“The bourgeois … necessarily regards all behaviour that bursts ‘spontaneously’ forth from the individual ignorant of its causality, as above all free. Therefore the instincts are conceived as freely striving for unconscious goals, and psychology becomes the adventures of the free instincts in their struggles against the restraints of the environment (in Freud, of society) which impede and cripple their freedom. Out of this struggle cognitive and emotional consciousness is born.Now the only objection to this bourgeois psychology is that it inverts the picture. The instincts are not free springs of connation towards a goal. They are, so far as they can be abstractly separated, unconscious necessities, as Kant realised. They are unfree.”

—  Christopher Caudwell

Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949), Chapter IV: Consciousness: A Study in Bourgeois Psychology

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The bourgeois … necessarily regards all behaviour that bursts ‘spontaneously’ forth from the individual ignorant of its…" by Christopher Caudwell?
Christopher Caudwell photo
Christopher Caudwell 10
British Marxist literary critic, journalist and writer 1907–1937

Related quotes

“That the environment does wrongs to man’s mind today none will deny. These wrongs are not done because consciousness imprisons the instincts with the fetters of necessity; but because bourgeois man is unconscious of the determinism of his culture. Because of this the instincts are losing such freedom as they attained, are becoming crippled, and less free. Unconsciousness and inexperience, not consciousness and experience, are the gaolers of modern bourgeois man.”

Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937) British Marxist literary critic, journalist and writer

Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949), Chapter IV: Consciousness: A Study in Bourgeois Psychology

Otto Weininger photo

“If man were not free, then he could not conceive of causality at all, and could not form any concept of it. Insight into lawfulness is already freedom from it.”

Otto Weininger (1880–1903) austrian philosopher and writer

Collected Aphorisms

Selahattin Demirtaş photo

“Only the democratic struggle of the people for their own freedom will free Turkey from authoritarianism and fear and free its institutions — the judiciary and the press — from tutelary control by the government.”

Selahattin Demirtaş (1973) Turkish Kurdish politician

I Am Running for President in Turkey. From My Prison Cell. (2018)

Matt Ridley photo

“The subject of learning lies in the provinces of neuroscience and psychology. It is the opposite of instinct. Instinct is generically-determined behaviour; learning is behaviour modified by experience.”

Matt Ridley book Genome

Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 16 “Memory” (p. 220)

Henry Adams photo

“Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore the ideally free individual is responsible only to himself.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
Context: No one ever seriously affirmed the literal freedom of will. Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore the ideally free individual is responsible only to himself. This principle is the philosophical foundation of anarchism, and, for anything that science has yet proved, may be the philosophical foundation of the Universe; but it is fatal to all society and is especially hostile to the State. Perhaps the Church of the thirteenth century might have found a way to use even this principle for a good purpose; certainly the influence of Saint Bernard was sufficiently unsocial and that of Saint Francis was sufficiently unselfish to conciliate even anarchists of the militant class.

African Spir photo

“The more a man is successful in getting out (or coming out) from his own individuality, of his egoist self, and to control (or dominate) the instincts of his physical nature, the more his character, by rising above material contingencies, widen, become free and independent.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 60.

J. Howard Moore photo

“There is no sympathy, no consciousness of kind, no realization that the emotions experienced by that valiant little creature struggling to avoid the mouths of those instinct-maddened dogs are similar to the emotions they themselves would experience in an identical predicament.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, pp. 117

Karl Marx photo

“In place of the bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, shall we have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Source: The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Section 2, paragraph 72 (last paragraph).

Vladimir Lenin photo

“When the workers of a single factory or of a single branch of industry engage in struggle against their employer or employers, is this class struggle? No, this is only a weak embryo of it. The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class and launch a struggle that is directed, not against individual employers, but against the entire class of capitalists and against the government that supports that class. Only when the individual worker realizes that he is a member of the entire working class, only when he recognises the fact that his petty day-to-day struggle against individual employers and individual government officials is a struggle against the entire bourgeoisie and the entire government, does his struggle become a class struggle.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: On the Foreign Policy of the Soviet State

Wilhelm Liebknecht photo

“Membership in the social democracy means a struggle, a political struggle with grievous persecutions, and a private struggle for existence, a struggle that for the majority is far more difficult and heavy than the political struggle. And it is necessary, because the courage for this twofold struggle is created only by the consciousness that the injustice of society by which the great majority of mankind are to-day oppressed, corrupted and crippled, can only be abolished through a revolutionary movement, that is, a movement that shall completely exterminate capitalism with every fiber of its roots.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Related topics