Freud: Civilization and its Discontents

Freud, Sigmund: Civilization and its Discontents, Tr. David McLintock; Penguin Modern Classics, St. Ives 2002.

These week we are reading a work of Freud's and an essay of Thoreau's.  Knowing only the most minimal and banal information about each of these (Freud as psychoanalyst with a fixation on the Oedipus complex and blaming the mother for any difficulties in an individual's life; and Thoreau as a simple-living backwoods philosopher who wrote Walden) I didn't immediately see a connection between the 2.

The book of Freud's we are reading is about Civilization, something I have never spent much time thinking about but, if pressed, would probably have said is a good thing.  I had a hard time with the introduction as it plunged me immediately into the deep end of psychoanalytical jargon and concepts, territory unknown to me.  I immediately found myself floundering in the murky depths of concepts about the anal eroticism of young human beings, primitive sniffing men on all fours and the repression of olfactory stimulation when mankind evolved from all fours to standing erect, discussions of the id, ego and super-ego, Eros, the totemic phase, and oceanic feelings.  I was having a hard time relating this to civilization but once I got into Freud's text itself, I found much there to make me think and reflect.

Freud's discussion was a bit challenging for someone lacking any previous knowledge of his earlier works (this text being written in 1929 and Freud lived from 1856 to 1939).  What was interesting to me is what I've been exposed to, via books and media culture (TV, movies etc), during my lifetime of western society's reaction to Freud's findings during the remainder of the 20th century (and now into the 21st century).  I found his discussions (about the exigencies of civilization, the role of religion, the conflict between the individual and society) were really thought-provoking and made me want to read more in this area - though what I really wanted to read, being lazy, was a text from some learned person assessing mankind and society in the 21st century in a manner similar to Freud's processes in the late 19th and early 20th century.  I was very curious, as I read about sexual repression, the constraints civilization imposes on an individual's appetites or drives, the importance of various innate human drives, about what this now looks like for someone growing up in the 21st century.

Freud writes quite a bit about why mankind may have developed and submitted to civilization.  In return for increased security (controlling nature, decreasing risk of physical harm including starvation, exposure to the elements, mitigating against intra-species aggression etc), mankind had to give up or constrain basic human pleasure-seeking drives, most notably for Freud (and according to him, man - though it is not always clear to me when Freud means "Mankind" and when he means "man") the drive for sexual gratification.  

[...] Civilization designates the sum totals of those achievements and institutions that distinguish our life from that of our animal ancestors and serve the dual purpose of protecting human beings against nature and regulating their mutual relations. [pg 27]

Communal life becomes possible only when a majority comes together that is stronger than any individual...The replacement of the individual by that of the community is the decisive step towards civilization."  "Its essence lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their scope for satisfaction [...] The next requirement of civilization is justice. [pg 32]

Much of mankind's struggle is taken up with the task of finding a suitable...accommodation between the claims of the individual and the mass claims of civilization. [pg 33]

What has occurred since Freud wrote this text, is a large body of research on animals, animal behaviour, animal societies, interactions, learning etc - and I'm fascinated by what we have learned about mankind vs the animal kingdoms in the last 100 years.

Freud goes on to discuss civilization and writes on pg 39 how, though women "1st laid the foundations of civilization with the claims of their love," men are set the difficult task of maintaining it and forced to "sublimate their drives," given that women have "little aptitude" for this and indeed soon resent men's distraction from their "duties as a husband and father."

Again, in the year 2013, almost 1/2 century since the early days of 'women's lib', I would really like to read a modern take on this from someone who has studied Freud and his field over the past few decades.  One jarring note, from a perspective 100 years later than when Freud was writing, lay in a footnote to Section IV where he notes:

... erotic relations are so often associated with a degree of direct aggression, quite apart from the sadistic component that quite properly belongs to them.  Faced with such complications, the love-object will not always be as understanding and tolerant as the farmer's wife who complained that her husband no longer loved her because he had not beaten her for a week.

Freud looks at several tactics mankind has experimented with to try and cope with the realities of civilization.  I found it interesting to read his opinion of communism, given that we read The Communist Manifesto just last week.  Freud writes about communism and the contention that mankind's "nature has been corrupted by the institution of private property." [pg 49]  He contrasts this with Christianity's grandiose and, Freud maintains, impossible commandment to 'Love thy neighbour as thy neighbour loves thee.'  Freud states that communism's attempt to redress inequality by abolishing private property rights and rights of inheritance don't take into account the 'natural' inequalities that will always occur due to varying genetic physical attributes and innate and unequal mental abilities.  Freud writes that:

Aggression was not created by property; it prevailed with almost no restriction in primitive times, when property was very scanty. [pg 50]

Freud considers aggression "an indestructible feature of human nature."

It was also interesting, on pg 50, to read Freud's comments about one outlet for mankind's natural aggression which is found within small tight cultural units, where aggression is directed outwards to outsiders.  Freud calls this the 'narcissism of small differences.' pg 51

As a scientist I enjoyed Freud's simple description of the goal of science.

...What we strive for in scientific work - a simple answer that neither neglects nor does violence to the facts.

In Part VII Freud speaks about internal controls that civilization instills to curb mankind's innate aggression, such as guilt and the need for punishment.  I'm sure I could pick up almost any book from the pantheon of literature and find this as one of the themes in the book.

Professor Zaslove sent along various extracts to consider as we read Freud this week.  One of these contained some responses Freud had communicated to Theodor Reik in 1926, when asked by Judge Emil Desenheimer of a Germanic Supreme Provincial Court for his views on capital punishment.  Freud raised the issue of 'talion' as an early legal principle, a term I'd never heard of.


According to Britannica Online Encyclopaedia: Talion:  A talion is a legal principle originating back in Babylonian times and in Palestine, based on the "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" concept.  The law makers in those times, and extending through the early Roman times and occasionally resurfacing in the middle ages, felt that the punishment should more literally match the crime.  Eventually the injured party could also choose to be compensated financially instead.  The Latin term was lex talionis.

Reading about it in Britanica Online, it made me think of my recent trip a couple of weeks ago to Todos Santos Cuchumatan, in northwestern Guatemala.  I've been there yearly since 2009, working on a canine population and rabies control project for Veterinarians Without Borders Canada.  It's a Mayan community which has been able to maintain a strong sense of identity and culture and resist the pace of change experienced elsewhere in the last century.  Though I'm seeing changes even in just 4 years, due to the availability of cellphones and the internet, it is still quite traditional.  This year we had one team member interviewing some of the people in the community.  One interesting thing to come out was a different concept of justice.  I knew that the municipal leaders spend much of their time mediating property disputes and other areas of conflict but one woman's story really brought it home to me.  Most of the dogs in Todos Santos, owned or otherwise, run loose in the community.  One woman told us that her dog, while running loose, had got into her neighbour's house and had eaten some of the neighbour's food.  The neighbour complained to the municipality and asked to be compensated for her loss.  The decision, and this was not deemed unusual by the community, was that the dog-owning woman had to either poison her dog or else pay a significant amount to the neighbour to make up for the lost food.  Being poor, the woman had to poison her own dog, something she is still heart-broken over months later.  This to me is an odd way of dispensing justice but it seems to fit with the ancient concept of 'talion'.

Freud seems to have a pessimistic tone in his book.  Having recently experienced WWI in the decade prior to this book being published, Freud must have been disillusioned about the earlier bright promise of civilization and the industrial revolution.  The aggression, territorialism, brutality and carnage that occurred during the war would have seemed an enormous fall from the civilized heights promised by the advances of the 19th century.  In this book Freud proposes that mankind may 

gradually carry out such modifications in our civilization as will better satisfy our ... demand for a form of life that will make us happy with[out] allowing so much suffering, which could probably be avoided. [pg 52]

In the year 2013, I'm finding it hard to judge whether civilization/culture or society have advanced in a desirable way from where we were at the beginning of the 20th century or whether we have lost our way.  This is probably a significant factor in my decision to embark upon this Master's program and explore the works of bright people over the preceding centuries and up until today.  I'll see if I'm able to come to any decisive conclusion 4 years hence.

Discussion: Dostoyevsky & Nietzsche

DOSTOYEVSKY
Dostoyevsky lived 1841-1881.  Russia had been Christian from about the 10th century.  The Tzars took power from the nobles but gave them increased power over their serfs.  The nobility became very oppressive.  Huge downtrodden serf population.
19th century.  In 1812 Napoleon had invaded Russia and was defeated but not through any superiority of Russia, more vanquished by the elements, deprivation.  Much tension in 19th c., paranoia, fear of uprisings.  Michael Vacunin, father of uprising, nihilism, Turgenev: questioning of the old values.

Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow, father was a doctor, an alcoholic.  He came from a religious, strict family, raised on hospital grounds and would talk to the patients.  Well-read.  Small of build, strong personality, hot-headed but pale and introverted at school.  Suffered from epilepsy.  Psychological writer.  Was a socialist and early existentialist.  Was a member of a writer's club and was arrested and ended up on the firing line.  Eventually the execution was called off (it's thought the calling off was planned from the beginning). He then was sent to Siberia for 4 years hard labour and then had to join the army. Following this, Dostoyevsky became a journalist and went to western Europe.  Became a gambler and addict.

Dostoyevsky was very affected by the people he met in prison and in Siberia as well as by his addiction to gambling and the degradations this brought him to (lying, pleading, debasing himself, importuning family and friends).  He also had numerous sexual intrigues throughout his life.

Every Dostoyevsky novel has a woman at the end as a Christ-like figure who saves (or, in the case of Letters from the Underground, tries to save) the "hero/narrator."

What is better - cheap happiness or exalted sufferings?  Why is it limited to these 2 choices, or to these qualifiers?
Dostoyevsky was a Christian writer and Christianity has a belief in redemption through suffering.  The narrator does not believe in Christianity but Liza is trying to save him by offering love.  Dostoyevsky felt that the threat to mankind was science (The Crystal Palace of science and technology at the London Exhibition of 1851) and reason, and the salvation was Christianity - if you accept the message.  Science tells you that you are going to die but offers you nothing else whereas Christianity offers you life after death. (Other religions offered other options such as reincarnation).

Normal man is "man of action" vs the acutely conscious man who is tormented by doubts, questions and emotions.  Men of action are the doers, the inventors, the scientists, the warriors etc.
The book is a critique of material progress..."cheap happiness."
Romantics believed that through nature and beauty you could find meaning/happiness.  Developed towards pantheism which believed God was in everything.

Liza's situation is much more dire than the Underground Man's yet she bears it, accepts it, she doesn't lament her lot, she still has hope.

NIETZSCHE - Dr. Samir Gandesha led this discussion.
On the Genealogy of Morals is most accessible of his texts.  Hermeneutics of Suspicion - geared towards unmasking language, culture, morals
Freud and Marx also included
French philosopher Paul Mercure

Nietzsche born 1844 - Marx wrote manifesto 1847
Radical humanist, critique of property - social and economic, trained as philologist

1889 - breakdown, dies 1900
Freud publishes Interpretations of Dreams in 1900
Sister Elizabeth cares for him after breakdown.  She was very right-wing and portrayed him as a German nationalist, a proto-Nazi, which he was not.

His relationship to Plato - wants to understand philosophy.  Criticizes socratism on 3 fronts -

1. in the Republic, devises an ideal state, banishes poets and tragedians.
2. ideal state based on theory of forms - world around us is illusory, comprised of copies of an ideal world located elsewhere
3. in the notion of a justice hierarchy, reason sits at top and governs with assistance of the passions - argument of the philosopher-king

Feels socratism is working its way, via christianity (St Aquinas, Emmanuel Kant) into the Western Civilization (phenomenal world and ideal world), critical of Kantian morality

110.14-25 - locates his issue in Plato/Christian ideal that god is truth, that truth is divine

"the truthful one, in that audacious and ultimate sense presupposed by the belief in science, thus affirms another world than that of life, nature, and history; and insofar as he affirms this "other world", what? must he not, precisely in so doing, negate its counterpart, this world, our world? ... It is still a metaphysical belief on which our belief in science rests -- we knowers today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, we too still take our fire from that great fire that was ignited by a thousand-year old belief, that belief of Christians, which was Plato's belief, that God is truth, that truth is divine ... But what if precisely this is becoming ever more implausible, if nothing proves to be divine any longer, unless perhaps error, blindness, lie -- if God himself proves to be our longest lie? -- --- At this point it is necessary to pause and to reflect for a long time.  Science itself now is in need of  a justification...

Nietzsche's conclusion was that a noble class/caste identified good qualities and bad qualities was derived from his philological studies.
Transvaluation and priestly class (slave-revolt) takes the reverse of this valuation
It is the slaves' feeling of weakness that leads them to this shift - their lack of power

Dark side of civilization (hermeneutics) - based on system of cruelty

Science includes cultural sciences as well as technological - systematic investigation

What does he mean by mastery, by will to power?
Are the masters those who control money, the state?

Nihilism - a process where the highest values are in the process of devaluing themselves
The sovereign individual -
Man is left with "will" and a question of where we derive our values from.
It's a will to power - this is how you counter will to nothingness (nihilism) - denial of the body, denial of the senses.

Nietzsche wants life-affirming ideals not life-denying as the ascetic ideals are.
What is the basic force?
Will to live but not in a metaphysical sense, not in a 'hereafter' sense.
Truth but not a propositional truth based on the state of the world but a Truth.
Will to power (based on his later writings but heralded in GM) - the ability to impose the aspect of being on becoming - if life is this constant process of becoming.
Role of Art, of style, fixes and establishes certain interpretations of the world
Justice is the right of the stronger, Nietzsche was influenced by the Renaissance and Machiavelli.

Heraclitus - Reality is this river, this constant state of becoming, you never step in the same water twice in a river.

52.19-25
"...life itself is defined as an ever more purposive inner adaptation to external circumstances (Herbert Spencer).  In so doing however, one mistakes the essence of life, its will to power; in so doing one overlooks the essential pre-eminence of the spontaneous, attacking, infringing, reinterpreting, reordering and formative forces, upon whose effect the "adaptation" first follows; in so doing one denies the lordly role of the highest functionaries in the organism itself, in which the will of life appears active and form-giving."

Will to power through naming and renaming, those who master language, the artists, now it's the media.  The creative people, enable us to see the world differently.
Italians futurists, over-powered by Roman empire, urged active forgetting.

Some people try to expand their minds by chemicals (Timothy Leary), or physically (other cultures use physical deprivation to achieve this as a rite of passage).  Any new ventures are often very quickly co-opted by greater society, mass culture.

Live your life knowing that everything you do will live on for ever and be repeated. Every moment must be lived to its fullest - the artist is always creating new value.
Nietzschean ideals taken up by European modernists at the turn of century (19th c. to 20th c.)
Innovation, avant-garde,

Sarah Kofman, a French philosopher - tried to appropriate Nietzsche from a feminist perspective.

Dostoyevsky: Notes from the Underground

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Notes from the Underground, Dover Thrift Edition,

I found this book depressing but it seemed SO familiar.  The main character, the underground man himself with his self-pity and his determination for self-sabotage was someone I felt I had read about before.  Maybe it's just a Russian archetype.  He was quite frustrating but Dosteyevsky wrote it all so beautifully: what he thought and felt, how he appeared to others, his opportunities for redemption and how he would throw it away.  I actually thought he might allow things to work out with Liza and get out of his funk but he was determined to keep himself down.  I loved the character of Appollon, so passive-aggressive, he must have driven the neurotic underground man crazy.

On pg 31, he is thinking back on his younger days and how he has come to be where he is now.  he scoffs at Romanticism "We Russians, speaking generally, have never had those foolish transcendental "romantics" -- German, and still more French -- on whom nothing produces any effect; if there were an earthquake, if all France perished at the barricades, they would still be the same, they would not even have the decency to affect a change, but would still go on singing their transcendental songs to the hour of their death, because they are fools."  He goes on to describe what the Russian 'romantic' is and it's quite a humorous description as he describes quite pragmatic romantics, always with an eye out for advantage.

"That is why there are so many 'broad natures' among us who never lose their ideal even in the depths of degradation; and though they never stir a finger for their ideal,..., yet they tearfully cherish their first ideal and are extraordinarily honest at heart." pg 32

He really is a sad character and though he is pitiful, there is something of his insecurity in many of us.  He says pg 31 "Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike everyone else.  'I am alone and they are everyone'.

He describes himself as pitiful, loathsome, hysterical etc. He is very untrustworthy as a narrator and he tells us so frequently (pg 33, pg 26, pg 27, pg 22, pg 25)
After he tries to pick a fight and get thrown out of a window [he is unsuccessful in his defenestration attempt], he says "I never have been a coward at heart, though I have always been a coward in action." pg 34
He starts to stalk an officer he has become obsessed with.  He refers to himself several times as a fly (pg 34 "I had been treated like a fly"; pg 36 "that I was a mere fly in the eyes of all this world, a nasty, disgusting fly -- more intelligent, more highly developed, more refined in feeling than any of them, of course -- but a fly that was continually making way for everyone, insulted and injured by everyone."; "All of them took scarcely any notice of my entrance, which was strange, for I had not met them for years.  Evidently they looked upon me as something on the level of a common fly." pg 42)

The underground man indulges in fantasies about how life could be where he was admired and loved.  "Everyone would kiss me and weep (what idiots they would be if they did not), while I should go barefoot and hungry preaching new ideas and fighting a victorious Austerlitz against the obscurantists. pg 40

He runs into old school friends and they are planning a party for Zverkov, a rich friend (who came in for an estate of 200 serfs while still a school).  The underground man hates him because of his advantages, what he calls being "favoured by the gifts of nature."

He didn't do well at school.  He was intelligent and knew the material but couldn't get along.  "Once indeed I did have a friend.  But I was already a tyrant at heart; I wanted to exercise unbounded sway over him..." pg 47  He is so insecure about everything combined with false bravado about his superiority.  He invites himself along to a get-together.  He wants everything to go perfectly, to be able to redeem himself in their eyes.  He sneaks away from work 2 hours early to be able to get ready  "The great thing, I thought, is not to be the first to arrive, or they will think I am overjoyed at coming.  But there were 1000 of such great points to consider , and they all agitated and overwhelmed me." pg 47.
He overthinks and obsesses about everything.

Of course it all goes terribly wrong, and where he can make it worse he does.  It's horrifying to observe him sabotage himself with absolutely everyone he encounters.

It was interesting to think about what Dostoyevsky would have been thinking and feeling as he was about the same age as his protagonist when he wrote this.  It's very dark but then I find so many Russian stories have this same dark fatalism.

Barthes: A Lover's Discourse

Barthes, Roland: A Lover's Discourse - Fragments, tr. Richard Howard; Hill and Wang, New York, 2010

A telling instance of the narrowness of a North American science-based education is that I'd never heard of Roland Barthes before receiving the reading list for LS801, the 2013 edition.  I found this a challenging book to get through.  It took me quite a few chapters to get into the format, the structure of the book.  Though Barthes is dissecting love into its various manifestations, I still found that I wanted to argue against many of his declarations and conclusions - or at least ask for more exposition.  I really wanted to be sitting around a long dinner table, discussing his ideas and hearing him expound on his views.  I needed more, to really understand what he was trying to say.  I also didn't really feel that I had a good sense of Barthes as a man, what he would have been like in conversation with friends.

I've never had to look up so many words/jargon as while reading this book.  Barthes is writing his discourse from a lengthy background of study, discussion and theorizing.  I found the book was too referential for someone who has not been a student of philosophy.  I very much liked the structure of the book because I am a person who likes collecting bits and pieces and later trying to make a whole of them.  It's probably best a book to be dipped into in small doses with much time to ponder in between, not read straight through like a narrative.  I felt I needed to read Barthes' source material (of which I have really only read Werther, and Plato's Symposium & Phaedrus so far) - and then go back and reread Barthes' discourse again.

Sentences such as the following gave me much grief in trying to understand what Barthes was trying to say:
On pg 103 THE GHOST SHIP,

"errantry does not align - it produces iridescence: what results is the nuance. Thus I move on, to the end of the tapestry, from one nuance to the next (the nuance is the last state of a colour which can be named; the nuance is the Intractable)."

or when speaking about amorous exuberance, on pg 86 about EXUBERANCE which

"can be interlaced with melancholy, with depressions and suicidal impulses, for the lover's discourse is not an average of states; but such a disequilibrium belongs to that black economy which marks me with its aberration and, so to speak, with its intolerable luxury."

Barthes provides several introductory pages about how the book is structured.  Regarding the meaning of the "Lover's Discourse" on pg 94 NOVEL/DRAMA, Barthes writes:

"Enamoration is a drama, if we restore to this word the archaic meaning Nietzsche gives it: 'Ancient drama envisioned great declamatory scenes, which excluded action [...] 'Amorous seduction (a pure hypnotic moment) takes place before discourse and behind the proscenium of consciousness: the amorous "event" is of a hieratic order: it is my own local legend, my little sacred history that I declaim to myself, and this declamation of a fait accompli (frozen, embalmed, removed from any praxis) is the lover's discourse." 

Barthes goes to numerous sources, from the written realm but also from conversations with friends and acquaintances - and his marginalia is interesting.

Some random bits that I enjoyed or puzzled over:
Under JEALOUSY pg 145 he quotes Djeddi in La poesie amoureuse des Arabes Joseph yielded 'to the extent of a mosquito's wing.'  He writes that his references are "not authoritative but amical".
After Baudelaire and Ruysbroek "the gentleness of the abyss"
He writes that a sigh is "an expression of the emotion of absence."



In WHAT IS TO BE DONE, pg 62, Barthes speaks of

"Ethics, the unpersuadable science of behaviour."

And on pg 71 THE OTHER'S BODY

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words.  My language trembles with desire.

On pg 129  in IDENTIFICATIONS:

Identification [with other lost lovers] is not a psychological process; it is a pure structural operation: I am the one who has the same place I have.

In the section ATOPOS pg 34, defined as "unclassifiable, of a ceaselessly unforeseen originality,"
Barthes describes the beloved in one of the most succinct and beautiful ways I have ever come across:

"the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the specialty of my desire."  

 He goes on to say that:

"The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

This agrees with my perception that there is not "One" person, there are many possible people that may be potential lovers but it all depends on timing, circumstance, the many external as well as internal factors.
A potential lover's desirability is also affected by mass culture.  In SHOW ME WHOM TO DESIRE
on pg 136, Barthes describes love as an "affective contagion,"

this induction, proceeds from others, from the language, from books, from friends: no love is original.  (Mass culture is a machine for showing desire: here is what must interest you, it says, as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire by themselves.

If this was true in the 70s, I can only begin to imagine how much more this applies to the 21st century.

This is unlike the Ancient Greeks' conception of love, the androgyne.  Barthes refers several times to the idea of the androgyne as propounded by Plato/Socrates and Aristophanes.  This is an image and a concept that has stuck with me ever since we read The Symposium.  It's appealing to think that there is another out there who fills the missing bits in oneself - there's a inevitability and durability to that concept that can be reassuring when in the torment of the love gone wrong or faded away.  In I WANT TO UNDERSTAND pg 60, he reprises Zeus' command to Apollo to 

"turn the faces of the divided Androgynes...toward the place where they had been cut apart...'so that the sight of their division might render them less insolent'."

 - like Adam & Eve and the citizens with the Tower of Babel in Genesis, we mortals sometimes presume.

In UNION pg 226

"En sa moytie, ma moytie je recolle - to her half, I rejoin my own half...desire is to lack what one has - and to give what one does not have: a matter of supplements, not complements."

Barthe spends an afternoon trying to draw Aristophanes' conception of the original hermaphrodites (androgyne figure) and concludes it is a "farce figure" and "out of the mad couple is born the obscenity of the household (one cooks, for life, for the other)."

He was very perceptive in describing all the odd little facets of love relationships.  On pg 92  THE WORLD THUNDERSTRUCK he is speaking of writing about one's own love (in journals, correspondence etc) and notes

"the events of an amorous life are so trivial that they gain access to writing only by an immense effort: one grows discouraged writing what, by being written, exposes its own platitude.

He was also effective describing love relationship other than the romantic or sexual ones.  In NO ANSWER pg 167 

"The perfect [...] friend, is he not the one who constructs around you the greatest possible resonance? Cannot friendship be defined as a space with total sonority?"

I had a hard time with much of Barthes mention of his mother and mothers and sons.  He portrays his mother is such a 2-dimensional, childish way.  She is discussed only in relation to her effect on her child, not as a person, a lover in her own right.  I'm not sure if this is a mother-son thing or a gender thing (Barthes is less interested in women as individuals, especially insofar as love is concerned).  In discussing Werther, Barthes refers to the famous blue coat which he was wearing when he met Lotte.  On pg 128  in BLUE COAT AND YELLOW VEST, Barthes writes:

"This blue garment imprisons him so effectively that the world around him vanishes: nothing but the two of us: by this garment Werther forms for himself a child's body in which phallus and mother are united, with nothing left over.  This perverse outfit was worn across Europe by the novel's enthusiasts, and it was known as a "costume a la Werther."

This isn't an analysis that resonates with me.  Nor can I identify or agree with his statement on pg 133 in IMAGES

"I project myself there [into a romantic painting of a cold scene] as a tiny figure, seated on a block of ice, abandoned forever.  "I'm cold." the lover says, "let's go back"; but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked.  There is a coldness particular to the lover, the chilliness of the child (or of any young animal) that needs maternal warmth.

To me, a woman, Barthes seems to be condescending when he mentions women.  He doesn't mention women often but when he does, it often has a negative cast.  In DOMNEI pg 82

"I shall exasperate myself with the chatter of women in the drugstore who are delaying my return to the instrument to which I am subjugated"and in THE DEDICATION pg 76

"I have this fear: that the given object may not function properly because of some insidious defect...for example, the latch [of a box] doesn't work (the shop being run by society women)"

In GRADIVA pg 126

"I want to possess fiercely, but I also know how to give actively.  Then who can manage this dialectic successfully? Who, if not the woman, the one who does not make for any object but only for . . . giving? So if a lover manages to 'love', it is precisely insofar as he feminizes himself, joins the class of Grandes Amoureuses, of Woman Who Love Enough to Be Kind."

The section which really resonated with me was THE UNKNOWABLE, on pg 134:

"I can't get to know you" means "I shall never know what you really think of me." I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.

"To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion."
"To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god."

This made me think of Elizabeth Smart who seems to have consecrated her life to orbiting around Barker.  Someone in our discussion noted that one of her sons said that all her life she regarded George Barker as a Jesus-figure.

Barthes goes on to write, in this section, that

"all the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known." "I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know."

In THIS CAN'T GO ON, pg 141, Barthes describes suffering in love as pleasurable.
"Ever the 'artist', I make form itself into content" (echoes of McLuhan's 'the medium is the message').  It's not about what is causing the suffering, it's about the suffering itself.
Once the exaltation of suffering has dissipated, Barthes says he is "reduced to the simplest philosophy: that of endurance."  He quotes a folk poem that accompanies Japanese Daruma dolls:

Such is life Falling over seven times And getting up eight.

In JEALOUSY, pg 144

"As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common."

Barthes includes the etymology of the word jaloux which interestingly is borrowed from the troubadours.

He very accurately describes many of the progressions and devastating aspects of love, the events that wear away at the foundations.  In NO ANSWER pg 167 he writes:

"When you were talking to him, discussing any subject at all, X frequently seemed to be looking away, listening to something else: you broke off, discouraged; after a long silence, X would say: 'Go on, I'm listening to you'; then you resumed as best you could the thread of a story in which you no longer believed."

Also in GRADIVA, pg 125 he describes much of the game-playing which drives me crazy within a relationship and which is supremely irritating to have to observe in other people's relationships.  If only we could keep the resolve and clear-sightedness we can have when outside of our relationships, for when we are in the throes of relationships' dark sides.

I found less agreement with his statement in THE HEART pg 53, that "only the lover and the child have a heavy heart" but as with many of the areas where I initially found I disagreed with Barthes or even felt really irritated by something he wrote, when I thought about it more and tried to dissect or even refute it, eventually I could distill my ideas and examples down into his truth.  The examples I could think of of non-love related angst and pain often could be reduced to a sense of isolation, of aloneness, of abandonment.  Perhaps this is where he gets his repeated return to comparisons with mother-son bonds.

In one section, GOSSIP, he unexpectedly (for me) compares passion and reason, and writes on pg 184,

the gossip is light, cold, it thereby assumes the status of a kind of objectivity; its voice...seems to double the voice of knowledge (scientia)...When knowledge, when science speaks, I sometimes come to the point of hearing its discourse as the sound of a gossip which describes and disparages lightly, coldly, and objectively what I love: which speaks of what I love according to the truth.

In an echo of Neil Young "It's better to burn out than to fade away"in THE INTRACTABLE on pg 23 Barthes affirms love as a value regardless of how it all works out in the end; that he can be happy and wretched at the same time.  When told "this kind of love is not viable" he asks: 

"Why is the viable a "Good Thing?  Why is it better to last than to burn?"and states that he has "withdrawn from all finality."

SOBRIA EBRIETAS

Barthes ends his discourse with this section and defines this as abandoning the "will-to-possess".  He quotes a zen saying:

"As I sit calmly, without doing anything, spring comes and the grass grows of its own accord."

On pg 8 in HOW THIS BOOK IS CONSTRUCTED Barthes specifies that he is not trying to set down a philosophy of love but merely to affirm it.  Such a philosophy would be a perversion of its elements, a monster, and he quotes from a mathematician that "we must not underestimate the power of chance to engender monsters," warning the reader not to draw conclusions from the order of the various sections.  It's not a book to be read as a narrative and it's a book I will come back to, to read a section here and there and think about it, then come back to it again after I've done further reading and studying.  I'll put it on the bookshelf near my bed with some of the other bits I want to re-read.

Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther; Tr. Michael Hulse; Penguin Classic; London, 1989

This is one of Goethe's earliest works.  He wrote it after a period of time when he fell in love with a woman engaged to another man he was friendly with; and also after he learned of the suicide of a young man over a failed love.  It's written in the form of letters to an old friend but it seems quite dated. Having a man write another male friend bemoaning and sighing over his forbidden love seems very unlikely in this time.

His passion does ring true though Goethe didn't bring Lotte to life for me - she seems colourless and not very present.

Werther has a discussion with Albert (Lotte's fiancé) about love and passion.
[...] a man wholly under the influence of his passions has lost his ability to think rationally, and is regarded as intoxicated or insane.

Werther replies: Ah you sensible people! [...] Passions! Intoxication! Insanity! You are so calm and collected, so indifferent, you respectable people, tut-tutting about drunkenness and holding unreasonable behaviour in contempt, passing by like the priest and thanking God like the Pharisee that you are not as other men.  I have been intoxicated more than once, my passions have never been far off insanity, and I have no regrets [...]

As Werther becomes more depressed about the futility of his love for Lotte (the lack of any future togetherness) he speaks about the transitory nature of much love and the relative unimportance of individuals. [26 October]

Your friends value you! You often make them happy, and your heart in turn feels it could not do without them; and yet - if you were to go, if you were to depart from this intimate circle, would they feel the void, how long would they feel the void that your loss tore open in their fate? - how long? - Oh Man is so transient a being that even where his existence is most secure, even where his presence makes its sole true impression felt, he must fade and disappear from the memories and souls of his loved ones, soon, oh so soon!

[27 October]
I could often tear my heart open and beat my poor head on seeing how little people can mean to each other.  if I do not offer love and joy, happiness and warmth, ah! the other will not bring them to me either; nor will my heart, overflowing with rapture, move him at all if he is cold and listless.

Werther continues to love and pine after Lotte but after she marries Albert, he finds that he can't bear the idea, can't keep himself away from her and so he borrows Albert's pistols (such a passive-aggressive move though maybe it wasn't at that time) and shoots himself.  Like the real model (Jerusalem), Werther doesn't die right away but lingers for a day or so before dying.

Goethe has some lovely descriptive phrases about the countryside where Werther spent most of his time, in the mountains.  He speaks about sitting many hours at a table outside an inn, under the linden-trees.

The language is very over-wrought: beset hearts, floods of tears, tear my heart asunder, awesome majesty, torment, ardent pleasures, anguished spirit etc.  High Romance.

It seems very different from the man who wrote Faust.  Werther is very intolerant about reason, maturity and age.  In Faust, the older Goethe is more sympathetic to aging, writing: "Old age doesn't make us childish, as they say, It finds the true surviving child in us."  Though I didn't end up feeling connected to any of the characters or their problems, Werther's passion did seem strong and all-consuming and I felt this was a good introduction to an early Romantic novel.  Exposing my lingering prejudices, I would probably have found Werther's emoting more bearable if he were a female - but then again, maybe not...he did go on and on.

DISCUSSION Plato's Symposium and Sappho's poems and fragments

We had our 2^nd class yesterday and discussed Plato’s Symposium and Sappho’s poems and fragments.  Though Plato’s book was all about Eros (love and desire) and contained no less than 7 separate speeches about Eros, the few poems and scraps of Sappho's poetry that have survived make you FEEL passion, love, desire.  The dominant motif of Plato’s work was Reason and the dominant motif in all Sappho’s words is PASSION.

Roberta led the discussion on Sappho.  Prior to the class and leading right up to the class, she had tweeted fragments from Sappho which was a fun way to read some fragments and think about them individually. We had a round table session where we each read a fragment and tried to be aware of what our immediate sensation was after hearing Sappho’s words.  Everyone seemed to have enjoyed her poetry.  When we got into a later discussion about what some of the fragments might have meant, it became bogged down for me in discussions of how literally to interpret the following 2 fragments:

“and for you I make an offering

of a white goat”

(which sounded to me like something Leonard Cohen might have written)

“Sweet mother, I can no longer work the loom.

Slender Aphrodite has made me fall in love with a boy.”

This is one of those situations where the words themselves are enough for me without analyzing it too closely but at the same time, it would be interesting to find out more about that time, what the rites would have been to worship Aphrodite, gender roles, people's relationships with the gods they worshipped – not to flesh out the poem itself but just to delve into a world I know nothing about.

It was very interesting to read Plato’s Symposium on Eros the same week we read Sappho’s work.  Someone mentioned that several speakers in the Symposium note that Eros is a neglected god whom no one has written about but Plato does not mention Sappho, a Greek poet from 2 centuries earlier who would certainly have been known in Athens in Plato’s (and Socrates’) time.  The two texts were such distinct examples of Passion vs Reason with the additional irony that Plato’s logical discussions were on the subject of Eros: Love or Desire, yet compared to Sappho, his work lacked passion.

Byron led the discussion on the Symposium.  There were several interesting themes in this work which we had a chance to discuss.

One was a brief discussion of Plato’s Theory of Forms:

There exist out there in the universe forms for everything that are the perfect versions – people may get a glimpse of these perfect forms and then once you’ve seen it you’ll never be satisfied with the imperfect forms i.e.: love is not just sexual satisfaction, it’s also a beautiful ideal.

I wasn’t aware of this theory before and don’t really have a good understanding of the concept – again something I would like to read more about when I get the chance.

We discussed the idea that what we see is not necessarily what really is – you have to work at things as they are not necessarily what they 1^st appear.  This, in my limited understanding of Socrates, seems to sum up his method: to challenge the other person on what they think they know and by questioning them and discussing their ideas, show them that their understanding is imperfect BUT help them towards a better understanding through the discussion.

We also discussed one of the recurrent themes: duality.  The speeches contained many examples where things were mentioned and categorized into 2 opposing categories:

Heavenly Aphrodite/Common Aphrodite

Young/old

Good love/vulgar love

Wisdom/Ignorance

Health/Disease

Lover/Beloved

Male/Female

Sappho by contrast did not seem to use duality in her work.  It's more centered on the person, the connection, the passion, the natural world around her.

Socrates speech was interesting as Diotima brings in the idea of a spectrum – that extremes aren’t the entire story – many people fall in the middle (the “enlightened” people?)

202a – Diotima (Haven’t you realized that there is something between wisdom and ignorance?)

“It’s having right opinions without being able to give reasons for having them” –

There are also some devastating characterizations in Plato's speeches:

204a  “The problem with the ignorant person is precisely that, despite not being good or intelligent, he regards himself as satisfactory.”

We also discussed the question of whether we should be concerned about the intention or the act.  Several speakers in the Symposium had touched on this, most notably Pausanias.  This issue is still debated to this day.  I remember seeing “Oleanna” a play by David Mamet which contrasts an interaction between a professor and a young female student from each of their viewpoints and suggests that judgment of an action or of someone's words depends more on how it is perceived than on how it was intended by the speaker.

The question of intention also comes up in the murder trials where the intent has a huge impact on the punishment: 1^st degree murder vs manslaughter.  Similarly with state-sanctioned killing: war, self-defense, terrorism etc.

Byron asked “How strange is it that Socrates stands still for extended lengths of time, presumably lost in thought? What would happen today if someone did this? Is this lost in thought or some form of dissociation?”  The answers brought up the theory of the bicameral mind again and how we define mental illness.  For me this brings us back to Diotoma’s spectrum.  Every time I hear about a new mental illness being defined and making it into  the latest edition of the “Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders", I can’t help but think that all of us could find ourselves somewhere on many of these spectra, that we are just defining variations on normal human conditions.

We ended our discussion by talking about immortality.  During Socrates’ speech the purpose of life seemed to be immortality and this is achieved through 'reproduction in beauty', suggesting that we should be pursuing truth, beauty, good and that the path to this was through philosophy.  We spoke about the ways of trying to achieve immortality, each containing some kind of flaw:

• procreational (via children) - the problem was that over time your line could die out, or even if it didn’t, who would remember you generations down ?  In modern scientific terms however, your genetic material would survive.

• reputational – either through history (figures such as Alexander the Great) or through surviving written works such as philosophy or literature, or works of art.  The question then becomes how well do you want to be remembered to consider you have achieved immortality: 

1. just your name, 
2. your work without your name (such as an anonymous creator of some Etruscan vase in a museum somewhere), 
3. having future generations know your work but nothing about you, such as Lucretius (coming up in a couple of weeks), to know about you but mainly misinformation such as Richard III, maligned by Shakespeare and known by today’s world as a hunchback, tyrant and murderer of children.  This is very topical today as archaeologists excavate on Grey Friars Street in Leicester, hoping to find the lost grave of Richard the III.

For me immortality would be best achieved by creating something that retained its significance and power centuries later, such as Sappho did.