Eros and Thanatos
I think Freud had some cute ideas
There are, broadly, two things to do as the facilitator of an undergraduate philosophy seminar:
You can guide your students in piecing together what a text is really saying, find connections, try to see the whole. This is slow, confusing, and the most important skill you can help them develop.
Or, you can present them with a fully-formed theory and invite them to attack it. This deprives them of a valuable opportunity to be productively confused, but it's exciting.
When I taught Freud in the Fall of 2021, I took the second approach. I didn't understand Freud well enough (still don't) to help them synthesize the text, so I decided to stitch what I felt I vaguely grasped into a sort of Frankenfreud, a Fraud, a "Floyd", at which they could tilt and which I could plausibly defend. I am not here to litigate whether Floyd and Freud are actually in agreement. They may or may not be — write to me if you think you might know. But whether or not they are, Floyd stuck with me.
Floyd believes all of our behaviour is motivated by the pursuit of pleasure — pleasure is the principle of all of our actions. Pleasure is a sensory experience and in this sense it is sensual. Sexuality is co-sensuality: sexual partners are responsive to the same world of stimuli in the same moment. They may not respond to this world in the same way — one pushes, the other pulls — but their responses are to the same world. Sexuality involves an agreement on which sensations matter, which will hold our attention. Floyd believes that the greatest possible pleasure is achieved when one person’s attention is united entirely with that of another.
We might imagine a world where that was all that we wanted, where, aside from our more basic appetites, the desire for sex was the only one to animate our bodies, and where carrying water, chopping wood, writing poems, singing songs — the other ten thousand things — were just foreplay. But, Floyd noticed, it appears that desire is flexible. We do not view all life-sustaining and creative activities as merely instrumental to sexual satisfaction, but desire them for themselves. Even more confoundingly, it is just as human to desire destruction as it is to desire creation. If pleasure is what guides us, it may seem mysterious that we are often so motivated not only to harm others, but to harm ourselves.
This is where Floyd theorizes that the engine of our minds is not a 'pleasure drive' per se, but that the pleasure principle is expressed indirectly by two subsidiary drives: Eros and Thanatos, the life drive and the death drive. These drives account for the flexibility of our desire.
In Floyd’s view the purest expression of Eros is the desire for sex. Since sexual pleasure is supposedly the pleasure-of-pleasures, this may give it the appearance of a ‘pleasure drive’, but it is subtler than that. Eros does not motivate you directly to pursue pleasure. Here is the situation: the world as it is presented to you is filled with collaborators, opponents, tools, and obstacles to deriving pleasure. Eros is the drive to take up pleasure’s tools and to join with pleasure’s collaborators. If Eros is presented with obstacles, it motivates you to make them into tools. Eros sees how the inhabitants of your world, rocks and trees and human beings, can be bent towards the common aim of pleasure. Eros is unifying. This is why sex, as a perfection of unification, is the perfection of Eros. But Eros is also satisfied by arts and crafts, friendships and institutions, and any other activity wherein you bring what the world has offered you — dead and living things — into the coordinated pursuit of pleasure.
The purest expression of Thanatos is murder. It is the desire that obstacles to pleasure, competitors and dead-ends, should be destroyed. Where Eros motivates us to join in a shared vision, Thanatos motivates us to cast each other off. If Thanatos is presented with a tool, it will use this tool to eliminate obstacles. If there is an animal in the road, and it refuses to budge, Thanatos would have you run it over. If your own heart or mind or body stubbornly refuses to find pleasure in the world, or if you are wracked with pain, Thanatos wills that your heart and mind and body should cease to exist. In the eyes of Thanatos, self-destruction is the appropriate response to self-sabotage. But it is no less a ‘pleasure drive’ than Eros. Eros and Thanatos are guided by the same end, though their means seem to contradict each other.
I don’t believe that these drives are any kind of final answer to the question of why we do what we do. In the first place, I don’t believe that pleasure is the fixed point on which all of our behaviours hang. But it seems to me that if you believe there is some fixed point, it is worth considering how it is expressed in Erotic and Thanatoic tendencies. It rings true that, whatever aim is guiding you, your desire to achieve this aim will tend towards either an Erotic or Thanatoic character. It is worth reflecting on how you are desiring what you desire. Eros and Thanatos exert contrary gravitational pulls, the expression of one tending to exclude the expression of the other. If you are pursuing an aim with the grim resolve of Thanatos, then you may fail to notice opportunities to pursue it with the expansive generosity of Eros.