Discussion: Thoreau and Freud

Our Thoreau discussion was led by Kirsten.  I read this short essay and while I felt agreement with some of what Thoreau had to say, about standing up for what you believe in, about not supporting entities (even if this means your government) that are carrying out actions you believe are wrong but I was left floundering somewhat by Thoreau's omission of any attempt to define conscience, to describe how this would work in reality.  I realize he was living in a very different time, less than a century after the American states, including Massachussetts, had been involved in a revolution to force independence from Britain.  Revolt against your government in this context would likely have been seen in a more acceptable and necessary light.  But Thoreau was a smart and thoughtful man and I would have thought he would have contemplated more stable situations and what future roles of democracy, conscience and individual rights and responsibilities might entail.  Kristen was helpful in giving us some background about Thoreau including his adherence to transcendentalism with its belief in the innate goodness of the human being.  I'm not sure that I'm as sanguine as Thoreau was.  I believe that there is innate goodness in human beings but I also believe (as did Freud) that there is innate aggressiveness and my worry in allowing individuals complete freedom is that those who contain more aggressiveness, allowed to run riot, can very easily and quickly with - mankind's technological and strategic abilities - come to dominate the more innately 'good' humans and certainly to oppress the weaker members of any community.

Kristen sent out a good set of questions but we only had a chance to discuss the 1st one - and even then it was a topic that we could have discussed for an entire day:

1. How do we determine what is right?  What are the rights of the individual vs the rights of society?

We live in a society which currently does not nurture a conscience in its citizens, instead it encourages obedience.  People may take actions based, they claim, on their conscience but at what point does their right to obey their conscience end?  My mind immediately went to the Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr quote that "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."  But a determination of 'harm to others' is not always as clearcut as in Wendell Holmes' quote.  We had a brief discussion about how to define conscience.  Examples brought up were conscientious objectors to the Vietnam war draft - where conscience was defined on the basis of adherence to religious tenets or teachings.  Society seemed willing to concede the overriding dictates of conscience if it was backed up by the practice of an accepted religion but in the absence of a religious foundation for conscience or in a current western world where religion holds less sway on society, where is conscience defined?  We discussed certain actions that may be sanctioned or even prescribed by religion and/or cultural norms: honour killings, genital mutilation, Christians objecting to abortion clinics (with varying levels of force reaching all the way up to sniper killings of doctors).  Thoreau doesn't explicitly state this but he was focused on the rights and obligations of the individual and for Thoreau, as for Wendell Holmes, the right of an individual to follow his conscience ends where harm to another might begin.

Thoreau was a fan of less government.  How do we make government more responsive to the needs to the people it governs?  Decentralization of government is one way of having a more flexible government with potentially less oppression of individuals (or potentially oppression of fewer individuals).  Switzerland would be one example of a country with a more decentralized government, with its various cantons.

It was an interesting discussion but we ran out of time to really dissect into what is conscience and how do we determine what someone's conscience is?  It was time to move onto Civilization and its Discontents, as postulated by Freud.

Dr. Jerry Zaslove led the discussion on Freud's text Civilization and its Discontents.  Dr. Zaslove has been studying Freud and the field of psychoanalysis for decades.  He spoke a bit about Vienna, the birthplace of psychoanalysis, where Freud lived for most of his life.  He had sent us a few texts including one containing Freud's views on capital punishment, and provided a handout on Ritual Psycho-Analytic Studies by Theodor Reik.  Zaslove made the point that the word civilization in the context of this book is probably not the best word.  Culture would have been more apt.  Freud (and Thoreau) are trying to understand the institutions that mankind had developed and how they have come to create such problems for individuals.

Freud is a modern step along a long pathway we've been following from the time of Copernicus through the the Enlightenment (Rousseau, Darwin, Nietszche, Kant, Thoreau etc) to a more modern era, one in which we may not need a state but we do require  a Social Contract.  Freud's method involved psychoanalysis, and the cornerstone of psychoanalysis is repression and the unconscious.  Freud saw psychoanalysis as a dynamic way of assessing the human mind rather than a static set of descriptors of symptoms.  Yet language is the main tool of psychoanalysis.  For someone new to the field, the jargon is a big barrier - not only to understanding but also because many of the words are sound cliched.  Interestingly, Professor Zaslove has been working on an analysis of psychoanalysis and aesthetics: aesthetics as a way to alleviate the suffering that civilization or culture causes to individuals.  Chapter II offers ways of coping with the unhappiness of life.  3 ways.  Deflection, intoxication or .....
Freud was influenced by Darwin and the concept of development and some of Freud's totemic concepts.

Dr. Zaslove briefly defined some of the language associated with psychoanalysis:

• Neuroses - where the ego is divided against itself
• Psyche - from the german means soul or spirit - the inner location of the body
• repression - in the german means repulsion, pushing away
• sexual - phases of the development of the human animal i.e.: adolescence, having a love object, Eros
• cathexis - one part of the mind is occupied by another part of the mind - almost militarily
• civilization - group or mass psychology - the energy of a group
• Id - place of non-conscious drives
• Ego - the self or "i"
• Super-ego - the over 'I' or meta-'I' - stands above the "I"; free association
• transference 
• obsession or compulsion - qualities of the human psyche

Zaslove described some of the influences at the time:

A time of revolutions and counter-revolutions
Archaeological investigation into ancient civilizations
Class system, industrialization - Freud was pessimistic whether these would change - persisent ruling class
City states such as Vienna are undergoing changes and stresses
Growing middle-classes - increased neuroses

One technique used in psychoanalysis is to try and understand emotions through memory and Zaslove briefly mentioned Mimesis in people.  Neurosis is a key issue in individuals as well as in society.  To Freud neurosis is not an illness, it's a consequence in the development of the mental life as a child, where it finds itself divided against itself.  The child has all these undifferentiated drives.  Each child will attach itself to an object (mother, father, grandparent or other caregiver).  The neurosis is the coming into existence of consciousness.  The human animal doesn't do this automatically, it does it via love and touch and by creating a picture .  The healthy self, in an effort to keep itself together, creates an imago, of that which has been lost or that which can be attained in the future.  The resistance or conflict arises when the child realizes that it won't achieve this image.

Civilization and Its Discontents is an anti-platonic book.  It's a book about where we are now (100 years ago) - about modernity.  It's a developmental psychology, it assumes the individual is capable of development.

Discussion: Goethe's Faust

Last class of the term and of LS800.  It's been an intense 3 months - yet despite the heavy reading load, most books made me want to delve deeper and read more about the period, about the issue, by the author etc.  Some much history and so many things I have a glancing awareness of but no knowledge.

GOETHE background - 'last' Renaissance man
1749-1832, born in Frankfurt, died in Weimar
Contemporary of Wollstonecraft
Born in the Holy Roman Empire, prior to unification of Germany (1871). HRE dissolved during his lifetime
At age 27, went to live in Weimar, died there (though in Italy for a period)
French soldiers invaded Weimar while he was living there, entered his house and his mistress convinced the soldiers to leave the house.  They married the following day
The Age of Enlightenment - away from Religion, towards Romanticism and emotions/passions/sensibility
Writer, poet, philosopher, natural scientist, critic, director, actor, painter, lawyer, government minister/advisor
Heigl, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer
Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert

Opposed French Revolution, opposed Romantic tradition (critical of emotional excesses)
In Italy during a period of renaissance of neo-classical influences
Like a German Shakespeare vis a vis language (as Dante was for Italy)
Accused by scientists of trying to import romanticism into science (i.e.: work with colours) - more appreciated in 21st c.  Hard science doesn't give us all the answers.


FAUST
Part 1 more about Faust, Part 2 more about society.
Goethe finished Faust Part 2 just before his death
Goethe wrote the work over an extended period 1773-1831
Original idea was a simple legend about a magician who makes a deal with devil.

QUESTIONS
1. Compare Adam and Eve myth with Faust & Mephistopheles myth: searching for knowledge, Fall from Grace, serpent

Faust wants all knowledge and Mephisto tells him he can't have god's understanding of universe, meaning of universe.  Offers him alternatives.
Mephisto tempts people but they have a choice.

Jung was very influenced by Goethe and Faust and relation of myth with collective unconsciousness.
Science vs intuition
Germany began to divide learning into departments: science vs philosophy etc
The beginnings of the concept of dangerous knowledge.

2. Is Faust a victim of a pact made by forces more powerful than himself, or a self-centred individual who leads an innocent young girl to her ruin?

Faust wanting to know and unify everything.
Mephisto couldn't tempt Gretchen as too pure but Faust could ensnare her with love.

3.  In the Prologue, Mephisto argues that "man's life would be easier without Reason - for he uses it only for bestial pursuits." Is this a fair assessment?
Goethe would agree with Hume that we are using Reason to serve passions.


Movement in Germany that assigns naziism and Holocaust to Reason - as a very rational approach to a goal and how to accomplish it.  It's a frightening thought, but this is probably the only approach that would enable people to commit such atrocities - remove the emotion, the empathy, the reactions from it.
WWI was a tremendous blow to reason - such a big change - got even worse with WWII and after.

Passion is pushing us to do things but reason separated from morals can be horrifying and terribly destructive.  See Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Goethe sees the start of the industrial revolution: destruction of cities, families, rise of importance of individuals, science, production and innovation - and foresees the dangers of where mankind was heading.

Goethe seemed to support man's striving - for the best of something.  We will read another of his texts in the new year and I'm curious to see how it compares to Faust.

This is it until 2013!

THE BHAGAVAD GITA
(Transl. Laurie L. Patton, Penguin Classics, 2008)

Plato's Phaedrus (which we read and discussed in July) proposed that wisdom was gained through discussion with others, not in isolation in nature nor via meditation.  Socrates felt that ideas and theories were honed through discussion, by being challenged.  He argues that the quest for Beauty is the quest for the perfect form, for wisdom.  The Bhagavad Gita sets out a different slightly quest.  Wisdom is still honoured but the goal in the Gita is enlightenment.

The Gita describes 3 gitas, or paths towards enlightenment:

Karmamarga - the path of action
Jnanamarga - the path of knowledge
Bhaktimarga - the path of devotion

Jnanamarga would be the path that Plato/Socrates would have followed, trying to understand all the categories of the ancient world, and enumerating everything, in order to then understand the universe (samkhya - the yoga of knowledge).

In the Gita's philosophy, the self (atman) moves from life to life in a cycle of birth and death but ideally always progressing upwards, closer and closer to the Divine.

Krishna (Vishnu), one of 2 main characters in the Gita, does not recommend one particular path over another but stresses that above all one must act without clinging to the consequences (the 'fruits') of the action.

I found much of what was discussed in the Gita to be of current interest, in its discussions of living a thoughtful life, knowing oneself and being true to oneself.

3.35  
Better one's own dharma, 
even if ineffective, 
than the dharma 
of another, practised well!
Better death
in one's own dharma!



Like Plato, Krishna values wisdom

4.38
In this world,
there is no purifier
like wisdom;
in time, one who is oneself perfected
by yoga
finds that wisdom
in the self.

This focus on looking within, of not clinging to 'wordly' things, is repeated over and over in the Gita.  Krishna discusses the 3-fold gates of hell which destroys the self: 
greed, anger and desire.  Whereas

5.24
The one who practises yoga,
who has joy within,
delight within,
and then radiance within,
thus reaches cessation 
in Brahman,
of one being 
with Brahman.

The Gita talks about giving up anger and desire, of giving up purposeful intent.
This is at odds with western civilization and especially North American culture.  Would insulin have been discovered, the automobile invented, would Neil Armstrong (who died this week) have been the 1st man to walk on the moon?  Krishna would argue that all of these are worthless, that a person's life (though he would have said a 'man's life' as women didn't figure much in Krishna's directions about how to live one's life), that a man's life was all about living according to one's dharma, following one of the disciplines (gitas or paths) to eventually achieve release from the cycle of transmigration (moksha).  It wasn't about achieving anything, about improving "man's" life on earth, about searching for happiness.  It was about freeing oneself from the earthly trappings that prevent transcendence into the divine.

We are at an interesting time in the history of mankind where we have knowledge that gives us the power to catastrophically affect the world we live in, yet as a species we have not achieved a broad enough communal wisdom to be able to wield this power (or NOT wield it) for the greater good of the species much less for the environment (meaning the other forms of life on earth but also the universe around us).  I don't know that I can fully subscribe to an ideology that not only does not value expanding our knowledge in order to improve our lot, but one which only values life on earth as something to be shed in such a way as to end up somewhere else.

I do find value in the ideal of not clinging to things, of not giving in to anger, desire, jealousy and all the other base emotions but I also value intelligence, compassion, altruism, honesty, creativity and imagination, I value human energy, and I value those people who don't feel bound by the norms (Plato's 4th kind of madness).  I think the discovery of insulin and penicillin, of robotics, of the magnifying properties of glass, of so many of mankind's achievements are worthy and good.  If these discoveries and the world they have brought us to (2012) had been tempered by some of the values promulgated in the Gita, we might not have the wars, the pollution and destruction, the loss of species, some of the disease, that we have today.
All pieces of the puzzle.