In 1915, Sigmund Freud wrote a short essay entitled “Transience.” Just over a century later, during the Coronavirus pandemic, the philosopher Jonathan Lear wrote “Transience and Hope” about returning to Freud’s essay in a time of COVID-19, the climate emergency, and the resurgence of authoritarianism. Now, Lear has passed, adding one more layer of pathos to their dialogue.

Freud’s piece turns out to be political, but it begins with a personal memory. “Not long ago,” he says, he went on a “summer walk through a smiling countryside” with a “taciturn friend” and a “young but already famous poet.” Many commentators have identified this poet as Rilke, but Lear thinks the whole story is fiction.

In any case, Freud and the poet argue. The poet is unable to enjoy the beauty of nature because it will fade with the coming fall, “like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour that men have created or may create.” Freud has the opposite feeling, that transience only “raises the value of the enjoyment.” He adds, “A flower that blooms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account any less lovely.” But neither the poet not the silent friend is convinced by Freud.

Freud says that his friends could not accept the transience of beauty because there was “a revolt in their minds against mourning.” He explains that we have a natural inclination to love–first ourselves, then other objects. When an object of love is lost, we cling to it anyway, which is the painful stage that we call mourning. However, mourning “comes to a spontaneous end,” allowing our love to move to new objects. In a later essay, Freud will explicitly distinguish the healthy, temporary process of mourning (which ultimately frees us to love something new) from “melancholia,” which is stuck in place.

The final paragraph of “On Transience” explains what the story is really about:

My conversation with the poet took place in the summer before the war. A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of our science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed forever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.

In 1914, Europeans like Freud had lost an object of their love–life before the war–and they were mourning it. To make matters harder, they had strongly identified with prewar culture and taken pride and hope in it. They were like a widower who not only misses his deceased partner but also mourns his own lost role or place in the world as a spouse. (This is my analogy, not Freud’s or Lear’s.)

Dr. Freud has a prescription. Mourning passes, and the same will happen to Europeans as the war moves into the past. “When once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.”

Mourning involves, among other emotions, a recognition of the value of what was lost. Thus, for someone like Freud to mourn his optimistic youthful days before August 1914 was to recognize their worth. His sadness reveals that it had been good to pursue medical science in Vienna.

In this case, however, the prewar culture had yielded an unspeakably terrible war. Therefore, the culture was not only over but also discredited. If Freud could travel back in time, perhaps he should not enjoy prewar Vienna (or Paris) but regard it with dismay as the predecessor of a global slaughter. Perhaps Freud and his contemporaries were not like people mourning loved-ones who had died innocently, but like people whose lovers had been unmasked as villains. Worse, the mourners had been part of the lost and discredited world.

When Freud went for his country walk, he and his friends knew that the flowers would fade. But that was not the flowers’ fault. Watching them wither would not negate their value while they bloomed, and the friends could fully appreciate new buds when they returned (as normal) the following spring. In contrast, the First World War revealed that prewar European society, which had seemed so progressive to Freud’s generation, had been deeply corrupt all along.

I am disagreeing here with Freud. He thinks that the negative feelings of his contemporaries are symptoms of mourning, which is healthy but should not be allowed to last forever. Their mourning reflects an authentic and appropriate appreciation for life before the war. They now realize that the past was “fragile,” but this recognition should not detract from its value. Their job is to create good things anew.

It is much harder if we think that something that we have lost is not only transient and absent but was never as valuable as we had previously believed.

I am often nostalgic for the polity and society that I knew as a young adult and up through the Obama Administration. I realize that many people who were less fortunate than I felt less positive about things then, as did people who were more radical than I. I am simply reporting my subjective state. I now experience mourning for that time. The questions is whether my mourning is appropriate because the past was good, or whether it is naive and self-justifying.

Lear’s main objective is to help us to see that mourning reflects a degree of appropriate appreciation for the past, and we can continue to make good things. We should recognize the fragility of what we had built but not reject it all. This is difficult if we blame the past that we miss for what has gone wrong.

Source: Sigmund Freud, “On Transience,” 1915 (just “Vergänglichkeit” in the original, without a preposition), translated by James Strachey in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, pp. 305-7, discussed in Jonathan Lear, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (Harvard, 2022). See also: the politics of nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be; nostalgia in the face of political crisis; there are tears of things; and Rilke, The Grownup

Michel de Montaigne famously imagined that he could learn not to mind dying. After all, there is no rational reason to fear not existing, nor to regret that you won’t still be alive in 100 years, for you weren’t alive a century ago. But if we are not going to fear death when we meet it, then there is no reason to fear it now. By imagining that we will face death without fear and working back from our last day to the present, we can remove distress.

As Montaigne says, no soul is “at rest so long as it fears death,” but if the soul can remove that fear, “then it can boast something almost surpassing the human condition: anxiety, torment, fear, and displeasure can no longer lodge in it” [1.20, my translation].

In this early essay, “To Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne canvasses many arguments against the fear of death. Nevertheless, the general air is of a person who is indeed anxious about dying, and whose everyday experience is colored by that fear. He seems to be clinging to logical arguments that are not really changing his state of mind.

Montaigne’s last essay, “Of Experience,” revisits the same topic in a spirit of greater equanimity, even though the author is old and close to his real death. Here he suggests that he has absorbed the arguments against fearing death and has made them part of his character:

Yet I am prepared to lose life without regret, as something that is losable by its very nature, not as something that is annoying and troublesome. Besides, only for those who delight in living is it appropriate to dislike dying.

There is a certain housekeeping involved involved in enjoying life; I enjoy it twice as much as others do, for the degree of enjoyment depends on the amount that we apply ourselves to it. Especially at this hour, when I perceive my life to be so brief, I want to extend its weight; I want to arrest the promptness of its flight by the promptness of my senses, and to compensate for the hastiness of its passing by the vigor of its use: since my possession of life is shorter, I must make it deeper and fuller.

Others feel the sweetness of contentment and prosperity; I feel the sweetness as they do, but not as something passing and slipping away. Also, we must study, savor, and ruminate on life to give appropriate thanks to the One who grants it to us.

Other people enjoy all pleasures as they do the pleasures of sleep, without knowing them. So that even sleep might not escape me so stupidly, I have sometimes found it good to have my sleep disturbed so that I can catch a glimpse of it.

I consult with myself about my own contentment, I do not skim over it. When I have become sorrowful and disgusted, I probe that state and bend my reason to meditate on it. Or do I find myself in some tranquil setting? Is there some pleasure that tickles me? I do not let myself be swindled by my senses, I associate my soul with it, not to engage in it, but to agree with it, not to lose myself in it, but to find myself there; and I let my soul see itself reflected in this state of thriving, to weigh and estimate its good fortune, and to amplify it. [Montaigne 3.12 (“Of experience”)]

If, as a young man, Montaigne had known that he would later achieve equanimity, then he would have known that he didn’t have to fear death in the present. Unfortunately for him, he could only advocate equanimity, not predict that he would achieve it until he actually did (or at least, so he claims).

See also: Montaigne the bodhisattva?; Montaigne and Buddhism; three takes on the good life: Aristotle, Buddha, Montaigne; three truths and a question about happiness (2011)

I am blogging a bit lightly this month, partly because I have wanted to reserve time for relatively sustained reading, mostly in two areas.

First, I am planning a new course on the life and thought of Hannah Arendt. To that end, I have been rereading a lot of her own work and reading some of her articles for the first time. I also reviewed Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s landmark biography (1982) and recent biographies by Samantha Rose Hill (2021) and Lyndsey Stonebridge (2024), plus many interpretive articles, old and new.

I really admire Young-Bruehl’s biography. She misses some information that has come to light in the 44 years since she published it, but she summarizes Arendt’s ideas and the work of other thinkers reliably and insightfully and paints a vivid portrait of her subject.

I am struggling to appreciate The Origins of Totalitarianism as much as I did when I first read it, notwithstanding my deep appreciation for Arendt’s political theory. At least on its face, this is a work of empirical, narrative history, and it includes many claims that don’t seem empirically right to me.

Just for example, Arendt views racism as basically a 19th century phenomenon and largely ignores transatlantic slavery. I can understand that racism took a new form in the 1800s, and I agree that it became more of an ideology then. (Arendt defines ideologies as “systems based upon a single opinion that proved strong enough to attract and persuade a majority of people and broad enough to lead them through the various experiences and situations of an average modern life.”) In his 2017 history of 19th century Britain, David Cannadine also emphasizes that racism hardened into an ideology in the later Victorian Era. Still, Arendt’s overall argument is distorted by a failure to address slavery.

I also wonder whether Arendt’s historical scholarship on European Jewry holds up. It is a little hard to tell, because Origins of Totalitarianism has been cited almost 30,000 times, and I haven’t found needles of historical scholarship in that haystack of political theory. Meanwhile, when I scan histories of Jewry, she does not appear as a source.

Second, I have collected my own writing about the inner life and personal ethics in an evolving collection called Cuttings: Ninety-Nine Essays About Happiness. Reviewing this collection when I prepared to present about happiness in Kyiv in June, I realized that Montaigne is really my model, and I interpret him as a kind of Skeptic in the tradition of the ancient Greek Skeptical School, except that Montaigne adds empathy for others’ suffering. I explored how this combination resembles Buddhism here.

My attraction to this way of thinking about ethics dates back to my 1998 book, Living Without Philosophy. With an eye to writing at least an article about Montaigne-style Skepticism, I have been reading and appreciating Richard Bett’s How to Be a Pyrrhonist (2019), Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne (2010), and some texts by Sextus, Plutarch and Montaigne himself.

I’ve been discussing these texts all semester with a very intense and dedicated group of students. In our final discussions, we are considering the following questions (or as many as we have time for):

1. What are the roles of reasoning and/or deliberation (Mill, Dewey, Arendt, Habermas), as opposed to unconscious emotions and/or interests (Freud, Adorno) in modern politics?
2. How do complex mass societies manage information, and how should they? Options include bureaucracies (Weber), free speech (Mill), price signals (Hayek), organic intellectuals (Gramsci), corporate propaganda (Horkheimer & Adorno), small-scale politics (Arendt), surveillance (Foucault), or institutions of civil society (Dewey, Habermas).
3. What causal factors are important in history? E.g., class struggle (Marx, Gramsci), Darwinian selection among ideas and institutions (Hayek, Weber, Foucault), intentional deliberation and learning (Mill, Dewey), great men (Mussolini), or conflicts among enemies (Schmitt, Mussolini, perhaps Fanon).
4. What is the potential of direct democratic self-rule as understood by Marx (in “The Civil War in France”), Luxemburg, duBois, Dewey, Arendt, or Fanon? What are its likely limitations, according to Schmitt, or Weber, or Habermas? How does decentralized democracy compare to market decentralization (Hayek)?
5. How should we think about positive and negative liberty (Berlin) in the light of other accounts of freedom by, e.g., DuBois, Foucault, or de Beauvoir?
6. What defines “liberalism” and how does it look from the perspective of a class revolutionary (Gramsci), a Black American thinker (DuBois), a revolutionary colonial subject (Fanon), or a woman (de Beauvoir)?
7. In 1945, Arendt wrote, “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” What, if anything, does evil mean in the context of earthly politics? Should we talk about evil?
8. What can political thinkers contribute? E.g., a prophetic voice (Marx, Benjamin, possibly Dewey, possibly de Beauvoir), detached analysis (Weber, early Foucault, perhaps Horkheimer and Adorno), or concrete involvements in public life (Dewey, Gramsci, DuBois, Fanon, late Foucault).
9. Are the questions of the 21^st century different from those of the 20^th?