Life and Death

In 1915 Sigmund Freud published his Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, a reflection upon the disillusionment felt by Europeans at the onset of a war more destructive than any other before it. He asked that while people knew that war would never cease as long as nations lived so differently, that is, lived under the guidance of different moral codes, different religions and practised different virtues in the pursuit of different interests, could it not at least be assumed that the great nations had sufficiently comprehended their commonality so that ‘ “foreigner” and “enemy” could no longer be merged’ (Freud, 1991c: 63)? Here Freud paints a picture of civilization very much in keeping with the ideology of modernity as the incremental and progressive movement towards universal peace. Indeed the Kantian echoes are very strong as he describes the unity of civilized peoples that has allowed innumerable men and women to exchange their native home for a ‘new and wider fatherland’ (63), moving, as cosmopolitanism demands, without ‘hindrance or suspicion’. These civilized cosmopolitans did not consider war, but if it were to happen they pictured a ‘chivalrous passage of arms’ (64) limited to establishing the superiority of one side, while also avoiding excessive suffering and offering full protection to non-combatants. Such war may indeed produce horrors, but nothing that might interrupt ‘the development of ethical relations between the collective individuals of mankind’ (65). The war that arrived, however, ignored all restrictions of such chivalry. As ‘cruel’, ‘embittered’ and ‘implacable’ as anything that came before: ‘It tramples in blind fury on all that comes in its way as though there were no future and no peace among men after it is over’ (65). This is a vivid picture of Freud’s belief in both civilization, the purpose of which is to extend human relations into ever larger cooperative units, and the immanence of human destructiveness. It is also the reason Freud remains important today; his philosophy of co-present contending forces of life and death refuses the monism that permeates current discourses of war. His persistent demand that we face up to the duality of the human condition disabuses us of the illusion that the forces of death can be clearly and definitively located outside, that the battle is between self-contained units of good versus evil. Freud thus undermines any simple moral topology.