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Articles
Freud, Aristotle & Judaism
Gur Hirshberg on competing conceptions of human nature.
In his essay, ‘Freud: Within and Beyond Culture’, Lionel Trilling summarizes a charge made by some critics of Sigmund Freud:
“The argument takes this form: if [contrary to Freud] we think of man as being conditioned not so much by biology as by culture, we can more easily envisage a beneficent manipulation of his condition…and if we repudiate Freud’s naive belief that there is a human given in all persons and cultures, then we are indeed encouraged to think that…there is no beneficent mutation of culture, there is no revision of the nature of man, that we cannot hope to bring about.” 1
What mattered most to those who labelled him a reactionary was the very existence of a ‘human given’ and a ‘nature of man’ in Freud’s thought: the terms were thought by Freud’s critics to be oppressive because they implied the setting of limitations on man’s manipulability. In the essay, Trilling goes on to defend Freud, and to tell us that “far from being a reactionary idea [Freud’s emphasis on biology] is actually a liberating idea.” Trilling answers the critics who labelled Freud a reactionary on their own terms: for some, the categories ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ are allimportant. But they cannot be so for us, at least not whilst we attempt to understand Freud’s thoughts on human nature on Freud’s own terms.
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