Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their
current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.”
37
And
indeed, the several decades succeeding the writing of these sentences in
1930 would be a time of unparalleled slaughter and brutality in world
history.
Although Freud had offered his audience a predominantly pessimistic
diagnosis, his tone should not, he says, be read as cautioning any spe-
cific value judgments. “My impartiality,” he adds, “is made all the
easier to me by my knowing very little about these things.” Neverthe-
less, what Freud does know “for certain . . . is that man's judgments of
value follow directly his wishes for happiness—that, accordingly, they
are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. ...I can offer
them no consolation: for at bottom that is what they are all demand-
ing—the wildest revolutionaries no less passionately than the most vir-
tuous believers.”
38
Freud was surely correct in foreseeing a prosperous,
if discontented, future for the hardworking would-be gods devoted to
crafting prostheses.
Freud's use of “consolation” (
Trost
) is striking and unexpected. It is
unexpected because clearly it is not what would-be prosthetic gods are
seeking, and hence the lack of an offering is not something they would
even notice. Consequently, the gift of consolation appears to be precisely
what Freud can offer to himself and those who would join him in his
heroic Wissenschaft. To those, that is, who would bear their fate of
unbrotherliness and incessant progress like a man, as Weber said. For
these German men, the key affect to be achieved is double: uprightness
in facing up to the limits of science as well as the deceptions of the world,
and equally the hope of consolation. But the consolation is bitter medi-
cine for these thinkers still living in the shadow of the death of God and
its related demystification of an unchanging human nature. Their posi-
tion is ever so close to nihilism. They both are living in a world in which
Friedrich Nietzsche's assertion that humans would rather value some-
thing than nothing at all still holds sway: an active nihilism is better than
a reactive one. Freud's and Weber's pathos and bathos turn on that
hauntedness.
Consolation, however, need not be so bitter, and in English it falls on
the sweeter end of a spectrum of physiognomy.
Consolation
is semanti-
cally layered. In English, the transitive verb
to console
means to “allevi-
