Preface:
Voloshinov went to the root of Freud’s theory and method, arguing that what is for him the central concept of psychoanalysis, “the unconscious,” was a fiction. He argued that the phenomena that were taken by Freud as evidence for “the unconscious” constituted instead a aspect of “the conscious”, albeit one that deviated ideologically from the rest of it, an “unofficial conscious” at odds with a person’s “official conscious.” For Voloshinov, “the conscious” was a monologue, a use of language, “inner speech” as he called it. As such, the conscious participated in all the properties of language, particularly, for Voloshinov, its social essence. And thus Voloshinov could argue that the unconscious was linguistic in nature because it was actually an aspect of the conscious, and, in turn, that it was a social phenomena because it was linguistic. This type of argumentation stood behind Voloshiniov’s charge that Freudianism presented humans in an inherently false, individualistic, asocial, and ahistorical setting.]
What, then, is the basic ideological motif of Freudianism?
Voloshinov went to the root of Freud’s theory and method, arguing that what is for him the central concept of psychoanalysis, “the unconscious,” was a fiction. He argued that the phenomena that were taken by Freud as evidence for “the unconscious” constituted instead a aspect of “the conscious”, albeit one that deviated ideologically from the rest of it, an “unofficial conscious” at odds with a person’s “official conscious.” For Voloshinov, “the conscious” was a monologue, a use of language, “inner speech” as he called it. As such, the conscious participated in all the properties of language, particularly, for Voloshinov, its social essence. And thus Voloshinov could argue that the unconscious was linguistic in nature because it was actually an aspect of the conscious, and, in turn, that it was a social phenomena because it was linguistic. This type of argumentation stood behind Voloshiniov’s charge that Freudianism presented humans in an inherently false, individualistic, asocial, and ahistorical setting.]
What, then, is the basic ideological motif of Freudianism?
A human being’s fate, the whole
content of his life and creative activity – of his art, if he is an artist, of
his scientific theories, if he is a scientist, of his political, program and
measures, if he is a politician, and so on – are wholly and exclusively
determined by the vicissitudes of his sexual instinct. Everything else
represents merely the overtones of the mighty and fundamental melody of sex.
If a person’s consciousness tells him otherwise about the motives and driving forces of his life and creativity, then that consciousness is lying. A skeptical attitude towards consciousness is the ever-present accompaniment to the development of Freud’s basic theme.
Thus, what really counts in a human being is not at all what determines his place and role in history – the class, nation, historical period to which he belongs; only his sex and his age are essential, everything else being merely a superstructure. A person’s consciousness is not shaped by his historical existence but by his biological being, the main facet of which is sexuality.
Such is the basic ideological motif of Freudianism.
In its general form this motif is nothing new and original. What is new and original is the elaboration of its component parts – the concepts of sex and age. In this respect Freud did genuinely succeed in disclosing an enormous wealth and variety of new factors and subtleties that had never before been submitted to scientific inquiry, owing to the monstrous hypocrisy of official science in all questions having to do with human sexual life. Freud so expanded and so enriched the concept of sexuality that the notions we ordinarily associate with that concept comprise merely a tiny sector of its vast territory. This must be kept in mind when making judgments about psychoanalysis: One ought not to lose sight of this new and extremely expanded meaning of the term “sexual;” in Freud, when, for instance, accusing psychoanalysis, as is commonly done, of “pansexualism.”
Psychoanalysis has, furthermore, revealed much that is surprising also in the matter of the connection between age and sex. The history of a human’s sexual drive starts at the moment of his birth and proceeds to pass through a long series of individually marked stages of development that by no means corresponds to the naïve scheme of “innocent childhood-puberty-innocent old age.” The riddle about the ages of man that the Sphinx asked Oedipus found in Freud a unique and surprising solution. How sound a solution is another matter, one we shall taken up later on.. Here we only need note that both component parts of the basic ideological motif of Freudianism – sex and age – are invested with thoroughly new and rich content That is why this motif, old in and of itself, has a new ring to it.
It is an old motif. It is constantly repeated during all those periods in the development of mankind when social groups and classes that had been the makers of history are in the process of being replaced. It is the leitmotif of crisis and decline.
Whenever such a social class finds itself in a state of disintegration and is compelled to retreat from the arena of history, its ideology begins insistently to harp on one theme, which it repeats in every possible variation: Man is above all an animal. And from the vantage point of this “revelation” it strives to put a new construction on all the values that make up history and the world. Meanwhile, the second part of Aristotle’s famous formula – “man is a social animal” - is totally ignored.
The ideology of periods such as these shifts its center of gravity onto the isolated biological organism; the three basic events in the life of all animals – birth, copulation, and death – begin to compete with historical events in terms of ideological significance and, as it were, become a surrogate of history.
That which in man is nonsocial and non-historical is abstracted and advanced to the position of the ultimate measure and criterion for all that is social and historical. It is almost as if people of such periods desire to leave the atmosphere of history, which has become too cold and comfortless, and take refuge in the organic warmth of the animal side of life.
That is what happened during the period of the break-up of the Greek city states, during the decline of the Roman Empire, during the period of the disintegration of the feudal-aristocratic order before the French Revolution.
The motif of the supreme power and wisdom of Nature (above all, of man’s nature – his biological drives) and of the impotence of history with its much ado about nothing- this motif equally resounds, despite differences of nuance and variety of emotional register, in such phenomena as epicureanism, stoicism, the literature of the Roman decadence (e.g. Petronius’s Satyricon), the skeptical ratiocination of the French aristocrats in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A fear of history, a shift in orientation towards the values of personal, private life, the primacy of the biological and the sexual in man – such are features common to all these ideological phenomena.
A now once again, starting at the very end of the nineteenth century, motifs of the same kind have been distinctly voiced in European ideology. For the twentieth century bourgeois philosophy the abstract biological organism has again become the central hero.
The philosophy of “Pure Reason” (Kant), of the “Creative I” (Fichte), of the “Idea and the Absoluter Spirit” (Hegel), that is, that which constituted the undeniably energetic and, in its way, respectable philosophy of the heroic age of the bourgeois (end of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century), such philosophy still commanded a full measure of enthusiasm for history and organization (in the bourgeois style). In the second half of the nineteenth century this philosophy became increasingly diminished and gradually came to a standstill in the lifeless and static schemes of the “school philosophy” of epigones (neo-Kantians, neo-Ficteans, neo-Hegelians) finally to be replaced in our time by the passive and flabby “Philosophy of Life” with its biologistic and psychologistic coloration and its implementation of every possible shade of meaning and combination of the verb “to live.”
The biological terms for the various organic processes have literally deluged the modern Weltanschauung: Efforts are made to find biological metaphors for everything, so as to impart an agreeable animation to whatever the cold of Kantian Pure Reason had benumbed.
All thinkers of modern times, such as Bergson, Simmel, Gomperz, the pragmatists [ James, ‘their father”] Scheler, Driesch, Spengler, despite the many points and ways wherein they disagree with one another, are fundamentally united under the heading of three motifs:
1 Life in the biological sense stands at the center of the philosophical system. Isolated organic unity is declared to be the highest value and criterion of philosophy.
If a person’s consciousness tells him otherwise about the motives and driving forces of his life and creativity, then that consciousness is lying. A skeptical attitude towards consciousness is the ever-present accompaniment to the development of Freud’s basic theme.
Thus, what really counts in a human being is not at all what determines his place and role in history – the class, nation, historical period to which he belongs; only his sex and his age are essential, everything else being merely a superstructure. A person’s consciousness is not shaped by his historical existence but by his biological being, the main facet of which is sexuality.
Such is the basic ideological motif of Freudianism.
In its general form this motif is nothing new and original. What is new and original is the elaboration of its component parts – the concepts of sex and age. In this respect Freud did genuinely succeed in disclosing an enormous wealth and variety of new factors and subtleties that had never before been submitted to scientific inquiry, owing to the monstrous hypocrisy of official science in all questions having to do with human sexual life. Freud so expanded and so enriched the concept of sexuality that the notions we ordinarily associate with that concept comprise merely a tiny sector of its vast territory. This must be kept in mind when making judgments about psychoanalysis: One ought not to lose sight of this new and extremely expanded meaning of the term “sexual;” in Freud, when, for instance, accusing psychoanalysis, as is commonly done, of “pansexualism.”
Psychoanalysis has, furthermore, revealed much that is surprising also in the matter of the connection between age and sex. The history of a human’s sexual drive starts at the moment of his birth and proceeds to pass through a long series of individually marked stages of development that by no means corresponds to the naïve scheme of “innocent childhood-puberty-innocent old age.” The riddle about the ages of man that the Sphinx asked Oedipus found in Freud a unique and surprising solution. How sound a solution is another matter, one we shall taken up later on.. Here we only need note that both component parts of the basic ideological motif of Freudianism – sex and age – are invested with thoroughly new and rich content That is why this motif, old in and of itself, has a new ring to it.
It is an old motif. It is constantly repeated during all those periods in the development of mankind when social groups and classes that had been the makers of history are in the process of being replaced. It is the leitmotif of crisis and decline.
Whenever such a social class finds itself in a state of disintegration and is compelled to retreat from the arena of history, its ideology begins insistently to harp on one theme, which it repeats in every possible variation: Man is above all an animal. And from the vantage point of this “revelation” it strives to put a new construction on all the values that make up history and the world. Meanwhile, the second part of Aristotle’s famous formula – “man is a social animal” - is totally ignored.
The ideology of periods such as these shifts its center of gravity onto the isolated biological organism; the three basic events in the life of all animals – birth, copulation, and death – begin to compete with historical events in terms of ideological significance and, as it were, become a surrogate of history.
That which in man is nonsocial and non-historical is abstracted and advanced to the position of the ultimate measure and criterion for all that is social and historical. It is almost as if people of such periods desire to leave the atmosphere of history, which has become too cold and comfortless, and take refuge in the organic warmth of the animal side of life.
That is what happened during the period of the break-up of the Greek city states, during the decline of the Roman Empire, during the period of the disintegration of the feudal-aristocratic order before the French Revolution.
The motif of the supreme power and wisdom of Nature (above all, of man’s nature – his biological drives) and of the impotence of history with its much ado about nothing- this motif equally resounds, despite differences of nuance and variety of emotional register, in such phenomena as epicureanism, stoicism, the literature of the Roman decadence (e.g. Petronius’s Satyricon), the skeptical ratiocination of the French aristocrats in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A fear of history, a shift in orientation towards the values of personal, private life, the primacy of the biological and the sexual in man – such are features common to all these ideological phenomena.
A now once again, starting at the very end of the nineteenth century, motifs of the same kind have been distinctly voiced in European ideology. For the twentieth century bourgeois philosophy the abstract biological organism has again become the central hero.
The philosophy of “Pure Reason” (Kant), of the “Creative I” (Fichte), of the “Idea and the Absoluter Spirit” (Hegel), that is, that which constituted the undeniably energetic and, in its way, respectable philosophy of the heroic age of the bourgeois (end of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century), such philosophy still commanded a full measure of enthusiasm for history and organization (in the bourgeois style). In the second half of the nineteenth century this philosophy became increasingly diminished and gradually came to a standstill in the lifeless and static schemes of the “school philosophy” of epigones (neo-Kantians, neo-Ficteans, neo-Hegelians) finally to be replaced in our time by the passive and flabby “Philosophy of Life” with its biologistic and psychologistic coloration and its implementation of every possible shade of meaning and combination of the verb “to live.”
The biological terms for the various organic processes have literally deluged the modern Weltanschauung: Efforts are made to find biological metaphors for everything, so as to impart an agreeable animation to whatever the cold of Kantian Pure Reason had benumbed.
All thinkers of modern times, such as Bergson, Simmel, Gomperz, the pragmatists [ James, ‘their father”] Scheler, Driesch, Spengler, despite the many points and ways wherein they disagree with one another, are fundamentally united under the heading of three motifs:
1 Life in the biological sense stands at the center of the philosophical system. Isolated organic unity is declared to be the highest value and criterion of philosophy.
2 Distrust of consciousness. The attempt
is made to minimize the role of consciousness in cultural creativity. Hence the
criticism of the Kantian doctrine as a philosophy of consciousness.
3 The attempt is made to replace all,
objective socioeconomic categories with subjective psychological or biological ones.
This explains a tendency to view history and culture as deriving directly from
nature and to disregard economics . . .[extended discussion of the above named
philosophers] . . .
Thus, we see that the basic ideological motif of Freudianism is by no means its motif alone. The motif chimes in unison with all the basic motifs of contemporary bourgeois philosophy. A sui generis fear of history, an ambition to locate this world precisely in the depths of the organic – these are the features that pervade all systems of contemporary philosophy and constitute the symptom of the disintegration and decline of the bourgeois world.
Freud’s notion of the “sexual” is the extreme pole of fashionable biologism. It gathers and concentrates in one compact and piquant image all the separate elements of modern-day anti-historicism.
Thus, we see that the basic ideological motif of Freudianism is by no means its motif alone. The motif chimes in unison with all the basic motifs of contemporary bourgeois philosophy. A sui generis fear of history, an ambition to locate this world precisely in the depths of the organic – these are the features that pervade all systems of contemporary philosophy and constitute the symptom of the disintegration and decline of the bourgeois world.
Freud’s notion of the “sexual” is the extreme pole of fashionable biologism. It gathers and concentrates in one compact and piquant image all the separate elements of modern-day anti-historicism.
What should
be our [Marxist] attitude towards this basic theme of cotemporary philosophy?
Is there any substance to the attempt to derive all cultural activity from the
biological roots of the human organism?
The abstract biological person, the biological individual – that which has become the alpha and omega of modern ideology – does not exist at all. It is an improper abstraction. Outside society and, consequently, outside objective socioeconomic conditions, there is no such thing as a human being. Only as a part of a social whole, only in a through a social class, does the human person become historically real and culturally productive. In order to enter into history it is not enough to be born physically. Animals are physically born but they do not enter into history. What is needed is, as it were, a second birth, a social birth. A human being is not born as an abstract biological organism but as a landowner or a peasant, as a bourgeois or a proletarian, and so on – that is the main thing. Furthermore, he is born a Russian or a Frenchman, and he is born in 1800 or 1900, and so on. Only this social and historical localization makes him a real human being and determines the content of his life and cultural creativity. All attempts to bypass this second, social, birth and to derive everything from the biological premises of the organisms existence are vain and doomed beforehand to fail: Not a single action taken by a whole person, not a single concrete ideological formation (a thought, an artistic image, even the content of a dream) can be explained without reference to socioeconomic factors . . .After all, 'the essence of man is not an abstraction inherent in each separate individual. In its reality it is the aggregate of social relationships'”* . . .
*Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach from The German Ideology
The abstract biological person, the biological individual – that which has become the alpha and omega of modern ideology – does not exist at all. It is an improper abstraction. Outside society and, consequently, outside objective socioeconomic conditions, there is no such thing as a human being. Only as a part of a social whole, only in a through a social class, does the human person become historically real and culturally productive. In order to enter into history it is not enough to be born physically. Animals are physically born but they do not enter into history. What is needed is, as it were, a second birth, a social birth. A human being is not born as an abstract biological organism but as a landowner or a peasant, as a bourgeois or a proletarian, and so on – that is the main thing. Furthermore, he is born a Russian or a Frenchman, and he is born in 1800 or 1900, and so on. Only this social and historical localization makes him a real human being and determines the content of his life and cultural creativity. All attempts to bypass this second, social, birth and to derive everything from the biological premises of the organisms existence are vain and doomed beforehand to fail: Not a single action taken by a whole person, not a single concrete ideological formation (a thought, an artistic image, even the content of a dream) can be explained without reference to socioeconomic factors . . .After all, 'the essence of man is not an abstraction inherent in each separate individual. In its reality it is the aggregate of social relationships'”* . . .
*Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach from The German Ideology
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