short assignments

What’s So Great about Loving Your Neighbor?

{Freud’s Objections to Jesus and St. Paul}

I. What is the Neighbor Love Rule?

A. The Relevant Biblical Passages:

Here are several: Leviticus 19, Matthew 19, Mark 12, Romans 13.

Matthew 22: 37 [Having been asked which commandment in the Hebrew Law was most important] Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

B. The History of the Neighbor Love Rule.

According to Freud, the Neighbor Love Principle is “older than Christianity,” but “certainly not very old; even in historical times it was still strange to mankind” (131-132).

Is this true?

C. The Neighbor Love Rule vs. the Golden Rule—‘Do as you would be done by’.

II. Initial Remarks and Questions.

A. A Primer in (“Late-Career”) Freudian Psychology: Libido, Id, Ego, Superego.

What are these aspects of the psyche? How do they relate to each other?

Libido:

Id:

Ego:

Superego:

Freud’s Psychological Metaphors: the Man on Horseback, the Iceberg.

B. Freud’s View of the Social Function of Morality.

1. Freud and the Origin of Moral Rules:

Notice that Freud, in this excerpt, doesn’t address his objections directly at the people you might expect: Jesus, priests, rabbis. Instead, he directs them at “society.”

This reflects that Freud’s Glaucon-style belief that society—“civilization”—is the ultimate source of moral rules. In his view, society attempts to impose upon its members rules that will stave off social chaos.

As Freud puts it, society “aims at binding the members of community together in a libidinal way” and “favours every path by which strong identifications can be established between members of the community” (131). No doubt, priests and rabbis, as well as parents, teachers, and other authority figures are the conduit of society’s expectations and impositions.

Also, note Freud’s remarks about social taboos against sexual excess: Society has a vested interest in reining in people’s natural and rampant sexual drives; and so it puts into place rules, with strong sanctions, against acting on every sexual impulse.

2. How Freud Evaluates Moral Rules:

This leads Freud to focus his attention (in this excerpt) on the following question:

Would the Neighbor Love Rule best serve society’s interests?

Freud’s answer is ‘No!’: “obedience to high ethical demands entails damages to the aims of civilization” (133).

Note that Freud does not reject morality altogether. He would like to replace the Neighbor Love Rule with a different moral rule . . .

. . . a less demanding principle.

Freud’s favored moral rule, the one he thinks society ought to teach and promote, is a principle of reciprocity—‘do unto others what others (intend to) do unto you’—would be more realistic and thereby better serve society’s interest in suppressing behavior that causes social discord, Freud thinks.

B. Freud’s Objections are (Fairly) “Common Sensical.”

Freud’s objections to the Neighbor Love Rule, whether they are ultimately sound, don’t seem to rely upon the more questionable aspects of his highly speculative theory of psychoanalysis (see Epstein, Envy, chapter 2).

{That said, there is, in this passage, an exception or two, quotations that raise the skeptical eyebrow: Aggressiveness “already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form” (136). Ugh.}

Freud’s assumptions about human nature and about the nature and origin of morality, which play important roles in his objections to the Neighbor Love Rule, are controversial, and we should scrutinize them.

C. Freud’s Request to His Reader: “See Jesus’ Rule with Fresh Eyes.”

Freud asks: “Let us adopt a naïve attitude towards [the Neighbor Love Rule], as though we were hearing it for the first time” (132).

Why does Freud ask us to approach his discussion of the Neighbor Love Rule with this attitude?

Consider an “unfair advantage” the Neighbor Love Rule has enjoyed.

D. The Primary Aim of This Excerpt of Civilization and Its Discontents.

Freud, before he goes on to construct his positive theory about how society should be structured, will need to argue that it is a bad idea for people individually and for society as a whole to adopt and attempt to live up to the neighbor love rule.

He does this largely by raising practical questions in a skeptical tone,

“Why should we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all else, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible?” (132),

and then attempting to answer these questions by pointing out the personal and social costs of attempting to live up to the neighbor love rule.