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Onfray versus Freud

You could argue that Michel Onfray is one of the most stimulating and provocative philosophers of ours days and it´s praiseworthy that his attempt to revitalize the best ´Nietzschan´ left-wing impulses, creating an ethic of pleasure that only celebrates life, through the own force of becoming.

onfray freud

Probably, the most valuable of Onfray´s work resides in his encyclopedic attempt to re-write the history of Western thought in his highly recommended Contrahistory of Philosophy. The different volumes of this important work rush the work of recuperating, in its main part, those authors that from ancient Greece have been forgotten, victims of the imposition of a way of thinking idealist and platonic that invariably associates pleasure not with virtue, which is what an important tradition did which was in many cases labelled pre-socratic (the atomist Democritus survived Socrates in 30 or 40 years) and derogatorily (despite the extraordinary audaciousness and modernity of the thought generated by urban philosophers englobed in this trend) of being sophistic, but with sin, vice and guilt.

However, in the same way that for being a sacrilegious person it´s necessary to keep on believing, sometimes it´s appreciated in Onfray a somewhat unmeasured belligerence towar aristothelic ds religion and the Church (which sometimes he gives the impression of confusing excessively), a product according to his own confession of the abuses he suffered during his childhood and adolescence in a religious boarding school, as against some of the undisputable totems of our culture. Along these lines it´s recently been Freud´s turn, with whom he settles a few scores in his latest and merciless book with the eloquent title of: ´Freud. The twilight of an idol´.

Ironically, despite accusing the great Viennese thinker, not very originally on the other hand, of neurotizing the whole of humanity so that his own neurosis seemed more tolerable by transforming his personal fantasies in universal scientific truths, the reader, aware of this nonetheless interesting book, can´t stop perceiving in his writing a certain Freudian intent of killing the father as well as a frequent fall in tortuous interpretations of the personality of Freud, who is, somehow, who comes out triumphant.

What´s true is that the figure of the Viennese doctor, whose house-museum is one of the most popular attractions of the Austrian capital (http://www.freud-museum.at/cms/index.php/en_home.html) still arouses all types of passions, despite that a lot of the time, just as Onfray points out, we just analyse his work instead of paying attention to its admirable style and the true revolution that the formulation of his suggestive ideas meant.

In conclusion, the total inversion of the Aristotelian model that postulates the humans as rational beings (which means another important contrahistory of philosophy in itself) and the legitimate suspicion that the world and our actions in it are governed by the ghost forces of the subconscious.

Paul Oilzum Only-apartments AuthorPaul Oilzum

That is, probably, true Freud territory that, when new seeds without dogmatism are planted in it, it´s shown to be amazingly creative, abysmal and fertile. You shouldn´t disdain reflecting on it visiting his house when you rent apartments in Vienna

aleixgwilliam Only-apartments TranslatorTranslated by: aleixgwilliam
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