Abstract

Matt ffytche attempts to make good on his book’s title and provide a philosophical foundation for the unconscious. To that end, he privileges the work of the Romantic philosopher F. W. J. Schelling, who not only flirts with the unconscious but comes to view it as a necessary foundation for thinking about human freedom more generally. So begins ffytche’s sometimes complex, often convincing discussion of the unconscious, which grounds post-Enlightenment interest in freedom, autonomy, authenticity, and liberalism. According to ffytche, the unconscious underlies philosophical ideas about identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, first and implicitly in Fichte’s examination of the self, second and ..