The Conatus: A Naturalistic Life Force

When the scientific worldview comes to predominate ones thinking, the most difficult thing to contemplate about the world I think are living things. For billions of years there was no discernible life on earth, and so far we haven't discovered much life anywhere else. Evolutionary theory explains the diversity of life, but not its origin.

Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker gave me a simple and for the time satisfying definition of what life is.

"Left to itself-and that is what it is when it dies- the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with the environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings...when we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings. Not all animals work so hard to avoid coming into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature, but all animals do some compatible work...if they fail they die. More generally, if living things didn't work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge onto their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings."

His definition of life is quite simple and had a profound impact on me. A living thing resists its parts returning to the equilibrium conditions of its environment. A living thing is a body in motion doing work to preserve its state of motion.

This seems to necessitate some kind of life force. After all, not everything in the universe acts like this. Quite the contrary. And living things just seem qualitatively different than non living things. And yet everything described in the passage obeys the laws of physics. There isn't anything supernatural occurring.

A couple years later I started reading Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan which despite being a work on political philosophy begins with an outline of human nature from which principles of government are deduced. Hobbes' famous violent state of nature is the result of a pre-Newtonian law of inertia.

"That when a thing lies still, unless somewhat else stir it, it will lie still forever, is a truth that no man doubts. But [the proposition] that when a thing is in motion it will eternally be in motion unless somewhat else stay it, though the reason be the same (namely that nothing can change itself), is not so easily assented to. For men measure not only other men but all other things by themselves. And because they find themselves subject after motion to pain and lassitude, [they] think every thing else grows weary of motion and seeks repose of its own accord, little considering whether it be not some other motion wherein that desire of rest they find in themselves, consists"

An object in motion preserves its state of motion until acted upon by another object. Applying this to human psychology, humans are dominated by small internal movements (passions) which cannot be stopped and so will always conflict with each other as individual bodies unless massive force brings them together (the leviathan which is the sum of their wills).

"So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. And from hence it is, that Kings, whose power is greatest, turn their endeavours to the assuring it a home by Lawes, or abroad by Wars: and when that is done, there succeedeth a new desire; in some, of Fame from new Conquest; in others, of ease and sensuall pleasure; in others, of admiration, or being flattered for excellence in some art, or other ability of the mind."

Dawkins and Hobbes brought me closer toward a satisfying naturalistic definition of life. Several properties of living things can be explained by such a "matter in motion" hypothesis. Life is quite frustrating and complete happiness is not fully attainable, and pleasure is fleeting as is pain. Life in some way comes from the inanimate world. Life follows the same laws as anything else in the universe. And ultimately Hobbes' conclusion that social life is defined by conflict rather than harmony, contrary to Aristotle.

This however is where I don't follow Dawkins or Hobbes; that humans are only aggregations of these moving parts, however complex and interconnected.

"The behaviour of the body as a whole will then emerge as a consequence of the interactions of the parts." -Dawkins

His naturalistic definition of life doesn't capture the uniqueness, the dynamism, the wholeness of life. My consciousness isn't reducible to separate sensations. It is one unified synthetic whole. Anything that can ever be known comes to this seemingly infinite understanding, capable of comprehending the vast infinite universe.

Why can't there be a non supernatural life force, that keeps the organism in existence as a whole? And would then apply to the universe itself? No longer a dead mechanical universe, but a driven unified one.

Rejecting the supernatural explanation means several things though.

This life force isn't teleological, that is it is not purposeful.

The life force does not aim at any particular being. There is no foresight, no planning. The existence of individuals no matter how complex is contingent.

The life force isn't itself conscious, as consciousness is defined by its individual objects (as I wrote about before).

The life force isn't a thing or particular being, and as such is not represented by the causal thinking of our own minds. Only individual objects subject to cognition are represented as such.

Accordingly this life force is as practically atheistic as the mechanical explanations of Dawkins and Hobbes.

Luckily for me there was a prominent philosopher who wrote in the same early modern era of Hobbes and had a similar understanding of the universe. Baruch Spinoza, the 17th Jewish-Dutch philosopher. He wrote at about the same time as Hobbes when the Aristotlean worldview was being replaced with the mechanical universe. Spinoza was a determinist and naturalist like Hobbes, but had very important differences in his system of the universe.

Spinoza didn't think mind could be reduced to matter. But unlike Descartes didn't think mind was a separate substance either. Rather body and mind are connected, as different aspects of the same universe. Just as with Descartes, matter is defined by its extended qualities and mind by its thinking qualities.

"A mental decision and a bodily appetite, or determined state, are simultaneous, or rather are one and the same thing, which we call decision, when it is regarded under and explained through the attribute of thought, and a conditioned state, when it is regarded under the attribute of extension, and deduced from the laws of motion and rest."

The Conatus, Latin for endeavor, comes to us in Book III of the Ethics. It is something like the will to live of Schopenhauer or the will to power of Nietzsche, though its also like Newton's first law. The word conatus was used by the Stoics like Cicero and was an explanation for the passions. We want something not because it is good, but rather we think something is good because we want it. Which seems pretty Stoic to me.

"Nothing comes to pass in nature, which can be set down to a flaw therein; for nature is always the same, and everywhere one and the same in her efficacy and power of action"

Spinoza was a monist, meaning that human activity follows the same laws as nature and can be understood causally, making him also a determinist. The mind is also determined by without, but can gain knowledge of the causes of its thoughts and actions and find a sort of happiness. What is unique and sort of counter intuitive at first is that Spinoza thinks not only that body and mind are connected, but that they don't actually cause each other. "The body cannot determine the mind to think, nor the mind the body to remain in motion or at rest." The reason they do not cause each other, as in thinking about raising my arm causes my arm to rise, is that they are different aspects of the same thing. "The mind is united to the body because the body is the object of the mind."

So the Conatus is what determines the motivation of the body and what the mind desires. But determined in an individual way for self-preservation.

The Conatus is presented thus;

Prop. IV Nothing can be destroyed, except by a cause external to itself.

Prop. V Things are naturally contrary, that is, cannot exist in the same object so far as one is capable of destroying the other.

Prop. VI Everything in so far as it is in itself endeavors to persist in its own being.

Prop. VII The endeavor wherewith everything endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question...the power or endeavour, wherewith it endeavours to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the given or actual essence of the thing in question.

Prop. VIII The endeavor whereby a thing endeavors to persist in its own being involved no finite time but an indefinite time. 

Spinoza then reiterates the Stoics. "From what has been said it is plain, therefore, that we neither strive for, wish, seek, nor desire anything because we think it to be good, but, on the contrary, we adjudge a thing to be good because we strive for, wish, seek, or desire it." This is because the mind, though it can only perceive bodies, gains knowledge by the clarity and distinctness of its ideas, thus being ignorant of the particular causes of its desires.

The argument is that something being what it is means not being able to destroy itself, which means that so long as the parts "agree" in not excluding each other, then the whole wil continue to exist. And that the birth and death of this whole does not measure its existence, but rather its actual continual existence does. The whole is greater than the sun of its parts.

If different things can exist together, they belong together in some larger sense, like how the whole world "hangs together". In individual things however, within the same space and time, existence means not becoming something else. Nothingness does exist with the individual. If something continues to persist, it does so because what is opposed to its nature is avoided and what is advantageous is attracted to. From the individual's point of view, this is not a discrete process as this constitutes the essence of the individual. Duration begins and ends with the individual.

One perseveres through change and harm simply because one perseveres as a whole. What the reductionists don't understand is that different parts can become something greater by what they share in common. The omission is that there is a principle that gives an internal nature to things. Self-preservation is that principle. By simply striving to continue to be as an individual, we determine our nature.

The form of life is a pattern, a creation of opposites. 

Why The Dialectic?

One of the most well-known ideas introduced by Plato is "truth is justified true belief". This appears in Theaetetus as the third theory of what knowledge is which is associated with belonging to Plato. 

What is true must be known by the subject, they must believe it. The Sophists appeared to agree with that, and so would relativists today. "Man is the measure of all things" Protagoras is supposed to have said. The Sophists instead of dialectic taught rhetoric, to win the argument through appearances to change the mind of opponent, not to discover the truth or continue the discussion. They did this often for payment, seeing knowledge's value as instrumental.

But belief isn't enough says Socrates. Belief must have external support. The English word truth derives from treowth which means something like good faith. What does good mean, if it isn't just having faith? It is external. But more than that; what is external must somehow also be linked to what is good.

In The Republic book I, Socrates gets Thrasymachus the critic of the utility of justice to accept that the good for any person requires knowledge. A good doctor must have knowledge of medicine and of the human body to be a good doctor. Anything that exists has a nature to it. Living to its full potential is what defines its own good. If one hand does not move, it is not a good watch as it cannot tell accurate time which is what a watch is supposed to do. The good of something entails knowledge of what that thing is. 

For something to be good it must serve some end. The good of a watch for me is that it can prevent me from being late to work among other things. In general the end of anything, the highest good, is happiness. It must be that for the "soul" or mind that it has its own nature that defines its own good which is our highest good. The soul or mind's nature is that which superintends our own actions. All of our actions have the end of our happiness. The good of the soul is to command our actions to the fulfillment of our happiness according to the nature of what we happen to be commanding for that purpose. Thus it is that knowledge requires belief of what is true, of the nature of what we hold beliefs of. (This is essentialism, that the essence of something is the criterion of true statements). This is Plato's specific view of what makes something true. Even if one does not accept essentialism, knowledge still can scrutinize the patterns of our own thinking and the biases within.

To have knowledge is to have belief which is also justified by what is true. What is justification? It is to have a reason for a belief.

The Apology lays ground for why knowledge must be justified. Socrates tells the story of a friend who asked the Oracle of Delphi who is the wisest person. The Oracle answered that it was Socrates. Socrates was puzzled by this as surely other people know more than he does on plenty of things. But there is something that he knows that most others do not. That is he knows he knows nothing. Most people think they know something, where they really just have an opinion or prejudice. Socrates is the wisest because he admits he does not think he knows anything, which is the source of hubris.

Elsewhere in Plato's dialgogues such as Meno is the paradoxical idea that one already has to know something in order to know it. That is have the potential or capacity for knowledge. The task of philosophy is to discern whether one really does in fact already know what they assume to know. 

This need for justification is where the dialectic comes from. A belief is presented, assumed to be true. Then another proposed truth which is acknowledged to be believed by both sides. Then the principle of non-contradiction, over whether it is possible to believe these different things to be true according some common non-conflicting notion of truth. This cross examination begins with the belief and does not end until the belief stands up to asserted criticisms or is denied or changed. 

Just as with Plato's tripartite definition of knowledge as true justified belief, the dialectic asserts belief, demands justification, and ends with the truth contained within this belief which may be naught. 

My Secret Doctrine

We humans don't live in the real world. We are trapped in our conceptions of space and time, and much of the content of our lives has been manipulated from its original meaning by language.

The real world is what comes to us via perception. Being as being. All things belonging together. Anything that can ever be "known", that is divided into the familiar categories of subject and object, is and can have as its basis only what is perception. Exempt from causal thinking, from space, time and all judgement.

Most of this is not subject to conscious thought. Self consciousness attributes to "the world" essentially what is beyond its control, its will. And yet always this self has some sort of notion of what these objects are. In reality, self-consciousness divides itself. For this knowing subject exists in a knowing relation with these objects, and itself takes an object for its existence to be real (the meaning of the cogito).

If this is true, that at all times we stand in relation to everything and in some way distance ourselves from everything, then why don't we think this way more often?

The answer is that we don't live in the real world. The self emerged from the nothingness produced by the vicissitudes of the struggle for life.

For the perpetuation of existence in its myriad animal modes, the transient individual is in a constant struggle with the world by its very nature. Being individuated in space and time, realizing this as the species gains conscious awareness, and gaining recollection of the past through memory, the individual's realization is only possible because of their impending death. This is because the individual separates from the world by its own praxis, preserving itself from a return to its undifferentiated state or a transformation into something else. This is what is common all animal life, the instinct to live.

Yet even this is not enough. Thought eventually develops to the realization of its estrangement from the world and transience. The only escape, while continuing to live, is to somehow end this alienation from the world. By either transforming it, or subverting to its "will". In either case, motivated by a desire to see itself in the world.

It is quite hard and in the end futile for the individual to transform the world in their image, so the other route is more common. To submit to the will of another (more like an-other). This necessitates on the part of who submits to identity with the master, otherwise it would pointless and death would be a more definite way of ending the alienation of individuated existence.

Thus begin the lies which inform the content of our lives. To convince ourselves and each other that our individual station in life relates to the world in a meaningful way. Using words, we can make the lesser appear the stronger and vice versa.

Philosophy can free us from the lies, but can't in my opinion give us anything positive. That is the problem. Thought takes us away from the real world of direct perception. That is the point.

The developed individual self-conscious cannot forever resist the return.

This is the real world: pain, pleasure, and the will.

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
General Remarks Transcendental Doctrine of Elements II.

"In confirmation of this theory of the ideality of the external as well as internal sense, consequently of all objects of sense, as mere phenomena, we may especially remark, that all in our cognition that belongs to intuition contains nothing more than relations. The feelings of pain and pleasure, and the will, which are not cognitions, are excepted"

The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Arthur told us to read this as the introduction to The World as Will and Representation, and boy was he right. Schopenhauer explains his treatment of Kant's philosophy so succinctly that WWR is really an exposition of what is written here. The strangest thing about Schopenhauer to me when i first approached him was his fixation on causality. You don't find a lot of thinkers so fascinated with the principle of sufficient reason. It is usually taken as a given. But it does form the basis of his whole system, which is why this is the proper introduction to his thought. 

Before reading this, it is necessary to have some familiarity with Plato and Kant, as Schopenhauer also told us in the introduction to WWR. The two things that one must approach this work which are found in Plato and Kant are 1) there is a difference between how the world appears to us and how it really is (Plato) & 2) we cannot go from this appearance to the thing in itself; the division of subject and object is fundamental (Kant). 

Given these two insights, the purpose of this work is to explore what Schopenhauer thinks is the general rule governing what we can know, which manifests itself in any attempt to understand "the world". It is also helpful to read Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant's philosophy to understand how Schopenhauer's treatment of the division of subject and object differs from that of Kant. The difference is that Arthur took the idealism associated with George Berkeley seriously. That is, an object is known by a subject and cannot be considered as just "out there". Without the subject the world as object disappears. The "external" world is in some way connected to us, as we are to it. It goes both ways. 

Most importantly, it is downright foolish and misleading to say that objects "cause" our representations. For causality is something that our knowing mind projects onto reality. Again without the knowing subject this world as object disappears, and so we cannot say these objects cause our sensations. Rather they are responsible for them, we attribute to these objects a reason. But if we try that, we must then explain how it is they are responsible for these effects, and so we discover that the principle of sufficient reason is fundamental to understanding and cannot be invoked to explain "the world" or "the thing in itself". It is imparted by our own consciousness. 

What the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason does is to ground sufficient reason as an explanation for various things we know, but not to invoke an explanation for it. That would require going to this noumenal world (which is dealt with in WWR). 

Sufficient reason is just that something is only explained with reference to something else. This being based on the fundamental division of subject and object. Both have no meaning without the other. It is owing to the basic relation between different things that a reason is to be provided for something, which only is in relation to what else is. 

The four classes are becoming (law of causality), knowing (reason), being (space & time), and motives (action or will). These can be thought to correspond to what are called the classical laws of thought. Schopenhauer acknowledges the four:

1) a subject is equal to the sum total of its predicates. Law of identity, a=a

2) no predicate can be attributed and denied to a subject at the same time. Law of non-contradiction, a=-a=0. 

3) one of two opposite, contradictory predicates must belong to every subject. Law of the excluded middle. A is not A and B

4) truth is the reference of a judgement to something outside of it, as its sufficient reason. 

The class of becoming corresponds to identity as like things can only be explained by like things, which shall always demand explanation. The effect is known by its cause and can contain only that. 

The class of knowing corresponds to non-contradiction. Among our representations, they may only follow from those of their type.

The class of being corresponds to excluded middle. Space and time allow for multiplicity and coexistence (space) and succession (time), thus a relation between the two as well as a difference. 

The class of motives corresponds to sufficient reason. This is because it is through the immediate object of the inner sense (time) alone that we come to know the principle of causality at first through the law of causality and then its other groundings. 

This conflation of the four laws of thought with the four roots is largely mine, though Schopenhauer does list the four laws in this way, as what he calls metalogical truths, governing the second class (of reason). I hope this conflation is accurate. If it is, then it is a splendidly easy way to understand this work. Together, the four laws of thought and the four roots explain everything. That i think Schopenhauer would assent to, even if I matched them incorrectly. 

The big point to all this is that the principle of sufficient reason and therefore all we can know is a result of the division of world into subject and object. It is that simple. Without this division, things wouldn't follow one after another, they would just be. But they could not "be" in a meaningful way without this division. 

The relevant part for his more popular ethical and aesthetic writings is the fourth class. This immediate motive power as will be shown in the World as Will and Representation is our direct access away from representation to the thing in itself.

If Schopenhauer is right about the principle of sufficient reason being "sufficient" to explain the different classes of knowing, then Kant's Procrustean table of judgements is reduced from twelve categories to one; causality. The end result of this is that it is possible to have intuitions without concepts. And thereby have access to the mysterious thing-in-itself. The route to this is the inner sense of time, where we experience an endless chain of causation where one thing becomes another, and an individual thing means nothing outside of its relation to other things. Just as the future makes no sense without a present or a past. 

We can perhaps escape our own individuated existence and learn the true nature of things. Which cannot be God, whose existence is reasoned to misapplying the principle of sufficient reason (cosmological and ontological arguments) outside of human consciousness to the universe itself. The underlying nature of reality is itself unconscious. It is not rational. Yet it is intimately connected to our conscious life. Not as a cause, but as one in the same as the world as it appears to us. 

Der Wille.

Thoughts on Civilization (and Its Discontents)

Freud is remarkably consistent in his worldview throughout psychology, religion, and politics. Here he takes his grand theory of everything to its latest manifestation, civilization. Civilization is a thing actively created. The original German title called it kultur, which derives from Latin cultus, to cultivate. Civilization is defined as what isn't natural, yet unlike a kingdom of God or a supernatural realm it is imperfect as we work on what is given under conditions not of our choosing.

For Freud civilization is the most difficult thing to achieve, what ultimately sets us apart from the animals. He starts out the book discussing what happiness is. He claims rightfully so that we can never be happy for more than a short time as satisfying one desire opens up others, and that satisfaction given the world of scarcity comes at something else's expense and is done at excess of too much or too little.

 "Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures."

Freud's comprehensive worldview begins with the law of conservation of energy. In our closed system the amount of energy stays the same or decreases with every use. Nothing is free. Organisms are the matter complexes which resist entropy, homogeneity with the environment, reproducing themselves and evolving to more complex forms which can overcome the environment. This is done with a major expense of energy from the organism to convert other living things, plants and animals, to energy. The activity of living drains the life force of the organism. Only by growing more sophisticated means of energy conversion like eating and eventually tool making can the organism escape death, a return to the original unorganized form of matter it emerged from at great cost.

Reproduction allows the individual organism to cheat death by passing on its genes. Offspring come from the organism and especially in mammals are cared for as one cares for one self. But the care come to take on a new meaning because younglings are the ticket to immortality. Of course simple creatures aren't conscious of this, but their basic drive to live evolves pleasure organs to facilitate reproduction, and it's genes would select a kind of altruism of the individual organism towards its children (using Neo-Darwinian theory here, which parallels many of Freud's theories.)

So then comes human beings who are aware of their death and gain a transcendental value to being loved by others, and having that love outlast them by the products of their copulation, the animal act. Our happiness becomes dependent on others. The ego emerges from this awareness of self and seeks immediate gratification from the world around it. When it fails and becomes disheartened, it seeks to destroy this world of desires and return to the original simple form. This death wish is manifested through aggression to others.

So there is an inherent struggle within human nature, between the pursuit of happiness and the difficulty of attaining it, especially from others. Freud mentions communism, the utopia of his day, as a false solution to this struggle not economically, which he doesn't think is impossible, but in terms of abandoning aggression which he argues has a metaphysical basis rather than being the result of property. We must love one another to live, but are frustrated when it is not returned.

So far nothing terribly new except for the thermodynamic metaphors. But here is Freud's innovative view civilization: we have to get people to thwart their own desires. We must limit our desires, like the desire to rape and abuse, to have social harmony which is at the same time can be antithetical to our desires. The ego will only do this by being inflicted with punishment, as the life force can't be alienated. For Freud political order follows social order which follows individual order. When no one is looking, we won't obey the taboos. What society must do is internalize that social pressure, making it feel as if there is always a parental figure watching us. This for Freud is the origin of religious experience as a return to the desired primordial state of oneness with the mother, the oceanic feeling, corresponding with a human face we crave. Religion makes it so we can see the father in the universe as well, providing order.

Freud established this earlier in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 1922.  "In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent, and so from the very first Individual Psychology is at the same time Social Psychology as well." The superego internalizes social authority through a reconnection of nature as something like us. We anthromorphize nature to make it feel as the eye of others is everywhere. The purpose of this is to keep the pain of guilt with us at all times. We restrain ourselves out a desire to serve a lover which will never leave us and is greater than anyone.

The pain of living in society which limits the ego's satisfaction of the id is transferred towards ourselves. This is why most religions and moral codes are altruistic, which means putting putting others ahead of yourself. Altruism is not really egalitarian; the individual is often the loser. Freud followed Nietzsche in Moses and Monotheism 1939 arguing that the Jews took this to an extreme with a fundamental belief in human wickedness with salvation only for a certain group who practices strict self-denial. Something future Abrahamic Faith's like Christianity and Islam as well as modern Western society adopted in their own unique forms.

The lesson for politics is that individual repression, not oppression, is the basis of social control. By oppression I mean blunt force from an external ruler. If this was the case no one would follow the law except in public when the police were around. Repression is force by yourself. You want to be controlled, not by another person but an abstract ideal lover, be it your parental ideal, God or "the people." The ruling class's power comes from taboos already being internalized into the people who are able to be ruled over.

Oppression is external rule and repression is internal rule. However it seems much more desirable to have a society in which individuals repress themselves than one in which people must be forced to do what is socially agreeable. It is also better to have repressing agents such as religion be separate from the state, to have civil society in addition to political society. Economic progress is also something that relies on self-denial, which is based on an anal character learned early in life during potty training, a time when parents and not government are the most important. Martin Luther from whom the Protestant work ethic eventually comes from thought of the doctrine of "solo fide", faith alone, while on the toilet. And so family values early in life and not government contributes more to developing the capitalist spirit, so government interference in the market should also take a backseat to family in cultivating virtue. That would be the "ideal" society; the late Victorianism, Gilded Age, Fin de Siecle that Freud lived in.

Another take from Civilization and its Discontents is that even though the motives for vice can't be eliminated, they can be repressed into more socially useful forms, called sublimation. This is why I think drugs even if always with us shouldn't be encouraged. But they reflect the basic driving force of life, pleasure, their continued use can be put into more positive things like funding education or supplementing the tax burden. Vice unlike evil can be shaped into better behavior, which is why we are amazed by the skills criminals have and how better life would be if they were put to different use. This jars with the repression aspect; if vice can be good then why should restrictions be tolerated? We must be rational, that's why. Follow the reality principle; that satisfaction of some of our desires must either be delayed due to immediate external circumstances or will be harmful in the future. Just like nature imposes objective demands on us which makes us delay satisfaction, so does society which is Freud's thesis here.

I think what Freud wanted to do was to give social morality a basis in the naturalist/scientific worldview as he felt that religion was losing its grip. While Freud thought the decline of religious belief was a good thing, there is the possibility of throwing out the good and the bad. Guilt, repression, sublimation, and altruism are necessary for society to ultimately limit aggression and channel pleasure to socially useful channels. So Freud, as accused by Richard Webster, was actually trying to justify Judeo-Christian morals and Victorian-liberal social values using thermodynamic and Darwinian theories from his late 19th century education of Herman Helmholtz and Ernst Haeckel. I think he was, and there's nothing wrong about it.

"Freud genuinely believed that, by invoking evolutionary biology in the manner that he did, he was using science to sweep away superstition and introduce a new view of human nature. His real achievement in creating psychoanalysis, however, was to hide superstition beneath the rhetoric of reason, and by doing this succeed in reintroducing a very old view of human nature. By portraying the unconscious or the ‘id’ as a seething mass of unclean impulses, and seeing men and women as driven by dark sexual and sadistic impulses and a secret love of excrement which was associated with a compulsion to hoard money, Freud in effect recreated Swift’s Christian vision of “unregenerate man” as a Yahoo. By casting his intense moral vision in an ostensibly technical form he had, it would seem, succeeded in reinventing for a modern scientific age the traditional Christian doctrine of Original Sin." Richard Webster Why Freud Was Wrong 1995

The Ego and the Id

The ego and the id describes the structural model that is now common knowledge; the id, ego, and superego. Prior to this, Freud used the topographical model of unconscious, pre-conscious, and conscious. The notion of the unconscious having explanatory power over conscious life is the essence of psychoanalysis. The essay begins with this, and then proceeds to lay out the limitations of the topographical model. The question is how does the unconscious get into the pre-conscious. There must be a censor of some sort which part of it which censors the unconscious is itself unconscious. But how would this fit into the topographical model, a mechanism which straddles the conscious and unconscious? Here comes the structural model of id, ego, and superego. The ego operates according to the reality principle, restraining the pleasure principle of the id. The ego can therefore be conscious and unconscious so long as it operates to both fulfill the demands of the id and the limits of the external world. Because of the ego, we can sustain long periods of unease so long as there is an opportunity to find pleasure down the road.

Freud's concept of pleasure and pain described in the prior essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a pessimistic one. Happiness is a sort of equilibrium, stability. It is pain that is a motivator to act. "Any given process originates in an unpleasant state of tension, i.e. with avoidance of pain or the production of pleasure". The pursuit of happiness is conservative, about conserving energy. Action doesn't reach toward any final goal, it is motivated by a quantitative disturbance. Pain and pleasure are only relevant according to this disturbance in the investment of energy. This energy "psychophysics" is beyond this book, but it does give insight into how nuanced Freud's argument is. This is the paradox of psychoanalysis, sometimes it appears to fit in with natural science. But then psychoanalysis posits unobservable explanations for naturalistic phenomena. However these unobservable explanations aren't supernatural. The job of the ego is to manage the expenditure of energy (called cathexis: the investing of energy into an object) to meet the competing demands of reality and the pleasure of the id. It may not be observable or measurable like the "physical" world but it is limited by it.

The ego is epiphenomenal. It rides atop the objective world described by physics and the unconscious realm of the id. Freud gives the metaphor of a man riding a horse, whose success entails satisfying the needs of the horse. He gets his power from the horse, his job is to direct the horse for his own needs as a conscious director working according to his foresight of environmental challenges (has a map I guess? I'm going a bit behind Freud's metaphor). But there is another demand on the poor ego, the superego. The superego is more complicated than I thought it was. Apparently it also gets its power from the unconscious despite being abstract. The superego is social morality. Although it seems abstract and universal like religion, it is inherently social. It emerges from the Oedipal desire to kill the father and love the mother. As this is not possible for the child, the child identifies with the father and seeks another woman to love. The female can also identify with the father apparently, but this isn't explained too much in this book. What happens is that the destructive desire of repressing the Oedipal desire becomes an ideal-self for the ego to achieve. The ego cannot fulfill its desire for the mother and hate for the father and must identify with them, and so the achievement of this is spurned by a negative emotion; guilt. This is explained in depth in other writings like Totem and Taboo, but the point is that the superego is an ideal ego which gets its power from repressed unconscious desire which internalizes social restriction.

With this tripartite model, conscious life seems very strained and weak. Freud says in Civilization and Its Discontents that "life as we find it is too hard for us". There are so many competing demands for the conscious self. The instincts, the external world, social obligations, and morality. But this is the cost of being a complex organism. Freud mentions that the long period of dependence on the parents from our Mammalian nature is responsible for this feeling of helplessness. We require so much to go right for us because of the complexity of our energy management and the limits of our budget. So we need to recognize the shortcuts that unconscious forces give us.

At the end of the Interpretation of Dreams Freud consoles us by saying we should not be held responsible for the seemingly immoral desires of the unconscious life.

"I think that the Roman emperor was wrong when he had one of his subjects executed because he had dreamt of murdering the emperor...would it not be right to bear in mind Plato's dictum that the virtuous man is content to dream what a wicked man really does? I think it best, therefore, to acquit dreams."

At the end of Ego and Id, he assured us that the id is neither moral or immoral. The superego of conscious is what provides morality. But we should not pretend that civilization can rid us of these undesirable feelings. These instincts in a controlled way make society and morality possible, and sure do take a load off of us. Surely the ego is at least strong enough to allow us to manage the instincts, fulfilling their needs.

Sensuous Animals and the Birth of Misery

Animals confront their own emptiness in the form of nature, external to its will, as a sensuous object. The sensuous object is an immediate object to consciousness, but it's continuation in existence forces the animal to confront its independence of the animals will. Those objects favorable and unfavorable to the animal will, the expression of its being outside the object, share an alien nature which must be overcome. The emptiness of animal life necessitates this domination of nature. The animal negates nature by the act of consuming it, destroying its alien-ness and adapting it to what is favorable to the animal will.

¨In this respect, what one can say to those who make assertions about the truth and reality of sensuous objects is that they should be sent back to the most elementary school of wisdom, namely, to the old Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus and that they have yet to learn the mystery of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine. This is so because the person who has been initiated into these secrets not merely comes to doubt the being of sensuous things. Rather, he is brought to despair (Verzweiflung) of them; in part he brings about their nothingness, and in part he sees them do it to themselves. Nor are the animals excluded from this wisdom. To an even greater degree, they prove themselves to be the most deeply initiated in such wisdom, for they do not stand still in the face of sensuous things, as if those things existed in themselves. Despairing of the reality of those things and in the total certainty of the nullity of those things, they, without any further ado, simply help themselves to them and devour them. Just like the animals, all of nature celebrates these revealed mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things.¨ Hegel-Phenomenology of Spirit

The act of negation is brought on by the despair of animal life. Animal existence is perpetuated by need, a lack of something. The lack of an object which belongs to consciousness. The being of sense certainty disappears with the separate will of nature. The vicissitudes of change, comprehended by the category of causality in the understanding undergirded by space and time, are what give power to the objects of consciousness. To have power of its own, consciousness must itself identify with sensuous objects. But it cannot be an identical relation.

Need results from the reality of nothingness. Only humans have the fear of death as animal life only fears deprivation of what is.

"The only good things he knows in the universe are food, a female and repose, and the only evils he fears are pain and hunger. I say pain and not death, because an animal will never know what it is to die; and knowledge of death and its terrors being one of the first acquisitions which man gains on leaving the animal condition." Jean Jacques Rousseau

Accordingly only humans or those animals approaching human consciousness have the capacity of self-improvement, which requires foresight. The foresight humans have, which undergirds reason, can be explained in physiological terms. But the impetus to greater intelligence is not a directive of nature. The overwhelming majority of life discovered so far is rather unintelligent or it is of a crude nature serving only survival. To contemplate ones existence is to remove the self from understanding the sensuous objects and their vicissitudes and understand them according to how one understands one self.

"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die." Friedrich Nietzsche-On Truth and Lie

We understand things according to our own empty nature, imaging that nature has teleology. That there is a purpose to the course of natural events.

Yes consciousness is empty. When we consider what can be said of sensuous objects that remains essential to them, it is the intuitions of space and time. But this reality is colorless, tasteless, soundless, odorless, and numb. To give content to consciousness is to engage with the sensuous objects

The truth is that the necessity of thought lies only in thought. It is by consciousness' own rules, its own necessity. Continually striving to identity with nature through unity, consciousness does impart necessity through its own actions but only to itself.

This loneliness that accompanies even the achievement of power over nature is where the need of recognition from another self-consciousness derives. Another consciousness makes the order and unity which thought provides to nature, through its relations, objective. We are not alone. Yet the existence of another consciousness limits the power of consciousness into self-consciousness. Moving beyond sense-certainty is self-certainty

Self-conscious self-certainty is also empty. Its needs derive from a lack of connection to nature rather than a lack of power over nature. To say I is I means almost nothing. It is in relation to something else that consciousness has any meaning.

The highest of our needs becomes embodied in social relations emptied of their sensual content, in the form of abstract ideas which retain the force of an alien will. This is the monotheist's God, which gives ethical demands but is not knowable to the senses. It is defined by its abstract power; omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent. The Gods of the pagans were closer to humans, but differed in the scope of their powers.

It is fitting that many of the philosophical arguments for God give the necessity of logical reasoning causal powers, which belong to the physical world. If I can conceive of the greatest possible being, then that entails its actual existence outside of thought. Unlike the emptiness of logical abstraction, God gets its appeal because being conscious itself it in some way is not limited by nature the way we are. Being all powerful, God is in the monotheist tradition usually the creator of the entire universe while being so powerful as to exist apart from it. The argument goes that if God made the universe then it follows whatever laws it wants. They need no justification, and the principle of sufficient reason is suspended. Sui Causa, self causation. Self explained. God is the thing in itself of sorts. God has power over nature, consciousness that isn't empty.

We thus see that man did not develop in isolation. Belief in God is a sign of the evolution of self-conscience.