Cynthia D. Coe

Wolves, Dogs, and Moral Geniuses: Anthropocentrism in Schopenhauer and Freud

Schopenhauer and Freud reject the anthropocentrism of the Western philosophical tradition by claiming that humans and animals are motivated by the same impulses, but they reinforce elements of that anthropocentrism by retaining the identification of animality with self-interested savagery, and by reserving for humans the capacity to overcome that state.

Nietzsche: The Therapeutic Function of Genealogy

Throughout this book, we have been developing, with Freudian resources, an account of qualified freedom. Human interpretation crucially enters into inheriting our personal and cultural histories, negotiating the demands of society, and expressing the basic drives possessed by embodied beings, but that activity also emerges out of these different conditions and is constrained by them. Nineteenth-century German philosophy tries to make sense of a divided self whose relation to the world and its own psyche are deeply troubled — limited epistemically and afflicted by forces that problematize its capacity for rational self-determination. We have discussed various attempts to come to terms what it means to be a situated subject: Fichte’s appeal to the Anstoss, the hermeneutic circle, and Marx’s challenge to the distinction between thinking and matter, among others. However, no philosopher challenges the model of the sovereign, self-possessed subject more than Nietzsche, whose work decisively rejects the faith in reason and progressive history that reaches its culmination in the work of Hegel.

Kant: The Inscrutable Subject

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.

Marx: Freeing Ourselves from Ourselves

Marx inherits from the Enlightenment the overarching goal of human liberation, but unlike the liberal focus on removing external forms of coercion, such as authoritarian governments or the institution of slavery, Marx emphasizes the importance of identifying and resisting internalized coercion. Accordingly, one of his persistent concerns is the way that ideology functions as a form of tyranny. In critiquing ideology, he exposes how the interests of the powerful shape not only the dominant beliefs but the institutions, norms, and practices of a society, and he offers those claims with the therapeutic intent of overturning the conditions of oppression.

Schelling: Methodologies of the Unconscious

Like Fichte, Schelling strives to overcome Kant’s dualisms. Unsatisfied with Fichte’s appeal to the I’s activity, Schelling attempts to derive both the subject and the object from what he takes to be a higher ground, which he calls the Absolute. Although the Absolute is necessarily opaque to consciousness, he proposes two methods of philosophical investigation: a negative philosophy that examines the development of the world as it is comprehended by reason, and a positive philosophy that apprehends the Absolute on its own (nonrational) terms. Schelling thus presents us with two alternatives: either the ground of consciousness is ignored in favor of consciousness itself, or it can be known directly, but without using reason to understand it. In appealing to nonrational intuition, he attempts to transcend the limits of reason and make claims about the basis of existence, but because they transcend the limits of reason, those claims cannot be rationally justified. Schelling is grappling with the epistemic problem of how consciousness can understand its own origins, but in doing so he runs afoul of Kant’s critique of metaphysics.

Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche: Mourning the Death of God

Kant repeatedly warns us about the ineffectiveness of political revolution, an ineffectiveness caused by the perpetuation of unrecognized prejudices and patterns of thought. But the intellectual revolution he initiates has left us with unresolved anxieties that continue to manifest themselves in academic, political, and religious domains. Kant’s transcendental idealism entails that God is epistemically inaccessible, but Kant invokes God to support our moral vocation. Following Kant’s Copernican turn, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel conceive of God in ways that would be barely recognizable to medieval theologians. With Marx, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, God disappears entirely or functions only as a pernicious psychological force.

Fichte: The Self as Creature and Creator

In the aftermath of Kant’s Copernican turn, philosophers set out to explain the relation between what is given to the senses (sensible intuition) and the way that we order our experience through concepts (the activity of the understanding). Kant rejected both the rationalists’ attempt to derive the whole of experience from our own faculties and the empiricists’ attempt to trace all of our ideas back to impressions, but this poses a problem: If the spontaneity of judgment is radically distinct from the material conditions of experience, then it is unclear how our empirical knowledge represents the world rather than fabricating a wholly subjective phantasy. In other words, if our understanding is responsible for how we organize our various perceptions, then how do we know that any of our objective claims are accurate indicators of the world — not as it is in itself, of course, but at least as it appears to people for whom thinking is judging? According to Kant, subjective activity is not reducible to objective reality; a materialistic account can never explain the normative constraint that makes experience possible in the first place.1 But we do not create the world out of whole cloth; we are not responsible for the matter of experience, only its form. Were either the case — that the object merely reflects the subject’s thinking, or that the subject is simply another object — how the world and our thoughts about the world are related would be readily intelligible.

Hegel: The Entanglements of the Present

Hegel and Freud make the apparently identical claim that nothing passes away that has once been present in the mind. But the meaning of this claim is quite different for each of them, and an analysis of its implications for their divergent conceptions of history and historical consciousness illustrates how Freud implicitly challenges faith in human progress. For Hegel the past is preserved in a rational narrative through which Geist actualizes its freedom, but for Freud the past resists such representation in consciousness and thus impedes full self-possession. Past events that have been repressed emerge in the present as symptoms, and psychoanalysis works at the boundary between conscious representation and what is excluded from consciousness in order to address these symptoms.

Schopenhauer: Renouncing Pessimism

Comparisons between the work of Freud and Schopenhauer are common in the secondary literature,1 and Freud himself recognizes the affinity of their approaches, as the epigraph indicates. But few critics go beyond the fact that they share similar conceptions of formless drives that motivate our behavior to consider what they recommend we do about it. Despite the proximity of their views of human nature and human motivations, Schopenhauer and Freud have very different ideas of what sort of life we ought to lead, or what a healthy response to this self-recognition ought to be. Schopenhauer encourages us to renounce the will and embrace nothingness, whereas Freud attempts to bring about a compromise among the competing demands in an individual’s psychological life.

Schleiermacher: The Psychological Significance of Translation

As Freud consistently emphasizes, it is through pathology that normal psychological functioning is most easily understood. In the case of transference, the neurotic restaging of old relationships leads to one of the core insights of psychoanalysis: the world that is real to me is my world, a world conditioned by my own interpretations, repressions, and anxieties. The less that world resembles the world recognized by others, the more problematic my perception and behavior will be to me and to those around me. However, the need to invest meaning in the world animates both normal and abnormal perception. The pathological state is only an intensification of the normal process of trying to make sense of experience by arranging it according to familiar concepts and patterns.