Psychoanalysis and the Cartesian subject
21 July 2024
[NOTE: This is the thirteenth in a series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech. For the previous article, click here. For the next article, click here.]
The difficulty in restoring the conditions for human freedom — that is, the conditions for free speech and genuine action — in the modern world is not only due to the eclipse of the public sphere by the rise of the social (in the nineteenth century), but also to the transformation of human beings from actors into subjects, which took place two centuries earlier. This transformation is most clearly evident in two historical developments that are closely associated with the dawn of modernity: the birth of the nation-state and the scientific revolution. These two developments are the cradle of the modern subject.
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The birth pangs of the nation-state appear with the consolidation of political power in the hands of centralised authorities, first in France and Spain in the late sixteenth century, and then in England, Sweden, and the Dutch Republic in the early seventeenth. Feudal systems, characterised by fragmented and overlapping authorities, gradually gave way to centralised states with more clearly defined territorial boundaries and unified governance. It is at this time that the modern concepts of sovereignty and the sovereign first appear prominently in Western thought, particularly in the works of political philosophers such as Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. The concept of sovereignty, which emphasises the ultimate authority of a central power over a defined territory and population, inherently involves the idea of individuals as subjects of that sovereign authority. Sovereignty is concerned with the relationship between the ruler (sovereign) and the people (subjects) within the state. The subjects are those who owe allegiance to the sovereign and are governed by the laws and authority of the state.
The birth of the nation-state is closely linked to processes of expropriation. As centralised authorities emerged, they frequently expropriated land, resources, and power from local and feudal authorities to strengthen their control and build a unified administrative structure. This process not only facilitated the consolidation of state power but also reshaped social, economic, and political landscapes by converting common wealth into private property. The overall result was, in Hannah Arendt’s evocative vocabulary, the alienation of the world.
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The world alienation resulting from the processes of expropriation and wealth accumulation associated with the birth of the nation-state is, however, of far less significance than the earth alienation underlying the scientific revolution. The shock of modernity arises in large part from the fact that these two forms of alienation occurred more or less simultaneously.
The publication by Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543 of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (“On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres”) sounded the death knell for both the geocentric model of the universe and the Aristotelian view of the cosmos. In that work, Copernicus imagined looking at the earth and the other planets from the perspective of a “virile man standing in the sun,” and thereby discovered the point outside the earth that Archimedes had longed for. And this discovery was the first indication of “the astounding human capacity to think in terms of the universe while remaining on the earth, and the perhaps even more astounding human ability to use cosmic laws as guiding principles for terrestrial action” (Arendt, The Human Condition, p.284).
The “perplexity inherent in this discovery of the Archimedean point” was, as Arendt notes, “that the point outside the earth was found by an earth-bound creature, who found that he himself lived not only in a different but in a topsy-turvy world the moment he tried to apply his universal world view to his actual surroundings” (ibid). The triumph of Descartes was to find a solution to this perplexity by bringing the Archimedean point back to earth and relocating it in man himself. This meant, in effect, “to choose as ultimate point of reference the pattern of the human mind itself” (ibid, emphasis added). And since, for Descartes, the human mind “assures itself of reality and certainty within a framework of mathematical formulas which are its own products” the end result is an epistemological revolution consisting in the “replacement of what is sensuously given by a system of mathematical equations where all real relationships are dissolved into logical relations between man-made symbols” (ibid).
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Modernity thus transforms man into a subject in two senses. First, a political subject — a being who owes allegiance to a sovereign and is governed by the laws and authority of the nation-state. Secondly, and more importantly, a Cartesian subject — a being who is forced to retreat from the objective world into the prison of his own mind, into the limitations of subjective patterns he himself created. Arendt points out the terrible fate to which this creature of modernity is condemned: he is no longer capable of what all those before him were capable of achieving — that is, “to experience the reality of what he himself is not” (op. cit., p.288, emphasis added). Instead of objective reality, in other words, he finds merely scientific instruments, and “instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself” (op. cit., p.261, emphasis added). Heisenberg’s point, of course, is that “the observed object has no existence independent of the observing subject” (ibid).
Psychoanalysis offers a way out of this internal labyrinth— a tortuous escape route, to be sure, but perhaps the only one we have discovered so far. Arendt is too pessimistic when she remarks that “the outstanding characteristic of Cartesian doubt is its universality” — that is to say, the fact that “nothing, no thought and no experience, can escape it” (op. cit., p.275). For psychoanalysis does, in fact, point to an escape route. If “this doubt doubts that such a thing as truth exists at all,” psychoanalysis is uniquely capable of dispelling it and enabling the analysand to perceive the truth of her desire. If “Being and Appearance part company” in the birth of modern science, they need not do so “forever,” as Marx once remarked; psychoanalysis reconstitutes one traditional concept of truth — that based on divine revelation — in a modern guise: namely, as the revelation of the unconscious. In this it restores the twofold foundation of classical epistemology: “that what truly is will appear of its own accord and that human capabilities are adequate to receive it” (op. cit., p.276).
The subject of psychoanalysis remains a Cartesian subject in the sense that she does not magically recover the premodern capacity to directly access what is sensuously given. She remains largely trapped in the world of science — that is, in “a system of mathematical equations where all real relationships are dissolved into logical relations between man-made symbols” (op. cit., p.284). In the course of psychoanalytic treatment, however, she discovers that these symbols are not merely subjective, but have an objective reality outside of her own mind, and in relating to them objectively she escapes from the labyrinthine pathways of the internal Cartesian prison.
This is what makes psychoanalysis so different from Cartesian introspection, which is “not the reflection of man’s mind on the state of his soul or body but the sheer cognitive concern of consciousness with its own content” (op. cit., p.280). This pure self-absortion is “the essence of the Cartesian cogitatio, where cogito always means cogito me cogitare” (ibid). If, in Cartesian introspection, “man is confronted with nothing and nobody but himself,” in psychoanalysis the subject is finally confronted with the Other. Descartes “believed that the certainty yielded by his new method of introspection is the certainty of the I-am,” but this certainty turns out to be illusory and collapses into paralysing doubt. Paradoxically, in highlighting the uncertainty of the I-am, psychoanalysis partially restores the long-lost classical access to a worldly reality that is given directly to the senses and to reason. It rescues the analysand from the “dissolution of objective reality into subjective states of mind or, rather, into subjective mental processes” (op. cit., p.282) brought about by modern science, in which “what men now have in common is not the world but the structure of their minds” (op. cit., p.283), and restores access to a common world — though one which is shared, it must be admitted, by a relatively small number of people. Still, it is better than nothing.
The world of modern science is one in which “the material things we see and represent” are now “unimaginable” (op. cit., p.288); tables are not solid, but mostly vacuum in which tiny things, which are not really “things” at all, somehow float. With the disappearance of the sensually given world – the world in which people used to live before the advent of modern science — “the transcendent world disappears as well, and with it the possibility of transcending the material world in concept and thought” (ibid). In place of this alienated universe, which is, as Erwin Schrodinger argued in his 1952 lecture series on “Science and Humanism,” not only “practically inaccessible but not even thinkable” — for “however we think it, it is wrong” — psychoanalysis allows us to feel at home in the world once more and restores the possibility of transcending it.
