Nietzsche is still a controversial figure. At times he writes
like a genius. At times he writes like a fool, as if he had never been in touch with ordinary realities. (His views on women, for example, are those of a man who simply didn't know any very well.) And so, though he has been dead for almost a century and has been the subject of countless commentaries and inter- pretations, there is still no generally agreed-upon judgment of this extraordinary man. Those naturally inclined to moderation, decent intellectual manners, rationality, or plain common sense, find him ridiculous or even hateful. Others see in him a prophetic figure, a constructive destroyer of false moral values, an intuitive psychologist who anticipates Freud [98]. And posi- tions in between these extremes have been set up ali along the line.
One general misconception is worth mentioning. The Nazis and Fascists in general did exploit, often by falsifying, Nietzsche's celebration of the virtues of war, ruthlessness, blood-thinking, and an elite class—or his presumed celebration, for his admirers translate his words rather differently. But Nietzsche would have despised Hitler and ali the little Hitlers. He was not anti-Semitic and he condemned German national- ism. "Every great crime against culture for the last four hundred years lies on their conscience" is his summing up of the Germans. Nietzsche in one of his aspects was a good European, a defender of the culture the Nazis hated. It cannot be denied that his political influence has been deplorable. But this is not the same as saying that he was a proto-Fascist.
Yet, good European that he may have thought himself, Nietzsche in a certain sense stands outside the Western tradi- tion. He is a total revolutionary, more total, if that is possible, than Lawrence [113] or Marx [82]. At times he seems to reserve his admiration for only a few: the pre-Socratics, Sуcrates himself [12], and a few "artist-tyrants," such as Frederick II of Sicily. He indicts Christianity as a "slave morality." He rejects the traditional virtues of compassion, tolerance, mutual accommodation, in favor of the "will to power," a phrase variously interpreted. He detests the liberal democratic humanitarianism of Mill [72], whom he called, with typical courtesy, "that blockhead.,> He exalts the heroic, the "Dionysian," and, it would seem, the irrational and intuitive elements in the human mind. He has no interest in the ordi- nary conception of progress, substituting for it a somewhat misty doctrine of eternal cyclical recurrence, and stressing the positive power of heroic suffering, exultant pessimism, and tragic experience. On the whole, not a comfortable chap.
No one can deny his extraordinary, though uncontrolled, gift for language; his command of invective and irony; the vari- ety of his poetical images; and the torrential, paradoxical inven- tiveness of his tortured mind. If taken in large, uncritical doses he can be not only antipathetic but dangerous; the God he denied seems to have formed him to attract the lunatic fringe. On the other hand it is true that, like Ibsen [89] and Shaw [99], he helped to point out to his century and ours many of our shams, cowardices, and hypocrisies.
Suggestion: Use the edition called The Portable Nietzsche, if available. The translations are intelligent, the notes and other apparatus helpful. You might read the whole of Zarathustra, uneven as that strange work is; the selections from Beyond Good and Evil; Toward a Genealogy of Morais and Ecce Homo, and perhaps The Antichrist.
C.F.
_ PART FIVE
cO
SIGMUND FREUD
1856-1939
Selected Works, including The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and Civilization and Its Discontents
Freud died September 23, 1939. In his memory W.H. Auden [126] wrote a superb poem from which I quote:
To us he is no more a person
Now but a whole climate of opinion.
That is the heart of it. To the discomfiture or horror of many, Freud is one of the major components of our mental world. There is hardly an area of thought, and there are few of conduct, untouched by him, his disciples, his ex-disciples, or his opponents. You will have to determine for yourself whether this is a good thing, a bad, or a mixture of both.
When we talked about Shakespeare [39] it was suggested that most of us think we know him when what we really know is some handed-down opinion of him. That is true of Freud. Many of us still vaguely believe that his doctrines encourage sexual license, or that "he sees sex in everything," or that he did little beyond shifting the confessional from the grating to the couch. A reading of his major works will clear up these and dozens of other vulgar erro rs.
Freud began his training in medicine, specializing in clinicai neurology. In 1884 he became interested in some work done by Breuer, with whom he later worked. Breuer had with some success treated a female hysteric by encouraging her to "talk out" her past under hypnosis. The case is classic; it
marked the birth of psychoanalysis, whose actual origin Freud, himself no humble type, always credited to Breuer. By replac- ing hypnosis with "free association" Freud found the key that unlocked his system. By 1896 he had named it psychoanalysis. The rest of his life was devoted to the widest possible develop- ment of the new conception of mental processes. Against mis- understanding, abuse, and moralistic prejudice he worked unceasingly, deepening his insights as he extended his experi- ence. In 1938 his books were burned by the Nazis. As he was already suffering torture from cвncer of the mouth, they waived their usual methods of dealing with the weak, the good, the great, and the non-Aryan. In return for a large ransom they permitted Freud to remove to England, where he passed the last months of his phenomenally productive life.
Psychoanalysis claims to be two things: a science (at least to its adherents) and a method. It is a theory of mental life and a spe- cific technique for the cure of neuroses. Both theory and tech- nique are based on a few fundamental concepts. They seem trite to us now, but they were not so a century ago. Among them are: the unconscious; the mechanism of repression; the formative power of infantile sexuality (Freud did not invent the Oedipus complex, he observed it); the dream life as the disguised expres- sion of fears and desires; and, more generally, the frightening power of the irrational in determining human behavior.
Sometimes with insufficient caution, Freud and his follow- ers applied their novel insights to fields seemingly remote from mental disease: religion, morality, war, history, death, humor, mythology, anthropology, philosophy, art, and literature. Particularly in literature Freud has had a pronounced influence, not always for the good.
I must alert the reader of this new edition to the fact that if W.H. Auden were alive today his reverential lines, quoted above, might possibly be qualified. During the last two decades many scholars have submitted the Freudian doctrine to rigor- ous re-examination, and have questioned the validity and weight of his evidence. Furthermore, we know today far more
than Freud did about the brain's electrical behavior, knowl- edge that makes us question Freud's interpretation of the dream work. There is no doubt that on the intellectual stock exchange Freud has slipped several points since his death.
With respect to your choice of reading, two difficulties present themselves. The first is the vast volume of Freud's work. The second is the change and development of his thought, which means that an early (yet still valuable) book may be in part superseded by a later one. I list herewith eight titles. Experts will quarrel over ali of them, and doubtless champion others. The first five books, arranged chronologically, contain much of the general theory. The last three, similarly arranged, are more specialized or exem- plify Freud's thinking on a philosophical levei.