The Kantian Proposition

The work of Edward Manet reflects a beginning awareness at the turn of the nineteenth century, of an alternative center of focus. Manet rejected the literalist picture plane. He painted with contrasts and penumbral blurs, reducing his paintings to a set of contrasting figure/ground relationships. In so doing, Manet proclaimed that he was the subject of his work (Janson, 1977). Some feel this awareness floundered as the Impressionists drew "too far back," in their attempts to produce pictures about that which was seen. In this we see the artistic articulation of Edward Edinger’s argument for ego-Self relationship as the blueprint for all relationships between subject and object (Edinger, 1972). Too close and you are eaten (inflation), too far away and you are estranged. The Freudians recognized this, but they saw only the danger of getting too close. Getting too close within the therapeutic relationship meant drawing dangerously near to the Archetypal psyche as it revealed itself in the dialogue of the moment.
 
 

Note: These excursions in thought are for those of us who enjoy thinking about the structure and dynamics of psychology.  The questions at the end of the primary reading are designed to verify that you have read the primary reading  for  Continuing Education Credits. There will be no questions asked regarding these additional readings that will apply to gaining Continuing Education Credits.
 

. . . the second text [referring to Freud’s Essay entitled The Unconscious] is couched in Kantian language; the context in which it occurs states that Kant corrected our views on external perception and warned us that our perceptions ‘must not be regarded as identical with what is perceived though unknowable.’ This is an important remark, for it places the unknowable outside, on the side of things; so too, the text continues, psychoanalysis warns us not to equate perceptions by means of consciousness with the unconscious mental processes which are their object. Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be. We shall be glad to learn, however, that the correction of internal perception will turn out not to offer such great difficulties as the correction of external perception--that internal objects are less unknowable than the external world." (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 435) It might be said that there were two major philosophical programs associated with the development of modern western thought. Descartes’ was the first, Kant’s was the second. Descartes’ thesis did not go unchallenged. A series of responses ensued. Empiricists, like Berkeley (1685-1753), Locke (1632-1776) and Hume (1711-1776) argued to ignore the role of the mind in analyzing sensory experience (Lemay, 1994). They suggested instead that we know things from experiencing them directly, then we use this information to build more complex knowledge systems, rather than by drafting a priori constructs from the corridors of our minds. An assortment of arguments continued until the end of the eighteenth century when the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, apparently resolved them (Kearney, 1991; Beardsley, 1960).

For the most part, thinkers before Kant clung to the position that through consciousness we confront objects that are real, and that this represents a limit our thinking could not surpass. Kant’s reply to this was that we know things in the world because, "we have produced them, not in respect to their existence (for in their existence they must be given), but in respect to their form" (Jaspers, 1962b, p. 16-18). Sensory perception, according to Kant, represented things only as they appeared, while intellectual ideas represented things as they really were (p. 15). One can see here that Kant was doing very little to address the dichotomies presented in Descartes’ thesis.

I use the term "Kantian" in this paper in a manner similar to my use of "Cartesian." I refer to a particular position or attitude taken regarding phenomena that infers a distinction between the ontological object (the thing-in-itself) and perception. When I see the lamp on my table, my experience of the phenomenon of the lamp involves the various physical qualities of light, color, shape, and a place in time and space. According to Kant, these features are not the objective reality of the lamp, which in itself is unknowable. While the objective reality of the lamp as a thing-in-itself may cause the experience, any attempts by reason to go behind this to the thing-in-itself results in a kind of logical contradiction (Collinson, 1987). So there is no way of knowing the lamp’s objective reality, one can only experience the lamp empirically through the subjective mechanisms of perception. What I perceive is then a mirrored projection of my own consciousness.

In the work of C.G. Jung there is a particular alignment with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Jung employs Kant’s terminology freely throughout his work, resulting in an assortment of problems for his interpreters. Confusing the issue is the fact that psychology does resemble a Kantian empirical science in some ways. Like modern science, for instance, it makes use of observation. Like modern science, it concerns itself with the structure of a given phenomenon. But that is where the similarity to Jung’s position ends. Kant continued the Cartesian assumption of a split between two irreducible realms of reality, Jung did not (Johnston, 1987).

Many Post-Jungians, however, interpret Jung in precisely this Kantian light. Edinger writes that, "There are in nature no points or lines or planes or regular solid figures. Those things are all projected by the psyche onto nature . . . .  " (Edinger, 1995, p. 57). Von Franz writes that, "Philosophically, you cannot reach a conclusion (about the perception of the thing-in-itself), you can only say that subjectively it seems to be correct" (von Franz, 1980, p. 34-35). Yet, neither Edinger (whose work has influenced me perhaps more than anyone elses) nor von Franz would, I presume, argue against the claim that Kant made the distinction between perception and thing-in-itself principally to account for the limitations of human perception, and not to lift the phenomenal realm out of the world of things and make it a creation of the subject (Brooke, 1991). This extrapolation would imply that Kant was relegating the ontological status of the world tos nothing more than a projection of an internal state, denying that things really exist. And to deny that things exists independent of us as perceivers seems awfully radical. Unlike the abstract notions of inside/outside, things talk back, proclaiming their presence often with a loud voice. We live, move, and experience our being through an environment populated with things that can stand off against us, resist us, and sometimes destroy us. When you kick a rock, you hurt your foot.

Now one might at this point ask . . . .  "So what?" What difference does this make? And one of the answers addressed in the next section of this paper will focus on precisely this relevance as it concerns the tautological fulcrum of transference and countertransference. When our knowledge of the world becomes relativised to a making subject, the external world and the beings inhabiting it, too easily slide into categories considered to have questionable existence. In fact, this was the charge Martin Buber leveled, perhaps a little too hastily, against Jung. While I do not believe Jung, or Kant, or even necessarily Edinger or von Franz are meaning this specifically, it is an easy conclusion in a Kantian world where the "reality" of the thing-in-itself cannot be reached directly. When the things of the world are only hypothetical, subjectively defined perception becomes the only known reality. Isolating ourselves as objects among objects, our own subjectivity quickly manifests as a theme for special investigation. It acquires a fascination equivalent only to that of its alternative objectivity, which has been the special fascination of modern science. Rather than shifting away from the blind literalism of the objective to the realm of embodied metaphor (the symbolic attitude of which Jung speaks), an insidious alignment occurs with this focus on subjectivity. The shift is from "out there" to its Hegalian antithesis "in here." The temptation is then to interiorize the meaning and place of all individuation -- just one more profound mistake in a pantheon of conceptual errors leading to the only you and only me of solipsistic isolation.
 

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Michael Staples