Philip Rieff > Quotes

“Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.”
― Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud

“Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going. Like his predecessor, the man of the market economy, he understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing is to keep going.”
― Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud

“The truth is, Jung has brought back one member of the old duality, unreason, with a new name; it is no synthesis at all, but only the latest maneuver in the war against rationality that has been conducted with rising hysteria by literary intellectuals and humanists against the laws of a culture they have reason to distrust and disobey. The Jungian theory proposes to every disaffected humanist his "personal myth," as a sanctuary against the modern world. Against the vulgar democracy of intelligence, Jungian theory proposes an aristocracy of feeling. From this proposal derives Jung's persistent influence on modern critical and aesthetic style.”
― Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud

“In a world without meaningful authority, all "acts" are coercive.”
― Philip Rieff, Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us

“Where there is nothing sacred, there is nothing.”
― Philip Rieff

“Holy terror is rather fear of oneself, fear of oneself and in the world. It is also fear of punishment. Without this necessary fear, charisma is not possible. To live without this high fear is to be terror oneself, a monster. And yet to be monstrous has become our ambition, for it is our ambition to live without fear. All holy terror is gone. The interdicts have no power. This is the real death of God and of our own humanity. It is out of sheer terror that charisma develops. We live in terror, but never in holy terror.”
― Philip Rieff, Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us

“A deconstructed text is tantamount to a forgery.”
― Philip Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority

“Under a credal order, there can be no struggle between self and authority. Where there is not this supreme confidence in authority--or, what amounts to the same thing, where there is no confidence in a supreme authority--the individual will lack confidence in himself. Without such supreme confidence, the individual might drop out and not take the risk of death in battle [...] Self-confidence is inseparable from submission to the credal order, and through that order, to the supreme authority expressed in that order [...] The conformity of action in mass organization is anti-credal. Deep individuality cannot exist except in relation to the highest authority. No inner discipline can operate without a charismatic institution, nor can such an institution survive without that supreme authority from a relation to which self-confidence derives. Without an authority deeply installed, there is no foundation for individuality. Self-confidence thus expresses submission to supreme authority [...] Released from the constraints of charismatic authority, Western culture can engage freely in its own destruction.”
― Philip Rieff, Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us

“Whether or not a monarch or a mass leader has great executive ability or power, modern politics suggests that his primary function may well be psychological; he acts as a center around which otherwise disturbed lives can be organized.”
― Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist

“Freud is the least confused of modern minds because he has no message; he accepts contradiction, and builds his psychology on it.”
― Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist

“Culture and sacred order are inseparable... No culture has ever preserved itself where there is not a registration of sacred order.”
― Philip Rieff

“The faith instinct…simply cannot be killed. That ‘simply cannot’ means that we simply cannot not live—cannot live as if life were meaningless, without purpose; as if life were merely material or mechanical or not spiritual. Such an effort in its deadly futility represents a historical ending time, a time just before the faith instinct will show itself again.”
― Philip Rieff

“In the materialist conception, mind is the agent of the body; in the Freudian conception, as it gradually emerged through these early years of uncertainty, the body exists as a symptom of mental demands.”
― Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist

“Reason cannot save us, nothing can; but reason can mitigate the cruelty of living.”
― Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist

“From Plato and Aristotle, through Burke and De Tocqueville, the therapeutic implication of social theory is remarkably consistent: an individual can exercise his gifts and powers fully only by participating in the common life. This is the classical ideal. The healthy man is in fact the good citizen.”
― Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud