The Education of the Human Race: Lessing, Freud, and the Savage Mind

Abstract

My purpose in applying Freudian terminology to Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts is not to subject Lessing to a psychoanalytical interpretation, or if so, then to invert that reading in a manner that implicates Freud in anthropological discourse of Enlightenment. To read Lessing psychoanalytically is to cast suspicion on certain eighteenth-century desires by scrutinizing figures through which those desires are ciphered. The aspiration to rational autonomy, for example, appears less familiar and more crisisladen when expressed by some of Lessing's dramatic characters as wish to choose one's own father and thus, in effect, to father oneself.' To read Freud through Lessing, on other hand, is to discover in latter discursive possibility of reading Enlightenment psychoanalytically. Psychoanalysis often has appearance of renewing Enlightenment's attempt to define legitimate bounds of paternal authority (and authority as such), and Freud's frequent use of verb aufkldren signals moment at which logic behind a paternal censure is recognized: enlightenment in Freud is discovery of a hidden law of which analysis itself is a manifestation (de Certeau 292-97). Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, too, is concerned with a peculiar complicity between censorship and knowledge. Censorship takes truth and confers upon it forms from which knowledge is deduced. As a process of abstraction whereby truth is distilled from guises that once made it accessible to immature mind, history becomes validation of that original concealment. When Lessing describes concrete perception as only kind of knowledge available to primitive intellect, he places aestheticsthe science of perceptionwithin realm of anthropology. His characterization of ancient Jews as ungeschickt zu abgezognen Gedanken (? 16) conforms almost verbatim to usual definition of pensee sauvage, which Claude Levi-Strauss sought to discredit: the supposed ineptitude of 'primitive people' for abstract thought (The Savage Mind 1). I would like to introduce Levi-Strauss as third term in this constellation, for not only was he, like Freud, indirect object of Lessing's sustained portrayal of early Jews as crude (roh),2 but he also struggled to impugn notion of progressive historical development that represents primitive as deficient Other of civilization.3 The comparison may in fact help clarify L ssing's own ambivalence regarding teleology of rationalism, which he undermines hrough repeated gestures toward primitive. The thrust of Die Erziehung is to establish a rhetorical framework according to which its author can profess archaic belief in metempsychosisthe transmigration of souls. The provocation lies not so much in belief itself as in its relation to memory, for as basis of Socratic view that learning constitutes recollection of what one knew in previous incarnations, metempsychois seems ill at home among progressivist tenets of rationalism. This doctrine answers ancient equivalent of a modern question, i. ., how can development of human race as a whole (phylogeny) be replicated in life of individual (ontogeny)? Even more important here is hypothetical status