Returning to chapter two of “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,” Richard Rorty is making the strong claim that Sigmond Freud has done for morality what revolutionary thinkers like Copernicus, Newton and Darwin did for science. I continued to struggle with his argument. Then I came across this footnote in the text:
I have enlarged on this claim in “Freud and Moral Reflection,” in Pragmatism’s Freud, ed. Joseph Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
So I searched for the book and found a copy on the Internet Archive that I could check out as a library book an hour at a time. It includes a 20 page essay from Rorty that, in stark contrast to this chapter, is incredibly lucid and well argued. Sifting through it will require substantially more work from me, but it will be worth it.
Incidentally, today I also came across an essay by Harold Bloom in the New York Times Book Review from 1986 on a similar subject. The weird part about it: chapter two reads much more like a poor rewriting of Bloom’s essay than it does an encapsulation of Rorty’s larger piece. Harold Bloom has two styles of writing: incredibly detailed examination of text, based on close reading, and sweeping generalizations about both texts and writers, and their place in the literary canon. The Freud essay fell into the latter category. It did not serve Rorty well as a template.
But enough chapter 2 griping. Picking up where we left off, Rorty writes of Freud:
We can begin to understand Freud’s role in our culture by seeing him as the moralist who helped de-divinize the self by tracking conscience home to its origin in the contingencies of our upbringing.
I’m going to leave the book now and deal with Rorty on the more solid ground of his “Freud and Moral Reflections” essay. And before we can begin this discussion of conscience, Rorty has some important background to share about what makes Freud unique in intellectual history. He starts by quoting Freud about his mission:
Psychoanalysis seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.
Rorty finds this quote a little puzzling and very troubling:
Freudian discoveries are troubling even for pragmatists. It looks like somebody who is stepping into our shoes, somebody who has different purposes than we do. It looks like a person using us rather than a thing we can use.
The suggestion that some unknown persons are causing us (or, to stress the alienation produced by this suggestion, causing our bodies) to do things we would rather not do is re-centering in a way that an account of heavenly bodies (or of the descent of man) is not. One can be entirely pragmatical in one’s approach to life and still feel that something needs to be done in response to such a suggestion.
Rorty then suggests that once we come into contact with this concept, the natural inclination is to wish to kill it off. This makes the ancient Socratic notion of “know thyself” not just a piece of wisdom, but an imperative.
Saying that there are competing parts of ourselves is nothing new, it goes back to the ancient Greeks. But the old conception is of passions and animal energies within us that need to be tamed. The stoics especially viewed these drives like our internal stupid mob that must be tamped down by the rationality police.
Freud argues that the unconscious is actually the intellectual peer of the rational mind. It’s not a brutish, stupid part of us at all, but rather a sensitive, silly, backstage partner who often feeds us our best jokes and one liners. Instead of trying to tame our unconscious, we need to make it our partner.
Now Rorty begins his discussion of conscience. Freud tells us that every facet of our psyche is an extrapolation of childhood events, and none of them holds a privileged place above the other. Rorty asserts as well that nothing will bring the id, ego and superego together as one, either, we simply need to create a tolerance for the ambiguity. And we do this by creating redescriptions of our past.
The ultimate goal of this isn’t to create a perfect moral self, but to find the right redescriptions to enable positive change in your life. And here Rorty comes to a very important explanation that he desperately needed to include in chapter 2, but didn’t.
Morality can mean two different things. One is an attempt to be just in the ways that you treat others. The other meaning is about personal perfection, becoming the best person you can be. In this spirit, Rorty makes this important statement:
Like Freud, I am concerned only with the latter. Morality as the search for justice swings free of religion, science, metaphysics, and psychology. It is the relatively simple and obvious side of morality—the part that nowadays, in the wake of Freud, is often referred to as “culture” or “repression.” This is the side of morality that instructs us to tell the truth, avoid violence, eschew sex with near relations, keep our promises, and abide by the Golden Rule.
The story of progress in public morality is largely irrelevant to the story of the mechanization of the world view. Galileo, Darwin, and Freud did little to help or hinder such progress. They have nothing to say in answer either to the Athenian question “Does justice pay?” or to the Californian question “How much repression need I endure?” Freud, in particular, has no contribution to make to social theory. His domain is the portion of morality that cannot be identified with “culture.”
If I’d known this, I could have saved myself a few hundred words of Sartre that I shared yesterday. Regardless of that, Rorty’s argument is that the unconscious is a tool within all of us that provides a touch of genius, and getting to know that part of us is essential to freeing ourselves from what we consider our nature, to become:
increasingly ironic, playful, free, and inventive in our choice of self-descriptions.
In the next essay, I’ll explore how this kind of self overcoming, one that integrated rationality with the unconscious, helps create a different view of morality than one proposed by Aristotle, Kant and, by extension, Sartre.
I’m withholding judgment on whether I fully buy Rorty’s argument and will at some point bring Sartre back in to the discussion, but for now it’s a relief to discover that Rorty has some interesting things to say in chapter 2, even if I had to go elsewhere to find them.
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