Dante, Freud, and the New Atheists

July 7, 2021

“Freud was one of the most honest thinkers of the 20th century.”

How do you cure spiritual paralysis? The question has been around as long as people have existed. Stanford’s Robert Pogue Harrison, host for Entitled Opinions, turns to Dante and a few others as he considers the human condition in the 21st century.

“In Dante’s time there was no Prozac, there was no psychoanalysis,” he said. “There was nonetheless a very real and intense need on Dante’s part to find a therapy or a cure to what amounted to a state of spiritual paralysis in Canto 1 of the Inferno. He had to find his way out of a deep hole that we otherwise would associate with clinical depression. Therapy took a very different form for him than it would for us.”

What are the answers? Freud made some bold attempts. “The honesty of Freud was to say that the purpose of psychoanalysis was to turn a pathological misery into an ordinary unhappiness, and that ordinary unhappiness is good enough for a human existence,” Harrison said. “Things can always get far worse than they actually are. And this is what’s very scary, that our barbarism is always just one step away from us.”

“Freud was anything but a flatterer of human nature,” he continued. “And it seems that these days we will only listen to those who somehow flatter us, those who speak from Dante’s Circle of Fraud, those who keep insisting that the purpose of human existence is to find fulfillment and realize one’s bliss and find the means to perpetuate an interminable happiness.”

The 18th-century theorist Giambattista Vico speculated that human society was born in the forests, populated by nomadic giants. Their exposure to the lightning and thunder made them God-fearing – according to Harrison, “the source of their poetic morality, the morality by which they organized themselves in human societies.”

According to Vico, human institutions arose from these beginnings, along with the understanding that to make good use of their knowledge, they must humble themselves, and that arrogance, or superbia, will lead them to atheism, ready to say with Horace, ‘Heaven itself we assail in our folly.’”

Harrison spoke of Capaneus, the foremost of the “Seven Against Thebes” and the first to scale the city’s walls. He was known to Dante through Statius’s the Thebaid. The gigantic, fiercely proud warrior was a blasphemer, “praying only to his own right hand.” Disdaining the lesser gods, he challenges Jupiter himself, and Jupiter struck him with a thunderbolt.

Thus, Harrison takes issue with the “new atheists”: “What I don’t understand is this superbia, the tone with which the atheists try to make their case — apart from the fact that they’re very shoddy arguments.”

“I take Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and the others to be the sons and grandsons of Capaneus, the great giant in Dante’s Inferno,” said Harrison. “I think it is superbia at bottom, a lack of humility, an excess of pride, and a form of disdain towards one’s fellow man. I think that one can be atheistic in more elegant ways than that.”

Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens?  “I think that one can be atheistic in more elegant ways than that.”