Ludwig Feuerbach and the origins of religion

I just came across a popular sketch of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) Dale DeBakcsy Philosophy Now Jul/Aug 2014.

DeBakcsy doesn't mention Feuerbach's status as one of the Young Hegelians, among whom he's often grouped. Instead he stresses Feuerbach's criticism of Hegel, his atheism and his critique of philosophy in general. Atheism was far more consequential for an academic's career in the German lands of the early 19th century than it is today in Western countries. This psychological-anthropological analysis of the human origins of religion pretty much excluded him permanently from a conventional academic life:

After five years of searching unsuccessfully for a permanent university post, Feuerbach fired off Thoughts on Death and Immortality in 1830 – a merciless, ironic, and downright fun broadside leveled at the Christian notion of personal immortality. You can hear him chortling while laying down lines like, "The entire pietistic or modern mystical theology rests only on a game of ball. The individual throws himself away only in order to have God throw him back again; he humbles himself before God only in order to be reflected in him. His self-loss is self-enjoyment, his humility is self-exaltation. He submerges himself in God only to surface again intact, and, refreshed and renewed, to sun himself in his own excellence."

But he also notes:

Even the [neo-orthodox] theologian Karl Barth, who recommends that the best way to criticize Feuerbach is to "laugh in his face" has to concede that "In his writings – at least in those on the Bible, the Church Fathers, and especially on Luther – his theological skill places him above most modern philosophers" and "No philosopher of his time penetrated the contemporary theological situation as effectually as he." And this is what you intimately feel when reading The Essence – the words of a man who has made the contemplation of religion his life's work, offering us his dearly-bought insight into its psychology.

As DeBakcsy says, The Essence of Christianity (1841) is generally consider Feuerbach's most important work.

Feuerbach basic idea in Essence was, "The secret of theology [is] anthropology." Hans Küng in Das Christentum (1994) calls Feuerbach's view a "projection argument," according to which humanity is projecting important elements of themselves onto an abstract, imaginary entity, God. Küng calls attention to the similarity between Feuerbach's projection concept of religion and that of Sigmund Freud in the 20th century.

Küng challenges Feuerbach's argument on two major points. One is that understanding the human psychology of religion does not exclude a theistic faith. "The fact of projection in no way determines whether the object to which it applies exists or doesn't exist." Or, "A real God can correspond to the wish for God." It's one thing to say that projection is present in human religion. But that in itself doesn't mean that the divine object of the religion is only a projection.

The popular joke expresses a similar idea about projection: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you!

Küng also argues that historical developments since Feuerbach's time don't give much confirmation so far to the notion that religion will fade away and be replaced by reason, a more just social order or scientific knowledge: "But rather what appears more in fact is exactly the opposite: the faith (!) in the good nature of humanity (Feuerbach) as an understandable projection, the faith in the fjuture socialist society as an interest-determined consolation, the faith in rational science as a dangerous illusion."

Tags: hans küng, ludwig feuerbach, freud

Freud on the strength of reason and intellect

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

No one has done more than Sigmund Freud to make people aware of the unconscious and instinctual sources of human thought and behavior.

But Freud in some ways was an adherent of Enlightenment ideals of reason. In The Future of an Illusion (1927; James Strachey translation), he wrote:

We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but it is in itself a point of no small importance.

Tags: freud, future of an illusion

Frankfurt School, 1935 (4): Erich Fromm on Freud and the nature of tolerance (Part 3 of 3)

At one level, Fromm's comments on the social evolution of tolerance could be expressed as a banal observation. Every society has to maintain boundaries on individual conduct. That part of what a society is.

But in that passage, he's describing a crucial change in the concept of tolerance. The classical liberal concept of tolerance is more in the nature of, "The Catholics may be papists and blasphemers and enemies of the True Gospel, and I sure don’t want them in league with the government to impose themselves on us true Christian Protestants. But they have a basic right to practice and teach their godawful, hideous version of Christianity freely as long as they can'’t impose it by force on anyone else."

Or, to formulate it in terms of freedom of speech, "Anyone should be free to say any dang fool thing they want, as long as everyone else is free to say what a dang fool thing it is."

Fromm points out that in the later development of society in the 19th and 20th centuries, tolerance took on a broader sense which came to include the notion that in the formal sense, one should not pass judgment on the values of others. He’s not saying that such an approach is altogether wrong. If someone's buying your product, who cares whether he's a Baptist or a Methodist? What he’s saying is that in part, the attitude of general tolerance is illusory.

And in science and medicine, which is he where he goes with his criticism of Freud’s clinical methodology, such an undifferentiated tolerance can be deceptive and even unscientific. One of the longtime themes of the Frankfurt School in general was to critique the positivist approach to social science, which claimed to be value-free in its approach. As Fromm argues here in a particular application, and as others of the Frankfurt School argued more broadly, values can be concealed within ostensible objective frameworks of knowledge or research.

In the various versions of his introductory lecture to his Lectures on the History of Philosophy talked about the notion of partisanship in describing the history of philosophy. On the one hand, he agrees on the need for a "positive" nonpartisanship in the sense of describing philosophies that one disagrees with in an accurate way. Another kind of nonpartisanship would be "merely negative", i.e., describing all of philosophy with a viewpoint that it is all empty, false, mistaken, delusional.

But he points out also that any history, whether of philosophy or politics, has to be partisan in the sense of focusing in on what is essential to the historical task at hand. For instance, in this discussion of Erich Fromm’s article, I could have chosen not to include the quotation from Freud describing his "fundamental technical rule," and instead have dug up some anecdote from Fromm’s childhood to relate instead. But I selected one as having more relevance to the topic at hand than the other, of being more essential to the story being told. That is the sense in which Hegel says "every writer of history must be partisan." The point is not to distort the topic in the service of a personal opinion or that of a party. The point is to make a sensible and informed selection of material: a rational, reality-based partisanship.

Barrington Moore, Jr., who was more of a critic of Frankfurt School thinking than an advocate, expressed an idea that is compatible with the point Fromm makes above, in his essay, "Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook," published in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965):

The dilettante who has "perceptive" but incorrect notions about a hodgepodge of books deserves as much condemnation as the narrow technician creeping up some ladder of promotion by keeping his mouth shut on every issue that matters. Indeed the dilettante deserves greater condemnation because the technician can under appropriate circumstances help to establish worthwhile knowledge. When pseudo-brilliance sheds light, that is purely an accident.

On the other hand, it is absolutely necessary to keep the door open for the chance of a favorable accident, and, much more important, for those truths endeavoring to gain acceptance in the teeth of established orthodoxies. According to the scientific outlook, every idea, including the most dangerous and apparently absurd ones, deserves to have its credentials examined. Still, examining credentials means exactly that. It does not mean accepting the idea. Toleration implies the existence of a distinctive procedure for testing ideas, resembling due process in the realm of law. No one holds that under due process every accused person must be acquitted. A growing and changing procedure for the testing of ideas lies at the heart of any conception of tolerance tied to the scientific outlook. That is genuine tolerance. It has nothing to do with a cacophony of screaming fakers marketing political nostrums in the public square. Nor does the real article exist where various nuances of orthodoxy pass for academic freedom. [my emphasis]

Erich Fromm's essay shows that he was clearly breaking sharply with Freud’s methods at this point. But in the 2/1935 number of the journal, Fromm reviews a book by Carl Jung, Wirklichkeit der Seele (1934), in which he gives Jung, long since a bitter critic of Freud and by 1935 an intellectual collaborator with the Nazis, credit for intuitive insights but criticizes his lack of “clear and penetrating thinking.” Fromm was sympathetic to Ferenzci’s criticism of Freud, not so much to Jung’s.

Tags: erich fromm, frankfurt school, freud

Frankfurt School, 1935 (4): Erich Fromm on Freud and the nature of tolerance (Part 2 of 3)

Fromm argues that this stance of impartiality actually concealed the analyst’s application of judgments based on the standards of his society. Despite Freud’s scandalous reputation for talking so much about sex, Fromm argues that Freud actually supported some of the irrational, repressive aspects of the constricted conventional sexual morality of his time and society. He criticizes what he calls the "authoritarian patrio-centric (patrizentrische) approach that generally is hidden behind 'tolerance'."

In other words, Fromm is suggesting that Freud is practicing a kind of "repressive tolerance" in the form of a tolerant attitude that hides an authoritarian attitude.

As I said, I'm not concerned here with trying to evaluate the substance of Fromm’s criticism of this clinical technique. But in the context of his criticism, he describes the broad historical background as follows:

Bis ins 18. Jahrhundert hinein hatte die Forderung der Toleranz einen kämpferischen Sinn. Sie war gegen Staat und Kirche gerichtet, die den Menschen verboten, gewisse Dinge zu glauben oder gar zu äussern. Der Kampf für Toleranz war ein Kampf gegen Unterdruckung und Knebelung des Menschen. Er wurde von den Vertretern des aufsteigenden Burgertums gefüht, das gegen die politischen und wirtschaftlichen Fesseln des absolutistischen Staates kämpfte.

[Well into the 18th century, the demand for tolerance had a fighting sense. It was directed against State and the Church, who forbade people to believe or even speak certain things. The fight for tolerance was a fight against the suppression and subjugation of people. It was lead by the rising bourgeosie (capitalist class), which fought against the political and economic fetters of the absolutist state.]

But then in the course of the 19th century, tolerance began to take on a different meaning, one with two distinct sides, affecting both public policy and private understandings:

Mit dem Sieg des Burgertums und seiner Etablierung als herrschender Klasse verschob sich die Bedeutung der Toleranz. Aus einem Kampfruf gegen die Unterdrückung und für die Freiheit wurde Toleranz mehr und mehr der Ausdrutfc eines intellektuellen und moralischen „laissez faire". Das Verhältnis von Menschen, die sich als Käufer und Verkäufer auf dem freien Markt treffen, setzte diese Art Toleranz voraus; die Individuen mussten sich unabhängig von ihren subjektiven Meinungen und Wertmasstäben als abstrakt gleich wertvoll anerkennen, sie mussten Wertungen für etwas Privates und in die Beurteilung eines Menschen nicht Einzugehendes ansehen. Toleranz wurde ein Relativismus von Werten, die selbst zum privaten und niemand, anderen etwas angehenden Besitz des Individuums erklärt wurden. Im Bewusstsein ging die Duldung unbegrenzt weit. In Wirklichkeit hatte sie ihre klaren, wenn auch unausgesprochenen Grenzen dort, wo die Grundlage der bestehenden Ordnung bedroht war. Dies gilt nicht nur für direkte Bedrohungen politischer oder sozialer Art, sondern auch für die Verletzung jener fundamentalen Tabus, die zum „Kitt" der Gesellschaft gehoren und für den Bestand einer auf Klassengegensätzen aufgebauten Gesellschaft unerlasslich sind. Die unerbittliche Strenge gegen jeden Übertreter dieser Tabus kann in Zeiten, wo die Herrschaft des Burgertums relativ gesichert und stabil ist, aus dem Bewusstsein weitgehend verschwinden. Sie bleibt aber nichtsdestoweniger im Unbewussten erhalten und Kommt sofort an die Oberfläche, wenn vitale persönliche oder gesellschaftliche Interessen ernsthaft in Frage stehen. Die liberalistische Toleranz, wie sie sich im 19. Jahrhundert entwickelt hat, ist in sich widerspruchsvoll: im Buwusstsein der Menschen herrscht ein Relativismus gegenüber allen Werten überhaupt, im Unbewussten eine nicht minder stenge Verurteilung aller Tabuverletzungen.

[My translation, with added paragraph breaks: With the victory of the bourgeosie {capitalist class} and its establishment as the ruling class, the meaning of tolerance shifted. From a fighting slogan against suppression and for freedom, tolerance became more and more the expression of an intellectual and moral "laissez faire". The relationship of people who encounter each other on the free market as buyers and sellers required this kind of tolerance.

Individuals had to recognize each other as equally valuable in the abstract, independent of their subjective opinions and stardards of values. They had to view values as something private and as not something to scrutinize in making a judgment judgment about a person. Tolerance became a relativizing of values, which were declared to be private property of the individual and no one else's concern. In consciousness the suffrance extends broadly without boundaries. In reality, they had their clear boundaries, even if also unstated, where the basis of the existing order was threatened.

This is also the case not only for direct threats of a political or social kind, but also for the violation of those cultural taboo that belong to the "cement" of society and is indispensible to a society built on class antagonisms. The unrelenting harshness against anyone who oversteps these toboos can, during times in which the rule of the bourgeoisie {capitalist class} is relatively secure and stable, vanish out of consciousness to a large extent.

Nevertheless, they remain in force in the unconscious and come immediate to the surface if vital personal or social interests are seriously called into question. The liberalistic tolerance that developed in the 19th century is self-contradictory: in people’s consciousness a relativism of all values rules completely, while in the unconscious there rules a not less strong condemnation of the violations of taboos.]

(Concludes tomorrow in Part 3)

Tags: erich fromm, frankfurt school, freud

Frankfurt School, 1935 (4): Erich Fromm on Freud and the nature of tolerance (Part 1 of 3)

Psychologist Erich Fromm (1900-1980)

Erich Fromm contributed an article to the 3/1935 issue of Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung titled "Die gesellschaftliche Bedingtheit der psychoanlytischen Therapie" (The Social Conditioning of Psychoanalytic Therapy). Despite the expansive-sounding title, Fromm is focusing in particular on a criticism of an technical aspect of clinical psychoanalytic therapy, described more fully below, in which the analyst listens to the spontaneous associations the patient is making with an attitude of tolerance, in the sense of not making judgments of a moral or other nature on what the patient is saying. Fromm relies heavily on the criticisms made by Sándor Ferenczi (1873-1933), one of Sigmund Freud’s inner circle who had broken with Freud’s method of treatment.

I’m not going to try to evaluate the strengths or weaknesses of Fromm’s clinical argument. For good or bad, that particular technique is still used by Freudian psychoanalysts today, as Stanley Leavy points out in "What Happened to Psychoanalysis?" American Imago 1/2010.

But in the process of his criticism, Fromm describes some of the larger historical background of tolerance, one relevant to one of the more famous products of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse’s essay, "Repressive Tolerance."

But to understand what Fromm is addressing, it’s necessary to know the role tolerance plays in the clinical technique he references. Freud himself described the rule to which Fromm refers in "Psycho-Analysis" (1922) Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers Vol. 5. Here he calls it the Fundamental Technical Rule:

The treatment is begun by the patient being required to put himself in the position of an attentive and dispassionate self-observer, merely to read off all the time the surface of his consciousness, and on the one hand to make a duty of the most complete candour while on the other not holding back any idea from communication, even if (1) he feels that it is too disagreeable or if (2) he judges that it is nonsensical or (3} too unimportant or (4) irrelevant to what is being looked for. It is uniformly found that precisely those ideas which provoke these last-mentioned reactions are of particular value in discovering the forgotten material. ...

It was now a matter of regarding the material produced by the patients' associations as though it hinted at a hidden meaning and of discovering that meaning from it. Experience soon showed that the attitude which the analytical physician could most advantageously adopt was to surrender himself to his own unconscious mental activity, in a state of easy and impartial attention, to avoid so far as possible reflection and the construction of conscious expectations, not to try to fix anything that he heard particularly in his memory, and by these means to catch the drift of the patient's unconscious with his own unconscious. It was then found that, except under conditions that were too unfavourable, the patient's associations emerged like allusions, as it were, to one particular theme and that it was only necessary for the physician to go a step further in order to guess the material which was concealed from the patient himself and to be able to communicate it to him. It is true that this work of interpretation was not to be brought under strict rules and left a great deal of play to the physician's tact and skill; but, with impartiality and practice, it was usually possible to obtain trustworthy results—that is to say, results which were confirmed by being repeated in similar cases. [my emphasis]

Stanley Leavy describes the technique from today’s perspective:

No psychoanalytic method exists that isn't still a "talking cure." Psychoanalysis depends on words, spoken almost always in the participant presence of another person. The "basic rule" propounded by Freud holds as always, that the patient try to say whatever comes to mind, notwithstanding self-criticism, embarrassing or otherwise troubling self-revelation, including also uncomplimentary comment - or the reverse - about the analyst's personality, history as known, profession, family, or chosen milieu, etc. What is the intention of this relaxation of some of the standards of ordinary courtesy, privacy, and the normal proprieties in general? Quite simply: self-disclosure, recognizing that we know much more of ourselves than we profess, or could acknowledge without this massive self-examination.

It is not a conversation. The listener, the analyst, does not engage in it as an equal participant, that is, has no intention of revealing a paralllel inner world. ... Everything uttered by the speaker [the patient] is worth hearing, without judgment, patiently and with interest. [my emphasis]

(Continued tomorrow in Part 2)

Tags: erich fromm, frankfurt school, freud

Ernst Sellin and the death of Moses (3 of 3): Is Sellin’s theory of the murder of Moses plausible?

This is the third of three posts on the book, Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes (1924) by Ernst Sellin. Part 1 is Freud's use of Sellin's material. Part 2 is The Sellin mystery.

Ernst Sellin was an important Biblical scholar and archaeologist. Ernest Jones describes him as “one of the most distinguished Hebrew and Arabic scholars.” He is perhaps most famous for his archaeological work including the excavation of Jericho, which he described in Jericho, die ergebnisse der ausgrabungen dargestellt von Ernst Sellin und Carl Watzinger (1913).

Michaelangelo's Moses

The seventh annual Ernst Sellin-Carl Watzinger-Kolloquium was held in May 2009 at the University of Rostock. The 2006 version was held by the University of Vienna. Sellin taught in both universities.

I don’t read Hebrew and I have no credentials as a Biblical scholar. So I can only offer a lay person’s view as to the plausibility of Sellin’s argument on the murder of Moses.

Contemporary historical scholarship on the period is marked by a dispute between archaeological minimalists who contend that absent any supporting archaeological evidence, the Hebrew Scriptures have no secular historical value and events known only through that and other literary sources cannot be accepted as historically valid.

Most Biblical scholars aren’t ready to go that far in dismissing the literary sources as completely useless for the writing of history. But most would also not have put the confidence that Sellin and Freud apparently did in the literary sources, either. But Sellin was also a leading Biblical archaeologist and did not assume that Biblical traditions should override the physical evidence. His extensive use of information derived from archaeological discoveries in Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes is evidence of his familiarity with the field.

There is no clear archaeological evidence for the existence of Moses or of the Exodus. There is archaeological evidence showing that a major part of the people who later became Israelites were not descended from Hebrews coming out of Egypt but rather developed locally and expanded their presence through some combination of peaceful and military expansion. A reasonably conservative use of the available evidence would argue that there probably was an Exodus and that some leader like the one remembered as Moses existed, and that Hebrew immigrants into Palestine combined with local groups over a period of time to form the tribes of Israel. There is evidence of the presence of large numbers of Semitic people in Egypt that is consistent with the movement of people there describes in Genesis in the story of Joseph.

Based on the Biblical passages he cites, I would say that Sellin has a good argument for a tradition that believed Moses had been killed by his own people. Given the lack of evidence outside the Scriptures for the existence of Moses, it doesn’t strike me as a tradition that should be completely discarded as history.

The fact that Freud found such a reading historically plausible is in itself a reason not to dismiss it carelessly. Ernest Jones wrote, “It was Sellin's suggestion [on the murder of Moses] that made Freud decide to write his book; it fitted so well with his views on the importance of parricide.” Jones’ description argues for the view that Freud may have been particularly disposed to accept such an interpretation, and that’s very likely true. But Freud’s own studies on religion and his views on the role of guilt in Judaism and Christianity provide a basis for that inclination that is neither arbitrary nor irrational in itself.

The possibility of the existence of such a tradition that Moses was murdered is important in itself because it could have shaped the understanding of the authors of the Hebrew Bible in ways such as those on which Freud speculated in Moses and Monotheism. I find Sellin’s idea that [Deutero-] Isaiah 53, the Suffering Servant chapter, could be read as coming out of this tradition that viewed Moses as having been murdered and then taken retrospectively as a substitute sacrifice for his people, to be particularly intriguing in that regard.

Christians, of course, see Deutero-Isaiah 53 as a prophecy of Jesus and generally don’t give it much more thought. A great deal of the lyrics in Handel’s orotorio The Messiah are taken from the Suffering Servant description. The Jewish theologian and philosopher Abraham Heschel wrote in The Prophets (1962) about the servant of the Lord, who is the subject of Chapter 53 and other passages in Second Isaiah:

Perhaps no other problem in the Hebrew Bible has occupied the minds of scholars more than the identification and interpretation of the servant. For a survey of the vast literature, see C. R. North, The Suffering Servant in Deutero-Isaiah (Oxford, 1956). In the main, four theories have been proposed. The servant is (1) an anonymous contemporary of Second Isaiah; (2) Second Isaiah himself; (3) Israel; (4) a purely ideal or imaginary figure. To quote J. Muilenburg, in The Interpreter's Bible, V, 408, 411, "The servant is certainly Israel. . . . Israel, and Israel alone, is able to bear all that is said about the servant of the Lord. For the fundamental fact outweighing all others is the repeated equation of the two in the poems." ... According to H. H. Rowley, The Faith of Israel (London, 1956), p. 122, "The servant is at once Israel and an individual, who both represents the whole community and carries to its supreme point the mission of the nation, while calling the whole people to enter into that mission, so that it shall be its mission and not merely his. ... The servant is Israel today and tomorrow; but Israel may be all or a few or one of its members."

A tradition like that Sellin and Freud describe around the murder of Moses could very plausibly have contributed to Jewish and later Christian concepts of the Messiah, the anointed one. And specifically to Deutero-Isaiah’s image of the Servant of the Lord.

Sellin’s following comments about the significant of Moses in the Jewish religion could apply just as well to an historically false tradition that nevertheless could have contributed to the development of ancient Jewish theology (S. 94):

Zum Schlusse sei schon hier daran erinnert, daß Mose auch durch sein persönliches Schicksal bedeutungsvoll für die Religion seines Volkes geworden ist. Sein Verkehr mit der Gottheit galt je länger je mehr als ein Unikum, nur er hatte Gott von Angesicht zu Angesicht gesehn, nur mit ihm hatte Gott von Mund zu Mund gesprochen vgl. Ex. 33.11; Num. 12.7 f.; Deut. 34.10. Er war von seinen eigenen Volksgenossen als Märtyrer seines Glaubens hingemordet, auch das ist im Kreise seiner Anhänger unvergessen geblieben. Während Hosea noch einfach konstatiert, daß dies ungesühnte Verbrechen der Gipfel aller Sünden Israels sei, daß es unweigerlich jetzt das Gericht im Gefolge haben werde 9.7,11f.; 12.15, bildete sich allmählich die Vorstellung heraus, daß Mose, der sanft-mütigste aller Menschen Num. 12.3, sich freiwillig selbst als Sühnopfer dargebracht habe, und daraus erwuchs beim Deuterojesaja der Gedanke einer Erlösung des Volkes durch ihn, die Hoffnung auf seine Wiederkehr als eines Torahlehrers für die Volker der Erde 42.1ff.; 49.1 ff. usw. Und das bleibt bestehn [sic]: mit ihm ist ein Großer durch die Geschichte hindurchgegangen, der nicht nur eine Bedeutung für sein Volk, sondern für die ganze Menschheit gewonnen hat, eine weit großere, als die meisten Menschen sich träumen lassen.

[In conclusion, it should also be remembered that Moses also became important for the religion of his people through his personal fate. [Sellin means his murder at the hands of the Israelites.] His interaction with God was seen increasingly as unique; only he had seen God face to face, only with him did God speak mouth to mouth. … He was massacred by those from his own people as a martyr to his faith, [and] that also remained unforgotten in the circles of his followers. While Hosea still simply took the view that this unexpiated crime was the pinnacle of all Israel’s sins, that it would now inevitably bring judgment …, a concept was developing that Moses, the mildest of all people, … freely offered himself as a sin-offering, and from that arose the idea with Deutero-Isaiah of the salvation of the people through him, the hope of his return as a teacher of the Torah for the peoples of the earth … And it remains true: with him, a great one passed through history who won not only a significance for his people, but for all of humanity, one far wider than most people could even dream.]

Tags: ernst sellin, ernest jones, freud, moses

Ernst Sellin and the death of Moses (2 of 3): The Sellin mystery

This is the second of three posts on the book, Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes (1924) by Ernst Sellin. Part 1 is Freud's use of Sellin's material.

Freud’s and Sellin’s view that Moses was murdered by the Hebrews he led never gained broad acceptance among Biblical scholars, an issue which is discussed further in Part 3 tomorrow.

Freud’s close collaborator and biographer Ernest Jones added a more recent mystery in The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2: The Last Phase, 1919-1939 (1957). Sellin’s argument was “immediately rejected by all Jewish scholars”, Jones writes. As Freud’s version of Moses in Moses and Monotheism was also, for the most part. One of the arguments Jewish scholars made is that Sellin himself later repudiated his argument, “some say ten years later and some seven”, according to Jones. That would presumably be seven or ten years after Sellin’s 1922 book on Moses. Jones relates:

Yahuda [presumably Abraham Shalom Yahuda], another great scholar, told Freud this when he visited him in 1938, and Freud could only shrug his shoulders and say "It might be true all the same." It was Sellin's suggestion that made Freud decide to write his book; it fitted so well with his views on the importance of parricide.

There is a curious postscript to this story. I have made all possible endeavors to find out the truth about Sellin's supposed withdrawal, and have been given a number of different references to it, in his writings, in his addresses before Congresses and so on. All of them proved to be false. On the contrary, in a book Sellin published thirteen years later he not only adhered to his opinion, but stated that he had found "further confirmation" of it in a number of allusions to the murder, which he listed, in the writings of other prophets. In spite of all that, however, there appears to be a certain basis for the rumor. A friend of Sellin's, Professor Rust of Berlin, has been good enough to answer my inquiries, and he informs me that on one occasion Sellin, when hard pressed in private talk, was willing to admit that he might have been mistaken in his interpretation of the passage in Hosea which had been the starting point of his theory.

The book to which he refers as having been published 13 years later than 1922 is Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes, which was originally published in 1924; Jones’ endnote cites a 1935 date. Additional mystery, because the original publication puts it two years after the 1922 book, so a repudiation seven or ten years after the 1922 book wouldn’t be contradicted by the first publication of Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes in 1924.

And Jones adds cryptically:

Sellin's hypothesis could be supported by numerous suggestive passages in the Torah and other apocryphal literature hinting mysteriously at various legends concerning the death of Moses, but it would be impertinent to discuss them here.

“Impertinent” is an odd choice of words in the context, it seems to me. Here he cites three sources: Meyer Abraham, “La Mort de Moïse,” Legendes juives aprocryphes sur la vie de Moïse (1925); Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (1947); and, M. Rosenfeld, Der Midrasch über den Tod des Moses (1899).

Ernest Jones (1879-1958)

It does seem that Jones’ account of this aspect of Freud’s work on Moses is too dismissive. Sellin had identified a number of passages in the Hebrew Bible which he read as a tradition that said Moses had been killed. Jones himself then cites material from the Jewish midrash that also, by his own account, lend credence to Sellin’s argument and also demonstrate the existence of Jewish traditions about the death of Moses at variance with the main view presented in the Hebrew Bible. Yet his account, quoted above, leaves the impression that Freud picked up the idea based on Sellin’s 1922 book and that he picked it up because “it fitted so well with his views on the importance of parricide,“ even lightly dismissing the news from a leading scholar that Sellin himself had rejected his own theory.

But, as I noted before, it seems odd that Freud would not have been familiar with Sellin’s later work on Moses. He was not a specialist in Biblical scholarship as such. But he was no dilettante, either. He was familiar with some of the cutting-edge work on Near East archaeology and Biblical criticism. It makes more sense to me that Freud was familiar with Sellin’s case he made two years after the original book, but cited the 1922 book in Moses and Monotheism because, as he wrote in it, “In 1922 Ernst Sellin made a discovery of decisive importance.” Moses and Monotheism cites only a limited number of sources; it’s entirely plausible that Freud cited only the one that originally contained Sellin’s “discovery”.

Unfortunately, Jones also does not give a date for Professor Rust’s reported conversation with Sellin, a fact which has obvious relevance to the question of whether Sellin later rejected his own argument on the death of Moses. And what Jones relates of Rust’s account of his private conversation with Sellin doesn’t have Sellin rejecting the whole notion; instead it has Sellin “willing to admit that he might have been mistaken in his interpretation of the passage in Hosea which had been the starting point of his theory.”

But as we’ve seen, Sellin cited at least five passages in Hosea in support of his view of the murder of Moses, and well as numerous others from other books of the Hebrew Bible. The fact that Sellin in a long conversation with a friend and fellow scholar may have mused out loud that his interpretation of one of those passages may have been mistaken in some way isn’t exactly the same as retracting an elaborate argument made in print on more than one occasion. (Not even close, actually.) And, again, in the context it’s puzzling that Jones didn’t give any indication of when that conversation took place.

Part 3 tomorrow: Is Sellin’s theory of the murder of Moses plausible?

Tags: ernst sellin, ernest jones, freud, moses

Ernst Sellin and the death of Moses (1of 3): Freud's use of Sellin's material

Ernst Sellin (1867-1946)

I recently found a copy of a book, Geschichte des israelitische-jüdischen Volkes (1924) by Ernst Sellin (1867-1946) which gave me new insight into a literary/historical question that has puzzled me for a long time.

One of Sigmund Freud’s very last publications, which came out during his exile in England, is Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion. Drei Abhandlungen, published in English as Moses and Monotheism (1939).

There is a tradition of considering Moses as an Egyptian rather than a Hebrew, which Freud also did in Moses and Monotheism. Not as implausible as it might sound to those familiar only with the traditional story. The familiar Biblical story itself describes Moses growing up as an Egyptian prince, and Moses is an Egyptian name. Jan Assmann discusses this tradition, including Freud’s part in it, in Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (1997; Harvard Press edition).

Assmann points out that the selection of the phrase “der Mann Moses” (the man Moses) for the title of Freud’s book in German refers to Exodus 11:3, the only place in the Scriptures in which Moses is referred to that way, in what Assmann calls “such a distancing manner”. That description includes a reference to Moses being “exceedingly important in the land of Egypt”, making the use of “der Mann Moses” a particular reference to his Egyptian background.

Freud cites the references in Sellin’s earlier Mose[sic] und seine Bedeutung fur die israelitisch-jüdischenReligionsgeschichte (1922) and describes Sellin’s references there to the murder of Moses as follows:

In 1922 Ernst Sellin made a discovery of decisive importance. He found in the book of the Prophet Hosea (second half of the eighth century [BCE]) unmistakable traces of a tradition to the effect that the founder of their religion, Moses, met a violent end in a rebellion of his stubborn and refractory people. The religion he had instituted was at that time abandoned. This tradition is not restricted to Hosea: it recurs in the writings of most of the later Prophets; indeed, according to Sellin, it was the basis of all the later expectations of the Messiah. [Katherine Jones translation]

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in London, 1938, with the manuscript of An Outline of Psychoanalysis

Sellin saw the northern prophets Hosea and Amos as part of a religious tendency that preserved the “desert religion” of Moses and the period of the Exodus. This trend placed a strong emphasis on an ethical monotheism. So they were particularly critical of the assimilation of what they saw as Canaanite practices, especially including the incorporation of Canaanite deities. The Hebrew Bible repeatedly refers to the cult of the goddess Asheroth. Sellin argues that Asheroth was of honored in some form as part of the Yahwist religion and later archaeological work has confirmed that view. She was sometimes considered to be Yahweh’s consort. But as the invective against Asheroth in the Hebrew Bible shows, this was never a generally accepted practice and apparently always had its opponents, not just among the supposed “desert religion” tendency of Hosea and Amos.

Sellin detects two distinct traditions in the Hebrew Bible over the wandering of the Israelites in the desert: a Sinai tradition and a Kadesh tradition, which were merged at the time of Saul and David. He’s careful to note that solutions have to be inferred from the evidence and cannot be taken as certain.

Sellin argued that part of this desert religion/Sinai tradition included a version of the Exodus in which the Israelite rose up against Moses and actually killed him. This tradition was also known to others, he argues, that were not Northern prophets like Deutero-Isaiah and Deutero-Zechariah. He lists the following as “Seher un freien Propheten” working in the direct Mosaic tradition: “Debora, Samuel, Nathan, Elia, Amos, Hosea, Jesaja, Micha, Jeremia, Deuterojesaja”. He argued that those in this group who followed the ethical religion of Moses “the most truly have the image of the historical Moses,” i.e., the more likely correct image.

The passages of the Bible in which he perceives this tendency include the following, based on his exposition in Geschichte des israelitisch-jüdischen Volkes (pp. 77-78) are:

Hosea 9:7-13; 12:14-13:4; 5:2; 4:4-5; 11:3. According to his summary in this work, the first three references are those he cited in the earlier book Der Mann Mose that Freud cites in Moses and Monotheism.

Exodus 32:32 vergleich mit Hosea 9:7ff

Numbers 11:12; 25:6ff; vergleich mit 12:1; he notes that Num. 25:1-5 “reißen ganz abrupt ab”.

Deuteronomy 34:1ff “mit einem Schleier zugedeckt”.

II Kings 9:31

Amos 5:13

Deutero-Isaiah Ch. 53, the Suffering Servant chapter, using the figure of the Servant of the Lord.

Jeremiah 2:30

Deutero-Zachariah 10:12; 11:4-14; 13:7

Since Geschichte des israelitisch-jüdischen Volkes appeared two years after Der Mann Mose and apparently includes more complete references to the texts on which Sellin based his theory of the death of Moses, I wonder why Freud didn’t cite the later text, as well.

Part 2 tomorrow: The Sellin mystery

Tags: ernst sellin, ernest jones, freud, moses

The War and the high-risk narcotic of national unity

Iconic photo from the First World War of a wounded soldier deprived of the use of part of his face. His fatherland was no doubt proud of him. Maybe strangers greeted him on the street saying, "Thank you for your service".

At the Web site for The War as of 09/29/07, producers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick write of their series:

Over the course of seven episodes, we spend a great deal of time in battle - on the ground, in the air and at sea, in Europe and the Pacific - examining in countless ways and from many perspectives what one of our witnesses, Paul Fussell, described as "the real war."

"The rest of it," he told us, "is just the show-biz war. The real war involves getting down there and killing people. And being killed yourself or just barely escaping it. And it gives you attitudes about life and death that are unobtainable anywhere else."

Throughout the series, one theme has stayed constant, one idea has continually emerged as we have gotten to know the brave men and women whose stories it has been our privilege to tell: in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives. (my emphasis)

That quote gives a good glimpse of what makes the series itself confusing and also at why war maintains a continuing attraction for our us fallible humans.

What does this business about the "real" war versus the "show-biz" war mean? Are they saying to us that all those chats and segments about life on the "home front" are worthless fluff? Seriously, that short excerpt from Paul Fussell doesn't make much sense to me on its own. Is he saying that only military events, literally only battles, are "real" war? If he is, I find that hard to interpret any other way than as his own personal preference for military history. The armaments production isn't part of the "real" war? Domestic politics aren't part of the "real" war?

The sentiment that "in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives" is a good statement of the gushy core of the mythology of the Second World War in its most kitschy incarnation.

There's no doubt that war produces a feeling of excitement and solidarity, at least for some moment of time. I often quote the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, comment that all wars are popular for the first 30 days.

But permanent war mobilization is also poison for democratic government. Every war of any size seems to inevitably bring government abuses of the public's freedom, even with the best-intentioned governments. (Just to be clear, a government run by Dick Cheney cannot be counted as a "well-intentioned" one.)

That feeling of national solidarity and patriotism feels good, no question about it. But war also has its price, above all in what was commonly called "the butcher's bill" in the First World War, i.e., the costs in dead and wounded. The promised miracles of air powers for nearly a century now have provided a useful basis for "boys with toys" fantasies about making war antiseptic - for Our Side that is - by killing lots of the Bad People while not killing many of Us. And I'm confident that if Cheney and Bush give the final word for attacking Iran, we'll hear about some new technological twist combined with new experience that will make this war a cakewalk, like the Iraq War was supposed to be.

But that pleasant, exciting feel of solidarity always comes with a price. As I mentioned in an earlier post, national unity isn't all it's cracked up to be. Contrary to the interviewee on The War who said that there was a feeling of unity he didn't think we would ever have again, it's very likely that the national feeling of unity after the 9/11 attacks exceeded even that following Pearl Harbor.

But what good has that feeling done us? Al Qa'ida is still out there plotting and killing. We jumped into a war in Afghanistan that possibly could have been some kind of success and in any case was unavoidable in the circumstances, but which has long since become one more useless little colonial war. We got the Iraq War, the most cynical foreign war that the country ever undertook that I can recall. (Some of the smaller wars, like the Indian Wars and various-and-sundry interventions in Latin America could be contenders.) We got torture as an official policy. We got Dick Cheney's theory of the all-powerful Unilateral Executive put into practice to a disgraceful extent. We got the final transformation of the Republican Party into an authoritarian political movement. We got the USA PATRIOT Act and unlimited NSA surveillance. And as sure as Richard Nixon was a crook, some substantial portion of that surveillance went to domestic partisan political espionage, as we'll someday find out. (The latter is speculation on my part, but speculation with a high confidence level.)

The next time we have a major terrorist attack in the United States, we should all pray for less national unity of that kind.

What Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Culture of Contentment (1992) is still very true, and sadly will likely be true long after the Iraq War is no longer a living memory for anyone:

Almost any military venture receives strong popular approval in the short run; the citizenry rallies to the flag and to the forces engaged in combat. The strategy and technology of the new war evoke admiration and applause. This reaction is related not to economics or politics but more deeply to anthropology. As in ancient times, when the drums sound in the distant forest, there is an assured tribal response. It is the rallying beat of the drums, not the virtue of the cause, that is the vital mobilizing force.

But this does not last. It did not as regards the minor adventures in Grenada and Panama, nor as regards the war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. The effect of more widespread wars has been almost uniformly adverse.

World War I, although it evoked the most powerful of patriotic responses at the time, has passed into history largely as a mindless and pointless slaughter. The party victoriously in power at the time, the Democrats, was rewarded in 1920 with a stern defeat at the polls. World War II, made inescapable by Japanese and German initiation or declaration of war, has survived with better reputation. However, the Korean and Vietnam wars, both greatly celebrated in their early months, ended with eventual rejection of the wars themselves and of the administrations responsible. In the longer run, it cannot be doubted, serious war deeply disturbs the political economy of contentment. (my emphasis)

And now that it's being used as the all-purpose justification for every war any US President deems desirable, we might wish that the Second World War had maintained a less favorable reputation. But not if Ken Burns and the "Greatest Generation" industry have their way!

At the risk of stepping on one of my favorite quotations about war, I would add to Galbraith's comment that American public opinion did stay remarkably strong in support of the goals of the Second World War. Maybe someone will do a real TV documentary someday that spares us the sentimental violin music and actually tries to analyze why that was so. Two thoughts on that: the cause was necessary and justified in a way that was obvious to most people; Franklin Roosevelt had a better fell for the politics of war than did his successors (predecessors, too, for that matter, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln).

Is Galbraith's view of war too cold and unromantic? Good. Any tiny thing I can do to help de-romanticize war, I'm glad to be able to do.

In his 1921 book Massenpsychologie und Ich-analyse (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego), Sigmund Freud describes with approval several aspects of the work of the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon, particularly his book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), on the psychological mechanisms at work in unified groups:

In order to make a correct judgement upon the morals of groups, one must take into consideration the fact that when individuals come together in a group all their individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel, brutal and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, are stirred up to find free gratification. But under the influence of suggestion groups are also capable of high achievements in the shape of abnegation, unselfishness, and devotion to an ideal. While with isolated individuals personal interest is almost the only motive force, with groups it is very rarely prominent. It is possible to speak of an individual having his moral standards raised by a group .... Whereas the intellectual capacity of a group is always far below that of an individual, its ethical conduct may rise as high above his as it may sink deep below it.

... In groups the most contradictory ideas can exist side by side and tolerate each other, without any conflict arising from the logical contradiction between them. But this is also the case in the unconscious mental life of individuals, of children and of neurotics, as psycho-analysis has long pointed out. ...

And, finally, groups have never thirsted after truth. They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced by what is untrue as by what is true. They have an evident tendency not to distinguish between the two ... (my emphasis; Standard English edition translation)

That is a good statement of the dynamic by which wars can produce both great achievements of self-sacrifice and personal accomplishment, as well as the greatest and most sickening cruelties. That dynamic operates no matter how worthy the cause in some kind of objective, ethical, moral, religious, political sense. If the best causes need conscious restraint, which is where the rules and laws of warfare have come from over the centuries.

When those boundaries are thrown overboard, as the current administration has with the torture policy and the invasion of Iraq when no imminent threat had occurred, and then reinforced that freedom from constraints by producing only half-baked prosecutions of the most serious legal offenses committed by Americans, for many individuals this no doubt took the lid off "all the cruel, brutal and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, [and which] are stirred up to find free gratification" in group psychology.

And, no, trolls that's not "criticizing the troops", though some certainly deserve to be criticized. It's a recognition that those troops are human beings subject to human dynamics, not the toy-soldier heroes so many Republicans like to pretend that they are.

So in that sense, what Burns and Novick write is certainly true in wartime and other cases where powerful group dynamics come into play, that "in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives". But unless we fully recognize the dark side of that kind extraordinariness, we make the positive side into a pretty lie.

Chris Hedges gives a vivid description of his own experience of war fever in the context of his work as a war correspondent in places like El Salvador and Bosnia in his book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002):

When we ingest the anodyne of war we feel what those we strive to destroy feel, including the Islamic fundamentalists who are painted as alien, barbaric, and uncivilized. It is the same narcotic. I partook of it for many years. And like every recovering addict there is a part of me that remains nostalgic for war's simplicity and high, even as I cope with the scars it has left behind, mourn the deaths of those I worked with, and struggle with the bestiality I would have been better off not witnessing. There is a part of me - maybe it is a part of many of us - that decided at certain moments that I would rather die like this than go back to the routine of life. The chance to exist for an intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant certain oblivion, seemed worth it in the midst of war - and very stupid once the war ended.

A Hallmark-card-style slogan like "in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives", standing alone, is about like saying that war gives its participants special opportunities for travel.

Tags: chris hedges, freud, john kenneth galbraith, ken burns, the war documentary