Buddhism2

Buddhism
Siddhārtha of the Gautama clan was born around 560 b.c.e. in what is today Nepal, just below
the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains. According to legend, the young Siddhārtha grew up in
a palace, surrounded by pleasures and protected from the harsh realities of everyday life. He was
married to a lovely woman and, in his late twenties, fathered a son, but he had grown restless and
discontented. Escaping from the secure but artificial world created by his loving father,
Siddhārtha saw for the first time people who were old and diseased—even dead. How, he
wondered, could anyone live in peace and happiness if this was what life had in store.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher and philologist, or scholar of
historical languages. He spent most of his life in Switzerland, where he taught at the university in
Bern. Nietzsche’s ideas are often misunderstood, in large part because he wrote them in an
especially idiosyncratic and often difficult style, composing whole works like Human, All Too
Human (1878) in aphorisms, or short, stylized statements rather than in standard academic prose.
Although he has been described as an inspiration for Nazism, scholars remain divided on the
soundness of this charge. Obviously, he had died before national socialism coalesced as an
ideology in Germany, but his critiques of modernity and glorification of ancient values—many of
them martial—did make his work appealing to Nazism, fascism, and other reactionary
movements. In addition, he has been described as a nihilist and relativist, but Nietzsche himself
dismissed such labels and, in fact, emphatically rejected nihilism.

Beyond Good and Evil: Nietzsche takes a jaundiced view of Christianity and early modern
values, depicting them as the triumph of social decadence over human nature and the victory of
what he terms a slave morality over a master morality, introduced in The Genealogy of Morals
(1887). In that text, he distinguishes two sets of ideas: good and bad versus good and evil. The
first describes the master morality, which values personal power and excellence—these come to
mean “good.” By contrast, “bad” refers to that which is low or common, and therefore
disapproved within the master morality. The slave morality, which Nietzsche associates primarily
with Judaism and Christianity, redefines the duality as being good versus evil. In this ideology,
what the master morality views as “good,” meaning that which is strong and superior, is equated
with “evil.” Good, under the slave morality, refers to qualities like self-sacrifice and humility.
Below is a passage describing the master morality, for illustration:
When the ruling group determines what is “good,” the exalted, proud states of the soul are
experienced as conferring distinction and determining the order or rank…. It should be noted
immediately that in this first type of morality the opposition of “good” and “bad” means
approximately the same as “noble” and “contemptible.” According to master morality it is
precisely those who are “good” that inspire, and wish to inspire, fear, while the “bad” are felt to
be contemptible.
Nietzsche draws the foundations of his master morality from ancient works like those of Homer,
depicting a morally shallow but vigorous and glory-loving culture. As such, Nietzsche’s master
morality is the product of a strong, free, life-affirming ruling class. It is a morality of those in
power, those who wish to honor excellence in humanity, representing the values of a warrior.
By contrast, the slave morality has its origin in the values of the weak and the oppressed, who
create a morality that attacks the judgments proclaimed by the master morality. According to
Nietzsche:
Here is the place for the famous opposition of “good” and “evil”: into evil one’s feelings project
power and dangerousness, a certain terribleness, subtlety, and strength that does not permit
contempt to develop. According to slave morality, those who are “evil” thus inspire fear….
The juxtaposition of master and slave moralities is important to Nietzsche because it is the
historical triumph of the slave morality over that of the master that has led to a critical decline in
human affairs. This transvaluation of values, as he calls it, started when Socrates first chastised
Thrasymachus for insisting that justice is nothing more than what is favored by the strongest.
Later, Judaism, and Christianity replaced the noble morality of the ancients with a morality of the
weak, praising compassion and selflessness over competition and glory. Slave morality is the

product of resentment and labels as “good” all that denies the strength and vitality of human
nature. Religion, especially Christianity, is included in the ethos of slave morality because it
praises a set of otherworldly values that deny noble human existence and individual power,
which Nietzsche sees as the true expression and greatness of humanity.
For Nietzsche, modernity and its ideological offshoots—liberalism, democracy, and socialism—
are products of the slave morality. All center the position of the weak and deny the life-affirming
values the master morality once endorsed. Modern politics is the victory of the slave morality
over that of the master, of the rabble over the elite, and the triumph of a set of dehumanizing
values over human nature, resulting in the denial of freedom and the production of weak and
resentful individuals. In addition to this skeptical view of conventional modern morality,
Nietzsche sees clear limits to the ability of reason and modern political thought to secure firm
foundations for moral and political values. Modernity, if anything, undermines itself, producing
nihilism and the urge to destroy.
Crisis of Modernity: The transvaluation of values is the origin of what Nietzsche describes as the
crisis of modernity. This is a crisis of nihilism, of denying the reality of human existence and
wrongly seeking to provide a rational foundation for morality. According to Nietzsche, the
project of the Enlightenment and modernity has not been so modest:
With a stiff seriousness that inspires laughter, all our philosophers demanded something far more
exalted, presumptuous, and solemn for themselves as soon as they approached the study of
morality: they wanted to supply a rational foundation for morality—and every philosopher so far
has believed that he has provided such a foundation.
Seeking to construct this rational foundation for morality, theorists have used science and reason
in place of religion. Yet science has been incapable of serving as such a foundation: “Science is
not nearly self-reliant enough to be that; it first requires in every respect an ideal of value, a
value-creating power, in the service of which it could believe in itself—it never creates
values….”
One flaw in grounding morality in science is that, by itself, science is unable to distinguish right
from wrong in an objective fashion. A second flaw in science as a basis of morality lies in the
belief, espoused by religious thinkers, that there is such a thing as immutable truth. To Nietzsche,
there is no such unchanging truth, “only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing.’”

Because he denies any absolute truth and the ability of reason to provide uncontestable
foundations for knowledge, Nietzsche argues that the attempt to replace religion with scientific
reason as the basis of knowledge has produced not certainty but a continual “tyranny of reason”
that started with Socrates and was perpetuated by early scientists like Nicolas Copernicus (1473–
1543). This tyranny has denied human freedom and put humanity on a self-destructive path
toward nihilism, a denial of all truths, including the legitimacy of reason itself. It did this, first,
by subjecting all other values and systems of knowledge to the test of reason, rejecting those that
could not be supported. Reason then turned on itself and questioned its own presuppositions,
which revealed that its own claims could not be rationally defended either. Reason in search of
truth inadvertently destroyed truth.
Nietzsche’s discussion of modernity builds on late modern criticisms of reason, which had
sought to place limits on it in order to protect religious faith from rational scrutiny. But
modernity could not provide such limits. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Nietzsche’s hero, the
philosopher-warrior Zarathustra, infamously proclaims that God is dead. But Nietzsche claims
that he did not kill God; it was the decadent culture produced by slave morality and the tyranny
of reason that did so.
To Nietzsche, bourgeois culture demonstrates that there are no transcendent values, no eternal
truths, no natural laws, and no firm or everlasting foundation for knowledge. All knowledge is
created by people in a specific historical situation, and there are no moral truths independent of
people creating them. Bourgeois culture has broken down and has entered a spiral of selfdestruction
and decadence. Nietzsche’s self-appointed task is to announce the need for a new
theory, one that creates fresh values. Yet it cannot be the traditional thinker who fashions these
values. It must be commanders and legislators who formulate truth by proclaiming it through
their will to power. The will to power is a complex idea but can be summarized as the human
drive to actualize one’s own individual will in the external world. The new theory and new
politics must reject slave morality, nihilism, and the tyranny of reason, instead imposing on the
world a novel set of values that affirm the underlying noble traits of human nature, thus creating
a unique period in human history that radically breaks with both the shallow morality of the
ancient world and the life-denying decadence of modern bourgeois culture.
Consider Nietzsche’s description of master morality. Recall Thrasymachus’s definition of justice
in Plato’s Republic, Book I: Justice is whatever serves the advantage of the strongest. Does
Thrasymachus subscribe to the master morality? Why or why not?
The phrase “God is dead” is often taken out of its context in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and used to
portray Nietzsche as a nihilist. What does this phrase actually mean as it is used in the story?

Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher and philologist, or scholar of
historical languages. He spent most of his life in Switzerland, where he taught at the university in
Bern. Nietzsche’s ideas are often misunderstood, in large part because he wrote them in an
especially idiosyncratic and often difficult style, composing whole works like Human, All Too
Human (1878) in aphorisms, or short, stylized statements rather than in standard academic prose.
Although he has been described as an inspiration for Nazism, scholars remain divided on the
soundness of this charge. Obviously, he had died before national socialism coalesced as an
ideology in Germany, but his critiques of modernity and glorification of ancient values—many of
them martial—did make his work appealing to Nazism, fascism, and other reactionary
movements. In addition, he has been described as a nihilist and relativist, but Nietzsche himself
dismissed such labels and, in fact, emphatically rejected nihilism.
Beyond Good and Evil: Nietzsche takes a jaundiced view of Christianity and early modern
values, depicting them as the triumph of social decadence over human nature and the victory of
what he terms a slave morality over a master morality, introduced in The Genealogy of Morals
(1887). In that text, he distinguishes two sets of ideas: good and bad versus good and evil. The
first describes the master morality, which values personal power and excellence—these come to
mean “good.” By contrast, “bad” refers to that which is low or common, and therefore
disapproved within the master morality. The slave morality, which Nietzsche associates primarily
with Judaism and Christianity, redefines the duality as being good versus evil. In this ideology,
what the master morality views as “good,” meaning that which is strong and superior, is equated
with “evil.” Good, under the slave morality, refers to qualities like self-sacrifice and humility.
Below is a passage describing the master morality, for illustration:
When the ruling group determines what is “good,” the exalted, proud states of the soul are
experienced as conferring distinction and determining the order or rank…. It should be noted
immediately that in this first type of morality the opposition of “good” and “bad” means
approximately the same as “noble” and “contemptible.” According to master morality it is
precisely those who are “good” that inspire, and wish to inspire, fear, while the “bad” are felt to
be contemptible.
Nietzsche draws the foundations of his master morality from ancient works like those of Homer,
depicting a morally shallow but vigorous and glory-loving culture. As such, Nietzsche’s master
morality is the product of a strong, free, life-affirming ruling class. It is a morality of those in
power, those who wish to honor excellence in humanity, representing the values of a warrior.

By contrast, the slave morality has its origin in the values of the weak and the oppressed, who
create a morality that attacks the judgments proclaimed by the master morality. According to
Nietzsche:
Here is the place for the famous opposition of “good” and “evil”: into evil one’s feelings project
power and dangerousness, a certain terribleness, subtlety, and strength that does not permit
contempt to develop. According to slave morality, those who are “evil” thus inspire fear….
The juxtaposition of master and slave moralities is important to Nietzsche because it is the
historical triumph of the slave morality over that of the master that has led to a critical decline in
human affairs. This transvaluation of values, as he calls it, started when Socrates first chastised
Thrasymachus for insisting that justice is nothing more than what is favored by the strongest.
Later, Judaism, and Christianity replaced the noble morality of the ancients with a morality of the
weak, praising compassion and selflessness over competition and glory. Slave morality is the
product of resentment and labels as “good” all that denies the strength and vitality of human
nature. Religion, especially Christianity, is included in the ethos of slave morality because it
praises a set of otherworldly values that deny noble human existence and individual power,
which Nietzsche sees as the true expression and greatness of humanity.
For Nietzsche, modernity and its ideological offshoots—liberalism, democracy, and socialism—
are products of the slave morality. All center the position of the weak and deny the life-affirming
values the master morality once endorsed. Modern politics is the victory of the slave morality
over that of the master, of the rabble over the elite, and the triumph of a set of dehumanizing
values over human nature, resulting in the denial of freedom and the production of weak and
resentful individuals. In addition to this skeptical view of conventional modern morality,
Nietzsche sees clear limits to the ability of reason and modern political thought to secure firm
foundations for moral and political values. Modernity, if anything, undermines itself, producing
nihilism and the urge to destroy.
Crisis of Modernity: The transvaluation of values is the origin of what Nietzsche describes as the
crisis of modernity. This is a crisis of nihilism, of denying the reality of human existence and
wrongly seeking to provide a rational foundation for morality. According to Nietzsche, the
project of the Enlightenment and modernity has not been so modest:
With a stiff seriousness that inspires laughter, all our philosophers demanded something far more
exalted, presumptuous, and solemn for themselves as soon as they approached the study of
morality: they wanted to supply a rational foundation for morality—and every philosopher so far
has believed that he has provided such a foundation.

Seeking to construct this rational foundation for morality, theorists have used science and reason
in place of religion. Yet science has been incapable of serving as such a foundation: “Science is
not nearly self-reliant enough to be that; it first requires in every respect an ideal of value, a
value-creating power, in the service of which it could believe in itself—it never creates
values….”
One flaw in grounding morality in science is that, by itself, science is unable to distinguish right
from wrong in an objective fashion. A second flaw in science as a basis of morality lies in the
belief, espoused by religious thinkers, that there is such a thing as immutable truth. To Nietzsche,
there is no such unchanging truth, “only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing.’”
Because he denies any absolute truth and the ability of reason to provide uncontestable
foundations for knowledge, Nietzsche argues that the attempt to replace religion with scientific
reason as the basis of knowledge has produced not certainty but a continual “tyranny of reason”
that started with Socrates and was perpetuated by early scientists like Nicolas Copernicus (1473–
1543). This tyranny has denied human freedom and put humanity on a self-destructive path
toward nihilism, a denial of all truths, including the legitimacy of reason itself. It did this, first,
by subjecting all other values and systems of knowledge to the test of reason, rejecting those that
could not be supported. Reason then turned on itself and questioned its own presuppositions,
which revealed that its own claims could not be rationally defended either. Reason in search of
truth inadvertently destroyed truth.
Nietzsche’s discussion of modernity builds on late modern criticisms of reason, which had
sought to place limits on it in order to protect religious faith from rational scrutiny. But
modernity could not provide such limits. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Nietzsche’s hero, the
philosopher-warrior Zarathustra, infamously proclaims that God is dead. But Nietzsche claims
that he did not kill God; it was the decadent culture produced by slave morality and the tyranny
of reason that did so.
To Nietzsche, bourgeois culture demonstrates that there are no transcendent values, no eternal
truths, no natural laws, and no firm or everlasting foundation for knowledge. All knowledge is
created by people in a specific historical situation, and there are no moral truths independent of
people creating them. Bourgeois culture has broken down and has entered a spiral of selfdestruction
and decadence. Nietzsche’s self-appointed task is to announce the need for a new
theory, one that creates fresh values. Yet it cannot be the traditional thinker who fashions these
values. It must be commanders and legislators who formulate truth by proclaiming it through
their will to power. The will to power is a complex idea but can be summarized as the human

drive to actualize one’s own individual will in the external world. The new theory and new
politics must reject slave morality, nihilism, and the tyranny of reason, instead imposing on the
world a novel set of values that affirm the underlying noble traits of human nature, thus creating
a unique period in human history that radically breaks with both the shallow morality of the
ancient world and the life-denying decadence of modern bourgeois culture.
Consider Nietzsche’s description of master morality. Recall Thrasymachus’s definition of justice
in Plato’s Republic, Book I: Justice is whatever serves the advantage of the strongest. Does
Thrasymachus subscribe to the master morality? Why or why not?
The phrase “God is dead” is often taken out of its context in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and used to
portray Nietzsche as a nihilist. What does this phrase actually mean as it is used in the story?

Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher and philologist, or scholar of
historical languages. He spent most of his life in Switzerland, where he taught at the university in
Bern. Nietzsche’s ideas are often misunderstood, in large part because he wrote them in an
especially idiosyncratic and often difficult style, composing whole works like Human, All Too
Human (1878) in aphorisms, or short, stylized statements rather than in standard academic prose.
Although he has been described as an inspiration for Nazism, scholars remain divided on the
soundness of this charge. Obviously, he had died before national socialism coalesced as an
ideology in Germany, but his critiques of modernity and glorification of ancient values—many of
them martial—did make his work appealing to Nazism, fascism, and other reactionary
movements. In addition, he has been described as a nihilist and relativist, but Nietzsche himself
dismissed such labels and, in fact, emphatically rejected nihilism.
Beyond Good and Evil: Nietzsche takes a jaundiced view of Christianity and early modern
values, depicting them as the triumph of social decadence over human nature and the victory of
what he terms a slave morality over a master morality, introduced in The Genealogy of Morals
(1887). In that text, he distinguishes two sets of ideas: good and bad versus good and evil. The
first describes the master morality, which values personal power and excellence—these come to
mean “good.” By contrast, “bad” refers to that which is low or common, and therefore
disapproved within the master morality. The slave morality, which Nietzsche associates primarily
with Judaism and Christianity, redefines the duality as being good versus evil. In this ideology,
what the master morality views as “good,” meaning that which is strong and superior, is equated
with “evil.” Good, under the slave morality, refers to qualities like self-sacrifice and humility.
Below is a passage describing the master morality, for illustration:
When the ruling group determines what is “good,” the exalted, proud states of the soul are
experienced as conferring distinction and determining the order or rank…. It should be noted
immediately that in this first type of morality the opposition of “good” and “bad” means
approximately the same as “noble” and “contemptible.” According to master morality it is
precisely those who are “good” that inspire, and wish to inspire, fear, while the “bad” are felt to
be contemptible.
Nietzsche draws the foundations of his master morality from ancient works like those of Homer,
depicting a morally shallow but vigorous and glory-loving culture. As such, Nietzsche’s master
morality is the product of a strong, free, life-affirming ruling class. It is a morality of those in
power, those who wish to honor excellence in humanity, representing the values of a warrior.

By contrast, the slave morality has its origin in the values of the weak and the oppressed, who
create a morality that attacks the judgments proclaimed by the master morality. According to
Nietzsche:
Here is the place for the famous opposition of “good” and “evil”: into evil one’s feelings project
power and dangerousness, a certain terribleness, subtlety, and strength that does not permit
contempt to develop. According to slave morality, those who are “evil” thus inspire fear….
The juxtaposition of master and slave moralities is important to Nietzsche because it is the
historical triumph of the slave morality over that of the master that has led to a critical decline in
human affairs. This transvaluation of values, as he calls it, started when Socrates first chastised
Thrasymachus for insisting that justice is nothing more than what is favored by the strongest.
Later, Judaism, and Christianity replaced the noble morality of the ancients with a morality of the
weak, praising compassion and selflessness over competition and glory. Slave morality is the
product of resentment and labels as “good” all that denies the strength and vitality of human
nature. Religion, especially Christianity, is included in the ethos of slave morality because it
praises a set of otherworldly values that deny noble human existence and individual power,
which Nietzsche sees as the true expression and greatness of humanity.
For Nietzsche, modernity and its ideological offshoots—liberalism, democracy, and socialism—
are products of the slave morality. All center the position of the weak and deny the life-affirming
values the master morality once endorsed. Modern politics is the victory of the slave morality
over that of the master, of the rabble over the elite, and the triumph of a set of dehumanizing
values over human nature, resulting in the denial of freedom and the production of weak and
resentful individuals. In addition to this skeptical view of conventional modern morality,
Nietzsche sees clear limits to the ability of reason and modern political thought to secure firm
foundations for moral and political values. Modernity, if anything, undermines itself, producing
nihilism and the urge to destroy.
Crisis of Modernity: The transvaluation of values is the origin of what Nietzsche describes as the
crisis of modernity. This is a crisis of nihilism, of denying the reality of human existence and
wrongly seeking to provide a rational foundation for morality. According to Nietzsche, the
project of the Enlightenment and modernity has not been so modest:
With a stiff seriousness that inspires laughter, all our philosophers demanded something far more
exalted, presumptuous, and solemn for themselves as soon as they approached the study of
morality: they wanted to supply a rational foundation for morality—and every philosopher so far
has believed that he has provided such a foundation.

Seeking to construct this rational foundation for morality, theorists have used science and reason
in place of religion. Yet science has been incapable of serving as such a foundation: “Science is
not nearly self-reliant enough to be that; it first requires in every respect an ideal of value, a
value-creating power, in the service of which it could believe in itself—it never creates
values….”
One flaw in grounding morality in science is that, by itself, science is unable to distinguish right
from wrong in an objective fashion. A second flaw in science as a basis of morality lies in the
belief, espoused by religious thinkers, that there is such a thing as immutable truth. To Nietzsche,
there is no such unchanging truth, “only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing.’”
Because he denies any absolute truth and the ability of reason to provide uncontestable
foundations for knowledge, Nietzsche argues that the attempt to replace religion with scientific
reason as the basis of knowledge has produced not certainty but a continual “tyranny of reason”
that started with Socrates and was perpetuated by early scientists like Nicolas Copernicus (1473–
1543). This tyranny has denied human freedom and put humanity on a self-destructive path
toward nihilism, a denial of all truths, including the legitimacy of reason itself. It did this, first,
by subjecting all other values and systems of knowledge to the test of reason, rejecting those that
could not be supported. Reason then turned on itself and questioned its own presuppositions,
which revealed that its own claims could not be rationally defended either. Reason in search of
truth inadvertently destroyed truth.
Nietzsche’s discussion of modernity builds on late modern criticisms of reason, which had
sought to place limits on it in order to protect religious faith from rational scrutiny. But
modernity could not provide such limits. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Nietzsche’s hero, the
philosopher-warrior Zarathustra, infamously proclaims that God is dead. But Nietzsche claims
that he did not kill God; it was the decadent culture produced by slave morality and the tyranny
of reason that did so.
To Nietzsche, bourgeois culture demonstrates that there are no transcendent values, no eternal
truths, no natural laws, and no firm or everlasting foundation for knowledge. All knowledge is
created by people in a specific historical situation, and there are no moral truths independent of
people creating them. Bourgeois culture has broken down and has entered a spiral of selfdestruction
and decadence. Nietzsche’s self-appointed task is to announce the need for a new
theory, one that creates fresh values. Yet it cannot be the traditional thinker who fashions these
values. It must be commanders and legislators who formulate truth by proclaiming it through
their will to power. The will to power is a complex idea but can be summarized as the human

drive to actualize one’s own individual will in the external world. The new theory and new
politics must reject slave morality, nihilism, and the tyranny of reason, instead imposing on the
world a novel set of values that affirm the underlying noble traits of human nature, thus creating
a unique period in human history that radically breaks with both the shallow morality of the
ancient world and the life-denying decadence of modern bourgeois culture.
Consider Nietzsche’s description of master morality. Recall Thrasymachus’s definition of justice
in Plato’s Republic, Book I: Justice is whatever serves the advantage of the strongest. Does
Thrasymachus subscribe to the master morality? Why or why not?
The phrase “God is dead” is often taken out of its context in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and used to
portray Nietzsche as a nihilist. What does this phrase actually mean as it is used in the story?

Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is considered the founder of modern psychoanalysis, an early form
of what is now the discipline of psychology. However, psychoanalysis does not approach the
project of understanding the human mind through analyzing large data sets, replicable
experiments, or biological studies, which are all now part of psychological research. Instead,
psychoanalysis is a therapeutic technique that seeks first to understand how each individual
personality is formed and then to use that information to address pathological thinking and
behavior. While psychoanalysis began as a therapeutic approach to psychological distress, it
gradually grew to inform disciplines like philosophy, political theory, sociology, and literary
criticism.
Freud spent most of his adult life in Vienna, Austria. However, Freud was Jewish, so he was
forced to flee to England in 1938, when Nazi forces invaded his home country. While Freud is
generally associated with the discipline of psychology, he also made notable contributions in the
field of political theory that would influence a number of important thinkers. Perhaps his main
contribution to politics was his theory that human psychology and nature are repressed by
cultural forces and institutions and that such repression influences individuals’ political actions.
Freud emphasizes the importance of sexuality and sexual development to human nature. He
asserts human sexual drives influence morality, laws, and cultural values. Although earlier
thinkers had addressed sex roles and perhaps sexuality as one aspect of politics, they had
subordinated sexual drives to reason and concluded that reason was the only legitimate basis of
politics. But to Freud, human instincts, including the sexual drive, develop through childhood
and are critical to defining personality and motivating behavior. The sex drive and related
passions clash with other urges in the human psyche, which lead to a politics based on an
aggregate of troubled individuals—each beset by conflicting internal pressures that are then
expressed in their social and political relations. More specifically, the human drives are essential
to defining the cultures people develop but at the same time create uneasiness at living in those
cultures because of the conflicts at the core of the human condition.
Freud describes the human psyche as partly governed or trapped by basic human drives, such as
sex and aggression, that need to be satisfied. In his books The Ego and the Id (1923) and The
Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1920), he describes childhood conflicts with
parents as eventually producing three components in the adult psyche: the id, ego, and the
superego. Put simply, the id represents basic passions and impulses, such as the sexual drive, or
eros. The ego represents rationality, and the superego represents the social pressures of family,
church, government, and the like, which seek to subdue human behavior, or control the id. The id
is in constant struggle with the ego and the superego. That is, basic human drives of the id, such

as sex and aggression, need to be curbed by the ego or superego, or else then could lead to
dangerous and self-destructive outcomes.
Endless Human Misery. In Freud’s most somber and pessimistic book, Civilization and Its
Discontents (1930), which sums up many of the ideas he had been exploring throughout his life,
he applies his theory of psychoanalysis to social and political (or at least cultural) analysis. He
wrote the book in Germany between the two world wars. Hitler would soon come to power,
fascism was spreading through Italy and Spain, and it appeared that liberal values and society
were collapsing in Europe and North America. The book provides a theory of human nature, a
vision of the state and society, and a description of how humans are at war with civilization, the
human condition, and the psyche itself.
All individuals seek happiness, Freud says, and “What decides the program of life is the pleasure
principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start.” But the
desire for happiness is thwarted by three forces: the human body, the external world, and
relationships with other individuals. Of the three factors contributing to human misery—
preventing happiness—he concludes that:
What we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and we should be much
happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing
because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact that all
things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources
of suffering are part of that very civilization.
Thus, the chief cause of human misery is the culture people have created for themselves. But
however uncomfortable they are with civilization, Freud argues that humans in the primitive or
presocial era were probably no happier or more secure.
He defines civilization as the “whole sum of achievements and the regulations which distinguish
our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serves two purposes—namely to protect
men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations.” Much in the same way that Hobbes saw
the creation of civil society as a way out of the anarchy and war in the state of nature, Freud sees
the rules and institutions of civilization as a means of protecting individuals against the external
threats that natural forces and other human beings pose. These threats exist in part because
humans are not, by nature, cooperative:

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if
attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be
reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a
potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their
aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him
sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to
torture and to kill him.
Not subject just to rational impulses, humans are driven by the need to satisfy their basic desires,
including their sexual and violent impulses. Without some restraints, individuals would kill one
another. Thus civilization, or life in organized political communities, including the creation of
the state, is an important advance for humans in that it creates rules and institutions that restrain
the id, making it possible for individuals to live together.
Costs of Civilization. The creation of civilization and social order comes with a price. To Freud,
all humans are motivated by the twin goals of utility and pleasure. On the one hand, people seek
pleasure. On the other, they require rules and institutions that serve to restrain their aggressive
impulses, and these two desires often conflict. Put another way, on some occasions the id (human
desires) comes into conflict with the ego, the superego, and the rules of society. This necessitates
some mechanism to regulate behavior, and that mechanism is the state:
Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger
than any separate individual, and which remains united against separate individuals…. The
replacement of the power of the individual by the power of the community constitutes the
decisive step of civilization.
That is, when the rules of politics become the force that regulates human behavior, people are
able to live together and enter civilization.
Although the need to preserve oneself is a driving force to create civilization and the state, eros
serves as the glue that holds society together:
Love relationships … constitute the essence of the group mind…. Our hypothesis finds support
in the first instance from two passing thoughts. First, that the group is clearly held together by a
power of some kind: and to what power could this feat be better ascribed than to Eros, which
holds together everything in the world?

In other words, the basic drives for life, love, sex, and survival propel people toward civilization.
Yet, according to Freud, entering civil society is sort of a social contract, which originates:
…with a renunciation of instinct, a recognition of mutual obligations, the introduction of
definitions pronounced inviolable (holy)—that is to say, the beginnings of morality and justice.
Each individual renounced his ideal of acquiring his father’s position for himself and of
possessing his mother and sisters.
The origin of the political community, then, has a conflicting character. It is a consequence of
following the demands of one’s survival instinct and erotic drive, yet it is also born out of fear of
patricide and an erotic fixation on the mother, or what Freud calls the Oedipus complex, and the
need to regulate social taboos, such as incest. The state originates to regulate familial and sexual
forces that threaten to destroy individuals.
At the same time, though, eros also drives humans toward freedom and against the demands of
civilization. Social controls themselves create this desire for freedom by proscribing aggressive
and sexual behavior. Civilization and political society are made possible only by the sublimation
of human instincts and drives. Yet civilization is based on the renunciation of what is still an
instinct, and culture is based on the frustration of what are still basic drives. Thus, eros is set
against civilization, driving individuals to rebel against the very institutions that make survival
possible.
It is not easy for people to prevent hostile or other instinctive behaviors, despite social
repression, because to do so represses their nature. For Freud, “if civilization imposes great
sacrifices not only on man’s sexuality but on his aggressivity, we can understand better why it is
hard for him to be happy in that civilization.” Civilization and social rules are produced by the
need of individuals to preserve themselves from death, which Freud associates with the ancient
Greek word for death, thanatos. Yet civilization also frustrates the id and the satisfaction of other
human desires. Ultimately, it frustrates human nature, presenting “a struggle between eros and
thanatos, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the
human species.” Although civilization is a product of instinct, it frustrates basic drives, which in
turn leads to drives to attack it due to another instinct. Social behavior, as well as individual
behavior, then, is composed of numerous drives which humans seek to control and repress but
which at any minute might break out and destroy them and civilization.

Consequently, people seek civilization and society to be happy, yet both are the cause of misery.
Individuals are at war with civilization, but more importantly, they are at war with their own
souls, seeking to subdue the nonrational and unconscious and bring them under control of the
rational. Human nature requires expression and satisfaction of the impulses, yet satisfaction of
those same desires may lead to death. The goal of civilization is to control this human tendency
toward self-destruction while at the same time regulating eros. In the end, Freud doubts whether
civilization can control humans’ self-destructive nature without perpetually frustrating and
suppressing freedom and human nature, thus destroying humanity in another way, by preventing
happiness. He sees the irrational, conflicting human needs perpetually challenging the rational
order of society, threatening an endless cycle of violence and domination.
Freud is typically thought of as a psychologist, not a political theorist. In what ways are Freud’s
ideas political?
Consider Rousseau’s contention that life in civil society makes human beings less happy and less
free. How does this differ from Freud’s assessment? How do the two thinkers’ accounts of
human nature shape their attitudes toward modernity?