by Nolan Sprokay
One may live one’s entire life, and in hypothesis the span of many lives beyond it, and still never come to terms with the simple fact that existence is narrated retrospectively. As much as one might long to have one’s life story imprinted on the eyes of an absolute, the atheistic perspective demands that an autobiography can only come from the mouth or pen of a subjective being, and this subjective being can only organize experience into narratives while looking back upon it from the future. For the subject, the present experience of each passing moment is characterized by barrages of internal and external sensations, and any narrative of the self is only composed after the subject relates itself to these sensations. The addition of chronological narration to existence is what the human subject comes to understand as temporality: the temporal, or, time, is absent without being, for without being there is nothing to categorize existence with using time. Considering the human subject is perpetually relating to the world through the lens of time, and the subjective place in time is intrinsically at constant change, it must be assumed that conflicts are likely to arise regarding how the human subject identifies with time, and how it identifies with itself in time.
Take the case of nostalgia; when one reminisces on the simple pleasures of their childhood, its security and lack of emotional complexity, it must be assumed that they are actually applying an ideal emphasis, a narration interwoven with the bias of the present, to their pasts. Although the mind of the child will generally tend to lack a strong understanding of abstract concepts, it is unreasonable to assume that the experience of the child is any less complex than that of the adult. Is the child not continuously forced to rationalize and re-rationalize their realities as they come into contact with more and more of the world? Has psychology not proven that the child experiences just as many emotional complexes as the adult?[1] The adult yearning to return to childhood clearly does so from a point of idealization, and when they allow themself to assume a melancholic position for living past these primordial ages, they are needlessly tormenting themself. This arising melancholy, however, is often an inevitable response to the recollection of past experience – how could it not be when this person is fervently rifling through memories which they have idealized to such a great extent, while simultaneously finding themself in a position where they can never relive the experiences tied to these memories? Watching time float these past experiences away, these memories of such profound reverence in the head of this nostalgic person, is nothing less than a horrifying sequence! At one time, the subject had an intimate connection to these experiences and could even feel itself within their presence, yet now the statues of these experiences, memories, are falling into obscurity, and the self of the present is in a state of loss. The nostalgic person finds themself trapped in the wake of a divine funeral, a celebration of worshiped selfhoods that are forever lost in time.
This daunting concept spreads across all kinds of speculation upon how the subject recognizes its own self. The subject reaches a crossroads in its identity when it reminisces in that it is confronted with the fact that it must live in the present, but desires to live in the past. Extending a critical eye into significant historical texts regarding human nature discovers this concept under a variety of different philosophical ideologies. One must particularly consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a French Enlightenment philosopher who discussed the dynamics of civilization, especially in reference to property. Rousseau’s work serves as sufficient philosophical representation for the subjective process of rejecting present time, in that he takes an East-of-Eden approach to human society: Rousseau asserts that there was once a utopian period of civilization, but due to the inevitable progression of civilizational development, this utopian era was lost forever. If his vision of utopia is an idealized past, then the impossible Rousseauian desire for civilizational regression is intellectually equivalent to a collective melancholy over idealized pasts. Beyond theories of the collective, however, in order to ground the macro Rousseauian approach in a micro theory of the individual, one must turn to psychoanalysis. The field of psychoanalysis, invented in the late nineteenth century by Sigmund Freud, offers insight into the structural development of human desires and drives, presenting explanations of the psychical incitement of melancholy through the subjective inaccessibility of past experience. By inspecting and comparing elements of both Freud and Rousseau’s philosophies, it becomes clear that their ideas presuppose the notion that melancholy is an intrinsic fixture of human nature, and that a core desire of the human subject is to return the self to a pre-melancholic ideal state.
Freud’s conception of a supposed pathological “oceanic feeling” is the first example the subject will ever face of melancholy in relation to this notion. In chapter one of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud refutes criticism of his atheistic text, The Future of an Illusion, in which his critic mentions an emotional state found within himself of deep connection to the world around him, and claims that it must be an attribute of divine presence. Freud speculates the opposite, that this emotional state is simply a pathology resulting from the unconscious remembrance of an early psychical state. This is the state of infantile narcissism, the very first manner in which the subject understands the world, where the subject is not yet able to distinguish object from subject. “An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing upon him.”[2] As the subject is still too young to proficiently organize its sensations, it fails to recognize its surroundings as beings outside of the self. Because of this, any sensation it achieves from interaction with its objective environment is falsely conceived as a subjective conjuration. “He must be very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of excitation, which he will later recognize as his own bodily organs, can provide him with sensations at any moment, whereas other sources evade him from time to time – among them what he desires most of all, his mother’s breast – and only reappear as a result of his screaming for help.”[3] At this point in time, the subject essentially perceives itself as a god – an absolute power over reality, not recognizing reality as an external being, nor frankly the concept of the word external. As time goes on, however, and the subject interacts with more of the objective world, it eventually learns to form the notion of object by the function of acting in certain ways and receiving certain sensations. “In this way, there is for the first time set over against the ego an ‘object,’ in the form of something which exists ‘outside’ and which is only forced to appear by a special action.”[4] Alongside this loss of infantile narcissism, the subject learns that it is a being-in-the-world, and is both protected and endangered by objective forces outside of the self, an individual in a world of infinity. Far later into the life of the subject, whenever it draws upon an “oceanic feeling” of spiritual connection to its environment, one must consider this as essentially the same energy as that of nostalgic reminiscing, for the subject loses itself in a desire to reconnect with a state of the past. In this sense, the subject’s interaction with the oceanic feeling is its very first divine funeral, an expression of mourning over an idealized earlier place in its life, and in this occasion, it almost literally mourns divinity, in that it is mourning its own position of absolutism.
Although this particular moment in the development of the psyche is a sufficient practical connection between the mourning of an idealized past and Freudian psychology, further examination is required to observe its centrality within psychoanalysis. For this, one must move further with Freudian thought and draw upon the psychoanalytic works of Julia Kristeva, a feminist psychoanalyst who proposes in her text Black Sun: Melancholia an innate confrontation that must be taken by the subject with melancholy, and how it may manifest as a pathology. Classical Freudian theory is largely centered on psychical relations to the father, Civilization and its Discontents in particular showing how the superego develops out of patricidal urges and remorse over these extensions of aggression exercised upon the paternal object, which is infused with the love of the subject. “After their hatred had been satisfied by their act of aggression, their love came to the fore in their remorse for the deed. It set up the superego by identification with the father; it gave that agency the father’s power, as though as a punishment for the deed of aggression they had carried out against him, and it created the restrictions which were intended to prevent a repetition of the deed.”[5] Kristeva, however, following the thought of object-relational psychoanalysts like Melanie Klein, suggests that the subject also has a very intense psychical struggle over its own drive toward symbolic matricide. As the maternal object is that which the subject first internalizes, long before the subject identifies with the paternal object as a resolution to the Oedipus Complex, the subject’s internalization of its mother is that which is most primeval and most powerful, and consequently the most heart-wrenching for the subject to lose. Kristeva, however, theorizes that in order for the subject to truly achieve autonomy in its life, it must reach a point in its childhood at which it eliminates its intense internalization of the maternal object, severing its psychical umbilical cord and experiencing the world as a free agent. “For man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine-qua-non condition of our individuation, provided that it takes place under optimal circumstances and can be eroticized […].”[6]
According to Kristeva, this is the most integral period for people who, in adulthood, suffer from the depressive state Freud called “Melancholia,” which is the pathological state in which the subject is afflicted by a severe mourning, the cause of which it cannot consciously produce. This experience of melancholy over matricide, however, in Kristeva’s eyes, is impossible to avoid in the development of a child.[7] “The lesser or greater violence of matricidal drive, depending on individuals and the milieu’s tolerance, entails, when it is hindered, its inversion on the self; the maternal object having been introjected, the depressive or melancholic putting to death of the self is what follows, instead of matricide.”[8] Of course, this pre-matricidal union with the mother that is envisioned by the subject is entirely misinterpreted outside of the ideal, for in reality mother and child can only ever remain two separate beings, despite the vast love both may have for the other. When the subject undergoes melancholic depression, once again, it is mourning an ideal of its own construction. Melancholy, an inevitable experience of the human subject that may be fostered and morphed into the pathology of melancholia, represents a tear in the mind of the subject between the present and the past, as the subject is compelled away from the world and time it must inhabit toward a fantastical time forever sealed away from its grasp, that of its internalization of the maternal object.
Transferring out of the individual and onto civilization, Rousseau’s interaction with societal melancholy and collective desire for regression through time is best seen in his Discourse on Inequality. This is the fundamental text for understanding Rousseau’s arguments about human civilization, how it came to be, and the consequences of its presence. Rousseau describes a pure state of humanity before civilization in which the human subject operated purely on biological urges based around self-sustaining necessity; the drives to fight, flee, and fornicate. “Being subject to so few passions, and sufficient unto himself, he had only such feelings and such knowledge as suited his condition; he felt only his true needs, saw only what he believed it was necessary to see, and his intelligence made no more progress than his vanity.”[9] In this pure state of pre-civilization, mothers only raised their children until they were ready to walk, and then they tossed them headfirst into the wilds.[10] Every human individually foraged and hunted in the woods for food, and then frantically searched around in bouts of thirst for bodies of water to drink. Humans only interacted with each other when their bodies pulled them toward sex, each person moving on from the other only moments after the action was completed. Humans were motivated only by sensation, and as such, did not have the capacity to interact with (and mourn) the abstract.[11] For Rousseau, this is the second best period of humanity, in part due to the notion that humans lacked any reason or ability to experience depression, but also because they lacked social emphasis on personal property that leads to competition and aggression. “For since his mind cannot form abstract ideas of regularity and proportion, his heart is not capable of feeling those sentiments of love and admiration which – even unconsciously – arise from the application of these ideas: he responds only to the temperament which nature has implanted in him, and not to taste (or distaste), which he has not been able to acquire: for him every woman is good.”[12] There was no social dissonance during this period, no struggle for love and property, only survival. Here, the first etchings of Rousseau’s proposed collective melancholy can be found. The natural state of humanity was not built for the dynamics and labors of modern society- it was built for competition with the wilderness, for clashes with the elements! Under Rousseauian thought, the body and psyche of the modern human subject bears weights it was never intended to bear, and in this must at all times experience an unconscious depression, which theoretically could only be relieved by a regression to the natural human state, or some form of civilization that may sustain the pleasures of this state.
The natural human subject under Rousseau’s model, however, no matter how primordial and natural, was forever lost in the relative blink of an eye, thus marking the dawn of civilization; humans decided they wanted not only to survive, but to live! They began to build tools for themselves in order to foster convenience, to build consistent shelters, and most importantly, to observe other humans as objects of reliance.
Soon, ceasing to doze under the first tree, or to withdraw into caves, men discovered that various sorts of hard sharp stones could serve as hatchets to cut wood, dig the soil, and make huts out of branches, which they learned to cover with clay and mud. This was the epoch of a first revolution, which established and differentiated families, and which introduced property of a sort from which perhaps even then many quarrels and fights were born.[13]
This is what Rousseau called nascent society. By the logic of Rousseau, nascent society was the perfect utopian era of civilization. During this era, the human subject operated on what was truly most beneficial for the self, motivated toward self-sustaining biological necessities while still experiencing the delights of the abstract, like love for others. Humans entered a form of contract in which they used each other to benefit the self as best they could, and thus had access to the securities of civilization without any of its attributed oppressions.[14] Already, Rousseauian philosophy demonstrates a great amount of idealization regarding the past. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud refutes utopian visions of nascent society, suggesting that subjective sensibilities between contemporary cultures are likely to have vast differences, and subsequently there is a possibility that the subject of nascent society will experience issues with its culture that the modern subject would not upon immersion into this culture.
It seems certain that we do not feel comfortable in our present-day civilization, but it is very difficult to form an opinion whether and in what degree men of an earlier age felt happier and what part their cultural conditions played in the matter. We shall always tend to consider people’s distress objectively – that is, to place ourselves, with our own wants and sensibilities, in their conditions, and then to examine what occasions we should find in them for experiencing happiness or unhappiness.[15]
For example, in a state of undeveloped technology like that of nascent society, one would lack access to clean drinking water, sufficient homes and shelters, medicine, and all forms of basic necessities that, while dynamically limited due to class differences in modern civilization, are also nonexistent without modern civilization. This suggests that Rousseau’s adoring vision of nascent society is largely biased due to a separate factor, which will demonstrably prove to be a desire to abandon the present rather than one to assume the past.
Nascent society, allegedly idyllic in disposition, is plagued with a morbid underlining in Rousseau’s eyes. The minute that this contract was formed and the natural state of humanity was abandoned, humans began to emphasize progression. “Those first slow developments finally enabled men to make more rapid ones. The more the mind became enlightened, the more industry improved.”[16] This is the characteristic of civilization most abhorred by Rousseau – its inherent inclination toward progression alongside the passage of time. As humans wanted more convenience, more technology, more enlightenment, they started to develop strategies like agriculture, which demanded division of labor and the claiming of property, officially bringing humanity into the third, final, and worst stage of civilization. The further labor and property relations came into fruition, the more barriers were set between humans. The human subject began to experience emotions like jealousy, for they now had to compete over properties, and the oppressions of slavery as workers were forced into labor by those who had more resources than them in order to receive those resources of self-sustaining necessity.
From another point of view, behold man, who was formerly free and independent, diminished as a consequence of a multitude of new wants into subjection, one might say, to the whole of nature and especially to his fellow men, men of whom he has become the slave, in a sense, even in becoming their master; for if he is rich he needs their services; if he is poor he needs their aid; and even a middling condition does not enable him to do without them.[17]
In Rousseau’s eyes, the instant agriculture was invented, society became post-apocalyptic, the aftermath of a previous state of civilization that no longer exists and cannot be reattained. As has been established, however, there is evidence to support that Rousseau’s conception of pre-apocalyptic society is idealized. Due to labor relations, the human subject most certainly bears weight it did not have to in its natural state, but it also bore weight in the past that it would never have to in the present. Any unconscious melancholic desire for the past in the Rousseauian collective must be a product of idealization, and the real issue the collective faces is once again not a lack of previous conditions, but the existence of current ones.
Mark J. Temmer, a scholar of French and comparative literature from the mid-late 20th century, discusses Rousseau’s biases regarding the temporal in his text Time in Rousseau and Kant: An Essay on Pre-Romanticism. In this essay, Temmer analyzes Rousseau’s attitudes towards different states in time, differentiating Rouseauian perspectives toward the conceptual past, present, and future, specifically relating to Rousseau’s autobiographical texts. Temmer establishes in his introduction that many of these autobiographies are Rousseau’s attempts to categorize human existence under the structure of time. “Similarly, autobiographic works like the Confessions, the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire and Rousseau, juge de Jean-Jacques represent an original effort to comprehend and justify his existence within the framework of human time, responsibility, and salvation.”[18] Temmer elaborates on the notion that Rousseau consistently idealizes the past, and reunification with lost aspects of the past in the future, by suggesting that it is because he wishes to immortalize his own desires. “Desirous of immortalizing desire, he had to have recourse to imaginary possession and to poetic fulfillment… Since possession can only occur in the present, Rousseau was constrained to thrust himself into the future and the past… The here and now is abandoned in favor of hopes and remembrances.”[19] In other words, Rousseau rejects the present because it is the realm of the tangible. Human desire can only be realized by the faculties of the subject experiencing it in the present, and thus to maintain its relation to objects that are only accessible in the future and the past is to render that particular desire eternal in the mind of the subject, as it will forever lack achievement and subjective satisfaction. In Rousseau’s desire to immortalize past objects, one will find an evident comparison to Kristeva’s melancholia, in which the desire for union with the maternal, which is impossible and must inevitably come to an end, is immortalized through introjection of the matricidal drive onto the self. The primary suggestion to be taken out of Rousseauian philosophy regarding temporal effects on subjective existence is that its most authentic motivation exists only in the past, and desires of the present lack the same profound authenticity. From a psychological standpoint, Rousseau and his described societal collective idealize their pasts, and thus the subject fruitlessly desires to realize them, allowing itself to be haunted by unfulfillment.
Nostalgia is both a euphoric and poisonous emotion for the human subject. It is the meth of the sentimental, the crack of the yearning, and the heroin of the wistful. Idealizations of the past suggest notions of happiness to the subject, but they also leave it sick and riddled with melancholy, torturing itself over the passage of time. In this way, desire is immortalized through this idealization, but gratification is forever shunted aside. Worshiping one’s past, as wonderful as experienced instances may seem from the future, casts one’s selfhood away from an innate characteristic belonging to it, its presence of presents.[20] If one’s self, as psychoanalysis suggests, is developed and influenced by its interaction with its environment, and the transience of its environment is constant throughout time, then one’s selfhood is reliant on its place in time. Consequently, the self of the past cannot be considered the same self as that of its future. Thus, when the subject wishes to rebel against temporality and return to “simple” times long passed, it is longing to assume an idealized selfhood undergoing experience contemporary to its particular time, a selfhood that does not truly belong to the subject itself. The subject idealizes a different selfhood that it perceives to be its own, with different sensations, excitations, and experiences, losing its grasp on its true self in the process. This is what the previously proposed term divine funeral references. The melancholic subject, through nostalgic recollection, is mournfully celebrating these different selfhoods, yet also through idealization allowing them to climb psychical pedestals to that of perfection and godliness, images of what the subject should be but has lost, like God’s garden to Adam and Eve. When, as happens in funerals, the subject is confronted with the fact that the mourned object is, in fact, forever lost, the subject senses a great emptiness within its own real, present self. The human subject with the most consonant sense of self, however, surely addresses this somber desire to realize a fantasized past, and must actively choose not to indulge in its seductions. The self that is the most authentic is that which lives not for the impossibility of the past. This self invents no deities, and this self mourns no deities. This is the self that laughs at its good memories, but desires no immersion in them. This is the self that recognizes, yet rejects its history, choosing to live for the tangibility of its present and the creation of its future!
Endnotes
[1] Consider the Oedipus Complex, an extremely significant process in psychoanalytic theory under which the child subject competes with its paternal object over the maternal object, and ultimately identifies with its father in the end so that it may commence reconciliation over its extensions of aggression toward him. This final step in the complex results in the Superego, which is the psychical function that imposes guilt upon the subject.
[2] Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton & Company, 1961), 27.
[3] Ibid
[4] Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 28.
[5] Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 127.
[6] Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 27.
[7] The Oedipus Complex, for example, is an extremely important step in the matricidal process, as the subject is seriously faced with the possibility of losing its internalized union with the maternal object to another object for the first time, invoking a degree of separation.
[8] Kristeva, Black Sun, 28.
[9] Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, 1984), 104.
[10] Rousseau’s opinion is assumedly that mothers raised children up until the walking stage due to a biological maternalistic drive. Rousseau, not being a resolutely feminist thinker, does not elaborate much on the experience of the natural mother.
[11] A proper comparison with Freud’s infantile narcissism should bring one to remark on the similarities between the primeval stages of both thinkers’ subjective models, in that the narcissistic infant and the natural man both operate completely based on their sensations, and in the relation of these sensations to the betterment of the absolutist self. Could it be possible that any nostalgia Rousseau feels for his proposed natural state in particular is an unconscious reflection of the oceanic feeling?
[12] Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, 103.
[13] Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, 112.
[14] Through this contract, human subjects were able to take pleasure in the other, which is what ultimately led to desires and appreciations of love.
[15] Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 61.
[16] Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, 112.
[17] Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, 119.
[18] Temmer, Time in Rousseau and Kant: An Essay on Pre-Romanticism (Geneva: Droz Bookstore, 1958), 11.
[19] Temmer, Time in Rousseau and Kant, 14.
[20] 😉
Bibliography
Freud. Civilization and its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Norton & Company, 1961.
Kristeva. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Rousseau. A Discourse on Inequality. Translated by Maurice Cranston. London: Penguin, 1984.
Temmer. Time in Rousseau and Kant: An Essay on Pre-Romanticism. Geneva: Droz Bookstore, 1958.