PREVIEW-Episode 26: Freud on the Human Condition

0:00 Wes: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You'll find the full episode available for purchase in the music section of the itunes store or at partiallyexaminedlife.com store. If you want more than one episode, you can become a PEL citizen at partiallyexaminedlife dot com membership.

0:25 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then just dropped the whole business for a decade or so. Our question for episode 26 is what's the relationship between individual and society? In preparation, we have all read Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. You can get a link to this reading and other good stuff@priallyexaminedlife.com my name is Mark Linton Meyer, sublimating my dark urges from Medicine, Wisconsin.

0:55 Seth: Wow. Sublimating. This is Seth Paskin being neurotic from Austin, Texas.

1:02 Wes: This is Wes all one using cocaine in Boston, Massachusetts. And I only say that because Freud discovered cocaine or was an early proponent of its use as an analgesic.

1:16 Seth: Early adapter.

1:17 Mark: Very nice.

1:18 Wes: Before he got a friend really addicted to it and realized that it was not a good option.

1:26 Mark: Someone has to be a trailblazer.

1:28 Wes: Yep.

1:30 Mark: I will once again give the discussion rules designed to create a reservoir of tension within us through their restrictive power that can then be channeled into expressions of great profundity and vigor.

1:40 Seth: Do not inhibit my libidinal impulses, Mark.

1:45 Mark: Number one, we try not to assume that our audience knows about any of this. Number two, no fair name dropping. Instead of actually explaining yourself, you have a point to make, just make it. Don't say, for instance, you would know what I mean had you only read Zorgon the Great's Breakfroom Ping. That's a extraterrestrial philosophy. Deadly silence.

2:03 Seth: Number three, that one did not work as well.

2:06 Mark: It sounded good when I was walking the dog. And it occurred to me, number three, we shall be rigorous and exact in all that we say, except when we're faking you out, making you look all this way and we're coming at you that way, and bam. Gotcha, sucker.

2:17 Wes: Shall I give a little summary?

2:21 Mark: Yes, we. Wes is our Freud expert today, being a current student at where.

2:27 Wes: So I take classes at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis with a view to thinking about becoming a shrink one day. Although now I don't really have that plan now. But I'm a patient. I'm interested in the subject matter, so. And that's unusual. You know, the typical psychology department you won't read Freud. You'll usually read Freud in English departments or in maybe a philosophy department or a cultural study, something like that.

2:53 Mark: Why is that? Because he barely qualifies his current psychology now?

2:57 Wes: No, because current psychology is bullshitty. So it depends on what perspective you want to take on it. I mean, current psychology is very oriented towards, I think, drugs and stuff like that. I'm not sure, but I just know that you're going to read textbooks in a typical psychology department. The New School for Social Research is one of the few schools that still integrates a lot of psychoanalytic theory. So otherwise you would go to a psychoanalytic institute when there are lots of them all around the United States. Most of them will only train people with MDS or people who already have a PhD in psychology.

This school in Boston is one of the few which is modeled on the English style, where you can have a graduate degree, say in philosophy and they'll let you take classes. So the English style is supposed to be more akin to what Freud himself thought, which is that anyone who wanted to be trained in psychoanalysis should be able to. But the American system became very exclusive. So most institutes are just for people who have already doctors of one kind or another.

3:57 Seth: Relative to our topic, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, if you search on Freud, you will find absolutely no author references. He is not considered a philosopher by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Internet's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, however, does consider him to be a philosopher.

4:15 Wes: Right? Yeah. And you know, there's a huge debate raging about his. You know, there are a lot of anti Freudians out there. A guy named Frederick Kruse is one of them. A guy named Jonathan Lear, who I actually knew at University of Texas as a very well respected Aristotle scholar, also happens to be a psychoanalyst and he writes on the intersection of ancient philosophy and Freud. And he's sort of a Freud defender, but he's an analytic philosopher. He's a very good writer. If listeners are interested, let's look at a book called Open Minded. So if you want to sort of look at the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis, that's a good place to start.

All right, so I'm not going to spend too much time on Freud's biography. Everyone knows who he was. He started out as a neurologist and noticed that people were having symptoms that really couldn't be explained organically. And so he got more and more into developing this body of thought that he calls psychoanalysis. Civilization and Its Discontents was written towards the end of his life. And you'll see that it sort of wraps up a lot of themes in some of the earlier stuff he's written.

5:20 Mark: Published 1930.

5:22 Wes: Yeah, I think he died in 1939.

5:24 Mark: And didn't he die because his son killed him and married his mother?

5:28 Wes: Yeah, that's right.

5:29 Mark: Married his wife.

5:30 Wes: Did you know he had cancer of the jaw?

5:33 Mark: Yes, from all the cigars.

5:34 Wes: Smoking cigars. And he wouldn't stop smoking cigars, so hence the famous. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. To get at what? The ego, you know, this contrast between the ego and the id. The ego, for Freud, it's what's involved in conscious agency. In one book, he calls it the part of the ID which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world. So the ID he calls a chaos of seething expectations, instincts, us trying to get what we want. We get frustrated. We have to find ways to deal with that. And the ego is one way of doing that.

The superego. I think we get enough of that in this reading, so we can talk about that later. But one other thing to note is that Freud had an early theory which he called the topological model of the psyche, which simply distinguishes the unconscious from the conscious and what he calls the preconscious. His theory of ID and ego and superego sort of develops later on. And it's important to note that large parts of the ego can be unconscious, and the superego, the id, is completely unconscious, but he also thinks of large parts of the ego and superego as unconscious.

So we shouldn't just think of ego, which I think I said a moment ago, as just a conscious, conscious agency.

6:45 Mark: If that was all very confusing and you've never heard of the ID and the ego and the superego, you might just want to pull up the Wikipedia page or something on, figure out what the basic terminology is. Because we want to talk about the subject of this book, which just sort of assumes that you know a lot about that. He's talked about those basics, at least.

7:01 Wes: Yeah. So the subject of this book, basically the idea is that the development of civilization, and there's a lot of reminders of Nietzsche and Rousseau here, which I think we can talk about, that is that the development of civilization requires curtailing aggression and sexuality in individuals to make communal bonding possible. But the result is a lot of individual unhappiness and then outbursts of extreme frustration, aggression between communities, such as war. So there's a sort of paradox here. Civilization requires curtailing instincts. And yet he sort of ends the essay with the idea that, you know, it may destroy itself because of the unhappiness that it produces.

7:40 Mark: I like seeing this as a contrast to utilitarianism or Spinoza's view that we just talked about in the last episode. Like he uses Spinoza, it seems as his starting point that we aim at our personal happiness. And so Spinoza has a view that something like, well, yes, if you're rational, you can maximize your happiness. And that involves maximizing the happiness of those around you. Which of course leads very naturally to utilitarianism. Whereas Freud, following Nietzsche, seems to think that that's really not possible, that we are set up so that being happy all the time is just not even something that's a possibility for us, that the goal is psychologically implausible.

8:19 Wes: Right. I have a one paragraph summary that touches a sentence for each section. Civilization arises as an institutionalization of work and communal cooperation. And it arises at the expense of individual sexuality and aggression. Because communal cooperation requires what he calls aim inhibited libido. It requires putting curbs on our very raw feelings that trades fleeting intensity and really intense moments of happiness in what we might call a state of nature for civilization's secure and prolonged kind of lukewarm moments of contentment. But on the other hand, there's a lot of unhappiness.

There's a natural conflict between the community and the individual that leads to that unhappiness. Repression of aggression, for instance, creates guilt and bad conscience. And that involves the superego and the internalization of the external authority that originally creates society. So we have different ways of dealing with that. Science, which is a form of mastery, art, a form of sublimation. But there's also self intoxication that could be as simple as drugs and alcohol or I think Freud thinks of one category of that as involving illusion or self delusion, and that's religion, which he thinks is the worst way that we can cope with the natural unhappiness of civilization.

He thinks that we need a sort of good diversification combination of different activities and sort of religion presents itself as this monolithic and excluding one, and it makes ridiculous demands on people such as love thy neighbor.

9:57 Mark: He doesn't say it's the worst way. I mean, there are plenty of other completely neurotic ways that you can do it. Other personal illusions. Right. He talks about hermits like just lock yourself off from the world and don't see anybody that doesn't work out too well for you.

10:12 Wes: Right.

10:12 Mark: Or just completely deny reality. At least religion is a. He thinks is a social way of doing that. Like, I guess it's a step up in terms of your ability to connect with other people from coming up with just a private fantasy. I'm the king of the world.

10:26 Wes: Right. Whether or not we're better off being neurotic or in an individual way or religious, which is sort of collective delusion, is a question, I think. But anyway, just to end it, his idea of religion here, and this gets us back to the beginning of the essay, it's not primarily, he thinks, this oceanic feeling of oneness with the world that a friend suggested to him, but rather it's this infantile regression to a longing for a father.

10:53 Seth: I struggled at first with the reading, and I think it had a lot to do with. Just because I don't know a lot about Freud and because I hadn't read a lot of other Freud, it took me a little while to get into it and kind of understand what he was trying to do. But there are a phenomenal number of touch points in this book to things that we have already discussed on this podcast and things that I think are interesting. One of the most obvious connections is that Freud is using, we'll call it a state of nature style approach. State of nature for Freud, is a family unit prior to the advent of civilization.

And so just in the same way that Hobbes builds his concept of civilization out of a state of nature where there's this war of all against all, which Freud actually mentions in the book, I think Freud is much more akin to Rousseau in talking about family units and social structures. There he just puts a different spin on it than Rousseau did. Where Rousseau is focused on the social aspect of having families, which then band together to form communities and so forth. Freud talks about the individual psychology that's involved in a family unit with a father and the children.

But he also does something that we haven't seen up to this point, which is to talk about the erotic component, that even prior to the family, there is this erotic attraction between a male and a female. Although for Freud, it could be between a male and a male and a female and a female. Sure. That forms the real foundation of civil society comes out of the erotic union of two individuals.

12:29 Mark: Yeah.

12:29 Seth: Which is a new element.

12:31 Wes: And one thing to note here is that for Freud, he uses the word libido, or sexual energy or erotic in a very general way. One of the things that got him into trouble was the fact that he wrote a lot about infant sexuality and wanted to depict the relationship between adult and infantile sexuality. And then there's the idea that we're all homosexual fundamentally. Right. So erotic is a very.

12:54 Mark: Bisexual.

12:55 Wes: I mean, bisexual erotic is a very general term.

12:58 Mark: And I think the reason that he does this is because he's trying to, as a scientist. And remember, he invented the science of psychotherapy, or at least he wanted it to be a science. Whether it actually is or not is a point of debate. But it's a matter of describing human motives in as simple a way as possible. In the same way that any physicist tries to give an account of physics using as few laws as possible. And hopefully making seemingly different ones able to be derived from some single more basic law. Well, he has the same kind of thing. So that seemed accurate, that he's trying to use sexuality as a motivating force. And really see how far he can stretch that as an analytical tool to areas that don't look sexual. Overtly sexual at all.

13:40 Seth: I was just gonna go back and kind of build this up from the ground up. Because you mentioned that religion was this longing for. It was regression. As opposed to a typical conception of religion as transcendence or externalization or some sort of that. He tries to point out that developmentally, the original structure of the human consciousness or human identity is there. There's a lack of differentiation between the external and the internal. Or the self and the outer world.

14:08 Mark: Right. The self is not yet defined at

14:10 Seth: all, I should say. Yeah. I mean, I didn't want to use the term ego. But basically there is no differentiation when you're a baby between what is inner and what is outer. You have no conception of self. Yep. And as you develop development and the creation of a self or an ego is a separation between something that's inner, that's you, and something that's outer, that's the world. And by definition, because you are separating out all of this sensation and all these other things that are the external world, the self gets diminished. So once you have a conception of self, it's a diminished.

I guess the word is thing. Or it's a diminished concept. Or it's a diminished experience relative to what you were like before you had that separation. Diminished in the sense that the world is so much greater than just your experience of it. So this longing to recover what is lost is really a longing to recover that state prior to having an ego or having a self or being separated from other things.

15:14 Wes: Yeah. He says, in fact, that in the beginning, the experience, say, of the infant includes everything within it. And then the ego is sort of differentiated in that sense. The ego diminishes in the sense that it no longer includes the whole world. Right. And that boundary is created between inner and outer. There's a diminishment in that sense. But yeah. And a lot of that is about frustration. The ego sort of gets carved out because there's a big difference between stimuli that come from the inside, which are always present, and those which come and go from the outside.

In the beginning, an infant may not distinguish itself from the breast. And then the idea is that the frustration, the fact that the breast isn't always there and that frustration must be dealt with or that there must be some action on the part of the ego to get the breast means that there's now a distinction between something that I don't have complete control over and then what's in my world and under my control or in my psyche.

16:12 Seth: Right. There's presumption that that original state is desirous, that there's a sense of loss, and that there's a longing to return to that state. And that is the foundation for any number of different things. But this concep of religion, for example,

16:28 Wes: well, he rejects that as the primary motivator for religion. Right. His friend suggests that as the foundation. And at the end of the first section, he's going to reject that and say, in fact, even though religion may involve that feeling, in fact, the primary motivator for religion is this longing for the father.

16:47 Mark: Origin for.

16:48 Wes: So it's still about regression, but it's a desire to regress to the point where you have someone who's taking care of you and taking care of all your needs and. And so on and so forth.

16:58 Mark: Just to put this in perspective, these first couple chapters are reflecting on his previous book, the Future of an Illusion, which goes into more detail about his views on religion and where he thinks these notions came from, which is what you're saying, Wes. And so he starts off with this objection from his friend, which just say, you know, you can't just say religion is from some irrational wish fulfillment. I have an experience right now when I'm in a religious mood. I can kind of experience God or I can whatever the mystical experience. Or maybe you don't have to actually go into a yogic trance or something.

You can just right now sort of reflect and feel yourself in your relation to the larger world. So this sort of New Agey feeling. And he says that right there. You don't even have to have these unprovable metaphysical assumptions and say, that's God, or that is something that created the universe. Or something that alone should be sufficient for grounding religion. And Karen Armstrong, which I keep bringing up in the past ones had a similar thing that says that what's common among all these various religious writers is this sort of apophatic feeling that there is something beyond words, that by feeling your own finitude, you get this idea of the infinite.

Something like that. And Spinoza was gesturing at that too, in his discussion of the infinite substances. Obvious given. Given that our. Our own feeling of finitude. And so Freud gives this alternate. It says, look, you don't have to see this as a foundation of religion. I can give this alternate explanation for why you might have this feeling. It's just that you're regressing. He's being dismissive of a large portion of what folks might say is their motivation for being into religion.

18:37 Wes: Right. And he makes a little reference to that sort of philosophical abstraction and then just dismisses it. That's in actually the very beginning of section 2. He talks about the philosopher as impersonal, shadowy and abst. Abstract principle, and thinks that's kind of absurd.

18:51 Mark: I guess that's a second reason for believing in God. That's related. Number one is this sort of experiential, this oceanic feeling that his friend has talked about that he's feeling a need to refute here. But then. And again, you could take Spinoza as maybe referring to that. But if. If you've been following some of the posts on our blog, one of the guys that I posted about Steven Nadler. Right. Says no, no, no. Spinoza was in no way a mystic of any sort of. So you really have to put him in the same category as the Deists or even less than a Deist, or Descartes or really the position that you've argued for. I think Wes Kant's position where you say something like, if there is a God, there's very limited things that we could say about it.

19:33 Wes: Right.

19:34 Mark: That even way back to Aristotle, you could say it's the first cause. That doesn't mean that he's a personality, that it has anything to do with the God that I think of as the God of Christian religion. And Armstrong refers to this throughout as the philosopher's God as being very distinct. So even though Kant, say, could have a defense that there's no way you could refute the philosopher's God, like you try to give arguments pro or con, God being the origin of the universe, it's just beyond our possible experience. You're not going to be able to treat it as a scientific hypothesis, you may as well be agnostic about this kind of God.

And so this gives a defense for, oh, well, then we have to be tolerant of other people's religious views. There's no grounds for atheism that's overstepping the bounds of what we can know. But Freud is taking the same view that the hardline atheists that Richard Dawkins, that I also linked to, takes that, you know, that that is completely misrepresenting what the ordinary person thinks of as God. And so that's not what Freud is talking about. Like, if you want to have some abstract notion of God, more power to you. But that's not what he's talking about.

It doesn't fulfill. It bears no resemblance to what religion has been as a social phenomenon. Yeah.

20:37 Wes: Freud actually is quite dismissive of philosophy in a lot of different places in his writings. I think he thinks of it as impractical.

20:44 Mark: And even though he clearly takes a philosophical approach that in these later essays, once he's not purely talking about, here's what I have observed in clinical practice and these theories that I'm making on that at least is allegedly scientific. And it's funny, in this book he'll have a couple chapters that are very philosophically interesting and he'll say, I bet my readers are kind of impatient that I've been saying just what's completely obvious.

21:06 Wes: Yeah, he does that.

21:09 Mark: Whatever philosophy might be doing is just stating common sense, if anything, or wild speculation.

21:16 Wes: Yeah. In fact, like the last section, section 8, I think he begins by apologizing for wasting. Wasting our time. You know, it's interesting with this essay, it's sort of. He begins with religion and he talks a lot about religion, but it's sort of, it's kind of a side issue to the general point of the essay, you know.

21:34 Seth: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he drops it pretty quickly. He just starts talking about what I consider to be social contract theory.

21:42 Mark: Yeah. Can I give just a quote? I have future of an illusion open here. So he thinks any social phenomenon. And he has this other essay that I read, some of toteman taboo, where he talks about where these taboos against incest came from or where ancient tribes association of themselves with some animal comes in or really just anything historically, that there's going to be some deep seated psychological need why something of this sort had to come into being, which we referred to on one of the last podcasts in terms of. Actually, Voltaire was the one who said, I found that quote, you know, if there was no God, we would have had to invent him.

That says something like, there's a place in the psyche for God. Well, so Freud says something like this, that. Here's my quote. The gods retain their threefold task. They must exercise the terrors of nature. They must reconcile men to the cruelty of fate, particularly as it is shown in death. And they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed upon them. So these are the three functions why religion was invented. He thinks it's not because somebody had a revelation and this came to them.

I mean, there's a reason why religions pop up all over the place. And it's not because people are witnessing miracles or something like this. It's because the world is a cruel place. And so it's a delusion. And by this, I'm sorry, an illusion. And he makes it clear he's using illusion in the technical sense. It doesn't actually mean it's false. He has a part in Future of Illusion where he says, you know, really, we don't know. He sounds very Kantian. But there's no reason, it seems much more likely when we're talking about the origin of this thing to say that we have these beliefs that we've put up in response to some psychological, social need than it is to say we had some sort of divine revelation that people now are cut off from.

But back then, you were somehow able to get in touch with that. No, no, it's a much simpler explanation. And so he says, for instance, you know, a poor girl working a crummy job might have sustained herself with the illusion that someday her prince will come and sweep her away from all this. And is that necessarily false? I mean, it could happen, right? I mean, she could meet some awesome guy, but it's not well grounded.

23:47 Wes: Yeah. Another way of saying that is it's fantasy and it's wish fulfillment, which is the same thing that he thinks, by the way, is the engine of dreams. Yeah. Or you might call it escapism. So whether or not it's actually going to come to be is irrelevant. It's just the very fact that it's sort of a retreat from reality. He says in the case of religion, reality becomes the enemy. Well, in the case of delusions in general, I think religion is. He does use the word delusion as well, I think. Yeah. In fact, I mean, section two is this whole sort of typology of the way in which we escape from the world, including the three things he mentions.

The effects of aging, the dangers of the external world and the vicissitudes of social life, which is the thing that makes us most unhappy, interestingly enough. So he talks about palliatives and there are different ways of dealing with misery. He talks of action, you know, someone who just goes out and acts upon the world as a way of gratification, love, a focus in relationships. Then I think he talks about a series of sort of narcissistic ways of dealing with things which involve seeking satisfaction in internal psychical processes. So something like fantasy.

But science are. Science and art are two forms that involve some fantasy to some extent. Those are two subtypes. Then he has this subtype, self modification, he calls it, and that includes intoxication. So when you get drunk, you're self modifying, you're self medicating, let's say. Or the enjoyment of art as opposed to sublimation, as opposed to the creation of art is another form of fantasy in a way. I think he sort of drills down to the lowest level of, you know, he goes to illusions and then. And he sort of drills down to religion. That's why I said I think he thought it was sort of the worst, you know.

Yeah, there are people who are psychotic and so on and so forth, but religion has this, you know, it's a collective that sort of makes life worse for people because it demands too much of them. It demands, you know, the love thy neighbor thing, which he addresses a few times in the essay. I think he seems to be really pissed off about that. Right?

25:54 Seth: Yeah. So we have this situation where our goal is happiness but life is pain. Right.

26:01 Mark: Or happiness is fleeting at best.

26:03 Seth: Right.

26:03 Mark: Again, he has this model of happiness is the satisfaction of pent up desire.

26:08 Seth: So how long does it. Satisfaction of sexual desire, for that matter.

26:13 Wes: Yeah, and he says we'll never reach complete happiness, but that doesn't mean, you know, we can't stop trying. And so I think he thinks it's important that we keep trying through these different ways.

26:24 Seth: The bottom line is that he says the pain of life you deal with in three ways. Deflection, which is joking. So you make light of things that are serious. There's satisfaction, which is sort of like small and fleeting pleasures. Substitute of satisfaction, substitute of satisfaction. And then there's intoxication or insensitivity. And he has a little sort of side note in this book about the whole concept of intoxication. But what I thought was interesting was that, you know, he says the purpose of life. I want to just come back to the religion question very quickly.

Where he says the purpose of life falls in the sphere of religion. And what he's really saying is that the meaning of life falls in the sphere of religion, not necessarily the debate about whether or not God exists. So to make it relevant to these, you know, this atheist debate, it's not really a question of whether or not you can have morality without God or whether there is a God, but the question of whether or not there is meaning, what the meaning of life is falls in the sphere of religion. And I thought if we wanted to, we could go in that direction.

Take it back to Camus, but I thought that was an interesting distinction that he makes. He's talking about religion. So, yeah, really, when it comes down to it, this whole question of society and your discontent in society is somehow bound up in this need to create meaning. Ultimately, even though he sort of loses track of that in the essay, but it's still there kind of subtext.

27:49 Wes: Well, he says this is in the some page 8 of my PDF. He says the question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times. It looks, on the contrary, as though one had a right to dismiss the question, for it seems to derive from human presumptuousness many other manifestations of which are already familiar to us. No one talks about the purpose of the life of animals.

28:09 Mark: Yeah, it's like God cares enough about us to have a purpose for us. And when you get rid of the notion of there being a God wanting to have purposes, then the question of what is the purpose of life doesn't have any other meaning. Or if some analog to that is a central question for us, then we have to reinterpret it. So we're not talking about an objective purpose in the way that the theologian would be looking for it, but we have to be talking about what do we want out of our lives.

28:39 Wes: Right.

28:39 Mark: You're right, Seth. That's exactly what we were talking about in the Camus episode. That Camus, an atheist, had a similar take. And Sartre, who we will eventually do an episode on, had an even stronger one such that. Whereas Freud. Yeah, we have to each individually figure out what we want out of life, but because we have a common nature and, you know, there's just gonna be difference in our constitution, in our ability to sublimate, whereas Sartre really thinks that we have this radical freedom to sort of make our purpose anything we want, that we have the power of interpretation and our own ability to make the self transcend any particular definition gives us a much wider range in the purposes we can select.

Whereas for Freud it does seem like no, we have to understand the human animal and the way we work and then we can figure out how best to navigate this pickle that we are in. I prefer pickle to dilemma.

29:36 Wes: Dill. Dill pickle.

29:37 Mark: Yes.

29:39 Seth: So it's an interesting story that he builds. And one of the things that I found interesting about this text in general was that I do not have a strong background in Freud or in psychoanalysis. And I was afraid of getting caught up in a lot of very technical jargon around id, ego, superego, Oedipus complex, and all that kind of stuff. But I think he actually does a very good job of keeping it pretty straightforward, pretty simple. This is the dumbed down popular version of maybe some of the more technical stuff that he wrote earlier, I guess, as opposed to his full fledged critique.

30:17 Mark: Right. If it's not aimed specifically at psychoanalysts, then he is a little more readable.

30:22 Seth: Yes. Yes. So my reading of this first section, and I'll allow Wes to correct me where I'm wrong, but basically, he says people strive after happiness, which is essentially the presence of pleasure in the absence of pain, and that in reality, the options of happiness are limited. And that's because his concept of what constitutes happiness has a lot to do with the fulfillment of these libidinal or erotic pleasures. But he says unhappiness can come from three major different places. One is the body, that your body can betray you. You get old, you're weak, you can't see as well, et cetera, that there's the external world.

So it's hot, it's cold, there's a giant mountain that you have to climb, things get in your way, tornadoes happen, that sort of thing. And then other people and those three things, your body, the external world, and other people, all conspire to bring you unhappiness. Or they certainly can. So he says what happens is that this principle of obtaining pleasure gets morphed into something called the reality principle, which is really just a modification of the pleasure principle, where you say my goal is just to really avoid unhappiness. So realizing that happiness is fleeting and difficult to obtain, my primary goal is just to avoid being unhappy, which is to make sure I don't get sick, I take care of my body, I don't get abused by other people, etc.

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