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The Darwinian Left
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12031 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1987 |
3,907 Words |
| Author
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Lee Congdon
Lee Congdon writes regularly on modern literature. He teaches
eastern European history at James Madison University. |
THE MANUFACTURE OF EVIL
Lionel Tiger
New York: Harper & Row, 1987
345 pp., $20.50
During the decade of the 1960s, radical theorists worked overtime to reclaim Freud for the camp of progress. I say "reclaim" because the Viennese neurologist had burst on the cultural scene as a prophet of scientific enlightenment and a sworn enemy of hypocrisy and obscurantism, particularly those forms that religious authorities were said to retail. Owing to the insights of psychoanalysis, he believed that he was uniquely qualified to dismiss religion as an illness, "the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity." Once necessary to curb men's instincts in the interest of communal harmony, creedal faiths had become anachronisms in an age of science and reason. With this message, Freud won a reputation not only as a sage, but as someone at the cutting edge of progressive thought.
But there was another side to Freud. Like Tolstoy and Thomas Mann, he had read and been profoundly affected by Arthur Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy. Schopenhauer had identified the Will as Kant's "thing-in-itself," the ultimate reality behind the individual "representations"--including human beings--that constitute the world of appearance. Because this cosmic Will is insatiable, we are forever longing, forever unhappy. In Freud's updated version of this pan-tragedy, we are primarily creatures of instinct, perpetually at odds with those civilized institutions that prevent what another pessimist, Thomas Hobbes, described as a "war of every man, against every man." Ceaselessly frustrated and discontent, we experience our only respite during fugitive moments of stoic resignation.
Such a conception of human existence was fundamentally quietistic with respect to social and political questions. It was therefore unlikely to appeal to partisans on the political Left who were determined to create the external world anew, if not at a single stroke, then step by step. Unlikely, but not impossible if, like Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and other members of "the Freudian Left," one were theoretically to overburden the master's most astonishingly speculative work, Civilization and Its Discontents: if, that is, one were to pursue Freud's hint that there might exist neurotic societies as well as neurotic individuals. What if civilization was overly demanding and repressive? What if instinctual gratification was benign? What if sexual liberation was at least as important as political liberation? Bathed in the
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