Freud - Civilisation and Its Discontents Flashcards
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilisation is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
What does the common man understand by his religion?
1/ A system of teachings and promises that explains to him, with enviable thoroughness, the riddles of this world
2/ Assures him that a careful providence will watch over his life and compensate him in a future existence for any privations he suffers in this.
The common man cannot imagine this providence otherwise than as an immensely exalted father.
All of this is so patently (clearly, without doubt) infantile, so remote from reality and so untenable. Yet so many defend it with pathetic rearguard actions.
Propitiate - win or regain the favour of a god or spirit by doing something that pleases them
The life imposed on us is too hard to bear. We cannot do without palliative measures.
Candide (Voltaire): cultivate one’s garden and scholarly activity.
Of such palliative measures there are 3 kinds:
1/ Powerful distractions: gardening, scholarly activity
2/ Substitutive satisfactions: e.g. art - an illusion that contrasts with reality, but which can diminish misery. This is thanks to the role that imagination plays in the mental life.
3/ Intoxicants, which anaesthetise us to misery.
No one talks about the purpose of life for non-human animals.
What we call happiness in the strictest sense of the word arises from the fairly sudden satisfaction of pent-up needs. By its very nature it can be no more than an episodic phenomenon. Our prospects of happiness are already restricted by our constitution.
Suffering threatens us from 3 sides:
1/Our own body - doomed to decay and dissolution
2/ External world/Nature
3/ Our relations with others
Deliberate isolation affords the most obvious protection against any suffering arising from interpersonal relations.
Ultimately, all suffering is feeling.
The most effective method of influencing our constitution is the chemical one - intoxication.
We achieve most if we can sufficiently heighten the pleasure derived from mental and intellectual work.
Satisfaction is derived from illusions.
The mild narcosis that art induces in us can free us only temporarily from the hardships of life; it is not strong enough to make us forget real misery.
It is asserted that each of us behaves rather like a paranoiac, employing wishful thinking to correct some unendurable aspect of the world and introducing this delusion into reality.
Religion is the special case in which substantial numbers of people, acting in concert, try to assure themselves of happiness and protection against suffering through a delusional reshaping of reality.
Religions of mankind must be described as examples of mass delusion.
We never have so little protection against suffering as when we are in love. We are never so desolate as when we have lost the object of our love.
The aesthetic approach to the purpose of life affords little protection against the sufferings that threaten us, but it can make up for much.
There is no advice that would be beneficial to all; everyone must discover for himself how he can achieve salvation.
By forcibly fixing human beings in a state of psychical infantilism and drawing them into a mass delusion, religion succeeds in saving many of then from individual neurosis.
