There was a lot going on the Vienna through the whole period from the turn of the century to the German takeover of Austria in 1938. In this connection, we have to discuss (as Edmonds necessarily does) one of the brightest stars streaking across the distinguished intellectual firmament of Vienna in the early 20th century: Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis itself raised the question: is this a science? Freud certainly thought it was. But what has to be true for a certain body of scholarship to be a science, or to be, perhaps more loosely speaking, scientific? The contrary term, for the Circle, was "metaphysics." The VC disdained metaphysics. Their manifesto said that the VC stood for "removing the theological and metaphysical debris of a millennia," and one is to imagine the adjective "metaphysical" pronounced with disdain as one reads that. Indeed, this is their major link with the philosophy of Auguste Comte, who invented the term "positivism"...
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Yesterday, I discussed a certain passage in Anna Aragno's contribution to an anthology about Psychoanalysis and the Mind-Body Problem, a book published by Routledge last year. I'd like to discuss something that bugs me about that contribution a bit more here. Aragno has written the book's chapter nine, entitled "A Revised Psychoanalytic Model of Mind and Communication in Body-Mind Continuity." The essay begins with a quote from Freud dated 1937, "For in the psychical field, the biological field does in fact play the part of the underlying bedrock." That sentence does support Aragno's general argument, as I laid it out yesterday. It supports it so conveniently that I naturally want to pursue the matter. Unfortunately, the source of that quote is not obvious. Aragno's endnotes reference five works of Freud, none of which was published (or translated into English) in 1937. So she has created a bit of a mystery. Googling the quote got me no res...
"Without Piaget's ... genetic-epistemology, arriving on the heels of Freud's death, or the integration of semiotic mediation,the fundamental continuity between body and mind, and therefore the translation from unconscious to conscious modes of thought, remained highly polarized and mired in physicalist metaphors describing, but not explaining, the functional/formal shifts in organization of a multi-tiered, polysemic, sign-infused psyche." I believe I've already mentioned in this blog the anthology in psychoanalysis and the mind-body problem published recently by Routledge. The above passage is drawn from that anthology, from an essay by Anna Aragna. The passage is quite difficult to follow (and no, not because I have removed it from a context that would otherwise have been illuminating -- it just IS.) But, abstracting where I can from the jargon, what I gather is this. Aragna sees the "fundamental continuity of body and mind" as both a premise and a p...
My recent reading includes PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM (2022), an anthology edited by Jon Mills. This is not one of those several-conflicting-points-of-view anthologies. Mills himself and the various authors involved all seem to share the point of view, though they approach it from different directions. Their contention, in a few words, is that psychoanalysis -- which these authors associate almost entirely with the work of Sigmund Freud and his most devoted followers -- implies the ontological position known as "dual-aspect monism." Specifically, the libidinous drive at the heart of Freudianism is neither material nor mental. It is a neutral sort of stuff, developed out of the body (which has the natural-selection defined drives to survive and to reproduce) but not simply a description of the body, yet again not mental stuff in a traditional sense of the term either. One way to think about the Freudian notion of "the unconscious" is pre...
Philosophers continue to wrestle with Freudian psychoanalysis. Case in point, Rudolf Bernet, a French thinker. In 2013, Bernet wrote a book on the subject which was widely praised, but which has only just now been translated into English under the title Force, Drive, Desire: A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, and published by the Northwestern University Press, focusing on Freud on the one hand and Lacan on the other. I'm looking today at a review of the book in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews , which tells me that one of Bernet's purposes is to create a philosophical etymology of the idea of "drive," or as Freud would have written it "trieb," from Aristotle to the point at which Freud and later Lacan picked up on it. [And since Freud's image is all to familiar, I have provided one of Lacan above.] If I can trust the reviewer -- Daniel J. Smith of the University of Memphis -- Bernet has a Heideggerian background. This means he "...
I recently watched, via Showtime, a seven-episode series by Kristie Allie called FAT ACTRESS, which aired in 2005. Allie plays a fictionalized version of herself. An actress struggling both to get her weight down and to get jobs consistent with her former fame as a star in CHEERS, and as the co-star (with John Travolta no less) in the LOOK WHO'S TALKING movies. One of the aspects of the character that I presume is fictionalized is that she is thoroughly and consistently self-delusional. She has two aides constantly around her who seek to protect her from the consequences of her delusions. In one episode, our protagonist stumbles into a raid on a homosexual men's hang out. It is a parking lot to a small park near her home (and near a "bat cave") where men meet up and engage in what the cops who raid them classify as public lewdness. She meets her ex-husband there, and he spends some time in a prison cell with her. He tries to break it to her that she was his bea...
My recent reading includes the book AMARNA SUNSET (2018), by Egyptologist Aidan Dodson. It is about the demise of ancient Egypt's 18th dynasty, the dynasty famous for the heresies of Pharaoh Akhenaten, who gets credit (or blame) for the creation of monotheism. Akhenaten was featured in Sigmund Freud's last book, MOSES AND MONOTHEISM (1939). Freud posits that the historical Moses was a devotee of Akhenaten, and that he and the other loyalists were exiled from Egypt after his hero's death, and followers of the older polytheism restored their own power and their gods. That was the origin of Judaism, on this view. There is much more to Freud's theory, and of course he brought psychoanalysis into the picture. He believed that the reason Moses didn't reach the promised land was that he was murdered, as an oppressive father figure, and that after he was murdered the memory of that dark deed was buried in the unconscious of the perpetrated, taking the form of exagg...
Adolf Grünbaum died on November 15. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh perhaps best known as an outspoken critic of Freudianism and psychoanalysis more broadly. Grünbaum wrote THE FOUNDATIONS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS:A PHILOSOPHICAL CRITIQUE (1984). This book was in its own way as much a criticism of Popper as of Freud. Psychoanalysis was the paradigmatic case of a pseudo-science for Popper. It was unfalsifiable and thus not a science, but rather a structure of ideas falsely marketing itself as a science. Popper, though, did not maintain that it was meaningless, or valueless. Had Freud considered himself an author of creative, imaginative, prose he would have been on the right side of the demarcation Popper sought to enforce. As Grünbaum tells the story, that was misguided. As the Popperian critique itself became conventional, some of Freud's admirers complied with it, on the master's behalf. And so was born the "hermeneutic" scho...
Years before Freud wrote his book, MOSES AND MONOTHEISM, he saw Michelangelo's famous statue of Moses in Rome and was spellbound. Being Freud, he had to analyze the basis for the statue's power, and he wrote a brief essay on the subject for IMAGO. Freud describes the sculpture this way: "The Moses of Michelangelo is represented as seated; his body faces forward, his head with its mighty beard looks to the left, his right foot rests on the ground and his left leg is raised so that only the toes touch the ground. His right arm links the Tables of the Law with a portion of his beard; his left arm lies in his lap." That's a straightforward description, which you can confirm for yourself dear reader with a look at the photo above. Why was it so spellbinding? The key passage in Freud's essay is this: "In his first transport of fury, Moses declined to act, to spring up and take revenge and forget the Tables; but [at the moment portrayed] he has...
This is from Freud's book, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). Freud throws off in a footnote a rather wild speculation about the origins of the human use of fire. I'll just paraphrase most of it, but I'll directly quote a bit at the end. In primordial days, lightning would strike the branches of trees and set them ablaze in this primordial forest, and primitive people would see the branches, still burning, fall to the ground. Then usually, one or more men would step toward the branch and put out the fire with their urine stream. Freud presumes that this was very pleasant for the men who did this: a form of sexual excitation, even. Why? Well … it was apparently an Oedipal thing. The father gods in the sky had sent the fire, the men of the tribe were conquering the father gods by pissing on the fire. Aaaaaah, feels good, eh? The real Prometheus? The real hero who tamed fire for the human species? That was a man who deprived himself of this pleasure by … N...
Insofar as any individual is THE public voice and face of anarcho-capitalism these days, it is not me (alas) but Stefan Molyneux. Be sure to spell his first name properly when looking for information about him. Though there is a well-known Stephen Molyneux, he's different person. At any rate, Stefan's rise to prominence has made me grateful that I am no longer editor of a publication on anarcho-cap and related subjects. Were I still at The Pragmatist, I would be expected to say something about him. And the sort of thing one can say must be either (a) ranks-closed against the mutual statist foe, or (b) shocking/edgy/pointed. My own reaction falls between the two stools. I have had no journalistic responsibilities within the world of libertarian and anarcho-capitalistic theorising since well before 2005, the year Molyneux founded what has been his punditry base ever since, FreeDomain Radio, out of Ontario. I fear that Molyneux, on balance, harmed rather than advanced...
A year or so ago I discovered that one of my relatives was reading some heavy-duty intellectual named Slavoj Zizek. Since she is merely an impressionable half century or so of age and her reading must be monitored, I asked her who Zizek was. She told me I could read about him on Wikipedia, and even sent me a link to the relevant article. I should mention that we've had philosophical differences before -- she was once an admirer of Ayn Rand, and I tried to persuade her that Randianism was crap. She now sees that it was crap, but I don't get any credit for my efforts at explaining this to her before she was ready. Instead, she thinks of me as an officious intellectual meddler, and does things like referring me to Wikipedia for accounts of her recent reading material. I read, but wasn't satisfied by, the Wikipedia article. There's more about Zizek in a Routledge publication, "Fifty Key Postmodern Thinkers." It is arranged in reference-work fashion, alp...
My recent reading includes THE QUESTION OF GOD (2002) by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi Jr., a contrast of the worldviews of C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, considered as exemplars of Christianity and secularism respectively. Early on there's a nice quote from Lewis' own memoir about his parents, I'll simply reproduce here. On his father's side were "true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily moved both to anger and to tenderness, men who laughed and cried a great deal and had not much talent for happiness." On his mother's side one encounters "a cooler race. Their minds were critical and ironic and they had the talent for happiness in a high degree." The situation bred in Lewis, on his own reflection, "a certain dislike or distrust of emotion as something uncomfortable and embarrassing and even dangerous." I'm not making any point here folks, I just enjoy the wording of that. But if you're curious whether th...