ON CIVILISATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS: Raymond Drew
Freud described the word civilization or culture (writing in German, he used the word Kultur) as:
the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes—namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations. (1)
For the purposes of this essay, we shall use the term 'culture' interchangeably with 'civilisation,' as Freud's translators did. Freud makes a number of claims about the nature of civilization. We shall concentrate on one of his claims. He argues that civilisation imposes great sacrifices on man's sexuality and his aggressivity.2 In regard to the latter, he claims that man is naturally and instinctually aggressive, and that without the strictures of civilization, brute force would rule in human relationships.
...men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. 3
We intend to argue that the destructiveness of two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the degradation of the natural environment that we have seen in the 20th and 21st Centuries, is not due primarily to an instinctual aggression in man. The scale of human cruelty that far outweighs that of the animal in scope over past millennia. We concur with Anthony Storr, when he states, 'Nature is red in tooth and claw when one species preys upon another in search of food; but destructive violence between members of the same species is
1 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, Ed. & Tr. James Strachey, Norton &Co., New York, 1961, p. 36.
2 Ibid., p. 62.
3 Ibid, p. 58.

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comparatively rare... Man is uniquely violent and cruel.'4 In the course of our rebuttal of some of Freud's claims, we shall touch on other aspects of his work, including the extraordinary value of art or 'high culture' in western civilisation and the matter of the death instinct. We shall argue that such destructiveness derives from man's identification with ideological constructs that have brought about a sense of alienation from nature, and also as a result of the suppression and repression of the instinctual drives. We shall briefly examine early Greek notions of gods and man, insofar as they are pertinent to the formative phrase of civilisation in the West.
Freud himself seems somewhat bemused in regard to his claims about innate human destructiveness and cruelty. He admits puzzlement about the fact that the aggressivity found in man is not present in the same way in the animal kingdom. Nor does the infant begin life as an aggressive animal. In the first Chapter of Civilisation and Its Discontents he concedes that the newly born infant does not distinguish his ego from the external world - originally, it includes everything, 'and later it separates off an external world from itself.'5 The statement implies that shortly after birth, at least, the child is not aggressive, but that the tendency develops later. Freud goes on to state,'our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of... an all embracing feeling - which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.'6 The resultant ego, therefore, is in a state of distantation or alienation from the world, (or the Real, in Lacanian terminology) and it is, in interior terms, the genesis of the individual's entry into culture, the world of thought and ideology.
Freud defined culture/civilization as an institution 'to protect men against nature', including one which assists in the bonding of human beings to one another, a bulwark against an alleged primitive aggressivity. However, many contemporary scholars tend to view culture in terms of an ideological discourse. In so doing, we are not referring to culture in its multi-discursive sense, such as 'art' culture, 'music' culture, and so on, but in general, inclusive terms. For example, one definition describes culture as 'the institutionally or informally organised social production and reproduction of sense, meaning and
4 Anthony Storr, 'Why human being become violent,' Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind, Fontana, London, 1990, p. 269.
5 S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p. 15.
6 Ibid., p. 15.
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consciousness. '7 For the purposes of this essay, we shall offer the following definitions of ideology: James Lull: 'Ideology is organised thought.'8 Seliger: 'Any action oriented set of beliefs organised into a coherent system.'9 Erikson introduces a distorting element into organised thought, an underlying hidden agenda:
...an unconscious tendency underlying religion and scientific as well as political thought: the tendency at a given time to make facts amenable to ideas, and ideas to facts, in order to create a world image convincing enough to support the collective and individual sense of identity. w
Finally, the study of ideology can be seen as a study of 'the ways in which meaning (or signification) serves to sustain relations of domination.'11 In the last definition ideology is conceived to contain a hidden agenda, that is, symbolic domination.
In order to mount a critique of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, it is necessary to examine certain aspects of the foundations of Western thought. As Freud remarks, long ago,
man formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. To these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him...today he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal, he has almost become a god himself.}2
In Homeric times, the gods were immortal, while the short life of Homeric man came to a close in near oblivion. The psyche, or soul of mortal man, scarcely more than a vapour, was transported to Hades. Budding rationalism was linked to the gods; Snell quotes Iliad 16.6888, 'The nous of Zeus is strong than that of men.'13 But in time, by the sixth Century
7 Tim O'Sullivan, John Hartley, et al., Key Concepts In Communication, Routledge, London, 1990, p.
37.
8James Lull, Media, Communication, Culture: a Global Approach, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1993, p. 6.
9 In David McLellan, Ideology, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1986, p. 82.
100 E. H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: a Study in Psychoanalysis and History, Norton, London, 1958, p. 22.
111John B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology, Polity Press, Oxford, 1984, p. 4.
12 Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, p. 38
13 Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, Harper and Row, NY, 1960, p.6.
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BC, the desire for immortality would assert itself via the Eleusian mysteries and Orphism. Later still, via Plato, the notion of a more substantial soul would unfold.
In Timaeus and elsewhere, Plato introduced a radical inversion of the nation of psyche. In Homer, psyche is an insubstantial vapour, but sensory appearances have real substance to the extraverted consciousness of the period. By the time of Plato (circa 428 - 347 BC), a monumental change occurred: a scepticism about the objective nature of the gods had developed.14 In many ways, man introjected the attributes of the gods. The psyche had come to be composed of a rational element, logistikon, that reasons, a 'spirited' element, thumoeides, and an appetitive part, epithhumetikon, each corresponding to the characteristics of the ideal community (in Republic) of Guardians, warrior Auxiliaries and Producers. The last of these, the most insatiate, require the discipline and control of the two superior elements. One cannot fail to note some equivalence with Freud's conception of Super-ego, Ego and Id.
But more significantly still, the sensible world, under Plato, came to be construed as a copy of a perfect paradigm, a set of mere representations. In other words, instead of thought being a representation, (the word 'tree' is not the actual tree), materiality is now construed to be a copy of thought (the actual tree is a copy of the thought or idea 'tree'). In the new hierarchy, the senses and the phenomenal world had been suppressed, dependent on ideal forms, and sink to a low point in a spiritual hierarchy. A central axiom of Plato concerns the dualistic division between:
that which always is and never becomes and which is apprehended by reason and reflection, and that which always becomes and never is... the world being thus created according to the eternal pattern w the copy of something (my emphasis) 15
Plato's theory of ideal forms maintained that the world we experience with the five senses cannot be fully real or reliable. Aware of the qualities of impermanence and change ever present in life, he reasoned that knowledge would provide certainty and freedom from error, while the fleeting sensory world could not offer a man the taste for the divine, the immortal. The divine Forms, invisible and eternal, exist somewhere, and particulars strive unsuccessfully to emulate them. Nietzsche wrote:
14 The scepticism began with the philosophers, not the masses. See the fragments of Xenophades ©560-470 BC), for example, considering the gods to be projections.
15 Plato, Tr. B. Jowett, Timaeus, 27-29, in The Dialogues of Plato, Oxford, Oxford, 1953, p. 640
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...As certainly as no one leaf is exactly similar to any other, so certain it is that the ideal "leaf has been formed through an arbitrary omission of these individual differences, through a forgetting of the differentiating qualities, and this idea now awakens the notion that in nature there is, besides the leaves, a something called the leaf, perhaps a primal form according to which all leaves were woven, drawn, accurately measured, coloured, crinkled, painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy had turned out correct and trustworthy as a true copy of the primal form.16
Plato argued that the soul is akin to the Forms, and like them, immortal. He believed in metempsychosis. The philosophic ideal, exemplified by Socrates, is that the true philosopher should not care for the pleasures of love; he desires to get away from the body and turn to the soul.17 For the body is deceptive. Absolute beauty and absolute good are not accessible to the senses. The body is despicable because it infects the soul18 and is the source of endless trouble because it requires food, is liable to disease, fills men 'full of loves, and lusts, and fears and fancies...(and) takes away from us the power of thinking at all.19 Wars, Plato argued, are indirectly caused by the body, because the desire for money, the direct cause, has to be acquired to look after the body. Finally, if we wish to have pure knowledge we must quit the body and its foolishness.20 Thus death is to be welcomed. Is such an ideology, repeated over millennia, not the foundation of a death wish?
With Plato's appropriation of the concept of soul, from Orphism, an act of inversion has taken place from Homeric man. The psyche was no longer an insubstantial vapour of the body, a fluttering vapour. 'The living body... changes its status: it now becomes a simple appearance, an illusory, insubstantial, fugitive image...'21 Now the soul alone is real; the body, the senses, and with it, nature, sink to the lowest level in a new hierarchy of being. The body becomes an impediment, a tomb, something to be denied.
16 Friedrich Nietzsche, Tr. M. Mugge, 'On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense,' (1873), Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays, T. N. Foulis, London, 1941, p. 179.
17 Benjamin Jowett, 'Plato, Phaedo,' in Plato: the Trial and Death of Socrates, Heritage, New York, 1963, pp. 188-189.
18 Jowett, 190-191 19Jowett, 191
20 Jowett 191
21 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Ed. Zeitlin, Froma I., Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, Princeton University Press, Princeton, p. 190.
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Aspects of the gods were introjected as the 'true' nature of man. In Republic much thought was given to censorship and control of the unruly elements of man by the dictatorship of reason. The primary god was, after all, Zeus, the lawgiver. Here is the superego and the foundation of guilt. In old age, Plato wrote,
The principle thing is that no man and no woman should ever be without an officer set over him, and none should get the mental habit of taking any step, whether in earnest or in jest, on his individual responsibility: in peace as in war he must live with his eye on his superior officer, following his lead and guided by him in his smallest actions... in a word, we must train the mind not even to consider acting as an individual or know how to do it.22
Feminist scholars have rightly drawn our attention to the tradition of misogyny in Greek thought and mythology, notably in Plato. The most ignorant men, said Plato, would be reborn as women, or animals. The growing drive to bring nature under control and to establish firm principles of governance of both State and the inner man, could not, in the end, acknowledge a feminine principle. If nature and the sensual world had to be controlled, so did woman. As Cavarero states,
Humans are thus split into thought and body, truth and life, and the second term of the dichotomy is allowed to slide toward insignificance. The split sets up a trajectory that explicitly establishes philosophy's tendency to disavow reality. Soon the concept of man (anthropos) - named in the masculine singular...will make its way into philosophical language. "Man is a rational animal, " Aristotle's famous definition proclaims. Bodies, feelings, and the deceptive senses supposedly belong elsewhere. 23
Freud, although a great pioneer, was a man of his time. He saw chaos and destructive menace in the unconscious, in the Id, deducing that it contained drives that were never conscious, and drives that were conscious but repressed. To Victorian man, the instincts and the unconscious represented a Heart of Darkness. He was correct - insofar that repressed instinctual drives can, distorted by the 'filter' or dictatorship of a stern superego and two thousand years of an ideology that declares thought superior to nature, be immensely destructive. The number of religious and morally justified wars and interpersonal violence provide evidence of that, plus the common belief that the combatants do not actually die but
22 Plato, Laws, 942 a-b, in Dodds, E. R., 'Plato and the Irrational,' The Ancient Concept of Progress, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1973, p. 114.
23 Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995, p. 38.
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live on, as souls, in some form of immortality. The very perception that instinctual drives are foreign, disgusting and degrading; that nature and the body is something alien, must give rise to a death wish that seeks to destroy the physical organism, as well as the natural environment.
There are other repercussions from the 'inversion' of Plato, for representations of nature have come to have more value in civilized societies than their object or referent. Constable's landscapes are of far more value to civilization than his subjects. Such valorisation of beauty - the beauty of representation - is only 'natural' from the perspective of civilized values. .
Man has come to identify with the dominant symbolic order and to value it above the natural world and the body, including other species and life forms, which have become material for mastery and exploitation. Institutions are formed to perpetuate the world view. Dominant ideological institutions, according to Althusser,24 address or 'hail' their subjects, and subject(s), most often unconsciously, seek to orientate themselves within the prevailing view, articulated or implied.
Freud correctly points out that the conflict between man's instinctual drives and civilised values creates neurosis. In our view, he misjudged the source of man's undoubted aggressiveness, which is due to man's identification with representations and ideologies and the repression or suppression of the instincts.
Civilization and man's split from the Real appears to have come into being from a fear of his mortality and of uncontrollable change. A virtual or symbolic reality, a reality consisting of second hand representations, appears to be more secure than a first hand confrontation with life. Better still, if he manages to convince himself that the world of representations is the Real. However, by identifying with a world of representations and an agenda to exploit, tame, and destroy nature, he has, consciously or unconsciously, set about destroying himself.

(c) Raymond Drew, 2004. HOME
24 Louis Althusser, 'Ideology and the State,' in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, NLB, London, p. 150.