Future of an illusion

the future of an illusion is a work of Sigmund Freud, published in 1927, under the title Die Zukunft einer Illusion .

Analyzes

With the assistance of the psychoanalytical theory Freud wondered about the future of the Occidental culture. “culture” (Kultur) and “civilization” are for him synonymous.

The human culture - I understand by there all it in what the human life rose with the top of its animal conditions and this in what it is different from the life of the animals, and I scorn to separate culture and civilization - presents, as one knows, two faces with the observer| future of an illusion, ED. PUF, p.6

To question to become to it civilization, the psychoanalysis privileges the field of the otherness, the exchanges of the men between them, the problem of the distribution of the goods, rather than that of the acquisition of the knowledge and the progressive domination of nature.

The first of these fields of investigation, Freud calls it “regulation of the human businesses” The men tend to regulate their intersubjective reports/ratios so as to obtain less possible displeasure for each one, for the greatest number. This task is political since it supposes to avoid the war. The bet is difficult, the men have antisocial tendencies (destruction of the other as well as of oneself), and do not like work spontaneously. Why? Work, according to Freud, is a play from which satisfaction is differed.

A majority of individuals is forced by a minority of privileged people maintaining a permanent conflict and a repression the desires. Crowd (analyzed in “collective Psychology and ego analyzes”) is inintelligentes and inaccessible to the arguments. It is necessary that they are forced by a controlling authority created with an aim of preserving civilization. But these controlling authorities are not more intelligent than crowd themselves and if a guide is detached some, it is by vital need and not for its capacities. The men interiorized the leading authority in the form of the “super-ego” with regard to the major interdicts at the base of any civilization. Constrained to obey chiefs, they obey more a representation of the chief that to a particular character who is only one momentary figure.

… one cannot exempt domination of the mass by a minority, because the masses are inert and deprived of understanding, they do not like the instinctual renouncement, cannot be convinced by arguments that this one is inevitable, and the individuals who compose them consolidate mutually by giving free course to their disordered state. Only the influence of exemplary individuals, that they recognize like their leaders, can bring them to services of work and renunciations whose the existence depends on the culture| future of an illusion, ED. PUF, p.7

The human desires which, in the name of the safeguarding of the species, remain nonsatisfied, are called deprivations. They have a direction because they are based on interdicts: the interdict of inceste, the cannibalism, the murder… and are integrated by the super-ego. The deprivations are generating cultural productions, the men substituent with these prohibited desires of the ethical and singular practices for each nation. These substitute practices are respected by fear of the punishment.

Other also dissatisfied desires are different natures and lead to frustrations. They do not have a direction because not being founded on interdicts: death does not have a direction (moreover the unconscious one does not recognize it). It anything else does not have a civilizing function being only one natural process. The man, speaking being, cannot admit it owing to the fact that there is nothing to say some. Most of the time he believes himself immortal, that arrives only at the others, but distresses himself if that touches a” close relation”. The men will equip with direction and will humanize nature (mortal) and its demonstrations. Thus is born a process called religion.

As for humanity as a whole, the life for the individual is heavy to support. The culture in which it takes part imposes him a batch of deprivations, the other men exempt a degree of suffering to him, either in spite of the regulations of the culture, or in consequence of the imperfection of this culture. Is added to it what the nature, not subjected to the constraint, inflicts to him like damage and which it calls destiny. A permanent distressed wait state and a serious attack with natural narcissism should be the consequence of this state. How the individual reacts to the damage caused by the culture and the others, let us know we it already; it develops, with the measurement of this damage, resistances against the devices of this culture, a hostility with the culture. But how is it put in defensive position against overpowers of nature, of the destiny which threaten it, him like all the others? | future of an illusion, ED. PUF, p.16

The first religious demonstrations are the animism, that is to say to equip the natural elements with intentions and human feelings.

Substitute secondary satisfactions with frustrations (imposed by nature) and with the deprivations (imposed by civilization) are born from repression. They are called artistic ideals and achievements. An ideal is narcissiquement satisfactory because that which defends it between in conflict with other ideals and it his appears to him of as much better. The functions of art, on the other hand, are anti-conflict, they exaltent the identification (a joint pleasure) and reconcile the elements of a community.

The substitute satisfactions born from frustrations occupy a special place since the man reacts to frustration (mainly the fact of being mortal) by the religious idea or “illusion”.

The illusion, contrary to the error which is an objective fault, is an erroneous belief, moved by the desire and subjectivity; it is indifferent to the effectivity. Freud differentiates it from the delirious idea which takes the place of the effectivity and replaces for the person who is affected.

The illusion thus remains in non-contradiction with a effectivity in addition assumed like such. Of course, if Freud holds for the religion the term of illusion, it does not exclude that it does not conceal also delirious ideas.

The animism will be replaced by a new illusion adapted better to the new economic situation. There will be gods whose function will be initially to reconcile the men with death (reversibility, passage towards another life…) then to soften the deprivations which civilization imposes, and finally to exorcize nature. With this phase, the religious ideas have as a function to compensate for as well frustrations as deprivations. The figure of the father becomes central then in the religious spirit of the men. The father east fears of the child who does not hope for of it less one protection of his share. From God, the man awaits the same service. The position of the god is fragile. If it orders with the natural forces it is necessary to convince itself that its ways are unsoundable, if it created only the nature, being given the unforeseeable way of which this one acts and the failure to reply of the god to human fear, it should be concluded that it gave up his creature. Because if it itself is subjected there it loses its divine statute. the men draw some by declaring the faith inseparable from the doubt. Arrived at a turning point in his history, the man makes endorse with the god the origin of civilization in addition to nature and charges it making with it comply with the rules. It concentrates divine qualities on only one god according to an unconscious mechanism that Freud explains in Traumdeutung: the condensation of several disparate desires in only one figure. God ends up being exactly identified to the father:

The people which arrived the first to such a concentration of the divine properties were not little to trust of this progress. He had released the paternal core which was from time immemorial dissimulated behind each figure of god; at the bottom, it was a return to the historical beginnings of the idea of god. Since God was a single being, the relations with him could recover the intimacy and the intensity of the report/ratio of the child to the father. However if one had so much made for the father, it is that one wanted to be rewarded in return, to be at the very least the single child with being liked, the elected people| future of an illusion, ED. PUF, p.20

The second part of the” Future of an illusion “is centered on the problem of the Christian faith: the religious idea is a dogma which claims an act of faith.

The most advantageous way to circumvent this problem is the doubt which allows the scientific activity not without tormenting obsessed. Another way of dodging the difficulty is to behave “as if” it were true. The trick of unconscious make of a keen faith a detachment which is that of the negation. The conscious one denies what the unconscious one retains what is the usual way in which the neurosis arises. It is frequent also to mask God behind abstractions “it is a force which exceeds us”, “it is something all the same”.

Only one attitude would not be nun: to recognize its impotence opposite nature. Any step aiming at comforting itself vis-a-vis this situation is inevitably nun. Under the terms of the principle of negation, atheism appears to be a religious attitude among others.

That one thinks of the situation present, impossible to ignore. We heard the consent which the religion does not have any more on the men the same influence that formerly (it is here about the culture euro-Christian woman). That, not because its promises became more modest, but because they appear to the less credible men. Let us recognize that the reason of this transformation is the reinforcement of the scientific spirit in the roadbases of the human society. It is not only. Criticism started the conclusive force of the religious documents, sciences of nature showed the errors which they contained, comparative research was struck by the fatal similarity between the religious representations that we will révérons and productions of the spirit of the times and people primitive| future of an illusion, ED. PUF, p.39

The implicit conclusion of Freud would be that the Western man does not escape God, being the heir to this civilization " euro-chrétienne". At most can it recognize that civilization is based on interdicts (laws) to survive and that the religion is only the consolation, the compensation of the men as well die deprived by the interdicts as frustrated by nature. In other words; the gasoline even of the religion is not the law in oneself: it is not either “natural”. It is located at a level where the man is a child in front of a father, in a register which is that of the neurosis, implies that the father did not die, is thus to fear, and that one can draw some from satisfactions of rewards etc

The future of the religious ideas as illusions appears flourishing in Freud. While at the same time science develops and should eliminate the causes from religious beliefs, this fact transforms traditional religious attitudes into atheistic attitudes, skeptics and other alternatives which mean only that the man is dissimulated, that there remained a child dependant on a father.

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