Creatures, Technology, and Scientific Psychology
2.1 The Finitude of the Created Entity
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© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 G. Arciero et al., The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78087-0_2
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Creatures, Technology, and Scientific
discovery of the individual as an object of reflection—has to do with the way in which ancient ontology assimilated the new question of the self-affirmation of sub- jectivity. As we will see, Foucault traces the patristic imprint of this period as far back as the fourth to fifth century, identifying the emergence of the Western self (and of the technologies for governing it) in monks’ interpretative analysis of the content of personal experience. This is the very same tendency, which later estab- lished itself with philosophies of the subject, to seek an objective knowledge of the human being starting from one’s own subjective experience.1 In any case, what would appear to underlie the continuity emphasized by Morris (and overlooked by Foucault)—and which spans over a millennium of Western history—is the same ontological horizon, marked by the paradigm of production.
On the one hand, the new problem of individuality, which was quite unknown in Antiquity, completely redirected the development of philosophy by steering it toward subjectivity. On the other hand, this problem was interpreted on the basis of the ontology which had been transmitted and in the light of its understanding of natural entities: the exemplary model of production. All the new questions about the subject, which from Aquinas to Descartes and Kant, down to the present day, have been at the center of the development of modern thought and have always been conceived within the framework of ancient ontology. The perspective of production, in other words, remained the ontological horizon within which the new interpreta- tion of the subject became rooted. Descartes was the first to envisage the I as a finite substance (res cogitans), separated from the equally finite substance of the world (res extensa) by an abyss of meaning, and he based this distinction precisely on the ancient understanding of the world as substance (ousia).2 Kant made this view his own, along with the accompanying method, and radicalized to the point of claiming that the genuine perception of an entity is only possible for its creator, for the one who has produced it.
Only the producer can know the essence of the entity, whereas all that human beings can know is what they themselves do, and not things as they subsist in their genuine being. In his Reflexionen zur Kritik der reinen Vernuft, Kant writes: “It is difficult to comprehend how an intuitive intelligence other than divine intelligence could exist. For this cognizes within itself the possibility of all things as primordial causes (and archetypes); but finite beings cannot by themselves know other things, if not the mere appearances which they can know a priori, for they are not the pro- ducers of those things. It is believed that every a priori knowledge is knowledge of things in themselves; actually, the very opposite is the case, since it is always only
1 According to Foucault, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries marked the beginning of a judicial age characterized by the ambition to govern whole peoples through juridical structures.
2 It is on this ontological basis that Descartes grasps the subject as the foundation of metaphysics, as the origin of methodological certainty. The subject of the method is the formal I which stands vis-à-vis objects. It is this “methodical” I, the same subject envisaged by ancient ontology, that possesses knowledge of... (GA 28 1997). The I is the source of judgment by virtue of its essence.
(“Dieses Urteilssubjekt wird vom Urteilen nicht erst aufgesucht und vorgefunden, sondern es liegt im Urteilen selbst – schlechthin,” p. 120).
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knowledge of things as phenomena, i.e. as objects of experience. We can therefore only cognize things in themselves in God” (929 p. 261).3
Ultimately, what Kant did was develop the full implications of Descartes’
thought. What separates the self-aware entity (res cogitans) from reality (res extensa) is not an abyss, but a constitutive impossibility of access. If the I knows itself (qua finite spiritual substance) as the foundation of its multiple determinations and attitudes, and thus possesses itself, and if all we can know is the effect which things produce on us and not the things themselves, since we are not their creators, then the knowledge of objects is bound to have to do with the alterations of the state of my I in relation to such objects—i.e. “affections.” Indeed, the thinking substance for Kant is not merely intelligence (or, more generally, activity) but also receptivity.4 A passage from Kant’s 1782–1783 lectures reads: “Sensible representations are sen- sible representations according to the manner in which I’m affected by things; intel- lectual representations are ones independent of that. Sensible cognition that rests on receptivity is sensible, that which rests on spontaneity is intellectual. Through sen- sibility thus I cognize things as they are for us; but through understanding as they are in themselves” (p. 249 Kant Metaphysik Mrongovius). From this it follows that the only way to approach the knowledge of objects is by dealing with “the concepts and principles of the intellect only insofar as these refer to the objects that may pres- ent themselves to our senses” (1793–1967, p. 66).
This is a crucial point: the given as given can count as an element of knowledge for the knowing subject only to the extent that it is mediated by the subject’s own intelligence and rationality. Hence Kant’s famous observation that intuition without conceptual activity would be “blind ... less than a dream.” The transcendental turn consists precisely in the establishment of a science capable of investigating our a priori possibilities to know objects.
Kantian transcendental philosophy, therefore, has to do with a limit: human fini- tude, which consists in the fact that, since we are not the creators of things, it is only possible to gain knowledge of an entity starting from the cognitive structure of the thinking subject.5 This finitude is the original debt which does not allow us to forget that being for a person amounts to having being produced: to being an ens creatum.
3 “Es ist schwerlich zu begreifen, wie ein anderer intuitiver Verstand stattfinden sollte als der göt- tliche. Denn der erkennt in sich als Urgründe (und archetypo) aller Dinge Möglichkeit; aber endli- che Wesen können nicht aus sich selbst andere Dinge erkennen, weil sie nicht ihre Urheber sind, es sei denn die blossen Erscheinungen , die sie a priori erkennen können. Man meint aber, dass alle Erkenntnis a priori Erkenntnis der Dinge an sich selbst ist; sie ist aber gerade das Gegenteil, sondern allemal nur der Dinge als Erscheinungen, d. i. als Gegenstände der Erfahrung. Daher kön- nen wir die Dinge an sich selbst nur in Gott erkennen*).”
4 Intelligence is not confined to the activity of knowledge acquisition, but extends to acting morally, as an end in itself. The “I act” provides a crucial link between the personalitas trascendentalis and the personalitas moralis.
5 Persons, conceived as intelligences, are distinguished qua spiritual substances from natural enti- ties, understood as corporeal substances. As intelligences, they are characterized by spontaneity—
the capacity to bring about certain effects starting from themselves—and by receptivity, which is to say, the capacity to receive the “affections” engendered by another substance.
2.1 The Finitude of the Created Entity
In this respect, Kant follows in the trail of ancient ontology. For Kant, the ens creatum corresponds to that I of pure self-awareness—the spiritual substance—
which underpins every experience and which, as such, is destined to remain unknow- able.6 On the other hand, the interaction with finite (spiritual or corporeal) substances produces certain effects within us. As already noted, this generally corresponds to our way of knowing things. Hence, according to Kant, the being of an entity coin- cides with its being perceived. The “affections” roused within us by our dealings with others and with objects manifest themselves as states of the self to our inner sense—“that is to say, the faculty of making one’s own representations the objects of one’s thought” (Kant 1992, p. 104).
From this view of personality, a positum emerged which was destined to shape psychology for centuries to come: the notion of the states of the I as the objects of inner sense (as opposed to the objects of outer sense).7 Psychology thus became the science of inner experience, ontologically conceived as something measurable and hence open to investigation through the methodology of the natural sciences.8
2.2 Action, Embodiment, and the Transcendental