Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud Read online

  Capitalist affluence combined with anti-communist propaganda – reinforced by McCarthyist witchhunts – were stabilizing the capitalist system to an unprecedented degree. History and the Marxian scenario for revolution no longer seemed to guarantee revolutionary possibility, and in this situation Marcuse turned to develop new perspectives on liberation and utopia. His achievement in EC was a resolute attempt to keep the space of emancipation open during a period that did not promise the sort of radical change envisaged earlier by Marcuse and other critical theorists.

  Looking at EC as a whole, Marcuse uses Marx, Freud, and critical theory in the first half of the book to analyze obstacles to liberation and to show the price paid in human happiness for the “benefits” of contemporary civilization. It is as if only by confronting without illusion the forces of domination and repression does the necessity for liberation and radical social change, which is the focus of the second half of EC, emerge. Freud is especially useful for this project for not only does he point to the depths of pain and suffering in human existence, but he reveals as well the deep-rooted psychic and somatic possibilities for liberation. It is as if in the depths of suffering, Marcuse finds new hope for overcoming pain and misery through creating new forms of happiness and freedom.

  In retrospect, Eros and Civilization is Marcuse’s most optimistic, engaging, and challenging work. Although his rather orthodox use of Freud and radical utopian thought will strike some as curiously old-fashioned in an age of cynicism and deconstruction, others will find Marcuse’s sharp social critique and daring vision of emancipation refreshing during an era when political vision and will seem to be in recession. Yet the text was published in an equally quiescent period and anticipated the tumultuous struggles and upheaval that were soon to arrive. And so, who knows?, perhaps another period of social and political upheaval is before us and readers may be seeking the sort of alternative vision of life and society that Marcuse so generously offers. For many of my generation, Eros and Civilization was a life-changing and eye-opening text and it could be hoped that younger generations will find it equally exciting and relevant. For liberation and utopia are, still, Not Yet.

  Preface

  This essay employs psychological categories because they have become political categories. The traditional borderlines between psychology on the one side and political and social philosophy on the other have been made obsolete by the condition of man in the present era: formerly autonomous and identifiable psychical processes are being absorbed by the function of the individual in the state – by his public existence. Psychological problems therefore turn into political problems: private disorder reflects more directly than before the disorder of the whole, and the cure of personal disorder depends more directly than before on the cure of the general disorder. The era tends to be totalitarian even where it has not produced totalitarian states. Psychology could be elaborated and practiced as a special discipline as long as the psyche could sustain itself against the public power, as long as privacy was real, really desired, and self-shaped; if the individual has neither the ability nor the possibility to be for himself, the terms of psychology become the terms of the societal forces which define the psyche. Under these circumstances, applying psychology in the analysis of social and political events means taking an approach which has been vitiated by these very events. The task is rather the opposite: to develop the political and sociological substance of the psychological notions.

  I have tried to reformulate certain basic questions and to follow them in a direction not yet fully explored. I am aware of the tentative character of this inquiry and hope to discuss some of the problems, especially those of an aesthetic theory, more adequately in the near future.

  The ideas developed in this book were first presented in a series of lectures at the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1950–51. I wish to thank Mr. Joseph Borkin of Washington, who encouraged me to write this book. I am deeply grateful to Professors Clyde Kluckhohn and Barrington Moore, Jr., of Harvard University, and to Doctors Henri and Yela Loewenfeld of New York, who have read the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions and criticism. For the content of this essay, I take the sole responsibility. As to my theoretical position, I am indebted to my friend Professor Max Horkheimer and to his collaborators at the Institute of Social Research, now in Frankfurt.

  H. M.

  EROS AND CIVILIZATION

  Introduction

  Sigmund Freud’s proposition that civilization is based on the permanent subjugation of the human instincts has been taken for granted. His question whether the suffering thereby inflicted upon individuals has been worth the benefits of culture has not been taken too seriously — the less so since Freud himself considered the process to be inevitable and irreversible. Free gratification of man’s instinctual needs is incompatible with civilized society: renunciation and delay in satisfaction are the prerequisites of progress. “Happiness,” said Freud, “is no cultural value.” Happiness must be subordinated to the discipline of work as fulltime occupation, to the discipline of monogamie reproduction, to the established system of law and order. The methodical sacrifice of libido, its rigidly enforced deflection to socially useful activities and expressions, is culture.

  The sacrifice has paid off well: in the technically advanced areas of civilization, the conquest of nature is practically complete, and more needs of a greater number of people are fulfilled than ever before. Neither the mechanization and standardization of life, nor the mental impoverishment, nor the growing destructiveness of present-day progress provides sufficient ground for questioning the “principle” which has governed the progress of Western civilization. The continual increase of productivity makes constantly more realistic the promise of an even better life for all.

  However, intensified progress seems to be bound up with intensified unfreedom. Throughout the world of industrial civilization, the domination of man by man is growing in scope and efficiency. Nor does this trend appear as an incidental, transitory regression on the road to progress. Concentration camps, mass exterminations, world wars, and atom bombs are no “relapse into barbarism,” but the unrepressed implementation of the achievements of modern science, technology, and domination. And the most effective subjugation and destruction of man by man takes place at the height of civilization, when the material and intellectual attainments of mankind seem to allow the creation of a truly free world.

  These negative aspects of present-day culture may well indicate the obsolescence of established institutions and the emergence of new forms of civilization: repressiveness is perhaps the more vigorously maintained the more unnecessary it becomes. If it must indeed belong to the essence of civilization as such, then Freud’s question as to the price of civilization would be meaningless — for there would be no alternative.

  But Freud’s own theory provides reasons for rejecting his identification of civilization with repression. On the ground of his own theoretical achievements, the discussion of the problem must be reopened. Does the interrelation between freedom and repression, productivity and destruction, domination and progress, really constitute the principle of civilization? Or does this interrelation result only from a specific historical organization of human existence? In Freudian terms, is the conflict between pleasure principle and reality principle irreconcilable to such a degree that it necessitates the repressive transformation of man’s instinctur structure? Or does it allow the concept of a non-repressive civilization, based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations?

  The notion of a non-repressive civilization will be discussed not as an abstract and utopian speculation. We believe that the discussion is justified on two concrete and realistic grounds: first, Freud’s theoretical conception itself seems to refute his consistent denial of the historical possibility of a non-repressive civilization, and, second, the very achievements of repressive civilization seem to create the preconditions for the gradual abolition of repression. To elucidate these grounds, we shall try to reinterpret Freud’s theoretical conception in terms of its own socio-historical content.

  This procedure implies opposition to the revisionist Neo-Freudian schools. In contrast to the revisionists, I believe that Freud’s theory is in its very substance “sociological,”1 and that no new cultural or sociological orientation is needed to reveal this substance. Freud’s “biologism” is social theory in a depth dimension that has been consistently flattened out by the Neo-Freudian schools. In shifting the emphasis from the unconscious to the conscious, from the biological to the cultural factors, they cut off the roots of society in the instincts and instead take society at the level on which it confronts the individual as his readymade “environment,” without questioning its origin and legitimacy. The Neo-Freudian analysis of this environment thus succumbs to the mystification of societal relations, and their critique moves only within the firmly sanctioned and well-protected sphere of established institutions. Consequently, the Neo-Freudian critique remains in a strict sense ideological: it has no conceptual basis outside the established system; most of its critical ideas and values are those provided by the system. Idealistic morality and religion celebrate their happy resurrection: the fact that they are embellished with the vocabulary of the very psychology that originally refuted their claim ill conceals their identity with officially desired and advertised attitudes.2 Moreover, we believe that the most concrete insights into the historical structure of civilization are contained precisely in the concepts that the revisionists reject. Almost the entire Freudian metapsychology, his late theory of the instincts, his reconstruction of the prehistory of mankind belong to these concepts. Freud himself treated them as mere working
hypotheses, helpful in elucidating certain obscurities, in establishing tentative links between theoretically unconnected insights — always open to correction, and to be discarded if they no longer facilitated the progress of psychoanalytic theory and practice. In the post-Freudian development of psychoanalysis, this metapsychology has been almost entirely eliminated. As psychoanalysis has become socially and scientifically respectable, it has freed itself from compromising speculations. Compromising they were, indeed, in more than one sense: not only did they transcend the realm of clinical observation and therapeutic usefulness, but also they interpreted man in terms far more offensive to social taboos than Freud’s earlier “pan-sexualism” — terms that revealed the explosive basis of civilization. The subsequent discussion will try to apply the tabooed insights of psychoanalysis (tabooed even in psychoanalysis itself) to an interpretation of the basic trends of civilization.

  The purpose of this essay is to contribute to the philosophy of psychoanalysis — not to psychoanalysis itself. It moves exclusively in the field of theory, and it keeps outside the technical discipline which psychoanalysis has become. Freud developed a theory of man, a “psycho-logy” in the strict sense. With this theory, Freud placed himself in the great tradition of philosophy and under philosophical criteria. Our concern is not with a corrected or improved interpretation of Freudian concepts but with their philosophical and sociological implications. Freud conscientiously distinguished his philosophy from his science; the Neo-Freudians have denied most of the former. On therapeutic grounds, such a denial may be perfectly justified. However, no therapeutic argument should hamper the development of a theoretical construction which aims, not at curing individual sickness, but at diagnosing the general disorder.

  A few preliminary explanations of terms are necessary:

  “Civilization” is used interchangeably with “culture” — as in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.

  “Repression,” and “repressive” are used in the nontechnical sense to designate both conscious and unconscious, external and internal processes of restraint, constraint, and suppression.

  “Instinct,” in accordance with Freud’s notion of Trieb, refers to primary “drives” of the human organism which are subject to historical modification; they find mental as well as somatic representation.

  Notes

  1 For a discussion of the sociological character of psychoanalytic concepts, see Heinz Hartmann, “The Application of Psychoanalytic Concepts to Social Science,” in Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. XIX, No. 3 (1950), Clyde Kluckhohn, Mirror for Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949); and Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Rudolph M. Lowenstein, “Some Psychoanalytic Comments on ‘Culture and Personality,’” in Psychoanalysis and Culture: Essays in Honor of Géza Róheim (New York: International Universities Press, 1951).

  2 For a more specific discussion of Neo-Freudian revisionism, see the Epilogue below.

  PART ONE

  UNDER THE RULE OF THE REALITY PRINCIPLE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Hidden Trend in Psychoanalysis

  The concept of man that emerges from Freudian theory is the most irrefutable indictment of Western civilization — and at the same time the most unshakable defense of this civilization. According to Freud, the history of man is the history of his repression. Culture constrains not only his societal but also his biological existence, not only parts of the human being but his instinctual structure itself. However, such constraint is the very precondition of progress. Left free to pursue their natural objectives, the basic instincts of man would be incompatible with all lasting association and preservation: they would destroy even where they unite. The uncontrolled Eros is just as fatal as his deadly counterpart, the death instinct. Their destructive force derives from the fact that they strive for a gratification which culture cannot grant: gratification as such and as an end in itself, at any moment. The instincts must therefore be deflected from their goal, inhibited in their aim. Civilization begins when the primary objective — namely, integral satisfaction of needs — is effectively renounced.

  The vicissitudes of the instincts are the vicissitudes of the mental apparatus in civilization. The animal drives be come human instincts under the influence of the external reality. Their original “location” in the organism and their basic direction remain the same, but their objectives and their manifestations are subject to change. All psychoanalytic concepts (sublimation, identification, projection, repression, introjection) connote the mutability of the instincts. But the reality which shapes the instincts as well as their needs and satisfaction is a socio-historical world. The animal man becomes a human being only through a fundamental transformation of his nature, affecting not only the instinctual aims but also the instinctual “values” — that is, the principles that govern the attainment of the aims. The change in the governing value system may be tentatively defined as follows:

  from: to:

  immediate satisfaction delayed satisfaction

  pleasure restraint of pleasure

  joy (play) toil (work)

  receptiveness productiveness

  absence of repression security

  Freud described this change as the transformation of the pleasure principle into the reality principle. The interpretation of the “mental apparatus” in terms of these two principles is basic to Freud’s theory and remains so in spite of all modifications of the dualistic conception. It corresponds largely (but not entirely) to the distinction between unconscious and conscious processes. The individual exists, as it were, in two different dimensions, characterized by different mental processes and principles. The difference between these two dimensions is a genetic-historical as well as a structural one: the unconscious, ruled by the pleasure principle, comprises “the older, primary processes, the residues of a phase of development in which they were the only kind of mental processes.” They strive for nothing but for “gaining pleasure; from any operation which might arouse unpleasantness (‘pain’) mental activity draws back.”1 But the unrestrained pleasure principle comes into conflict with the natural and human environment. The individual comes to the traumatic realization that full and painless gratification of his needs is impossible. And after this experience of disappointment, a new principle of mental functioning gains ascendancy. The reality principle supersedes the pleasure principle: man learns to give up momentary, uncertain, and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but “assured” pleasure.2 Because of this lasting gain through renunciation and restraint, according to Freud, the reality principle “safeguards” rather than “dethrones,” “modifies” rather than denies, the pleasure principle.

  However, the psychoanalytic interpretation reveals that the reality principle enforces a change not only in the form and timing of pleasure but in its very substance. The adjustment of pleasure to the reality principle implies the subjugation and diversion of the destructive force of instinctual gratification, of its incompatibility with the established societal norms and relations, and, by that token, implies the transubstantiation of pleasure itself.

  With the establishment of the reality principle, the human being which, under the pleasure principle, has been hardly more than a bundle of animal drives, has become an organized ego. It strives for “what is useful” and what can be obtained without damage to itself and to its vital environment. Under the reality principle, the human being develops the function of reason: it leams to “test” the reality, to distinguish between good and bad, true and false, useful and harmful. Man acquires the faculties of attention, memory, and judgment. He becomes a conscious, thinking subject, geared to a rationality which is imposed upon him from outside. Only one mode of thought-activity is “split off” from the new organization of the mental apparatus and remains free from the rule of the reality principle: phantasy is “protected from cultural alterations” and stays committed to the pleasure principle. Otherwise, the mental apparatus is effectively subordinated to the reality principle. The function of “motor discharge,” which, under the supremacy of the pleasure principle, had “served to unburden the mental apparatus of accretions of stimuli,” is now employed in the “appropriate alteration of reality”: it is converted into action.3