Nietzsche, Freud, and the Challenge to Positivism

HI 153 Making of the Modern World

Week 14

What is/was positivism?

• Scientific view of world; ‘scientism’

• Only the observable & measurable counts (for which there is positive proof)

• Enlightenment rationality in action?

• Linked to notions of progress

Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

Irrationality

• Discovery of emotion and sexuality as driving forces in human nature

• Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau recognised the force of emotion in human history (L. L. White, The Unconscious before Freud, 1979)

• Romanticism: artistic movement of late 18th/early 19th centuries stresses the idea of authenticity through feeling

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900

• Trained as philologist (historian of language), specialising in Greek

• Abandoned academia to become polemicist and cultural critic

• Passing friendship with composer Wagner

• Aphoristic style spurned more traditional essayistic approach

• 1889: nervous collapse; reduced to vegetative state

• Ailing years spent with sister who cultivated Nietzsche myth

The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

Apollo, god of order, art, and boundaries

Symbolises individuating desire & rationality

Socrates (469-399 BCE) `father of rational thought’; for Nietzsche, he represented the spirit of 19th-century scientism/positivism

Dionysus, god of dance, drinking, debauchery & dissolution of boundaries

Symbolises human consciousness & irrationality

Voluntarism

• Voluntas = Latin for will• Human faculty to foresee actions

& project desire onto world• Schopenhauer: the only reality is

the reality projected from self (i.e. no objective reality outside of self)

• Nietzsche’s theory of Will to Power: all living beings (and all energy sources) constantly seek to expand their radius of power

Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860, author of The World as Will and Idea, 1819; early influence on Nietzsche

Nietzsche and the Nazis

• Aristocratic values of the ‘overman’ (Ubermensch) versus the ‘herd morality’ of the masses

• Belief in great men of history creating own values and ‘overcoming’ or fusing the rational and irrational

• Nietzsche’s sister fostered connection with Nazism

• Had to airbrush out Nietzsche’s actual contempt for German Nationalism and anti-semitism

Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche greeting Hitler at the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar

Deconstructing language

• Historical development of values

• Philosophy not exact science because of changing meaning of words

• Saussure (1857-1913); structuralism; the relationship between the signifier and the signified (word and thing) is entirely arbitrary

• Through Saussure, Nietzsche an influence on 20th century literary deconstructionists, like Jacques Derrida

• Beyond Good and Evil (1886); Genealogy of Morals (1887)

Killing God• Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72): religion is social construct;

projects human notions of goodness onto a supreme being

• David Strauss, Leben Jesu (1835); historicised religion by examining social context

• Dislike of ‘other worldliness’ of Christianity with its stress on life after death

• ‘Eternal recurrence’: would you welcome the perpetual repetition of the moment? If Yes, you have affirmed life, in Nietzsche’s view

• Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-85): an anti-Bible, loosely based on Zoroastrianism; source of Nietzsche’s claim that ‘God is dead’

Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939

• Founder of psycho-analysis

• Began career as neuro-biologist; remained a scientist, using rational means to explore the irrational; Sulloway, Freud. Biologist of the Mind (1992)

• Treatment of hysteria in patients led

to formulation of the `unconscious’

Freud’s method

• Talking cure: analyst listens to patient, allowing much free association

• Word association

• Dream analysis

• The use of `science’ to cure

• Unconscious is formed by the process of repression

• Unconscious reveals itself in dreams, in slips of the tongue, and through the process of psycho-analysis itself

• Dreams are `the royal road to the unconscious’

Freud’s Model• Superego = parental values; society;

civilisation• Ego = Latin for ‘I/me’: the rational

individual self, mediating between cultural constraints from above and primal urges from below

• Id = Latin for ‘it’: the unconscious self which regulates automatic behaviour (breathing during sleep), but also primal instincts, such as reproduction and self-assertion

‘The Ego and the Id’, 1923.

‘The ego seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavors to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle which reigns unrestrictedly in the id … . The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions.’

Freud was ill-served by his translators. See Brenda Maddox, Freud’s Wizard. The Enigma of Ernest Jones (2006) for a recent account of them.

Infantile sexuality• Oral stage (birth -1 year): fixation on mother’s breast, as

source of all good and not-good

• Anal stage (toddler): fixation on excretory functions

• Phallic stage (child): beginnings of sexual awareness;

• Oedipus Complex as child vies for maternal affections with father

• Childhood abuse: were patients reporting real abuse which Freud had to turn into metaphor to avoid the stigma attached to even mentioning such things?

Civilisation and its Discontents (1930)

• Investigation of social relations, art and religion; Western mores distort personality

• ‘The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value.’

• Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation (1955): `history’ is not the Marxist anti-capitalist class struggle but fight against repression of the instincts

• Fuels libertarian movements of 1960s in which self-emancipation through revolution of self is the goal

Psycho-history

• Can Freudian models predict behaviour, individual and collective?

• Erikson, Young Man Luther (1958) explained individual and religious development by medical and psychological episodes in the young Luther’s life

• Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1931): Nazism released the psychosexual energy of masses in rallies

Freud and art

• Artists draw on interior world

• Expressionism: art is not an emulation of nature but projection of the interior world of human beings, particularly of the artists

• Surrealism: emphasises word association, dream worlds

• Edward Munch, The Scream (1893)

Surrealism

Salvador Dali, The Great Masturbator (1929)

Freud and capitalism• Advertising seeks to influence

subliminal decision-making process• ‘If we understand the mechanism

and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.’ (Bernays)

• Positional goods reflecting desire for social status; consumerism and the pleasure principle

Edward Bernays, 1891-1995, Freud’s nephew and founder of motivational research

David Eder (1865–1936) psycho-analyst

• Deptford Clinic and Open-Air School, London

• North of England Education Conference, Jan 1913

• `Child Life and Sex Teaching’, Yorkshire Observer, 1 Jan 1914

• M. D. Eder and Mrs Eder, `The Conflicts of the Unconscious in the Child’, Child Study, 9:6 (1916), pp. 79-83.