Nostalgia for the Absolute Read online

  Like Moses, his battle was one which had, at all times, to be sustained on two fronts: against the Gentiles, the Philistines, the false sages who would entrap the science of the mind in censorship and superstition, and against the vacillations, the recalcitrance, the treason, of his own followers. The latter was always—he tells us this himself—the worse of the two battles. He could handle the Philistines and the attackers and the censors but not the desperate betrayals of those closest to him. One after another, like Aaron, like Korah and his rout, the most faithful rebelled, split away from the founder, established rival schools. Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, Jung—rebellion after rebellion, betrayal after betrayal, by the most gifted, by those nearest to him, by the elected sons. Yet whatever the personal suffering and aloneness of the leader, the movement must march forward—refusing compromise and guarding the law in its original purity. Through the desert of ridicule and active emnity to the threshold of victory. Indeed, vexed as he was in his personal end, in exile, wracked with physical pain, Freud knew that psychoanalysis had become a world phenomenon. He suspected that America might be its promised land, and he was fully aware that his name had passed into the household of language.

  It is, I believe, in the perspective of this identification, intermittent no doubt, with the talismanic figure and sage of Moses, that we must view one of Freud’s very last works, the study of Moses and Monotheism. The puzzle, of course, is this: why should Freud, so intimately involved with the person of Moses, make of the begetter of Israel and of modern monotheism an Egyptian? I have never seen a plausible explanation. My own is only tentative. As he wrote the book in 1938 Freud could see the storm of Nazism gathering over European Jewry. Rightly, he identified the peculiar moral genius and demandingness of Judaic monotheism, of Judaic legalism, with Moses. By making of Moses an Egyptian, a leader who had come to the Jews from outside, Freud may, unconsciously, have sought to divert from the Jewish people the new wave of Gentile hatred. Such displacement was, to be sure, illusory. But it points again to the mythological, myth-making fabric of the Freudian method.

  The third aspect concerns the generation of myths. In psychoanalysis, as in Marxism, there is a mystery of original sin. But unlike that of Marx, Freud’s account is specific. He tells of the patricide enacted in the primal horde, of the castration and/or murder of the father figure by the sons. Humanity, says Freud, bears the mark of this primal crime. From it flows the long history of adjustment between instinctual drive and social repression, between indiscriminate sexuality and family order, and this adjustment is far less than perfect. Civilization and its Discontents, one of his last works, offers an ironic, desolate diagnosis of the strains, suppressions, distortions, suffered by the psyche in the process of its adjustment to the economies of ordered society. Pondering the seemingly inherent unhappiness of the human species, meshed in a dialectic of biological and social thrusts and constraints, Freud now advances deeper into the mythological.

  The little book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is one of the most extraordinary documents of the history of the Western tragic imagination. It formulates (and remember, it is only very rare individuals of genius who can do so) a myth of the meaning of life as comprehensive, as metaphorically authoritative, as those that have come down to us from ancient, collective sources. Two deities, two gods, two overwhelming agencies, govern and divide our being, said Freud. Love and death, Eros and Thanatos. The conflict between them determines the rhythms of existence, of procreation, of somatic and psychic evolution. But finally—the contrary to all intuitive, instinctive expectations, to all our hopes—it is not Eros, not love, but Thanatos who is the stronger, who is closer to the roots of man. What the species strives for, finally, is not survival and perpetuation, but repose, perfect inertness. In Freud’s visionary programme, the explosion of organic life, which has led to human evolution, was a kind of tragic anomaly, almost a fatal exuberance. It has brought with it untold pain and ecological waste. But this detour of life and consciousness will sooner or later end. An internal entropy is at work. A great quietness will return to creation as life reverts to the natural condition of the inorganic. The consummation of the libido lies in death.

  Freud insisted that these were imagistic speculations, that they did not belong to his scientific labours, but to what he himself called the “metapsychology” of an aging man in a community overshadowed by the recurrence of world war and the more particular terror of a holocaust of the Jews. But the scientific and the mythological do interpenetrate with each other much earlier. The myth of the murder in the primal horde is vital to the Freudian analysis of the tensions of consciousness in modern man. The model of a dialectic of Eros and Thanatos is implicit in Freud’s whole theory of instinct and rationality. Beyond the Pleasure Principle is, unquestionably, a metaphoric speculation; but its depth, its sombre conviction, derive from the whole unfolding and logic of Freud’s theses. It is the crowning act in Freud’s unbroken attempt to reconcile man to a godless reality, to make this reality endurable by suggesting a final release from it. It is in this sense that both the Marxist and the Freudian blueprints for man are scenarios of deliverance-Prometheus, Moses, liberators, deliverers, both. But whereas Marx intimates an Edenic condition free of necessity and of conflict, Freud knows that such freedom would be tantamount to the repose of death.

  In both Totem and Taboo, an earlier book, and Moses and Monotheism, Freud explicitly invokes the notion of a collective inheritance of primal memories. He speaks of the transmission of archetypal experiences and traumas via the unconscious of the human race. The same idea is, of course, implicit in the meta-psychology of Beyond the Pleasure Principle There is until now, no neuro-chemical, no neurophysiological warrant whatever for this audacious conjecture. In fact the notion of inherited or racial archetypal memories goes totally against everything which molecular biology suggests as a plausible account of the genetic mechanism. It is a piece of mythology of controlling metaphor as vital to the agnostic world view of Freud as is the parallel metaphor of sin to the world view of theology. For Freud, this inheritance of the archetypal remembrance of man’s prime plays the same role as the fall of man, man’s disobedience of God in Pauline theology.

  Now, as is well known, the concept of a collective unconscious in which dreams, memories, seminal images are embedded, are transmitted over generations, nay, over millenia. This is crucial to the psychology of Jung and to his whole theory of archetype. As the recent publication of the Freud-Jung letters, which had been awaited for so long, shows, the bitter break between the two men had complex and cumulative motives. A very different emphasis on the role of sexuality, on the nature of the therapeutic process, was doubtless among the most aggravating. But the coincidence of views between Freud and Jung on the inheritance of archetypal psychic material and images does suggest to me that the quarrel between Freudian and Jungian theories is not, at every point, an entirely genuine one. Or, to put it more precisely, it suggests that there were in Freud’s view of Jung’s rebellion, of Jung’s betrayal, elements themselves opaque to him.

  Freudian psychoanalysis was resolved to remove from the human psyche the infantile illusions—that’s his own phrase—of religion. He was going to liberate man from the childishness of metaphysical beliefs. Jung’s psychology, of course, does not only draw on religious experience for many of its main categories, but sees in religion a necessary, evolving component in the history and health of the human soul. Thus the Freudian quarrel with the Jungian model is, I think, in part, a dispute between agnosticism and transcendent belief, and on a much deeper level, a duel between a new mythology, a surrogate belief, and a system which wants to restore the ancient rival gods. Let me quote from one of these very newly published letters. Jung is writing to Freud in the early days of their understanding.

  “I think, dear Dr. Freud,” he says, “we must give psychoanalysis time to infiltrate into people from many centres, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth. Eve
r so gently we want to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were—a drunken feast of joy where man regains the ethos and holiness of an animal. That was the beauty and purpose of classical religion.”

  It is a very curious statement. I think it explains something of the severity and personal drama of the break between the two men. Jung was saying to Freud no less than this: let us bring back the ancient gods.

  Like orthodox Marxism, classical Freudian psychoanalysis is already receding into history. No analyst today meets patients anything like those described in Freud’s own cases. Clinical support remains problematic. The movement has splintered into dozens of bitterly rival churches. The liberation initiated by Freud in regard to our awareness of sexuality, of the autonomous needs of children, in regard to psychopathology and mental illness, has been very considerable. Because Freud lived and worked, we do breathe more freely, both in our private and social existence. But the issue was a much larger one. Freud sought to banish the archaic shadows of irrationalism, of faith in the supernatural. His promise, like that of Marx, was a promise of light. It has not been fulfilled. On the contrary.

  THE LAST GARDEN III

  Early on in Tnstes Tropiques, his famous philosophic autobiography, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, tells of the decisive influence of Marx and Freud on his own vocation and on his own methods. Lévi-Strauss tells us that he sees in Marxism and in psychoanalysis two modes of radical understanding and reconstitution which he compares with those used in geology.

  The Marxist analysis of French society and social and class conflict, as put forward in Marx’s book The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the Freudian case study, these are analogous penetrations below the appearance, below the surface of phenomena. Like the geologist, the Marxist social thinker and the Freudian analyst uncover the dynamic levels of stress, the sedimentation, which determine the contour of the landscape. Both systems of explanation, moreover, again just like those of the geologist, go in depth. They go in depth structurally and historically; their mapping of social or psychic strata constitute a history. They tell us how this piece of earth was produced: Why the mountains and valleys? How did the rivers come to be dug? They tell us how the surface features—social institutions, behaviour, speech patterns—have evolved, and how they are the necessary end-product of a long process in time.

  With a high degree of self-consciousness and with a confidence which is sometimes a little awesome, M. Lévi-Strauss tells us that he will complete, and, by clear inference, correct and improve upon, the labours of Marx and of Freud. It is this explicit combinatorial design which underwrites the claims to totality in his use of the word “anthropology”. Like no “anthropologist” before him, with the possible exception of Rousseau, Claude Lévi-Strauss employs this word in its complete etymological sense: anthropology, properly understood, is no less than the exhaustive “science of man”—la science de I’homme. You and I are to hear in the word the complete play of values and connotations associated with the Greek root “logos”—which as we all know is such a difficult word, ranging from “spirit” and “ordering speech” to “logic” and, perhaps, to “incarnate mystery” in the way it is used in the Fourth Gospel. An anthropologist, if he is not to be a mere ethnographer or collector of exotica, is, says Lévi-Strauss, no less than a “scientist of man” to whose comprehensive model of the nature of human life the Marxist investigation of social forces and the Freudian mapping of consciousness are preliminary. It is a majestic claim; but only if we bear it plainly in mind can we grasp the scope, the unifying impulse, of Lévi-Strauss’s great enterprise.

  In trying to say something adequate concerning that enterprise, my disqualifications are all too obvious. The format of these talks allows us only a limited time. Much of the material is technical and could be debated only by Lévi-Strauss’s professional colleagues. At key points, moreover, the texts are elusive and there is a certain degree of orchestral rhetoric, inseparable from Lévi-Strauss’s great genius as a writer. But to anyone concerned with the postulate and merits of the great mythologies which have attempted to fill the vacuum left by religion, Lévi-Strauss’s work is of cardinal interest. Here, indeed, is a creator of myths, a mythographer, an inventor of legends, to whom the notion of a complete, total mythology is absolutely central.

  If time allowed, I would want to sketch the background of this centrality. The very distant precedent is the Italian thinker, Vico, of the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth, whose New Science for the first time said that the myths, the stories of Greek antiquity, the fables, had a vital nucleus of social and psychological history. Other models lay closer at hand in Michelet, in Victor Hugo, and in Wagner. Hugo’s Legende des siecles, Wagner’s Gotterdammerung have their very precise counterpart in Lévi-Strauss’s Pensee sauvage and Mythologiques. Even Lévi-Strauss’s prose style has that orchestral texture so reminiscent of the epic arts of the nineteenth century. But this would be a subject in its own right.

  For Claude Lévi-Strauss, myths are, quite simply, the instruments of man’s survival as a thinking and social species. It is through myths that man makes sense of the world, that he experiences it in come coherent fashion, that he confronts its irremediably contradictory, divided, alien presence. Man is enmeshed in primal contradictions between being and non-being, male and female, youth and age, light and dark, the edible and the toxic, the mobile and the inert. He cannot, says Lévi-Strauss, resolve these formidable, clashing antitheses by purely rational processes. He is at either pole of conceivable time, confronted with the mystery of his origins and then confronted with the mystery of his extinction. Chaos is co-existent with seemingly exquisite symmetries. Myths alone are able to articulate these universal antinomies, to find figurative explanations for the divided situation of man in nature. Man is, in Lévi-Strauss’s view, a mythopoetic primate (it’s a difficult phrase but we don’t have a better one), a primate capable of manufacturing, creating myths, and through these enduring the contradictory, insoluble tenor of his fate. He alone can construct, modulate, and give emotional adherence to the mythological (a necessary hyphen), the mythical and the logical, the logical inside the myth.

  There is an Hassidic parable which tells us that God created man so that man might tell stories. This telling of stories is, according to Lévi-Strauss, the very condition of our being. The alternative would be total inertia or the eclipse of reason. The mediative, ordering capacity of myths, their ability to “encode”—another Lévi-Strauss word—to give coherent expression to reality, points to a profound harmonic accord between the inner logic of the brain and the structure of the external world. “When the mind processes the empirical data which it receives previously processed by the sense organs, it goes on working out structurally that which at the outset was already structural. And it can only do so inasmuch as the mind, the body to which the mind belongs, and the things which body and mind perceive, are part and parcel of one and the same reality.” The codes through which these perceptions are transmitted and understood are, suggests Lévi-Strauss, binary. That’s again a technical word, but not difficult for us to understand. He says that everything that matters comes in sets of two. Thus we have the relations and interactions of what he calls “the great pairings”. For example, affirmation and negation, which really means in simple language, yes and no; organic and inorganic; left and right; before and after. Lévi-Strauss suggests that the symmetries of the nervous system and the hemispheric architecture of the human cortex—the two halves of our brain—seem to be an active reflection of this binary structure of reality.

  Of all the fundamental polarities which structure the destiny and the science of man, the most important, according to Lévi-Strauss, is that of Nature and Culture (he usually spells these two words with capital letters). In the inmost of his being and histo
ry, man is a divided composite of biological and socially-culturally acquired elements. It is the interplay between biological constraints on the one hand, and social-cultural variables on the other, which determines our condition. That interplay is at every point dynamic because the environment, as it impinges on human biology, is itself modified by man’s social and cultural activities. But the binary set, Nature/Culture, also points to an essential ambiguity, even tragedy, in the genesis of human consciousness.

  We have seen in the two previous talks, that both Marx and Freud took over from religion and from systematic theology the inference of original sin, of a fall of manthough neither mythology is really completely specific as to the occasion of this disaster. Lévi-Strauss is specific. Necessary as it was, imprinted as it must have been in the genetic code and evolutionary potential of the human race, our transition from a natural to a cultural state was also a destructive step, and one that has left scars on both the human psyche and the organic world.