Civilization View On Civilization

For generations mankind has tried to answer the question about their purpose here on earth and tried to explain human behavior. In their written works, Freud and Nietzsche develop independent hypotheses about the evolution of civilization from its beginning, and similarly assess the unintentional effects caused by society on an individual’s life.

Sigmund Freud, a psychologist and influential thinker of the early twentieth century, enumerates the fundamental conflicts between civilization and the individual in his writing, Civilization and its Discontents. He asserts that an individual’s primary discontent originates from civilization’s demand for conformity contrary to the individual’s search for instinctual freedom. Freud continues and postulates that the demands and laws forced onto the individual create the “super ego.” This super ego puts limits on one’s intrinsic desires and restricts them from pursuing different opportunities of happiness. Similar to Freud’s assessment of civilization, Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher and cultural critic, illustrates a similar evaluation on communal living in his major work, On the Genealogy of Morals. In this writing, Nietzsche begins to examine the origin and meaning of different moral concepts, starting with “good”, “evil”, and “bad.” In this process he states that noblemen defined these terms and that the people around them are you talking about the noblemen or people in general? influenced and ultimately determined what was “bad” or “good.” While both thinkers addressed several different concepts, they had similar views on the influence of civilization and the unintentional effects it had on the individuals living in that society. While both Freud and Nietzsche discuss the pow...

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...so. But anyone who follows such precept in present-day civilization only puts himself at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the person who disregards it. What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defense against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself!” (Freud, 146)

Even in the early twentieth century, Freud was able to not only diagnose the “illness” of the society that he lived in, but was also brilliant in stating that civilization pays no attention to the happiness of the individual. This quote also demonstrates that an individual who believes that there is more “merit” in obeying rules that are hard to follow are actually at a disadvantage in contrast to those around him/her who may disregard those precepts. Overall, the two thinker’s analytical texts impact our perception of morality, even with our different modern values.