Freud - Complete Works (387 page)

   In an essay in the
Conferenze
Fiorentine
the following pronouncement of Leonardo’s is
quoted, which represents his confession of faith and provides the
key to his nature: ‘Nessuna cosa si può amare
nè odiare, se prima non si ha cognition di
quella.’² That is to say: One has no right to love or
hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its
nature. And the same is repeated by Leonardo in a passage in the
treatise on painting where he seems to be defending himself against
the charge of irreligion: ‘But such carping critics would do
better to keep silent. For that (line of conduct) is the way to
become acquainted with the Creator of so many wonderful things, and
this is the way to love so great an Inventor. For in truth great
love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you
know it but little you will be able to love it only a little or not
at all . . .’³

  
¹
Merezhkovsky (1902; German trans., 1903).
Leonardo da Vinci
forms the second work of a great
historical trilogy entitled
Christ and Antichrist
. The two
other volumes are
Julian the Apostate
and
Peter and
Alexis
.

  
²
Bottazzi (1910, 193).

  
³
Trattato della Pittura
.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2251

   The value of these remarks of
Leonardo’s is not to be looked for in their conveying an
important psychological fact; for what they assert is obviously
false, and Leonardo must have known thus as well as we do. It is
not true that human beings delay loving or hating until they have
studied and become familiar with the nature of the object to which
these affects apply. On the contrary they love impulsively, from
emotional motives which have nothing to do with knowledge, and
whose operation is at most weakened by reflection and
consideration. Leonardo, then, could only have meant that the love
practised by human beings was not of the proper and unobjectionable
kind: one
should
love in such a way as to hold back the
affect, subject it to the process of reflection and only let it
take its course when it has stood up to the test of thought. And at
the same time we understand that he wishes to tell us that it
happens so in his case and that it would be worth while for
everyone else to treat love and hatred as he does.

   And in his case it really seems
to have been so. His affects were controlled and subjected to the
instinct for research; he did not love and hate, but asked himself
about the origin and significance of what he was to love or hate.
Thus he was bound at first to appear indifferent to good and evil,
beauty and ugliness. During this work of investigation love and
hate threw off their positive or negative signs and were both alike
transformed into intellectual interest. In reality Leonardo was not
devoid of passion; he did not lack the divine spark which is
directly or indirectly the driving force -
il primo motore
-
behind all human activity. He had merely converted his passion into
a thirst for knowledge; he then applied himself to investigation
with the persistence, constancy and penetration which is derived
from passion, and at the climax of intellectual labour, when
knowledge had been won, he allowed the long restrained affect to
break loose and to flow away freely, as a stream of water drawn
from a river is allowed to flow away when its work is done. When,
at the climax of a discovery, he could survey a large portion of
the whole nexus, he was overcome by emotion, and in ecstatic
language praised the splendour of the part of creation that he had
studied, or - in religious phraseology - the greatness of his
Creator. This process of transformation in Leonardo has been
rightly understood by Solmi. After quoting a passage of this sort
in which Leonardo celebrates the sublime law of nature (‘O
mirabile necessità . . .’), he writes
(1910, 11) ‘Tale trasfigurazione della scienza della natura
in emozione, quasi direi, religiosa, è uno dei tratti
caratteristici de’ manoscritti vinciani, e si trova cento e
cento volte espressa . . .’¹

  
¹
[’Such a transfiguration of natural
science into a sort of religious emotion is one of the
characteristic features of Leonardo’s manuscripts, and there
are hundreds and hundreds of examples of it.’]

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2252

   Because of his insatiable and
indefatigable thirst for knowledge Leonardo has been called the
Italian Faust. But quite apart from doubts about a possible
transformation of the instinct to investigate back into an
enjoyment of life - a transformation which we must take as
fundamental in the tragedy of Faust - the view may be hazarded that
Leonardo’s development approaches Spinoza’s mode of
thinking.

   A conversion of psychical
instinctual force into various forms of activity can perhaps no
more be achieved without loss than a conversion of physical forces.
The example of Leonardo teaches us how many other things we have to
take into account in connection with these processes. The
postponement of loving until full knowledge is acquired ends in a
substitution of the latter for the former. A man who has won his
way to a state of knowledge cannot properly be said to love and
hate; he remains beyond love and hatred. He has investigated
instead of loving. And that is perhaps why Leonardo’s life
was so much poorer in love than that of other great men, and of
other artists. The stormy passions of a nature that inspires and
consumes, passions in which other men have enjoyed their richest
experience, appear not to have touched him.

   There are some further
consequences. Investigating has taken the place of acting and
creating as well. A man who has begun to have an inkling of the
grandeur of the universe with all its complexities and its laws
readily forgets his own insignificant self. Lost in admiration and
filled with true humility, he all too easily forgets that he
himself is a part of those active forces and that in accordance
with the scale of his personal strength the way is open for him to
try to alter a small portion of the destined course of the world -
a world in which the small is still no less wonderful and
significant than the great.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2253

   Leonardo’s researches had
perhaps first begun, as Solmi believes, in the service of his
art;¹ he directed his efforts to the properties and laws of
light, colours, shadows and perspective in order to ensure mastery
in the imitation of nature and to point the same way to others. It
is probable that at that time he already overrated the value to the
artist of these branches of knowledge. Still constantly following
the lead given by the requirements of his painting he was then
driven to investigate the painter’s subjects, animals and
plants, and the proportions of the human body, and, passing from
their exterior, to proceed to gain a knowledge of their internal
structure and their vital functions, which indeed also find
expression in their appearance and have a claim to be depicted in
art. And finally the instinct, which had become overwhelming, swept
him away until the connection with the demands of his art was
severed, so that he discovered the general laws of mechanics and
divined the history of the stratification and fossilization in the
Arno valley, and until he could enter in large letters in his book
the discovery:
Il sole non si move
.² His investigations
extended to practically every branch of natural science, and in
every single one he was a discoverer or at least a prophet and
pioneer.³ Yet his urge for knowledge was always directed to
the external world; something kept him far away from the
investigation of the human mind. In the ‘Academia
Vinciana’, for which he drew some cleverly intertwined
emblems, there was little room for psychology.

  
¹
Solmi (1910, 8): ‘Leonardo aveva
posto, come regola al pittore, lo studio della
natura . . . poi la passione dello studio era
divenuta dominante, egli aveva voluto acquistare non più la
scienza per l’arte, ma la scienza per la scienza.’
[‘Leonardo had prescribed the study of nature as a rule for
the painter . . ., then the passion for study had
become dominant, he had no longer wished to acquire learning for
the sake of art, but learning for the sake of
learning.’]

  
² [‘The sun does not move.’]

  
³
See the enumeration of his scientific
achievements in the fine biographical introduction by Marie
Herzfeld (1906), in the various essays of the
Conferenze
Fiorentine
(1910), and elsewhere.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2254

   Then, when he made the attempt to
return from investigation to his starting point, the exercise of
his art, he found himself disturbed by the new direction of his
interests and the changed nature of his mental activity. What
interested him in a picture was above all a problem; and behind the
first one he saw countless other problems arising, just as he used
to in his endless and inexhaustible investigation of nature. He was
no longer able to limit his demands, to see the work of art in
isolation and to tear it from the wide context to which he knew it
belonged. After the most exhausting efforts to bring to expression
in it everything which was connected with it in his thoughts, he
was forced to abandon it in an unfinished state or to declare that
it was incomplete.

   The artist had once taken the
investigator into his service to assist him; now the servant had
become the stronger and suppressed his master.

   When we find that in the picture
presented by a person’s character a single instinct has
developed an excessive strength, as did the craving for knowledge
in Leonardo, we look for the explanation in a special disposition -
though about its determinants (which are probably organic) scarcely
anything is yet known. Our psycho-analytic studies of neurotic
people have however led us to form two further expectations which
it would be gratifying to find confirmed in each particular case.
We consider it probable that an instinct like this of excessive
strength was already active in the subject’s earliest
childhood, and that its supremacy was established by impressions in
the child’s life. We make the further assumption that it
found reinforcement from what were originally sexual instinctual
forces, so that later it could take the place of a part of the
subject’s sexual life. Thus a person of this sort would, for
example, pursue research with the same passionate devotion that
another would give to his love, and he would be able to investigate
instead of loving. We would venture to infer that it is not only in
the example of the instinct to investigate that there has been a
sexual reinforcement, but also in most other cases where an
instinct is of special intensity.

   Observation of men’s daily
lives shows us that most people succeed in directing very
considerable portions of their sexual instinctual forces to their
professional activity. The sexual instinct is particularly well
fitted to make contributions of this kind since it is endowed with
a capacity for sublimation: that is, it has the power to replace
its immediate aim by other aims which may be valued more highly and
which are not sexual. We accept this process as proved whenever the
history of a person’s childhood - that is, the history of his
mental development - shows that in childhood this over-powerful
instinct was in the service of sexual interests. We find further
confirmation if a striking atrophy occurs in the sexual life of
maturity, as though a portion of sexual activity had now been
replaced by the activity of the over-powerful instinct.

Leonardo Da Vinci And A Memory Of His Childhood

2255

   There seem to be special
difficulties in applying these expectations to the case of an
over-powerful instinct for investigation, since precisely in the
case of children there is a reluctance to credit them with either
this serious instinct or any noteworthy sexual interests. However,
these difficulties are easily overcome. The curiosity of small
children is manifested in their untiring love of asking questions;
this is bewildering to the adult so long as he fails to understand
that all these questions are merely circumlocutions and that they
cannot come to an end because the child is only trying to make them
take the place of a question which he does
not
ask. When he
grows bigger and becomes better informed this expression of
curiosity often comes to a sudden end. Psycho-analytic
investigation provides us with a full explanation by teaching us
that many, perhaps most children, or at least the most gifted ones,
pass through a period, beginning when they are about three, which
may be called the period of
infantile sexual researches
. So
far as we know, the curiosity of children of this age does not
awaken spontaneously, but is aroused by the impression made by some
important event - by the actual birth of a little brother or
sister, or by a fear of it based on external experiences - in which
the child perceives a threat to his selfish interests. Researches
are directed to the question of where babies come from, exactly as
if the child were looking for ways and means to avert so undesired
an event. In this way we have been astonished to learn that
children refuse to believe the bits of information that are given
them - for example that they energetically reject the fable of the
stork with its wealth of mythological meaning -, that they date
their intellectual independence from this act of disbelief, and
that they often feel in serious opposition to adults and in fact
never afterwards forgive them for having deceived them here about
the true facts of the case. They investigate along their own lines,
divine the baby’s presence inside its mother’s body,
and following the lead of the impulses of their own sexuality form
theories of babies originating from eating, of their being born
through the bowels, and of the obscure part played by the father.
By that time they already have a notion of the sexual act, which
appears to them to be something hostile and violent. But since
their own sexual constitution has not yet reached the point of
being able to produce babies, their investigation of where babies
come from must inevitably come to nothing too and be abandoned as
insoluble. The impression caused by this failure in the first
attempt at intellectual independence appears to be of a lasting and
deeply depressing kind.¹