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1 The Atavistic Spirit or “the Monster of Energy”
- Northwestern University Press
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13 That individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each other; that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as all the members of the fauna of a continent—is betrayed in the end also by the fact that the most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always revolve once more in the same orbit; however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in a definite order, one after the other— to wit, the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts. Their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a recognition, a remembering, a return and a homecoming to a remote, primordial, and inclusive household of the soul, out of which those concepts grew originally; philosophizing is to this extent a kind of atavism of the highest order. —Nietzsche By then, there is usually also someone who becomes the recipient of great gratitude, not only for the good he himself has done but above all for the treasure of what is best and highest that has gradually been accumulated by his predecessors. —Nietzsche I have been driven to realize that here once more we have one of those not infrequent cases in which an ancient and jealously held popular belief seems to be nearer the truth than the judgement of the prevalent science of to-day. —Freud The Atavistic Spirit or “the Monster of Energy”: Origins of Freud’s Synthesizing Mind 1 As Nietzsche so eloquently noted, the generation and evolution of ideas and even entire systems of thought rarely occur in a historical vacuum. More typically they incubate within the multifarious forces of abundant dynamic , historical environments, when at last they burst forth in a sudden flash of intricately synthesized insight.1 Nietzsche created an even more powerful imagery in this respect: There are men who are the heirs and masters of this slowly-acquired manifold treasure of virtue and efficiency—because, through fortunate and reasonable marriages, and also through fortunate accidents, the acquired and stored-up energies of many generations have not been squandered and dispersed but linked together by a firm ring and by will. In the end there appears a man, a monster of energy, who demands a monster of a task.2 Freud may be said to have been a prototypical example of the “monster of energy” Nietzsche presaged. Furthermore, Freud fit Nietzsche’s descriptions in another way as well: A higher culture must give to man a double-brain, as it were two brainventricles , one for the perceptions of science, the other for those of nonscience : lying beside one another, not confused together, separable, capable of being shut off; this is a demand of health.3 Recall Strachey’s earlier observation that Freud was “a man of two cultures ” in precisely the above way. To appreciate the nature and extent of Freud’s synthesizing mind it is important to mention in a preliminary way some of the general characteristics of his specific historical context (the synchronic) and those historical influences exerted upon it (the diachronic), as well as the way in which he engaged them. The historical context in which Freud worked was characterized by an especially tumultuous intellectual climate, and various fundamentally opposing and powerful conceptual viewpoints were operative. In the wake of the Philosophes and Comte, science was defined by Helmholtz in positivistic , physicalistic, and deterministic language. Darwin and Spencer (who were promoting the psychology of instincts) were especially prominent in this movement. While jointly opposing this worldview, nonscientistic philosophy was itself split into a spectrum of competing worldviews. As the pinnacle of German idealism, Hegelian philosophy was dominant during the nineteenth century: absolute consciousness was in the process of coming to know itself in the dialectical movement of the phenomenol14 A P P R E H E N D I N G T H E I N A C C E S S I B L E [107.23.85.179] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:38 GMT) ogy of spirit. Contra Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche focused on the will, and will to power, as the underlying impetus for all that happened (yet each conceived this will in very different ways). As the heir to...