An Outline of Four Types of Being in Relation to Freud's Concept of Death Drive

by Kevin Wilson

Copyright Kevin Wilson, 2010. Can reproduce individually only for non-commercial reading purposes.
Introduction

I want here to outline what I perceive as interconnecting relationships between logic, science,

experience, identity, and repetition, these relationships necessary for developing a philosophical

conception of Freud's death drive.

Within this essay, being-in-itself, being-for-itself, abstraction, and nothingness play the role

of four semi-distinct, non-exclusive, shifting, and evolving types of being. We will consider the

specificity of their development.

This essay divides itself into four sections. Section I constitutes an investigation into the

relationship between logic, human experience, and reflection. Section II develops concepts of

identity and repetition in the context of Freud's death drive. Section III applies the concept of death

drive to matters of science, logic, and material social relations. Section IV reformulates death drive

from the perspective of Nietzschean philosophy.

I. Logic, Human Experience, and Reflection

I want to characterize logic, formal and informal, as something internal to human

consciousness that is perceived indirectly as part of external reality existing in relationships primarily

between material things. These material things can be both living and non-living, though I tend to

believe that we experience formal logic most immediately, most evidently when perceiving non-

living concrete things, that is, roughly, inanimate objects, being-in-itself.

From perspectives of usefulness and power, one might want immediately to assume the value

of logical reasoning and, in turn, science. I believe, though, that a philosophical method should

foster a certain intuition in exploring axioms and their effects, including and especially those effects

of a stranger, more elusive, and more thoroughly paradoxical nature. We could claim this

exploration in part the purpose of this section.

Consider, then, the three 'laws of thought' (identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle)

usually attributed to Aristotle. I hope first of all to convey my sense that these principles do not exist

or function in any simple, uncontroversial fashion. On the contrary, I increasingly tend to believe

that logic and science possess suprisingly controversial, unusual properties and implications that

threaten inextricably to (continue to) change life and experience beyond present recognition, that a

process has begun whose end state cannot easily be comprehended or evaluated.

While I believe that these three laws apply more readily to being-in-itself (inanimate things)

than being-for-itself (animate things, specifically humans), I also recognize that the only case in

which these laws appear (if only appear) to function completely without complication is the case of

'pure mathematics'. I tend, then, to agree with philosophers like Hegel in stating that human

phenomenological reality is experienced in accordance with Heraclitean philosophy, in contrast to a

Parmenidean mode of abstraction extracted or separated from direct, immediate experience.

I hope to emphasize, though, crucially, that different material environments will lend

themselves more either to Heraclitean or Parmenidean interpretation, and that history itself, under the

wing of logic and science, possesses a decidedly Parmenidean directionality. I do not think I would
be exaggerating to claim that a prisoner held in solitary confinement, or an assembly-line worker in

Shandong, experiences what approaches a kind of ultimate Parmenidean reality, where a

predominance of being in his or her reality would strictly abide by the aptly-titled 'laws of thought.'

I want to emphasize these precise moments (what one could dismissively designate as 'word

play') when meaning multiplies itself, when connections reveal themselves, when, even, the truth

happens as if by accident. You can see, then, that I am proposing a methodology in which we search

almost for the exact opposite of that singular certainty and pure linearity toward which Aristotle and

other related philosophers aim.

I do not want to appear, though, to discount the philosophical import of logical principles or,

extrapolating, scientific and analytical methods. On the contrary, let us assert that we cannot deny in

good faith the power, almost too tremendous power, of these methods. I want to propose, then,

perhaps, a type of essential balance, in which analytical processes (i.e., of division) are balanced with

synthetical processes (i.e., of combination). In some respects, I believe modern society already

possesses both of these elements, except that the synthetical elements often appear as a kind of

additive afterthought, a surface-level addition on top of a further-reaching, more essential analytical

core.

At this point, let us establish more clearly our four-part distinction with regard to types of

being. In some circumstances, I will consider, arguably in the classical tradition, a two-part

distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Additionally, I think for our purposes we

will also find it useful to introduce notions of abstraction and nothingness. Conceive abstraction,

then, as (at times) this analytical process of division or determination. The fourth term, nothingness,

I think presents the greatest challenge, the most subtle enigma, which I think will prove fundamental

when we reach the point, toward the end of the essay, at which we reformulate the Freudian death

drive along the lines of Nietzschean philosophy.

In a real sense, we can conceive these four types of being (being-in-itself, being-for-itself,

abstraction, and nothingness) as stages or states of being, overlapping, interactive and non-exclusive

except in limiting, finalizing circumstances such as death, slavery, and certain forms of what I will
call social material pathology.

Notice also, though outside the limited scope of this paper, that logic breaks down (or opens

up) at the precise moment where human agency occurs, the moment of (Gödelian) reflection (i.e.,

the transcription of 'This statement is false'). We almost have cause to reformulate grammatically the

moment being emerges from logical abstraction (or reemerges, as I think Hegel might prefer) as the

following statement: 'In that I am not, I am'. Or, similarly, it appears as if logic itself exists on the

threshhold between, to frame the matter in Kantian terms, phenomenal and noumenal reality; that is

to say, that logic itself exists in the very 'middle' that it excludes.
II. Identity and Repetition in the Context of Death Drive

Let us now proceed to illustrate the relationship between identity and repetition, attempting to

bridge the gap between philosophical and psychoanalytical approaches.

To repeat, I have contended that logic and science conform themselves most readily to

physical non-living objects, and even then not without complication. Now, I want to claim that the

human mind, including and especially its subconscious, conforms itself neither to physical nor

logical objects, but rather to something that transcends the immediate workings of logical reasoning.

To speak more descriptively, I think that the subconscious at times resembles more an assembly of

spirits or ghosts than, say, a system of cubes, pyramids, pulleys, and levers. This perspective, I

recognize, potentially stands at odds with Freud's aim for the development of psychoanalysis, his

scientific drive that tends reflexively to conceptualize the subconscious as a steam engine. I want to

suggest that, in general, the scientific drive conforms to the Freudian death drive, and that the set of

all instantiated death drives contains the Freudian discovery of death drive as a member.

Freud situates death drive beyond, or more precisely, before the pleasure principle (i.e.,

before a calculus for minimizing pain and maximizing pleasure fully develops the capacity to govern

human action and experience). He postulates that the death drive asserts its influence often as a

consequence of certain forms of psychological trauma, creating within the subconscious a

'compulsion to repeat' traumatic events, this compulsion in many cases not easily explained by means

of the pleasure principle.

Distinguishing unambiguously the difference between the workings of the pleasure principle

and of the death drive proves a considerable challenge that Freud very actively acknowledges and

attempts to address. In the famous example of the game of 'fort/ da' (gone/ there), a child's symbolic

representation and repetition of his mother's disappearance and return, we cannot easily distinguish

death drive from the pleasure principle (BPP, II). Freud appears unclear whether the child's pleasure

lies in the act of making 'gone' or in making 'there', or both, or otherwise.

The simulation potentially involves, for the child, a critical perspectival shift from passive to
active agency. That Freud discounts this interpretation (BPP, II) appears somewhat surprising, as

mastery of a traumatic experience becomes a critical element in his framing of traumatic dream

recollections as less ambiguous instantiations of death drive (BPP, III). Freud argues that these

dreams enable the subject to reengage and potentially overcome some traumatic event for which he

or she originally lacked proper psychological preparation.

No matter the vicissitudes of interpretation, repetition in the sphere of human reality seems

consistently to correspond with identity through change or difference, that is, with the Heraclitean

and Hegelian perspective. While certain material objects at times will appear to possess a strict

(mathematical, concrete physical) identity across time, we can recognize, with some reflection, that

this appearance is a form of abstraction. Yet, with psychological reality, we might often lack even

this immediate appearance; that is to say, we immediately experience perceptually and intuitively not

identity but identity through change.

The dialectical reversal that Freud achieves lies in realizing, or at least postulating, that

behind the perceptual experience of psychological change there exists what I want almost to

characterize as a concrete metaphysics. In terms of my earlier descriptive phrasing, Freud appears to

be conceiving a bidirectional reversal in which perceptual reality appears solid and logically

objective but actually reveals itself, to the careful eye, as ambiguous, strange, and subjective; whereas

psychological reality appears incomprehensible, mystical, and elusive, yet, upon analysis, reveals

itself as concrete, reducible, objective and systematic.

As my preceding analysis indicates, I tend to reject an exceedingly mechanistic portrayal of

the human mind, particularly the subconscious. The reasons for this rejection will become clearer in

the next section, in which we explore in greater detail what precisely constitutes Freud's conception

of death drive. While attempting to affirm the existence of some form of death drive, I will

demonstrate that overly mechanical, reductive, or objective conceptions of the subconscious

instantiate death drive 'at work', thereby revealing their contingency. The subtlety lies in whether we

should normatively affirm death drive, whether death drive (or even just related notions like

aggression and violence) can generally be perceived as for or against value in human life (or human
life as value). These final questions we will more adequately address in the four section,

incorporating critically-relevant elements of Nietzschean philosophy.

III. Death Drive, Science, Logic, and Material Social Relations

Freud's formulation of death drive arises from a specific characterization of instinct as 'an

urge inherent in living things to restore an earlier state of things' (BPP, V, original in italics).

Pursuing this idea to its conclusion, we can see that 'the aim of all life is death', and that animate

beings will to return, without premature external intervention, to an original state of being inanimate

objects (V).

One can immediately perceive overlap between this conception of death drive and

phenomenological and existential notions of being-for-itself's striving to return to being-in-itself.

Implementing being-in-itself as a type of conceptual pivot point, we can develop death drive's active,

arguably subterranean (indeed, subconscious) agency in logic and science.

With medical doctors as a type of front, a façade in both senses, modern science has already

assumed a position of if not positivity then at least neutrality with regard to itself as a social force,

denying the possibility let alone the reality of itself existing as predominately a force of destruction.

Science even sometimes claims a capacity to occupy the position of a new, superior form of justice,

its ostensible disinterestedness aggressively willing itself into the role, act, and illusion of impartiality.

Yet evidence appears in abundance demonstrating science's intimacy with death drive, at

least, that is, given science's current contingent manifestation relative to the organization of social

and material production. Along these lines, I think we generally tend to forget or overlook the

essential structural connection between science and violence, the short circuit that occurs in the name

of predictive power. In a non-violent relationship (e.g., in friendship), there tends to exist

overflowing patterns of spontaneity and ambiguity, as innumerable specificities within a

vicissitudinous array of possible emotions, reactions, and developments could conceivably come into

being at any given moment. Yet we can see that, in regard to interpersonal relationships, violence

potentially functions as, proceeding genealogically, a kind of prime reduction, the first instance of a

great multiplicity's being reduced to a prehistorical either/ or, that of fight/ flight. Despite the subtlety

of time and history, science in its present form continues to risk this same violent objectification of its
object of inquiry.

A similar dynamic exists in the humanities and social sciences, which too often reveal this by-

now familiar longing to achieve the appearance of being-in-itself characteristic of 'hard' sciences,

with mathematics and physics usually as the desired conceptual limit. Simultaneously, and I think

insanely, the atom bomb seems at times to symbolize a great conceptual transcendence (and not just a

new destructive excess). More reasonably, we could perhaps reserve our awe for some device, not

readily forthcoming, that can put back together what it destroys. And returning again to medical

science, one could argue that the totality of scientific knowledge and its material, technological

implementation (still) pales in comparison to the physical and metaphysical sophistication implicit in

a single living organism.

At times, Freud clearly recognizes that psychoanalysis relates dialectically with social and

political structure, claiming, for instance, that a society in which psychoanalysis is fully realizable

would no longer need psychoanalysis. He similarly recognizes that the process of transference

between analyst and analysand reflects patriarchal, Oedipal organizations. Yet, in his later

sociocultural works (specifically The Future of an Illusion as well as Civilization and Its Discontents)

he seems to lose perspective on the dialectical nature of humanity qua subjectivity and objectivity.

There exist innumerable pitfalls one can suffer along this conceptual terrain, such that I

should take precaution here not to be misunderstood. We should avoid, I think, a categorical

dismissal of logic and science across all differences in their instantiation. The position I am assuming

might arguably align with some elements of Hegelian philosophy, in that I think science and logic

exist as abstractions (or, perhaps, determinate negations) that themselves must properly be negated in

order to return or reemerge into a greater (Hegelian, Heraclitean) absolute (of permanent flux or

change).

I want to propose, along these lines, that the question of idealism versus materialism, in its

very structure, implies idealism in either of its dictated solutions; that is to say, regardless of whether

one chooses idealism or materialism, one is choosing, in fact, idealism. The proper answer, I want to

claim, the intended answer of materialists, is a kind of 'both!', affirming the threshold of
contradiction and of the excluded middle where evaluation situates itself.

So while science and logic exist as abstractions, we should recognize the prime abstraction to

which they cannot easily avoid subordinating themselves, the abstraction of value qua commodities,

that is, value conformed to the properties of material being-in-itself. One could regard death drive,

as Freud conceives it, as reflecting (indeed repeating) the trauma of being-for-itself's being recast as

being-in-itself qua commodified labor.

While death drive in its present contingent instantiation should, I think, be rejected, let us not

assume that death drive exists only as derivative of the trauma of material relations. Instead, death

drive appears to exist very generally, and its value depends on the type of object at which it aims. In

the context of capital relations, the superior commodity is one whose persistence of value most

nearly approaches infinity and therefore most radically contrasts, in a sense, the finitude intrinsic in

being-for-itself. Subsequently, rare resources and commodity money occupy the role of aimed

object, and death drive conforms to this object's properties. In this way, commodities (and

commodity money in particular) embody abstraction, reversing one's possible intuition that

abstraction disembodies itself from material reality.

Freud, in postulating the opposition between life and death drives, grasps their connections

to, respectively, infinitude and finitude, as well as to, respectively, being-for-itself and being-in-

itself. While death drive requires an object, life drive requires a non-object, an abstraction that we

can relate essentially to nothingness. The process is such that, in aiming drive at a (non-living)

object, one affirms a type of nothingness, abstraction as death, whereas while aiming drive at a non-

object, one affirms a different type of nothingness, abstraction as life. The former exists as

abstraction of (positive, reductive) finitude, the latter as abstraction of (negative, irreducible)

infinitude.

To avoid concern that I am contradicting myself, I want to emphasize that, in accordance

with the Heraclitean and Hegelian approach, every connection with a given element implies an

essentially-related connection with that element's opposite or negation. Critically, then, being-for-

itself's connection with infinitude necessitates its connection with finitude. The infinitude of being-
for-itself can manifest itself, for instance, as thought qua infinite transference of different forms of

meaning. Meanwhile the finitude of being-for-itself is partly defined by the spatiotemporal

limitations of its physical being.

Consider, conversely, being-in-itself, whose infinitude is manifested in its existence as

abstraction as well as its appearance of persistence over time. Meanwhile the finitude of being-in-

itself corresponds with its necessary non-persistence, its immanence and inseparability from flux,

constant change, and non-identity.

Abstraction as well can similarly be viewed as both instantiating infinitude and finitude.

Abstraction separates from reality-as-infinite-change, thereby establishing itself as determinate

negation, as finite. Yet its status as thought, as metaphysical, as unbound by the spatiotemporal,

reestablishes itself as infinite. We could regard abstraction, then, as infinite-finitude, that is, as an

infinite gesture of determining finitude.

IV. Parallels with Nietzschean philosophy

Very briefly, let us relate our developments to parallel conceptions in Nietzschean

philosophy.

We can frame Nietzsche's distinction of active and passive nihilism relative to the above

distinction between two types of abstraction, two types of nothingness, active nihilism affirming

infinite nothingness and passive nihilism affirming finite nothingness (active nihilism affirming life

drive and passive nihilism affirming death drive).

We know that Nietzsche describes and affirms the universality or non-contingency of

aggression, exploitation, murder, and, more generally, the will to power (GM, II, 4). Nietzsche

appears to hypothesize several drives organized somewhat around the will to power, proceeding then

to evaluate these drives in terms of their health.

Nietzsche's concept of bad conscience parallels Freudian death drive as instantiated in

modernity, that is, death drive in its present-historical, pathologically-unhealthy state. We witness

that being-for-itself, irreversibly repressed by external forces, now redirects inward those

subconscious drives that originally guided its action, leaving one's 'weakest and most fallible organ

[e.g., consciousness, ego]' suddenly to assume agency (or at least its appearance) (GM, II, 16).

Nietzsche's 'willing nothingness', recognized by the modern type (the 'last man') to be

preferable to willing nothing at all, illustrates a remolding of the will to power to the limitations of an

increasingly powerless position (GM, III, 28). As a consequence of this form of submission, any

power that the repressed being manages to acquire suddenly functions as an outlet to the new,

strange demands of the will to power in its repressed form.

The crucial point that both Nietzsche and Freud recognize is that repression fundamentally

alters the will repressed, such that the will, upon escaping repression, proceeds too often to recreate

(as repetition) itself not in its released, freer state but in its earlier repressed state. Strikingly,

Nietzsche emphasizes what in our terms we could describe as the danger of thought qua infinity:

'What bestiality of thought erupts as soon as [being-for-itself] is prevented just a little from being a
beast in deed!' (GM, II, 22). In other words, psychological repression from within appears more

dangerous than direct physical repression from without.

Conclusion

We have seen how abstraction in relation to nothingness mediates being-for-itself in relation

to being-in-itself.

We have avoided a linear, foundationalist approach, instead assuming a phenomenological

method in the tradition of Heraclitus and Hegel.

We have attempted to implement a type of logical reasoning that captures reality as infinite

flux and constant change; or, to restate the matter, we have developed a method of philosophizing

that recognizes systematically that it cannot truly or fully capture reality, such that we must

ultimately, essentially leave our determinations to immerse ourselves again in some kind of infinite

absolute.

The conception of Freud's death drive and its application to scientific and material reality

evidence dynamic interplay among the four types of being.

This paper represents only an outline. More work, I think, is needed to establish with greater

precision the philosophical connections with Heraclitus and Hegel. Also, I suspect many of the

apparent methodological and philosophical oppositions to Aristotelian philosophy will dissolve

under more critical consideration. Finally, more thoroughly establishing the connections and relative

strengths of Nietzschean and Freudian philosophy appears absolutely necessary.

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Norton, 1989.

Gagarin, Michael, and Paul Woodruff. Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists.

Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and J. B. Baillie. The Phenomenology of Mind. Mineola, NY: Dover

Publications, 2003.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Walter Arnold. Kaufmann. On the Genealogy of Morals. Basic

Writings of Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library, 1992.