David Black, Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective (2023) (III)
Descartes and the Meaning of Foundations
We concluded the last discussion with a question: what is the meaning, for Black, of a philosophical “foundation?” As I suggested, it is both surprising and frustrating that he never addresses this question directly, since the trope pervades virtually every essay in the collection. And I examined a particular instance of this language — again, one of countless instances — to illustrate some of the puzzles and ambiguities it raises: “With Loewald…psychoanalysis became able to step away from its initial base in medicine and the natural sciences, and to stand on a richer and more complex base in philosophy” (18).
In fact, the drift of Black’s argument suggests that the quoted sentence misrepresents his considered critique. The latter concerns, not the “base [of psychoanalysis] in medicine and the natural sciences,” but rather the problematic relation of psychoanalysis with the “scientific Weltanschauung” (9), “the nineteenth century materialist conception of science” (9), or the philosophy of “positivism,” which for Black “involved accepting materialism and rationality, and rejecting metaphysics, idealism, and religion” (9).”
With these clarifications in place, we may revise Black’s sentence into something like the following: ‘With Loewald…psychoanalysis became able to step away from its initial base in philosophical positivism, and to stand on a richer and more complex base in the philosophy of phenomenology.’
Very well. But now, again, we confront the more serious question: what precisely could it mean for something, X, — say, psychoanalysis — to “stand” on the “base” of something else, Y, — say, phenomenology? The metaphor has a distinguished philosophical pedigree, suggesting that, in much the way that
a building “rests” upon a sound “foundation” and collapses in the absence (or upon the destruction) of the latter; similarly,
certain of our ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and practices “rest” upon some underlying philosophical conception, and enjoy only so much legitimacy as that conception imparts to them.
Perhaps the best-known instance of this metaphor, at least in the modern era, appears at the opening of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy:
“It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was everything I had since constructed on this basis; and from that time I was convinced that I must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structure in the sciences…[I]t will not be requisite that I should examine each [opinion] in particular, which would be an endless undertaking; for owing to the fact that the destruction of the foundations of necessity brings with it the downfall of the rest of the edifice, I shall only in the first place attack those principles upon which all my former opinions rested” (45-46)
Students of the Meditations will recall that Descartes’ initial “foundation” — those “principles upon which all my former opinions rested” — is a version of empiricism, or the view that the most “certain” knowledge is won from the deliverances of the senses. The Meditations, though, which document Descartes’ experiments in “radical doubt,” demonstrate that knowledge derived from sense-experience is invariably doubtful. (After all, the knower might always be hallucinating, or dreaming, or demonically possessed, or otherwise deceived by his or her senses.) It follows for Descartes that the empiricist “foundation” — the principle that the senses are the most trustworthy — is shaky. More specifically, his claim is that opinions resting upon such a foundation — for example, my “opinion” that I am really sitting here at my desk, rather than deep in a dream-state — are equally shaky, that is, untrustworthy.
In the remainder of the Meditations, Descartes attempts to justify his own, alternative “foundation,” one constituted by rationalist principles. On this view, our only “indubitable” knowledge is based upon self-conscious reasoning, paradigmatically the cogito’s certainty that “I think, therefore I am,” the sort of knowledge that cannot be coherently doubted, since it is built from “clear and distinct ideas.” For Descartes, only knowledge that rests on this foundation — rather than the old, empiricist one — is finally trustworthy.
We may leave aside the question of whether or not Descartes’ project succeeds. My purpose with this detour was only to illustrate one clear and compelling use of the “foundation” metaphor. It is tempting to construe Black’s own use of the foundations idiom in just this way. On such a reading, when he writes that psychoanalysis “needs to be stood on a different philosophical foundation, a phenomenological base” (3), he would be telling us that (traditional) psychoanalytic ideas and beliefs are uncertain and flimsy, inasmuch as their traditional “foundation” — positivism — is itself uncertain and flimsy. (For example: the foundation of positivism might not support our suppositions concerning either the existence or the attributes of “internal objects.”)
By contrast, a more robust or “solid” foundation — phenomenology, phenomenological ethics, and so on — might succeed in “supporting” psychoanalytic ideas where the old foundation failed. If the traditional ideas are supported by this new “base,” so much the better. (In Descartes’ account, we can — ultimately — found our commonsense beliefs about sense experience on his new, rationalist “foundation.”) On the other hand, having established a new, phenomenological foundation, perhaps we’ll discover that traditional psychoanalytic ideas cannot be supported —hence they must be abandoned, revised, or replaced by ideas that can rest atop the new foundation. (For Black, such “new ideas” seem to include [phenomenologically-secured] “allegorical objects,” “ethical” objects,” “religious objects,” and the like.)
Yet the remainder of the passage we’ve been examining complicates this reading. After telling us that psychoanalysis ought to rest on the foundation, not of positivism, but of phenomenology, Black continues:
“To say this is in no way to disrespect science, but to recognize that the “phenomenological” nature of the internal world makes it a different sort of thing from the shared objective world that science describes so successfully — not a replacement of it…but different from it and requiring a different approach to language if we are to grasp it appropriately” (18)
With this qualification, Black’s “foundations” proposal begins to sound like a simple plea for ontological pluralism. On this view, some object-domains (say, those comprising subatomic particles and black holes) demand one kind of foundation — precisely something akin to positivism. Other domains (those of “internal objects,” and similar items) demand another foundation — one described as phenomenological, ethical, and so on. But once foundations are multiplied in this way, the metaphor loses much of its power. Moreover, I’m far from certain that Black would accept this amendment concerning a “plurality” of foundations. For at other times (e.g. 10, 126, 141), he also suggests that phenomenology ought to be the foundation of both psychoanalysis and every other standpoint — very much including the natural sciences.