A quick recap of Civilisation and Its Discontents
some succinct extrapolations of what I contended the first few chapters are about, followed by a short synopsis of the remaining chapters.
To prepare readers, over summer I’ll be returning to complete the close read of Civilisation and Its Discontents (C&ID) I began in Jan-Feb.
In order to re-orient myself (and perhaps you, dear reader), here’s some succinct extrapolations of what the first few chapters are about, followed by a short synopsis of the remaining chapters.
1 the oceanic feeling, and Rome:
Freud begins by considering our existential situation and the possibility of an unbounded connection to everything. Starting from the premise of a diversity of people and desires, he notices that while ‘superior beings’ like Romain Rolland can intuit this cosmic oneness, ‘the rest of us’ moderns who see the Goddess dancing and still aren’t convinced that magic happens must figure out life’s most basic questions: by conformity to norms; by becoming Believers; by becoming ‘men’ of science. Meanwhile, the metaphor of the Eternal City, which glitters in Freud’s imagination, speaks to the power of accretion and sedimentation, the lost urban underworld of our ancestors in the city of the mind beneath our feet.
2 purpose, religion:
The first chapter’s basic existential probing continues by asking what the purpose of ‘all this’ could possibly mean. Freud contends that religion at least offers a meaningful explanation of life’s purpose, but ends by turning against life. Against the explanation of purpose offered by religion as Freud conceives it, he submits that the actual purpose of life is pleasure, but that reality puts the kibosh on that, every day, in ways large and small. We want to be happy: and we want happiness in this world, via pleasure. But thanks to of the power of nature, our mortality – and because we must live with one another (and so renounce, repress or canalise our individual wishes… ) we cannot ever really be happy. Ordinary unhappiness is (thus) the order of the day.
3 the tragic irony of civilisation:
Moreover, we must live with one another in the context of a well-established ‘advanced’ civilisation (the Vienna of the Ringstrasse being the paragon of this, for Freud’s milieu). Civilisation is the source of all our achievements and the enabling condition of our every pleasure and convenience. Yet the tragic irony here is that it is also the source of our every unhappiness, because living in civilisation means renouncing our individual freedom, and only the latter is in alignment with our nature. Law and justice are renunciations of human nature – something in us rebels.
(Bookmark: in the next substantive post, I want to focus on the status and meaning of institutions in a account that admits these intensifications of Hobbesian assumptions)
4 civilisation, tribe, family, incest, taboo:
back to the shaky late 19C anthropology of Fraser and Baldwin Spencer to base all this on the Golden Bough and the Arrernte.
(Bookmark: this is where it’s impossible not to really stick the boot in… but we need a copy of Spengler’s The Decline of the West and Gombrich’s Little History of the World to get a non-anachronistic and generous enough sense of where Freud was writing from)
5 the drives – love-life (Eros[1]):
Life is driven by hunger and love (a hunger for love), a longing for connection as release, love as union, aggregation of greater unities.
6 the drives – death (Thanatos):
but... love thy neighbour?! Death drive as appetite for destruction, a longing for dis/connection and obliteration; dissipation, discharge, disaggregation of higher unities.
(sidenote: Pete Burns really smashed parts with 5 and 6 with the lyrics to ‘Sex Drive’, did he not; and JG Ballard and Cronenberg really, really ramped it up…. )
7 how we accommodate:
We're all gonna end up neurotic, soz. Yes, Freud concedes private property is a problem at the core of this (his Rousseau moment), but socialists are living under an illusion1 because of their psychologically unrealistic read of human nature (we’re not nice, 'cos we’re creatures of the drives, including the aggression inhering in the death drive).
8 kultur and civilisation’s terminal forms:
guilt and remorse – and (maybe even a teeny desire for) punishment; the best we can hope for is sublimation in art, the refuge in/of kultur; maybe love.
[1] In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as memory serves, Freud was preferring the terms Eros and Thanatos. By the end of the decade in C&ID, he was using Lebenstrieb and Totestrieb.
Freud was a socialist at one point and was school friends with Victor Adler; Romain Rolland was also a socialist.