Francey Russell

This paper highlights the ways in which Kant engages with obscure representations (dunkle Vorstellungen) throughout his 1766 essay Dreams of a Spirit Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. Kant works with obscure representations at the levels of philosophical method, form, and content. First, obscure representations are implicated at the level of philosophical method, since for Kant philosophy itself involves pulling obscure representations out of darkness and into the light; second, the text itself stages obscurity; and third, obscure representations constitute the text's main content, as Kant characterizes both spirits and human-spirit communication—the text's central topics—as “obscure.” Dreams also anticipates some of the cautionary remarks he makes about obscure representations in his work on pragmatic anthropology.

This paper explores the idea that forms of self-opacity— vicissitudes of self-consciousness and disruptions of straightforward self-knowledge, registrations of dissonance and self-strangeness— need not be understood exclusively or necessarily as pathologies nor as brute psychological facts, but can be valued as part of a rich moral psychology and conception of selfhood. I consider a prominent contemporary account of self-knowledge that situates self-knowledge in the context of philosophical moral psychology and analyzes self-knowledge as an achievement of “rational, responsible self-directed agency.” While this model provides resources for understanding both self-knowledge and self-opacity, its broadly Kantian normative or axiological orientation means that forms of opacity tend to be framed as privations or pathologies of rational agency, in such a way as to leave us potentially cut off from the kinds of complexity, value, and significance that they might have for us. I then turn to some suggestive remarks by Bernard Williams, Lionel Trilling, and a passage from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, that serve not only to indicate a way of thinking about the value of opacity, but suggest that attending to this value might call for imaginative and metaphorical forms of representation. This is to say that attending to this particular topic—the significance of self-opacity—involves attending to questions of philosophical and aesthetic style.

Recognition theory has engaged psychoanalysis primarily for its developmental theory and realistic philosophical anthropology. In this paper, I elaborate a third way of bringing psychoanalysis and recognition theory together. Can the concept of recognition clarify what is distinctive in our relationship to psychoanalytic theory, insofar as we are at once readers and authors of the theory and the theory's object? I will argue that psychoanalytic theory calls for what I call an epistemology of recognition. In short, it is not sufficient theoretically to understand the theory; we must be able to recognize ourselves in the theory and find ourselves recognized by the theory. Just as recognition theorists have argued that a detached or purely theoretical relationship with other persons or ourselves is insufficient, so too, I argue, a detached or purely theoretical relationship with psychoanalytic theory is insufficient. The twist is that in theorizing the unconscious, psychoanalytic theory seems to present it precisely as we do not and perhaps could not “recognize ourselves.” Thus, I must explain how these two aspects hang together: if psychoanalytic theory presents us as, at least in certain respects, strangers to ourselves, what would it mean to recognize that picture? (This paper develops ideas from my 2022 Die Seele abbilden. Über Freuds Methodologie und Metapsychologie)

In recent decades, philosophers have turned to Freud’s last metapsychology of id, ego, and super-ego in order to reconstruct a naturalistic, developmental account of a Kantian moral psychology. In this paper I try to show that Freud’s conception of the super-ego as the intra-psychic source of authority presents a challenge to Kantian conceptions of conscience. I argue that the recent philosophical reconstruction of Freud omits a crucial and unusual detail: according to Freud, the super-ego has a ‘double aspect’ (Doppelangesicht), at once commanding and prohibiting that the ego become like the ego-ideal. After defending this more unusual interpretation of the super-ego, I argue that, on the one hand, Freud’s ‘contradictory’ moral psychology is quite different than Kant’s ‘conflicted’ moral psychology, and yet on the other hand, I argue that Kant’s discussion of self-conceit brings his moral psychology unexpectedly closer to Freud’s. I then suggest how Freud’s picture contributes to our own practical self-understanding, and close by clarifying the nature of Freud’s challenge to our ordinary and/or Kantian conception of moral psychology and moral authority. After Freud, it is not clear that our moral and psychic ideals come out unscathed.

Kant's most sustained discussion of obscure representations can be found in the first book of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. What is puzzling is that in the middle of the section devoted to the topic, Kant asserts that “because this field can only be perceived in his passive side as a play of sensations, the theory of obscure representations belongs only to physiological anthropology, and so it is properly disregarded here.” So, do obscure representations belong to pragmatic anthropology or not? Kant's official position is that they do not, yet the textual evidence—we find discussions of obscure representations in 20 years of his work on pragmatic anthropology—suggests that they do, in fact, belong here. Most of the literature on obscure representations focuses on their contribution to cognition and none has clarified what it would mean to assume a “pragmatic point of view” on obscure representations, and to study them in the context of pragmatic anthropology. My aim in this paper is to provide such clarification, focusing on Kant's discussion of our propensity to “play with” obscure representations and what he calls our “art of obscuring.”

Iris Murdoch offers a distinctive conception of moral psychology. She suggests that to develop a moral psychology is to develop what she calls a soul-picture; different philosophical moral psychologies are, as she puts it, “rival soul-pictures.” In this paper I clarify Murdoch’s generic notion of “soul-picture,” the genus of which, for example, Aristotle’s, Kant’s, Nietzsche’s, and Murdoch’s constitute rival species. Are all philosophical moral psychologies soul-pictures? If not, what are the criteria that a moral psychology must meet in order to qualify as a soul-picture? I propose five key dimensions. A soul-picture provides a picture of the soul or self that is 1) holistic, 2) value-rich and psychologically realistic (for Murdoch these are intertwined), 3) reflexive, 4) therapeutic and 5) the articulation of which makes use of imaginative language.

Throughout his lectures and published writings on anthropology, Kant describes a form of unintentional, unstructured, obscure, and pleasurable imaginative mental activity, which he calls fantasy (Phantasie), where we ‘take pleasure in letting our mind wander about in obscurity.’ In the context of his pragmatic anthropology, Kant was concerned not only to describe this form of mental activity as a fact of human psychology, but more importantly, to criticize and discourage it. But must we share Kant’s negative evaluation? Could fantasy play a positive role in some kinds of experience? In this paper I first reconstruct Kant’s conception of fantasy, and then consider what role fantasy might play in aesthetic experience. Precisely because of his anxieties about fantasy, Kant is careful to distinguish between the lawless freedom of the imagination in fantasy and the ‘free lawfulness’ of the imagination in aesthetic judgment. Departing from Kant, and with help from Susan Sontag, I argue that certain aesthetic objects, especially certain works of modernist art, positively invite fantasy, making fantasy part of proper aesthetic appreciation. I conclude by suggesting that while fantasy can indeed play a positive role in aesthetic appreciation, there is still reason to regard fantasy as ‘normatively ambiguous.’

[please see my website for the English language version] What is the relationship between a philosophical or theoretical conception of mind, and the mind’s conception of itself? Should the latter constrain the former? And how does the mind itself understand a theory of mind, that is, a theory of itself? I raise these questions by means of Freud. Freud suggested that the mind cannot merely theoretically comprehend psychoanalytic concepts but must be able to “recognize” and “sympathize” with them. I call this the recognition requirement. This idea clarifies the rationale behind Freud’s last metapsychology of Id, Ego, and Super-ego. I close by asking: when should a theory of mind try to meet the recognition requirement? I propose that a theory of mind should be structured according to the recognition requirement when that theory is connected with practical aims, specifically, when the theory is concerned with the life of the mind and with facilitating the mind’s own self-understanding.

What is the difference between knowing someone and acknowledging them? Is it possible to want to be acknowledged while remaining unknown? And if one’s desire to know another person is too consuming, can this foreclose the possibility of acknowledgment? Cavell argues that we sometimes avoid the ethical problem of acknowledgment by (mis)conceiving our relations with others in terms of knowledge and that this epistemic misconception can actually amount to a form of ethical harm. I show that Polanski’s Chinatown helps us understand the difference between knowing and acknowledging and that Cavell’s concepts help us better appreciate Chinatown.

What might film’s contribution be to the work of acknowledgment, apology, and moral repair? James Baldwin's 1976 book on film, The Devil Finds Work, can be read as a reflection on the role that film might play in the extensive, multi-dimensional, public task of, as he puts it, putting ourselves in touch with reality, specifically the reality of American racism as an integral to American reality, its past and present. Developing Baldwin's thought, this paper outlines two broad types of cinematic pictures or conceptions of racism: (1) films can present racism as a special event, or (2) films can present racism as a pervasive, structural reality. The former is complicit in a racist ideology that pictures racism as exceptional, rare, and unusual; the latter functions to critique such an ideology by picturing racism, not as a departure from the norm, but as constitutive of it. I develop a formal account of these cinematic pictures or conceptions through close analysis of two films made three years apart: Norman Jewison’s 1967 In the Heat of the Night (which Baldwin also analyses) and Michael Roemer’s 1964 film Nothing But a Man.

There is a debate in the literature as to whether Kantian self-conceit is intrapsychic or interpersonal. I argue that self-conceit is both. I argue that, for Kant, self-conceit is fundamentally an illusion about authority, one’s own and any authority one stands in relation to. Self-conceit refuses to recognize the authority of the law. But the law “shows up” for us in two guises: one’s own reason and other persons. Thus, self-conceit refuses to recognize both guises of the law. Hence self-conceit is essentially double-sided, at once intrapsychic and interpersonal.