No analogy like this can do full justice to Gödel’s theorem, but it at least conveys the paradox adequately. It is for some a depressing conclusion (and Godei himself battled bouts of chronic depression. After living an ascetic personal life, he died in 1978, aged seventy-two, of ‘malnutrition and inanition’ brought about by personality disturbance).78 Godei had established that there were limits to math and to logic. The aim of Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, and Russell to create a unitary deductive system in which all mathematical (and therefore all logical) truth could be deduced from a small number of axioms could not be realised. It was, in its way and as was hinted at above, a form of mathematical uncertainty principle – and it changed math for all time. Furthermore, as Roger Penrose has pointed out, Gödel’s ‘open-ended mathematical intuition is fundamentally incompatible with the existing structure of physics.’79
In some ways Gödel’s discovery was the most fundamental and mysterious of all. He certainly had what most people would call a mystical side, and he thought we should trust [mathematical] intuition as much as other forms of experience.80 Added to the uncertainty principle, his theory described limits to knowledge. Put alongside all the other advances and new avenues of thought, which were then exploding in all directions, it injected a layer of doubt and pessimism. Why should there be limits to our knowledge? And what did it mean to know that such limits existed?
16
CIVILISATIONS AND THEIR DISCONTENTS
On 28 October 1929 the notorious stock market crash occurred on Wall Street, and U.S. loans to Europe were suspended. In the weeks and months that followed, and despite the misgivings of many, Allied troops prepared and then executed their departure from the Rhineland. In France, Georges Clemenceau died at the age of eighty-eight, while in Thuringia Wilhelm Frick was about to become the first member of the Nazi Party to be appointed minister in a state government. Benito Mussolini was clamouring for the revision of the Versailles Treaty, and in India Mohandâs Gandhi began his campaign of civil disobedience. In Britain in 1931 a National Government was formed to help balance the budget, while Japan abandoned the gold standard. There was a widespread feeling of crisis.
Sigmund Freud, then aged seventy-three, had far more personal reasons to feel pessimistic. In 1924 he had undergone two operations for cancer of the mouth. Part of his upper jaw had to be removed and replaced with a metal prosthesis, a procedure that could only be carried out using a local anaesthetic. After the operation he could chew and speak only with difficulty, but he still refused to stop smoking, which had probably been the cause of the cancer in the first place. Before he died in London in 1939, Freud underwent another two dozen operations, either to remove precancerous tissue or to have his prosthesis cleaned or renewed. During all this time he never stopped working.
In 1927 Freud had published The Future of an Illusion, which both explained away and yet amounted to an attack on organised religion. This was the second of three ‘cultural’ works by Freud (the first, Totem and Taboo, was discussed earlier: see above, page 141). At the end of 1929, as Wall Street was crashing, Freud delivered the third of these works, Civilisation and Its Discontents. There had been famine in Austria and attempted revolution and mega-inflation in Germany, and capitalism appeared to have collapsed in America. The devastation and moral degeneration of World War I was still a concern to many people, and Hitler was on the rise. Wherever you looked, Freud’s title fitted the facts.1
In Civilisation and Its Discontents, Freud developed some of the ideas he had explored in Totem and Taboo, in particular that society – civilisation – evolves out of the need to curb the individual’s unruly sexual and aggressive appetites. He now argued that civilisation, suppression, and neurosis are inescapably intertwined because the more civilisation there is, the more suppression is needed and, as a direct result, the more neurosis. Man, he said, cannot help but be more and more unhappy in civilisation, which explains why so many seek refuge in drink, drugs, tobacco, or religion. Given this basic predicament, it is the individual’s ‘psychical constitution’ which determines how any individual adjusts. For example, ‘The man who is predominantly erotic will give first preference to his emotional relationships with other people; the narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental process.’2 And so on. The point of his book, he said, was not to offer easy panaceas for the ills of society but to suggest that ethics – the rules by which men agree to live together – can benefit from psychoanalytic understanding, in particular, the psychoanalytic concept of the superego, or conscience.3
Freud’s hopes were not to be fulfilled. The 1930s, especially in the German-speaking countries, were dominated more by a complete lack of conscience than any attempt to refine or understand it. Nevertheless, his book spawned a raft of others that, though very different from his, were all profoundly uneasy with Western capitalist society, whether the source of concern was economics, science and technology, race, or man’s fundamental nature as revealed in his psychology. The early 1930s were dominated by theories and investigations exploring the discontents of Western civilisation.
The book closest to Freud’s was published in 1933 by the former crown prince of psychoanalysis, now turned archrival. Carl Jung’s argument in Modern Man in Search of a Soul was that ‘modern’ society had more in common with ‘archaic,’ primitive society than it did with what had gone immediately before – i.e., the previous phase of civilisation.4 The modern world was a world where the ancient ‘archetypes’ revealed themselves more than they had done in the recent past. This explained modern man’s obsession with his psyche and the collapse of religion. The modern condition was that man knew he was the culmination of evolution – science told him so – but also knew that ‘tomorrow he will be surpassed,’ which made life ‘solitary, cold, and frightening.’5 Further, psychoanalysis, by replacing the soul with the psyche (which Jung clearly thought had happened), only offered a palliative. Psychoanalysis, as a technique, could only be used on an individual basis; it could not become ‘organised’ and used to help millions at a time, like Catholicism, say. And so, the participation mystique, as the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl called it, was a whole dimension of life closed to modern man. It set Western civilisation, a new civilisation, apart from the older Eastern societies.6 This lack of a collective life, ceremonies of the whole as Hugo von Hofmannsthal called them, contributed to neurosis, and to general anxiety.7
For fifteen years, Karen Horney practised in Weimar Germany as an orthodox Freudian analyst, alongside Melanie Klein, Otto Fenichel, Franz Alexander, Karl Abraham and Wilhelm Reich at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Only after she moved to the United States, first as associate director of the Chicago Institute and then in New York, at the New School for Social Research and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, did she find herself capable of offering criticism of the founder of the movement. Her book, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, overlapped with both Freud and Jung but was also an attack on capitalistic society for the way it induced neurosis.8
Horney’s chief criticism of Freud was his antifeminist bias (her early papers included ‘The Dread of Women’ and ‘The Denial of the Vagina’). But she was also a Marxist and thought Freud too biological in outlook and ‘deeply ignorant’ of modern anthropology and sociology (she was right). Psychoanalysis had itself become split by this time into a right wing and a left wing. What may be characterised as the right wing concentrated on biological aspects, delving further and further into infantile experience. Melanie Klein, a German disciple of Freud who moved to Britain, was the leader of this approach. The left wing, which consisted in the main of Horney, Erich Fromm, and Harry Stack Sullivan, was instead more concerned with the individual’s social and cultural background.9