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THE FUTURE OF AN
ILLUSION
SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939)
Doubleday Anchor Book, 1955, 22-24 [German original:
1927]
Freud shared in the atheism common to many
European intellectuals of his time. He thought that all religious belief was
based on anthropomorphism. He refers to this here as "the humanization
of nature"-- attributing human qualities to natural forces. He
also thought that anthropomorphic thinking was all just a variation on
animism and polytheism. So all religion was to him just primitive and
archaic superstition, albeit sometimes dressed up in fancier language.
When people began to realize that the forces of nature followed natural
laws, then they could have abandoned anthropomorphisms
("humanizations'). But by this time they had gotten used to
relying on God as a parental figure as a guide and guard, so they could not
give up their belief. And this belief also allowed them to think that
their lives serve a higher purpose, and that there is a God-given moral
law. Freud did not think that there is adequate basis for such
beliefs.
When someone defended belief in God as the
Infinite Ocean of Being he responded by saying that that was not the kind of
God that people believed in. Because it seemed so obvious to him that
belief in gods or (an anthropomorphic) God was superstition, he had to ask
why so many people continued in such beliefs. Here is a sample of his
answer. Notice that he cites two sources of trouble for humans -- nature and
other people.
For the individual, as for mankind in general,
life is hard to endure. The culture in which he shares imposes on him some
measure of privation, and other men occasion him a certain degree of suffering,
either in spite of the laws of this culture or because of its imperfections.
Ques: what is it about culture that imposes some
privation? [Answer: Recall the class lecture on Freud's
ideas about cultural norms and laws frustrating people because people cannot
then just have fun as they please.]
Add to this the evils that unvanquished nature--he calls it Fate--inflicts
on him. One would expect a permanent condition of anxious suspense
and a severe injury to his innate narcissism to be the result of this state
of affairs. . . . But how does he defend himself against the supremacy
of nature, of fate, which threatens him, as it threatens all? [Disability,
disasters, disease, death]
Ques: what
does Freud refer to when he speaks of "Fate"?
With the first step, which is the humanization
of nature, much is already won. Nothing can be made of impersonal
forces and fates; they remain eternally remote. But if the elements
have passions that rage like those in our own souls, if death itself is
not something spontaneous, but the violent act of an evil Will, if everywhere
in nature we have about us beings who resemble those of our own environment,
then indeed we can breathe freely, we can feel at home in face of the supernatural,
and we can deal psychically with our frantic anxiety. We are perhaps
still defenseless, but no longer helplessly paralyzed; we can at least
react; perhaps indeed we are not even defenseless; we can have recourse
to the same methods against the violent supermen of the beyond that we
make use of in our community; we can try to exorcise them, to appease,
them to bribe them, and so rob them of part of their power by thus influencing
them. . . .
Ques: what are two of
the three means Freud lists of influencing supernatural beings? [Also
see the parargraph below the * * * * marks after the next question.]
For there is nothing new in this situation.
It has an infantile prototype, and is really only the continuation of this.
For once before one has been in such a state of helplessness: as a little
child in one's relationship to one's parents. For one had reason
to fear them, especially the father, though at the same time one was sure
of his protection against the dangers then known to one.
Ques: T or F: Freud says
that a person never need fear a father.
* * * *
In the course of time the first observations
of law and order in natural phenomena are made, and therewith the forces
of nature lose their human traits. [I.e., science develops and sees that
impersoanl natural laws gods, rule things.] But men's helplessness remains,
and with it their father-longing and the gods. The gods retain their
threefold task: they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile
one to the cruelty of fate, particularly as shown in death, and they must
make amends for the sufferings and privations that the communal life of
culture has imposed on man. . . . .
Ques: In the
following paragraph how does
Freud think belief in the gods offers a sense of comfort?
What [belief
in gods or God] amounts to is this: life in this
world serves a higher purpose; true, it is not easy to guess the nature
of this purpose, but certainly a perfecting of human existence is implied.
Probably the spiritual part of man, the soul, which in the course of time
has so slowly and unwillingly detached itself from the body, is to be regarded
as the object of this elevation and exaltation. . . . Over each of us watches
a benevolent, and only apparently severe, Providence, which will not suffer
us to become the plaything of the stark and pitiless forces of nature;
death itself is not annihilation, not a return to inorganic lifelessness,
but the beginning of a new kind of existence, which lies on the road of
development to something higher.
Ques: Name a specific problem
that belief in Providence answers, according to the previous paragraph.
And to turn to the other side of the question,
the moral laws that have formed our culture govern also the whole universe,
only they are upheld with incomparably more force and consistency by a
supreme judicial court. In the end all good is rewarded, all evil punished,
if not actually in this life, then in the further existences that begin
after death. And thus all the terrors, the sufferings, and the hardships
of life are destined to be obliterated.
Ques: According to Freud in
the previous paragraph, how
does religious belief compensate for life's hardships?
Freud never changed his opinion
of religion. In his later work, Civilization and Its Discontents,
he repeated his basic charge. He argued that religion remains a
"system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains the riddles of
this world to a person with enviable completeness, and, on the other, assures
him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him
in a future existence for any frustrations he suffers here."
Freud asserted once again that belief in this Providence takes the form of
belief in a supreme father-figure who can take care of people as their own
father once did. Freud's final judgment is harsh: "The whole
thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a
friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of
mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life."
Ques: which word does Freud use twice in all these
readings to describe religion:
1) infantile,
2) mature, 3) schizophrenic
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