Civilization and Its Malcontents: A Talk with Translator Ulrich Baer

Civilization and Its Malcontents: A Talk with Translator Ulrich Baer

######

Ulrich Baer is a writer, translator, and literary scholar who believes passionately in the transformative power of ideas and books, and that real conversations play a key role in our evolution as conscious, responsible and compassionate people "- hence, his publications, including single-authored and edited books, his commitment to education, and his podcasts.

He holds an appointment as University Professor at New York University where he teaches literature and photography, and is Director of NYU's Center for the Humanities. He is the recipient of Getty, Humboldt, and Guggenheim fellowships, and has twice received NYU's Teaching Awards.

Baer has several books published recently, including The Rilke Alphabet (2014), What Snowflakes Get Right About Free Speech (2019), We Are But a Moment (novel, 2020), Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (translator, 2021), Beggar's Chicken (2022), and Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (translator, 2022).

In this interview Baer primarily addresses Freud's analysis of society and what ails it. This lively new translation with helpful explanatory notes captures Freud's engaging tone for a twenty-first-century audience and includes essays by two of Freud's most insightful and renowned interpreters, historian Carl E. Schorske and philosopher Richard Rorty.

######

John Hawkins  · Civilization and Its Malcontents: A Talk with Translator Ulrich Baer

######

The above podcast is unedited. The following is an edited transcript of the podcast with Baer done on November 22, 2022.

Hawkins: [00:00:00]

In our postmodern relativistic world, it seems more difficult than ever for ordinary people to appreciate a "classic" of literature. It's had its effect on the idea of a 'liberal education'. What is a classic anyway and why do we still need them? And Why is Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents still important almost a hundred years later?

Baer: [00:00:16]

Probably a classic work of literature or philosophy is one that has shaped a kind of collective self-understanding; a book that sort of professional critics or academics or other scholars or writers have considered very important for them. The second part is kind of internal to academia and the writers who consider a certain works to be really influential for their own thinking. But the first part is a little bit harder to pin down: how groups of people, societies, collectives become who they are, what they stand for, what their values are, and, sometimes, books can sort of identify that. There's probably not one book that makes an entire group into a collective, short of the Koran or the Bible. So those would be classics in the sense of giving a sense of collective identification.

The slim little book we're talking about today, Sigmund Freud's 1930 Civilization and Its Discontents, is really just an essay on why we are so unhappy in our modernity. Such books are classics in the way that they distill some questions and some problems and some answers that people are generally groping for. Sometimes they have the capacity to distill into a pretty coherent or memorable set of phrases or ideas what is generally a kind of zeitgeist.

Hawkins: [00:01:50]

And so, the problems with unhappiness and civilization in 1930 are still with us today? In a Freudian sense.

Baer: [00:01:58]

I would think so. Being happy is a fundamental problem today. And I think a lot of things that we're looking at today -- the rise of technology, the overwhelming nature of global phenomena, whether it's the pandemic, whether it's economics, whether it's politics - [make us] feel a little bit out of control of how our lives are shaped. A lot of the things giving us trouble are human-made. It was Freud's [key] insight to wonder why we live in a civilization that we have created collectively that makes us relatively unhappy or discontented?

You can look at it really simply in a way. Technology, Freud [might] say, lets us [communicate by Zoom] right now. You're in Australia. I'm in New York. Fantastic, great achievement. But the [Internet] is also a cause of a lot of unhappiness and misery; we are constantly being enslaved to our devices. We don't live our [human]lives anymore. So, technology comes with its downsides. We don't feel authentic.

You could think of another [discontent] -- the loosening of conventional morality so that people can live in different arrangements [than before]. The family structure is no longer what it is. Sexuality has been liberated. It doesn't really make people very happy. It seems we suffer more, possibly more than before, or the same. Freud [saw that] our human progress produces new and different problems and doesn't completely result in everybody feeling content.

That argument will be something that also other philosophers like Adorno and Horkheimer, they write a book, Dialectic of Enlightenment. A couple of years later, Max Weber kind of says bureaucracy eliminates corruption and arbitrariness. But bureaucracy can also become a nightmare, like Kafka spells out, to haunt us. So, Freud's basic question, I think is really relevant for us today when a lot of things are happening very rapidly. The advances of medicine and science produce a lot of great things for people, but they also produce a lot of new problems. The fact that we can manipulate the gene and create or affect how human beings are shaped. That is a really major problem. Freud doesn't focus on science in particular. He [refers to it as part of] civilization -- the culture and politics of how we live.

Hawkins: [00:05:15]

How is the Reality Principle holding up?

There's still no collective understanding of why we exist, why were the only life out in the middle of all space's emptiness. And we still seem to need to come to some understanding of that. The Why. And Freud suggests that we must have, alone and together, some form of sublimation, whether it be with art, or in the sciences or, with activities that civilize us and make us more amenable to getting along with each other and creating works together. Relativism and the post-modern era are supposed to free us up, so that we may follow our own bliss in some way. And now we're heading toward the so-called singularity, A.I. is deeply intruding into our lives, and a kind of robotization of our reality by way of algorithmic shaping is taking place online. A hive-mindedness, that creates new anxieties for us as we're remaking ourselves. But we're not perfect to begin with. So, we're remaking ourselves from a position of fragility and that is problematic.

Religion is the opium of the people, one wise guy said. Freud called it a dangerous delusion meant to replace man's search for human meaning. Freud argued that we would all need "palliatives" or sublimations to get us through the long, dark night of being. But he saw light, too. Was it the light of Reality or the light of cocaine addiction?

Baer: [00:07:01]

Freud might think that humans need to be part of something larger. As you a minute ago, he was incredibly skeptical to the point of being cynical about religion. Freud, at least, acknowledges it. And that's why I retranslated this short book, Civilization in Discontents. Freud can be quite self-deprecating for very brief moments. And he writes, Well, I just don't have access to the oceanic feeling of being part of something larger, having true meaning. He just he can't get access to it. And so, he distrusts everybody who says that they have access to it. But then he allows that some people may have [such access]. That solves their problem because they are part of something greater. Good for them. I don't have access [to that oceanic feeling].

Then he moves on. He says other people take drugs to enlarge their consciousness, to get in touch with something else. Like people are experimenting with all sorts of drugs today. We are deregulating certain drugs in America, for example, that we've been demonizing for 50 years. And Freud himself was a cocaine [addict] in the 1890s. When you read his letters to his wife, they're very entertaining. He says, Oh, I'm in Rome today, took some cocaine in the morning, had a great day. I had so much energy. Then I took more cocaine and went to the theater. For us, it's shocking [to hear such an admission] because we've lived through a century of demonizing this road to feeling better about ourselves.

And so, when they so he would just say, we have this urge and this need to be part of something. So, what you just said, the kind of hivemind mentality or like logging on and being part of something bigger, Freud would have just said, This will never go away. People will find their answer where they can find it. Religion may be one, drugs, may be another. Freud is also very [skeptical] about Eastern religion and yoga. Some people have told me that yoga is a path to spiritual awakening. I'm just not really sure it is. And then he moves on. He doesn't say, These people are totally wrong and fooled. He's never very moralistic. It's completely understandable why people find these solutions somewhere. He just doesn't find it right there.

But for religion, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche are incredibly suspicious because they all feel as soon as it's institutionalized, religion becomes a human project. With all the failings of any human project, with corruption, with seduction, with power in the hands of some people, and with people handing over their capacity for thinking and determining how their life should be to somebody else who has authority over them. But Nietzsche and Freud are really [speak to] our postmodern age: We can all determine our own lives.

They say a lot of people don't want to make those choices. They just want to live like other people and or live the way people tell them how to live. Because [living authentically] is too exhausting and it takes too much work and it's disorienting if you wake up every morning and say, How do I want to really shape my life? Let's say, in wealthy countries today, you have a lot of options to determine how you want to live your lives. But most people actually are totally conforming to certain social expectations. Freud and Nietzsche really never tire of saying it. It might just well be part of human nature, and Freud saw that we just want to hand over all this thinking to other people. We just want to kind of outsource this part, and let [other] people dictate to us what we like, what we want, what makes us happy, what makes us unhappy.

Baer: [00:12:50]

The great irony of Freud and Nietzsche is that they will not really solve these problems for you. People, myself included, tend to need to turn to Nietzsche and Freud and say, Wow, there is some guidance. Someone can enlighten me. Here's my prophet, my guru, my spiritual leader, my thinker or my intellectual. But both say: It is up to the individual. And if we recognize that we have the capacity to think for ourselves, it's a very frightening thing. You can make use of reason to liberate yourself from all these conventions and enslavement to other people's ideas. So, it's very destabilizing. Nietzsche and Freud anticipate what we would call postmodernism because we are now unmoored from conventional morality. We have to invent new rules. We will not find a kind of master narrative for anybody any more, probably. And what Freud, in 1930, is seeing people tempted by some big narrative that substitutes for their own thinking, and that will become fascism and communism from the two specters on the horizon, and it'll all come true. Europe will be largely seduced and corrupted by fascism and communism. And Freud sees that. Nietzsche sees that as well.

Today, I'm not really so worried about Elon Musk, or something like that. I'm worried about the algorithms that are going to start thinking for us. They look very neutral and innocent. And Freud would have been interested in [machine thinking and] how algorithms give us a semblance of collective wisdom, of humanity, but, in reality, it's [an oracle that's been programmed by people with agendas]. I totally get why that may be the best outcome for a medical procedure or something, because it's based on thousands or countless experiments and trials. But it's very problematic when you say let's [let AIs] come up with a moral solution to problems.

Freud says, [beware] the tyranny of the majority, which is an [expression] from John Stuart Mill. He's really worried about that because he says democracy unleashes everybody in a big way, liberates us from the aristocracy, from the elites. But then, once we have that [freedom], how else are we going to make decisions besides saying most people think like that? So, we're going to hand over our fate to algorithms, and Nietzsche and Freud would not exactly have a way out of this. They don't give us a collective solution. Let's say they keep on [telling us that] you have to keep on remaining vigilant and critical and attentive. That is what's needed from every single person, and it's very hard to do because, as I said, it's very exhausting.

Hawkins: [00:16:08]

Your translation of Civilization and Its Discontents includes an essay by Richard Rorty, titled "Freud and Moral Reflection," in which he discusses 'the mechanical mind'. Is such a concept any more acceptable to our fragile egos today than it was 100 years ago?

Baer: [00:16:57]

So, Richard Rorty is an American pragmatist philosopher who writes this great essay, basically asking, if Freud is a moral thinker and does he give us any moral [guidance]? And he [refers to David] Hume, who discusses a kind of mechanistic mind where there are these different forces and instincts competing with each other [for control]. Before that, you have Aristotle. People wondering, What's the true center of myself? What is my authentic true being? Which is a very prevalent question, I think. The Internet is loaded with this kind of question. Be your true self. Express yourself. These slightly silly maxims go back to this notion that there's a true center in me. Rorty says Freud never believed that there is [a]true me that the unconscious can reveal. But Freud says what the unconscious is -- a part of me that is irrational, often counterproductive and not in my own best interest, because it has aggressive drives, and has all sorts of conflicts, but it's to be taken seriously. It's as valid as all the other impulses and drives I have. But he doesn't say, Oh, this is the true self. You're a dark person, you're hidden, your hidden impulses must be repressed or sublimated. But neither does he say, Oh, the rational part of you is the better part.

They're all equally important. And what Freud proposes, and what Rorty says, is it's not a mechanical kind of relationship, but it's the model for a dialogue with or conversation with these impulses once we know we have them and we realize we're not always really good people. Freud would say it's not important whether we are good or bad. It's important that we [recognize that] we have an impulse for destruction and aggression. This is very difficult to hear, in a way. We take pleasure in destruction, Freud says. We like to see things go down or get blown up, let's say. And he doesn't really mean the spectacle of that, as much as there's a pleasure in seeing things end, which is very disturbing for us. But Freud said to be disturbed is not good enough. You're disturbed and then you have some moral. You take recourse to some moral assumption. Don't be [merely] disturbed. Be aware that it is part of you. And may actually allow you to understand other people who think differently from you. And they are really bad. They're evil, they're horrible people. Once you realize, I have this part in me as well, you maybe start to understand and deal with other people better.

Hawkins: [00:19:43]

So, consciousness raising. The kind of consciousness raising you normally associate with the 'liberal education' in the American sense. Resulting in more empathy and understanding and raising the level of humanity in oneself.

Baer: [00:20:10]

Empathy, meaning other people will do horrible things and I'm probably capable of them as well. It's not this idea of we're all going to be starting to read novels and watch movies and feel empathic toward another. We still dislike people strongly. I mean, Freud keeps on saying that we cannot completely sublimate that. So, we should be aware of that. I think this 'liberal education' that you alluded to, it's a little bit of an idea. Oh, you get a good education, you read all these smart books, then you're a better person at the end. And Freud, who lives in our culture at this time, at the heart of European civilization, German speaking culture, and the German speaking philosophy [and reading high] literature will produce the Holocaust, the greatest crime of the 20th century. Freud sees all this, he says, as much light and enlightenment as there is, there is such darkness.

Hawkins: [00:21:17]

Right. Freud sounds, in that sense, like Erich Fromm, you know, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), that kind of thing. How would Freud psychoanalyze warmongers in Ukraine lazing on his consult couch?

Baer: [00:21:34]

In 1932, Einstein writes his letter to Freud and asks, Why do we continue to have war? And then Freud says, I was looking forward to your letter, but I thought, you're going to ask me some question about the unknowable dimensions of the world as a physicist. This question [about war] seems both unexpected and basic. And then Freud answers that war [is] part of life. He says two really remarkable and strange things: War sometimes can become a solution to create greater peace, because it ties different factions into a larger whole when someone is overpowered. And then he goes into his now well-known sort of mythology about the origins of human coexistence. You start out with the power of the strongest person -- you use, subordinate, dominate other people. This power cannot be guaranteed because there's going to be the next person who's even stronger than you are. So, you tie people into a collective that supports you. Since you can't fight everybody, this binding through shared goals and [racial and ethnic] identification [allows] you to idolize a person, and that is totally natural. It happens all the time. And then, [united] they will go against other people. So, he concludes that war is part of human existence.

Baer: [00:22:53]

And Freud would address what's happening in Ukraine and Russia right now, by saying that, first of all, it's up to politicians, not psychologists, to solve the problems of war. But what's [the basis of] the war? I think there a psychologist may provide something useful for people. What is the immense identification with Putin? What is the immense identification with Zelensky in different parts of the world? Why do people attach themselves to somebody and feel stronger? Why are people excited when they see that Ukrainian forces have taken back the city of Kherson? [Well, because] we are taking sides. We are participating. It's a spectacle, even though there is incredible suffering. And Freud has an incredibly moving paragraph in his return letter to Einstein. He writes that war must be condemned because it hurts people not only materially, physically, [but] also [hurts] their dignity. It is dehumanizing. It subjects people to irrational violence. So, he's completely against war, and yet says we'll probably never live without it. It'll [always] be part of the human condition. But he would start by asking, what is the identification? [And, if you think that people are identifying with Putin as a strong man, then they need to be given someone else to identify with]. They cannot just be told that this [identification] is irrational and not good for [them].

Baer: [00:24:18]

They cannot be stripped of all identification and left kind of as an incoherent mass of people. They have to be given a new vision or something. And Freud says [the identification] will be replaced by something else. Hopefully someone [will replace Putin who is] not quite as aggressive. But you cannot just explain to people, Putin isn't good for you, right now. You're being drafted into the war. You should stop this. You cannot stop these things. In Freud's mind, [it's] just part of human nature. [It] cannot be stopped. It can be sublimated or redirected into something more constructive, but the whole world is struggling with that [aggressive energy] very much. We [say we] believe in democracy, constitutions, elections, all this, [but] many countries don't channel the people's interest in [identity politics] in that direction. [Instead], they [are driven toward] identity with charismatic, powerful leaders. And Erich Fromm, Adorno, all these people in the 20th century, become kind of critics of society. They are informed by Freud's idea that identification is something intrinsic to human beings, and it cannot be taken out of our thinking.

Hawkins: [00:25:36]

Right. What is the value of democracy? The great so-called public philosopher Noam Chomsky tells us that democracy around the world is really at risk right now. And, along with the threat of nuclear war and climate change, there is a serious threat to the foundations of civilization right now. If we lose democracy around the world, then what are we going to replace it with?

Baer: [00:26:15]

[Hard times have fallen on] democracy. It has a really difficult task [trying] to sell itself. People are voting it out of existence all around the globe. They are actually voting for people who are not democratic, who don't believe in elections, or don't believe in the press, etc. But the trouble is that the idea of selling democracy to the people is a kind of PR idea, [and, perhaps ironically] Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, invented the whole field of public relations.

So, it sounds simple: Replace a bad version of the strongman, the anti-democratic leader, with democracy itself. But Freud would say that people need to be told what's good for them, that we're back here at square one, that people don't really act in their own self-interest. The fields of economics, of political science, to a large extent rely on a model of rational actors or people who act in their own interest.

Baer: [00:27:21]

Freud would simply look at that and say, Well, this is a model that doesn't explain [how]the world [works]. He would say it's an interesting model -fine -- but it doesn't explain how the world [actually] functions. Our unconscious or irrational dimension is as much a part of the rational one. So, when you start having a model of people in electoral behavior voting against their own interests, Freud is not even surprised. He'd say, Of course they're not voting in their own self-interest because, for example, identification with a leader, or belonging to a group, trumps your own self-interest. You'd rather be part of the winning team, even if it's not so good for you.

Hawkins: [00:28:20]

Last year, Warbler Press put out your translation of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. As with the Freud translation, why is it still important more than 100 years later?

Baer: [00:28:37]

[He's similar to Freud in some of his thinking.] Nietzsche is relentlessly radical.

Baer: [00:30:44]

So, he [deconstructs] the Western European idea of morality, and wants to put it back together with some ideas that never become a full political philosophy. He's not a systematic thinker. Nietzsche is a poet. But he's ending the fantasy that we have overarching metaphysical narratives where the subject is centered and [the nature of] Good and Evil are completely decided. That doesn't mean there's no good or evil anymore in the world for him. But he says good and evil are categories that have been used by people in power to subjugate other people. They're not inherently intrinsically rooted in some greater transcendent ideal of what is good in human behavior and what is bad in human behavior, he said. That is the great deception of religion that God gave us a tablet with ten rules on it, etcetera, all these systems of thought. So, I think Nietzsche is still completely relevant, because where will we find sort of moral guidance in the world? You can turn anywhere and who is going to tell you how to behave? So Nietzsche [like Freud] is very skeptical when someone comes along and [sells us on] what behavior is good and what behavior is bad. [And we need to guard against] institutions, organizations, elites that exempt themselves from that kind of ["moral"] behavior.

Hawkins: [00:32:16]

In March, 2021, you wrote a piece for the NYRB, "Buber on Nietzsche." You aver: "That cultural Zionism's great thinker found inspiration in the German philosopher is testament to the heterodox value of his ideas." This is fascinating and potential elucidating of both Zionism and the Nietzsche posture. Can you help us with this?

Baer: [00:32:39]

So, I found this little essay Martin Buber wrote in 1900 the year that Nietzsche died. He had been mentally unstable for at least ten years [and] hadn't written a word. And Buber is a young man who, as a high school student, wanted to translate Nietzsche, and he writes this incredibly excited eulogy for Nietzsche, suggesting that this is the thinker that will shape the 20th century. One way we need. We know that the Nazis in Germany turned Nietzsche into their patron saint, completely corrupted his work and just [extracted] the parts that benefit their own perverse ideology. But then Buber, who is a completely anti-fascist thinker, who believes that the essence of human nature is dialogue and community, and not in [pack-worshipping] a strong-willed individual person. So, Buber relies on Nietzsche to fill his idea that a community can be shaped by people making a decision to live together rather than apart, let's say. And then I was just interested in this. And then in the 40s and 50s, Buber becomes a kind of proponent and then vocal critic of certain [aspects] of political idea of Zionism.

Baer: [00:34:01]

He says it's a cultural idea of Jewish life and community that gets corrupted by political leaders. But that wasn't really so interesting to me. To me, it was just surprising. And then I talked to the great Buber biography, Paul Mendes-Flohr, who is a professor at Hebrew University in the University of Chicago. And he says, Ulrich, your surprise is very telling. [It's historically determined 100 years later, we think.] How can one of the great Jewish philosophers in the world love Nietzsche so much? And he says, What we can remember is that Nietzsche was available to everybody. [He] contains so many ideas that could be productive for so many ends. What you're seeing is that Nietzsche gets kind of channeled into fascism and ends up there for a good while until he's kind of made palatable to American readers, especially in Walter Kaufman's translation. In the 1950s Nietzsche becomes a kind of quasi-Emersonian poet of self-reliance, of a kind of individualism, of liberty.

Baer: [00:35:19]

Emerson was a huge influence on Nietzsche, which was surprising to the American pragmatist [philosophy]. And then, [again], Nietzsche also gives rise to the Nazis, who [misappropriate] the expression Will to Power and [crow], Will to Power really means the will of some super strong man who dominates the masses. So, I was interested in [this phenomenon where] one thinker can contain so much -- [even] for really diametrically opposed ideologies -- to take inspiration from that. That sent me back to my own work and re-reading Nietzsche, because if the Nazis could [use] it and Jewish philosophy could [use] it and the Zionists could [use] it, and the 60s hippies could [use] it and feminists could [use] it and Communists could [use] it, then I needed to make sense of my own nature, which was probably Nietzsche's true [intention]. He would have been happy to know that people had to go back to his works and make sense it for themselves. I don't think he wanted to give a kind of prescriptive ideology for some political party. [So this is what Buber argues.]

Baer: [00:39:37]

Buber is a strange and understudied philosopher. In the 60s he had a very important major exchange with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who lent himself to the fascists in 1933. So, Heidegger, one of the greatest philosophers probably ever, becomes a kind of helpmate to Hitler, which was a disaster for all of us, because we have not been able to really understand how can someone of such intellectual power be seduced by such a crude, violent and crass regime? And it happens to lots of people. Heidegger is just an extreme example. And then Buber in the 60s has a full conversation and dialogue with Heidegger. [And so, you have] Buber, who is a Jewish thinker who lives in Israel, and then you have Heidegger, who was a supporter of the fascists in 1930. They're having a dialogue. And all these things remain somewhat unresolved, because we realize that one of the greatest philosophers can be seduced by fascism, and another great philosopher is someone who thinks about Zionism, but, then, these things turn out to be catastrophic nightmares for lots of people.

Hawkins: [00:49:05]

You've also written about and translated the work of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I can't help but recall that one thing Nietzsche, Freud, and Rilke had in common was Lou Salome'...If you were to put on your Salome' mask, in the parlance of our time, what would she see as the value of these three geniuses? What did they have in common that she was attracted to?

Baer: [00:49:57]

It's a funny idea to put myself in the mind of Lou Salome'. So, Nietzsche falls in love with her quite famously, and she turns him down and she'd probably say that Nietzsche was just such an incredibly talented young man who liberated us from conventional morality but regrettably could not liberate himself. What her next lover, Freud, called his neurosis. So, Nietzsche remains an incredibly neurotic hypochondriac who can't handle women, who can't handle himself. So, she would say he used all of his intellect to liberate all of society from conventional morality. He himself couldn't escape it. And Salome' would have said, Who would date a guy like this? I mean, he was so in conflict with himself.

And then she would say that Freud also basically blew up conventional morality, especially around sexuality, and the great insight Freud had that women have sexual desire and that society does not allow them to express that in the way men are allowed to express it. He said, very complicated. He couldn't resolve it. And Salome' would say, Look at Freud, who remains conventionally married, has children, is a very conventional bourgeois Jewish doctor with all these women patients. So, he also couldn't quite liberate himself [when he discovered that] women have desire ("I'm so astonished," he'd say), and Lou said, like, Yes, Sigmund, you know, I'm a very vivacious, incredibly brilliant novelist, writer speaks six languages, probably a bit smarter than you. But he also couldn't get over himself.

And Rilke, is her lover when she's 36 and he's 20, and she [expresses] this beautiful anecdote --she says to Rilke, First of all, your given name, was Rene' Maria Rilke.

Baer: [00:51:58]

Rene', she said, is not masculine enough for a poet. And we're going to rename you Rainer, which sounds more masculine. Secondly, your handwriting is terrible. It's illegible. You have to write like a poet. And then she takes him to Russia. He doesn't speak a word of Russian, but Rilke thinks he understands everything. He goes to meet Tolstoy. He's amazed. And later on, Lou Salome' says, You didn't understand one word. You couldn't even follow our conversation at the shop. But he thinks, this is the woman who totally made him into the poet he is.

So all three of these men in some way, I would say, remain vastly inferior to Salome', who has this incredibly broad intellect, who sees culture as this great, exciting exercise of the mind that actually you can liberate yourself from your neuroses. She marries a professor in GÃ ¶ttingen. Rilke comes to visit her. She's actually what we were today call a kind of liberated person who is not hamstrung by the absence of an overarching system. I think also the fact that she is German and Russian and all these different things, but all three of these men Nietzsche, Freud, Rilke, are so neurotic and their neurosis drives [each of] them to take apart the entire system of society they live in; they can't quite help themselves. So she would probably say, It was great dating all of you. I grew a lot. But to be with you -- one of you for the whole time -- not for me at [all].

######

- Companion Book Talks podcast for Civilization and Its Discontents

- Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger in Dialogue

- "Buber on Nietzsche" by Ulrich Baer, NYRB, March 15, 2021

- Freud: The Psycho-archeology of Civilizations by Carl E. Schorske

- Freud and Moral Reflection by Richard Rorty

- Ulrich Baer's website.

######

John Hawkins has a Substack site: Tantric Disposition Matrix . Join for free.