Posts Tagged Sigmund Freud
Lila Notes, Pt. 3: Pirsig’s Teleological Hierarchy
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, PEL's Notes on February 6, 2012
In Pt. 2, I described Pirsig’s notion of dynamic vs. static quality, which should sound a lot like naturalistic moral intuitionism as discussed in our Hume/Smith episode. All there is is people (or, more widely for Pirsig, any being that is capable of reacting affirmatively or negatively to anything: judging agents, we might want to call them), and morality can only be founded on the moment-to-moment judgments of value that we issue, because there’s simply no other available ontological source for a good empiricist. But to avoid this collapsing into a whimsical subjectivism, we have to say that these judgments get ossified into systems, and in many cases, we’ll want to listen to the established system instead of our whim. But how do you decide in which cases to do this, and how to you judge between the different established systems? Pirsig proposes a hierarchy of purpose-generating systems to help clarify conflicts (this is from 158-9 of Lila):
What the evolutionary structure of the Metaphysics of Quality shows is that there is not just one moral system. There are many. …There’s the morality called the “laws of nature,” by which inorganic patterns triumph over chaos; there is a morality called the “law of the jungle” where biology triumphs over the inorganic forces of starvation and death; there’s a morality where social patterns triumph over biology, “the law”: and there is an intellectual morality, which is still struggling in its attempts to control society…
Carol Gilligan on Freud and “Voice”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on September 6, 2011
We mentioned on the episode Gilligan’s opposition to Freud.
In this clip, Gilligan discusses a methodological difference in analyzing women’s self-reporting (much of the content of In a Different Voice):
Watch on YouTube.
She claims that rather than imposing your theory (in this case that the patient knows more than she is willing or able to say) on the patient, you need to derive your theories from what the patients say. The notion of hearing your aggressor’s voice as your own has echoes of our Hegel discussion of self.
What do you all think? Do any of our readers here with some prior Gilligan reading experience feel that we failed to give an adequate account of her work on the ‘cast?
-Mark Linsenmayer
Schizophrenia, Philosophy & Freud
Posted by Seth Paskin in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on October 5, 2010
While we’re following up on the Freud podcast, I caught this interesting show from ABC National Radio in Australia on schizophrenia and philosophical investigation. The show is called All in the Mind, hosted by Natasha Mitchell. In this episode, she interviews Dr Paul Fearne, who suffers from schizophrenia but managed to acknowledge it, get help and get it under control with medication and therapy. After doing so, he both published parts of his personal journal, writes poetry and got a PhD in Philosophy. Here’s the link:
All in the Mind interview with Dr. Paul Fearne
The discussion is fascinating in itself, but he does specifically address the value of philosophical investigation in understanding schizophrenia, mentioning among other things:
- The difficulty in defining ‘schizophrenia’ and Wittgenstein’s thoughts on definition (e.g. ‘game’)
- Freud’s concept of schizophrenia
- Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of schizophrenia
We didn’t specifically touch on schizophrenia in reading Civ and it’s Discontents, but thought this might be of interest to our fans.
–Seth Paskin
Mark Steel on Sexual Fixation
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on October 4, 2010
Here’s an “Open University lecture” on Freud that does not at all resemble a lecture, but is instead a somewhat informative comedy monologue with TV-news-magazine-style visuals.
Highlights here are more detail on Freud’s fascination with cocaine and some funny details about his love life. There’s not much explicitly on the philosophical aspects of his work here; it just gives a summary of his development of psychotherapy. It’s still mostly entertaining, and I must say that this is about my favorite kind of British accent to listen to: very Monty Python.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Freud on Religion: A Quiz
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on October 3, 2010
Given that the subject of our Freud episode was Civilization and its Discontents, we were pretty quick regarding Freud’s specific points on religion, which are pretty interesting in themselves, in that his view is for practical purposes very much in line with the modern scientism of someone like Dawkins but acknowledges elements of Kantian agnosticism. For a refresher, here’s a short quiz I found on the web that puts forth the basic points in a painless manner.
Why would you want to answer quiz questions instead of just reading a two paragraph summary, that I could write right here? Well, because it’s like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, and who doesn’t like those? (Do you young people under 30 even remember those?) Just like when reading one of those books, I suggest you click on all the wrong answers first, as the author Harry Gensler, philosophy prof. at John Caroll University in Cleveland) here gives a few interesting remarks like “that’s not Freud’s view but it is the view of this guy and this other guy.”
If you like this, Gensler has a number of other quizzes and study aids on ethics, philosophy of religion, and several of the figures we have covered or will cover in the podcast.
To learn more about Freud’s view here, take a gander at his book The Future of an Illusion (Buy it here).
-Mark Linsenmayer
“Working Notes” Blog on the Epistemology of Freudian Drives
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on October 2, 2010
Mike Johnduff, a Princeton grad student in English whose “Working Notes” blog includes a number of interesting short essays on figures in Continental philosophy (e.g. Heidegger, Marx, Foucault, etc.), has written several pieces on Freud, including this article what we can know of psychological drives according to Freud.
He states:
Though drives are determined by that somatic process whose being stimulated is represented by the instinct (their source), in mental life itself we know them only by their attempt (within mental life) to remove that stimulation of the somatic process–what Freud calls the “aim” of the drive. (This is the reason why later Freud will say that drives are also only present to the unconscious–just as much as consciousness–through their “representatives.”)
To put it a different way, though drives get their character (roughly, “what distinguishes one from another,” as Freud goes on to say) from the sort of stimulation which they represent, they can’t be seen in mental life except in terms of how they try to rid themselves of this character. We can’t look at a drive then and see how the character was formed. We can only postulate that it was formed from looking at how it proceeds to try and get rid of this form–that is, how it uses this form.
Jane McAdam Freud: Art and the Good Life
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on October 1, 2010
Here’s a short interview with the granddaughter of Sigmund Freud talking about the goals of her art:
What’s the good life, according to Ms. McAdam Freud? Be your own boss. Have friends, love your life. Finally, lead an analyzed life, and she does this through art.
Read the rest of this entry »
Freud vs. C.S. Lewis: A Roundtable on Religion and Morality
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch on September 30, 2010
Here we see guys in goofy Lewis and Freud costumes putting forward simplistic alternative views on the origin of moral sentiments to set up a round-table discussion:
The discussion interestingly displays no evidence of these folks having read Freud’s discussion of morality in Civilization and its Discontents, specifically his claim that experience in fact does not support the utility of Christian morality, but that its central tenet, “Love thy Neighbor as Thyself,” is an absolute psychological impossibility, and so nonsense as a commandment.
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Slavoj Zizek on Applying Psychotherapy to Culture
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on September 29, 2010
Here is a somewhat startling video of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek talking briefly about trying to apply the insights of psychotherapy (which deals with individuals) to cultures:
His remarks about being able to relate an “anonymous social field” reflect Heidegger’s conception of “Das Man,” i.e. our tendency to conform to social norms, seeing through eyes that are not authentically our own.
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Mad Men on the Death Drive
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings on September 28, 2010
A bit of thoughtful pop culture to kick off our Freud blog deliberations:
In what I believe was the pilot episode of Mad Men, the 1950s advertising professionals that are the show’s main characters are thinking about how to do a campaign for a cigarette company now that it was becoming common knowledge that smoking causes cancer. The company’s researcher pulled out Freud’s notion of the death drive, saying that really, people want danger on some level, so an effective ad campaign should play on that: acknowledge that the product is deadly but say “so what?”
Now, this suggestion ends up getting dismissed by both the main character and, when it is later brought up in a moment of desperation, by the client. (A paraphrase: “So we tell them that since you’re going to die smoking anyway, you should die with us? That’s crazy!”)
The scene points out an obvious initial objection to Freud’s idea of putting forth the sex drive and death drive as fundamental explanatory forces for human behavior. If these forces both worked overtly, then a campaign like this should actually work: just as sex is used to sell, death should work too, so long as it’s glammed up as advertising is. …And certainly this could be an explanation for the appeal of slasher horror and other forms of entertainment, but really, the apparent danger of thrill rides, scary movies, dark music, and the like is only attractive because it’s actually perfectly safe for us. Catharsis seems a better explanation than any actual will towards death; we may want to go on a scary ride at Six Flags, but as soon as we hear that that ride has caused actual permanent injuries, attendance tends to go down considerably.
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Episode 26: Freud on the Human Condition
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on September 25, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:05:09 — 114.6MB)
Discussing Civilization and its Discontents (1930).
What’s the meaning of life? Well, for Sigmund Freud, an objective purpose rises or falls with religion, which he thinks a matter of clinging to illusion, so to rephrase: what do we want out of life? To be happy, of course, yet he sees happiness as a matter of fulfillment of pent-up desires, meaning it’s by its nature temporary. Yet we can’t shake off its pursuit, and so we’re in a bind, and have a number of strategies for obtaining some satisfaction: some compensation for what we have to repress in order to live in a society that forces us to repress our innate desires.
Read the book online or purchase it.
End song: “The Easy Thing” by New People from The Easy Thing (2009).
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The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
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