Freud departs from the prevailing narrative in that he finds the discomforts of civilization both inevitable and preferable to a state in which its constraints did not exist. Civilization is not, for him, visited on the self by other people or created in the course of a collective history of acculturation and interaction. It is generated, in its essential elements, from a primal act, the murder and ingesting of the father, which persists phylogenetically in every individual and all generations, as conscience, as religion, in repression and sublimation. Granting the discomforts, no one is to blame for them. They are not the consequence of decline, since their origin lies in an event that took place at the beginning of human time. They are not the consequence of deracination, since the Freudian self is at ease nowhere and has no kindred beyond father and mother, who offer identity in a somewhat negative sense, standing in place of the principals in that ancient, Oedipal crime.
Religion is a single, universal consequence of that same cannibal feast, out of which arose the god who terrifies and protects like the Freudian father and whose authority is preserved in the guilt that persists in human experience though its source, the memory behind it, is repressed. In other words, since it lies at the root of the emergence of the human psyche, once in the primal act itself and again in every (male) infant, religion profoundly marks every individual and society in an essentially similar way. Therefore it cannot be the conflict of religious cultures that accounts for unease. Instead, from the beginning unease is implanted in experience together with religion, with which it is more or less identical. The argument in Moses and Monotheism that the ancient Hebrews murdered Moses and then, so to speak, resurrected him, repressing the memory of the crime and preserving and magnifying his authority, conforms Judaism to the universal, psychologically driven pattern also to be seen in the death and resurrection of Christ.
Related to all this is the problem, a corollary of Darwinism, of accounting for the power of a morality that runs counter to self-interest, and therefore counter to the evolutionary interests of the species, insofar as they would be served by the relentless assertion of advantage on the part of the strong. It has rarely seemed agreeable or even practical to conform human behavior wholly to, in Herbert Spencer’s words, “the law that each creature shall take the benefits and the evils of its own nature.” This, he says, “has been the law under which life has evolved thus far; and it must continue to be the law however much further life may evolve.”11 Yet if it is indeed a law of nature, it is departed from a good deal more frequently than, say, the law of gravity, or the second law of thermodynamics.
That we are seemingly free to behave altruistically, at least to the degree that it is altruistic not to press every advantage, and are able to sustain value systems that encourage generosity or selflessness, is an anomaly that has troubled Darwinist thinking since T. H. Huxley. Freud solves the riddle of moral behavior, obedience to restraint and obligation, by placing its source in that primordial crime. When Freud derived his “primal horde” from Darwin, he put the notion of it to uses that depart from Darwinist orthodoxy in making its overwhelming impact on subsequent generations a barrier to violence and also to reproduction. He says, “The tendency on the part of civilization to restrict sexual life is no less clear than its other tendency to expand the cultural unit. Its first, totemic, phase already brings with it the prohibition against an incestuous choice of object, and this is perhaps the most drastic mutilation which man’s erotic life has in all time experienced.”12 We, or the male among us, internalize the threats and prohibitions represented in the murdered father. On one hand, this internalization imposes a secondary nature on the human self, one that is neither happy in its origins nor able to be fully reconciled to the profounder pull of instinct. On the other hand it establishes the terms of collective life, the necessary truce that permits civilization to exist, and the sublimations by which civilization is distinguished. Freud’s highly polished, deeply troubled Vienna, for many years seeming to sustain a perilous equilibrium between the strict imperatives of social order and the raw frictions of group conflict, bears more than a little resemblance to the Freudian self. To hope for more, for something to compare with the rootedness and authenticity for which the racial nationalists yearned, would risk destabilizing the very fragile equilibrium that for Freud is the closest approach human beings can make to their natural condition.
*
Figures such as Freud and Nietzsche, viewed against a background void of detail, seem to us to appear like meteors, to be singularities that shape intellectual space and time, not at all to have been shaped by them. Yet they are both inevitably engrossed in the passions that were consuming Europe. I have mentioned Fichte, Maurras, and Spengler as among the writers against whose influence Freud’s metapsychological essays are directed. In general we Americans prefer to notice those thinkers we can find a way to admire, those whose thinking might enlarge our own, or refine it. This may possibly, on balance, be to our credit, I suppose. But there is the fact of modern history, and there is the fact that intellectuals, renowned in their time, made significant contributions to the worst of it. Freud, living in the midst of an emerging collective pathology as febrile in the universities as it was in the streets, could not have anticipated our highly selective indifference and admiration.
Fichte’s reputation among us now is based on the philosophical texts that associate him with Kant. His Addresses to the German Nation, which were influential in the early formation of the theory of European nationalism, seem to be available in English only as a reprint of a damaged nineteenth-century copy of the book.13 Charles Maurras, a vociferous anti-Semite about whose importance there is no doubt whatever, appears as a subject in studies of the extreme right in France, but little of his work is in translation. Spengler is available, but he and his book have dropped out of the conversation. So the context I assume for Freud, radically incomplete as it is, might seem a little recherche.
Fichte’s Addresses, published at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Germany had been successfully invaded by the armies of Napoleon, undertook to encourage a sense of the uniqueness of German-speaking peoples and to inspire loyalty to “the German Nation,” which was then still many years away from unification and nationhood. He based his argument on the language they shared, which conferred on them a profundity and a capacity for truth that the mongrelized, Latinate French tongue could not approach. German being an original language, it was given to their nation by God, and therefore gave them privileged access to truth. “The investigations of a people with a living language go down, as we have already said, to the root where ideas stream forth from spiritual nature itself; whereas the investigations of a people with a dead language only seek to penetrate a foreign idea and to make themselves comprehensible. Hence, the investigations of the latter are in fact only historical and expository, but those of the former are truly philosophical.”14