To adopt another language, or to allow an original language to be contaminated by foreign influence, was to be alienated from oneself at the cost of the most essential human qualities, and at the cost of spiritual wholeness and peace. This is an early version of the interpretation of European experience that made the contact and interpenetration of cultures the source of the individual and collective unhappiness acknowledged on every side. Though the French are, understandably, the irritant in this case, the concept is entirely open to being applied to foreigners and foreign influence in general. Though Fichte allows for the possibility of true linguistic assimilation, short of that the most loyal and well-intended immigrant population is as great a threat to true national survival as an invading army. This is a version of the logic behind the role of philology in racial nationalism.
Fichte’s nationalism is a generous passion, given his view of history. He tells the German nation, “If there is truth in what has been expounded in these addresses, then are you of all modern peoples the one in whom the seed of human perfection most unmistakably lies, and to whom the lead in its development is committed. If you perish in this your essential nature, then there perishes together with you every hope of the whole human race for salvation from the depths of its miseries…. There is, therefore, no way out; if you go under, all humanity goes under with you, without hope of any future restoration.”15 The terrors and passions that lie behind these philosophies go much further than the philosophies themselves in anticipating and accounting for the extremes of modern European history.
When Oswald Spengler addresses the relationship of Jewish and European populations, he is rather evenhanded, by the standards of the time. But he, too, sees culture and history as the source of profound malaise. He dismisses “the silly catchwords ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semite’ that have been borrowed from philology.” According to him the differences are between the old Jewish or Magian mind and the Gothic or Faustian mind, which is younger or at least slower maturing into the ways of civilization. But the consequences of this mingling of peoples, the inevitable mutual provocations, are the same, finally, as they always are in these narratives. “If there is inward relationship, a man affirms even where he destroys; if inward alienness, his effect is negative even where his desire is to be constructive. What Western Culture has destroyed, by reform efforts of its own type where it has had power, hardly bears thinking of; and Jewry has been equally destructive where it has intervened. The sense of the inevitableness of this reciprocal misunderstanding leads to the appalling hatred that settles deep in the blood and, fastening upon visible marks like race, mode of life, profession, speech, leads both sides to waste, ruin and bloody excesses wherever these conditions occur.” Again, mingled with the magisterial philosophy of history we find the language of terrible fear. If I am correct in interpreting Freud’s metapsychological writing, also in its way magisterial, it is an attempt to retell the narrative of European civilization, to counter the elements in prevailing narratives that provoked enmity and the sense of mortal threat. This is certainly an impulse consistent with his role as healer of the psyche, at least in the sense of maintaining its discomforts at the level of neurosis rather than seeing them flare into full-blown psychosis.16
Freud does speak to this grand malaise in the terms of its exponents. He says,
When we consider how successful we have been in precisely this field of prevention of suffering, a suspicion dawns on us that here, too, a piece of unconquerable nature may lie behind — this time a piece of our own psychical condition.
When we start considering this possibility, we come upon a contention which is so astonishing that we must dwell upon it. This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization.
17
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It is a canard, and also true, that metaphysics as traditionally practiced has passed out of Western thought. Its abandonment is treated as one of those threshold events it is usual to proclaim, as if metaphysics were a naive exercise which we are now too knowing to persist in. As usual, where exactly this threshold is to be found varies with the telling. If I had to propose a date for the event, a moment in which this old habit was put aside, I would say it occurred when European thought turned from epistemology and ontology to politics and parascience — and when Freud was creating his great narrative about the nature of the mind. The exponents of the racial and nationalist theories meant to raise political and territorial passions to the high dignity of philosophy. Freud meant to bring passions and aversions under the cool scrutiny of science. The Oxford English Dictionary defines metaphysics as “that branch of speculative inquiry which treats of the first principles of things, including such concepts as being, substance, essence, time, space, cause, identity, etc.; theoretical philosophy as the ultimate science of Being and Knowing.”18
In the moment when science seemed to justify an insistence that the true could only be the objectively demonstrable, when science as a speculative art was still new enough that Spengler could describe relativity theory as “a ruthlessly cynical hypothesis,” the rejection of metaphysics no doubt seemed rigorous and clarifying.19 It was, in any case, of a piece with the rejection of religion as a repository of truth or of insight into the nature of humankind and our place in the universe, both of these questions being shifted into the language of science as that word was then understood.
I will put aside for the moment whether or not the concepts the dictionary identifies as metaphysical can indeed be excluded from statements about human nature. Freud’s account of human origins goes very far toward describing an anti-metaphysics, proposing an encapsulated self with as few ties to a larger reality as are consistent with its survival. According to Freud’s account of biological origins in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in embryonic development the integument folds inward to form the nervous system, and this fact accounts for the character of consciousness. “Indeed embryology, in its capacity as a recapitulation of developmental history, actually shows us that the central nervous system originates from the ectoderm; the grey matter of the cortex remains a derivative of the primitive superficial layer of the organism and may have inherited some of its essential properties.” Here is how he expands this observation.
This little fragment of living substance [the simplest type of organism] is suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli. It acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli….
Protection against
stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than
reception
of stimuli…. The main purpose of the
reception