LIFE AFTER GOD
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What happes next?...
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A dear child psychotherapist in Somerset, is also a gifted writer. He has become increasingly known for his artful and epigrammatic essays, many of which have been appropriately published in literary journals. Phillips will often take up a relatively unnoticed phenomenon, like tickling, or explore a commonplace yet mysterious behavior, like kissing, using some observation by Freud as a launching platform. In the case of kissing, Freud noted that a young child learns to seek sensual pleasure split off from nourishment by sucking, will subsequently turn to his own skin, on his arm or toe or thumb, as an ''inferior'' source of pleasure and at a still later date seek ''the corresponding part -- the lips -- of another person.'' The child seems to be saying, Freud remarks, ''It's a pity I can't kiss myself.''
Phillips acutely homes in on this not exactly perspicuous passage and proceeds interpretively and theoretically to work it over. What regularly attracts his attention is the cryptic in psychoanalysis itself, and he seeks it out in large part because for him psychoanalysis is an open field of discourse. No orthodoxy or exclusionary terminology constrains him. At the same time, Phillips's essays incline to be ruminative rather than argumentative. They move along by association and incremental repetition rather than by progressive trails of logic. Almost invariably lively and entertaining, they are directed as well toward instructing their audience. They resemble what in the 19th century were called ''lay sermons'' -- moral and spiritual discourses composed by someone outside the clergy within a religious and cultural context lit up by the troubled consciousness of irremediable secularization.
Phillips's new book, ''Darwin's Worms,'' answers to this characterization. It consists of four brief pieces, the whole amounting to fewer than 150 pages -- sermonettes for both the old and new millenniums. A generalizing ''Prologue'' and ''Epilogue'' flank two specific excursions, ''Darwin Turns the Worm'' and ''The Death of Freud.'' God having been evacuated from the intellectual universe, the mysteries of the origin and persistence of evil and suffering decline into mere conundrums. Our new world, in whose creation Darwin and Freud are momentous figures, consists of us and nature and nothing between the two. It makes no sense any longer ''to talk of nature . . . as being divided against itself. Nature is . . . always on its own side.'' Nor can people be plausibly described as acting against their own nature or being ''unnatural.''
Similar radical transformations in other global conceptions, like sexuality, childhood, competition and the past, are salient to what Darwin and Freud achieved in the way both of creating new accounts of life and the world and of compelling us to apply their redefinitions in our self-descriptions. These descriptions can no longer, for example, include redemption. Nor can they circumvent our distinctive animal nature or the fact that we die ''conclusively.'' Both Darwin and Freud, Phillips brightly quips, were in on ''the death of immortality.'' Neither left room for transcendence or deliverance; both gave priority of place to the transience of our lives.
Death figures for both as a precondition and organizing principle -- we seem to be animals ''haunted by'' our own and other people's absences; ''birthdays remind us that we were once inconceivable.'' Without the consolation of belief, Phillips goes on, modern life ''could be consumed by the experience of loss.'' Indeed, he adds, ''all modern therapies are forms of bereavement counseling.'' Moreover, the de-deified nature that Darwin and Freud newly represented is ''apparently organized but not designed.'' Phillips quotes Freud to the effect that ''one is inclined to say that the intention that man should be happy has no part in the plan of creation,'' and comments that Freud wrote this ''knowing that there is no plan and no creation.'' Hence, although Darwin and Freud are by comparison with their precursors pessimistic, neither is in point of fact particularly gloomy. Both find occasions for celebration and for praise.
Such occasions are the subject of Phillips's two central meditations. The first is devoted to an analysis of Darwin's intense and lifelong interest in earthworms. These humble creatures embody major themes in Darwin's life and work. They exemplify the endless, fascinating, purposeless prodigality and indifferent pitilessness of nature. The lowly worm, associated traditionally with death, rot and corruption, also helps to sustain the fertility and abundance of our common mother, the earth. These tiny gardeners carry on the labor of Adam, and like the British working class transform the earth while remaining semi-invisible. (Darwin's famous capitalist relatives, the Wedgwoods, were doing similar things in their potteries.) They do so through silent, ceaseless work and by means of their digestion (Darwin was always plagued by his). In action beneath the surface of the visible world, they figure forth the earth scientists, archaeologists, sociological analysts, evolutionary theorists and psychoanalysts of the coming century: they are involved with hidden processes, with things occurring underground; but they are also excavators, sifting through and turning the soil, symbolizing in their ''heroic ordinary labor'' the secular achievements of modern science and thought. Yet they are also, like Darwin's evolution itself, supreme gradualists; and like the British of the 19th century, they are dedicated to slow motion, to fragmentary reformation and piecemeal reform.
The homily continues as Phillips addresses Darwin's last book, ''Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits.'' Like Hamlet, Darwin was ''obsessed by burial'' and by worms, although his writing, like ''Hamlet,'' is ''counterelegiac'' and ''proposes what might be called a secular afterlife.'' It celebrates the ''inexhaustible work'' that perpetuates the natural world, whose life ''continues after one's own death.'' Although nothing in this world is intended for our well-being, it can be, ''in its own way, contingently hospitable.'' The natural economy that obtains between worms and men is altogether ''our accidental good fortune.'' Still, it is good fortune.
Phillips's lesson on Freud is longer and more complex. He begins by referring to Freud's destroying, when he was 29, virtually all his personal and scientific papers, letters, notes and manuscripts, sparing only those from his family and his future wife. This personage-to-be whose work was to transform our notions of what an individual life story entails reported that he had done this to make things difficult for his future biographers. For although Freud incorporated Oedipus, the remorseless tragic detective and destructive discloser of a life plot, he also identified with the Sphinx. And as a psychoanalyst, he invented a new professional version of the Sphinx, ''the one who asks, but never answers, the question.''
Enlisted in the service of eros, the life instinct, Freud contrived new means of telling our life stories and of explaining why we are compelled to tell them. Yet we also harbor impulses to destroy our lives and their stories, impulses integral to that which they aim to obliterate. If eros projects a meaningful story for each individual person and seeks to be the builder of cities, then Freud's grand fiction of the death instinct (which was born in 1920) aims to deconstruct the stories we make up about ourselves, leaving at best only the chaotic record of how we fell apart, and, on a larger scale, presides over the ruination and fall of empires. The death instinct specializes in counterconnectedness, and is itself an ur-presiding spirit in the antinarratives of the legion of ''post''-phenomena that rage in our time.
Focusing on ''Beyond the Pleasure Principle'' as his scriptural text, Phillips picks out several resonating passages. First, Freud declares that for the purposes of his argument, ''we are to take it as a truth that knows no exceptions . . . that everything living dies for internal reasons.'' It follows that ''the aim of all life is death'' and that all living entities strive to die; indeed, death appears to be an object of desire. Yet this project is not a simple, universal quest to go blotto. Each particular organism, Freud writes, ''wishes to die only in its own fashion.'' And so even death is included among our life projects, and dying only in our own individuated way is also a form of self-realization. Having discovered this dialectical whirligig, Phillips rides it for a while until it finally stops at the death of Freud.
Phillips interprets Freud as being skeptically disposed to suggest that biography attempts to account for too much. At the same time, Freud himself was a great narrative theorist, who found or invented theoretical scenarios and persuasive clinical explanations that were nonetheless incompatible with one another. Still, the death of Freud seemed to those who were there and to his subsequent biographers to discredit the conclusion that conflict and ambivalence were organic to Freud's systems. For the reports of this episode all stress Freud's control over things right up to the very end. Freud the organism died strictly in his own fashion. Phillips examines these ''narratively coherent'' biographical representations, with their inevitable references to Oedipus and Hamlet, and finds them impossibly neat. They fly ''in the face of all the psychoanalytic evidence'' in their endeavor to portray the dying Freud as a ''heroically unified subject'' -- never self-divided, a unique being without an unconscious, a monument of his beliefs.
Yet for all his skepticism, Freud of course believed that the efforts of biographers were legitimate. They were so precisely because of what he called ''the psychological fatality'' of ambivalence -- the de-idealizing and ''degrading'' impulses of the biographer will intractably find means to expression. Nevertheless, in these final scenes, Freud's death is put forward as an exemplary conclusion to an utterly significant life story. In this sense, Freud symbolically died for all of us, since we too want to die only in our own way. It is exactly because of such suspect reasons and dubious reasonings that Phillips ironically urges us to consider that ''the subject of a biography always dies in the biographer's own way.''
The last section of the book, ''Epilogue,'' is, surprisingly, a complete bust. I am at a loss to explain why Phillips undertook it, but it is mostly mere writing, spinning words out, reformulations of previous reformulations. One reason for this sudden disappearance of subject matter may be found in the circumstance that neither Darwin nor Freud offers much in the way of overt moralizing. Both are of course moralists in the sense that their works deal with matters of the gravest importance for human life. Although neither gives us many explicit or detailed instructions about how we should live, their work continually engages themes and problems that affect our fundamental conceptions of the natural and human worlds and hence our choices. Phillips would have done better to augment his specific analyses. He might, for example, have turned to Darwin's autobiography, which opens with the astonishing declaration that in it Darwin is imagining himself as a dead man. Or he might have dealt with some of Freud's other writings on death -- the memorable essay called ''The Theme of the Three Caskets,'' for one. Sermons, lay or otherwise, are most effective, after all, when they are rich with anecdote and illustration, when they tell us stories about the perplexities that make our mortal life so interesting.
Written by: James W S Parker