The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Yet, good European that he may have thought himself, Nietzsche in a certain sense stands outside the Western tradi- tion. He is a total revolutionary, more total, if that is possible, than Lawrence [113] or Marx [82]. At times he seems to reserve his admiration for only a few: the pre-Socratics, Sуcrates himself [12], and a few "artist-tyrants," such as Frederick II of Sicily. He indicts Christianity as a "slave moral­ity." He rejects the traditional virtues of compassion, tolerance, mutual accommodation, in favor of the "will to power," a phrase variously interpreted. He detests the liberal democratic humanitarianism of Mill [72], whom he called, with typical courtesy, "that blockhead.^,> He exalts the heroic, the "Dionysian," and, it would seem, the irrational and intuitive elements in the human mind. He has no interest in the ordi- nary conception of progress, substituting for it a somewhat misty doctrine of eternal cyclical recurrence, and stressing the positive power of heroic suffering, exultant pessimism, and tragic experience. On the whole, not a comfortable chap.

No one can deny his extraordinary, though uncontrolled, gift for language; his command of invective and irony; the vari- ety of his poetical images; and the torrential, paradoxical inven- tiveness of his tortured mind. If taken in large, uncritical doses he can be not only antipathetic but dangerous; the God he denied seems to have formed him to attract the lunatic fringe. On the other hand it is true that, like Ibsen [89] and Shaw [99], he helped to point out to his century and ours many of our shams, cowardices, and hypocrisies.

Suggestion: Use the edition called The Portable Nietzsche, if available. The translations are intelligent, the notes and other apparatus helpful. You might read the whole of Zarathustra, uneven as that strange work is; the selections from Beyond Good and Evil; Toward a Genealogy of Morais and Ecce Homo, and perhaps The Antichrist.

C.F.

_ PART FIVE

cO

SIGMUND FREUD

1856-1939

Selected Works, including The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and Civilization and Its Discontents

Freud died September 23, 1939. In his memory W.H. Auden [126] wrote a superb poem from which I quote:

To us he is no more a person

Now but a whole climate of opinion.

That is the heart of it. To the discomfiture or horror of many, Freud is one of the major components of our mental world. There is hardly an area of thought, and there are few of conduct, untouched by him, his disciples, his ex-disciples, or his opponents. You will have to determine for yourself whether this is a good thing, a bad, or a mixture of both.

When we talked about Shakespeare [39] it was suggested that most of us think we know him when what we really know is some handed-down opinion of him. That is true of Freud. Many of us still vaguely believe that his doctrines encourage sexual license, or that "he sees sex in everything," or that he did little beyond shifting the confessional from the grating to the couch. A reading of his major works will clear up these and dozens of other vulgar erro rs.

Freud began his training in medicine, specializing in clini­cai neurology. In 1884 he became interested in some work done by Breuer, with whom he later worked. Breuer had with some success treated a female hysteric by encouraging her to "talk out" her past under hypnosis. The case is classic; it

marked the birth of psychoanalysis, whose actual origin Freud, himself no humble type, always credited to Breuer. By replac- ing hypnosis with "free association" Freud found the key that unlocked his system. By 1896 he had named it psychoanalysis. The rest of his life was devoted to the widest possible develop- ment of the new conception of mental processes. Against mis- understanding, abuse, and moralistic prejudice he worked unceasingly, deepening his insights as he extended his experi- ence. In 1938 his books were burned by the Nazis. As he was already suffering torture from cвncer of the mouth, they waived their usual methods of dealing with the weak, the good, the great, and the non-Aryan. In return for a large ransom they permitted Freud to remove to England, where he passed the last months of his phenomenally productive life.