Roger Scruton has an article in the National Post about Sigmund Freud (hat tip: Arts and Letters Daily) celebrating the latter’s birthday, one hundred and fifty years ago. Well, maybe not celebrating. According to Scruton,
Freud suffered from the "charm of disenchantment." Like Marx he was irresistibly drawn to explanations that demean us, and which turn our world view upside down — or set it, as Marx insisted, "on its feet." This is apparent in Freud's theory of the "incest taboo," which begins from a characteristic gesture of astonishment. Why is it that incest is not just avoided but forbidden?
All right, why?
Freud leaps at once to his conclusion: that which is forbidden is also desired. And the horror is needed because the desire is great… A real scientist, observing the facts, would draw the opposite conclusion. Incest arouses horror not because we desire it but because we don't.
I think Scruton is correct here; in fact, I think he is so obviously correct that, but for the influence of Freud, it would hardly be worth writing. So then why would anyone buy into Freud’s explanation in the first place— and why do so many people continue to do so? Scruton has an explanation for that, too:
The Freudian story is a fiction, believed not because of its explanatory power but because of its charm. We are thrilled by disenchantment, which seems to set us free from social norms. We watch with fascination as our ideals are punctured, and our gods brought down to Earth. After this Gotterdammerung, we imagine, there will be a bleak but permissive dawn.
Okay, that explains someone like Alfred Kinsey who apparently wanted what was theretofore had been deemed perverse to be seen as normal so that he would be deemed normal. But Freud, as Scruton notes, did not think repression, sexual or otherwise, was intrinsically harmful. So that leaves me still mystified as to why Freud would be “irresistibly drawn to explanations that demean us, and which turn our world view upside down”? The question interests me because what some, to paraphrase the late, great Raymond Aron, would call the opium of the intellectuals has been “secular humanism”. Whether it was Nietzsche or Dewey or Aron, the great secular humanists of the late 19th and 20th centuries saw something (at least potentially) great about humanity— or at least some humans. Yet today, the intellectual mainstream of what passes for modern secular humanism— whether in the form of the “Copernican Principle” imbibed by Carl Sagan or Peter Singer and Tom Regan’s pet notion of “speciesism” would deride the old Deweyian sort of view as a quaint, if dangerous, chauvinism.So this is my question. Why? I suppose the simplest explantion would be that such thinkers are simply assessing the facts of the matter as best as they can, which seem to them, as they did to Bertrand Russell,
that Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms… that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave… all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
and then, like Russell, bravely looking into the abyss of the moral implications of those facts. But so many of their facts are, if not beyond all certainty wrong, certainly nearly so certainly wrong as to be ridiculous. I mean, the best evidence as of right now plainly points to the Earth being unusual for obvious reasons; human beings are different than other animals for even more obvious reasons. So the notion that neither humans nor the Earth are special can’t be primarily motivated by the facts.What charm, other than in those cases in which it serves to rationalize behavior, does the “charm of disenchantment” hold? Could it be as simple as wanting to be smarter than everyone else (or at least the masses)?
May 11, 2006 at 9:12 pm
Glad you brought Scruton’s take on Freud to my attention. His (and your) skepticism about the Freudian achievement makes more sense than Harold Bloom’s celebration of Freud in a recent Wall Street Journal column. And even Bloom admitted that Freudian theory was scientifically invalid–but it was a great “myth.” I have to think you’re right in suspecting that the desire to be superior to ordinary common sense and thus to most other people is a major source of the appeal of theories like Freud’s or Marx’s, or, to take a comparatively trivial example, deconstruction. Russell, however, didn’t buy into either Freud or Marx, did he?
May 25, 2006 at 4:16 pm
Neocon, Russell didn't buy into Freud or Marx at first, but he did buy into many of the same assumptions they did. One of the biggest differences I see between the the three was that, while each believed (apologies to Hamlet) that there were no more things in Heaven and Earth than their materialist philosophies dreamt of, Russell and Marx shared a naive belief that this meant man could manipulate nature to make Earth Heaven, which Freud never believed himself. Marx thought this could be accomplished by History moving through the proletariat (much as Hegel thought it had moved through Napoleon) while Russell thought utopia would come about as a result of the advent of "scientific philosophy" which theretofore had not existed.
If you read some Russell's criticsms of Marx, you might even confuse him for Hayek. But if you look at his support for Marxist governments and policies, especially in the mid-to-late sixties, one would have to guess Russell either warmed up to Marxism or was never really all that cold to it.
June 19, 2006 at 8:44 pm
The question posed is why would someone be drawn to present explanations about our nature that demeans us or that turn our common conceptions upside down? Freud, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx and others are part of a group that inspire an “ethics of suspicion.” Writers like these are important to read because they allow for a forum where common beliefs can be tested and, in some cases, realized. As Derrida pointed out, I am aware I am a man only when I have seen a woman. Although Freud’s belief in the unconcious is potentially irrefuatable, it might have shown us that we have a conscious. These suspicious thinkers are valuable because they do two things: (1) they test the ground we walk on, which allow us a forum to earn our beliefs; without new ideas testing old ideas, how will we ever know the true value of those old ideas? (2) They provide a contrast which can illuminate beliefs we didn’t even know we had.