Edward Feser On Freud's Civilization And Its Discontents

Prof Feser is something of a puzzle for me. He's one of the best academics currently writing, but he teaches at Pasadena City College, and in the California community colleges, a PhD isn't really a requirement for tenure. His PhD is in fact from UC Santa Barbara, not an academic bright light itself. Yet as as undergraduate at an elite school, I never had anyone as effective as a teacher.

His latest post at his blog reinforces this for me. He brings up Freud as an "Old Atheist", as opposed to the New Atheists whom he frequently discusses.

Our theme has been the tendency of the best-known Old Atheists to show greater insight vis-à-vis the consequences of atheism than we find in their shallow New Atheist descendants. This was true of Nietzsche and of Sartre, and it is true of Sigmund Freud.

He pays particular attention to Civilization and its Discontents, and this is a particular issue for me, because I had it as assigned reading as an undergraduate. Actually, I never quite figured out why it was in the course, which was the sophomore survey Eng Lit course intended for majors. But then, we were always having to read Big Think stuff, as far as I can see in hopes it might rub off, but certainly nobody was getting any smarter there. (This place was the model for Faber College, but recall that when the Delta brothers went on road trips, they were living in the same world.) So I never quite made head or tail out of it.

Actually, I doubt if the prof who assigned it did, either. He moonlighted as a senior editor at Buckley's National Review, and while I was a student of his, he converted to Roman Catholicism. In hindsight, this was to advance his career as a Buckley protégé. But after Buckley died, he wrote opinion pieces favoring abortion for undergraduate women in the campus health center, because they'd have good careers, after all, and eventually he endorsed Obama in 2008 and was finally fired from the National Review.

So Feser's well-reasoned and coherent views are refreshing indeed.

The popular image of the father of psychoanalysis has it that he thought human happiness could be secured if only we would free ourselves of stifling repressions, especially regarding sex. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact Freud believed that human beings were likely doomed always to be unhappy, and that this was probably the inevitable price of our enjoying the benefits of civilization.

This is famously the theme of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, wherein he avers that “the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation’” (p. 43). As maturity brings one to follow the sober “reality principle” more than the “pleasure principle,” one will find that merely avoiding pain and suffering as far as one can – as opposed to finding positive fulfillment – is the best that can be hoped for. “[T]he idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system” (p. 42), Freud says, and since (he thinks) religion is an illusion, there can be no purpose to life and thus nothing the realization of which could bring genuine happiness.

. . . The three main sources of our unhappiness are, in Freud’s view, natural forces that lie outside our control, the weaknesses of our bodies, and frustration with the ways we relate to other human beings (p. 57). The idea that civilization is the source of our unhappiness, and a return to primitive conditions the remedy for it, strikes Freud as “strange,” even “astonishing” (p.58). In fact it is only civilization that allows us to mitigate the sources of suffering to the extent that we can. Enmity against civilization and nostalgia for pre-civilized times is rooted in resentment at the frustration of desire that civilization entails:

He concludes,

An attractive feature of Freud’s Old Atheism, then, is its realism and sobriety. Science, art, work, a return to primitive living, sexual indulgence, an ethic of nonviolence, socialism, the abandonment of religion – none of these are going to bring human happiness or otherwise substitute for the meaning that religion promised. Neither Burning Man festivals, nor Reason Rallies, nor Bernie Sanders can save us. Deal with it.

Feser's distinction between New and Old Atheists tracks quite well with Bp Barron's distinction between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, which I noted here two weeks ago. What I find encouraging is that the quality of intellectual analysis seems to have improved greatly in the 50 years since I had to read Freud for the first time. But then as now, the quality isn't going to happen in elite institutions.