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

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. 19It 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

of stimuli is to discover the direction and nature of the external stimuli; and for that it is enough to take small specimens of the external world, to sample it in small quantities.

20

This little entity, “threatened by the enormous energies at work in the external world,” forms a “crust” to defend itself against, in effect, experience. Freud offers this fable to suggest that “the exposed situation of the system Cs ., immediately abutting as it does on the external world,” might account for its difference from other mental systems. 21However limited his intention, however, Freud has proposed a very strange and powerful model of reality, one in which the world in itself is an intolerable threat, and only the strict rationing of awareness of it, by grace of the selectivity of the senses, makes the organism able to endure it.

Considered over against, let us say, Romanticism, or any mode of thought or belief that proposed an intuitive contact with profound reality as possible and normative, and even against the very unspecific “oceanic feeling” which his colleague Romain Rolland asked him to acknowledge and about which he wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents , Freud’s model of the origins and nature of consciousness is of a being first of all besieged and beleaguered, not by the threats posed by the vital, amoral energies of Darwinian nature, but by, so to speak, the cosmos, the barrage of undifferentiated stimuli which is everything that is not oneself.

Freud defines the “oceanic feeling” as “a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.” He speaks about this notion as if there had never been such a thing as Romanticism, as if Fichte or Maurras or Spengler had never pined for a lost bond with the earth. He says, “The idea of men’s receiving an intimation of their connection with the world around them through an immediate feeling which is from the outset directed to that purpose sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology that one is justified in attempting to discover a psychoanalytic — that is, a genetic — explanation of such a feeling.” That he should speak dismissively of “such a feeling” at the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents , when so many of his contemporaries laid those discontents to the loss of what Spengler calls “the beat” of authentic life, that he should express amazement at the notion and disallow the meaningfulness of this feeling on firm scientific grounds, is certainly understandable as a rhetorical or polemical strategy. He says, making unmistakable the consequences of viewing this “intimation” in the light of science, “pathology has made us acquainted with a great number of states in which the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly.” 22

I am suggesting here that Freud was part of an odd, post-metaphysical conversation, an early instance of a conversation that is uniquely modern. On one side “profundity” refers to the imagined beneficial consequences for individual and group consciousness of ethnic or cultural purity, a state projected into a mythic past and then treated as the one true reality, against which present reality is weighed and found wanting. On the other side, Freud’s side, consciousness is in its nature both threatened by and shielded from contact with an external world which he nowhere represents as friendly to our presence in it or as capable of imparting to us authenticity, truth, meaning, profundity, or anything else of a presumably positive character. Both sides curtail the dimensions of traditional Western thought radically, the reactionary position by conforming it to an extreme, fearful, and nostalgic politics, and Freud’s position by insisting on a psychology that withdraws itself from history, from culture in the narrow sense, and from the natural world as well. Neither argument has much to recommend it. Crucially, both represent the mind as, for one reason or another, not to be credited.

Descartes anchored his argument for an objective and knowable reality in the fact of the experience of his own mind thinking. He assumed that in thought he bore the kind of relation to God that made his consciousness in its nature a conduit of true perception. Therefore, so his argument goes, science is possible, the world is knowable, and experience, which for him meant the kind of truth sought out by the methods of science, is authorized by God himself. This is an argument directed against the belief that science and its methods were irreligious. It is, necessarily, also dependent on a metaphysics that assumes a God with whom humanity bears an essential likeness and kinship. Granting all the assumptions implicit in the fact that it was through disciplined inquiry that the world could be known — that is, that knowledge of reality was hard-won — nevertheless, with all caveats acknowledged that science acknowledges, the mind can be trusted, according to Descartes.

If there is one thing Freud asserts consistently, from which every theory proceeds and to which every conclusion returns, it is just this — that the mind is not to be trusted. The conversation in the larger culture to which I have referred, the variously lamented loss of spiritual authenticity, assumes that civilization has alienated Europeans from their essential selves and corrupted their experience. But at least the sense of alienation is to be credited as a true report on their condition, and the integrity of mind of which they believe they have been deprived they also believe can be restored to them. For Freud, self-alienation is a consequence of human ontogeny. Freud’s “sexual theory,” in generalizing the sexual so thoroughly, renders that concept as nearly meaningless as the concept of culture which the theory does indeed undermine. For the purposes of the metapsychological essays, the theory makes sexuality primarily a name for the urges of the involuted self, the unacknowledged core of archaic frustration and guilt at the center of subjective experience which baffles and misleads conscious awareness.