Civilization and Its Discontents

By Sigmund Freud. Notes and excerpts:

"Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times."

"Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person."

"Happiness is essentially subjective." me: a complex arrangement of subjective units, each with its own unique "qualia" (and by qualia I mean the product of genotype, phenotype, memory and position). happiness for all is impossible. some happinesses will preclude others. happinesses can be mutually exclusive. "Our possibilities for happiness are restricted by our constitution." me: and by the environment. "We derive intense enjoyment only from contrast, never from the state of things."

"The narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental processes. As a last technique of living...he is offered that of a flight into neurotic illness."

"Religion restricts this play of choice and adaptation -- depressing the value of life, distorting the picture of the real world, and intimidating the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more."

Goethe:
Wer Wissenschaft und kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion;
Wer jene beide nicht besitzt, der have Religion!
(He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he who possesses neither of those two, let him have religion!)

Wilhelm Busch: "He who has cares has brandy too."

Todestrieb -- "death-drive", Trieb - drive, the instinct of destruction, of mastery, the will to power.
das Ich - "the I" or ego,
Eros -- "life-drive" the drive to combine organic substances into ever larger unities
Two Heavenly Powers -- centrifugal and centripetal, entropy and negentropy, disorder and order, yang and yin, distinction and unity, discord and harmony.

"Aggressiveness was not created by property." me: no, it was created by organic chemistry and biological distinction, as a strategy for 'das Ich.' The will to life of das Ich also created Eros as a strategy. Distinction and unity were combined and recombined forever after by the selfish gene, and the play goes on. When balance is lost, a rip-current forms -- of one kind or the other. A man appears to play the deuce.

Wherever we go, this "indestructible feature of human nature will follow." The reign of Todestrieb begets an Eros triumphant. But from the shell of victory Nemesis is hatched...harmony is the foreshadowing leitmotif of a new kind of master.

Trilling: "The Opposing Self" -- A firewall against cultural control it is not -- a too romantic phrase. Rather, it is an inevitability, a necessity; a cure, as it were.

The "oceanic" feeling of eternity, of oneness with the universe.

Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Hannibal: "Indeed, we shall not fall out of this world. We are in it once and for all."

What do men demand of life? "They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and remain so." Almost -- they strive after satisfaction; they are moved to quench desire, to satiate appetite, to accomplish self-elected goals and affirm self-elected identities. Happiness is an empty word. It is hard to bear a succession of fair days. (Goethe). Desires, always and forever, move on. (Heidegger, man as the caring animal).

The drive to become independent of Fate -- the will to power. Fate as Nature, Fate as environment, Fate as other people. Distinction is the essence of the will to power.

Beauty is health, the sublime pinnacle of existence. ("The pleasure before the fall." -- Goethe).

The pursuit of pleasure is ipso facto a drive of distinction, a centrifugal drive of atomizing "I's". As such it needs parameters, channels, conduits, restraints -- it needs these things to ward off distinction's dreaded descendants: dissolution and decay (I am an alliterative bastard!).