In one of the strangest (and most intriguing) passages of his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud suggests that human beings have a kind of nostalgia for our pre-animate existence. He notes that all displeasure in life stems from a state of tension—caused by a discord between what we have and what we want—and that much of human mental life is devoted to quenching this desire so that we might attain a state of repose. This condition of repletion appears to be the goal of all we seek—the ultimate telos of all our striving: a will-less state without any more effort or desire or motivation.
Indeed, the mystics of every religion have defined salvation in similar terms. The Buddhists have always been admirably literal and ingenuous about this. The goal of meditation is nirvana, non-existence, annihilation; the extinction of the self. But most other religious movements that have contemplated some kind of ultimate transcendence of the human plight have been led to speak in similar terms.
In his closet drama Axël—that great and notorious work of 19th Century French Decadent Aestheticism that so upset (yet tempted) Edmund Wilson, with its ultimately life-denying message (the ultimate heresy for any American; which is surely why it so intrigued, frightened, and yet attracted the great American critic Wilson)—Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam describes at one point his protagonist's efforts to attain esoteric wisdom. What he comes to discover is that all the teachings of his instructor in the occult amount to a kind of renunciation of the self—and ultimately, indeed, of all individual existence.
"Master," says Axël, "I know that according to the ancient doctrine, in order to become all-powerful, one must, within oneself, conquer all passion, forget all covetous desire, destroy all human traces—and subdue through detachment." (Guicharnaud trans. throughout.) But—it then occurs to him—such a state of complete salvation and freedom from desire resembles nothing so much as death. It requires a renunciation of life. And, Axël concludes (at least in this conversation), he is not willing to make this sacrifice: it's "too high a price for nothingness: [...] I do not wish to become a stone statue."
Freud would say that it is no coincidence that the highest state human beings can imagine—the transcendent condition all religious experience strives toward of achieving absolute repose; the end of all striving; the extinction of the self and of the self's desires—is really just a synonym for death. He writes that all instincts are conservative—they seek to recreate a prior state that has been lost. They seek Housman's "land of lost content," we might say—and the true secret kernel of that nostalgia—the final link of the chain of being, if we could trace it all the way back to its beginning—would be the inanimate condition.
And so, we do indeed yearn for life as "stone statues," pace Axël—if Freud is to be trusted. Or, perhaps it is better to say—for non-life, as such inanimate matter. "The attributes of life were at some time evolved in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception," writes Freud. "[...] The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavored to cancel itself out. In this way, the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state." (Strachey trans.)
I was reminded in reading this passage of Wilfred Owen's poem "Futility"—in which that great poet of war's pity contemplates the waste and hopelessness of a soldier killed in battle before his time. He ponders the great existential question of why Earth's organic processes set us in motion to live and strive in the first place (why they "woke once the clays of a cold star," as he puts it), if it was only to end like this. Why ever depart in the first place from the great pleasant state of eternal pre-animate repose from which we began? "O what made fatuous sunbeams toil," he asks, "to break Earth's sleep at all?"
Owen's poem is haunting not only because it awakens our compassion for the pity and waste and uselessness of war—but also because it speaks to that taboo yearning for the inanimate that lies in every human breast: the "ego-instincts," as Freud called them—which are also the death instincts. One is familiar from Freud's later writings with his concept of a death drive, or Thanatic urge. But here, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we seem to glimpse this theory in its moment of conception—and it is more plausible and intuitive than one might have believed.
After all, in moments of great sorrow, we do indeed tend to wonder "what made fatuous sunbeams toil / to break Earth's sleep at all"—we yearn for repose and surcease of striving. It is an instinctual drive most closely allied to pity, compassion, morality, and religion. It is in sorrow and in confrontation with existential dread that we seek out the temples. It is in compassion for human suffering that we are tempted to wish for the extinction of the whole human experiment with all its cruelty. The impulse to religion and morality are part of the death-drive—the life-denying drive; whereas the will to life is cruel.
At some point in pondering further along these lines, it appears to have occurred to Freud that he had really just recapitulated Schopenhauer. And so, he went back in a later edition to add a sentence acknowledging his debt to the great philosopher—who would certainly have agreed that morality and true religion were life-denying impulses.
But it is essential to realize that—for Schopenhauer—these were not points against them. He did not mean this at all in a derogatory sense. To the contrary, in his view, one ought to deny life; for the will to life was the root of all evil (that is why everywhere it is attended with shame and blushing).
The human animal in its moments of transcendence; when it recovers its sense of ultimate meaning; when through a confrontation with suffering or death it reaches the state of calm repose which can only come from the complete renunciation of hope—is really expressing its nostalgia and longing for the pre-animate state. The will to life—by contrast—is what upsets that state of changeless equilibrium (which can only be completely attained in death). It re-introduces desire, and with it—turmoil and inner tension; violence and strife with others; ambition and the lust for power. Life is the essence of evil.
So one could conclude, at any rate—going no further than Schopenhauer or Axël or the version of Freud who gave us this intriguing passage. But, as soon as we do so—we encounter an insurmountable contradiction. For if the dead soldier arouses our compassion in Owen's poem—if he makes us shake a fist of cosmic rage at the "fatuous sunbeams" that animated us in the first place—it can only be because our compassion longs to sustain life in others. Indeed, passages of Schopenhauer contain this same contradiction: he acknowledged that human pity was due precisely to recognizing and wanting to foster the will to life in others.
Whereas, suppose we followed through the consequences of the life-denying instincts to their ultimate conclusion. Suppose we decided that human life is not worth living, and that the compassionate thing to do would be to spare human life the suffering of its existence and its unfulfilled desires by simply ending it—say, in a nuclear explosion. But then, are we not destroying what we just claimed to seek to protect and aid? Or—suppose we were so aroused with indignation by the injustice that man inflicts upon man that we decided to eliminate man to punish him for his crimes and thereby avenge his fellow man (making of his victim our own victim in the very effort to avenge him!)?
The contradictions in such positions are obvious. But they have not prevented some misguided souls from trying to carry them out. A young man in California recently tried to detonate a bomb to destroy frozen embryos, purportedly because he wished to spare potential human babies a lifetime of future suffering—perhaps the first example on record of what could be called anti-natalist terrorism. Here was a man who took far too literally Heine's great aching line, "best of all is never to have been born." Fortunately, the man did not success in destroying any embryos. But he did, tragically, destroy himself. Futility, indeed.
In his Penguin Island—a misanthropic satire in the Swiftian vein—Anatole France writes at one point: "[S]ince the folly and wickedness of men are incurable, there remains but one good action to be done. The wise man will collect enough dynamite to blow up this planet. When its fragments fly through space an imperceptible amelioration will be accomplished in the universe and a satisfaction will be given to the universal conscience. Moreover, this universal conscience does not exist."
One could read this as a kind of manifesto backing up the anti-natalist extremists who bombed the fertility clinic; except for that last sentence, which shows France's saving sense of irony. For, he realized, as the good satirist must do, that there is an inherent contradiction in pursuing humanitarianism to the point of misanthropy. After all, there is no higher conscience than humanity. And so, if we condemn humankind through satire—it can only be in humankind's own name. If we are disgusted with humanity's crimes and follies against itself—it can only be because we cry out on behalf of an outraged humanity—we are outraged on its own behalf.
As Camus wrote in The Rebel: "[O]ne feels contemptuous in the name of something. If the world is a matter of indifference to the man who commits suicide, it is because he has an idea of something that is not or could not be indifferent to him. [... F]rom this act of self-destruction itself[,] a value arises which, perhaps, might have made it worth while to live." (Bower trans.)
If we condemn life for being cruel and evil—it cannot be that we therefore must seek to end life. For that would only be to compound the cruelty due to which we rejected it; it would make us more cruel than the cruelty we condemn, and thereby transform us into hypocrites. A truly life-denying form of compassion or morality would end up defeating itself. It ends in contradiction.
So too, a will to life that strives only to realize its own power and self-perpetuation through egocentric ambition and cruelty would end up contradicting itself as well—for the same reason. It would end up denying life to others in the name of fulfilling life.
And so, if the will to life and the death-instincts do in fact exist in some kind of perpetual conflict, as Freud suggests—it is a dialectical one. Neither can ever defeat the other fully without defeating itself thereby. Each needs the other in order to exist; let alone to reach its fulfillment. And so, perhaps it is a conflict that can never and will never be resolved, as long as human kind shall live. Or, perhaps, it is the sort of dialectic that is capable of a higher synthesis. And perhaps that, rather than the pure unmitigated death-drive, the pure unmitigated yearning for the pre-animate existence, is what is really involved in the religious state.
Perhaps that condition of transcendence, of extinction, of which all the religions speak—is not just a synonym for death; but rather of a hitherto unimaginable state of death in life; or life in death. Perhaps it is transcendent precisely because it seeks to attain that which has so far been impossible: the ultimate union of life and death; the higher synthesis of the death-instincts and the will to life. The marriage of Heaven and Hell, if you will allow me a Blakean reference.
Heaven—the land of the stone statues; the state of blissful repose and repletion that is inconceivable alongside human mutability and existence; with that root of all evil, reconciled at last—the will to live.
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