Freud and Morality, Part Three

All of this examination still leaves the basic question: why is Freud essential to understanding morality, the quest for people to become their best possible selves?

Rorty finally gets to this question by dispensing with the alternative models. Descartes keeps the mind in exactly the same place as the ancients and the Christians, as beings with defined purposes, using reason to prove our existence. Then Kant comes along and he tries to take the religion out, saying there’s a core morality in humanity even without a God. Then Sartre completes it:

It was perhaps predictable that the sequence of descriptions of this self that begins with Descartes should end with Sartre: the self as a blank space in the middle of a machine—an être-pour-soi, a “hole in being.”

Rorty is, of course, describing the Sartre of “Being and Nothingness,” his big, complicated, complete misunderstanding of Heidegger’s “Being and Time.” And Rorty has a point. It’s interesting to me that while Rorty is so much better when he uses his analytic philosophy background, slows down and takes it all an argument at a time, Sartre is the opposite, he is much more cogent when giving a breezy overview of his philosophy in a lecture like “Existentialism is a Humanism” than when he tries to systematize it all.

Rorty then goes on to give five reasons why Darwin is essential to understanding morality:

1. While Freud doesn’t do away with the human conscience, he makes it part of a bigger system, not superior to other elements and drives. And he shows that our personal values are developed in a highly idiosyncratic, accidental way, often in childhood.
2. At the same time, he didn’t denigrate our personal morality as something reductive of our experience, he placed in in equal importance to the human drives to create art, investigate science, or develop a philosophy.
3. He made the effort to know yourself something that gives people more and better tools to improve themselves, not as something that reveals a true nature.
4. He gave us a new vocabulary of human foibles and tendencies, which can fit into a strategy of character-formation, both as a person mission and as something that can help shape dramatic arts.
5. He broke some of the last chains that bind us to the Greek idea that we, or the world, have a nature that, once discovered, will tell us what we should do with ourselves. He left us able to tolerate the ambiguities that the religious and philosophical traditions had hoped to eliminate.

And what does Rorty hope we do with these tools? After admitting that even Freud ended up tying himself to a lot of stoic language, he hopes in time Freud gave us the vocabulary necessary to shape new human narratives:

By contrast, narratives that help one identify oneself with communal movements engender a sense of being a machine geared into a larger machine. This is a sense worth having. For it helps reconcile an existentialist sense of contingency and mortality with a Romantic sense of grandeur. It helps us realize that the best way of tinkering with ourselves is to tinker with something else—a mechanist way of saying that only he who loses his soul will save it.

Honestly, I don’t understand the difference between what Rorty describes here and what Sartre said in “Existentialism is a Humanism.” Perhaps they used slightly different vocabularies, but the end result is exactly the same. Sartre said that we need to act without hope, that we need to decide which values are most important to us and devote ourselves to them completely, no matter the results. We need to use our individuality as tools to elevate humanity. That’s the same as Rorty’s losing one’s soul to save it.

I want to end with one caveat about Freud, his vocabulary and his long term value. I mentioned in part two that the pure Freudian tool of discovery, psychoanalysis, is nearly dead. It’s has morphed into different forms of psychotherapy and been replaced with every conceivable modality of talking cures.

Rorty saw Freud as someone who would lift humanity out of categories. But if he were to return in 2024, he’d discover that categories are nearly all that young people talk about. Every young person seems to be looking for a way to fit into the LGBTQA+ spectrum. The plus is helpful in that it invites in allies–unquestionably a good thing–but also invites ambiguity and continued categorization. There are likely by now Aristotelean categories to describe how many dates people prefer to go out on before beginning a sexual relationship.

But the categories do not end with the micro-descriptions of sexuality. There are now multiple categories of neurodivergence, and young people are eager to fit in. They look at Myers-Briggs letters as if their personalities were determined at birth by dice rolls, and they were Dungeons & Dragons characters. What Hogwarts house do I properly belong to? How should I describe the fact that I don’t eat red meat, but do eat fish? Aristotle and his many lists have certainly not been banished by Freud, if anything he seems to have conquered Gen Z.

If just viewed as a matter of fun and icebreaking, there’s nothing wrong with finding the boxes where you feel most comfortable. But the social media age seems designed to fit people into boxes and never let them out. Sadly, Freud’s mission of helping everyone rewrite their narratives and discover their individuality seems to have been abandoned. Let’s see how this reality affects Rorty in the chapters ahead.