死生論の論文も少しずつ形が出来てきた。英文に少しずつ変えながら書き進めていく。何しろもう3か月くらいこのテーマを考えている。自分の中で固まっていない内容を論文化するのは、これほど時間がかかってしまうのだ。
Freud’s “On Transience” フロイトの「無常について」
This short
essay was written in 1915, at the invitation of the Berliner Goethebund for a
commemorative volume under the title of Das Land Goethes (the
Land of Goethe). Among a large number of well-known contributors,
Freud made his own. The essay includes a statement of the theory of mourning contained in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), that Freud wrote some months
before, but which was not published until two years later.
In this
essay, Freud went on a summer walk in a countryside with his taciturn friend
and a young poet. His poet friend admires the beautiful landscape, but
expressed no joy in it. The poet was “disturbed by the thought that all this
beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all
human beauty and all the beauty and splendor that men have created or may
create” (Freud, p.304). The poet thinks that the worth of “[A]ll that he would
otherwise have loved and admired” seemed to diminish by their transience.
この詩人に対してフロイトが教え諭す内容が、この論文の中心テーマでもある。物事の価値は、その儚さゆえに損なわれるわけではなく、むしろ高めるのだという事を、フロイトは花にたとえて言う。"A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely. “the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth. On the contrary, an increase!”そして言う。 “Transience value is scarcity value in time”.
そして消えゆくものを嘆く人は、そのものの儚さゆえに、辛い「喪の前触れ a foretaste of
mourning over its decease」を感じさせ、その人が喪の作業を拒否するからだという。
“What spoilt their enjoyment of beauty must have been a revolt in their minds against mourning".
そして人はその抵抗を乗り越えて、もの作業を行うことで、必ずその作業には終わりが来ると保証する。”Mourning, as we know, however painful it may be, comes to a spontaneous end”. そして“We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before”という希望に満ちた楽観的なトーンでこのエッセイは終わる。