Against Interpretation

by Susan Sontag

  Religious fellow-travelling leads to several highly undesirable consequences. One is that the sense of what religions are and have been historically becomes coarse and intellectually dishonest. It is understandable, if not sound, when Catholic intellectuals attempt to reclaim Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and James Joyce—passionate atheists all—as true, if highly tormented, sons of the Church. But the same strategy is entirely indefensible on the part of the religious fellow-travellers operating within the Nietzschean “God is dead,” who apparently see no harm in making everybody religious. They stand for no tradition to which they seek to reclaim errant members. They merely collect exemplars of seriousness, or moral earnestness, or intellectual passion, which is what they identify the religious possibility with today.

  The present book under review18 is just such an example of religious fellow-travelling, worth examining because it clearly reflects the lack of intellectual definition in this attitude which is so widespread. It consists of an assemblage of writings by twenty-three authors “from Tolstoy to Camus,” selected and edited by Walter Kaufmann, an associate professor of philosophy at Princeton.

  Of the order of the book one need not speak since it has no order, except a vague chronological one. There are a few selections with which one could hardly quarrel, such as the two chapters “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov (certainly Kaufmann is correct in saying that one cannot understand the Grand Inquisitor story without the preceding disquisition by Ivan on the sufferings of children), the excerpts from Nietzsche’s The Antichrist and Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, and William James’ essay “The Will to Believe.” There are also a few imaginative choices of writings which deserve to be better known: e.g. the Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX, the exchange of letters between Karl Barth and Emil Brunner on the Church’s stand against Communism, and the essay of W. K. Clifford which prompted the famous reply of William James. But the majority of the selections seem ill-chosen. Oscar Wilde cannot be regarded seriously as a religious writer. Neither is there any justification for Morton Scott Enslin’s chapter on the New Testament, a conventionally sound account of the gospels and their historical setting, which is entirely out of place in an anthology of religious thought. The choices of Wilde and Enslin illustrate the two poles of irrelevance into which Kaufmann’s book falls: frivolity and academicism.19

  Kaufmann says in his introduction: “Almost all the men included were ‘for’ religion, though not the popular religion which scarcely any great religious figure has ever admired.” But what does it mean to be “for” religion? Does the notion “religion” have any serious religious meaning at all? Put another way: can one teach or invite people to be sympathetic to religion-in-general? What does it mean to be “religious”? Obviously it is not the same thing as being “devout” or “orthodox.” My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not “language.” Similarly one is not “a religionist,” but a believing Catholic, Jew, Presbyterian, Shintoist, or Tallensi. Religious beliefs may be options, as William James described them, but they are not generalized options. It is easy, of course, to misunderstand this point. I don’t mean to say that one must be orthodox as a Jew, a Thomist as a Catholic, or a fundamentalist as a Protestant. The history of every important religious community is a complex one, and (as Kaufmann suggests) those figures who are afterwards acknowledged as great religious teachers have generally been in critical opposition to popular religious practices and to much within the past traditions of their own faiths. Nevertheless, for a believer the concept of “religion” (and of deciding to become religious) makes no sense as a category. (For the rationalist critic, from Lucretius to Voltaire to Freud, the term does have a certain polemical sense when, typically, he opposes “religion” on the one hand to “science” or “reason” on the other.) Neither does it make sense as a concept of objective sociological and historical inquiry. To be religious is always to be in some sense an adherent (even as a heretic) to a specific symbolism and a specific historic community, whatever the interpretation of these symbols and this historic community the believer may adopt. It is to be involved in specific beliefs and practices, not just to give assent to the philosophical assertions that a being whom we may call God exists, that life has meaning, etc. Religion is not equivalent to the theistic proposition.

  The significance of Kaufmann’s book is that it is one more example of a prevailing modern attitude which seems to me, at best, soft-headed and, more often, intellectually presumptuous. The attempts of modern secular intellectuals to help the faltering authority of “religion” ought to be rejected by every sensitive believer, and by every honest atheist. God-in-his-heaven, moral certitude, and cultural unity cannot be restored by nostalgia; the suspenseful piety of religious fellow-travelling demands a resolution, by acts of either commitment or disavowal. The presence of a religious faith may indeed be of unquestionable psychological benefit to the individual and of unquestionable social benefit to a society. But we shall never have the fruit of the tree without nourishing its roots as well; we shall never restore the prestige of the old faiths by demonstrating their psychological and sociological benefits.

  Neither is it worth dallying with the lost religious consciousness because we unreflectively equate religion with seriousness, seriousness about the important human and moral issues. Most secular Western intellectuals have not really thought through or lived out the atheist option; they are only on the verge of it. Seeking to palliate a harsh choice, they often argue that all highmindedness and profundity has religious roots or can be viewed as a “religious” (or crypto-religious) position. The concern with the problems of despair and self-deception which Kaufmann singles out in Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich do not make Tolstoy in these writings a spokesman “for” religion, any more than they do Kafka, as Günther Anders has shown. If, finally, what we admire in religion is its “prophetic” or “critical” stance, as Kaufmann suggests, and we wish to salvage that (cf. also Erich Fromm’s Terry lectures, Psychoanalysis and Religion, with its distinction between “humanistic” or good and “authoritarian” or bad religion), then we are deluding ourselves. The critical stance of the Old Testament prophets demands the priesthood, the cult, the specific history of Israel; it is rooted in that matrix. One cannot detach criticism from its roots and, ultimately, from that party to which it sets itself in antagonism. Thus Kierkegaard observed in his Journals that Protestantism makes no sense alone, without the dialectical opposition to Catholicism. (When there are no priests it makes no sense to protest that every layman is a priest; when there is no institutionalized other-worldliness, it makes no religious sense to denounce monasticism and asceticism and recall people to this world and to their mundane vocations.) The voice of the genuine critic always deserves the most specific hearing. It is simply misleading and vulgar to say of Marx, as Edmund Wilson in To the Finland Station and many others have done, that he was really a latter-day prophet; no more than it is true of Freud, though here people are following the cue of Freud’s own rather ambivalent self-identification with Moses. The decisive element in Marx and Freud is the critical and entirely secular attitude which they took to all human problems. For their energies as persons and for their immense moral seriousness as thinkers, surely a better epithet of commendation can be found than these tired evocations of the prestige of the religious teacher. If Camus is a serious writer and worthy of respect, it is because he seeks to reason according to the post-religious premises. He does not belong in the “story” of modern religion.

  If this is granted, we will become much clearer about the attempts which have been made to work out the serious consequences of atheism for reflective thought and personal morality. The heritage of Nietzsche constitutes one such tradition: the essays of E. M. Cioran, for example. The French moraliste and anti-moraliste tradition—Laclos, Sade, Breton, Sa
rtre, Camus, Georges Bataille, Lévi-Strauss—constitutes another. The Hegelian-Marxist tradition is a third. And the Freudian tradition, which includes not only the work of Freud, but also that of dissidents such as Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse (Eros and Civilization) and Norman Brown (Life Against Death), is another. The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas. Modern seriousness, in numerous traditions, exists. Only a bad intellectual end is served when we blur all boundaries and call it religious, too.

  [1961]

  Psychoanalysis and Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death

  THE publication of Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (1959) in a paperback edition is a noteworthy event. Together with Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), it represents a new seriousness about Freudian ideas which reveals most previous writing on Freud published in America, be it the right-wing scholasticism of the psychoanalytic journals or the left-wing cultural studies of the Freudian “revisionists” (Fromm, Horney, etc.), as theoretically irrelevant or, at best, superficial. But, more important than its value as a reinterpretation of the most influential mind of our culture is its boldness as a discussion of the fundamental problems—about the hypocrisy of our culture, about art, money, religion, work, about sex and the motives of the body. Serious thinking about these problems—rightly, in my opinion, centered on the meaning of sexuality and of human freedom—has been continuous in France since Sade, Fourier, Cabanis, and Enfantin; it is to be found today in such disparate works as the sections on the body and on concrete relations with others of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, in the essays of Maurice Blanchot, in L’Histoire d’O, in the plays and prose of Jean Genet.

  But in America, the twin subjects of eroticism and liberty are just beginning to be treated in a serious way. Most of us still feel required to fight the stale battle against inhibitions and prudery, taking sexuality for granted as something which merely needs a freer expression. A country in which the vindication of so sexually reactionary a book as Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a serious matter is plainly at a very elementary stage of sexual maturity. Lawrence’s ideas on sex are seriously marred by his class-romanticism, by his mystique of male separateness, by his puritanical insistence on genital sexuality; and many of his recent literary defenders have admitted this. Yet Lawrence must still be defended, especially when many who reject him have retreated to an even more reactionary position than his: treating sex as a matter-of-fact adjunct to love. The truth is that love is more sexual, more bodily than even Lawrence imagined. And the revolutionary implications of sexuality in contemporary society are far from being fully understood.

  Norman Brown’s book is a step in this direction. Life Against Death cannot fail to shock, if it is taken personally; for it is a book which does not aim at eventual reconciliation with the views of common sense. Another distinction which it possesses: it shows, convincingly, that psychoanalysis is not to be written off—as many contemporary intellectuals have done—as one more vulgar and conformist “ism” (along with Marxism, original sin-ism, existentialism, Zen Buddhism, etc., etc.). The disenchantment with psychoanalysis which animates the most sophisticated voices of our culture is understandable; it is difficult not to reject a view which has become both so official and so bland. The vocabulary of psychoanalysis has become the routine weapon of personal aggression, and the routine way of formulating (and therefore defending oneself against) anxiety, in the American middle classes. Being psychoanalyzed has become as much a bourgeois institution as going to college; and psychoanalytic ideas, incarnated in Broadway plays, in television, in the movies, confront us everywhere. The trouble with psychoanalytic ideas, as it now appears to many, is that they constitute a form of retreat from, and, therefore, conformity to, the real world. Psychoanalytic treatment does not challenge society; it returns us to the world, only a little better able to bear it, and without hope. Psychoanalysis is understood as anti-Utopian and anti-political—a desperate, but fundamentally pessimistic, attempt to safeguard the individual against the oppressive but inevitable claims of society.

  But the disenchantment of American intellectuals with psychoanalytic ideas, as with the earlier disenchantment with Marxist ideas (a parallel case), is premature. Marxism is not Stalinism or the suppression of the Hungarian revolution; psychoanalysis is not the Park Avenue analyst or the psychoanalytic journals or the suburban matron discussing her child’s Oedipus complex. Disenchantment is the characteristic posture of contemporary American intellectuals, but disenchantment is often the product of laziness. We are not tenacious enough about ideas, as we have not been serious or honest enough about sexuality.

  This is the importance of Brown’s Life Against Death, as well as of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. Brown, like Marcuse, pursues Freud’s ideas as a general theory of human nature—not as a therapy which returns people to the society which enforces their conflicts. Psychoanalysis is conceived by Brown not as a mode of treatment to smooth away the neurotic edges of discontent, but as a project for the transformation of human culture, and as a new and higher level in human consciousness as a whole. Freud’s psychological categories are thus correctly seen, in the terminology of Marcuse, as political categories.

  The step which Brown takes, which moves beyond Freud’s own conception of what he was doing, is to show that psychological categories are also bodily categories. For Brown, psychoanalysis (and he does not mean the institutions of current-day psychoanalysis) promises nothing less than the healing of the split between the mind and the body: the transformation of the human ego into a body ego, and the resurrection of the body that is promised in Christian mysticism (Boehme) and in Blake, Novalis, and Rilke. We are nothing but body; all values are bodily values, says Brown. He invites us to accept the androgynous mode of being and the narcissistic mode of self-expression that lie hidden in the body. According to Brown, mankind is unalterably, in the unconscious, in revolt against sexual differentiation and genital organization. The core of human neurosis is man’s incapacity to live in the body—to live (that is, to be sexual) and to die.

  In a time in which there is nothing more common or more acceptable than criticism of our society and revulsion against civilization, it is well to distinguish the arguments of Brown (and Marcuse) from the general run of criticism, which is either childishly nihilistic or ultimately conformist and irrelevant (or often both). And since both books are sharply critical of Freud at many points, it is also important to distinguish them from other attempts to modify Freudian theory and to extend it as a theory of human nature and a moral critique of society. Both Brown and Marcuse offer the sharpest opposition to the bland “revisionist” interpretation of Freud which rules American cultural and intellectual life—on Broadway, in the nursery, at the cocktail parties, and in the suburban marriage bed. This “revisionist” Freudianism (Fromm to Paddy Chayevsky) passes for a criticism of mechanized, anxious, television-brainwashed America. It seeks to reinstate the value of the individual against the mass society; it offers the worthy ideal of fulfillment through love. But the revisionist critique is superficial. To assert the claims of love, when love is understood as comfort, protection against loneliness, ego-security—while leaving all the claims of sublimation unchallenged—hardly does justice to Freud. It is no accident that Freud chose to use the word sex when, as he himself declared, he might as well have used “love.” Freud insisted on sex; he insisted on the body. Few of his followers understood his meaning, or saw its applications in a theory of culture; two exceptions were Ferenczi and the ill-fated Wilhelm Reich. The fact that both Reich and Ferenczi, in Brown’s account, misunderstood the implications of Freud’s thought—mainly, in their acceptance of the primacy of the orgasm—is less important than the fact that they grasped the critical implications of the Freudian ideas. They are far truer to Freud than the o
rthodox psychoanalysts who, as a result of their inability to transform psychoanalysis into social criticism, send human desire back into repression again.

  Of course, to some extent, the master does deserve the disciples he gets. The contemporary appearance of psychoanalysis as a form of expensive spiritual counselling on techniques of adjustment and reconciliation to culture proceeds from the limits in Freud’s own thought, which Brown points out in careful detail. Revolutionary mind that he was, Freud nevertheless supported the perennial aspirations of repressive culture. He accepted the inevitability of culture as it is, with its two characteristics—“a strengthening of the intellect, which is beginning to govern instinctual life, and an internalization of the aggressive impulses, with all its consequent advantages and disadvantages.” Those who think of Freud as the champion of libidinal expressiveness may be surprised at what he calls “the psychological ideal,” for it is none other than “the primacy of the intellect.”