So, having established his cred, his

credibility as an Enlightenment thinker in this discussion of the oceanic feeling,

Freud goes on to talk about why the only thing you can really look at,
scientifically, is the pleasure principle. And here he's really identifying himself
in certain ways with utilitarianism and the calculus of pleasure. He wants to move
away from any big
question of the purpose of life. Remember that from early in the book,
that the purpose of life for individuals is just reducing suffering and
seeking pleasure. I mean,
he doesn't really wanna get into any other large stories about the meaning or
purpose of life. And instead,
what Freud wants to talk about are what he calls the three sources of suffering.
Remember this, the three sources
of suffering, our own body, the external world, and other people. And for Freud
it's really important
to face the sources of suffering. And we need to spend a little
time on why that's the case. He says that so many other writers,
whether they are religious writers, philosophical writers, or
politicians, social commentators, what they really want to do is, instead of
facing what really causes us sorrow and pain, they want actually
to give us consolation. And Freud is one of those thinkers, call him stoic I guess
you could say, say
consolation is not what we should pursue. Consolation is a awful thing really for
Freud because it disguises where
our suffering comes from and makes it harder for us to deal
with these sources of suffering. Freud writes in the edition we use in this class
on page 22,
life as we find it is too hard for us, it brings us too many pains,
disappointments and impossible tasks. It order to bear it we cannot
dispense with palliative measures. Right? Palliative measures. So we come up with
these,
almost like drugs, so we don't have to deal with
life as it really is. Freud sees what he's doing in
civilization's discontents as poking through some of the palliative measures which
wind up causing us even more suffering. Some of the illusions that we give our,
we give ourselves to make ourselves feel better but actually which those
illusions make things worse for us. So in order to do that, Freud has to
make the analogy between the individual psyche that he's been studying
most of his career and society. He says on page 44 in our edition,
we cannot fail to be struck by the similarity
between the process of civilization and the libidinal development
of the individual. It is impossible to overlook the extent
to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it
presupposes precisely the
non-satisfaction of powerful instincts. Here is the core,
a core of Freud's understanding. That civilization is based on
the renunciation of instinct. And for Freud, that is okay if you will,
but it doesn't work. When you renounce instinct and you repress
things, they come out in other ways. Nietzsche says much the same thing. So Freud
takes his Oedipus complex, and you know the Oedipus complex, at the level
of the individual is that the boy or the girl desires to be with the mother and
desires to eliminate the father. Being with the mother Freud says, Roth you're
being euphemistic,
I said has sex with the mother. That's Freud's view,
that we have a desire for incest. Whether we're boys or girls, to be with
the mother, the originary caregiver, and that we have this desire
to get rid of the father. Boys and girls act differently
in relation to the father, but they both have this desire for
the primary giver of life, the mother. And that has to be renounced. That has to be
pushed away,
that primary desire. And for Freud, at the level of society
there, he has the story of the primal horde, where a big, strong,
alpha male is controlling the horde, this troop of proto-humans and
keeping all the other males from having sex with it unless, the chief guy says
you can reproduce with that person or not, or the chief guy just says no,
nobody can have sex but me. Freud says that chief
guy will one day will be killed by all the brothers who
are frustrated by the alpha male's power. They band together and kill him. But once
they kill him, they feel guilty
because in some ways he was their father. And they themselves institute
prohibitions against incest to renounce this primary desire. Freud doesn't insist
on this story,
you can read it in Civilization and its Discontents. He thinks of it as almost like
a myth to
organize his understanding of society. What it does is allows,
it gives him a story for talking about how civilization
creates rules against what we want. For instance, there's no rule against
putting your hand in the fire. Cuz nobody, you don't want to
put your hand in the fire. You have rules against incest
because people really want incest. You have rules against coveting
your neighbor's wife because people want to covet. You have rules against
things you want to do. And these rules exist out of
a civilizing function that in order to have peace in society,
in order to have some security, renounces desire, renounces instinct. Freud thinks
that you do need
some of that renunciation. He is not a thinker who says,
let's let it all go and let's all everybody should be free and
do whatever the heck they want. No, Freud is a good,
solid bourgeois doctor. He doesn't think that we should just, that we would be
better off if
everybody acted on their impulses. But he does think that the civilizing
process has gotten to a point where it has renounced our desires so
much that they explode in awful, pathological, excessive ways. He's clearly writing
after World War I
when there was such enormous suffering, tens of millions of people
who were killed and wounded or died in the aftermath
of the first World War. For Freud,
this explosion of violence is related to the fact that we deny that we
have desires for aggression. I have to say a little bit
more about that because so far we've just been
talking about sexuality. But by the second decade
of the 20th century, Freud had began to think that not only do
we have the desire for sex, that we also have a desire that he calls aggressive, or
sometimes he calls it the death instinct. The desire for sexuality, for
instance, is the desire to combine, link things together, put things together. But
we also have a desire to break things
apart, to smash things, to divide things. This is a desire for aggression,
or the aggressive instinct. And for Freud, our moral codes deny sex
through the prohibitions on incest, through sexual morality which he thinks
is really hypocritical most of the time, and a denial of aggression. And if you
deny,
if you bottle up things explode. >> When you get in the way
of pleasure it's a problem because that will lead to aggression. When you get in
the way of pleasure, people will try to get their
pleasures in other ways. Through aggression. This is Nietzsche's view too. So then
you get in the way of aggression. So you can't have professional
wrestling on field. You can't have, no fisticuffs in class. I don't know, you start
limiting
opportunities for aggression. And for Freud,
the more you limit the opportunities for aggression, the more you bottle up an
impulse that will, at some point explode. It's not that he thinks we
should be hitting each other, or getting into fisticuffs, but
he does think that the denial of the pleasure we get from aggression,
the denial of that pleasure will lead us actually to have more either
internal aggression, guilt, or to create explosive
aggression in mass war. >> And so Freud spends a lot
of time in Civilization and its Discontents on
the denial of aggression. What does civilization demand of us, Freud
asks, in Civilization and its Discontents. It demands a morality that
we love our neighbors. And Freud says, this is impossible. It's impossible because
we actually
like to see our neighbors suffer. That's something that's gratifying,
and denying that will in the end cause more suffering and
here he's very much like Nietzsche. He says, because every time you have
people say, well, love your neighbor, be kind to strangers, all that, you always
find some scapegoat
that you can take your rage out on. For instance,
every time you ask people to be sweet and kind, as a rule,
they will find something to attack. They will find an enemy,
they'll find a scapegoat. They'll find some group
of people that they have, they can vent their aggression on. And he's thinking of
the Jews. Freud is a Jew himself. A secular Jew who very much
identifies as a Jewish person. And he says that on page 61 in our
edition, and he's kind of in a comic or ironic tone I should say, he says,
in this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere,
have rendered the most useful services to the civilizations of the countries
that have been their hosts. But unfortunately, all the massacres
of the Jews in the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful
and secure for their Christian fellows. Here, Freud is taking a page
out of Nietzsche saying, here this Christian moralists who say we
have to be kind to everybody and love everybody, what they then do is they vent
their rage on the Jews and massacre them. For instance, well, the Jews have
provided
this service because the Christians have to get their rage out somewhere. But of
course he's mocking
the hypocrisy of neighborly love and morality by saying you
always need a scapegoat. The other thing he insists
on in Civilization and its Discontents is that we also
turn our aggression inward. Not only do we find scapegoats out there
that we can hate, we can attack like the Jews, like people we colonize or
people we consider an other. Right?
Whether they're racial others, sexual others, people we think are beneath contempt
that we are allowed to rage
against them or beneath morality. Not only do we do that but Freud says
that in Civilization and its Discontents, that we turn our aggression inward, that
is we're not allowed to express it enough. There aren't enough,forgive me for
putting it this way but in Freud's terms,
there aren't enough Jews around. There aren't enough people to attack,
that we're allowed to attack so we turn our aggression inward and the turning of
aggression inward as
you've learned from Nietzsche, is guilt. And what Freud sees is
the increase in guilt. As we've become more civilized,
we have more and more occasions to feel we're
not living up to our ideals. We have more and
more occasions to turn against ourselves, to become twisted and racked by guilt cuz
we're not living up to the
expectations we've created for ourselves. We're not studying enough,
we're not working hard enough, we're not making enough money,
we're not being kind enough. Whatever the ideal is. And Freud thinks that this
again
bottles up impulse which will eventually [NOISE] explode as it did
in World War I in murderous rage.