Abstract
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.
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
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. ed. P. H. Nidditch, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 211–12.
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. ed. P. H. Nidditch, 3d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 27–42.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B129–68. As is standard in Kant scholarship, references to Kant’s writings cite the page numbers of the Royal Prussian Academy edition (Kants gesammelte Schriften), which are included in the margins of the translations.
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 43.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 30–32.
Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 228.
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as a Science, trans. Gary Hatfield, in Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 307.
Günter Gödde, Traditionslinien des “Unbewuβten”: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud (Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1999), 29–34.
Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Louden, in Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 136.
Stanley Cavell, “Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman,” in Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 27;
and Debra B. Bergoffen, “Freud’s Philosophy,” Philosophy Today 25, no. 2/4 (summer 1981): 160.
Linda A. W. Brakel, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and the A-rational Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
A. C. MacIntyre, The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), 30.
Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic or the Soul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 307.
Since we have to posit the existence of some thing behind our appearances (as their cause), Fichte claims that the so-called thing in itself actually depends on the activity of thinking, and it is thus not a thing in itself: “it is by means of this act of your own thinking that you ascribe receptivity or sensibility to yourself. Thus the object, considered as something given, is also something merely thought of” (J. G. Fichte, “Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre,” in Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings (1797–1800), ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994], 73). See also J. G. Fichte, “[First] Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre,” in Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre, 28.
Stan Draenos, Freud’s Odyssey: Psychoanalysis and the End of Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 7.
Alfred I. Tauber, Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 59.
Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. George di Giovanni, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37, 46.
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, trans. Allen W. Wood, in Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 25–26.
Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 110.
James Strachey translates the German word Trieb as “instinct,” which conflates two very different ideas: instinct (Instinkt) and drive (Trieb). This is an important distinction for the reading of Freud that we develop throughout the book. Therefore, when a quotation from Strachey’s translation includes “drive” or “instinct,” we insert the original German term in brackets. On the significance of this mistranslation in the Standard Edition, see Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (New York: Knopf, 1982), 103–8.
Freud claims that World War I confirms the relatively pessimistic picture of human nature that he develops in his psychoanalytic work. He expresses this opinion in a letter to his friend and colleague Lou Andreas-Salomé in 1914: “I do not doubt that mankind will survive even this war, but I know for certain that for me and my contemporaries the world will never again be a happy place. It is too hideous. And the saddest thing about it is that it is exactly the way we should have expected people to behave from our knowledge of psycho-analysis. Because of this attitude to mankind I have never been able to agree with your blithe optimism. My secret conclusion has always been: since we can only regard the highest present civilization as burdened with an enormous hypocrisy, it follows that we are organically unfitted for it” (Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, trans. William Robson-Scott and Elaine Robson-Scott [London: Hogarth, 1972], 21). However, in “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), Freud also describes the war as an unprecedented event that undermined what little humanity we had, or at least the faith we had in the purer part of ourselves: “We cannot but feel that no event has ever destroyed so much that is precious in the common possessions of humanity…. [The European can only] stand helpless in a world that has grown strange to him” (WD 14:275, 280). Many biographers characterize Freud’s postulation of the death drive as his attempt to make sense of the unparalleled violence unleashed during the Great War.
For example, see Robert Bocock, Sigmund Freud (New York: Tavistock, 1983), 72;
J. N. Isbister, Freud: An Introduction to His Life and Work (Cambridge: Polity, 1985), 203;
and Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), 396.
For a brief but well-researched article on Freud’s indebtedness to Darwin, see Lucille B. Ritvo, “The Impact of Darwin on Freud,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 43 (1974): 177–92.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Matthew C. Altman and Cynthia D. Coe
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Altman, M.C., Coe, C.D. (2013). Kant: The Inscrutable Subject. In: The Fractured Self in Freud and German Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263322_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263322_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44251-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-26332-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)