I learned something today while I was studying — first and foremost, when you are not in a very healthy headspace reading Freud can be very unsettling. In fact, it can be downright depressing at points and encourages a kind of destructive self-analysis best avoided. That said, it wasn’t entirely unenjoyable either. I just finished Civilization and Its Discontents and, even though it took me about ten times longer than it should have to get through, it’s pretty dope.
There are a couple of points that need thinking over a bit, but I’ll only touch on one for now. Freud has a view of ethics that is so vastly different from Derrida’s. I say this because I was reading Derrida’s Specters of Marx just before this and it was fresh in my mind. Derrida feels that ethics is all about responsibility to others, and the most ethical position you can take is to recognize that you will never completely fulfill that responsibility. Not that you shouldn’t try to treat every person and every situation in the justest way possible, but that you must be aware of an ongoing debt to society that is embodied in the person you may inadvertently treat unjustly in the process. If this isn’t clear I think I talked about it a few months ago in another post about ethics. Now Freud also talks about a responsibility to the other, as is represented in the maxim “love thy neighbour as thyself.” However, he believes that although this is valued as one of the highest ideals in human relations it is inherently impossible because human beings are instinctively aggressive towards one another and will always be enemies and competitors at their core. He even goes so far as to make a value judgment on the ideal, claiming that to love his neighbour may actually be unjust in some situations. He argues that some people may be unworthy of love, and that by extending the same understanding to them it devalues the love we share with the people who actually deserve it and is thus unjust towards them. He presents it with a nearly airtight logic — but that doesn’t make it any less disturbing.
Though Civilization and Its Discontents is a well-written and fascinating read, it is deeply pessimistic. There is much more to it than I have the energy to go into right at this moment, but suffice it to say he paints a very bleak picture of the state of civilization and human relations. It is interesting to suggest, as he does, that all of culture originates in a struggle between Eros and Death. But it is also a rather hopeless view of the possibilities for humanity’s future. This requires a much more extensive explanation, which I may get into later. For now though, I think I’ll try to suppress my self-destructive death drive and actually get some sleep.
