Abstract
This paper is a comprehensive investigation of Freud’s views on technology and human well-being, with a focus on ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’. In spite of his thesis in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, I shall argue that Freud, always in some measure under the influence of Comtean progressivism, was consistently a meliorist: He was always at least guardedly optimistic about the realizable prospect of utopia, under the ‘soft dictatorship’ of reason and guided by advances in science and technology, in spite of due recognition in his later years of the possibility of annihilation through technological advances in warfare. The possibility of human annihilation, then, muffled Freud’s meliorism. Freud’s ‘muffled meliorism’, however, was not a quiet commitment to viewing technology as something good. Ultimately, Freud steered a middle course between techno-advocacy and techno-antagonism. The technologies of science, like the discoveries of psychoanalysis, were tools for humans that could be used for human betterment or, as war showed, for human degeneration.
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Transhumanists support the use of new sciences and technologies to enhance human capacities and diminish human deficiencies such as stupidity, pain, disease, aging, and involuntary death.
Singularitarianists argue for the possibility of a technological singularity—the technological creation of a benevolent super-human intelligence—and strive for its actualization. Such a superintelligence, programmed through ‘recursive self-enhancement’, can solve problems such as poverty, war, disease, and aging.
Cyberlibertarianism is a movement that essays to reconcile electronically mediated forms of living with libertarian ideas of human flourishing.
Extropianism is a form of transhumanist thought, which strives proactively and modestly for a continually improved human condition within the evolutionary framework of modern biology.
Transtopianism may be understood as the journey from the transtopian realm, where humans or artificial intelligences have become superhuman through technological advance, to the posthuman realm, a near-perfect technological paradise, where humans or artificial intelligences are themselves deities.
Following Mario Bunge, ‘The Philosophical Inputs and Outputs of Technology’, Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 170-5.
Following Arendt, I prefer the ‘human condition’ to ‘human nature’. Human nature is a fixed condition, while the human condition allows for flexibility. As Arendt says, ‘The human condition comprehends more than the conditions under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence’. Arendt, however, rejects any notion of a fixed human nature. Freud, in contrast, does have a changing notion of the human species over time, but change is developmentally fixed in a manner that resembles ontogenetic human development. In that regard, it scarcely follows a Darwinian pattern. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 8-11.
Such achievements, he adds in ‘The Future of an Illusion’, include human’s knowledge and capacity to control nature—i.e., human technology—as well as social regulations to adjust human relations—especially the distribution of resources (1927, S.E. XXI: 5-6).
Later, described economically: ‘Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual’s libido’ (1930, S.E. XXI: 83).
Sex is limited to the genitalia, object-choice is restricted to the other, and incest is strictly prohibited (1930, S.E. XXI: 104–5).
Herbert Marcuse, ‘The New Forms of Control’, Philosophy and Technology: The Technological Condition, eds. Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 207.
Hans Jonas, ‘Toward a Philosophy of Technology’, Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). 193.
Jacques Ellul, for instance, maintains that technology has become independent from economic, political, social factors, and even of ethics. It has destroyed everything of value, only to be the basis of a new human ethics. He says, ‘technology depends only on itself, it maps its own route, it is a prime and not a secondary factor, it must be regarded as an ‘organism’ tending toward closure and self-determination: it is an end-in-itself’, which threatens to rob persons of their freedom. Cf. Jacques Ellul, The Technological System, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Continuum Publishing Corporation, 1980), esp. 125 and 358, and The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Knopf and London Jonathan Cape, 1964).
Deferring throughout to the customary translation of Trieb as “instinct”, though “drive” is a translation more in keeping with the German.
Freud wavered on the notion of the ego being an agency whose energy source was independent of the id. In ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923, S.E. XIX: 30fn. 1 &46), he states baldly that the ego uses borrowed energy to fulfill its functions. In other works—‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920, S.E. XVIII: 50-2), ‘An Autobiographical Study’ (1925, S.E. XX: 56), ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’ (1933, S.E. XXII: 103), and ‘Outline of Psychoanalysis’ (1940, S.E. XXIII: 150–1)—he says plainly that the ego is the ‘reservoir of libido’.
Herbert Marcuse, ‘The New Forms of Control’, 411.
In Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau writes, ‘I almost dare to affirm that the state of reflection is a state contrary to nature and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal’ (Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1987), 42.
For Freud, the result of our incapacity to satisfy impulses immediately.
Winner maintains that the thought of turning back to an older, technically simpler tradition is foolhardy, as ‘the world that supported the tradition and gave it meaning has vanished’. Langdon Winner, ‘Luddism as Epistemology’, Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). 607.
For further discussion on Freud’s self as atomic or social, see Richard H. King, ‘Self-Realization and Solidarity: Rorty and the Judging Self', Pragmatism’s Freud: The Moral Disposition of Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 28–51.
See Nicomachean Ethics X.7–8.
His letters, of course, often give a different impression. For instance, he writes in a letter to Fliess on May 16 of 1897 about his discovery concerning dreams: ‘Oh how glad I am that no one, no one knows…’. No one even suspects that the dream is not nonsense but the fulfillment of a wish’. See also his short essay ‘On Transience’ (1916, S.E. XIV).
There is, of course, an abundance of evidence to suggest that he was, in practice, anything but open-minded on foundational theoretical issues, like statistical justification of psychoanalytic practice or the role of sexuality in human behavior. See e.g., Frank J. Sulloway, ‘Reassessing Freud’s Case Histories: The Social Construction of Psychoanalysis’, Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis, 153–192; Frank Cioffi, Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience (Chicago: Open Court, 1998); Richard Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Robert Holt, ‘The Current Status of Psychoanalytic Theory’, Freud Reappraised: A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Theory (New York: The Guilford Press, 1989); and Adolf Grünbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Cf. Fromm, who maintains that there are ‘universal criteria for mental health … valid for the human race … and according to which the state of health of each society can be judged’. One such proposition is that all humans share basic psychic qualities, which are psychologically discoverable and are the province of the psychoanalyst. Psychical health is psychical development in keeping with the characteristics and laws of human nature; psychopathology is development contrary to the characteristics and laws of human nature. Eric Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1955), 21–3.
Comte claimed to have discovered a ‘great fundamental law’ to which the human mind was subject: Each branch of human knowledge passes successively through a theological (fictive), metaphysical (abstract), and scientific (positive) stage. August Comte, Introduction to Positivist Philosophy, trans. Frederick Ferre (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1988), 1–2.
Philip Rieff, Mind of the Moralist, 335. See also 318–9.
See also ‘Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’ (1917, S.E. XVII: 139) and ‘Resistances to Psycho-Analysis’ (1925, S.E. XXII: 173).
Comte claimed that progress toward the final stage was seen to be inevitable.
Where he still clings to the notion of ego- and object-instincts.
First entertained in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920).
Cf. Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1984), 123–4.
Inconsistent with his thesis in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’. Freud’s meaning here is likely ‘whatever fosters the true growth of civilization…’.
See the seminal work of Heinz Hartmann on the primary and secondary autonomy of the ego, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: International Universities Press, 1939).
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I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of Sophia for helpful comments.
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Holowchak, M.A. Technology and Freudian Discontent: Freud’s‘Muffled’ Meliorism and the Problem of Human Annihilation. SOPHIA 49, 95–111 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-009-0160-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-009-0160-1