The Birth of Ideas

I won’t claim that the history of ideas is important. Importance is relative. It may not be important to you. But it is interesting to me. Instead of trying to explain it to you, I’ll showcase one of my favorite pieces of intellectual history.

Sigmund Freud starts with a simple idea: “Every subjective phenomenon is, essentially, connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.”

He writes this in 1900 in his book The Interpretation of Dreams. 12 years later, he would publish Totem and Taboo ¹, in which he postulates that our religious mythology is the repressed guilt of a single murder of a patriarch, only exacerbated by time and the indulgence of our inner symbolic representations of repression (the God concept), which we then objectify onto the world as “spirituality” (or animism [animismus]).

Yet, we nevertheless sense the artificiality of what we insist (and even feel) is authentically real (and therefore “true”) to us — the existence of God. Freud calls this sensation Das Unheimliche (“The Uncanny”). ² Freud reflects on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s book Der Sandmann (“The Sandman”), which contains (per Hoffmann’s style) an automaton named Olimpia with whom the protagonist Nathanael falls in love, interpreting her mechanistic single reply “Ah, ah!” as genuine understanding and connection.

The real meaning of unheimliche for Freud is not unease in the typical sense (Freud made it unreal) but truly the semantic field of the opposition of the German words heimlich and unheimliche. Freud explains:

“What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. […] In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. Unheimlich is customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only of the first signification of heimlich, and not of the second. … everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”

He is responding here to Ernst Jentch’s two-article series “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift). Jentch gives a generic interpretation of the word only as superficial unease which threatens the human desire “for the intellectual mastery of one’s environment.” ³

For Freud, uncanniness moves from a cosmic event that threatens our “intellectual mastery” (Jentsch) to a speciesistic event which is truly horrifying, because it threatens our humanity — which is, as Freud often posits, the original Oedipal sin, the killing of the patriarch; the murder of one’s father, repressed for generations and play-acted out through symbols of horror. Humanity is, through religion, speaking to itself truths which it cannot face. And so, for Freud, the prophets and the Apostles were correct in more profound ways than they would ever have dared to admit. Freud here is not referring to the construction of the ecclesial ediface, or the invention of religion, but the subconscious generation of spirituality from primal guilt which gave birth to it all.

In 1962, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan lectured on Freud’s Das Unheimliche in his Seminar X: Anxiety, in which he makes the claim that it unheimliche is an occurrence — an event that irrupts into our phenomena to make known the absence of all. The symbol φ has been used to signify waveforms, physicality, and material existence, and Lacan insists that the uncanny is the sensation of our experiencing directly the minus phi (- φ). He comments:

The Unheimliche is what appears at the place where the minus phi should be. Indeed, everything starts with imaginary castration, because there is no image of lack, and with good reason. When something does appear there, it is, therefore if I may put it this way because lack happens to be lacking.” ⁴

Lacan notes that for Freud, and for all of us, “The Unheim is poised in the Heim.” What is uneasy becomes familiar, which is precisely what makes it uneasy. For Lacan, unheimliche is our awareness of our own Id — our own darkness — and a fear that it really is us.

Lacan later abstracts this, so that the concept of the uncanny is (1) made notable by Jentsch, (2) made profound by Freud, and (3) made universal by Lacan.

Say what you will about Freud, and what he meant when he said this, but he is at least super

If human beings did not practically have free will, our lack would not owe to causality or constraint, but concepts. What we call reality is a shadow cast through the filter of our own subconscious self-censorship. It is not reason or revelation, but repression, makes human experience three-dimensional.

Repression is a secondary value judgment. First come the cosmic values, of which we have no direct knowledge. Secondarily, we inherit the global values of our species, imparted as religion and heresy, family and alien. Finally, our own values. Each of these three filters — cosmic, speciesistic, and psychological — are the closest things we have to get our arms around ideas, what they are, and how they shape us.

This topical space is devoted to understanding ideas like this — the biography of concepts and their mothers, the thinkers who labor to manifest them through the written and spoken word.