Freud - Complete Works (775 page)

   Here, I believe, we already have
all the essentials: violence overcome by the transference of power
to a larger unity, which is held together by emotional ties between
its members. What remains to be said is no more than an expansion
and a repetition of this.

Why War?

4795

   The situation is simple so long
as the community consists only of a number of equally strong
individuals. The laws of such an association will determine the
extent to which, if the security of communal life is to be
guaranteed, each individual must surrender his personal liberty to
turn his strength to violent uses. But a state of rest of that kind
is only theoretically conceivable. In actuality the position is
complicated by the fact that from its very beginning the community
comprises elements of unequal strength - men and women, parents and
children - and soon, as a result of war and conquest, it also comes
to include victors and vanquished, who turn into masters and
slaves. The justice of the community then becomes an expression of
the unequal degrees of power obtaining within it; the laws are made
by and for the ruling members and find little room for the rights
of those in subjection. From that time forward there are two
factors at work in the community which are sources of unrest over
matters of law but tend at the same time to a further growth of
law. First, attempts are made by certain of the rulers to set
themselves above the prohibitions which apply to everyone - they
seek, that is, to go back from a dominion of law to a dominion of
violence. Secondly, the oppressed members of the group make
constant efforts to obtain more power and to have any changes that
are brought about in that direction recognized in the laws - they
press forward, that is, from unequal justice to equal justice for
all. This second tendency becomes especially important if a real
shift of power occurs within a community, as may happen as a result
of a number of historical factors. In that case right may gradually
adapt itself to the new distribution of power; or, as is more
frequent, the ruling class is unwilling to recognize the change,
and rebellion and civil war follow, with a temporary suspension of
law and new attempts at a solution by violence, ending in the
establishment of a fresh rule of law. There is yet another source
from which modifications of law may arise, and one of which the
expression is invariably peaceful: it lies in the cultural
transformation of the members of the community. This, however,
belongs properly in another connection and must be considered
later.

Why War?

4796

   Thus we see that the violent
solution of conflicts of interest is not avoided even inside a
community. But the everyday necessities and common concerns that
are inevitable where people live together in one place tend to
bring such struggles to a swift conclusion and under such
conditions there is an increasing probability that a peaceful
solution will be found. Yet a glance at the history of the human
race reveals an endless series of conflicts between one community
and another or several others, between larger and smaller units -
between cities, provinces, races, nations, empires - which have
almost always been settled by force of arms. Wars of this kind end
either in the spoliation or in the complete overthrow and conquest
of one of the parties. It is impossible to make any sweeping
judgement upon war of conquest. Some, such as those waged by the
Mongols and Turks, have brought nothing but evil. Others, on the
contrary, have contributed to the transformation of violence into
law by establishing larger units within which the use of violence
was made impossible and in which a fresh system of law led to the
solution of conflicts. In this way the conquests of the Romans gave
the countries round the Mediterranean the priceless
pax
Romana
, and the greed of the French kings to extend their
dominions created a peacefully united and flourishing France.
Paradoxical as it may sound, it must be admitted that war might be
a far from inappropriate means of establishing the eagerly desired
reign of ‘everlasting’ peace, since it is in a position
to create the large units within which a powerful central
government makes further wars impossible. Nevertheless it fails in
this purpose, for the results of conquest are as a rule
short-lived: the newly created units fall apart once again, usually
owing to a lack of cohesion between the portions that have been
united by violence. Hitherto, moreover, the unifications created by
conquest, though of considerable extent, have only been
partial
, and the conflicts between these have called out
more than ever for violent solution. Thus the result of all these
warlike efforts has only been that the human race has exchanged
numerous, and indeed unending, minor wars for wars on a grand scale
that are rare but all the more destructive.

Why War?

4797

   If we turn to our own times, we
arrive at the same conclusion which you have reached by a shorter
path. Wars will only be prevented with certainty if mankind unites
in setting up a central authority to which the right of giving
judgement upon all conflicts of interest shall be handed over.
There are clearly two separate requirements involved in this: the
creation of a supreme agency and its endowment with the necessary
power. One without the other would be useless. The League of
Nations is designed as an agency of this kind, but the second
condition has not been fulfilled: the League of Nations has no
power of its own and can only acquire it if the members of the new
union, the separate States, are ready to resign it. And at the
moment there seems very little prospect of this. The institution of
the League of Nations would, however, be wholly unintelligible if
one ignored the fact that here was a bold attempt such as has
seldom (perhaps, indeed, never on such a scale) been made before.
It is an attempt to base upon an appeal to certain idealistic
attitudes of mind the authority (that is, the coercive influence)
which otherwise rests on the possession of power. We have seen that
a community is held together by two things: the compelling force of
violence and the emotional ties (identifications is the technical
name) between its members. If one of the factors is absent, the
community may possibly be held together by the other. The ideas
that are appealed to can, of course, only have any significance if
they give expression to important affinities between the members,
and the question arises of how much strength such ideas can exert.
History teaches us that they have been to some extent effective.
For instance, the Panhellenic idea, the sense of being superior to
the surrounding barbarians - an idea which was so powerfully
expressed in the Amphictyonic Council, the Oracles and the Games -
was sufficiently strong to mitigate the customs of war among
Greeks, though evidently not sufficiently strong to prevent warlike
disputes between the different sections of the Greek nation or even
to restrain a city or confederation of cities from allying itself
with the Persian foe in order to gain an advantage over a rival.
The community of feeling among Christians, powerful though it was,
was equally unable at the time of the Renaissance to deter
Christian States, whether large or small, from seeking the
Sultan’s aid in their wars with one another. Nor does any
idea exist to-day which could be expected to exert a unifying
authority of the sort. Indeed it is all too clear that the national
ideals by which nations are at present swayed operate in a contrary
direction. Some people are inclined to prophesy that it will not be
possible to make an end of war until Communist ways of thinking
have found universal acceptance. But that aim is in any case a very
remote one to-day, and perhaps it could only be reached after the
most fearful civil wars. Thus the attempt to replace actual force
by the force of ideas seems at present to be doomed to failure. We
shall be making a false calculation if we disregard the fact that
law was originally brute violence and that even to-day it cannot do
without the support of violence.

Why War?

4798

   I can now proceed to add a gloss
to another of your remarks. You express astonishment at the fact
that it is so easy to make men enthusiastic about a war and add
your suspicions that there is something at work in them - an
instinct for hatred and destruction - which goes halfway to meet
the efforts of the warmongers. Once again, I can only express my
entire agreement. We believe in the existence of an instinct of
that kind and have in fact been occupied during the last few years
in studying its manifestations. Will you allow me to take this
opportunity of putting before you a portion of the theory of the
instincts which, after much tentative groping and many fluctuations
of opinion, has been reached by workers in the field of
psycho-analysis?

   According to our hypothesis human
instincts are of only two kinds: those which seek to preserve and
unite - which we call ‘erotic’, exactly in the sense in
which Plato uses the word ‘Eros’ in his
Symposium
, or ‘sexual’, with a deliberate
extension of the popular conception of ‘sexuality’ -
and those which seek to destroy and kill and which we group
together as the aggressive or destructive instinct. As you see,
this is in fact no more than a theoretical clarification of the
universally familiar opposition between Love and Hate which may
perhaps have some fundamental relation to the polarity of
attraction and repulsion that plays a part in your own field of
knowledge. But we must not be too hasty in introducing ethical
judgements of good and evil. Neither of these instincts is any less
essential than the other; the phenomena of life arise from the
concurrent or mutually opposing action of both. Now it seems as
though an instinct of the one sort can scarcely ever operate in
isolation; it is always accompanied - or, as we say, alloyed - with
a certain quota from the other side, which modifies its aim or is,
in some cases, what enables it to achieve that aim. Thus, for
instance, the instinct of self-preservation is certainly of an
erotic kind, but it must nevertheless have aggressiveness at its
disposal if it is to fulfil its purpose. So, too, the instinct of
love, when it is directed towards an object, stands in need of some
contribution from the instinct for mastery if it is in any way to
obtain possession of that object. The difficulty of isolating the
two classes of instinct in their actual manifestations is indeed
what has so long prevented us from recognizing them.

Why War?

4799

   If you will follow me a little
further, you will see that human actions are subject to another
complication of a different kind. It is very rarely that an action
is the work of a
single
instinctual impulse (which must in
itself be compounded of Eros and destructiveness). In order to make
an action possible there must be as a rule a combination of such
compounded motives. This was perceived long ago by a specialist in
your own subject, a Professor G. C. Lichtenberg who taught physics
at Göttingen during our classical age - though perhaps he was
even more remarkable as a psychologist than as a physicist. He
invented a Compass of Motives, for he wrote: ‘The motives
that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two
winds and might be given names in a similar way: for instance,
"bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread".’
So that when human beings are incited to war they may have a whole
number of motives for assenting - some noble and some base, some
which are openly declared and others which are never mentioned.
There is no need to enumerate them all. A lust for aggression and
destruction is certainly among them: the countless cruelties in
history and in our everyday lives vouch for its existence and its
strength. The satisfaction of these destructive impulses is of
course facilitated by their admixture with others of an erotic and
idealistic kind. When we read of the atrocities of the past, it
sometimes seems as though the idealistic motives served only as an
excuse for the destructive appetites; and sometimes - in the case,
for instance, of the cruelties of the Inquisition - it seems as
though the idealistic motives had pushed themselves forward in
consciousness, while the destructive ones lent them an unconscious
reinforcement. Both may be true.

Why War?

4800

   I fear I may be abusing your
interest, which is after all concerned with the prevention of war
and not with our theories. Nevertheless I should like to linger for
a moment over our destructive instinct, whose popularity is by no
means equal to its importance. As a result of a little speculation,
we have come to suppose that this instinct is at work in every
living creature and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce
life to its original condition of inanimate matter. Thus it quite
seriously deserves to be called a death instinct, while the erotic
instincts represent the effort to live. The death instinct turns
into the destructive instinct when, with the help of special
organs, it is directed outwards, on to objects. The organism
preserves its own life, so to say, by destroying an extraneous one.
Some portion of the death instinct, however, remains operative
within
the organism, and we have sought to trace quite a
number of normal and pathological phenomena to this internalization
of the destructive instinct. We have even been guilty of the heresy
of attributing the origin of conscience to this diversion inwards
of aggressiveness. You will notice that it is by no means a trivial
matter if this process is carried too far: it is positively
unhealthy. On the other hand if these forces are turned to
destruction in the external world, the organism will be relieved
and the effect must be beneficial. This would serve as a biological
justification for all the ugly and dangerous impulses against which
we are struggling. It must be admitted that they stand nearer to
Nature than does our resistance to them for which an explanation
also needs to be found. It may perhaps seem to you as though our
theories are a kind of mythology and, in the present case, not even
an agreeable one. But does not every science come in the end to a
kind of mythology like this? Cannot the same be said to-day of your
own Physics?