Informed Opinion

It's difficult to share Russell Jacoby's concern here:

How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy? Instead these masters of Western thought are taught in fields far from their own. Nowadays Freud is found in literature departments, Marx in film studies, and Hegel in German. But have they migrated, or have they been expelled? Perhaps the home fields of Freud, Marx, and Hegel have turned arid. Perhaps those disciplines have come to prize a scientistic ethos that drives away unruly thinkers. Or maybe they simply progress by sloughing off the past....

The divorce between informed opinion and academic wisdom could not be more pointed. If educated individuals were asked to name leading historical thinkers in psychology, philosophy, and economics, surely Freud, Hegel, and Marx would figure high on the list. Yet they have vanished from their home disciplines. How can this be?

So much for informed opinion then. The reason that Freud, Marx and Hegel are no longer taught is that while they're undoubtedly part of intellectual history, they're no longer of any significant relevance to their respective fields. Far from being a problem, this is surely a sign of a healthy culture. Reputation counts for nothing in the face of constant questioning. Outside this "informed opinion", the big three haven't survived because their work hasn't stood the test of time. (And there's such a dated air to that list - very mid-20th Century.)

In the case of Freud, if I can quote myself [might as well; nobody else will - Ed], I think this is relevant:

Psychoanalysis is a theory of the mind as developed by a highly ambitious man thoroughly at home with all of Western literature from the classical to the modern. As we now know, its supposed grounding in the therapeutic situation, in the rigours of scientific endeavour, is entirely spurious. Freud didn't cure anyone, or come to his conclusions through the hard work of trial and error. The analytic situation was merely the backdrop for what was really going on: myth-making on a grand scale.

Which explains why among all Freud's followers, the literary establishment are the most entrenched. It's just the sort of theory they'd appreciate, because it's true home is not science, but, precisely, Western literature. That's why they feel so at home there. It's Western intellectual and literary thought, as at the end of the 19th century, condensed into one all-encompassing theory. To use it to explain Western literature, as generations of academics have done, following Freud's example, is to hold up a mirror and believe you're seeing through a window. It's an echo chamber for the best that's been thought and written in Western culture, from sex to death and all points in between. Those who devour Freud's writings so eagerly do so because they want so badly to believe it all. How wonderful to have such a deeply satisfying theory that gets you from biology to culture in just a few short steps, throws in Sophocles to Shakespeare, Goethe to Nietzsche on the way, and explains it all in what seems to be such a rigorously scientific manner.

With Marx, well, it's not really my area, but we can at least say that wherever societies have claimed to be following his precepts, disaster has inevitably followed.

As for Hegel: it's difficult surely to conceive of a less profitable way to spend one's time than ploughing through Phenomenology of Mind. You can never quite pronounce a philosopher to be wrong, but really, can History be defined as the evolution of consciousness? No. Next question please. Which of course is glib, but sometimes it's a relief to be glib in the face of the high tide of Germanic idealist philosophy. Didn't Darwin blow all that away? The main reason for studying him now would be to understand Marx (see above). He was maybe the first of those philosophers where such an effort's required to comprehend what's being said that when you do glimpse some understanding through the tangles and thickets of dense prose, you're so pleased with yourself that you mistake that understanding for agreement. You take your insight into the man's thinking to be an insight into the way things really are. It's a trick that plenty of philosophers have used since.

Comments

[Alcuin]

"to hold up a mirror and believe you're seeing through a window"

What an extraordinarily apt description of how far too many literati see the world. I have become more and more suspicious of writers of fiction - they come to think the world they write about is the real world, leading the likes of Harold Pinter and Arundhati Roy to the most absurd political judgements.

As for political philosophy of all flavours, it is a bit like talking about temperature without realising that it is not a real property at all, but a metaphor for the mean motion of particles. There are times when political philosophy may be useful, but you have to realise that it is an imperfect description of an average behaviour od something far more complex than particles, viz. people. And Marx will always be trumped by Darwin.

[George]

Exactly (about Freud).

[Small bugaboo... it should be "As we now know, its..." (not "it's")]

[Mick H]

Indeed. Thanks for that. Now corrected.

[dearieme]

When Derrida was nominated for an honorary degree from Cambridge, for his contributions to Philosophy, there were protests from the Philosophy Faculty that no-one had consulted them. He had been nominated by (IIRC) Eng Lit.

[Andy]

Ah, yes, of course, the great Cambridge Philosophy Department. Now if you really want to waste your time, a good dose of British analytic philosophy is just the way to go.