Freud - Complete Works (727 page)

   We may go on from here to
consider the interesting case in which happiness in life is
predominantly sought in the enjoyment of beauty, wherever beauty
presents itself to our senses and our judgement - the beauty of
human forms and gestures, of natural objects and landscapes and of
artistic and even scientific creations. This aesthetic attitude to
the goal of life offers little protection against the threat of
suffering, but it can compensate for a great deal. The enjoyment of
beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality of feeling.
Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural
necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it. The
science of aesthetics investigates the conditions under which
things are felt as beautiful, but it has been unable to give any
explanation of the nature and origin of beauty, and, as usually
happens, lack of success is concealed beneath a flood of resounding
and empty words. Psycho-analysis, unfortunately, has scarcely
anything to say about beauty either. All that seems certain is its
derivation from the field of sexual feeling. The love of beauty
seems a perfect example of an impulse inhibited in its aim.
‘Beauty’ and ‘attraction’ are originally
attributes of the sexual object. It is worth remarking that the
genitals themselves, the sight of which is always exciting, are
nevertheless hardly ever judged to be beautiful; the quality of
beauty seems, instead, to attach to certain secondary sexual
characters.

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   In spite of the incompleteness, I
will venture on a few remarks as a conclusion to our enquiry. The
programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes
on us, cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not - indeed, we cannot -
give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfilment by some means
or other. Very different paths may be taken in that direction, and
we may give priority either to the positive aspect of the aim, that
of gaining pleasure, or to its negative one, that of avoiding
unpleasure. By none of these paths can we attain all that we
desire. Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as
possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual’s
libido. There is no golden rule which applies to everyone: every
man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be
saved. All kinds of different factors will operate to direct his
choice. It is a question of how much real satisfaction he can
expect to get from the external world, how far he is led to make
himself independent of it, and, finally, how much strength he feels
he has for altering the world to suit his wishes. In this, his
psychical constitution will play a decisive part, irrespectively of
the external circumstances. The man who is predominantly erotic
will give first preference to his emotional relationships to other
people; the narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient,
will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental processes;
the man of action will never give up the external world on which he
can try out his strength. As regards the second of these types, the
nature of his talents and the amount of instinctual sublimation
open to him will decide where he shall locate his interests. Any
choice that is pushed to an extreme will be penalized by exposing
the individual to the dangers which arise if a technique of living
that has been chosen as an exclusive one should prove inadequate.
Just as a cautious business-man avoids tying up all his capital in
one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look
for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration. Its
success is never certain, for that depends on the convergence of
many factors, perhaps on none more than on the capacity of the
psychical constitution to adapt its function to the environment and
then to exploit that environment for a yield of pleasure. A person
who is born with a specially unfavourable instinctual constitution,
and who has not properly undergone the transformation and
rearrangement of his libidinal components which is indispensable
for later achievements, will find it hard to obtain happiness from
his external situation, especially if he is faced with tasks of
some difficulty. As a last technique of living, which will at least
bring him substitutive satisfactions, he is offered that of a
flight into neurotic illness - a flight which he usually
accomplishes when he is still young. The man who sees his pursuit
of happiness come to nothing in later years can still find
consolation in the yield of pleasure of chronic intoxication; or he
can embark on the desperate attempt at rebellion seen in a
psychosis.¹

  
¹
I feel impelled to point out one at least
of the gaps that have been left in the account given above. No
discussion of the possibilities of human happiness should omit to
take into consideration the relation between narcissism and object
libido. We require to know what being essentially self-dependent
signifies for the economics of the libido.

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   Religion restricts this play of
choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own
path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering.
Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and
distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner -
which presupposes an intimidation of 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. There are, as we have said, many paths which
may
lead
to such happiness as is attainable by men, but there is none which
does so for certain. Even religion cannot keep its promise. If the
believer finally sees himself obliged to speak of God’s
‘inscrutable decrees’, he is admitting that all that is
left to him as a last possible consolation and source of pleasure
in his suffering is an unconditional submission. And if he is
prepared for that, he could probably have spared himself the
détour
he has made.

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4484

III

Our enquiry concerning happiness has not so
far taught us much that is not already common knowledge. And even
if we proceed from it to the problem of why it is so hard for men
to be happy, there seems no greater prospect of learning anything
new. We have given the answer already by pointing to the three
sources from which our suffering comes: the superior power of
nature, the feebleness of our own bodies and the inadequacy of the
regulations which adjust the mutual relation ships of human beings
in the family, the state and society. In regard to the first two
sources, our judgement cannot hesitate long. It forces us to
acknowledge those sources of suffering and to submit to the
inevitable. We shall never completely master nature; and our bodily
organism, itself a part of that nature, will always remain a
transient structure with a limited capacity for adaptation and
achievement. This recognition does not have a paralysing effect. On
the contrary, it points the direction for our activity. If we
cannot remove all suffering, we can remove some, and we can
mitigate some: the experience of many thousands of years has
convinced us of that. As regards the third source, the social
source of suffering, our attitude is a different one. We do not
admit it at all; we cannot see why the regulations made by
ourselves should not, on the contrary, be a protection and a
benefit for every one of us. And yet, when we consider how
unsuccessful we have been in precisely this field of prevention of
suffering, a suspicion dawns on us that here, too, a piece of
unconquerable nature may lie behind it - this time a piece of our
own psychical constitution.

   When we start considering this
possibility, we come upon a contention which is so astonishing that
we must dwell upon it. This contention holds that what we call our
civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we
should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive
conditions. I call this contention astonishing because, in whatever
way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact
that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against
the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of
that very civilization.

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   How has it happened that so many
people have come to take up this strange attitude of hostility to
civilization? I believe that the basis of it was a deep and
long-standing dissatisfaction with the then existing state of
civilization and that on that basis a condemnation of it was built
up, occasioned by certain specific historical events. I think I
know what the last and the last but one of those occasions were. I
am not learned enough to trace the chain of them far back enough in
the history of the human species; but a factor of this kind hostile
to civilization must already have been at work in the victory of
Christendom over the heathen religions. For it was very closely
related to the low estimation put upon earthly life by the
Christian doctrine. The last but one of these occasions was when
the progress of voyages of discovery led to contact with primitive
peoples and races. In consequence of insufficient observation and a
mistaken view of their manners and customs, they appeared to
Europeans to be leading a simple, happy life with few wants, a life
such as was unattainable by their visitors with their superior
civilization. Later experience has corrected some of those
judgements. In many cases the observers had wrongly attributed to
the absence of complicated cultural demands what was in fact due to
the bounty of nature and the ease with which the major human needs
were satisfied. The last occasion is especially familiar to us. It
arose when people came to know about the mechanism of the neuroses,
which threaten to undermine the modicum of happiness enjoyed by
civilized men. It was discovered that a person becomes neurotic
because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society
imposes on him in the service of its cultural ideals, and it was
inferred from this that the abolition or reduction of those demands
would result in a return to possibilities of happiness.

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   There is also an added factor of
disappointment. During the last few generations mankind has made an
extraordinary advance in the natural sciences and in their
technical application and has established his control over nature
in a way never before imagined. The single steps of this advance
are common knowledge and it is unnecessary to enumerate them. Men
are proud of those achievements, and have a right to be. But they
seem to have observed that this newly-won power over space and
time, this subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the
fulfilment of a longing that goes back thousands of years, has not
increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may
expect from life and has not made them feel happier. From the
recognition of this fact we ought to be content to conclude that
power over nature is not the
only
precondition of human
happiness, just as it is not the
only
goal of cultural
endeavour; we ought not to infer from it that technical progress is
without value for the economics of our happiness. One would like to
ask: is there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal
increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I
please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of
miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time after a
friend has reached his destination that he has come through the
long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that
medicine has succeeded in enormously reducing infant mortality and
the danger of infection for women in childbirth, and, indeed, in
considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man? And
there is a long list that might be Added to benefits of this kind
which we owe to the much-despised era of scientific and technical
advances. But here the voice of pessimistic criticism makes itself
heard and warns us that most of these satisfactions follow the
model of the ‘cheap enjoyment’ extolled in the anecdote
- the enjoyment obtained by putting a bare leg from under the
bedclothes on a cold winter night and drawing it in again. If there
had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have
left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his
voice; if travelling across the ocean by ship had not been
introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and
I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is
the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that
reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the
begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless
rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene,
while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our
sexual life in marriage, and have probably worked against the
beneficial effects of natural selection? And, finally, what good to
us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it
is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a
deliverer?

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   It seems certain that we do not
feel comfortable in our present-day civilization, but it is very
difficult to form an opinion whether and in what degree men of an
earlier age felt happier and what part their cultural conditions
played in the matter. We shall always tend to consider
people’s distress objectively - that is, to place ourselves,
with our own wants and sensibilities, in
their
conditions,
and then to examine what occasions we should find in them for
experiencing happiness or unhappiness. This method of looking at
things, which seems objective because it ignores the variations in
subjective sensibility, is, of course, the most subjective
possible, since it puts one’s own mental states in the place
of any others, unknown though they may be. Happiness, however, is
something essentially subjective. No matter how much we may shrink
with horror from certain situations - of a galley-slave in
antiquity, of a peasant during the Thirty Years’ War, of a
victim of the Holy Inquisition, of a Jew awaiting a pogrom - it is
nevertheless impossible for us to feel our way into such people -
to divine the changes which original obtuseness of mind, a gradual
stupefying process, the cessation of expectations, and cruder or
more refined methods of narcotization have produced upon their
receptivity to sensations of pleasure and unpleasure. Moreover, in
the case of the most extreme possibility of suffering, special
mental protective devices are brought into operation. It seems to
me unprofitable to pursue this aspect of the problem any
further.