Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 7 (XXII)
The final chapter of Love and its Place in Nature, “Radical Evaluation,” summarizes Lear’s interpretations in a way that throws light both on Freud’s “revolution” and the permanent convergence of psychoanalysis and philosophy. The “I,” Lear repeats,
is essentially a product of a “good enough” — loving and so lovable — world;
must “incorporate” its drives, if it is going to develop; and
does not admit of third-personal, detached, external observation and explanation, so constituted is it by “love” — a force which, wherever it is active, precludes such a perspective
This last proposition — (c) — is particularly significant. What may appear as detached — say, the “neutral” clinician’s ex cathedra interpretation regarding the patient’s mental life — is in reality, upon the sort of examination conducted by Lear, a mediated expression of that same mental life. Interpretation is not imposed from the outside upon an object, archaic functioning, with an independent destiny; the analyst’s “concepts” are instead the realization, the terminus of that functioning in a unity of two minds.
According to Lear, one casualty of these results is the doctrine of “nihilism” allegedly promulgated by Nietzsche, glossed as follows:
“Both [Nietzsche and Freud] were master diagnosticians of unconscious motivation, but the conception of man’s place in the world implicit in Freudian psychoanalysis is just the opposite of the nihilism that flows from Nietzsche’s work. For simplicity, let us say that nihilism is the view that things in the world have value solely in virtue of being valued by humans. Nihilism portrays a world in which value is contingent, arbitrary, capricious” (184).
Now, as a reading of Nietzsche’s use of the term, this is questionable. As a rule, in Nietzsche’s writings, “nihilism” designates, not a theoretical position he is advocating, but the pervasive cultural malaise he is diagnosing — one he associates with disorientation, despair, alienation, etc, and which he refers (especially) to modernity’s rolling deracination of traditional sources of authority. (Ironically, the legacy of Judeo-Christian morality — a far cry from “the view that things in the world have value solely in virtue of being valued by humans” — is itself one of several culprits in Nietzsche’s account.) The view Lear has in mind, on the evidence, might be better named “subjectivism.” But even with this revision, I think Nietzsche is best left out of the story. There are passages in Nietzsche, certainly, that reflect Lear’s attribution — the ex nihilo self- and world-creation of the aesthetic genius — but the notorious innovator of philosophical “genealogy” was hardly a stranger to the world-responsiveness of mind, or history as it actually occurred, hence to the constraints that an era or psychological environment places on the the free “spontaneity" of mind. This strikes me as one of Lear’s rare lapses in precision when discussing the history of philosophy.
With these qualifications in place, let us return to Lear’s argument. Psychoanalysis undercuts the viability of “subjectivism” inasmuch as it stipulates certain “objective” conditions of subjectivity. (To be sure, the idiom of “objective” assessment has by this point in Lear’s argument an equivocal ring to it.) These conditions of mind are not simply “external” prerequisites of human life — such as oxygen, sunlight, nutrition, and the like. Lear is suggesting, I take it, that not only must a world exist, and with certain specifiable proprieties, in order for a “mind” to emerge; this world must also bear intrinsic value and meaning, antecedent to the mind’s own investments, since this is a condition of any investiture at all. So:
“From the perspective of Freudian psychoanalysis, it is not that humans make the world lovable by investing it with their love; it is because the world is lovable that humans can develop into creatures capable of loving it. Since the form of the world forms the human mind, there are constraints on what form the world can have if there is to be a human mind” (184-5).
As we discussed in the last entries, an “I” is in its innermost structure a more or less successful identification with, and internalization of, a “good enough” environment. In the complete absence of such an environment, no “I” could emerge (at least with the characteristics Freud distinguishes in it), since an utterly unlovable, unloving world would supply no traits with which to “identify” — and the I, again, is finally nothing apart from an accumulation of such identifications with (lost) love-objects.