Continental
Still Freud for a bit:
Dreams are always satisfactions of a wish (Wunsch).
There is an economical function for dreaming, it keeps you sleeping. And the dream provides a satisfaction for the tension that rises in the body.
Because most of our desires are not ok, we have to cope by disguising the satisfaction. If it was too unacceptable, we would wake up, and so we would fail to rest. This is why streams end up being so strange, in order to keep us resting.
Linguistic interpretation of the unconscious works quite well as the unconscious only thinks in language.
The dream disguises the satisfaction through dream-work.
Fehlleistung: actions that go wrong. Parapraxis. I do something to express a moment of my unconscious thought which is laterally related to what was really at stake. There is an innocent element that is related to the thing that bothers me, but which is referred through a lateral representation.
(Psychoanalysts only assist the patient themselves, whilst the patient activate the correct associations that lead to a deciphering of a dream.
”It could be seen that the elements which stand out as the principal components of the manifest content of the dream are far from playing the same part in the dream thoughts. And, as a corollary, the converse of this assertion can be affirmed: what is clearly the essence of the dream thoughsts nneed not be represented in the dream at all. The dream is, as it were differently centered from the dream thoughts – its content has different elements as its central point.”
Procedure of representation or representability:
Dreams are distorted not only because of the prior too, but also because there is a tension between the linguistic unconscious dream thoughts and the dream images. Not all thoughts can be transposed into images. You cannot put into a drawing every element of a thought. The dream thought is a full linguistic sentence. You should be able to find that all the components of the linguistic sentence should be found, whilst connectives and coppolas are still there in the full dream thought. Syncategorematic elements that are simply for a logical connections of the semantic contents cannot be represented.
Dreams are comparable to the art of a a caricaturist.
”What representation do dreams provide for ”if, because, just as, although, either, or” and all the other conjunctions without which we cannot understand setences or speechee? In the first resort our answer must be that dreams have no means at their disposal for representing these logical relations between the dream thoughts.
So we should be able to portray each dreamthought in a fully ”sayable” scenario.
Dramatisation:
It puts the element in a certain dramatic context.
These are the ways in which the dream is actively distorted.
What elements are important for a dream? Dream work.
Suppression and repression:
Dreams emerge out of a conflicting relationship between two psychic antagonistic systems: conscious and unconscious.
The unconscious wants something that the conscious is not willing to accept.
The refusal of the conscious to desire the same as the unconscious is then what causes repression.
The superego represses.
This, ie. The superego, explains the whole mechanism of disguise itself.
Topics: different places for categorisations, topoi, from aristotle. Concepts are spread out into a kind of field of ideation, where all the concepts have their places. We have to depict the psychic system as a kind of machine-like apparatus that is spacially extended, and there is a place in the second topic called the id (es), Ego (ich) and the superego (uberich).
id is unconscious repressed desire. Ego is the conscious thinking self, which is mixed up with my ideal ego, but this ideal ego is what decides what comes into consciousness from the id.
”We may therefore suppose that dreams are given their shape n individual human beings by the operation of two psychical forces (or we may describe them as currents or systems); and that one of these forces constructs the wish which is expreesed bu the dream, while the other exercises a censorship upon this dreamwish and, by the use of that censorship, forcibly bings about a distortion in the expression of the wish”.
It is because of the superego that things more or less become strange.
”The ego is nothing more than the endpoint of a series of identifications, everything here can be an identification, and so the self is fundamentally multiple.”
Not all psychic activity is in the unconscious. Superego is more or less an internalised social prohibition.
”Nothing, it would seem, can reach consciousness from the first system without passing the second agency (censorship); and the second agency allows nothing to pass without exercising its rights and making such modification as it thinks fit in the thought which is seeking admission to concsiousness.”
The true self lies in the unconscious, in the id. The superego is an internalisation of an external prohhibition, whereas our drives are the kind of things that are real rests of reality, that escape prohibition and the social system, and are even uncodifiable by the social system. The drives manifest in language, but the symbolic overdetermination of drives can take a different expression.
(Therapy always fails at the end according to Freud) You can never know your self as your whole. You can never shape yourself as you wholly are, id, ego and superego at the same time. We have to stay fundamentally mysterious for ourselves, and it is the same with other people.
He extends his psychoanalytic project to all spheres of culture.
By doing this, he discovers everywhere a kind of duality between a manifest and a latent content.
He uses this to interpret social phenomena and artwork and behaviour etc.
It now becomes possible to explain things as being manifestations of latent content, or at least supported by this.
Effectively for Freud, every time someone does something consciously, there is a little voice in that person’s head talking and desiring. There is a continuous parallel between an ongoing latent content and a manifesting of that.
There is so much psychic content bounded to unconscious, it never sleeps, and once one tries to liberate this kind of energy, then we have much more creativity and strength.
In the socio-cultural sphere, all the things we do are overdetermined.
Every word that starts with the German ver- indicates displacement sense.
Before Freud, a lot of mistakes are just that, mistakes, they are not rationally explained. In Freud, these things can be bared open. Sometimes the unconscious has to act, and acts out, by momentarily taking control of what the conscious does.
Conscious life thought and behaviour is not able to account for its total production.
If one had to decide every word one said, this would be very difficult. As such, the unconscious explains a lot of the gaps that we have in the conscious system. The conscious system is not able to explain what happens in itself.
Hence the hypothesis of an unconscious is necessary and legitimate.
”The hypothesis is necessary because the data of consciousness have avery large number of gaps in them; both in healthy and in sick people. Psychical acts often occur whihc can be explained only by presupposing othe acts, of which, consciousness affords no evidence. These not only include parapraxes and reams in healthy people, and everything described as a psychical symptom or an obsession in the sick; our most personal daily experience acquaints us with ideas that come inour head, we do not know from where, and with intellectual conclusions arrived at we do not know how.”
”the most repressive way to live is a life without repression”.
For Freud, freedom is the ability to displace desire. Freedom is not to get rid of all kind of repressions, but that which really oppresses us, that which makes it impossible to be happy, and this is the general goal of psychoanalysis. Pleasure and joy is authentic, and that depends on the life-trajectory we’ve had. Someone who suffers a psychosis is generally not very happy, to free the unconscious is generally not good.
Heidegger:
There are two Heideggers, one is the project of the history of philosophy, and intertwined with this, is the existencial philosophy of Heidegger, the fundamentalontologie.
For the moment we are bracketing the existencial, and then focusing on his interpretation of history.
Heidegger works initially with history, then existencial (and nazism), and then back to history. Being and Time is actually a kind of sidestep in his general project.
Hediegger takes over in Freiburg in 1929. One of Rickert’s most talented students.
Was initially destined to become a protestant priest. Is part of a very conservative protestantism.
Heidegger loves the history of philosophy, but has very little respect for epistemological quesitons, which are instead the most important for Husserl.
Heidegger doesn’t have a very high esteem for modernity, which is also contrary to Husserl.
He is critical against subjectivity and consciousness, whilst Husserl loves these.
Heidegger wants to make philosophy different, so rejects both neokantianism and Husserl’s phenomenology.
But not by referring to a field outside of philosophy, but returning to what philosophy really is.
Which for Heidegger is the history of metaphysics, metaphysics itself in its unfolding through history.
Modernity is an Ereignis (event) which is very pervasive and perverted. It entirely hides being, instead of focusing on it. The only moment it was pure was in Heraclitus. Modernity is a climax of all the bad things of the history of philosophy.
Philosophy = Question of Being.
This question can only be asked in relation to the history of metaphysics.
Participates in a new theoretical renewal of philosophy, into making it a theoretical philological endeavour about thinking about what philosophy is, a thinking of pure thinking. A pure knowing, this is what the highest form of the nous does.
Although he rejects his epistemological friends, he doesn’t renew philosophy through new praxis.
The solution to philosophy is immanent to philosophy.
Philosophy must be in its authentic place, which is the history of metaphysics. And the history of metaphysics is the history of being.
All philosophical concepts are historical concepts, which means they are handed over to us from generation to generation, wherein in every act of handing over, a transformation happens, a kind of translation, from ousia to substantia – and so it is already forgotten what the ousia is through the notion of substantia. A translation is always a mistranslation, and the original sense of the world is lost.
Every new generation of philosopher will necessarily bring up new concepts, by bringing up old concepts in a new way, and with each stepping forward, the old is forgotten. So philosophy necessarily distances itself from its origin. For Heidegger, the origin is what is purest, and the best, so philosophy must return there.
Everything else is decay.
Heidegger presupposes that we lose the origin. Whilst he has the power to go back to that origin, and this is our historical necessity, in order to institute a new era of philosophy, with a new (or the oldest) intepretation of being. We need to be open to a new understanding of being.
Heidegger thinks that philosophy is fundamentally only Greek and German, and he rarely interacts with French thinkers, despite speaking both Latin and French fluently.
Heidegger depicts Husserls as a cartesian, which is why Husserl has no access to the being. All this talk about intentionality doesn’t help to understand what is really at stake.
We lost the original meanings of words; all words are situated in a time and serve metaphysical difference.
True philsophical interpretation = becoming aware of the fundamental differences between contemporary and past understandings of philosophical concepts.
Ousia is not just something that upends and carries underneath, but is also the realm that the free man extends himself, unlike the purely material support of substance. We have to be aware of the concepts as they were in their ancient way. Which for Heidegger is a kind of creative deed. We need to be aware of our time, and of the Greeks etc. We only get a notion of the history of metaphysics if we understand the pluriousity of our terms.
By being aware and becoming aware, the interpretation of the history of philosophy will be a critical self understanding. We will understand the insularity of ourselves.
Our own ontology is distinct from the kind of ontologies that preceeded us.
Ontology here being the signs about what being is.
For Heidegger this is a creative deed, and we do not anymore claim that our ideas are universal or that we have a transparent way of understanding what the Greeks said when they said Ousia.
So Heidegger brings forward the study of Hermeneutics, which is the discipline of the interpretation of texts. Already seen in Aristotle in De interpretatione.
So Hermeneutics is the scientific elaboration of what interpretation is, of a text.
How can one make sense of a text?
Initially Schleiermacher and Dilthey made these two extremely important. Focusing heavily on empathy and sympathy.
What happens to us when we try to understand a text?
We have to talk with a text and make it alive for ourselves. And this reveals something not only about the person who wrote a text, but also about ourselves. We immediately become more aware of ourselves as we read texts. This is why reading is so much more powerful than for example watching a movie, because things are experienced internally.
Heideggerian hemeneutics = investigation of the history of philosophy as a reflection about one’s own historical situatedness.
As a process of self-distancing and self-understanding.
Every understanding of the other, is a critical understanding of the self.
Understanding a text, a friend, the Other, is the same mechanism. It is an understanding through the understanding of oneself. And you can only understand yourself through the Other’s opposite.
[We can contrast Heidegger with Hegel, where the process of history is entirely positive. Whilst in Heidegger it only goes away from the original meaning of things].
Philosophy has to re-activate the forgotten sense of meanings in order to transform the present and create a critical distance to ourselves.
”In the field of ontology, any Entspringen (springing-from) is degeneration”.
In Being and Time, he introduces a new project, called the destruction of metaphysics. Especially of the destruction of the concept of being.
It is actually the first volume of a bigger project that Heidegger burned the rest of. He wrote it mainly for Karl Jaspers. So metaphysics is not actually destroyed because he burned that part, the project ended up being incoherent. It can be said quite simply that there is a proliferation of the concept of being, such that we are unsure what it is. Heidegger lost the overview of his project, which is probably why it didn’t work out.
”We understand this task as one in which by taking the question of Being as our clue, we are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontoloy until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being – the ways which have guided us ever since.”
Being reveals itself in revealing the things, the beings. It institutes a new understanding of itself, as in being exploitation, ousia, substance etc etc etc. In the history of philosophy there are different a priori projects of being. If you are born in a certain epoche, you will understand that kind of being as such. All different epochs of being has a different understanding of what being is. It is an explanation of everything, in each time.
And Heidegger wants to return to the key moments of some key philosophers who expressed being in a new way. When Descartes lays out an inventory of the sort of things that the thinking thing has in its mind, this is the inaugural moment at which we understand that everything is inside me. And Heidegger wants to grasp these as experiences of a new way of exepriencing the world.
Aristotle does this, in order to witness the kind of experience that was at stake for these philosophers, when he spoke to being in a new way.
So he wants to show the multiple layers of Being, and wants to grasp all the inaugural moments at which being was sedimented and removed from sight. The interpretations of Heidegger are usually not really correct, but they are creative and lets us see something really new in how people understood themselves.
Sein: Being
Seiendes: the overall understanding of beings.
Metaphysics only thinks beings (Seiendes), not Being (Sein) itself. Metaphysics conflates Being with ”beingness” (Seiendheit).
(Heidegger read a lot of Meister Eckhart).
Being is a non-being, because being is the revelation of beings.
The Being of Heidegger, is the revelation of all things. It is not something that can be seen as another being, it is rather the act of revelation, and the light that illuminates and makes the objects intuitable. We can see the lights on the objects, but not the light itself. It is the act of manifestation. This is why Being is always a non-being in the traditional sense of metaphysics. In traditional metaphysics we think of Being as just simply a being, another thing that appears directly to us, and not by the fact of appearing itself.
Heidegger sees these things quite clearly through Meister Eckhart.
This is the phenomenological aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy, in that it relates to experience that direct to phenomena.
And it is through language that Being manifests.
Heidegger was most impressed by Husserl’s definition of truth, the givenness of a thing.