Kenny Anthony. Philosophy in the Modern World: A New History of Western Philosophy. Volume 4

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Freud on Religious Illusion

Freud, on the other hand, wanted to turn up the lights on the dark corners

of the soul in order to rid the world of enchantment. Religion, he

maintained, was an illusion; and he used ‘illusion’ in a precise sense as a

belief determined by human wishes. Illusions, for Freud, are not necessarily

false beliefs, as delusions are, but they are beliefs undetermined by evidence;

if they are true it is by a happy accident. ‘For instance, a middle-class girl

may have the illusion that a prince will come and marry her. This is

possible; and a few such cases have occurred.’ Freud’s definition means that

he can maintain that religio n is an illusion while, in theory at least, leaving

open the question of the truth-value of religious beliefs. It is unlikely, he

thinks, that the Messiah will come and found a golden age; but religious

doctrines can no more be disproved than they can be proved.

Religious ideas, Freud says in The Future of an Illusion, are not the result of

experience or ratiocination.

They are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes

of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. . . .

The terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for

protection—for protection through love—which was provided by the father;

and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary

to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the

benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the

establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of

justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the

prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal

framework in which these wish-fulfilments shall take place. (FI 47–8)

Though Freud disowns any pretension to refute religious claims, he clearly

thinks it would be better for all concerned if religion withered away.

Religion has rendered great service by helping to tame human instincts.

But in the thousands of years it has held sway it has achieved very little.

There is no evidence that men were in general happier when religious

doctrines were universally accepted, and they were certainly no morally

better than they are nowadays. The growth of the scientific spirit has

decisively weakened the hold of religion. ‘Criticism has whittled away the

evidential value of religious documents, natural science has shown up the

errors in them, and comparative research has been struck by the fatal

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resemblance between the religious ideas which we revere and the mental

products of primitive people and times.’ (FI 63).

Thus far Freud’s criticism of religion, as he himself insists, owes nothing

to psychoanalysis. But, ever since Totem and Taboo in 191 3, he had pro-

pounded a psychoanalytic narrative of the origin of religious morality. In

the earliest ages, he reported, humans lived in hordes, each horde being

ruled by a primal father who enslaved the other men and possessed all the

women. One day the men banded together and slew the primal father and

established taboos against murder and incest. The primal crime left an

inheritance of guilt, so that humans deified the murdered father in their

imaginations and determined to respect his will hencefor ward. Religion, on

this view, is the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.

Like the obsessional neurosis of children it arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of

the relation to the father. If this view is right, it is to be supposed that a turning-away

from religion will occur with the fatal inevitability of a process of growth, and that we

find ourselves at this very juncture in the middle of that phase of development. (FI 71)

Freud tells us that the time has come to replace the effects of repression by

the results of the rational operation of the intellect. But what he is doing is

not at all replacing religion with science, but substituting for the myth of

Adam’s fall another myth of no greater credibility as a historical narrative.

His later writings diminished, rather than increased, a ny plausibility that

Totem and Taboo may have possessed. In Moses and Monotheism he maintained

that the prehistoric primal murder had been twice repeated in historic

times—once when the Jewish people murdered Moses (did they, now?)

and once when they murdered Jesus. Thus ‘there is a real piece of historical

truth in Christ’s resurrection, for he was the resurrected Moses and behind

him the returned primal father of the primitive horde, transfigured and, as

the son, put in the place of the father’ (SE xxiii. 89–90).

Philosophical Theology after Wittgenstein

God is hardly mentioned in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:no

doubt he is among the things whereof one should keep silent. But

throughout his life, Wittgenstein, though he early gave up his Catholic

faith, took religion very seriously. ‘To believe in God’, he wrote in a

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notebook during the First World War, ‘means to see that life has a

meaning.’ But believing in God was not a matter of assenting to a doctrine.

The Gospels do not provide a historical basis for fait h.

Christianity is not based on a historical truth: rather, it offers us a (historical)

narrative and says: now believe. But not: believe this narrative with the belief

appropriate to a historical narrative; rather, believe through thick and thin, which

you can do only as a result of a life. Here you have a narrative; don’t take the same

attitude as you take to other historical narratives. Make quite a different place in

your life for it. (CV 32)

Wittgenstein was most opposed to the idea that Christianity was reason-

able, and that its reasonableness was established by a branch of philosophy

called natural theology. Philosophy, he thought, could not give any

meaning to life; the best it could provide would be a form of wisdom.

But compared with the burning passion of faith, wisdom is only cold grey

ash.

But though only faith, and not philosophy, can give meaning to life,

that does not mean that philosophy has no rights within the terrain of

faith. Faith may involve talking nonsense, and philosophy may point out

that it is nonsense. Having in the Tractatus urged us to avoid nonsense by

silence, Wittgenstein after his return to philosophy said, ‘Don’t be afraid of

talking nonsense’ (CV 56). But he went on to add: ‘You must keep an eye

on your nonsense.’

The logical positivists shared the view that religious language was

nonsense; but they felt for it none of the paradoxical respect accorded it

by Wittgenstein. A. J. Ayer, in Language, Truth and Logic, offered a brisk proof

that religious language was meaningless and that ‘God’ was not a genuine

name. A religious man, he tells us, would say that God was a transcendent

being who could not be defined in terms of any empirical manifestations.

But in that case, ‘God’ was a metaphysical term:

To say that ‘God exists’ is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be

either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to

describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance.

It is important not to confuse this view of religious assertions with the view that

is adopted by atheists, or agnostics. For it is characteristic of an agnostic to hold

that the existence of a god is a possibility in which there is no good reason either to

believe or disbelieve; and it is characteristic of an atheist to hold that it is at least

probable that no god exists. And our view that all utterances about the nature of

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God are nonsensical, so far from being identical with, or even lending any support

to, either of these familiar contentions, is actually incompatible with them. For if

the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist’s assertion that

there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that

can be significantly contradicted. ( LTL 115)

For some years, believing philosophers were alarmed by verificationist

arguments against religious doctrines, and strove to defend their meaning-

fulness without making much effort to demonstrate their truth. Towards

the end of the twentieth century, however, some natural theologians

recovered confidence and were much less defensive in their attitudes.

Typical of this phase is Alvin Plantinga, first of Calvin College, Grand

Rapids, and later of Notre Dame University.

For instance, Plantinga has offered a sophisticated restatement of the

ontological argument. In a simplified version his revision goes like this. Let

us begin by defining the property of maximal excellence, a property that

includes omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection. Obviously God,

if he exists, has maximal excellence in the actual world. But maximal

excellence is not sufficient for Godhead: we need to consider worlds

other than this one.

Those who worship God do not think of him as a being that happens to be of

surpassing excellence in this world but who in some other worlds is powerless or

uninformed or of dubious moral character. We might make a distinction here

between greatness and excellence; we might say that the excellence ofabeinginagiven

worldWdependsonlyuponits...propertiesinW,whileitsgreatnessinWdepends

not merely upon its excellence in W, but also upon its excellence in other worlds. The

limiting degree of greatness, therefore, would be enjoyed in a given world W only by a

being who had maximal excellence in W and in every other possible world as well.3

Maximal greatness therefore is maximal excellence in every possible world,

and it is maximal greatness, not just maximal excellence, that is equivalent

to divinity or Godhead. Any thing that possesses maximal greatness must

exist in every possible world, because in a world in which it does not exist it

does not possess any properties. If it is possible for maximal greatness to be

instantiated, then it is instantiated in every world. If so, then it is instan-

tiated in our world, the actual world; that is to say, Godhead is instantiated

and God exists.

3 Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 214.

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Plantinga’s argument obviously depends on the coherence of the appa-

ratus of possible worlds, and on a solution having been found to the

problem of transworld identity. He believes that he has found such a

solution, and he presents it at considerable length in his book. But it

should also be remarked that in the case of a possible God, rather than

of a possible human, the problem does not seem so pressing; it seems

foolish to put to Plantinga the question, ‘Which God are you proving the

existence of ?’ It remains the case, however, as Plantinga himself points out,

that the whole argument depends on the truth of the premiss that it is

possible for maximal greatness to be exemplified—that is to say, in his

terms, that it is exemplified in some possible world.

Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, maintained that there

were instances where philosophy had reached definitive answers to central

questions. He gave as one example the ontological argument. ‘This as we

have seen was invented by Anselm, rejected by Thomas Aquinas, accepted

by Descartes, refuted by Kant, and reinstated by Hegel. I think it may be

said quite decisively that as a result of analysis of the concept ‘‘existence’’

modern logic has proved this argument invalid’ (p. 752). Plantinga’s

reinstatement of the argument, using logical techniques more modern

than any available to Russell, serves as a salutary warning of the danger

that awaits any historian of logic who declares a philosophical issue

definitively closed.

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CHRONOLOGY

1757 Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

1789 Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

1790 Kant’s Critique of Judgement

1800 Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads

1841 Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity

1843 Mill’s System of Logic

1844 Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea (2nd edn.)

1846 Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript

1848 Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto

1859 Mill’s On Liberty; Darwin’s On the Origin of Species

1867 Marx’s Capital, vol. I

1870 Newman’s Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent

1872 Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy

1874 Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics

1879 Frege’s Begriffsschrift

1884 Frege’s Grundlagen der Arithmetik

1887 Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals

1897 Tolstoy’s What is Art?

1900 Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams

1900–1 Husserl’s Logical Investigations

1905 Russell’s On Denoting

1910 Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica

1918 Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

1927 Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit

1929 Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung der Wiener Kreis

1936 Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic

1943 Sartre’s L’E

tre et le ne

ant

1945 Popper’s Open Society and its Enemies

1953 Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

1957 Anscombe’s Intention

1959 Strawson’s Individuals

1960 Quine’s Word and Object

1967 Derrida’s Grammatologie

1970 Davidson’s ‘Mental Events’

1971 Rawls’s Theory of Justice

CHRONOLOGY

320

ABBREVIATIONS

AND CONVENTIONS

Works cited are quoted by page number unless otherwise specified.

Anscombe

ERP Ethics, Religion and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981)

Ayer

LTL Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd edn. (London: Gollancz, 1949)

Bentham

B The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring, 10 vols. (New York:

Russell & Russell, 1962)

P Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J. H. Burns and

H. L. A. Hart (London: Athlone, 1982); cited by chapter, section,

and/or subsection

Brentano

PES Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, ed. Oskar Kraus, 2 vols.

(Hamburg: Meiner, 1955)

Collingwood

PA Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938)

Darwin

OS On the Origin of Species, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1996)

Davidson

EA Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)

ITI Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1984)

Derrida

Diff. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul, 1978)

G Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1976)

P Positions, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981)

SP Speech and Phenomena (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press,

1973)

Engels

See under Marx.

Feuerbach

EC The Essence of Christianity, trans. G. Eliot (New York: Harper, 1957)

WSa

mtliche Werke, 12 vols. (Stuttgart: Bolin, 1959–60)

Frege

BLA The Basic Laws of Arithmetic: Exposition of the System, trans. Montgomery

Furth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964)

CN Conceptual Notation and Related Articles, trans. T. W. Bynum (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1972)

CP Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic and Philosophy, ed. B. McGuinness

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1984)

FA The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1950, 1980)

PW Posthumous Writings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979)

Freud

EI The Ego and the Id (London: Hogarth Press, 1962)

FI The Future of an Illusion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964)

NIL New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1949)

SE The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,24

vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1981)

Husserl

CCH Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge

Companion to Husserl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

322

ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS

CM Cartesian Meditations (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988)

Ideas Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, 3 vols. (Dordrecht: Kluwer,

1980, 1982, 1989)

LI Logical Investigations, ed. J. N. Findlay, 2 vols. (London: Routledge,

2001)

James

T The Meaning of Truth (New York: Prometheus Books, 1997)

VRE Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Fontana, 1960)

Kant

M Critique of Judgement, ed. J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1978)

Kierkegaard

E/O Either/Or, trans. A. Hannay (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992)

FT Fear and Trembling, trans. A. Hannay (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1985)

P Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. A. Hannay (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1996)

SD Sickness unto Death, trans. A. Hannay (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1989)

Marx

C Capital, ed. D. McLellan, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1995)

CM Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed.

D. McLellan, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1992)

CPE Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress, 1971)

EW Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975)

GI The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Allen (London: Lawrence & Wishart,

1920, 2004)

TF Theses on Feuerbach (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998)

VPP Values, Price and Profit, ed. E. M. Aveling (New York: International

Publishers, 1935)

323

ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS