Written during the Great War, this little essay is a useful outline of the psychology of atheism. Many adolescents, troubled by the world, realising for the first time the fact of their mortality, ask what’s the point of being alive? This short essay is by way of being Freud’s existentialist response.
Freud tells us he was out walking with a poet (not named in the piece but, in fact, the eminent Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke) who said: ‘Everything will die and pass away, what’s the point of even being alive?’ Freud, solid, sensible, stoic, replied: The brevity of life is all the more reason to value things, flowers, friends, works of art – to appreciate and value them properly while they’re here.
The proneness to decay of all that is beautiful and perfect can, as we know, give rise to two different impulses in the mind. The one leads to the aching despondency felt by the young poet, while the other leads to rebellion against the fact asserted. ‘No! It is impossible that all this loveliness of Nature and Art, of the world of our sensations and of the world outside, will really fade away into nothing. It would be too senseless and too presumptuous to believe it. Somehow or other this loveliness must be able to persist and to escape all the powers of destruction.’
But this demand for immortality is a product of our wishes too unmistakeable to lay claim to reality: what is painful may nonetheless be true. I could not see my way to dispute the transience of all things, nor could I insist upon an exception in favour of what is beautiful and perfect. But I did dispute the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss of its worth.
On the contrary, an increase! Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of an enjoyment. It was incomprehensible, I declared, that the thought of the transience of beauty should interfere with our joy in it. As regards the beauty of Nature, each time it is destroyed by winter it comes again next year, so that in relation to the length of our lives it can in fact be regarded as eternal. The beauty of the human form and face vanish forever in the course of our own lives, but their evanescence only lends them a fresh charm. A flower which blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely. Nor can I understand any better why the beauty and perfection of a work of art or of an intellectual achievement should lose its worth because of its temporal limitation.
A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire today will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers, or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases; but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.
So: enjoyment of life is an act of the will, is a choice. Freud’s calm defence of enjoyment (not just of the body, but of the mind) looks back to the calm, sensible hedonism of Horace (Epistles) and anticipates the willed leap of faith into positive action taken by the existentialists.
For my money the best, the most practical and least politically compromised of those post-war European thinkers was Albert Camus. His early essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1939) starts from a meditation on suicide (‘What’s the point of living in a world without God or meaning?’) works its way round to affirming man’s rebellion against a world without God or meaning, and ends up by describing the physical, sensual pleasure of being alive, swimming and sunbathing and smoking by the sea and drinking wine and laughing with friends, sensations which were to be marvellously captured in many of his later novels and stories.
Credit
The history of the translations of Freud’s many works into English form a complicated subject in their own right. The very short essay ‘On Transience’ was first translated into English in 1957 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quote is from the version included in Volume 14 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Art and Literature’, published in 1985.
Books & Boots 