Facs
Transcript
because man remains man, even if Queen Victoria demands him to be not man! [little laughter] And therefore, suddenly, sporadically and then generally, the revolt of the repressed seeps up and becomes powerful. But now the situation is the following: this revolt is still under the pressure of the suppressing commandments of the ideal of personality. Therefore it is done with passion, but not always with good conscience. The conscience represents not in itself a divine or rational command, but it represents the symbols of the Victorian period. Therefore it produces a bad conscience about the acceptance of vitality generally. On the other hand, the power of that which is repressed is so strong that it breaks through and forces revolt with bad conscience. Now this is my main analysis of the state of mind in the present and the little bit preceding generation – perhaps more even the preceding than the present. All this is a consequence of the ideal of personality.
The question now arises: what, in the different forms, can help us to overcome this ideal of personality which is equally supported by religion and by humanism? Very often – and maybe you have learned this from these lectures – the answer “religion” is not answer at all, because religion has entered the same transformations which we find in the general culture. Whether [it is] repression by the Ten Commandments and their interpretation in Protestant preaching and indoctrination, from earliest days on – or whether the demands of a secular puritan rationality, as we find it in Kantianism – doesn't make any difference. And the one is not the solution for the other. Ultimately the secular repressive powers are only secularized religious powers from which they finally come.