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but bad masters. Where phenomena have not yet been under-
stood properly, their intoxicating effect can be disastrous. It is
worth while looking at the evidence which started Freud out in
this direction to see whether we can find other, less dramatic but
more helpful, ways of understanding it.
5 RADICAL DUALISM
Freud s new views arose from his work on traumatic neuroses
produced by the First World War. He found that traumatized
patients dreams continually took them back to the scenes of
their disasters, reviving  experiences of the past that contain no
168 wickedness: a philosophical essay
potentiality of pleasure, and which could at no time have been
satisfactions, even of impulses since repressed. 14 He saw that
these cases really did break his rule that all dreams must be wish-
fulfilments serving the pleasure principle. He connected them
with the more general phenomenon of compulsive repetitions
of painful experience, which he must already have suspected of
breaking that rule. He concluded that  there really exists in psy-
chic life a repetition compulsion, which goes beyond the pleas-
ure principle , and that, in order to explain this, the drastic,
though admittedly only speculative, hypothesis of a general
death-wish was needed.
The gap between this vast, mystifying solution and the
limited question it answers shows that two quite different kinds
of issue are entangled here. Besides the question of how com-
pulsive repetition is caused, Freud is suddenly trying to solve
the problem of evil.15 Only now has its vastness and urgency
come home to him. That is why these two books, in spite of
much strangeness and confusion, are still so impressive and
have much to tell us. (The confusions are largely due to one of
Freud s most unfortunate gifts, his immense, lawyer-like ability
to argue that he has not changed his mind, and is still saying
what he said before. Combined with his incredible fertility in
quite new suggestions, this habit has been a major disaster to
thought.) What then could be done about the problem of evil?
For practical purposes, Freud s solution to it is Manichaean,
positing two tendencies in us which are radically separate and
can have no intelligible relation. In our world, death and love,
though usually mixed up in their operation, appear as totally
distinct forces. The unavoidable compromises between them
can be made only by violence. It is true that there is a reconcili-
ation at a deeper level, whereby the pleasure principle turns
out to partake of  the most universal tendency of all living
matter . . . to return to the peace of the inorganic world , and
life instincts only transiently and half-heartedly  make their
death-wish 169
appearance as disturbers of the peace. 16 But it is not clear what
meaning this belief can actually have for us. It sounds at first as if
it might be meant to induce resignation and withdrawal of
attachment from these transient disturbances. Yet Freud, a born
fighter, has certainly not been converted to any such policy.
His exhortations are all that we should fight on the side of life,
and in spite of his rather vague use of the word  Nirvana
his occasional references to Buddhism remain hostile and
uncomprehending. Moreover, he explicitly repeats at this stage
his earlier contemptuous rejection of the consolations of
religion generally. No way of coming to terms with the death
principle by finding a meaning for death has any place in his
thought.
6 THE PROBLEM OF ACCEPTANCE
What, then, is the resignation he is certainly demanding? It is
essentially a Stoical realism, an honest admission of the appalling
features of human life. This is indeed continuous with his earlier
demands, in so far as it still requires honesty. But the things we
are to be honest about are now so different that the effect is
totally changed. As far as our own inner life is concerned, the
impulses which we must honestly admit are now not just sexual
and childish; they are murderous. Repressing them no longer
appears as merely cowardly vanity, but as an entirely under-
standable caution in the face of a deadly danger. Making this
danger cosmic by placing a universal death-force behind it does
not help us to understand it or deal with it. Honesty here will
only tell us that we are possessed by a demon which we must
somehow control. This is certainly better than being possessed
by one and not knowing it, but it is not much help till we gain a
better understanding of the demon. And as far as the outside
world goes, getting similar information about other people has
an equally limited value. We are warned that they are more
170 wickedness: a philosophical essay
dangerous than we supposed, but not what we can possibly do
about it.
Because of the difficulty which as we have noticed before
there is in admitting bad things without accepting them, Freud s
demand for honesty carries him towards fatalism. He thinks that
the need to admit human destructiveness involves positing a
vast, alien, destructive force behind people s motives. But this
move seems to make it useless to try to understand the
destructiveness itself. Our life-embracing motives can only deal
with the others externally, that is, by controlling them. There
seems no alternative to the more or less blind, uncomprehend-
ing self-command which Freud had always rejected. The differ-
ence between informed suppression and unconscious repression
dwindles away when the motive to be admitted is entirely
opaque to our thought. In dealing with sex, Freud had usually
proceeded on the basis that greater understanding would make it
possible to unblock the path to genuine and suitable gratifica-
tion, even if neurotic and infantile wishes really did have to be
abandoned. This could be seen as a good bargain. But have
murderous impulses any such acceptable outlet?
The hydraulic or  economic model which he still took for
granted as the only one for instinct poses a fearful problem here.
 It is not easy to understand how it can be possible to withhold
satisfaction from an instinct. . . . If the deprivation is not made
good economically, one may be certain of producing serious
disorders. 17 This puzzle made the problems of responsible
agents so obscure to him that though fully admitting the pres-
ence of destructive motives he scarcely touched on their dif-
ficulties, and still devoted most of his space, even in Civilization and
its Discontents, to what are essentially patients problems
society s oppression of sexuality and the pathological effects of
guilt. He is not asking why people act so badly, but simply why
they are so unhappy. And when he notices the first question, the
connexion he draws is nearly always  they act badly because they
death-wish 171
are unhappy , only occasionally  they are unhappy because of
bad actions and bad choices both their own and other
people s. Morality still figures nearly always as an oppressor,
occasionally as a necessary compromise, but never as a
reconciler a way of working out genuinely accepted priorities.
Although he sees its development in the individual as similar to
that in the group, Freud explicitly denies that the individual can
contribute to it. Outward and inward morality, he says, always
agree in their demands, which originate in the group, and are
therefore easier to study there.18 This extraordinary neglect of
the clashes between individual conscience and the demands of
society, and of their effect in producing reform, is part of his
whole static, fatalistic attitude to politics and society. The stag- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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