Civilization and Its Discontents Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Civilization and Its Discontents - Essay Example This shows that Civilization and its Discontents is a great contributor to the Western culture’s literature. Freud commences his reflections with ruminations based on religious values, and tries to bring out responses to the question as to why human beings are possessed with the feeling of being with the passion of construction, oceanic feelings. An in-depth understanding of the reasons as to why Freud describes this type of feeling as oceanic gives two separate explanations: he intended to establish the view of the superstitions, infantile and mystical religious ways which civilization defines as valuable while based on religious thought, and; the scientific, analytic, and rational ways. An assumption made by Freud in this situation is that the entire method of civilization is based on human’s conscious analyses of the motives of human life that are not trustworthy, and that people do adopt analytical attitudes and methods which as a result lead to a truer, a healthier understanding of the motives, high levels of consistency, and a summary giving a brief on why and how people do it. The common human characteristics is that people have the notion of religion which they hold so dearly and use it to organize their actions and value-systems, though their grounds for this religion value, based on scrutiny, resulted into being explicable through unconscious psychic drivers and processes. Chapter two of the same book shows how the fact that religion exists is an illustration and a manifestation of infantile origins of human beings in the seeking of a father figure to secure them against the world’s pains and depression. Further still, this depicts that civilization has an immensely deep and systematic discontents in the human life, for without them, region would not be a thing of practice since there would be no need for it in eternity. On the contrary, though, there is need for religion since life as it is found by human is quite hard as it brin gs too much pain, impossible tasks, and disappointments. Therefore, for the purpose of keeping by it, human cannot dispense with such palliative measures (Freud, S., 2002, p. 23). These measures are threefold; deflection of needs, intoxicants, and substitutions for needs. To expound on this, Freud moves on to elaborate on the main purpose of life, overhauled in religion. He, in his own perspective, sees no cosmic purpose to the human life but sees an internal psychic purpose upon which anyone’s psychic economy is based, as the pursuit of happiness or experience of pleasure. Pleasure principle is denoted by an individual’s imperative towards the pursuit of pleasure, but the minds pursuit of happiness being in loggerheads with the entire world’s happenings. Religion plays an important role of trying to restrict people’s efforts by continuously imposing its moral codes upon people who are naturally characterized to have different ways of trying to negotiate their ways to happiness, even though, the project may entirely experience drawbacks.