Beyond the Pleasure Principle (17 page)

Once we do so, however, we are entitled to feel astonished at how little agreement there is amongst biologists on the question of ‘natural death’, indeed at the way the whole concept of death loses all substance the moment they touch it. The fact that, in the case of the higher animals at least, there is a distinct average lifespan does, of course, tend to support the notion that death occurs for intrinsic reasons; but this impression is cancelled out again by the circumstance that individual large animals and giant trees reach a very great age that we are as yet unable to calculate. According to Wilhelm Fliess's grand conception, all the vital phenomena of an organism – and doubtless its death as well – are tied to the fulfilling of a specific timescale that expresses the dependence of two living substances, one male, one female, on the solar year. But when we look at how easily and how extensively external factors can influence the timing of physiological events in plants in particular, accelerating or delaying them, we see a picture that is sharply at variance with the rigidity of Fliess's formulae, and at the very least raises doubts as to whether the laws he postulates do indeed reign supreme.

In our view, the most interesting treatment of the topic of the
lifespan and death of organisms is to be found in the publications of August Weismann (1882, 1884, 1892 etc.). It was Weismann who proposed the differentiation of living matter into two parts: the mortal and the immortal. The mortal part is the body in the narrower sense of the word, the ‘soma’; it alone is subject to natural death. The germ-cells, however, are potentially immortal inasmuch as they are capable under certain favourable conditions of developing into a new individual, or – to put it another way – of enveloping themselves with a new soma.
⁴⁷

What is truly fascinating here is the unexpected similarity of this to the view that we ourselves arrived at by such a very different route. Weismann, who looks at living matter in morphological terms, discerns in it one part that is doomed to die the soma, the entire body
except
the element concerned with sexuality and heredity and another that is immortal, precisely this latter element, the germ-plasm, that serves to preserve the species by reproducing it. We for our part focused not on living matter itself but on the forces at work within it, and this led us to identify two different kinds of drives: those that seek to guide life towards death; and others, the sexual drives, that continually seek and achieve the
renewal
of life. This sounds very much like a dynamic corollary to Weismann's morphological theory.

However, all sense of a basic concurrence of views immediately evaporates once we take note of Weismann's position on the problem of death. For in Weismann's view the distinction between mortal soma and immortal germ-plasm is applicable only to multicellular organisms, while in unicellular organisms the specific individual and the reproductive cell remain one and the same.
⁴⁸
He therefore declares unicellular organisms to be potentially immortal, death only entering the picture with the metazoa, i.e. multicellular organisms. While the death of these higher organisms is indeed a natural one in his view, that is to say a death arising from inherent factors, it does not rest upon a primal attribute of living matter,
⁴⁹
and therefore cannot be regarded as an absolute necessity grounded in the very essence of organic life.
⁵⁰
He sees it instead as a purely functional device, a phenomenon reflecting adaptation to the external conditions of life:
once the body-cells separated into soma and germ-cells, it would have been a functionally quite inappropriate luxury if the individual had carried on having an unlimited lifespan. As soon as this differentiation took place in multicellular organisms, death became possible and functionally appropriate. Ever since then the soma of higher organisms has died after a certain span of time due to inherent factors, whereas the protista have remained immortal. Reproduction, on the other hand, did not appear only when death did, but instead is for Weismann a primal attribute of living matter, just like growth, out of which indeed it arose, and life has accordingly been continuous right from its very beginnings on earth.
⁵¹

It will be readily appreciated that our own argument gains very little from the fact that Weismann grants that the higher organisms die a natural death. If death is a late acquisition on the part of living beings, then there can no longer be any question of death drives that date from the very beginning of organic life. In this scenario, multicellular organisms may well still die due to inherent factors, be it shortcomings in their differentiation or imperfections in their metabolism – but this is wholly irrelevant to the question that concerns us. It is surely the case, too, that this sort of view, and this sort of explanation of the origins of death, are much closer to people's customary way of seeing things than the discomfiting theory of ‘death drives’.

The debate prompted by Weismann's propositions did not in my judgement decide the issue either one way or the other.
⁵²
Some authors reverted to the position taken by Goette (1883), who regarded death as the direct consequence of reproduction. Hart-mmann does not characterize death in terms of the supervention of a ‘corpse’, of a portion of living matter that has become dead, but instead defines death as the ‘conclusion of individual development’. In this sense, the protozoa are mortal too; in their case death is always coincident with reproduction, but is masked as it were by the latter, in that the entire substance of the parent organism can be transferred directly into the individual offspring.
⁵³

Researchers soon turned their attention to testing the alleged immortality of living matter by means of experiments on unicellular
organisms. An American, Woodruff, started to breed a ciliate infusorium, a ‘slipper animalcule’, which reproduces by dividing into two new individual organisms, and followed it right through to the 3,029th generation before breaking off the experiment, each time isolating one of the two products of the division process and putting it into fresh fluid. The remote descendant of the first animalcule was just as vigorous as its ancestor, without any signs of ageing or degeneration; the hypothesis of the immortality of the protista thus appeared to be susceptible of experimental proof, assuming that figures of this order can be deemed conclusive.
⁵⁴

Other researchers came to other conclusions. In contradistinction to Woodruff, it was found by Maupas, Calkins and others that after a certain number of divisions these infusoria, too, become weaker, diminish in size, lose part of their organic structure, and ultimately die, unless they are revitalized by certain influences acting upon them. According to this view, the protozoa die after a period of senile decay just as the higher animals do – which directly contradicts the assertions of Weismann, who sees death as an attribute acquired by living organisms only relatively late in their evolution.

From this whole body of research we would single out for special emphasis two particular facts which appear to support our argument.

First: if, at a point before they exhibit signs of senescence, two animalcules are able to coalesce with each other, to ‘conjugate’ – after which in due course they separate again – then they remain unaffected by age; they have become ‘rejuvenated’. This conjugation is surely the precursor of sexual reproduction in the higher animals; at this stage, however, it has nothing to do with propagation, but is limited simply to the merging of the respective individuals’ living matter (Weismann's ‘amphimixis’). But the rejuvenating effect of conjugation can also be achieved by other means: use of certain stimulative agents, changes in the composition of the nutrient fluid, increase in temperature, or shaking. One is reminded of the famous experiment undertaken by J[acques] Loeb, who by the use of certain chemical stimuli induced segmentation in the eggs of sea-urchins – a process that normally occurs only after fertilization.

Second: it
does
seem altogether probable that the infusoria
proceed via their own life-processes to a natural death, for the contradiction between Woodruff's results and those of others derives from the fact that Woodruff put each new generation in fresh nutrient fluid. When he tried
not
doing so, he observed the same senescence across the generations as the other researchers did. He concluded that the animalcules must be damaged by the metabolic products given off into the surrounding fluid, and was then able to demonstrate convincingly that it is only the products of their
own
metabolism that have this lethal effect. For when placed in a solution supersaturated with the waste products of a less closely related species, these same animalcules that would surely have perished if massed in their own nutrient fluid flourished in a quite remarkable way. Left to itself, therefore, an infusorium dies a natural death because it does not satisfactorily dispose of the products of its own metabolism; but perhaps all the higher animals also die essentially because of the same deficiency.

We might begin to doubt at this point whether it was at all helpful to try to resolve the question of ‘natural death’ by reference to the study of protozoa. The primitive structure of these organisms may conceal from us certain features which, though present in them too, are actually
observable
only in the higher animals, where they have found morphological expression. If we shift from a morphological to a dynamic standpoint, then we can regard it as a matter of complete indifference whether or not the protozoa can be said to die a natural death. In their case the matter identified as being immortal at some later point has not yet separated off in any way whatever from the part that is mortal. The drives that seek to convert life into death could easily be at work from the very beginning in them too, and yet their effect could be so well masked by the effect of the life-preserving forces that it becomes extremely difficult to demonstrate their presence. As we have discovered, the biologists' observations
do
allow us to suppose that such inner processes conducing to death may be present in the protista as well. Even if the protista prove to be immortal in Weismann's sense, however, his assertion that death is an attribute acquired at a relatively late stage applies only to the physical
manifestations
of death, and does not
rule out hypotheses about
processes
doing all they can to bring about death.

Our expectation that biology would simply scupper the notion of death drives thus turns out to be unfounded. We can continue to entertain the possibility of such drives, assuming we have other grounds for doing so. Furthermore, the striking similarity between Weismann's soma/germ-plasm distinction and our own differentiation of death drives and life drives not only still exists, but has regained all its relevance.

Let us dwell for a moment on this exquisitely dualistic conception of the life of the drives. According to Ewald Hering's theory of what happens in living matter, two processes are ceaselessly at work within it that run in opposite directions to each other: one that is anabolic or ‘assimilative’, and another that is catabolic or ‘dissimilative’. We are surely not presuming too much if we see in these two contrary directions taken by the vital processes the workings of our two sets of drive-impulses, the life drives and the death drives. One thing we cannot close our eyes to, however, is the fact that we have unwittingly fetched up in the philosophical domain of Schopenhauer, for whom, of course, death is the ‘proper result’ of life and hence its purpose,
⁵⁵
whereas the sexual drive is the embodiment of the will to life.

Let us boldly attempt to take the argument a step further. It is generally accepted that the coming together of numerous cells to form a single animate unit – the multicellularity of organisms – became a means of extending their lifespan. Each cell helps to preserve the life of the others, and the community of cells can survive even if individual cells have to die off. We have already heard that even conjugation, the temporary coalescence of two unicellular organisms, has a life-preserving and rejuvenating effect on both of them. All of this being so, we might try to take the libido theory evolved through psychoanalysis and apply it to the cells' relationship to each other. We might then try to imagine that it is the life drives or sexual drives active within each cell that make the other cells their object, partially neutralizing their death drives (or rather the processes that the latter instigate) and thereby keeping them alive, while other drives do exactly the same for them, and others again
sacrifice their whole existence by performing this libidinal function. The germ-cells themselves could be said to behave in a totally ‘narcissistic’ fashion – to apply the term we are accustomed to use in neurosis theory when an individual retains his libido entirely within his own ego and expends none of it on object-cathexes. The germ-cells need their libido, the activity of their life drives, entirely for themselves by way of reserves for their later, magnificently anabolic activity. (Perhaps we may also use the term ‘narcissistic’ in the same sense to describe the cells of malignant neoplasms that destroy the organism. After all, pathologists are prepared to accept that the seeds of these growths are present at birth, and to concede that they display features characteristic of embryos.)
⁵⁶
All of this being so, it would appear that the libido of our sexual drives is one and the same thing as the Eros evoked by poets and philosophers, the binding force within each and every living thing.

This seems an opportune moment for us to review the slow evolution of the libido theory. The psychoanalysis of transference neuroses initially compelled us to postulate an antithesis between ‘sexual drives’ directed outwards at an object, and other drives that we only very imperfectly understood, and that we provisionally termed ‘ego drives’. Amongst the latter, the drives that were inevitably recognized first were those that contribute to the individual's self-preservation; for the rest, no one was in a position to know what other drives might be identified. In order to establish psychology on a sound footing, nothing could have been more important than
some
kind of insight, however approximate, into the general nature of drives and the particular characteristics they might prove to have; but there was no other field of psychology in which people were groping so completely in the dark. Everyone posited as many drives or ‘basic drives’ as they liked, and played around with them rather as the ancient Greek philosophers did with their four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Psychoanalysis, which couldn't escape having some kind of theory on the subject, stuck initially to the distinction popularly made between drives, exemplified in the phrase ‘hunger and love’. At least this was no new arbitrary act. And it enabled us to progress quite a long way in the analysis of neuroses.
The concept of ‘sexuality’ – and with it the concept of a sexual drive – did of course have to be considerably extended, to the point where it included much that could not be classed as having a reproductive function, and this caused quite a stir in the world of the puritanical, the posh and the purely hypocritical.