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