Marilynne Robinson - Absence of Mind - The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

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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. 13Charles 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

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.” 15The 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.

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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