Practical Philosophy
Gibbs A. Williams, Ph.D.
Selected Philosophical Quotations and Commentary
Relevant to Significant Psychological Change
Part 3
Abraham Kaplan: Freud and Modern Philosophy
An epistemology which takes into account of the depth psychology of Freud
and his successors is yet to be written.
Psychoanalysis shares with philosophy the point of view which poses the
problem of the theory of knowledge: a distrust of what people think they
know. Much of what presents itself as known is projected onto the object from
the depths of subjectivity. But an important element even of what is sound in
knowledge is contributed by the knower. What Nietzsche called the dogma of
immaculate perception must now be recognized as psychological heresy.
{The psychoanalytic method} is self- knowledge its aim is self-mastery. Man
is free when his choices are the product of full awareness of operative needs
and actual constraints. Such needs and constraints, so far as they lie in the
self, owe their being to a history of fulfillments and frustrations. But it
is a history buried in the unconscious and what irrationalities it engenders
remain invulnerable behind masks of rationality. To remove their masks is not
thereby to destroy them but only to reveal them for what they are. To know
what he truly wants and what he can truly have - this truth does not make man
free, but makes freedom possible. Self-mastery is not antecedently
guaranteed, but is something to be achieved.
Freud is not so much a pessimist as a realist, possibly the most
thoroughgoing realist in Western thought. The noblest enterprise of
philosophic antiquity Kant saw in the attempt to distinguish appearance from
reality. At bottom, this remains the philosophical task. Freud was occupied
with its most basic part: to dispel man's illusions about himself.What is
remarkable is that he dispelled illusion without falling into cynicism or
groping for new illusions to replace the old. He bows to the reproach that
he has no consolation to offer. But he is not himself inconsolable; he
remains always a yea-sayer to life. His aim is only ''to transform neurotic
despair into the general unhappiness which is the usual lot of mankind.''
The process of education in general does not consist in replacing one set
of beliefs by another, but rather in transforming our reasons for believing.
Cured of his neurosis, a man may espouse the same values as before; only now,
he knows what he is doing, he is prepared to accept the consequences, and
above all, he accepts himself as the man he knows himself to be.
Gibbs' Commentary
What Freud adds to philosophical discourse is the fact of the reality and
the undeniable revolutionary implications of the wondrous power and logic and
workings of the personal unconscious. An excellent example of this is in the
following description of R.D.Laings who implies that for most intelligent people
their life difficulties often spring less from that which they see and know than
from that which they are blind and or ignorant.
Says Laings '' The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to see,
and because we fail to see, that we fail to see, there is little we can do to
change, until we see how failing to see shapes our every thought, feeling and deed.''
The acknowledgment and acceptance of the personal unconscious in our lives brings us
back again to the beginnings of speculative philosophy. Making a conscious connection
{cathexis} with our personal unconscious puts us in the company of the likes of
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza, seeking like them, our own answers to the
biggest questions of our lives on this earth. What is really real and how do we know
it; who am I and what do I really want; what is the meaning of my existence; do I
discover or create ultimate meaning; how do I know what is of ultimate significance.
All these real life issues are the daily concern of a thorough going psychoanalytic
experience. Far from seeming endless chatter - the systematic investigation of what
makes a given individual tick is indeed serious business.
Bertrand Russell's, “A Free Man's
Worship”
...But the
beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more or
less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life.In the
spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the
irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an
overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the
inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange
marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of
sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of
temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all
care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make
up the common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow
raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the
dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; from the
great night without, a chill blast breaks in upon our refuge; all
the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated upon
the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage
it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares
nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the
powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of
heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human
existence. From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer
world, emancipation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their
birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul
the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be--Death and
change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of
Man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity--to
feel these things and know them is to conquer them.
This is the reason why the
Past has such magical power. The beauty of its motionless and silent
pictures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn, when the
leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still glow against
the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or strive; like
Duncan, after life's fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager and
grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the things
that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the
night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable; but
to a soul which has conquered Fate it is the key of
religion.
The life of Man, viewed
outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of
Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death,
because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and
because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great
as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless
splendor, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we
no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we
absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle
for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire,
to burn with passion for eternal things--this is emancipation, and
this is the free man's worship. And this liberation is effected by a
contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which
leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of
Time.
United with his fellow-men
by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man
finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every
daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march
through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by
weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and
where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades
vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent
Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which
their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on
their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to
give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen
failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not
weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think
only of their need--of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the
blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember
that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the
same tragedy as ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when
their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of
the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they
failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the
divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with
encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage
glowed.
Brief and powerless is
Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls
pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction,
omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned
to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the
gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow
falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining
the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine
that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance,
to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his
outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that
tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to
sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own
ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious
power.
Gibbs' Commentary
Russell seems to have the soul of a classical Freudian analyst. He is a quintessential realist. To illustrate this point, compare the following perspectives of Jung and Freud concerning the fundamental meaning of life.
Jung, decidedly anti earthly mundanity, states: ''My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life. To me it was a profound disappointment that all the efforts of the probing mind had apparently succeeded in finding nothing more in the depths of the psyche than the all too familiar and ‘all too human limitations.'' {Memories, Dreams and Reflections}
Freud, ever the uncompromising realist, states: {paraphrase} The end of a successful analysis enables the patient to convert neurotic suffering into an acceptance of everyday common misery.
Russell eloquently affirms the Freudian ethic that the beginning and the end of life are crystal clear facts - it is what is in between that challenges each of us to carve out of our existence a path to walking and living the good life.
No matter how much we find it objectionable, none of us can escape the inevitability of realistic limitations such as death, and change. But by accepting the awesome responsibility that each of us is his own final authority, one transforms blind faith into a grounded self-generated faith born of stuggling with struggle.
By acknowledging the dark side, the forces of destruction, normal ambivalence (love and hate) and striving to channel its tremendous power into everyday existence, there can be the actuality of freedom from a life of reactivity to freedom to choose and to act from within. Freud said it well: ''Where id and superego are, ego {the voice of reason} will be.
'' Russell said it well too: ''I cannot believe ... that there can ever be any good excuse for refusing to face the evidence in favor of something unwelcome. It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth. "{Fact and Fiction, p.46}
Preface |
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Gibbs A.Williams Ph.D.© 1999-2000
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