The Fractured Self in Freud and German Philosophy

M. Altman, C. Coe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137263322
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

The Fractured Self in Freud and German Philosophy examines Freud's transformation of German philosophical approaches to freedom, history, and self-knowledge; defends a theory of situated knowledge and agency; and considers the relevance of Freudian thought for contemporary cultural issues.

1

Kant: The Inscrutable Subject

The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.

Sigmund Freud, quoted in Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination

One of Freud’s fundamental insights is that our conception of reality is unconsciously permeated by phantasies,¹ and it is fair to say that this idea would be impossible prior to Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy. By establishing that the activity of judgment (in part) constitutes reality, Kant demonstrates the illegitimacy of metaphysics and challenges Descartes’s appeal to immediate self-knowledge. Although Freud follows Kant in his commitment to the opacity of human motivations, Freud’s conception of the unconscious allows for repressed thoughts and emotions to be understood through the therapeutic work of psychoanalysis. Behaviors and symptoms can become meaningful within an analytic framework that makes them intelligible to consciousness. Unlike Kant’s thing in itself, the Freudian unconscious is positioned as part of the empirical domain, in principle accessible to scientific study.

These disparities between Kant and Freud on the unknown parts of ourselves lead them to radically different conclusions about the human condition. The noumenal subject that, for Kant, allows for rational self-determination becomes in Freudian psychology the source of underlying forces that threaten our autonomy. This chapter traces the elements of Kantian epistemology that emerge in psychoanalytic theory, almost unrecognizably stripped of their transcendental status and cast in empirical terms. Despite their shared conception of the non-transparent self, Freud diverges from Kant in ways that call into question the ability of the apparently rational subject to overcome or control the irrational forces of the body, desire, society, and history.

Kant’s theory of freedom

According to Kant, experience is an exercise in claim-making. Famously, Kant was driven to this position by Hume’s skepticism: sense data cannot warrant our commitment to the continued and distinct existence of objects,² and we beg the question when we use constant conjunction and subjective association to justify causal necessity.³ But if, as Kant claims, our experience of the world is about something more than our own psychological associations, if it is about persisting objects rather than merely subjective perceptions, then the sensible intuitions that we receive must be organized by us through the activity of judgment.

In the Transcendental Deduction of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant shows that experience is only possible if the various perceptions are synthesized into a manifold, that synthesis is only possible if there is a self-consciousness (transcendental apperception) that has the experience, and that a unified consciousness is only possible if the subject can distinguish subjective perceptions from external objects by means of what Kant calls the pure concepts (or categories) of the understanding.⁴ That is, a subject must actively hold together successive perceptions, and she must distinguish the changing objects of experience from the persisting consciousness using certain a priori rules. We do not perceive the world as it is in itself, but construe what we are given as an appearance according to our conceptual demands. This is the Copernican turn in philosophy. Along with Kant’s claim in the Transcendental Aesthetic that space and time are pure forms of sensible intuition – that is, how we subjectively apprehend sense data – the argument of the Transcendental Deduction shows that empirical knowledge is limited to things as they appear to us. Things as they are in themselves – not in space and time, and apart from the categories – are in principle unknowable.

This conclusion has important implications for how Kant conceives of the subject’s relation to himself and the world. What seem like passively received sensations are actually the result of interpreting what is given to the senses. This is the case regarding not only outer experiences, but the experience of ourselves as well. Because the ideas that I apprehend in inner sense are intuited as a sensory manifold in time, and because time is a form of sensible intuition (not a thing in itself), I can know myself only as I appear to myself. In Kantian terms, empirical apperception is made possible by transcendental apperception.⁵ The objects of inner and outer sense depend on an underlying self-consciousness that exceeds the conditions of knowledge.

On this point, Kant breaks with the Cartesian picture of the mind that, to an extent, continues to exert its influence over us. According to Descartes, I can clearly and distinctly perceive the nature of the mind as an immaterial thing whose essence is thinking, a rational being who stands apart from the ever-changing desires of the body. One of the implications of this separation is that Descartes can rely on the judgments of the mind, as long as reason controls the purity of those judgments by refusing to allow our passions to infiltrate our thinking: “if, whenever I have to make a judgment, I restrain my will so that it extends to what the intellect clearly and distinctly reveals, and no further, then it is quite impossible for me to go wrong.”⁶ Although I can be mistaken when I make unwarranted claims based on those ideas, I am capable of controlling my will and using my judgment rightly such that absolute certainty and right action are attainable. Indeed, I must be capable of doing so if my existence is to be compatible with the existence of a perfect creator God.⁷

As Kant demonstrates in the first Critique, Descartes’s claim that I am an immaterial, thinking thing results from a dialectical inference. Descartes concludes that self-consciousness is an object of inner sense (content of an experience), when in fact it is a formal condition for the possibility of experience (including inner sense).⁸ What we can know about ourselves through introspection is subject to the categories, including the category of causality. All of my apparent actions, and even my mental life – my character, beliefs, and other psychological events – are the results of prior causes, which are themselves determined by prior causes. Therefore, the self can be analyzed empirically, like all other objects in the world.

Although this seems to make freedom impossible, Kant insists that it in fact “make[s] room for faith” in freedom, God, and immortality.⁹ Because the category of causality only applies to the world as it appears to us, we may be free apart from the categories, as noumenal beings. He concludes that “nature at least does not conflict with causality through freedom.”¹⁰ Having established through theoretical reason that freedom is possible, Kant argues in the Critique of Practical Reason that we are justified in believing that we are free. There he derives the practical reality of freedom from our immediate consciousness of moral constraint, what he calls the fact of reason.¹¹ In order for the “ought” claim to make sense for us, we must conceive of ourselves as free beings whose choices are not determined by the play of causal forces. Our ability to free ourselves from the inclinations means that we are able to act purely for the sake of duty, doing what is right simply because it is right. That is, we are able to act not only freely (setting our ends) but autonomously (choosing the right ends), such that, as Barbara Herman phrases it, we act for reasons “all the way down.”¹²

The split between consciousness and the unconscious

Even in such a brief overview, we can see that Kant’s theoretical philosophy establishes some of the basic tenets of Freudian psychology. Specifically, the distinction between phenomena and things in themselves gives us a subject who can be considered from two different standpoints, either as a causally determined thing or as an autonomous agent. First, Kant claims that, when we view human actions as phenomenal events, they can be understood wholly in terms of prior causes, such as a person’s past experiences and psychological history. Our thoughts are intuitable in inner sense – they are objects of consciousness in time – so a deterministic account can, in principle, be given of our actions, beliefs, desires, and value judgments.

Kant was not the first philosopher to assert a determinist position regarding human behavior. Greek atomism explains all events, including human actions, in terms of purely mechanical forces. The early part of Hobbes’s Leviathan tries to develop an account of human nature based on geometry and the newly discovered laws of motion. Hume claims that a person’s character is constantly conjoined with certain behaviors, and that we form expectations about the person’s future behavior on that basis. All of Kant’s materialist predecessors claim that (some) actions are the result of psychological causes, but that mental states are also caused by prior events.¹³ Because we can predict future events with an understanding of past events and natural laws, human motivations can be empirically discovered, and the human subject can be scientifically analyzed “just like all other natural things.”¹⁴

One implication of this view is that, because actions follow directly from a person’s character, others may know me as well as or better than I know myself. Although I have privileged access to my desires and fears, the nature of who I am and what I value is accessible to others as it is expressed in my actions. My actions do not arise independently of my historically and culturally conditioned character – as Hume says, they would not really be mine if they did¹⁵ – and thus anything I do can be traced to an underlying set of habits. This seems to anticipate Freud. However, none of these determinists (including Hobbes and Hume) recognizes the unconscious, but only what Freud calls the preconscious, what happens not to be conscious because it goes unnoticed. The fact that I do not realize what I am doing does not preclude my eventually understanding why I am doing it, if only I were more introspective.

Kant also claims that we have degrees of self-knowledge. With regard to inner sense, Kant makes a distinction between clear and distinct thoughts and “dark” or “obscure” (dunkel) thoughts. Kant uses this term to refer to judgments about representations that we assume but cannot sense (for example, the facial features of a person whom we see from a distance) as well as other representations that we have but of which we are not presently aware (such as what my fourth-grade teacher looked like). All of these things, he says, are in principle accessible to consciousness. There is nothing in inner sense that effectively resists introspection: “no psychological darkness is possible that could not be regarded as a consciousness that is merely outweighed by another, stronger one.”¹⁶ In this and similar passages, Kant places himself alongside Enlightenment thinkers such as Leibniz and Johann Friedrich Herbart in what Günter Gödde calls the “tradition-line” of the “cognitive unconscious.”¹⁷Although much of what we know does not rise to the level of consciousness, it may when coupled with other mental perceptions.

Sometimes Kant suggests that these obscure representations affect our behavior in ways that exceed our awareness. He describes poorly understood representations as “illusions [Täuschungen],” and he says that, even though we may recognize them as illusions, we make less-than-rational decisions under their influence. Kant’s example here is sex, where someone who claims to be expressing love for another person is actually driven by physical desire.¹⁸ Still, Kant has no conceptual framework that would allow him to discuss the repression of these ideas, and so even dunkel representations are introspectively available.

Only with Kant’s conception of noumenal freedom do we get a subject whose motives are necessarily opaque, both to others and to the person herself. What motivates free actions are not empirical causes but reasons that lie outside of the welter of experience. As Kant puts it, the “intelligible ground” of our actions is distinct from their “empirical character,” and only the latter can be apprehended because “the transcendental subject ... is empirically unknown to us.”¹⁹ As noted earlier, freedom is at least conceivable when we consider ourselves apart from the categories. However, we can only know things as they are subject to these conditions, so we can never know why we (qua noumena) are acting or even whether we are free. Although we can be held responsible for our actions when we conceive of them from the practical standpoint, as resulting from free choices (uncaused causes), that does not imply that what motivates those choices can be identified. The thing in itself, which allows “room” for freedom, is, by definition, unable to be intuited.

Because a person’s reasons for acting cannot be inferred from what is apparent, Kant says that we cannot give any examples of actions that are performed for the sake of the moral law. Even what looks like the purest action may be selfishly motivated:

In fact, it is absolutely impossible by means of experience to make out with complete certainty a single case in which the maxim of an action otherwise in conformity with duty rested simply on moral grounds and on the representation of one’s duty. It is indeed sometimes the case that with the keenest self-examination we find nothing besides the moral ground of duty that could have been powerful enough to move us to this or that good action and to so great a sacrifice; but from this it cannot be inferred with certainty that no covert impulse of self-love, under the mere pretense of that idea, was not actually the real determining cause of the will; for we like to flatter ourselves by falsely attributing to ourselves a nobler motive, whereas in fact we can never, even by the most strenuous self-examination, get entirely behind our covert incentives, since, when moral worth is at issue, what counts is not actions, which one sees, but those inner principles of actions that one does not see.²⁰

Kant focuses on whether we are performing morally permissible and obligatory actions for the right reasons, but his claim here applies to all human actions. Even in the case of a wrong action, when more than one inclination converges on it, we cannot know which inclination serves as the basis of our maxim. In psychological terms, every symptom is overdetermined. With actions contrary to or in accordance with duty, we cannot apprehend our spontaneous power of free choice (Willkür). Because we are only available to ourselves as objects of inner sense, what we take ourselves to be doing – the psychological facts of our everyday mental lives, our apparent wishes and intentions – cannot tell us why we are doing something. Kant says that we tend to think of ourselves as virtuously motivated because of our vanity, but no matter how introspective we are, the maxims behind our actions are unknowable.

The availability of the unconscious

Philosophers such as Stanley Cavell and Debra Bergoffen have compared Kant’s thing in itself with the Freudian unconscious,²¹ and Freud himself claims that his work extends Kant’s epistemic limits to mental phenomena.²² However, Kant and Freud understand the hidden dimensions of the self in significantly different ways. For Kant, we must engage in conceptual representation as a condition for the possibility of experience. Our judgment cannot be suspended, which means that we have no intellectual intuition of noumena. For Freud, what is unconscious is made unconscious through the process of repression, rather than being simply left unconditioned by judgment. As a dynamic process, repression can be studied and, to some extent, reversed.

Freud designs the therapeutic work of psychoanalysis to bring our deepest motivations to light, harking back to Kant’s empiricist and rationalist predecessors by denying the noumenal self. According to Freud, Kant is one of the philosophers for whom the “unconscious has been something mystical, som...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Freuds Anxieties about Philosophy, Philosophys Anxieties about Freud
• 1  Kant: The Inscrutable Subject
• 2  Fichte: The Self as Creature and Creator
• 3  Schelling: Methodologies of the Unconscious
• 4  Schopenhauer: Renouncing Pessimism
• 5  Schleiermacher: The Psychological Significance of Translation
• 6  Marx: Freeing Ourselves from Ourselves
• 7  Hegel: The Entanglements of the Present
• 8  Nietzsche: The Therapeutic Function of Genealogy
• 9  Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche: Mourning the Death of God
• Conclusion: A Freudian After-Education
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index