A little while ago I blogged about Aaron Stalnaker’s concept of chastened intellectualism. Chastened intellectualism, for Stalnaker, is a central feature of the thought of Augustine and Xunzi, across their very different cultural contexts. Their ideas are “intellectual” in that one needs to learn (directly or indirectly) from texts and reflect intellectually on them in order to live a good human life; but “chastened” in that our own reflection is insufficient to allow us to reach this good life. We unconsciously sabotage our efforts to reach the good; we need help from others to get there, likely involving some sort of practice that will transform us.
Such practice seems at first to involve the kind of thing we might normally count as “religion”: meditation, prayer, ritual. But it seems to me that there’s another thinker, not religious except in the broadest stretching of the word, whose worldview also counts as chastened intellectualism: namely, Sigmund Freud. Freud’s message, it seems to me, is very similar to Augustine’s and Xunzi’s: the ego is not the master of its own house. To be saved from oneself, one needs some understanding of the textual learning that Freud saw himself as beginning; but simply reading Freud isn’t going to be enough to understand yourself. Our repression, our defences, are too strong. You need to engage in the practice of therapy (or analysis) at someone else’s guidance.
I tend to suspect that a chastened intellectualist view of humans is correct. I rather wish it weren’t, because its conclusions never seem pleasant. Augustine slams the very idea of human flourishing – because we are weak we cannot live a good life in this world, only in the next. Freud says a very similar thing – but denies that there is a better world to come. All we can do is be slightly less neurotic. Of the three, it’s Xunzi who seems to allow that a life in this world could be good – but only if restrained by the kind of hierarchies that would now seem tyrannical to us.
I, also, tend to suspect this view is probably correct, but Xunzi’s view is , I think, only partially true and really minimizes or discounts circumstance. Augustine’s view is religious in nature and requires fundamentally flawed human nature to work. Freud relies on observation rather than theology and comes closer to modern views of individualism. Altogether, not views one can get enthusiastic about, but reality requires we look with clear eyes and master ourselves only.
Hi Count Sneaky – I would agree overall that Freud’s view is the most plausible of the three. It’s still a sad picture of human life if that’s the case – sadder than Xunzi’s, in a way, since the hope for a happy and harmonious life isn’t there.
Count Sneaky:
If anyone’s scientific credibility is exploded it surely is Freud’s. He is at the moment a little to the shady side of Scientology. His cocaine usage is well documented cf. Thornton/The Freudian Fallacy who also points out that infantile sexuality without their being actual sex hormones is deeply daft. The literature is vast on his fabrications. Interestingly a little monograph by Alisdair MacIntyre called ‘The Unconscious’ was early in the day with a philosophical rebuttal.
If not the scientist which he promoted himself as, what was he?
The striking thing about Freud is how widely he is read by everyone except scientists. He is dead in psychology and biology, but alive and well in literature and religious studies. Which suggests to me that your last question should not be read as rhetorical: what was he, indeed? The answer might be: an interpretive humanist who helped us understand ourselves better, while believing he was a natural scientist. Freud as scientist is closely parallel to Marx as revolutionary; Marx’s successors, against the man’s own intention, have done far better at interpreting the world than at changing it.
Amod:
What in your opinion is the major thing from Freud’s work that helps us understand ourselves better?
The most important idea in Freud’s work for our self-understanding is the unconscious: the fact that most of what goes on in our minds is opaque to us.
But that’s not something that’s unique or original to Freud: Paul of Tarsus had figured it out (“the good I would do, I do not”). Beyond that, he has a number of important ideas that help a lot in particular cases: narcissism and masochism are the two I’ve personally found most valuable. So too is the idea of sexual symbolism appearing in places where even the symbol-makers aren’t aware of it (such as the “Freudian slip”). Hard to name a single one of his ideas (beyond the unconscious itself) as standing above the rest, but together they add up to a very rich field of insight.