The movement of ideas comes to
discover truths only by responding to some pulsation of interpersonal life,
and every change in our understanding of man is related to a new way he
has of carrying on his existence. If man is the being who is not content to
coincide with himself like a thing but represents himself to himself, sees
himself, imagines himself, and gives himself rigorous or fanciful symbols
of himself, it is quite clear that in return every change in our representation
of man translates a change in man himself. Thus it is the whole history
of this half century, with its projects, disappointments, wars, revolutions,
audacities, panics, inventions, and failures, that we would have to
evoke here. We can only refuse this unlimited task. (MP, Man and Adversity)
With these reservations, we propose to acknowledge that our century
is distinguished by a completely new association of “materialism” and
“idealism,” of pessimism and optimism, or rather by the overcoming of
these antitheses.
materialistas
espiritualistas
natureza humana
humanismo?
Our century has erased the dividing line between “body” and “mind,” and
sees human life as through and through mental and corporeal, always
based upon the body and always (even in its most carnal modes) interested
in relationships between persons. For many thinkers at the close of
the nineteenth century, the body was a bit of matter, a network of mechanisms.
The twentieth century has restored and deepened the notion of
flesh, that is, of animate body.
In psychoanalysis, for example, it would be interesting to follow the
development from a conception of the body which for Freud was initially
that of nineteenth-century doctors to the modern notion of the lived body.
Did not psychoanalysis originally take up the tradition of mechanistic
philosophies of the body—and is it not still frequently understood in this
same way today? Does not the Freudian system explain the most complex
and elaborate behavior of adults in terms of instinct and especially sexual
instincts, that is to say physiologically, in terms of a composition of forces
beyond the grasp of our consciousness or even realized once and for all in
childhood prior to the age of rational control and properly human relationships
to culture and to others? Perhaps things seemed this way in
Freud’s first works, and for a hurried reader; but as his own and his successors’
psychoanalysis rectifies these initial ideas in contact with clinical
experience, we see the emergence of a new idea of the body which was
called for by the initial ideas.
It is not false to say that Freud wanted to base the whole of human
development upon the development of instincts; but we would get further
if we said that from the start his works overturn the concept of instinct and
break down the criteria by which men had previously thought they could
circumscribe it. If the term “instinct” means anything, it means a mechanism
within the organism which with a minimum of use ensures certain
responses adapted to certain characteristic situations of the species. Now
what defines Freudianism is surely to show that in this sense man has no
sexual instincts, that the “polymorphously perverse” child establishes a socalled
normal sexual activity (when he does so) only at the end of a difficult
individual history. Unsure about its instruments as it is about its goals,
the power to love wends its way through a series of investments which approach
the canonical form of love, anticipates and regresses, and repeats
and goes beyond itself without our ever being able to claim that what is
called normal sexual love is nothing but that. The child’s attachment to
his parents, so powerful at the beginning as to retard that history, is not itself
of the instinctual order. For Freud it is a mental attachment. It is not
because the child has the same blood as his parents that he loves them;
it is because he knows he is their issue or because he sees them turned
toward him, and thus identifies himself with them, conceives of himself in
their image, and conceives of them in his image. For Freud the ultimate
psychological reality is the system of attractions and tensions which attaches
the child to parental images, and then through these to all the
other persons, a system within which he tries out different positions in turn,
the last of which will be his adult attitude.
It is not simply the love object which escapes every definition in
terms of instinct, but the very way of loving itself. As we know, adult love,
sustained by a trusting tenderness which does not constantly insist upon
new proofs of absolute attachment but takes the other person as he is, at
his distance and in his autonomy, is for psychoanalysis won from an infantile
“erotic attachment” [“aimance”] which demands everything at all
times and is responsible for whatever devouring, impossible aspects may
remain in any love. And though development to the genital stage is a
necessary condition of this transformation to adult love, it is never sufficient
to guarantee it. Freud himself described an infantile relationship to others which is established through the intermediary of those regions and
functions of the child’s body which are least capable of discrimination and
articulated action: the mouth, which does not know whether to suck or
bite—the sphincteral apparatus, which can only hold in or let go. Now
these primordial modes of relationship to others may remain predominant
even in the genital life of the adult. In this case the relation to others
remains trapped in the impasses of absolute immediacy, oscillating between
an inhuman demand, an absolute egotism, and a voracious devotion
which destroys the subject himself. Thus sexuality and, more generally,
corporeality, which Freud considers the soil of our existence, is a
power of investment which is at first absolute and universal. This power is
sexual only in the sense that it reacts immediately to the visible differences
of the body and the maternal and paternal roles. Instinct and the physiological
are enveloped in a central demand for absolute possession which
could not possibly be the act of a bit of matter but is of the order of what
is ordinarily called consciousness.
And yet it is a mistake to speak of consciousness here, since to do so
is to reintroduce the dichotomy of soul and body at the moment Freudianism
is in the process of contesting it, and thus to change our idea of
the body as well as our idea of the mind. “Psychical facts have a meaning,”
Freud wrote in one of his earliest works. This meant that no human behavior
is simply the result of some bodily mechanism, that in behavior
there is not a mental center and a periphery of automatism, and that all
our gestures in their fashion participate in that single activity of explication
and signification which is ourselves. At least as much as he tries to reduce
superstructures to instinctive infrastructures, Freud tries to show
that in human life there is no “inferior” or “lower part.” Thus we could not
be further from an explanation in “terms of the lower part.” At least as
much as he explains adult behavior by a fate inherited from childhood,
Freud shows a premature adult life in childhood, and in the child’s sphincteral
behavior, for example, a first choice of his relationships of generosity
or avarice to others. At least as much as he explains the psychological
by the body, he shows the psychological meaning of the body, its hidden
or latent logic. Thus we can no longer speak of the sexual organ taken as
a localizable mechanism, or of the body taken as a mass of matter, as an
ultimate cause. Neither cause nor simply instrument or means, it is the vehicle,
the fulcrum, and the steadying factor of our life. None of the notions
philosophy had elaborated upon—cause, effect, means, end, matter,
form—suffices for thinking about the body’s relationships to life as a
whole, about the way it meshes into personal life or the way personal life
meshes into it. The body is enigmatic: a part of the world certainly, but offered
in a bizarre way, as its dwelling, to an absolute desire to draw near the other person and meet him in his body too, animated and animating, the natural face of the mind. With psychoanalysis mind passes into body as, inversely, body passes into mind. ( ah, o mesmo texto anterior,
poesia pelo amor de Deus..........................................................