Abstract

This dissertation investigates the nature and the depth of the crisis of reason in modern thought through an interdisciplinary engagement of the work of Kant and Freud; philosophy and psychoanalysis. The crisis is one in which reason can no longer provide teleological guidance for human thought and meaning. The fact that the crisis can be shown to have permeated the foundations of the work of these two thinkers as well as their disciplines, which would otherwise have been thought to be fundamentally disparate, underlines just how deeply and broadly it has effected modern thought. While modernity's critique of finality and theology heralded the epistemological empowerment and enlightenment of the subject, Kant and Freud thematize a subject which is itself under critique as it projects problematical illusions rather than certainties. Moreover, Kant's and Freud's critique of the modern subject is linked to a critique of Aristotle's theory of time. Their critique of time leads to a constitutive division within the subject: a subject which knows itself only as it appears to itself, and not as it is in itself. In light of the constitutive division in the subject, the dissertation considers Kant's and Freud's assertion that the activity which is most proper to the human subject is its drive to an absolute quiescent unity: a drive which is as unconditioned as it is unattainable. Reason, then, is left without a final cause or a foundation of meaning--in the Aristotelian sense--and is caught, moreover, in the dialectic of its constitutive division, on the one hand, and its drive to an unattainable unity, on the other hand. This crisis suggests a threefold pathology of reason which includes the paradoxical and perverse reinscription of Aristotelian finality; the neutralization of subjectivity both with regard to identity as well as epistemological certainty; and reason's grounding in something other than empirical ratiocination: namely, the irrational. Far from being fundamentally disparate, Kant's and Freud's projects are seen as exemplary precipitates of the crisis of reason which has been wrought by modernity