MODERN LITERATURE
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supererogatory. But although Freud's view of society and culture
has indeed a very close affinity to Nietzsche's, Freud does add
certain considerations which are essential to our sense of the
modern disposition.
For one thing, he puts to us the question of whether or not
we want to
accept
civilization. It is not the first time that the
paradox of civilization has been present to the mind of civilized
people, the sense that civilization makes men behave worse and
suffer more than does some less developed state of human exist–
ence. But hitherto all such ideas were formulated in a moralizing
way-civilization was represented as being "corrupt," a divaga–
tion from a state of innocence. Freud had no illusions about a
primitive innocence, he conceived no practicable alternative to
civilization. In consequence there was a unique force to the
question he asked: whether we wished to accept civilization,
with all its contradictions, with all its pains-pains, for "discon–
tents" does not accurately describe what Freud has in mind. He
had his own answer to the question-his tragic, or stoic, sense of
life dictated it: we do well to accept it, although we also do well
to cast a cold eye on the fate that makes it our better part to
accept it. Like Nietzsche, Freud thought that life was justified by
our heroic response to its challenge.
But the question Freud posed has not been set aside or
closed up by the answer that he himself gave to it. His answer,
like Nietzsche's, is essentially in the line of traditional humanism
-we can see this in the sternness with which he charges women
not to interfere with men in the discharge of their cultural duty,
not to
claim
men for love and the family to the detriment of
their free activity in the world. But just here lies the matter of
Freud's question that the world more and more believes Freud
himself did not answer. The pain that civilization inflicts is that
of the instinctual renunciation that civilization demands, and it
would seem that fewer and fewer people wish to say with Freud
that the loss of instinctual gratification, emotional freedom, or
love, are compensated for either by the security of civilized life
