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The Darwinian Left
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12031 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1987 |
3,907 Words |
| Author
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Lee Congdon
Lee Congdon writes regularly on modern literature. He teaches
eastern European history at James Madison University. |
THE MANUFACTURE OF EVIL
Lionel Tiger
New York: Harper & Row, 1987
345 pp., $20.50
During the decade of the 1960s, radical theorists worked overtime to reclaim Freud for the camp of progress. I say "reclaim" because the Viennese neurologist had burst on the cultural scene as a prophet of scientific enlightenment and a sworn enemy of hypocrisy and obscurantism, particularly those forms that religious authorities were said to retail. Owing to the insights of psychoanalysis, he believed that he was uniquely qualified to dismiss religion as an illness, "the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity." Once necessary to curb men's instincts in the interest of communal harmony, creedal faiths had become anachronisms in an age of science and reason. With this message, Freud won a reputation not only as a sage, but as someone at the cutting edge of progressive thought.
But there was another side to Freud. Like Tolstoy and Thomas Mann, he had read and been profoundly affected by Arthur Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy. Schopenhauer had identified the Will as Kant's "thing-in-itself," the ultimate reality behind the individual "representations"--including human beings--that constitute the world of appearance. Because this cosmic Will is insatiable, we are forever longing, forever unhappy. In Freud's updated version of this pan-tragedy, we are primarily creatures of instinct, perpetually at odds with those civilized institutions that prevent what another pessimist, Thomas Hobbes, described as a "war of every man, against every man." Ceaselessly frustrated and discontent, we experience our only
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