeed, this aggressive instinct can actually be used as a force of social cohesion, as long as it is given an outlet. Says Freud, “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” Thus, in particular, “When once the Apostle Paul posited the universal love between men as the foundation of the Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside of it became the inevitable consequence.” In other words, the more those of a kind love one another, the more their instinctual aggressiveness must be compensated by hatred toward others.
Freud explains that the gradual recognition of the depth of this instinctual aggressiveness led him over time to conclude that the human id’s drive for pleasure and for connection with the objects of pleasure, as we have observed it above, is linked by nature to a commensurate drive for pain and destruction; in short, the drive for love and life implies also a drive for death: “besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units, there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primeval, inorganic state.”
The link between pain and pleasure, life and destruction, love and death is most evident in its erotic manifestations of sadism and masochism, inclinations to which all of us, presumably, possess, though for most of us, most of the time, such inclinations are evidently largely latent or repressed. But we might recall that even in its most mundane forms, pleasure and happiness are so linked with their opposites as to be interdependent and even at times indistinguishable:
What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.
In other words, according to Freud we can feel pleasure or happiness only as an absence or negation of pain or unhappiness, not as a positive fulfillment. For example, for Freud the ultimate sexual pleasure of orgasm is a function merely of a release from sexual frustration, and on a purely physical level we can easily see the narrow plausibility of this view, though this of course ignores any possibility of a greater and deeper spiritual basis for sexuality, which of course Freud would categorically deny. We would do well to recall here that this is altogether in keeping with the materialistic foundations of Freud’s views, according to which our only natural motivation is physical pleasure and the only threat to us its absence.
It is thus that our original state of perfect painlessness and connection, in the womb, is one to which we naturally seek to return in death, and thus that all life, in purely material terms, tends toward precisely that same experience: from dust have we come and to dust shall we return. And we should recall here as well that that “oceanic feeling” which we consider at the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents represents the yearning for a return to the ground of our origin in a literal, materialist sense, which for us can be accomplished only in death. Thus death offers precisely the virtues of the womb, for in both cases we experience the perfect happiness of absolute comfort and painlessness along with an indissoluble connection to the ground of our origin. So it all comes together: the subconscious memory trace of the womb, which we long for, is essentially identical to, the same as, the expectation of death, thus rendering highly plausible indeed Freud’s association, and even the essential identification of, love and death.
The Analogy between Individual and Social Development
Having investigated the nature and origins of the death drive, Freud can conclude that “the meaning of the evolution of civilization… must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species.” Thus, notably, this same tension between love and death that defines and drives the development of the individual psyche is at the root also of the development of human society (and at the root of the evolution, by way of “creative destruction,” we might say, of natural processes as well). Upon reflection, it is hardly surprising that the development of society should mirror the development of the individual, since society is nothing other than the combination of individuals, thus, “Just as a planet revolves around a central body as well as rotating on its own axis, so the human individual takes part in the course of development of mankind at the same time as he pursues his own path in life.”
This nice, concrete metaphor of Freud’s offers a fitting, materialist image of the relationship between individual and society, with both following the same laws of natural mechanics. However, there are clear limits to the analogy between individual and social development. Most notably, “In the process of individual development… the main accent falls on the egoistic urge or the urge towards happiness; while… in the process of civilization… the most important thing is the aim of creating a unity out of individual human beings.” In other words, the respective, primary motivations of individual and society are starkly different: the individual is id-driven toward its own pleasure (and, ultimately, destruction) with no essential regard to others, whereas society’s primary aim is the achievement and maintenance of unity and order, accommodating individual happiness only as necessary to maintain that order. It is thus that civilization is bound to entail “discontents” in the individual, since individual happiness is not, and as a practical matter cannot be, its primary aim.
Society’s Secret Weapon: the Superego
We have previously sketched the outlines of the superego: to review, like the id the superego is subconscious, but unlike the id, the superego is not natural but a function of social conditioning. Specifically, the primary function of the superego is known as “conscience,” a subconscious guide moving us toward “right” or “good” behavior—that is, socially acceptable behavior―which tends toward the cohesion of society and counters our natural egoistic and destructive tendencies. The tool that the superego uses to accomplish this guidance is the sense of guilt, or remorse. Freud devotes a lengthy discussion to the source and development of guilt because it is mysterious (it is the subconscious that we’re dealing with here, after all) and also because its source consists of two distinct components.
We should recall that for Hobbes, whose primary interest was political and who concerned himself at most only obliquely with anything akin to the subconscious, the only substantial means of social control consisted of the forces of physical compulsion and fear occasioned by our surrender of personal freedom to the absolute power of the ruling elite. As Hobbes suggests, the fear of God might in principle be nature’s greatest motivator, but as a practical matter it is on the power of men that we must rely for social order. Freud naturally acknowledges such forces and their practical effect, but the force “that appears to be the most important” is never considered by Hobbes, and that is the force of the sense of guilt exerted by the superego.
“What happens,” asks Freud, “in the history of the development of the individual to render his desire for aggression innocuous?” In other words, how does the individual develop in such a way as to become a docile and serviceable member of society, rather than being bent exclusively on its own egoistic pleasure and ultimately the destruction of others and even of itself? The answer, says Freud, is as follows:
His aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from—that is, it is directed toward his own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of “conscience,” is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.
The energy of our natural aggressiveness would ordinarily find its primary outlet in conflict with the external world and thus result in destructiveness toward the possibility of stable society. The effect of social conditioning is to redirect this energy into ourselves, so that instead of aggressing externally against the outside world, we aggress internally against our own egos. In other words, rather than society’s depending primarily on the use of external force and fear to regulate our conduct, society effectively conditions us to regulate ourselves by planting within us the superego, which is simply the animal-like training we are submitted to from birth (we are for Freud, after all, as for Hobbes, in essence merely animals) which has become so deeply ingrained in our subconscious as to feel perfectly natural to us, such as our revulsion for our own feces.
The Origin of the Sense of Guilt
The tool the superego uses to enforce society’s demands is the sense of guilt or remorse, the source and development of which is, as we noted, complex. To put it succinctly, however, there are, according to Freud, two basic sources for the sense of guilt; one of them has its origin within us, the other without. The more obvious is the external source, which results from the experience of punishment by our parents, and the consequent fear of it, which we have actually experienced in childhood; but this experience of punishment and fear has become internalized, that is, it has become subconsciously implanted within us as the superego, through constant, repetitive conditioning, so that we feel it all on our own, even when we do not get caught doing some forbidden deed, and even in fact at the mere thought of the forbidden deed, since “nothing can be hidden from the superego, not even thoughts.”
In addition, says Freud, there is another, more subtle source of the sense of guilt, which derives from within us. This is the sense of ambivalence we feel, primarily for our fathers, which is a function of the fact that we feel both love and hatred for them, love because they protect and provide, hatred because they punish us and compete with us for our mothers’ attention. This tension of feeling for our fathers seems to be another manifestation, we might observe, of that natural tension between love and death, our dual feelings of love and hatred for our fathers mirroring the id’s duality of love and death, pleasure and pain, connection and dissolution. And this feeling of ambivalence for our fathers produces a sense of guilt for our wanting to kill our fathers even as we also desire and cherish their care. More deeply, suggests Freud, there is a phylogenetic component to this feeling of guilt as well—one whose origin is in the historic development of the species and harkens back to a primeval rebellion of children against the absolute domination of their primitive fathers, which still now is preserved “genetically” as a physical trace within us. In other words, in addition to the guilt we harbor simply for the hostile thoughts we naturally have for our own fathers, there is also a trace memory, borne along by the historical evolution of our species, of an original, actual murder of the father by the children.
Conclusion
It is in substantial part because Freud shares Hobbes’s materialist (and atheistic) assumptions that his view of the human psyche must take the form it does; thus our natural impulse can only be the drive for pleasure as embodied in the id. Our egos’ only concern must be the service of that pleasure-drive, as mediated by the necessity to deal with reality. And it makes perfect sense that we trade the relatively perfect liberty we enjoy in a state of nature for the restrictions of the security that only society can provide, despite the discontent that such restrictions cause us, especially with regard to that most intense of pleasure drives, namely that for sex. It is precisely because of that intensity, clearly, that so many of society’s harshest taboos involve sex.
This reminds us, of course, that sex is just another word for the ultimate pursuit of love, which is just another term for what we view as “good” which is in turn simply a refined term for simple physical pleasure: for Freud, as for Hobbes, we are material beings in a material world seeking material pleasure, resulting in our natural tendencies for selfishness, greed, violence, domination and anti-sociability. And, until society evolves to mold our individual psyches as effectively as it has done for bees and ants, we as individuals will continue to be bedeviled by discontent, and the ultimate fate and survival of society must remain, Freud ominously concludes, in suspense.
But are Freud, and Hobbes, right in their reduction of freedom and love to the instinctual and mechanical drive for material pleasure? We have already considered Rousseau’s response to Hobbes, and we turn next to a response to Freud’s view of love offered by another psychologist, Erich Fromm.
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