Avoiding Heidegger

I should confess an avoidance to Heidegger that is particularly defensive in nature. I actually want to protect Husserl from Heidegger in a really irrational kind of way, which is besides the point from a philosophical perspective. Nonetheless, I do believe that reading Husserl and Freud together should provide an interesting perspective from which to interpret Heidegger. This is the unfortunate reading that you might have found here in this blog, unfortunate because it is oh so long and tedious and incredibly self-gratifying. For that, I apologize.

I began closely reading Being and Time today (where all my reading of it before has been admittedly sophomoric) and noted that Heidegger's take on facticity is particularly compelling. Recall that Husserl had argued in Ideas II that the psycho-physical subjectivity is grounded in the body by the faculty "I can," this faculty I understand as a leading thread to the pure Ego in all its transcendental numbness. Heidegger understands such an attempt as positioning a metaphysical entity in corporeality in a factical relationship to the world that leaves the fundamental relationship between the metaphysical entity and the world mysterious. Heidegger's facticity is remarkably more intimate, grounded in "taking care" that he believes is fundamentally apprehensive in nature but that also presupposes that every subject-object relation is fundamentally a taking-care that we cannot parse down to a pure Ego as the final theoretical absolute substantial subjectivity which transcends somehow our finitude. For Heidegger then the common ontological mistake is a kind of natural attitude that misplaces the task of ontology in privileging knowledge rather than making this facticity as a kind taking care of oneself within the world explicit in its phenomenality.

This is a fascinating idea, but perhaps we should be careful before we fully accept it as such. If we are to question facticity, make it "wonderful" phenomenologically, and then make this the essentially of Dasein, then we must be very careful explicating the narrative under which we construct this factical essential nature of Dasein. Where Heidegger is compelling I also find him to be unnerving, and I have the sense that in trying to lay hold of some anthropological essentially proves to be a risky business at the ontical level.

These are just brief thoughts that probably seem obfuscatory, or perhaps still sophomoric in nature. Let's just say I am worried that we might level at Heidegger a vague accusation of essentiality that we could level at Freud in his worst moments (phallic stage, anyone?) or Lacan when he priveleges a certain socio-symbolic law of the father? With Heidegger, admittedly, this accusation is aimed at what? Finitude? Being? I have no idea.

C. Pierce 1

Freud, Husserl, and the Question of Agency

The Freudian ego and the Husserlian ego seem irreconcilable entities. Freud insisted after the development of the second topology that the ego was partly unconscious and undiscoverable in reflection; in The Ego and the Id, he writes that “we have come upon something in the ego itself which is also unconscious, which behaves exactly like the repressed – that is produces powerful effects without itself being conscious and which requires special work before it can be made conscious” (9). Alternatively in Ideas I, Husserl’s emphasis on the availability to reflection of an eidetic intuition would seem to demand that “by the reflectional experiencing acts alone we know something of the stream of mental processes and of the necessary relatedness of the <stream> to the pure Ego” (sec. 78, 150). One could argue that the Freudian ego is not available to reflection in any essential sense because no act of reflection could uncover the ego as an intentional structure of consciousness. However, Freud’s argument has another implication, namely that part of the ego’s structure is by necessity unconscious. What separates the Freudian ego then from the Husserlian ego is that the latter cannot be constituted without making metaphysical assumptions about the nature and ultimate identity of the self, and further, an assumption concerning the adequation of concept, memory, and perception with lived experience that would seem particularly reductive. However, as Tito notes, “In Husserl’s view intentionality (consciousness) is not restricted to the explicit cogito; it includes the implicit cogito” (110). What this means is that the psychic Ego, the Body, and any other subjective genetic constitution can be activated and made explicit by the intentionality of transcendental subjectivity. If this is the case, then the Freudian theory of the ego, resistance, and working through of resistance can be interpreted as an elucidation of this very same process, and thus the Freudian ego and the Husserlian ego would be in deeper communication with one another than it would seem. There remains a question concerning the possibility of explicating phenomenologically psychical agency. What one can do is make phenomenologically explicit the unconscious destabilization of psychical agency by paying sufficient attention to the particular somatic and psychical determinations of psychic life, thereby situating the very “reality” of the metapsycholgical within the complex concatenations of lived experience. I will try as well to address at the end of this reaction a way of articulating the results of my interpretation on the question of agency in general and the relationship of psychic life to agency.

What is this relationship between the somatic and the psychical? Indeed, one could as well ask, what is the somatic and what is the psychical for Freud. It is how he understands the relationship between these two determinations of psychical agency that allows Freud to conceive an unconscious essence of psychic life not bound to conscious processes and conscious temporality. This conception of the somatic and the psychical would not amount to psychologism in the way that Husserl would understand it since it would not ground the essence of conscious processes in psychological geneticism. When Freud writes that “even subtle and difficult intellectual operations which ordinarily require strenuous reflection can equally be carried out preconsciously and without coming into consciousness” (21), such as finding the solution to difficult mathematical problems while sleeping, he is not denying that their meaning is dependent upon the intentional acts which make it intelligible for the subject. Freud argues instead that psychical agency cannot be bound primarily to consciousness in any essential fashion. Where it is important to emphasize the meaningfulness of the unconscious, it is justifiable to conceive this meaningfulness as intentionality, but also one should take into account the full dynamic of Freud’s argument. The ego is, in either an active or a passive sense, in the here and now. It maintains its relationship to the external world. It has access to an internal world, a psyche, and it controls motility. Yet this status is beleaguered by the force of unconscious ideas, and the ego seems capable of exercising resistance to its own conscious activity: “When we put certain tasks before the patient, he gets into difficulties; his associations fail when they should be coming near the repressed. We can tell him that he is dominated by a resistance; but he is quite unaware of the fact, and, even if he guesses from his unpleasurable feelings that a resistance is now at work in him, he does not know what it is or how to describe it” (ibid. 8). This resistance leads Freud into the question of psychical agency. This question is at the source of understanding the relationship between the somatic and the psychical. Indeed, the problem of agency turns upon the question of what the somatic is and what the psychical is. This can be attended to by placing Freud and Husserlian phenomenology into a dialogue with one another concerning the role of agency in the authenticity of self-reflection.

Nicolas Abraham describes in “The Shell and the Kernel: The Scope and Originality of Psychoanalysis” the anasemia of the term somatic in its relationship to the psychical:

How does it happen that fantasy has the power to move our bodies, be it sexually or by creating real diseases? […] This is nonsense, obviously, if we give to somatic and psychic the meanings of naïve empiricism. Nonsense again if we constitute them phenomenologically in the body proper and the habitudes of the Ego, respectively […] The somatic must be something quite different from the body proper, which derives from the psychic as one of its functions, the psychic having been described by Freud as an exterior layer, an envelope. The somatic is what I cannot touch directly, either as my ingument and its internal prolongations or as my psyche, the latter given to the consciousness of self; the somatic is that of which I would know nothing if its representative, my fantasy, were not there to send me back to it, its source as it were and ultimate justification. (87)¹

If we are to conceive the unconscious in wholly intentional terms, then we can direct our attention to the meanings of unconscious ideas which are at a certain temporalized remove from consciousness. In The Intepretation of Dreams, Freud models the psychic apparatus on an optical “lens” in which consciousness, the preconscious, and the unconscious are mediated by the traces of mnemic images each at some regulated distance from each other on this theoretical model. The unconscious, Freud argues, is thus a hallucinatory wish impulse asserting a demand upon the higher systems in certain pathological situations or normal states in which the relaxation of the influence of consciousness and perception is enforced, such as the ego’s own wish to sleep. Dreams will be said then to express manifest visual content indirectly giving voice to the latent dream thoughts of wish fulfillments. At this psychic level, an intentional description is incredibly useful in describing the relationship between unconscious idea, wish impulse, and conscious ideas. However, for Abraham, that symbols, signifiers, and conscious content can be designified in relation to unconscious processes is an example of the antisemantic affect of the psyche, an affect he names anasemia (ibid. 85). Yet, anasemia would not truly be anasemia if not for the complex relationship between psyche and soma he outlines above. The somatic constitutes the lack of any real ground on which to establish a transcendence of meaning, having been destabilized by the anasemantic effect of the psyche. Abraham writes, “The Somatic must therefore reign in a radical nonpresence behind the [psychical] Envelope where all phenomena accessible to us unfold” ( ibid. 87).

Freud writes in The Ego and the Id, “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface” (20). This theory of the somatic as an anasemic affect of the psychical has significant consequences in relation to the authenticity of the ego as a psychic agency. As Abraham has shown, psychoanalysis attempts to situate its discourse in the “opaque indeterminacy of the distance that separates reflecting subjects, a distance endangering even patent notions found on an illusory proximity to self” (84). Abraham points to a nearly insolvable problem in psychoanalysis familiar to philosophical discourse, namely the question of the extent to which this proximity to self must be assumed in order to produce the cure. Kant in Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View pointed to the complexity of this issue:

The fact that the human being can have the “I” in his representation raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person, and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all changes that happen to him, one and the same person – i.e., through rank and dignity an entirely different being from things, such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes. This holds even when he cannot yet say “I,” because he still has it in thoughts, just all languages must think it when they speak in the first person, even if they do not have a special word to express this concept of “I.” (15)

Kant’s claim here is important. By arguing that even at the most basic impersonality the human subject has the capacity to take herself as an “I,” Kant shows that this capacity is grounded upon the fact that the unity of consciousness gives the subject an abiding identity in time. The difference for Kant between the impersonal and the “I” is the difference between merely feeling the self and the capacity to think oneself as unified.² If Abraham’s assessment is correct then, for Freud this feeling of self and this capacity to have an abiding identity are at some remove from one another. This would be to say that in certain moments I could feel myself to be depressed without having an abiding sense of that depression for my concept of myself. My anxiety, so distinctly and “bodily” felt by me, seems groundless.

It is around this “groundlessness” of psyhical agency that Freud’s hypothesis of the ego as a projection of the body becomes intelligible. My psychic ego is not merely my surface, my body, but also a feeling I have of myself projected, as it were, around me from my psyche. In a footnote, Freud remarks: “[The body] may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body, besides, as we have seen above, representing the superficies of the mental apparatus” (Ego 20, fn. 16). Laplanche and Pontalis argue that “endogenous excitation is successively described as coming from the inside of the body, from inside the psychical apparatus, and finally as stored in the ego: this presents a series of successive embeddings which […] gives rise to the idea of the ego as a kind of actualized metaphor for the organism” (466). Freud envisions the agency of the ego as torn not only between external reality/consciousness and unconsciousness, but also as torn between the id, the unconscious agency of the drives older in its history than the ego “given up” throughout development, and the super ego, an identification made at the loss of the first object-choice of the id. Freud describes how these agencies become set up within the ego:

When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us. It may be that by this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the mechanism of the oral phase, the ego makes it easier for the object to be given up or renders that process possible […] The process, especially in the early phases of development, is a very frequent one, and it makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-choices. It must, of course, be admitted from the outset that there are varying degrees of capacity for resistance, which decide the extent to which a person’s character fends off or accepts the influences of the history of his erotic object-choices.

The ego is an agency anasemically organized around the psychical displacement of the somatic. Insofar as there is a biological proper body there is also a psychogenesis of the subject which cannot be fully represented as one would represent the intentional acts of the ego in relation to the making explicit of transcendental objectivities and meanings. Abrarham writes, “Both of these alternative – the body with its anatomical and physiological objectivations and the phenomenological Ego’s habitudes, with its repeatable acquisitions – belong to the same set of representations which, according to Freud, defines merely part of the whole: the Ego” (87). The agency of the ego then, even insofar as it is connected meaningfully to consciousness and to bodily motility, is at a remove from the whole spectrum of psychic life; it is a structural dislocation, a groundless agency.

In Husserl’s Ideas II, the psycho-physical reality of ego and body are oriented toward the fulfillments of intentional activity made explicit by transcendental subjectivity. The direction of this orientation is important for considering exactly what is at stake in Freud’s theory of psychical agency.

[The Body] is an organ of the will, the one and only Object which, for the will of my pure Ego, is moveable immediately and spontaneously and is a means for producing a mediate spontaneous movement in other things, in, e.g., things struck by my immediately spontaneously moveable hand, grasped by it, lifted, etc. Sheer material things are only moveable mechanically and only partake of spontaneous movement in a mediate way. Only Bodies are immediately spontaneously (“freely”) moveable, and they are so specifically, by means of the free Ego and its will which belong to them […] The Ego has the “faculty” (the “I can”) to freely move this Body […] and to perceive an external world by means of it. (151-2)

Like Freud, Husserl sees the body standing in a unique relationship to the psyche. Above, Husserl determines that the body is foremost an “organ of the will,” that though it is a materiality, it is a unique materiality in that it is moveable in an immediate, spontaneous fashion. Husserl explicates three different modes of being of the materiality of the body: 1), the body is a center of orientation, a “zero point,” a “here” toward which everything else is constituted as “there” (Husserl notes that provisionally the ego cannot be placed in objective space and that it is for the ego that the body is here and all other spatial realities are there); 2), the body has both facticity in that the ego cannot separate itself from it and a limit in appearance being imperfectly constituted such that there are regions of the body that are invisible to it, such as the head and the back; 3), the body is part of the causal nexus of reality, and insofar as it is located materially in this nexus, we are both capable of apprehending it as real and we experience it passively as an entity that is acted upon, feels pain, pleasure, tension, etc. For Husserl, the body represents a turning point in the subjective constitution of nature in that it is both a sheer materiality found in the causal nexus of external reality and that interiorly the body is felt to be “immediately spontaneously moveable.” This “turning point” of the body is such that psycho-physical reality has a unique constitution, a psyche conditional to the materiality of the body, and a physicality primarily causal in nature, both of which are intertwined with one another. (ibid. 158-60) Above, Husserl designates an “I can” as a faculty of this psychical ego. It is this faculty that is the source for Husserl of the psycho-physical subject’s freedom in reflection, its agency. This would be an agency “grounded” in the body, an agency conditional to the materiality of the body.

“In the modes of behavior apprehended in reference to the circumstances which pertain phenomenologically, the psychic property in question manifests itself or primordially manifests itself in originary experience” (ibid. 125), Husserl writes. It is important for Husserl that through the change of psychic states that psychical properties of the ego can be delineated such that we can know ourselves, perhaps not in the sense that we know a material thing of nature for which we have adequate concepts and schemas, but in the sense in which our psychic life comes to be found for ourselves in reflection. These behaviors, insofar as they are understood as expressing the “I can” faculty of psychical subjectivity, are knowable insofar as we can assume the subject, or as the subject assumes of herself, to be an abiding identity in time: a pure Ego. “The [pure] Ego holds sway only in the performance, in the cogitations proper. Yet it can cast its gaze precisely into everything that can receive this ray of Ego-function” (ibid. 107) writes Husserl. To the “I can” of psychic agency, the pure Ego provides the thesis, the meaning of this agency:

My thesis, my position-taking, my deciding from memories […] is something I have a stake in […] I can […] become “unfaithful” to myself in my position-taking, can become “inconsistent,” only in this, that I have become precisely an other inasmuch as I have succumbed to other motivations. In truth, however, I am not unfaithful to myself, I am constantly the same, though in a changing stream of lived experience, in which new motives are often constituted. (ibid. 112)

The founding immanent time of inner time consciousness provides the now in which the ego can find itself as subject of all of its acts. This is not a mere accident of the succession of now points but follows from the fact that this succession of present moments is proper to the ego as the ego’s own thematic life. Reflection is within the total sphere of this freedom of the human subject to grasp it “adequately in the reflexive shift of focus that goes back to it as a center of functioning” (ibid. 105). Husserl writes, “As this identical, numerically one, Ego, it itself belongs to ‘its own’ stream of lived experience, which is constituted as a unity of endless immanent time” (ibid. 112).

We are in a position now to characterize, by means of situating a dialogue between Freud and Husserl, of psychical agency, both phenomenologically and psychoanalytically. An authentic agency for Husserl would stem from knowledge we have of ourselves through reflection; the challenge is making this knowledge explicit through reference to our lived experience in which the body and the ego are found in intimate sense-bestowing relations to the evidence of what is given for consciousness. For Freud, authentic agency is an awareness, which is not the same as knowledge, of ourselves. Contrary to Husserl, Freud asserts that this can only be achieved by working through our resistance to analysis, wherein our reflective life cannot knowledgeably grasp the ego. As a psychical agency, the ego is always other to itself, where for Husserl, the ego’s agency is dependent upon the thematizing of its conscious life in the intentional acts of the pure Ego. As our brief allusion to the Kantian distinction between feeling oneself passively and actively thinking oneself as an identity points toward the question of how a psycho-physical subject can be said to reflect upon itself, then one can argue that Freud inserts the otherness of psychical agency into Husserl’s phenomenological understanding of the difference between “I” and “me.” I am the unity of my acts insofar as I take myself to be this subject within the material physical world, but insofar as I am a personality, a sexual subject, a person with a certain history, etc. I am necessarily an other to myself. Where Husserl would refer to an inconsistency in my motivations that makes me other, Freud refers instead to part of my history which is radically other than what the ego can realize of itself reflectively since its own development is rooted in this otherness. “To have heard something and to have experienced something are in their psychological nature two quite different things, even though the content of both is the same” (176), writes Freud in “The Unconscious.” This problem is at the heart of resistance as metapsychological phenomenon and why mere interpretation will not resolve resistance; a working through of resistance facilitates this communication between “hearing” and “experiencing.” For Husserl, there is a similar adherence to a kind of working through. As Husserl writes, “Simply to look at a thing, i.e., to bring to givenness its extension and the concomitant sensuous fullness (thus the momentary schema of it) is not yet the same as actually experiencing the thing as a material thing” (Ideas II, 122). Where Husserl acknowledges the legitimating role of the “I” in knowledge, Freud shows that this legitimation is undermined by an opacity of the “I” in regards to itself. We can understand how a pleasure can be lived as unpleasure, a self can be other, and so on by situating psychical agency within lived experience. Acknowledging this shared commitment to lived experience, one would need to register its role as evidence for Husserl and as extra-phenomenal meaning for Freud. From this perspective, psychical life would be more than mere dreams and fantasies but would have unique significance in respect to an agency that cannot adequately discover itself in constituting its experience. Yet it is shared “lived experience” accesed by the strenuousness of phenomenological reflection and the work of analysis that provides both a profitable communication between phenomenology and psychoanalysis and also the greatest challenge in determining what constitutes experience, remembering, and intelligible identity

Works Cited

Abraham, Nicolas. “The Shell and the Kernel.” The Shell and the Kernel. (with Maria Torok). Ed and

trans. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994. v. 1. 79-98.

Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Trans. Joan Riviere. Ed. James Strachey. New York: W.W.

Norton, 1989.

- -.“The Unconscious.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of

Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. by James Strachey. v XIV. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 161-205.

Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983.

--. Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book, Studies

in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz et André Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Publishers, 1989.

Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. and Ed. Robert B. Louden.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.

Laplanche, Jean. The Language of Psychoanalysis. (with J.B. Pontalis). Trans. Donald Nicholson-

Smith. New York: W.W. Norton, 1973.

Tito, Johanna Maria. Logic in the Husserlian Context. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990.

1 I have skipped a sentence about instinct and drive: “What is the sense of the nonsensical ‘organic sources of Instinct or Drive,’ or of the deployment of either one ‘on the limits of the somatic and psychic’”(Abraham 87). Freud’s theory of the drives is intimately bound up with his theory of sexuality and self-preservation and of death and destructive tendencies, representing what he often would call the mythology of psychoanalysis. The existence of drives, on the limits of the somatic and the psychic, Freud would claim in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, are older than dreams.

2 On the child’s acquisition of language, Kant writes: “Before he merely felt himself; now he thinks himself” (15).