POL 3102 Lecture 16: 2014-11-21 - Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents.docx

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POL 3102
• Professor: Sascha Maicher

Document Summary

Freud: civilization and its discontents (1930) chapters i-iv th century: part i: without noting, freud must have taken genealogy of nietzsche. Hegel: still enlightenment, actualizing abstract ideas, teleological. Marx: we are historical but there are some crazy difficult stages we are going trough, our ideas are often the product of our historical circumstances. Not an escape from it: we are losing our sense of rationality that will save everything, there"s rationality and it is in progress. Still a rational universe we live in (enlightenment) Nietzsche: moral judgments are contingent on historical products/power structures, civilization is declining, science is harming us (dead facts, we may be historical beings in nietzsche but it isn"t necessarily a great thing according to nietzsche. Moral beliefs may just be power struggles, not rationality. These ideas bring us to freud and weber. Freud, mr. irrationality: we are irrational we hurt our own happiness through our irrationality, weber: we have become overly specialized/too narrow.