A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action: Phenomenology, Recognition, Negation, Language and the logic of Dialectic and Psychoanalysis(Freud and Hegel).

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Hegelian Phenomenology did not found itself explicitly on the Cartesian first truth: I think, I am. Instead, Hegel proposed the notion of “Spirit” which he characterised in terms of a succession of “figures” that in turn gave a teleological account of the role of knowledge in the philosophical interpretation of cultural “progress”. Cartesianism is not teleological and does appear to conflict with this Hegelian form of the de-centering of the role of consciousness. Hegel, preferring instead an idealistic terminus of “Absolute knowledge” that is not located in an individual consciousness capable of thinking almost anything including thinking its own body away(Descartes’ “Meditations”). The founding ground or fact for Descartes was the fact of its (conscious) thinking. The “founding fact” or ground for Hegel, on the other hand, insofar as our agency is concerned, is that the status of my agency is the outcome of:

“this imagined conflict which he famously called a struggle to the death for recognition. Subjects in this reconstruction of the necessary conditions for such a status can not(without question-begging) be understood as originally just “subjects” but must be understood as originally in positions of power or powerlessness, as masters or bondsman.”(R Pippin, “Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008, P 29)

Pippin goes on to claim that Hegel’s practical Philosophy rests on this theory of recognition(which for Kant would be a “phenomenal fact” rather than a “founding fact” or transcendental principle) that is actualised historically over time. This “phenomenal fact” for Aristotle would “disguise” two kinds of causality requiring different kinds of explanation or justification. Such requirements would, for example, demand explanations of the form of material and efficient forms of causality whilst, on the other hand, the principle of sufficient reason would demand that a full account of rational agency refer to all four forms of Aristotelian explanation or causality(including formal and final “causes”). Agents or subjects for both Kant and Aristotle possess causal “power” which Hegel appears eager to deny, believing instead that such an argument contains an illegitimate appeal to an assumption of individualism, a form of individualism that is not “situated” appropriately in relation to the communal environment of social practices and institutions. For Kant, the individual’s power is universalizable but not “formal” in the sense of being divorced from an intersubjective environment(as has so often been claimed). Willing that one’s maxim becomes a universal law for all, is not a mere imaginative feat of “wishing” that this be so, but rather a rational position involving an idea of the common good, or good for all: an idea, namely, of what ethical situated-ness requires of an agent with rational powers. The key component of this idea is that what is required is normative, i.e an idea of what the agent “ought to do”.

Hegel’s account of a struggle of recognition to the death inevitably conjures up a constellation of connected emotions that appear pathological. This attitude probably has its roots in Rousseau’s “amour propre”, an attitude that is in turn linked to a metaphysical/ethical theory of discontentment that both Kantian and Aristotelian Philosophical Psychology would call into question. For Kant, it is clear that although we humans need a master no one actually wants a master, preferring to decide what we need to do on the grounds of self-love. Hegel’s conclusion, insofar as Kant is concerned is that Kant is some form of individualist but this view fails to take into account both political and religious ideas. Kant’s ethical system, for example, appeals to the idea of God as part of the answer to the question “What can I hope for?”. This idea of God is both that of a causal designer of the universe and a teleological guarantor of individual justice–ensuring, that is, that those agents leading a moral life in fact also lead flourishing lives(Eudaimonia). Here we are clearly in the political sphere and the sphere of what Hegel called “Objective Spirit”, a sphere that Kant would call “objective practical rationality”. Kant, however, would not appeal to dialectical logic and “negation” and would look suspiciously upon the idea of a “march of Spirit” toward “absolute knowledge”. Insofar as Plato and Aristotle were concerned the political good was a subservient form of what was referred to as the idea or form of the Good which for Plato was a logical form and for Aristotle was an idea that had many meanings. Both Plato and Aristotle would regard dialectical logic working on the principle of negation as an inferior form of reasoning compared to what they would call “philosophical logic”. For both of these Greek Philosophers, the “justice” of the state was a form of the good that required a foundation in a more general and abstract form of the Good as such. Kant, too, would have argued that the political good, including the legal system, is founded upon the ethical form of the Good. He would point to the fact that revisions of the law are often on ethical grounds that relate to the rights of the individual or the freedom or equality of the individual.

In his “Lectures on World History”, we find Hegel claiming that:

“only in the state does man have rational existence”(Vdg, III(PWH, 94)

Justice is, of course, one form of rational existence but neither for Aristotle nor for Kant is this related to the psychological process of “recognition” between citizens or particular agents in general, The agents are not playing a game in which one responds to requests for reasons for some kind of psychological reward.

Regarding language as embedded in forms of life and also as speech acts located in a space-time matrix tends to hide the intentional aspect. Intentional action in the eyes of Anscombe is something done which accords with a reason that is given in answer to the question “Why?” (Anscombe 2000)

It is, however, problematic to relate the above language-game to Hegel’s “Spirit” that he so problematically characterises as something which is a product of itself. This is almost as problematic as Hegel’s characterisation of the Concept as:

“The Concept gives itself its own actuality”

In his discussion of these issues, Hegel fixates upon the Kantian idea of the unity of apperception and denies the objectivity constituting operation of this act and its relation to nature. For Kant, it is the “I” of the unity of apperception that thinks, and not “Spirit”. This “I” does not give itself its own intuitions of Nature. This “I” is necessarily intentional and must think or intend something that is real. Nature, for both Aristotle and Kant, is not a Hegelian totality of Concepts that miraculously provide the actuality of content but is rather a totality of conditions and what is conditioned. What is conditioned is a reality where “forms” determine what is simple and what is complex, contains, i.e. both tadpoles and frogs which produce tadpoles. Neither Kant nor Aristotle would deny, in this context, that Nature evolves in accordance with “forms” that are “before”, “In”, and “after” Nature. On the other hand, for Hegel, “Negation”(an abstract theoretical logical notion), is used to “justify” or “explain” transformations of Nature. For Kant and Aristotle, this would be regarded as an illegitimate “projection” of a negative logical operation onto the world. The world for Hegel becomes a totality that changes in accordance with contradiction(the negative face of the law of non-contradiction). This move also prevents Hegel from using the Aristotelian idea of potentiality and the Kantian idea of possibility in order to characterise what is “before”, “in”, and “after” natural change. A tadpole may not be a frog but neither is it a fish as it might appear to an inquiring observer to be. Living organisms, such as the tadpole, with the origin, shape, and behaviour of tadpoles could not logically be fish and the truth of this judgment is not a function solely of a mind conceptualising what is “before”, “in”, and “after” Nature. The material and efficient causes involved in the interaction of frogs around the event of reproduction are in Aristotelian and Kantian scientific accounts, necessary but not sufficient accounts of the existence of tadpoles. Here the category of causality is organising our explanatory judgments in a context of exploration. For both Aristotle and Kant, the context of exploration is operating in the use of observation and the discovery of the origin, habits, and telos of tadpoles. In this context, the Hegelian theoretical notion of Negation carries with it a counterintuitive concept of the kind of consciousness required for application to this current perceptual consciousness of the activity of tadpoles and frogs. In a context of explanation, there may occur a moment of seeing the frog in terms of a negation of a tadpole, but only on the condition that one originally believed the tadpole to be a fish: the frog is otherwise naturally and “conceptually” related to the tadpole. The correct synthesis of the representations of the tadpole and the frog would be to regard both as instances of the concept of Animalia amphibia Anura. For Aristotle, a key element of this particular process of discovery would include an investigation of the organs of the animal as well as observation of the animal’s behaviour.

Kant distinguishes clearly between what he calls reflective judgments and determinant judgments. The classificatory judgment claiming that particular tadpoles and frogs are to be conceptualised as Animalia amphibia Anura is an example of a determinant judgment. This is a categorical classificatory judgment that embodies material, efficient, formal and final causes(“explanations”). Reflective judgments, on the other hand, are based on particulars and are more descriptive, e.g. this animal I am observing that looks like a fish swims like a fish and behaves generally like a fish. Here the mind is in search of a category or a “universal” for this organism. If the particular is classified as a fish merely on the basis of these observations without any attempt to observe its origins, its system of organs, or its telos, then we can imagine the appropriateness of the Hegelian operation of Negation. This acknowledgment, however, would not be describing any change in Nature but only an operation pertaining to our earlier problematic judgment. This is why we regard reflective judgments as subjective and unreliable. Kant and Aristotle stand firmly together on such issues. Both would agree to the application of the distinction of subjective/objective to the difference between determinant and reflective judgments in such circumstances. Both would see the role of perception and imagination replacing the role of reason in a reflective judgment that results in a mistaken classification of a tadpole as a “fish”. Neither would deny the mechanism of Evolution which Hegel does not have the conceptual resources to characterise. The quote below from Kant’s “Critique of Teleological Judgment” confirms the presence of hylomorphism in Kantian Philosophy:

“When we consider the agreement of so many genera of animals in a certain common schema, which apparently underlies not only the structure of their bones, but also the disposition of their remaining parts, and when we find here the wonderful simplicity of the original plan, which has been able to produce such an immense variety of species by the shortening of one member and the lengthening of another, by the involution of this part and the evolution of that, there gleams upon the mind a ray of hope, however faint, that the principle of the mechanism of nature, apart from which there can be no natural science at all may yet enable us to arrive at some explanation in the case of organic life. This analogy of forms, which in all their differences seem to be produced in accordance with a common type, strengthens the suspicion that they have an actual kinship due to descent from a common parent.”(Trans Meredith J., C.,(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1932, Part II, P 78)

These “mechanisms of nature” obviously take place in the noumenal realm which Hegel categorically denies the existence of. It would be interesting to investigate whether this Hegelian denial also denies a possible non-conceptual intuitive relation to nature and also whether it denies the operation of various forms of causality in the mechanism of nature investigated by the Theory of Evolution. For Hegel, it almost appears from this line of reasoning that reality must develop out of thought itself, and be a product of a kind of intellectual intuition which for both Kant and Aristotle could only belong to a non-embodied divine intellect. Nature issues in such thought experiments, from an Idea of Nature, and this idea can only be “explored”(not explained) by a dialectical Philosophy of Nature. Charles Taylor confirms this possibility in his work on “Hegel”:

“The Philosophy of nature is therefore really what we called a hermeneutical dialectic.”(Cambridge, 1975, P.352)

Aristotelian and Kantian Logic is thus supplanted by an imaginative exposition of the relation between Nature and our Idea of Nature, an exposition that does not appeal to experience but rather to an idealistic conception of conceptual thinking. In his Encyclopaedia article, Hegel maintains that Nature itself is an “unresolved contradiction”(EN §248, Remarks). The levels of simplicity and complexity and the relation of lower to higher levels is not the blind work of Nature(supposed by Kant and Aristotle) but rather, according to Hegel, the work of the Concept. Taylor argues that this line of reasoning is disastrous:

“Hegel not only argues further against evolution but also against understanding differences in a series in which the higher are produced out of the lower recursively by the same formula. Nature does make jumps because the Concept moves by qualitative differences. Thus Hegel rules out the periodic table, Mendeleev as well as Darwin.”(Hegel, P.354)

The Mathematical representation and exploration of reality as a continuum also become problematic on the above account. Space is real for Hegel and is the foundation of Nature but paradoxically the mathematical point, for example, is a negation because it lacks extension. The point in its turn obtains its meaning from a succession of figures, for example, the line, which also lacks extension and that also in its turn obtains its meaning from the Concept of a surface which is then enclosed finally by the Concept of Space. Time is conceived of as the contradiction of Space and both unite in a synthesis or unity of the Concept of Place. Change of place requires motion and motion requires matter which in turn contains the forces of attraction and repulsion. Eventually, the operation of Negation in relation to Concepts generates the entire system of bodies in the universe.

The Order of Life is also Conceptual in the above sense. It is the Negation of the inorganic. Reproduction in the life process produces new individuals that negate the origin and death of their parents. Spirit is the Negation of life and it arises like a Phoenix from the ashes of the burning of life. All History thus becomes the unfolding of Spirit in Time.

This movement of Negation is a “formal” move not in a logical sense but in a very abstract theoretical sense. This move was probably the beginning of the association of Phenomenology with the idea of “infinite tasks”. Hegel’s Phenomenology, however, differs from Husserl’s because it espouses a decentering from Consciousness as the matrix of all phenomena. The Hegelian Teleological movement of Negation locates meaning outside of Consciousness.

Husserl’s appeal to the matrix of consciousness also raises the issue of the status of Scientific explanations such as that of the Theory of Evolution. On Husserlian grounds, Science is a second-order expression of consciousness or our experiences in the life-world.

There are also significant questions to raise relating to Husserl’s Political judgment in 1910 which he was forced to reverse in 1935. In a sense, in the realm of reflective judgments (such as classifying tadpoles as fishes), this was just the movement of Negation in operation and part of the “natural” order of things. It is fortunate, however, that we have the determinant political judgments of Aristotle and Kant that can be used for the purposes of explanation and justification, and we can thereby reject dialectical reversals as problematic. History tends to repeat itself as many have observed. Martin Heidegger, a pupil of Husserl was also to explore the legitimacy of this teleological movement of Negation in his reversal from embracing National Socialism in the 1930s and rejecting this position as “mistaken” sometime later. This would not be possible unless in some sense determinant judgments trumped reflective judgments in the “game” of prediction.

Perhaps we ought to point out in the context of this discussion that we will not find in Hegel the paradoxical claim that we find in Husserl, namely, that living and perceiving are more important than judging and reasoning. There is, however, a kind of teleological life-world involved in the Idea of the Hegelian concept of the Absolute end of Absolute Knowledge: a life-world not founded upon Husserlian transcendental solipsism. For Hegel, Objective Spirit is the negation of subjective Spirit(which involves the realm of individual consciousness). The former is characterised as a stage on the way to Absolute Spirit. Objective Spirit comprises both the Philosophy of History and Political Philosophy, and Absolute Spirit comprises the realms of art, religion, and Philosophy per se. The telos of Spirit appears to be the actualisation of man’s knowledge of the Universal, a knowledge that includes both self-knowledge and man’s freedom to Negate in general. We recall also that when Husserl finally managed to diagnose the “sickness of Europe” he claimed that the origin of the problem lay in a “Crisis of Reason”. An interesting question to raise here, of course, is whether Phenomenology in its denials of the power of Reasoning played any part in this putative “crisis”. The observation that many sciences of the time were themselves experiencing a crisis of Reason may have been correct given the presence on the Cultural Stage of a limited perspectival view of Science that rejected transcendental and metaphysical elements of Reasoning processes. This “Analytical” recoil manifested itself in England in particular in the Philosophy of Russell and the early Wittgenstein. We know, for example, that Russell both wished to distance himself from the Philosophies of Hegel and Kant.

There is however one phenomenological position that captures the spirit of Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger as well as English Philosophers of Language which also manages to incorporate much of the Philosophical Psychology and Political and Religious Philosophy of both Aristotle and Kant: the Hermeneutical/Existential Phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur.

Ricoeur is eager to point out that insofar as Husserl is concerned his work has an earlier and a later phase:

“It is thus finally against the early Husserl, against the alternately Platonising and idealising tendencies of his theory of meaning and intentionality, that the theory of understanding has been erected. And if the later Husserl points to this ontology it is because his effort to reduce being failed and because, consequently, the ultimate result of phenomenology escaped the initial project. It is in spite of itself that phenomenology discovers in place of an idealist subject locked within its system of meanings, a living being which from all times has as the horizon of all its intentions, a world, the world.”(“Existence and Hermeneutics” Page 9 in Conflict of Interpretations edited by Ihde D., Evanston , North Western University Press, 1974)

This quote is part of an appeal to an Aristotelian idea of meaning and interpretation of meaning. It contains a shift away from, and criticism of, the “objectivism” of the so-called “mundane sciences”. Ricoeur, however, is focussing here on Hermeneutics and its methodology of “Interpretation of texts”(cultural works) in order to appropriate our existence, i.e. the desire to be, and effort to exist that humans manifest in their cultural activities. Ricoeur, in this work, sees in Heidegger an ontological understanding of Man that cannot be denied but he does raise questions over his Existential/Phenomenological methodology. The key issue of Truth, for Ricoeur, must be intimately linked to those hermeneutic disciplines that concern themselves with symbolism and symbolic language. Symbolic language, Ricoeur, argues, here supports a reflective approach that aims at self-understanding. We can see here the resemblance of this approach to that of Kantian reflective judgments in which the “universal” is being “explored” in particular texts that symbolise our effort to exist and desire to be.

It is clear that the major phenomenological innovation in Ricoeur’s account is the reference to language:

“It is first of all and always in Language that all ontic or ontological understanding arrives at its expression. It is thus not vain to look to semantics for an axis of reference for the whole of the hermeneutic field. Exegesis has directly accustomed us to the idea that a text has several meanings, that these meanings overlap, that the spiritual meaning is “transferred”(St Augustine’s translata signa) from the historical or literal meaning because of the latter’s surplus of meaning. Schleiermacher and Dilthey have also taught us to consider texts, documents, manuscripts as expressions of life which have become fixed through writing. The exegete follows the reverse movement of this objectification of the life-forces in psychical connections first and then in historical series.”(Conflict, P.12)

This is, in no uncertain terms a radical transformation of the Husserlian “Lebenswelt” that does not necessarily clash with Aristotelian or Kantian Philosophy. For Heidegger, individual artists and authors are mediums of their Art and communicate their interpretations of the lifeworld reflectively and contemplatively with understanding. For Ricoeur, there are three regions of symbolic meaning that explore our desire to be, and effort to exist. Firstly, the cosmic symbolism of the Phenomenology of Religion explores the extent to which the symbol of the heavens express wisdom, justice, awe-inspiring infinity and order. Secondly, symbolic meaning is also involved in dream interpretation and myth interpretation. Thirdly the sensory and imaginative explorations of the poet are also areas of concern for symbolic meaning and hermeneutic interpretation. All three symbolic “regions, then, require hermeneutic interpretation that aims to reveal the scope and limits of the sacred, repressed desires and images of literary criticism.

It is clear from this that for Ricoeur, Husserl’s “Logical Investigations” and “Cartesian Meditations” are insufficient accounts of those realms of meaning that can be expressed symbolically in a manner requiring interpretation. Insofar as one of the resting points of Husserlian Phenomenology is the Cartesian cogito, this, for Ricoeur is not an adequate or sufficient characterisation of man’s existence in his life world. For this, we must evaluate the objects and the forms of understanding of the ego of this cogito, especially because the ego as a matrix of consciousness is liable to suffer from illusions as a consequence of misinterpretations of the life-world.

Kant. of course, subjected consciousness to a Critique of Reason but Ricoeur would not accept such a traditional and logical critique because for him only a Philosophy of Reflection can rid us of the illusions of false consciousness embedded in what Husserl called “the natural attitude”, an attitude of false certainty.

Ricoeur refers to Heidegger’s attempt to square the hermeneutic circle using the methodology at his disposal. It is clear from the criticism of Ricoeur that the ontological endpoint of understanding (explanation/justification) is for the hermeneutical philosopher only an aim or a horizon of significance. The squaring of the circle for Ricoeur resides rather in the conflict of rival interpretations of being, each of which provides us with an aspect of Being. Such a conflict has two consequences. Firstly it involves a dismissal of the agent as consciousness and secondly, it involves a restoration of the ancient Aristotelian problematic which maintains that practical existence is a form of existence that desires to understand itself and its world.

Ricoeur has the following to say on the contribution of Psychoanalysis to the project of hermeneutic understanding:

“It is indeed through a critique of consciousness that psychoanalysis points to ontology. The interpretation it proposes to us of dreams, fantasies, myths, and symbols always contests to some extent the pretensions of consciousness in setting itself up as the origin of meaning, The struggle against narcissism–the Freudian equivalent of the false cogito–leads to the discovery that language is deeply rooted in desire, in the instinctual impulses of life.”(Conflict P .20)

The actual relation of Psychoanalysis to ontology is far more complex and convoluted than the above account by Ricoeur indicates. Freud was both a hylomorphic theorist and he was also convinced that his Psychology was in accordance with the Philosophy of Kant. The complexity of his theoretical position is well illustrated in his contention that both consciousness and the unconscious were vicissitudes of instinct or desire. His delineation of three Aristotelian principles regulating these vicissitudes is further evidence that the matter is not as simple as Ricoeur professes it to be. These three principles, the energy regulation principle, the pleasure-pain principle, and the reality principle are in their turn related to the Kantian faculties of sensibility, understanding, and reason. It is very clear that Rationalism permeates all Freudian theorising from ca 1920 onwards. It is also clear that what we are seeing is the kind of Kantian and Aristotelian rationalism that can accept Darwinism in its universe of discourse. There is a theoretical acceptance of the mechanisms of evolution and the energy regulating mechanisms of the Instincts or desires and their vicissitudes. The Freudian account is also sufficiently flexible to enable us to “interpret” mythical accounts of man’s origin and destiny. Ananke is the mythical embodiment of the Reality Principle. In its later form Freudian theory became the home for what can be called “Philosophical Mythology” in which we can encounter the presence of mythical figures such as Eros and Thanatos interacting not just on the territory of our psychological states and processes but also as battling giants on the world stage of civilisation or culture. It is, however, also clear, as Ricoeur claims, that the role of consciousness in Freud’s Philosophical Psychology is a minimal one.

Freud’s theories provide us with the principles and the mechanisms involved in the process of “becoming conscious” and his theory also provides us with the role of language in this process as well as the process of the organisation of desire.

Ricoeur wishes, incorrectly in our view, to characterise Freud’s work as being more oriented toward what he called the “archeology of the subject” rather than its teleology. This was probably due to an underestimation of the Aristotelian and Kantian components of Freud’s account. After Ricoeur’s one-sided account of Freudian psychoanalysis, there is a need for a restoration of Freudian ideas in the arena of Aristotelian/Kantian debate. The Kantian question that perhaps most concerns Freud is the question “What is man?” but following close on its heels is the question “What ought we to do?”. Freud’s theories also contribute to our knowledge of man’s relation to civilisation and there must consequently be implications for the question “What can we hope for?” The “material” Freud uses for his Psychoanalytical theory takes the form of confessions of patients who are given the freedom to talk about their psychological conflicts. Freud’s response to these confessions was to “interpret” them as expressions of desire rather than reports on their state of mind. By doing this Freud was able to expand the field of operations of their mind through the transformation of a matrix of instinctive/emotional unconscious activity into an ordered conscious activity that is in accordance with the operations of the reality principle. Let us remind our readers how close this experience is to the experience Ricoeur elaborates upon in his work “The Symbolism of Evil”:

“The experience of which the penitent makes confession is a blind experience, still embedded in the matrix of emotion, fear, anguish. It is this emotional note that gives rise to objectification in discourse: the confession expresses, pushes to the outside, the emotion without which it would be shut up in itself, as an impression in the soul. Language is the light of the emotions. Through confession the consciousness of fault is brought into the light of speech: through confession, man remains speech, even in the experience of his own absurdity, suffering, and anguish.”(Trans Buchanan E., Boston, Beacon Press, 1967, P.7)

Professor Brett in his work “The History of Psychology” accused the Aristotelian definition of man(rational animal capable of discourse) as lacking in what he referred to as “causal connections”. This work was being written just around the time that Freud was publishing his more mature philosophically-based writings so perhaps there is no excuse for him not to appreciate the value of a “confession” in the psychoanalytical context of explanation and justification. There was, that is, no reason, not to see enacted before our eyes a telos, an “event” of “becoming conscious” and taking control of what had once enslaved one. It surely must also have been clear that this process was being facilitated through language, the power of discourse. The difference between the religious and the psychoanalytical confession is that the first forms the basis of our mythology and religions and the latter have yet to give rise to a wider understanding of the oracular challenge to “know thyself”.

Ricoeur, in his work entitled “Freud and Philosophy: an essay in interpretation” reflects interestingly on these questions especially in a section entitled “The Phenomenological approach to the Psychoanalytic Field.” Ricoeur points out in this essay that Husserl saw in the sciences of his time(which must have included Freudian Psychoanalysis) a commitment to what he called “objectivism” that in his view involved assumptions which fixated upon the objects of our knowledge at the expense of cognitive attitudes such as intention. He seeks to convince us that the phenomenological reduction comes very close to the idea of the Freudian idea of “The Unconscious”. The reduction deposes the authority of immediate consciousness that comes with the “natural attitude” and it seeks to displace this attitude with more ontologically complex attitudes. According to Ricoeur the Phenomenology of Husserl is both the beginning and the end of the Cogito:

“of course, a nucleus of primordial experience is presupposed by phenomenology: that is what makes it a reflective discipline. Without the presupposition of such a nucleus–“the egos living self-presence”–there is no phenomenology: that is why phenomenology is not psychoanalysis.”(Freud, P.377)

Psychoanalytical theory is not in any sense “reflective”: it is rather a categorical theory giving rise to determinant judgments. Psychoanalysis during the course of its early explorations and experiments may well have produced what Kant would call “reflective judgments”. When Freud was in search of his “mythology”, his theory of the instincts(a far more important part of the theory than his theory of “the Unconscious”) there undoubtedly occurred “negations” of the previous theorising and perhaps even syntheses of previous negations. But once Freud had found what he called his “mythology” this obviously became an important contribution to debates in the name of Philosophical Psychology.

Ricoeur does, however, point interestingly to one concept from Husserl’s phenomenology that does have a family resemblance to the idea of Instinct and that is the concept of intentionality. He argues that there is a lack of conscious awareness of self, involved in the act of intentionality and that both Husserl and Freud were students of Brentano. The Husserlian ego’s living self-presence, however, is primarily “representational”, according to Ricoeur, and thereby shared the animus of “objectivism” that Husserl was seeking to reject. In response to this Ricoeur maintains firstly that in general:

“it is possible to dissociate the original lived relation from its refraction in representation. In a philosophy of immediate consciousness the subject is first of all a knowing subject, that is to say, ultimately, a look directed to a spectacle.”(Freud, P.379)

Ricoeur continues with another claim that the primacy of self-consciousness and the primacy of representation are connected(P.379)and that Husserl’s matrix of consciousness prioritized what he called “objectivising” acts and attitudes over other more practical and emotional acts and attitudes. Meaning in act is dynamic and active and forms the core of Freudian instinctive acts but here we do not encounter any reference back to an original “becoming acquainted” with phenomena passively.

Husserl appears, that is, to point backward archeologically to “association” and believes it to be the universal principle of the genesis of dynamic acts and operations and thus in our opinion “psychologises” his account irrevocably. “Passive genesis” is characterised by Husserl as that which:

“receives the object as pre-given”(Husserl, Meditations §38)

Ricoeur then asks whether it is not the case that the Freudian history of the libidinal object through various stages(oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) is such a “passive genesis”. For Freud, however, it is clearly the case that “In the beginning was the deed”, because even at the inception of the oral stage we find the infant first finding active satisfaction at the breast before the representation of the absent breast occurs as some kind of memory in the dynamically developing psychical system. At this point in this system there is no “I” or “me” to detach from what is occurring. We are dealing here with an Aristotelian bundle of potentialities that are embodied and regulated by principles. One can, as Merleau-Ponty did, claim that the body is incarnate meaning and see sexuality as a mode of the existence of the body but the attempt to detach “meaning” from Aristotelian ideas of “causality”(Forms of explanation) would not be in accordance with the Freudian spirit of investigation. Sexuality for Freud can be symbolically sublimated and change not just its objects but also its aim and we see this occurring in many cultural activities on the cultural stage where we also encounter other forms of the life instinct.

According to Ricoeur, the phenomenological reduction produces what he calls the phenomenological attitude but it is not clear what this attitude amounts to. It is clear what it is not, namely, the natural attitude or the scientific(objectivist) attitude, but no positive account is given. Language for the phenomenologist is tied very closely to the act of speaking that establishes meaning, rather than the “objective” characterization of uttered meanings or propositions. This, however, in Ricoeur’s account is quickly abandoned in favour of Hegel for whom language and mind are intimately entwined. A Hegelian dialectic of absence and presence is referred to. It is claimed that the attitude of a speaker in speaking is one of making himself absent to the things he is speaking of and of thereby making things present to the mind of the speaker. Ricoeur refers in this context to an article by Freud entitled “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. Here in the case study of an infant there is a linking of the anxiety related to the absence of a needed figure to the expressive play with linguistic opposites: these opposites express or represent both the presence and absence of the needed object which in this case is the child’s mother. Here we see intentionality in operation but it does not as Ricoeur claims:

“make it possible to generalize the perceptual model of the unconscious”(Freud, P. 385)

This illustrates an active expression of anxiety and fulfilment that exemplifies both the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principle. It also, however, illustrates a Hegelian dialectic of Negation that may be playing a cathartic role in the psychic development of the one and a half year old that is the subject of the above reflection. We are witnessing here a form of life in embryo where there is not merely a representational shift between the presence and absence of an object but also an emotional shift from anxiety to wish-fulfilment involving both Eros and Thanatos(in the form of the compulsion to repeat this act over and over again). Mourning is a more complex form of life in which the absence of a loved object that has died cannot be restored however powerful the wish for the presence of the object is. The Reality Principle or Ananke demands here that the absence of the object be accepted and in the mourning process, the memories of the object are de-energized and de-emotionalized, reducing i.e. the intensity of the emotional attitudes of anxiety and expectancy. This process aims at an attitude in which the compulsion to repeat on the part of the unwelcome or unexpected appearance of “traumatic” memory no longer occurs. Such a “catharsis” would appear to be necessary for achieving the ultimate Aristotelian end of Eudaimonia(the flourishing life). In this reflection, we see an interplay of various types of intentionality which we do not find in the phenomenology of Husserl’s life world. The Freudian account here appears at the same time more Philosophical and more Psychological. In Mourning and Melancholia the wishes/demands of the agent are not just negated but “wound” the Ego, and if the “wish” is not “sublimated” by an attitude of acceptance of the lost object, we are witnessing a “weakened” Ego in the case of mourning or a “weak” Ego in the case of melancholia. Melancholia involves an attitude or a mood in which one’s aggressive response to the wounding is ultimately directed at oneself in the form of self-harm or suicide. The discourse involved in analysis is directed by the Reality Principle and aims at an attitude in which the past does not intrude traumatically or disruptively in the present and does not inhibit future projects. The “temporal” aims of analysis well illustrate the Freudian Transcendental Aesthetic and can only be achieved by a very technical use of Language that is not conceivable from the point of view of Phenomenological theory whether it be Husserlian or Hegelian.

Ricoeur claims that Phenomenology attempts to characterise the history of desire from the perceptual model of the unconscious and that it has the same telos as psychoanalytical theory, namely a return to a more authentic form of discourse. The difference between these two approaches(the phenomenological and the psychoanalytical) is characterised by Ricoeur in terms of a conflict of Interpretations in which, it is claimed, psychoanalysis concerns itself with the archeology of the subject in contrast to the phenomenological approach that concerns itself with the telos of the subject and teleological explanation. This, in our opinion, fails to see the extent to which Freudian psychoanalysis is teleological in both Aristotelian and Kantian respects. It also fails to acknowledge the extent to which Phenomenology is not sufficiently teleological to incorporate the practical reasoning of Aristotle and Kant. Ricoeur refers here to what he calls a “mixed discourse” in Freudian theorising, i.e. a discourse composed of an “energetics” and “relations of meaning”. It is Ricoeur argues, this process of achieving insight in analytical therapy that requires what he calls an economics of energy, and this has no equivalent in Phenomenological reflection. We have argued above that three principles regulate analytical discourse: the energy regulation principle, the pleasure-pain principle, and the reality principle. The technical discourse and the “total listening” of the analyst involve all three Aristotelian principles. These principles are Freud’s first principles, his “metaphysics”(Metaphysics in Aristotle is the theory of first principles) and these assist to form Freudian Philosophical Psychology. A manifold of attitudes display themselves in the patient as the therapy progresses but it is clear that the dominant attitudes are those of suffering and wanting to “become well”. One attitude needs to be removed and one installed in a very technical process. Suffering causes resistance on the part of the patient because there is in this state a compulsion to repeat. A number of techniques are required to reduce this resistance, techniques that will use a number of the Kantian faculties of the mind, e.g. the imagination, understanding, and Reason. Much of the analytic work will be aimed at refusing to engage with the anxiety-laden and wish-fulfilment fantasies of the patient. The positive aim of the therapy will engage with the Kantian faculties of understanding and reason primarily and attempt to instil a psychically distanced self-insight that will initially form a critical attitude toward oneself. There is nothing equivalent in Phenomenology because installing a “rational” master inside the mind of someone in bondage to their illness would be anathema to this modernistic approach. Submitting to Ananke for phenomenology would be another form of bondage from which one ought to seek to free oneself.

We should recall in this context the ancient Greek idea of thinking as a form of talking to oneself. We should also remind ourselves of the practice of Socrates when faced with difficult decisions relating to authority(whether he ought to openly admit to attempting to replace the Gods of the state with the child of the Gods, namely Philosophy). Socrates in such situations would consult with his daemon, seeking some form of guidance as to what he ought to do. Surely the daemon was good, in which case the Socratic resignation to his own imminent death was good-spirited–related to Eudaimonia–something far beyond the pleasure principle. We should also recall in this context that the great champion of the practical idea of freedom was Kant, who also claimed in his Psychological writings that man detested having a master but nonetheless needed one, until, that is, rationality became an integral and sustained presence in his life-world.