David Black, Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective (2023) (IV)

Concluding Comments — A Critique

In a certain sense, however, the steps of Black’s argument seem to run in nearly the opposite direction of the one I’ve recounted, and I want to conclude with a critical observation about this. We saw in the last entry that Descartes begins to mistrust his everyday opinions once he realizes they rest on a weak “foundation.” By contrast, Black, whose central concern is ethics, frequently appears to be arguing something like: ‘Our everyday ethical opinions — our values, intuitions, beliefs, and objects — are unsupported by a “positivist” foundation. Therefore a new foundation is needed, to restore legitimacy to these opinions.’ In other words, whereas Descartes (and Freud, incidentally) begin by throwing doubt on our “everyday opinions,” since they purportedly rest on unsound foundations, Black essentially begins by affirming our “everyday opinions” — broadly speaking, conventional ethical norms and experiences — and insisting that we build a new foundation to support and reinforce those opinions, since the old (and current) foundation does not.

Now, one may certainly appreciate the appeal of such a project. According to Black, the proposed “re-grounding,” if successful, will do human beings a lot of good, promote our individual and collective welfare, and so on. As I indicated at the beginning of this review, the stakes for Black could not be higher:

“[I]n the modern era, neither philosophy nor psychoanalysis has been able to furnish an adequate account of a basis for the compelling power of ethics to motivate decision, or to recognize the values without which humanity is unlikely to survive.” (11)

Or again, in one of the later essays dedicated to Levinas:

“In recent years, the crucial importance of ethical issues has been increasingly recognized both in psychoanalysis and elsewhere. The accelerating dangers in the public domain, to do with climate-change, AI, and mendacious populism have made the devastating consequences of a failure to discover a compelling basis for ethics ever more apparent.” (108)

But the appeal of a theoretical conclusion is no substitute for its feasibility, as surely Black would agree. Freud himself warns us not to mistake a wish for its realization: our need to believe something is no measure of its truth, but on the contrary calls the latter into question all the more insistently.

(For understandable reasons, Black himself takes an ambivalent attitude towards this skepticism, especially as regards Freud’s critique of religion. Black attempts to circumvent the disturbing consequences of this critique by distinguishing between religion-as-belief (that is, in religious objects of various sorts), and religion-as-institutional-support for “epiphantic” ethical experiences that are not themselves matters of “belief” at all. While Black acknowledges the potential “infantilism” of religion under the former description, he defends the legitimacy of the latter.)

Of course, this same Freud, who in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego notoriously proposed that fraternal love, sociability, and ethical ideals like justice and equality are “reaction formations” against more primitive attitudes of rivalry, envy, and hostility (66), would surely have some critical words for Black, too. But apart from the occasional dismissive comment (e.g. 20, 107-8), Black himself never really engages with the legacy of psychoanalysis in its challenge to our conventional ethical ideas.

(Even Immanuel Kant, that militantly deontological ethical thinker, was forced to concede our helplessness to know, in any given instance, whether our actions really have moral worth, or whether they’ve (perhaps unconsciously) been tainted by sensual inclination and self-love. Hence it is ironic that Black enlists Kant (23) as a philosophical ancestor to Levinasian, “apodictic” ethical experience. Substitute Levinas’s “face of the other” for Romain Rolland’s “oceanic feeling” and one gains a sense both of Black’s objection to the Freudian vision and of Freud’s probable rejoinder to it. In either case, someone propounding a view about the mainspring of ethics or religion appeals to apodictic, first-personal, “phenomenological” experience. Yet the skeptic may always reply: ‘I’ve experienced no such thing.’)

Whatever its merits, the result is surely a domestication of psychoanalysis. Black’s position is evidently that, understood aright, psychoanalytic ideas are none-too-disturbing to our ethical (and religious) assumptions, concerns, and needs. It is rather as though, following Freud’s claim that his “science” — alongside Copernicus and Darwin — has dealt a devastating blow to our narcissistic self-regard, and that our relation to ethical reality is not what it seems, Black emerges to assure us that all is not lost — that, indeed, with a few renovations to our philosophical “foundations,” we will find this relation intact, after all.

Undoubtedly Black would claim — and does (38) — that Freud simply got things wrong here. But his account, as far as I can make out, presupposes, rather than demonstrates, Freud’s error. My own intuition is that precisely the thinker most viscerally repelled by Freud’s critique, as Black appears to be, ought also to be the most wary about this repulsion. One may list all the negative, even catastrophic consequences for human beings following from our failure to “found” or “deduce” our values. Such a situation makes an alternative appealing, indeed, materially and mortally urgent. But it does not in the slightest touch the truth or untruth of that alternative. And a vision that seems to offer the very “consolation” Freud explicitly denied to his teaching should perforce fall under the same suspicions he voiced.