Category Archives: philosophy

Freud on mourning the past

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In 1915, Sigmund Freud wrote a short essay entitled “Transience.” Just over a century later, during the Coronavirus pandemic, the philosopher Jonathan Lear wrote “Transience and Hope” about returning to Freud’s essay in a time of COVID-19, the climate emergency, and the resurgence of authoritarianism. Now, Lear has passed, adding one more layer of pathos to their dialogue.

Freud’s piece turns out to be political, but it begins with a personal memory. “Not long ago,” he says, he went on a “summer walk through a smiling countryside” with a “taciturn friend” and a “young but already famous poet.” Many commentators have identified this poet as Rilke, but Lear thinks the whole story is fiction.

In any case, Freud and the poet argue. The poet is unable to enjoy the beauty of nature because it will fade with the coming fall, “like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour that men have created or may create.” Freud has the opposite feeling, that transience only “raises the value of the enjoyment.” He adds, “A flower that blooms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account any less lovely.” But neither the poet not the silent friend is convinced by Freud.

Freud says that his friends could not accept the transience of beauty because there was “a revolt in their minds against mourning.” He explains that we have a natural inclination to love–first ourselves, then other objects. When an object of love is lost, we cling to it anyway, which is the painful stage that we call mourning. However, mourning “comes to a spontaneous end,” allowing our love to move to new objects. In a later essay, Freud will explicitly distinguish the healthy, temporary process of mourning (which ultimately frees us to love something new) from “melancholia,” which is stuck in place.

The final paragraph of “On Transience” explains what the story is really about:

My conversation with the poet took place in the summer before the war. A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of our science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed forever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.

In 1914, Europeans like Freud had lost an object of their love–life before the war–and they were mourning it. To make matters harder, they had strongly identified with prewar culture and taken pride and hope in it. They were like a widower who not only misses his deceased partner but also mourns his own lost role or place in the world as a spouse. (This is my analogy, not Freud’s or Lear’s.)

Dr. Freud has a prescription. Mourning passes, and the same will happen to Europeans as the war moves into the past. “When once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.”

Mourning involves, among other emotions, a recognition of the value of what was lost. Thus, for someone like Freud to mourn his optimistic youthful days before August 1914 was to recognize their worth. His sadness reveals that it had been good to pursue medical science in Vienna.

In this case, however, the prewar culture had yielded an unspeakably terrible war. Therefore, the culture was not only over but also discredited. If Freud could travel back in time, perhaps he should not enjoy prewar Vienna (or Paris) but regard it with dismay as the predecessor of a global slaughter. Perhaps Freud and his contemporaries were not like people mourning loved-ones who had died innocently, but like people whose lovers had been unmasked as villains. Worse, the mourners had been part of the lost and discredited world.

When Freud went for his country walk, he and his friends knew that the flowers would fade. But that was not the flowers’ fault. Watching them wither would not negate their value while they bloomed, and the friends could fully appreciate new buds when they returned (as normal) the following spring. In contrast, the First World War revealed that prewar European society, which had seemed so progressive to Freud’s generation, had been deeply corrupt all along.

I am disagreeing here with Freud. He thinks that the negative feelings of his contemporaries are symptoms of mourning, which is healthy but should not be allowed to last forever. Their mourning reflects an authentic and appropriate appreciation for life before the war. They now realize that the past was “fragile,” but this recognition should not detract from its value. Their job is to create good things anew.

It is much harder if we think that something that we have lost is not only transient and absent but was never as valuable as we had previously believed.

I am often nostalgic for the polity and society that I knew as a young adult and up through the Obama Administration. I realize that many people who were less fortunate than I felt less positive about things then, as did people who were more radical than I. I am simply reporting my subjective state. I now experience mourning for that time. The questions is whether my mourning is appropriate because the past was good, or whether it is naive and self-justifying.

Lear’s main objective is to help us to see that mourning reflects a degree of appropriate appreciation for the past, and we can continue to make good things. We should recognize the fragility of what we had built but not reject it all. This is difficult if we blame the past that we miss for what has gone wrong.

Source: Sigmund Freud, “On Transience,” 1915 (just “Vergänglichkeit” in the original, without a preposition), translated by James Strachey in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, pp. 305-7, discussed in Jonathan Lear, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (Harvard, 2022). See also: the politics of nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be; nostalgia in the face of political crisis; there are tears of things; and Rilke, The Grownup

consider the octopus

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Ancient Greek members of the Skeptical School taught methods or habits that helped people to live better. One method involved pondering how different the world might seem to different animals, considering that other species have diverse types of eyes, ears, and tongues; preferences and aversions; and perhaps whole senses unknown to us.

Skeptics said that we are animals and not fundamentally different from the “so-called irrational animals.” Meditating on examples of animal psychology would prevent people from believing that their own experience was true or that the pursuit of truth was possible. In turn, suspending judgment was a path to inner peace and good treatment of others.

In this spirit, consider the octopus, as described in detail by the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith. People who study this animal almost universally conclude that it is curious, intelligent, and interactive and that each octopus has a personality that persists over time. Yet the species is so remote from us on the evolutionary tree that it is like an alien visitor to our planet. Or we could be the aliens on theirs.

For one thing, an octopus has quite different senses from ours, such as suckers that each have 10,000 sensors and eyes of a fundamentally different design. Since an octopus lives underwater and has a soft and flexible body, its whole relationship with its environment must be profoundly different from ours.

I gradually became who I am over many years–the first period now barely a memory for me–and I was deeply connected to other people from the start. I have persisted for almost six decades, building up (and losing) memories. An octopus emerges from an egg and for lives for two years, if it’s lucky, before it dies of old age. Its combination of substantial intelligence and a brief lifespan is unusual on earth and would presumably give it a different sense of time from mine.

An octopus doesn’t have a brain, because its complex nervous system is distributed through its body, and its arms have considerable autonomy. “Octopuses [may] not even track where their own arms might be” (p. 67). Nevertheless, each octopus functions as a coherent organism with an individual personality.

I think of myself as one thing, my body parts as something a bit different (because I control them imperfectly), and the external world as something distinct from both my self and my body. This experience deeply influences my assumptions about fundamentals like self and other, thought and matter, cause-and-effect, intention, and the objective world. It is hard to believe that an octopus feels the same way, yet my experience is no more valid or true.

If you doubt that an octopus has enough mental capacity to have a model of its own world, fine—just imagine an extraterrestrial creature with a similar design as an octopus and 10 times as many neurons. It doesn’t matter whether an alien like that exists on other planets, only that it is plausible. The thought-experiment is enough to tell us that we experience just one of many possible worlds.

Sources: Sextus, Outlines of Pyrhhonism (see 1.13:61 on humans as animals); Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). See also: thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition; ‘every thing that lives is holy’: Blake’s radical relativism;

the politics of nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be

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I believe Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. coined the phrase “politics of nostalgia” in a 1955 article in which he observed, “Today, we are told, the bright young men are conservatives; the thoughtful professors are conservatives; even a few liberals, in their own cycle of despair, are beginning to avow themselves conservatives.”

This article is light but disdainful. Schlesinger dismisses the intellectual conservatives of his day as “irrelevant” and a “hothouse growth.” They feel nostalgic, and they officially endorse a principled form of conservatism that respects ancestors and inherited ways. But the USA “is a dynamic and expanding economy” whose elites are not landed aristocrats but plutocrats. So the real power on the right is not conservatism but business, which seeks lower taxes and less regulation and welcomes rapid change.

Schlesinger wrote a long time ago, and nostalgia seems much more widespread today, when relatively few people celebrate a dynamic economy or its attendant technological and social advances. Even our plutocrats (Silicon Valley barons) often sound scared of the future or bitter about present obstacles to their genius.

Not only is MAGA nostalgic, but so are never-Trump conservatives and, I think, many across the broad spectrum of the left. To be sure, progressives insist that progress occurred in living memory, especially on social issues. Nevertheless, they (or perhaps I should include myself and say “we”) tend to be deeply nostalgic for a remembered time when society seemed to be moving in the right direction and when crises–from climate change to polarization–had not reached their current levels.

Analytically, it might be worth distinguishing these political attitudes:

  • Despair: the attitude that things cannot or will not improve.
  • Fear, in the sense of Judith Shklar’s “Liberalism of Fear” (1989). Shklar’s starting point: “somewhere someone is being tortured right now.” Her philosophy is “a response to these undeniable actualities, and it therefore concentrate[d] on damage control.” She is “entirely nonutopian,” motivated by memories of disaster, not by hope for a better state. Her main recommendation is to limit state power.
  • Caution based on pessimism. Montaigne (1588) writes, “Our morals are extremely corrupt and have an amazing tilt toward getting worse; among our laws and customs, several are barbaric and monstrous: however, because of the difficulty of putting ourselves in a better state and the danger of further decline, if I could plant a peg in our wheel and stop it at this point, I would do so willingly.”
  • Nostalgia: A bittersweet appreciation for a past state, combined with regret for its passing. Nostalgia is compatible with hope, and it need not imply pessimism. However, the following common features of nostalgia can be obstacles to progress or can simply prevent clear thinking:
  1. Nostalgia often assumes that a harmonious and integrated condition continued over a whole span of the past. “This is how things were back in the day … This is how my life was back then …” In contrast, we often perceive our present selves and our current society as inconsistent or even contradictory and as constantly changing (Hart 1973, Brewer 2023). This contrast biases us against the present.
  2. Envy easily attaches to nostalgia. We wish that we could be like the people back in the time for which we feel nostalgic. We may envy individuals or groups who benefited from causing those good times to end for us. However, as Walter Benjamin notes, we never seem to envy the people of the future. Someone living in 1925 might have anticipated the amount of technological and economic progress that has occurred since then, yet they didn’t envy us. Likewise, we don’t envy our successors, even if we are optimistic. Envy is problematic because it is zero-sum and promotes conflict.
  3. Nostalgia can erase the salutary kind of fear that Shklar recommends. Near the beginning of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera’s narrator says that everything is bathed in nostalgia in the face of dissolution, even the guillotine. People feel nostalgic for moments of crisis and action, such as the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” (Wordsworth). They forget the violence, confusion, failure, and vices of the moment. Of course, good things also happened, but nostalgia distorts our estimation and causes us to discount present dangers.
  4. Nostalgia suggests that the best choices were obvious and makes us angry at those who chose badly, or self-critical if we think that we were unwise. We think: Why didn’t they (or we) prevent harmful change? But we always act under conditions of deep uncertainty and confusion, and the best choices are rarely obvious until it is too late.
  5. Nostalgia tends to discourage action. It is not a sharp analysis of trends that can recommend concrete reforms to restore broken institutions or to reverse declines. Nostalgia is a hazy, elegiac, twilight feeling; an attitude for spectators rather than actors.

To summarize: Nostalgia can cause symptoms of bias, envy, complacency, anger and/or disdain, and passivity. As one who exhibits all of its symptoms, I recommend trying to avoid it.

See also: nostalgia in the face of political crisis; phenomenology of nostalgia; nostalgia for now.

Sources: Judith N. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed. Liberalism and the moral life. Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 27, 26; Montaigne 2.17 (“Of Presumption”), my trans.; Marshawn Brewer, “Sketch for a Phenomenology of Nostalgia,” Human Studies 46.3 (2023): 547-563; J.G. Hart “Toward a phenomenology of nostalgia,” Man and World 6 (1973), 406-7; Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte (1940), II.

The Art of Solitude

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I first explored similarities between Montaigne’s Essays (1580-88) and the ancient Buddhist texts called the Pali Canon (particularly the “Chapter of Eights”) on this blog in August 2024. I have been developing these ideas into a longer article or perhaps a portion of a book. One shared theme (among several) is that we should be committed to other people rather than to our own ideas. We can be unattached to our opinions while still deeply caring.

Last week, I discovered and read Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude (2022), which emphasizes precisely the same pair of texts. He translates the whole Chapter of Eights and discusses Montaigne at length.

Batchelor is a great writer on solitude. He does not define it as being alone, but rather as being deeply attentive to what’s going on inside yourself. In fact, you can hide away in your room or retreat to a forest and yet be mentally consumed by other people and events, or you can genuinely talk and listen to others while retaining an inner space. Montaigne makes these points well, as does the Pali Canon.

Montaigne, a Renaissance European, knew nothing of Buddhism, but he was impressed–at least during a phase of his life–by the Skeptical philosophy of the Greco-Roman author Sextus. The Skeptical School traced its origins to Pyrrho of Ellis, who had visited India with Alexander the Great in 327-326 BCE and may even have become a Buddhist. In my view, the strongest evidence of Buddhism’s influence on Greek Skepticism is this passage, which purports to represent Pyrrho’s teaching:

Whoever reflects on how to attain happiness must see three things: First, what are matters like by nature? Second, in what state should we approach matters? And last, what happens to those who are in this state? … Matters are without an essential nature, unmeasurable, and unfixed, and for this reason neither our senses nor our opinions are true or false. For this reason, therefore, do not believe them, but be without opinions and without biases and without agitation. …

Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio Evangelica, 14.18.1-4 (my trans)

Christopher Beckwith (2017, p. 32) shows that this text “is so close to” a specific, early Indian Buddhist text “that it is virtually a translation of it,” and he argues that some of the Greek words were coined to translate Sanskrit words that were important in early Buddhism, such as anatman (without an essential nature) and duhkha (unsteady or unstable).

At any rate, Greek Skepticism developed during a period when Greeks were in dialogue with Indian Buddhists in a large region where many schools and sects taught overlapping ideas. And Montaigne was strongly influenced by Greek Skepticism.

Batchelor is less interested in such historical links and influences than in sheer similarities. He presents Montaigne as having rediscovered principles of solitude, meditation and compassion from personal experience and experimentation, which is how Montaigne describes his own journey.

Montaigne is far more empathetic and compassionate than Sextus, who often tries to attain inner peace by ridiculing the various views of past philosophers. There are more than 1,300 quotations from Latin alone in Montaigne’s Essays (Selevold 2010), and his usual mode is to demonstrate that he appreciates the quoted author’s stance without necessarily endorsing it. By introducing compassion to Sextus’ Skepticism, Montaigne actually moves closer to Buddhism (without knowing anything about that tradition).

There is pretty good evidence that Montaigne also remained a believing Catholic, in private as well as public life, which means that some of his deepest commitments were incompatible with Buddhism. But he could write long passages in which his religious commitments appear irrelevant and he is fully guided by ideals that we could call compassion and mindfulness. Just for example:

When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been absorbed by external events for part of the time, I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude and to myself.

Montaigne, 3:13 (“On Experience”), my trans.

Batchelor beautifully translates this and other relevant passages–as I can attest, since I have been translating an overlapping set of excerpts from Montaigne for my own use. (I do wish, however, that the Yale Press book provided notes or other references, because it is quite a task to locate Batchelor’s original texts.)

Batchelor also writes about meditation and his own experiments with hallucinogens. Those sections are engaging and interesting but beyond my capacity to evaluate.

Sources: Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude (Yale University Press 2022); Christopher I. Beckwith, Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (Princeton, 2017); Sellevold, Kirsti. “Quotation in Montaigne’s Essais: communication across time and contexts–A case study,” Symbolae Osloenses 84.1 (2010).

See also: Montaigne and Buddhism; three takes on the good life: Aristotle, Buddha, Montaigne; Montaigne the bodhisattva?; does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?

Montaigne’s equanimity

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Michel de Montaigne famously imagined that he could learn not to mind dying. After all, there is no rational reason to fear not existing, nor to regret that you won’t still be alive in 100 years, for you weren’t alive a century ago. But if we are not going to fear death when we meet it, then there is no reason to fear it now. By imagining that we will face death without fear and working back from our last day to the present, we can remove distress.

As Montaigne says, no soul is “at rest so long as it fears death,” but if the soul can remove that fear, “then it can boast something almost surpassing the human condition: anxiety, torment, fear, and displeasure can no longer lodge in it” [1.20, my translation].

In this early essay, “To Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne canvasses many arguments against the fear of death. Nevertheless, the general air is of a person who is indeed anxious about dying, and whose everyday experience is colored by that fear. He seems to be clinging to logical arguments that are not really changing his state of mind.

Montaigne’s last essay, “Of Experience,” revisits the same topic in a spirit of greater equanimity, even though the author is old and close to his real death. Here he suggests that he has absorbed the arguments against fearing death and has made them part of his character:

Yet I am prepared to lose life without regret, as something that is losable by its very nature, not as something that is annoying and troublesome. Besides, only for those who delight in living is it appropriate to dislike dying.

There is a certain housekeeping involved involved in enjoying life; I enjoy it twice as much as others do, for the degree of enjoyment depends on the amount that we apply ourselves to it. Especially at this hour, when I perceive my life to be so brief, I want to extend its weight; I want to arrest the promptness of its flight by the promptness of my senses, and to compensate for the hastiness of its passing by the vigor of its use: since my possession of life is shorter, I must make it deeper and fuller.

Others feel the sweetness of contentment and prosperity; I feel the sweetness as they do, but not as something passing and slipping away. Also, we must study, savor, and ruminate on life to give appropriate thanks to the One who grants it to us.

Other people enjoy all pleasures as they do the pleasures of sleep, without knowing them. So that even sleep might not escape me so stupidly, I have sometimes found it good to have my sleep disturbed so that I can catch a glimpse of it.

I consult with myself about my own contentment, I do not skim over it. When I have become sorrowful and disgusted, I probe that state and bend my reason to meditate on it. Or do I find myself in some tranquil setting? Is there some pleasure that tickles me? I do not let myself be swindled by my senses, I associate my soul with it, not to engage in it, but to agree with it, not to lose myself in it, but to find myself there; and I let my soul see itself reflected in this state of thriving, to weigh and estimate its good fortune, and to amplify it. [Montaigne 3.12 (“Of experience”)]

If, as a young man, Montaigne had known that he would later achieve equanimity, then he would have known that he didn’t have to fear death in the present. Unfortunately for him, he could only advocate equanimity, not predict that he would achieve it until he actually did (or at least, so he claims).

See also: Montaigne the bodhisattva?; Montaigne and Buddhism; three takes on the good life: Aristotle, Buddha, Montaigne; three truths and a question about happiness (2011)