Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Discontents
In 1930, Sigmund Freud, already in a somber, pessimistic mood about
the state of the world, one reinforced shortly thereafter by the victories
of the National Socialists, published
Civilization and Its Discontents
.
Perhaps defiantly, Freud conspicuously continued the scientifically
detached stance he had fashioned in
The Future of an Illusion
. This
stance, with its resigned distance and its self-control, was both the price
to be paid and the constraint required, or so it seemed to Freud, to pursue
successfully the project of demystifying humankind's deepest illusions.
By means of this ascetic exercise, Freud believed he could, or had already,
achieved essential insights that others, mired in illusion, lacked. That lack
(Freud was lucid about this point) provided its own benefits in the
world—benefits that those pursuing science would have to forgo as the
price of insight. Basically, for Freud, what had to be abandoned was
hope, or at least, childlike or naive hope.
It would seem to follow that abandoning this type of hope was a nec-
essary, if not definitive, step toward maturity or perhaps wisdom. But is
there such a thing as scientific maturity or wisdom? Much turns on the
term
Wissenschaft
, science. And what it offered. And to whom. For
several reasons that appear pertinent to the question modern science
poses to our understanding of human nature and well-being, I take
Freud's claims and the position he claimed them from as a starting point
to explore these issues. The hope is that such an effort might help us
to better understand—and renew—the historical complexities of
Wissenschaft as well as the commitment to making it a central compo-
nent of a human life.
One of Freud's central claims was that humankind, for most of its
history, had unknowingly projected its ideals onto its gods. Recent
advances in civilization, however, had complicated this millennial
process; not only were some of these delusionary processes now under-
stood (thanks to the scientific advances Freud himself was spearheading)
but additionally, and this was more complicated yet, humankind was
close to turning its ideals into realities: “Man has, as it were, become a
kind of prosthetic God.” This double turning of increased self-awareness
and increased power constituted the diacritic of the present. What Freud
held to be certain was: first, that the process would continue indefinitely
