Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud
by Walter A. Davis
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989 Paper: 978-0-299-12014-6 Library of Congress Classification BD222.D38 1989 Dewey Decimal Classification 126
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
A profound, challenging, wide-ranging book, back in print for a new generation
“Inwardness and Existence accomplishes what no book before or after has even approximated: it demonstrates with great lucidity and insight the shared philosophical project that animates psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, and Hegelian dialectics. Davis roots the reader in the enterprise of questioning what is given and probing beyond what is safe in order to demonstrate that psychoanalytic inquiry, Marxist politics, existential reflection, and dialectical connection all move within the same orbit. No one who reads it will ever think about existence itself in the same way again. Davis’s landmark work will profoundly transform anyone who reads it.”—Todd McGowan, author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Walter A. (Mac) Davis is professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press,and Death’sDreamKingdom: The American Psyche Since 9/11.
REVIEWS
“Davis takes the historical strains between determinism and agency, content and process, inwardness and the external (or historical contingency and processsual immediacy) into dynamic, rupturing explorations of categories which provoke the reader’s analytic process. His writing is elegant and energetic, saturated with stress, the heady rush of analysis, and the challenges of hard work.”—Leighton Brooks McCutcheon, Journal of Mind and Behavior
“Praiseworthy because it grapples with the fundamental assumptions of these competing traditions, and does so with clarity and conviction.”—David M. Thompson, Philosophy and Literature
“This is . . . an enormously ambitious project, both for the mastery of diverse traditions and perspectives it requires, and for the philosophical acuity and imagination it presupposes. . . . Davis’s work has an original and important contribution to make . . . to the intellectual situation of our time.”—Jerrold Seigel, author of The Idea of the Self
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Toward a Hermeneutics of Engagement
1.
Hegel: The Contemporary of the Future
A Farewell to Epistemology: Reflection on Hegel's Concept of Consciousness
The Critique of Rationalism and Empiricism
The Structure of Consciousness
The Life of Reflection
Self-Consciousness: The Spirit That Cuts Back into Life
Desire—and the Object
Desire—and the Other
Subjective Growth: Master-Slave and the Struggle for Recognition
To Freedom Condemned: Stoicism and Skepticism
Self-Consciousness as Unhappy Consciousness
Toward a Dialectic of Situated Subjectivity
2.
Existentialism: The Once and Future Philosophy
The Experience of the Existential Subject
Identifying Existence
Who am I … What Shall I Do? Understanding the Question
Toward Anxiety: The Other and the Value of Fear
Toward Anxiety: Love as Existential Experience
Anxiety: In and for Itself
The Mother of Beauty
Dialectical Ontology of the Existential Subject
Two Misunderstood Concepts
The Existential A Priori
Existential Categories as Principles of Drama
Drama: The Law/Lure of the Concrete
Situated Subjectivity: The Ethos of Inwardness
Subject in Its Immediacy: Sketch for an Existential Psychology
Possibility, Project, Situation, World
3.
Subject in a Marxism without Guarantees
The Dialectic of Subject within Marxism
Taking Stock
Ideology and the Dissolution of the Rational Self
The Concept of Ideology: A Dialectical History
Capitalizing on Inwardness: A Nondialectical Comedy
The Belly of the Beast
A Last “Dialectic of Enlightenment ”
Everyday Life under Capitalism: The Workings of an Antidialectic
Anti-Bildung: Retrieving the Contradictions of “objective Spirit”
4.
The Drama of the Psychoanalytic Subject
On Catching Up with Oneself
Point of Entry: The Problem of Beginnings
Beginning in Medias Res: Trauma as Inaugural Experience
The Core Theory of Psychoanalysis as a Structure of Theses
Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud
by Walter A. Davis
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989 Paper: 978-0-299-12014-6
A profound, challenging, wide-ranging book, back in print for a new generation
“Inwardness and Existence accomplishes what no book before or after has even approximated: it demonstrates with great lucidity and insight the shared philosophical project that animates psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, and Hegelian dialectics. Davis roots the reader in the enterprise of questioning what is given and probing beyond what is safe in order to demonstrate that psychoanalytic inquiry, Marxist politics, existential reflection, and dialectical connection all move within the same orbit. No one who reads it will ever think about existence itself in the same way again. Davis’s landmark work will profoundly transform anyone who reads it.”—Todd McGowan, author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Walter A. (Mac) Davis is professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press,and Death’sDreamKingdom: The American Psyche Since 9/11.
REVIEWS
“Davis takes the historical strains between determinism and agency, content and process, inwardness and the external (or historical contingency and processsual immediacy) into dynamic, rupturing explorations of categories which provoke the reader’s analytic process. His writing is elegant and energetic, saturated with stress, the heady rush of analysis, and the challenges of hard work.”—Leighton Brooks McCutcheon, Journal of Mind and Behavior
“Praiseworthy because it grapples with the fundamental assumptions of these competing traditions, and does so with clarity and conviction.”—David M. Thompson, Philosophy and Literature
“This is . . . an enormously ambitious project, both for the mastery of diverse traditions and perspectives it requires, and for the philosophical acuity and imagination it presupposes. . . . Davis’s work has an original and important contribution to make . . . to the intellectual situation of our time.”—Jerrold Seigel, author of The Idea of the Self
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Toward a Hermeneutics of Engagement
1.
Hegel: The Contemporary of the Future
A Farewell to Epistemology: Reflection on Hegel's Concept of Consciousness
The Critique of Rationalism and Empiricism
The Structure of Consciousness
The Life of Reflection
Self-Consciousness: The Spirit That Cuts Back into Life
Desire—and the Object
Desire—and the Other
Subjective Growth: Master-Slave and the Struggle for Recognition
To Freedom Condemned: Stoicism and Skepticism
Self-Consciousness as Unhappy Consciousness
Toward a Dialectic of Situated Subjectivity
2.
Existentialism: The Once and Future Philosophy
The Experience of the Existential Subject
Identifying Existence
Who am I … What Shall I Do? Understanding the Question
Toward Anxiety: The Other and the Value of Fear
Toward Anxiety: Love as Existential Experience
Anxiety: In and for Itself
The Mother of Beauty
Dialectical Ontology of the Existential Subject
Two Misunderstood Concepts
The Existential A Priori
Existential Categories as Principles of Drama
Drama: The Law/Lure of the Concrete
Situated Subjectivity: The Ethos of Inwardness
Subject in Its Immediacy: Sketch for an Existential Psychology
Possibility, Project, Situation, World
3.
Subject in a Marxism without Guarantees
The Dialectic of Subject within Marxism
Taking Stock
Ideology and the Dissolution of the Rational Self
The Concept of Ideology: A Dialectical History
Capitalizing on Inwardness: A Nondialectical Comedy
The Belly of the Beast
A Last “Dialectic of Enlightenment ”
Everyday Life under Capitalism: The Workings of an Antidialectic
Anti-Bildung: Retrieving the Contradictions of “objective Spirit”
4.
The Drama of the Psychoanalytic Subject
On Catching Up with Oneself
Point of Entry: The Problem of Beginnings
Beginning in Medias Res: Trauma as Inaugural Experience
The Core Theory of Psychoanalysis as a Structure of Theses