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Bringing the Good into View
Think of our attachment to some sort of ideal…some goal of satisfaction,
in as complexly psychological a way (neither naturally caused nor reflectively deduced),
and then think of that attachment as a condition of life,
a condition of any practical sense in a life.
Pippin Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy.
This paper developed out of a sense that something is wrong in philosophical accounts of action, ethics, and our
relationship to the good broadly speaking, and represents an effort to justify this discomfort. It seems that
proponents of the guise of the good—the thesis that all action is for the sake of some good—take as their basic
guide Aristotle’s suggestion that “every decision seems to aim at some good” (NE1094a); in following this,
acting under the guise of the good is modelled on the structure of conscious endorsements or decision. Theorists
of action and self-consciousness frequently invoke examples that suggest that acting for the sake of some good
were a matter of performing simple actions or making straightforward decisions—going upstairs to get a camera
(Anscombe 2000, 35), deliberating between staying home and going to a concert (Byrne 2011, 213), flipping a
switch to turn on a light (Davidson, 1980). We deliberate between available goods by reflecting on each good’s
merits or drawbacks; thanks to this reflective or deliberative process, we are able then to give reasons for our
action. One corollary of picturing acting under the guise of the good as a matter of conscious choice or decision
is that conflict is understood on the “traditional” model of mutiny (as Boyle and Lavin call it): either our
motivational faculties come into conflict with one another, or our reasons or desires in support of one good
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conflict with our reasons or desires for some other good. This is what I would call a “combinatorial” account of
conflict, which suggests that the faculties could be disposed or organized such that all conflict would be
resolved.
I’m still not familiar enough with philosophy of action or even philosophies of the good to know if this
is true, but my sense has been that there is fairly broad confidence in the power of conscious, rational reflection
both in structuring our relation to the good and in transforming or adjusting that relation in cases of conflict. As
Boyle and Lavin write in their essay “Goodness and Desire:” “[a rational agent] has the power to reflect on how
to act, and if on reflection he does not accept that a given way of acting has at least something good about it, he
will in so doing have changed his mind about whether to do it” (192). Thus on such an account we both have the
power to reflect on our acting under the guise of the good, and our conscious reflection and assessment of our
own action just as such is sufficient to change our minds.
What I want to articulate is the possibility that rational reflection is not the primary form of cognition
involved in our relationship with the good, and that any account of our relation with the good must accommodate
this fact. Part of this idea comes from a commitment to the thought that unconscious mental processes do a lot
of work in organizing and mediating our relation to the good, and part comes from the thought that the very
rational reflection we engage in in our assessments of the good is already structured, already shaped, by the good
qua standard or dimension of reflection (this is Boyle and Lavin’s idea, which I will discuss). In writing this
paper, I wanted to do justice to my sense that while we are responsible for our relation to the good, for our
decisions and actions and commitments, we do not choose the standards that govern our choices of good and
bad; how we regard the world with respect to good and bad is not wholly up to us, and so an account of acting,
or more broadly livng, under the guise of the good, has to grapple with the fact of a certain self-blindness or selfstrangeness, and hence a certain blindness or strangeness with respect to the good. We are accountable for,
responsible for, and beholden to an evaluative relation to the world that is not entirely up to us, and not entirely
available for our reflective assessment and endorsement. So I wanted to justify both my sense of estrangement
from these philosophical approaches, and my sense of the strangeness, or even uncanniness of the good.
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In their recent paper defending an Aristotlean, Thomistic, Thompsonian version of the guise of the good thesis,
Boyle and Lavin write that “rational action is a kind of movement that has its source in a subject’s power to
bring things under the concept good” (2010, 20-21); thus human intentional action is grounded in the ability to
represent an object or action as good, in the capacity to give reasons for the action with reference to a
desirability characterization, to use Anscombe’s phrase. In the conclusion of their paper, Boyle and Lavin
respond to an objection that their guise of the good thesis is too intellectual in seeming to require conscious
reflection on the concept of goodness, an ability to predicate an end as good, as a condition for rational action.
In response, they insist that goodness functions, not as an idea upon which we must reflect in order to act, but
more broadly as the standard brought to bear in considerations of action, or as the dimension in which actions
and beliefs are organized; such a standard, they argue, can be operative unreflectively or unselfconsciously
(2010, 40). They suggest that an actor need not make explicit reference to the goodness of his chosen end;
rather, goodness operates as the implicit standard or dimension in accordance with which relevant reasons or
considerations for acting can be distinguished from those irrelevant. In this way, goodness constrains, not the
particular reasons given to justify an action, but as they say the “manner” in which any action or reason for
action can be considered. To paraphrase Boyle and Lavin, a rational creature may not have the predicate ‘is
good’ in its vocabulary, but the standard that this predicate designates provides the structure of its reflection and
action (cf. ibid).
It is this notion of goodness as a standard or dimension of action and thinking about action that I will
employ here. I take cues from Kant’s theoretical philosophy and Freud’s and Klein’s metapsychology to offer
what I will occasional call a conditioned transcendental account of the good qua standard. That is, I will suggest
that we need to conceive of the good as both transcendental—as an a priori, formal condition of possibility for
thought and action—and as conditioned—as, to use McDowell’s phrase, “an aspect of one’s nature as it has
become” (1998, 185), a feature of mind shaped by conditions external to the mind itself. This is an effort to offer
something like a formal account of the good qua standard that can still accommodate the historicity or
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conditioned nature of the good. So it fills out the formal account without fully determining the nature of the
good.
Boyle and Lavin close their paper by urging that “if the [guise of the good] thesis turns out to articulate a
commitment involved in the application of forms of thought [essential to our everyday understanding of
ourselves], then it cannot be lightly dismissed, for we can no more brush aside these forms than we can brush
aside our capacity for choice itself” (2010, 44). For Boyle and Lavin, then, the good as a structuring standard or
dimension of action underwrites, most importantly, our capacity to choose amongst objects or actions; thanks to
the standard of the good, our choices can be rationally articulated and ordered. By contrast, I want to argue that
we underestimate the reach of this standard if we understand acting under the guise of the good as primarily
underwriting our everyday capacity for choice, and that we overestimate the reach of reflection if we understand
it as capable of both apprehending and adjusting that standard.
Now to be fair, Boyle and Lavin don’t state that all actions result from conscious choices, and seem
happy to acknowledge that the scope of human action is wider. But their paper does seem to track a model of
action that puts a lot of weight on self-consciousness and reflection, where both of these function primarily to
guide conscious choice, endorsement, and action. As they write: “a rational agent is one whose self-movement
is subject to explanations that are essentially known to their subject” (188)—that is, rational action is such that
its explanation is known to the actor; if it cannot be so explained, the agent is not rational.
Boyle and Lavin are not alone in presenting the idea of acting under the guise of the good on the model
of choice. As I’ve mentioned, the examples from this area of philosophy suggest that acting is best illustrated by
extremely unproblematic examples—going upstairs to get a camera (Anscombe 2000, 35), deliberating between
staying home and going to a concert (Byrne 2011, 213), flipping a switch to turn on a light (Davidson, 1980).
These are examples, in Anscombe’s words, “concerned with a man’s performance in its more immediate
descriptions” (Anscombe, 87). Keeping in line with such thinkers, for Boyle and Lavin acting under the guise of
the good is best understood as a matter of deliberating between available goods (things already brought under
the concept good, to use their terms), such that difficulty in the deliberative process is understood to result from
weighing those goods’ merits and drawbacks.
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Such examples are understood to be helpful because they represent cases where the actor is expected to
be able to give an account of herself (give her reasons for acting), and so they are taken to be exemplary cases of
intentional action for the sake of some good. Yet one could also argue, as I will, that such cases are limited as
illustrations of pursuing the good insofar as they describe situations where the problem as to what could count as
good or bad is in fact already resolved, and where one’s deliberation between goods is nearly a matter of
indifference. Deliberating between going to a concert or staying home of course could represent a significant
instance of pursuing good and avoiding bad, but such significance would derive, not from the objects themselves
or even one’s current desires, but, as I will suggest, from the context or patterns of significance (or motivational
set, to use Williams’ phrase) in light of which the final decision was made.
The real shortcoming of such theories comes from the fact that they in fact presuppose that the agent can
and indeed already has structured her actions vis-à-vis some standard of goodness, that she can already engage
her power to subsume things under the concept of good, and that things are available, so subsumed. That is,
such accounts don’t clarify how the agent comes to regard anything in particular as good in the first place, how
she comes to regard this particular as good; instead they presuppose that certain things are already regarded as
good. In this way, reflecting on the guise of the good by way of instances of straightforward, first-order
choosing seems to take for granted part of what an account of the good should seek to explain; namely how it is
that the good comes to function as a standard for human life, or what this power is that allows us to represent
things as good. By concentrating on choice, such accounts arrive on the scene too late. Or in a less critical tone,
by concentrating on action in its immediate descriptions, such accounts are interested in the rationality of the
action, and what I want to explore is the rationality of the person, the whole motivational complex in which
actions make sense or fail to.
By concentrating on action in its immediate descriptions, these kinds of accounts of acting and thinking
under the guise of the good sidestep the difficult notion that we are bound in a relationship with the good that we
do not choose, that we often do not fully understand, or more problematically, a relationship that we may not
fully endorse. Boyle and Lavin place much of the weight of their argument for the good qua standard on our
capacity for reflection: “[a rational agent] has the power to reflect on how to act, and if on reflection he does not
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accept that a given way of acting has at least something good about it, he will in so doing have changed his mind
about whether to do it” (192). What I suggest is that, without claiming that reflection has nothing to do with or
no power over our relationship to the good, reflection is in fact a limited and not inherently transformative
capacity. Further, precisely as the standard for reflection, as what provides the dimension or shapes the manner
of reflection, the good will not be straightforwardly available as the object of that very reflection. Thus, taking
seriously the good as a standard or dimension means reorienting philosophical discussion away from its focus on
the good as the object of choice or decision.
As a secondary concern—and one I haven’t worked out yet—I want to suggest that this preoccupation
with choice and reflection means that such accounts miss a source of conflict more fundamental and intransigent
than the conflict normally addressed by philosophy. Boyle and Lavin account for conflict by way of what they
call the “traditional” view that the motivational faculties can fall into mutiny (2010, 43); desire, for example, can
override what reason tells us is good, and thanks to the resulting confusion, our relation to the good and our
ability to pursue it is compromised. That we have a divided soul, it is argued, means that our various aims can
contradict one another, and thereby our relation to the good is conflicted. The mutiny explanation holds that
such conflict is a contingent (and thus ultimately resolvable) combinatorial difficulty, whereby mental and
motivational faculties come to clash, or when we select the wrong good to pursue. In fact this account of
combinatorial irrationality is an essential component of accounts of the good that take choice to be the model for
action: my various independent faculties want various different kinds of things, and I find myself in the situation
of having to choose between competing goods precisely because my faculties can themselves come into
competition, or mutiny. But, such accounts suggest, if on reflection an agent does not accept that a given way of
acting has at least something good about it—which is to say he perceives some conflict or tension—he will
thereby have changed his mind about whether to do it or endorse it (cf. Boyle and Lavin,192).
As I will propose, focusing on the conflict arising between reasons, or between reason and desire, can
obscure the deeper, more structural conflict operative in the good qua standard. The Kantian-psychoanalytic
account I will offer demonstrates that a kind of essential or a priori form of conflict not only underpins our
relation to the good, but in fact makes that relation possible. I wont work to defend this yet, but just want to
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indicate that the level at which conflict is pitched in traditional accounts of the good is, in fact, too rational, and
this allows such accounts to regard reflection as capable of resolving such conflicts. In Lear’s words, this is a
philosophical orientation that “insists that in self-conscious reflection we manifest our freedom” (Lear 2004,
452). I follow Lear in his suggestion that what needs appreciation and what is so difficult about responsibility
and self-understanding, is that it is not most fundamentally this or that conflict that needs attention or resolution
but rather the whole motivational organization or standard of good and bad in which that conflict is located.
What remains to be seen is whether the more fundamental and structural form of conflict can be resolved—I
leave this as a genuinely open question.
All of this means that our study of action and the good must go beyond the limits standardly set to
studies of action, asking more from our self-accounting and pointing out that we might be capable of less in
terms of our reflective self-understanding. This may, as Anscombe put its, edge our inquiry towards “ethics or
literary criticism” (19), and perhaps psychoanalysis or moral psychology. But I hope to show that in wanting to
understand actions, and moreover the actions we judge to be good and bad, we are also, or primarily, seeking to
understand actors; and this, I think, means understanding how it is that we come to hold the good in view, what
keeps it there, and whether and how it can be challenged or transformed. I want to suggest that in working to
provide an account of how the good comes to operate as the standard for action, in coming to appreciate how our
relationship to the good is formed, as it were, behind the back of self-conscious reflection, we will begin to
appreciate the depth of our relation to the good, the extent to which we are responsible for that relation, and the
scope and limits of reflection.
By offering a conditioned transcendental account of the mind’s orientation towards good and away from
bad, I hope to provide an account of acting—or rather living—under the guise of the good that can illuminate the
profound, meaningful, and sometimes troubling experience of finding ourselves disposed towards the world in
the particular ways that we are. This will function as an account of our most fundamental practical orientation
for which, though not of our own making nor wholly up to us, we are nevertheless responsible, and with which
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we must grapple in our efforts to know ourselves, to know why we do what we do, why things matter to us as
they do.
**
I want to suggest that an account of the human relationship with and pursuit of the good must distinguish two
dimensions or levels. On the one hand, there is what I will call the first-order or empirical level. At this level,
one is expected to have, and can usually give, reasons for one’s actions and commitments, which are available to
reflection and evaluation; what tends to be regarded as the exemplary cases for intentional action and belief
operate at this level. As Boyle and Lavin argue
just as a rational believer is one who can reflect on his grounds for belief by putting to himself the
question “Why p?”, so a rational agent is one that can reflect on his grounds for action by putting to
himself the question “What speaks in favour of doing A?” Just as “truth” names the standard we apply
in answering the former question, so “goodness” names the standard for answers to the latter. 2010, 40.
At the first-order level, the standard of goodness designates the dimension in which relevant reasons are
distinguishable from those irrelevant, and this standard can be called upon in first-order judgments made by an
agent with respect to herself and the ends she pursues. Goods themselves are, on this level, available for
reflective endorsement, and one’s reasons in support of such reflection and pursuit are likewise available. Much
philosophical discussion of the good—for example, wealth, or health, or going to a concert, as possible goods—
is concerned only or primarily with this level.
On the other hand, there is what we can conceive as the transcendental level of the good; there is, to use
Boyle and Lavin’s term, a “dimension” of the good qua standard that functions as the condition of possibility or
condition of intelligibility for our first-order judgments about good and bad, that orients and informs any
particular first-order experience of good or bad. If, as Boyle and Lavin suggest, rational action and commitment
have their source in the subject’s power to bring things under the concept of good, this power cannot be
explained at the same level as the judgments in which such a power or capacity is actualized. While the
particular judgments and actions that are effected in light of some good may be, in the so-called standard case,
available for reflection and explanation, that which makes such first-order activity possible is not so available.
Whatever it will mean to give an account of oneself, of one’s actions and commitments, simply asking oneself,
to use Boyle and Lavin’s question, “what speaks in favour of doing, believing, wanting A?” will be inadequate.
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So I’ll turn now to the account I want to offer of this transcendental level of the good, first discussing
Kant and then Freud and Klein.
Boyle and Lavin propose that goodness functions as a “standard” for action, and that this standard functions to
provide the structure of action; they suggest further that rational action has its source in a subject’s “power” to
bring things under the concept good. With a consideration of certain key Kantian ideas we can clarify how to
conceive of this power, and what it is for a standard or ideal to function as an organizing structure for human
experience.
Kant adopts a “transcendental” method in order to demonstrate that the possibility of experience depends
upon various conceptually necessary conditions. As he puts it, “the [transcendental] proof proceeds by showing
[what] experience itself, and therefore the object of experience, would be impossible without” (A783/B811). Or
again, “I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of
our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori” (A12/B25). Kant’s
method assumes that the salient features of our first-order experience can be explained and justified only through
an account of the non-empirically derived formal conditions that would make those features possible. His aim in
the Critique as a whole is concerned, not with the truthfulness or reality of any given experience, but with the
very possibility of an intelligible experience as such, how it could have the requisite coherence and order to be
about anything at all (cf. Conant 2004, 99). Crucially—and this is Kant’s “Copernican turn”—these conditions
of possibility are what the mind contributes to the form of experience; thus the most basic shape of a possible
experience is a result of our own activity. So what Kant’s transcendental method offers for my purposes is a
philosophical re-orientation towards the mode of our knowledge of objects, where such a mode is determinable,
not empirically but formally, and where the level at which the investigation is pitched is not the veracity or
intelligibility of this or that experience or judgment, but the overarching coherence or order that makes any
experience or judgment possible at all.
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Now, to anticipate, while the psychoanalytic method is undoubtedly empirical and clinical, whereas Kant
made every effort to avoid providing an empirical ground for his claims, I am arguing that Freud was also
concerned to articulate not just the empirical conditions for pathologies, but also the formal conditions for
human experience as such; in the metapsychological writings especially, we find in Freud an attempt to
illuminate the requisite conditions for world-directed mindedness as such, irrespective of individual
idiosyncrasies. In this way, he too was concerned with conditions of the possibility of experience (rather than
the conditions for any actual experience), and so can be seen as engaged in a properly philosophical, perhaps
even transcendental project.
If Freud is more Kantian than might first appear, it also true that Kant is more Freudian, interested not
only in the conditions of experience but in the conditions for illusion, in our capacity as finite rational beings not
just to be mistaken about the objects of judgment but about what can count as a judgment, as knowledge, or as
experience at all. It is quite incredible the language Kant uses to describe human reason—while his juridical
metaphors are perhaps better known, he also employs the language of illness and pathology to describe reason’s
fate or career.
In the Critique’s opening passage, Kant characterizes reason as “burdened by questions
which…it is not able to ignore but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer” (Avii), and
that such a burden drives reason to “darkness and contradictions” (Aviii); in the B-Preface, Kant asks why nature
“visited [Heimsuchung—“haunted” or “plagued”] our reason with the restless endeavor whereby…it does not
merely fail us, but lures us on by deceitful promises, and in the end betrays us” (Bxv). In the Canon of Pure
Reason, Kant points out that when reason attempts to provide knowledge of objects, it “perverts” and
“frustrates” the ultimate ends of reason (A819/B847).
The faculty of reason is burdened, haunted, and restless, driven beyond itself to pose questions it is
compelled to ask and unable to answer, and as so driven, it is prone to frustration and perversity. Far from
functioning as a secure or unproblematic condition of knowledge, reason is “naturally” and “inevitably”
(A298/B354) prone to illusion, illusion that moreover “does not cease even after it has been detected”
(A297/B353). Which is to say—and this is striking coming from Kant—even upon critical reflection, the
illusions of reason do not lose their power.
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Thus while reason is, on the one hand, a necessary condition for the possibility of experience, it is, on
the other hand, constitutively self-disrupting, a condition for illusory experience that resists the scrutiny of
reflection; that is, the darkness and contradictions in which it finds itself are not the contingent result of
erroneous judgments but, as natural and inevitable, they are permanent features of its functioning. We do not
correct reason, as we might correct an error of judgment; instead the task is to learn to live with the permanent
possibility of darkness and illusion, to learn, we we shall see, to put reason’s illusions to good and proper use.
As Lear writes of psychoanalysis’ crucial discovery, though it seems equally to apply to Kant’s account of
reason: “one should see irrational disruptions as themselves an inherent expression of mind” (1999, 84).
So reason is non-accidentally prone to pathology: that is, conflict does not result from reason in mutiny
with desire, or one reason in competition with another; rather reason is in “unavoidable conflict with itself”
(A497/B526). Put otherwise Kant is, as he says, not concerned with empirical illusion (individual mistakes in
judgment or instances of deception) but with transcendental illusion, with the illusion into which reason is
plunged given its very nature or function. Bearing this in mind, lets turn now to what reason can do, its positive
contributions to knowledge.
While the faculty of the understanding has application only to what is given in intuition, Kant insists that
the faculty of reason is characterized by a tendency to transgress the limits of cognition in search of what he calls
the unconditioned: the totality of knowledge and experience of which any particular is an integrated part.
Reason is “driven on by an inward need” (B21) to comprehend that which, by Kant’s definition, cannot possibly
be known, to find for conditioned knowledge the unconditioned whereby its unity is brought to completion
(A308/B364). Thus, even within the finite boundaries assigned to it by Kant’s system, the human mind is
endowed with a driven need to exceed those boundaries; reason presents us with a faculty of excess that strives
to achieve an impossible goal.
The question, then, is whether reason has any “good and proper use”
(A643/B671), whether its excesses and internal conflict have any legitimate role to play as conditions for human
experience.
In the Appendix to the Dialectic, Kant suggests that reason does have a form of “right employment:”
namely, to posit an impossible ideal of coherence and unity in light of which the understanding is organized; the
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unconditioned is, we might say, reason’s “good” in its theoretical employment.
Such ideals are in fact
conditioned by and a result of excess and illusion, the latter in fact makes possible the ideal or standard in light
of which the mind can operate. Kant refers to reason’s regulative demand for unity as a “problem for the
understanding” (A508/B536), indicating that part of reason’s right employment involves plunging the
understanding into the right kinds of problems. This involves taking the ideal of reason—the unconditioned—
not as a given object but as a “task” (A508/B536), a “problem (ibid.), and an unreachable goal set for the
understanding (A510/B538). This goal is what Kant calls a “projected” unity (A647/B675): such a unity is not
derived from experience, but is rather projected as something we seek in the interests of reason, in order to bring
about the systematic organization of our knowledge (A650/B678). That is, reason sets the understanding with an
in-principle impossible goal of coherence and unity, and in this way demands a kind of work from the
understanding, in full acknowledgment that this work will never be completed, the goal of totality will never be
reached; the projected goal of reason functions instead to organize and motivate human experience, providing an
overarching standard in light of which all incremental achievements can be assessed. Using language familiar
from our earlier discussion of Boyle and Lavin, we can say that the idea of the unconditioned functions as a
“standard” for knowledge and experience, which standard provides the structure of knowledge and experience,
suggesting further that coherent experience has its source in a subject’s “power” to bring elements of its
experience in line with the ideal of systematicity and unity.
There are four points to take from this condensed discussion of Kantian reason. First, as discussed
already, in reason we find a faculty that exemplifies the idea that self-disruption is an inherent expression of
mind. Kant provides an account of a mind that exceeds itself, setting impossible demands in light of which it can
be led either to illusion or to expansion in the form of greater and better organization. This faculty of the mind is
Janus-faced, both disruptive and productive. As such, its disruptiveness cannot be dismissed as a contingent
failure but is rather the proper work of the mind. Moreover, anticipating some of the insights of psychoanalysis,
such self-disruption is a result of reason’s being “driven on by an inward need” (B21-my emphasis), driven by
the “single interest…to obtain satisfaction” (A694/B666); that is, the mind self-disrupts as a result of its needs
and in pursuit of some satisfaction. This will be crucial for both Freud and Klein, both of whom suggest that a
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relationship with the good is contingent upon the experience of need, or as they understand it, tension. What
Kant makes perspicuous is that this needfulness is not just a contingent moment in human development but a
formal condition for possible experience, he suggests that something like a transcendental ideal or standard must
be thought in connection with notions of need, satisfaction, and frustration. So, appreciating how a standard
organizes and inspires thought (and action), one has to appreciate its relationship with the organizing and
inspiring function of need, and more specifically psychic need (that is, not bodily need or sensuous desire).
Second, by projecting the ideal of completeness and systematicity as a “task” (A508/B536) or “goal”
(A510/B538), reason makes possible a kind of directedness or purposiveness1 in knowledge and experience.
Because reason can conceive the unconditioned whereas the understanding can only comprehend what is given
in experience (A311/B367), the former is able to set an ideal goal that the latter would be unable to formulate on
its own. In this way, while the understanding can acquire only an aggregate of disconnected knowledge bits
(“distributive unity” [A644/B672]), reason can demand ongoing organization or patterning in the acquisition of
knowledge (“collective unity” [ibid.]). Thus reason’s self-disruption is expressed in the form of a demand for
complete coherence and systematization of knowledge, and these demands make possible ordered development
or growth. Abstracting from Kant’s language, we could say that a projected ideal or standard is that which
facilitates coherence in experience—in thought and action; it provides the dimension in which incremental
efforts or means-ends reasoning takes meaningful shape, in which, to anticipate, any particular encounter can be
evaluated as good or bad.
Third, and connected with the last point, reason imbues the activity of the understanding, and so any
particular judgment or experience, with sense or value. By projecting an ideal towards which the understanding
must work, reason provides a purpose and thereby a value to that very work. Pieces of knowledge have value—
or even more basically make sense—only insofar as they occupy a place in a larger domain of thought, a domain
which is never itself encountered but is projected as the intelligible milieu in which thoughts and experiences
have traction. It is against this overarching standard that any particular Erkenntnis or Erfahrung can be regarded
1
Of course, the notion of purposiveness is the governing idea of the third Critique, and indeed, the Critique of Judgment
can be understood as expanding on ideas developed in the Dialectic of the firs Critique. But I wont be able to explore this
further here.
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as such, and this standard is qua transcendental standard not available as an object of choice or reflection (this is
the error of the pre-critical metaphysicians2).
Fourth and finally, note that Kant is insistent that even while the illusions of reason have a good and
proper use as conditions for experience, these illusions do not thereby cease to compel us as illusions; as Kant
puts it “the ideas [of reason] produce what, though a mere illusion, is none the less irresistible, and the harmful
influence of which we can barely succeed in neutralizing even by means of the severest criticism” (A642/B671).
Whereas transcendental error can be remedied by critical reflection (this is the negative work of the Dialectic),
transcendental illusion persists even through such reflection. That is, reflection and critique are not just as such
remedial or transformative. What the Appendix seeks to articulate is what role the illusions to which reason is
prone can have for experience and knowledge qua illusions. How can you, to use Axel Rose’s phrase, use your
illusion?
With these thoughts in mind, I want to suggest that we should likewise understand the good as a
standard or ideal that functions as a condition of possibility for experience, experience as organized in
accordance with good and bad. The idea is not that there is, first, experience, which is ordered or evaluated after
the fact or in a second step; rather I want to say that a kind of order of salience, a partitioning of experience into
good and bad, is a condition for possible experience as such. Put otherwise, human experience just is a
particular organization or arrangement of good and bad. What this reveals is that a consideration of the role of
the good for human life and action is at the same time a reflection on human life as ordered or coherent only
thanks to a good qua standard; that is, the question of the good is not primarily a question of kinds of objects but
of kinds of order. Indeed, following what Kant urges, the ideal or projection of order or orderability is what
makes possible the apprehension of a good or bad object in the first place.
Kant then provides a philosophical model for thinking about the good qua standard that is tied, not to
our form of life qua natural kind (as is the case with Boyle and Lavin, following Thompson and Aristotle); rather
the good qua standard is tied to certain projected ideals or illusions. This projection provides the standard in
Kant writes, reason “cannot tell us what the object is” (A510/B538) but can only demand that the understanding work
towards achieving a kind of unity or order. Rational psychology, cosmology, and theology all mistakenly believed that
reason could articulate what their object of concern (the soul, the world, God) in fact is, as though it could simply be given.
2
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accordance with which experience is organized into good and bad, and this standard is not something whose
force or attraction can be simply neutralized or adjusted via reflection. Because of the close relation between the
projection of a standard on the one hand, and the experience of need and the drive for satisfaction on the other,
our relation with the good will not primarily take place at the level of conscious reflection but will, as Freud and
Klein make clear, involve importantly different forms of cognition. Kant’s work support the thought that the
good qua organizing standard must be conceived as a kind of demand or pressure on human thought and action.
If reason is driven by an inward need (B21), then reason’s good and proper work—its projection of a standard—
is a driven or needful work. Switching to the register of the guise of the good, I will argue that the good qua
standard can make the kind of demand for psychic order that it does, only as animated by what Freud calls the
tension due to need. What we can take from Kant is the philosophical conviction that the very idea of life
organized in relation to an ideal or standard, of life understood as purposively striving towards some good,
requires some notion of need or drive that is irreducible to biological need: what we require is a notion of
rational need, a distinct notion of psychic needs and so psychic satisfactions or goods.
**
While Kant determined that a standard of unity was a formal condition for experience—where the effort to
realize this unity just is an effort to obtain satisfaction—his transcendental method meant that he would not
account for how such a standard itself becomes operative. Adopting a strictly Kantian approach, we can propose
that experience takes shape in light of a projected ideal, and even insist that such a structure is inherently
conflicted, disruptive, and needful, but from Kant alone we cannot advance anything like a historical,
developmental, or conditioned account of such a priori structures; indeed, such an account would be, for Kant,
to miss the point about what a priori conditions are.
With Freud we find a similar concern with what must be the case for human experience to have the kind
of dynamic order that it does, yet with the twist that his method additionally investigates what must have been
the case. Thus on the one hand, he is concerned to articulate a metapsychological account of the structure of
mind such that there can be a coherent relation between mind and world, and on the other hand he observes that
this structure is conditional upon ultimately contingent circumstances, developed in and through interactions
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with otherness, the failure to obtain of which would result in important failures or disruptions in the structure of
experience.3 A general Freudian assumption is that what we take to be the essential elements of an objective
relation to reality—for example, an ego or I separated from an object, where judgments are informed by reality
and logic—cannot exist from the start of life but have to be developed (Freud 1914, 77). The difficult thought
here is that Freud wants to investigate the conditions of the conditions of possibility for experience, or the
conditioned transcendental structures of mind.
In what follows I will present a psychoanalytic understanding of the structures of mind relevant for an
understanding of our relationship to the good, which will include the idea that such structures are not given but
must be established, and so have a specific history; this history will be comprised of forms of mental activity,
which, in their repetition and elaboration, articulate a basic psychic pattern or structure. While thinkers like
Freud and Klein are guided by certain empirical features of human experience, and so could be understood as
investigating the merely contingent conditions for or aspects of that experience, I will argue that their
philosophical relevance derives from the fact that they can be read as giving an account of the basic conditions
without which experience would be neither possible nor conceivable.
For example, Kant perceived that
something like the projection of an ideal was a condition for experience, and Freud and Klein work to account
for the conditions under which such projective activity is made possible. That psychoanalytic theory perceives a
need to articulate the conditions for the conditions of experience, however, does not lead us into a regress, but
rather expresses the thought that the human mind is not given but formed in transaction with other minds. I will
not be able to follow this thought out here, but suffice for now to say that we might understand psychoanalysis as
providing the view that one formal condition of the possibility of mindedness is precisely other minds, or even
more specifically, norm-governed adult minds—though of course this insight is not unique to psychoanalysis
(see especially Hegel and Aristotle). Now, though, I want to turn to Freud and Klein, and their efforts to
articulate the standard of goodness in light of which human experience is possible.
I use the term “otherness” rather than “others,” precisely because the kinds of interactions Freud is interested in make
possible relations with discrete, determinate others. “Otherness” helps clarify that while the development of mind does not
take place in a vacuum, much interactive development must have take place before the mind can apprehend other persons or
objects.
3
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I suggested that a sufficient account of the guise of the good must explain how we are able to take
anything as good in the first place, how anything could so much appear as good; I suggested further that in
giving such an account, remaining at the level of first-order relations to goods—such as belief, desire,
deliberation, reason-giving—would be inadequate. The task then is to conceive of a relation to the good that is
irreducible and instead supports the first-order, subject-object relationship.
Precisely with regards to this
conceptual difficulty, psychoanalysis can be an important resource insofar as it makes perspicuous that the good
qua standard cannot be conceived as a specific kind of object or mental content.
Psychoanalysis helps us elucidate precisely this point, suggesting that we will better understand certain
dimensions of mind and world if we conceive them, not as kinds of contents but as activities or structures; as
Hans Loewald advises, “we cannot do justice, conceptually, to psychic structures unless we conceive of them as
systems of action-patterns” (1962, 48-my emphasis). The notion of an action-pattern recommends that we
understand psychic structures broadly speaking as both a form of order and as dynamic or live, literally forms of
activity. While this idea of systems of action-patterns bears a kind of resemblance to Kant’s spontaneous forms
of synthesis, a crucial difference for the psychoanalytic account is that, paradoxically, such action-patterns are
both conditioning and conditioned, they both provide the form of experience and are formed by experience. The
psychoanalytic version of the Kantian insight is that the transcendental structures of mind that we bring to and
provide the form of our experience of the world are in dynamic interaction with those very experiences, not only
informing but being continually informed.
By placing such emphasis on the conditioning/conditioned structure of mind, psychoanalysis
demonstrates a commitment to the idea, first, that the mind is not simply given but must be developed (Freud
1914, 77); it is, not just in its substance but in its form, a kind of achievement. And second, while Freud quickly
abandoned the simplistic thought that early experiences straightforwardly determine later cognitive dynamics
(both pathological and not), psychoanalysis does hold that the mind’s earliest impressions and efforts to cognize
do have implications for its mature functioning, not because the former cause the latter, or represent some
essential developmental stage, but because our forms of thinking are conditioned, habituated, patterned. We can
thus understand psychoanalysis as proposing how to conceive of forms of thought (i.e., we must conceive them
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as conditioned, as dynamic and historical systems of action-patterns), rather than offering speculative claims
about pre-discursive psychic development or the phenomenology of the infant mind.
Focusing on the
psychoanalytic contribution to our understanding of form of experience helps us appreciate that the specific
history of a mind shapes not primarily the contents of thoughts—i.e., memories, phantasies, or ideas of what is
good and bad—but the very form of thinking, the mind’s active formal structure. For psychoanalysis, while the
formal dimensions of mind are thoroughly historical and conditioned, we need not be committed to
understanding such conditioning on a straightforwardly developmental or teleological model. To use Jean
Laplanche’s phrase, what psychoanalysis is interested in is a “schema of [the mind’s] engendering … (if the term
if taken in the very wide sense of engendering)” (1999, 126).
One of the most basic components of the psychoanalytic theory of the mind’s engendering is the thought
that mental activity is activated in response to, and as an attempt to regulate, fluctuations of pleasure and pain
(“unpleasure”); the “pleasure principle” names this most fundamental orientation of the mind towards pleasure
and away from unpleasure. The type of mental functioning dedicated to facilitating the discharge of tension
Freud called the “primary processes,” forms of thinking organized especially to relieve tension by the most
efficient means possible; by contrast, the “secondary processes,” while still beholden to the pleasure principle,
operate in light of truth, reality, and consistency. With the notions of the pleasure principle and the primary
processes, Freud is attempting to explain the (intuitive) idea that thoughts can be charged with energy, and that
certain forms of thinking are more effective than others at discharging this energy; some thoughts are “difficult”
or “painful,” and the mind is capable of forms of thinking whose function is to think not about but through this
tension. The primary processes—condensation and displacement—are those modes of psychic ordering or forms
of thought that are best able to process and metabolize pleasure and unpleasure; these are the kinds of processes
Lear refers to as forms of restlessness or irrational forms of thought.
While Freud insists on a certain development or chronology of mental functioning, such that those forms
of thought governed by the pleasure principle arise “earlier” and, for the most part, “develop” into more
advanced forms, what is essential is not Freud’s developmental speculations, but his idea that pleasure and
unpleasure, satisfaction and safety, on the one hand, and needfulness and danger, on the other—that these poles
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of experience inspire unique forms of thinking, forms not governed by logic or reason; that is, thinking through
good and bad, pleasure and unpleasure, is not primarily a rational or truth-functional form of thought. Indeed,
even as the reality principle ascends to prominence in governing the mind’s activity, certain forms of thinking—
like phantasying and dreaming—are kept free of the constraints imposed by logic and reality, and instead operate
primarily under the aspect of the pleasure principle, what we might understand as a rudimentary guise of the
good. Freud’s insight, then, is not that rational thought has an irrational ancestry, or that adult humans can
regress to infantile forms of thinking, but that the genus of thinking includes an irrational species, that
irrationality is a proper mode of thought, an inherent expression of mind.
More specifically for our purposes, the organizing principle governing this unique form of thinking is
determined by the poles of pleasure and unpleasure, what we might take to be the prototypes of good and bad.
What this suggests is that good and bad command their own uniquely ordered mode of thinking. Which is to say
that belief, judgment, and reason-giving are in some sense not native to the kind of thinking involved in good
and bad. Of course we can reason about the good. The point is not to deny or undermine this, but to indicate
this other, perhaps more basic mode of thinking through the good, and to suggest that an account of how we act
under the guise of the good must grapple with the problems and possibilities presented by these other modes.
What then are these unique forms of thought? To what kinds of thinking do the primary processes—
thought governed by the pleasure/unpleasure series—contribute? While it is the pleasure principle that governs
these forms of thought, it is in fact the experience of unpleasure—disappointment, fear, pain, and guilt: which is
to say, tension—that most basically inspires cognitive activity; if the tension due to need is too substantial, the
mind endeavours to relieve that tension by the most efficient means possible—paradigmatically hallucinating or
phantasying the experience of satisfaction.
The drive is, as Freud puts it, “a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, the
psychical representation of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, a measure of
the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body” (1915, 121-122).
Thus drives are not mere bodily needs but are meant to capture the intersection of need and mindedness; we
could say that the idea of Trieb articulates what its like to be an embodied—finite and dependent—mind. And as
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Freud perceives, what its like is to feel burdened by a demand for a kind of work. Psychic tension is experienced
as a demand to do something, to act in the world, or to think.
Again, the important Freudian insight here is not that such forms of thinking are more primitive (though
they may be) but that the mind engages in specific forms of work when it experiences pleasure and unpleasure,
satisfaction and needfulness, and that this work is no less properly thinking than, for example, rational cognition.
Further, what is distinctive of this kind of mental activity or thought is not its content—say, pleasant or
unpleasant ideas or fantasies—but, as I will presently discuss, its form, its capacity to form and organize the very
mind that thinks.
While allowing their differences to stand, lets recall Kant’s characterization of reason as burdened or
haunted, as driven on by an inward need, and as—under the pressure of its desire for satisfaction—demanding a
kind of organizational work from the understanding. The point is not to insist that Kant and Freud were
elaborating the same notion of mind, or engaged in the same project, but to notice that in their efforts to account
for the conditions of experience, both thinkers made use of the notion that the mind’s needfulness inspires it to
get to work.
And, significantly, this unique kind of cognitive work is not primarily truth-functional or
representational but rather, for lack of better words, regulative and organizational. That is, the thinking that is
inspired by an inward need or demand is a thinking devoted to finding a kind of repose or respite from
restlessness—tension reduction for Freud, internal harmony for Kant (A666/B694)—and this repose is found,
not through pleasurable objects or contents of thought, but through the establishment of a certain order. Thus,
the burdened or needful mind does not just get to work haphazardly; on the contrary the very aim of this work is
the achievement of order. Turning now to the specific forms of thinking which function to institute such psychic
order—specifically, introjection, projection, and idealization—we will see that the earliest accomplishments of
order, aimed primarily at organizing the mind with respect to pleasure and unpleasure, will come to function as
the template or standard for later relationships with good and bad things, for our regarding things as good or bad.
For Freud and others, much metapsychologial theory is concerned with articulating the types of thought
processing that dominate in conditions of pleasure and unpleasure, where these processes are not simply
techniques available to an already constituted mind but function—at all stages of development—to order and
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shape that very mind. Melanie Klein proposed that in response to both anxiety (the situation of non-satisfaction
[Freud 1926, 137]) and the satisfactions of care, the mind has recourse to what she calls the “primal processes of
projection and introjection” (Klein 1952, 49), but also splitting, denial, omnipotence, and idealization (ibid.).
These are the forms of activity most immediately responsive to and expressive of good and bad. When the mind
is unable to tolerate anxiety—when it is not sophisticated enough or the anxiety is too frequent or great—it
engages in such phantasmatic activity, working on the one hand to initiate and protect a relationship with the
source of pleasure, and to reject or control the causes of pain. Such phantasies—Klein’s term for specifically
unconscious fantasy—are primarily defensive, reacting against and attempting to diffuse the tension of need;
from such a defensive posture, under the pressure of an inward need, a peculiar mode of thinking is instigated.
As I have been urging, pleasure and unpleasure, good and bad, inspire their own proper mode of
thought. Projection and introjection are two instances of thinking through these poles of experience, functioning
not primarily to think about or phantasize about good and bad things, but instead operating through a kind of
patterning, assembling good and bad in the most gratifying arrangement possible. When the instigating anxiety
is excessive, such arrangements are, we might say, crude, insofar as they represent the attempt to exclude all
bad, all sources of pain or tension, and incorporate or preserve all good. Projection pushes an experience of
either good or bad out, while introjection takes something in.
To describe briefly the other processes:
idealization frames an experience as totally good, splitting divorces the good from the bad, denial blocks out
certain features or experiences, and omnipotence describes the phantasy that thinking is in fact really capable of
all these feats. Taken together, these processes describe the mind’s most efficient resources or forms of thinking
under pressure. Crucially, such forms of thinking are not representational but organizational, concerned not
with particular good or bad things, but with their relations; it is a topographical form of thinking.
The critical and difficult idea captured by the notion of primary forms of thought, as I mentioned, is that
such processes are not organizational procedures that a fixed mind has at its disposal; rather such processes
“build up the internal world and shape the picture of external reality” (Klein 1955, 141). Both the internal and
the external world, and their relationship, are literally built through such primal activity. These forms of thought
do not “qualify reality,” as it were—as if, for example, in projection the mind cast a favourable light over aspects
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of a neutrally available, motivationally inert world, or as if introjection simply picked out some given good or
bad thing; rather these mechanisms in fact establish the mind’s very relationship with (and so separation from)
the world. As Laplanche and Pontalis indicate, “the dialectic of introjection/projection…[can be understood as]
the actual basis of discrimination between inside and outside, [subject and object]” (1973, 353). The world takes
its shape in accordance with the primal processes, which initiate the coordination of mind and world along the
axis of good and bad, or along the pleasure/unpleasure series, as Freud puts it. Which is all to say that mind and
world are not established separate from or prior to but in and through good and bad.
The introjection of a good experience, for instance, contributes not only to the establishment of
innerness, to what will eventually become an experience of selfhood, but also to the establishment of the inner as
good, or to the self as good, which is also to say stable, coherent, liveable; by contrast, the introjection of bad
builds up a threatening or unliveable internal world or self. On the other hand, the projection of aggression
outwards not only generates the experience of externality and otherness, it shapes that otherness as bad, while
the projection of good shapes it as good, as, we might say, a possible world. And it is through the ongoing and
increasingly complex elaboration of these processes that mind and world—or mind/world, so as not to imply any
strict separation—are established. Crucially, for Klein, that which is introjected and projected are not (extant,
discrete) objects but object-relations, dynamics or forms of relating to good and bad; as such, the mind is not a
space populated by objects but a dynamic systems of action-patterns the shape or patterning of which will
provide the standard for the kinds of relations to goods and bads with which philosophy is more often concerned.
Thus for psychoanalytic thinkers, the kind of dynamic coherence—the unity and diversity—that Kant saw to be
a condition for experience of a world, this most basic order is already arranged in terms of good and bad. Note
that while this account of psychic elaboration is in some sense more determinate or fleshed out than the merely
formal account of the good as provided by Boyle and Lavin, we still have not substantiated any concepts of good
or bad, what will count as good or bad still awaits determination; what I hope is becoming clear is that we can
give a formal account that is yet characterized by a historical dimension or specificity.
My aim in describing the notion of primary processes here has not been to recount a Freudian or
Kleinian theory of early mental activity, but to introduce these ideas as demonstrating an effort, on the part of
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Freud and Klein, to account, first, for the mind’s active formal contributions to its experience of the world, and
second, to capture the specific demand or burden made by pleasure and pain, good and bad, on the form of
thinking as such. In theorizing these processes, Freud and Klein are attempting to establish that certain forms of
thinking are generated under the aspect, or as we have seen under the pressure, of good and bad, and these forms
of thinking contribute to the mind’s most basic sense of self and other, inner and outer, ego and world. This is
what I mean to capture by the term conditioned transcendental: conditions of possibility for experience that are
formed or animated in, as it were, conditions of pathos. Conceived in this light, pleasure and pain, good and bad,
are not, or are not only, the contents or objects of thought and judgment; rather the very form or functioning of
the mental apparatus as such is affected by these experiences. Under the pressure of an inward need, to use
Kant’s phrase, the mind works to pursue good and avoid bad, and this work, characterized by the primary and
primal processes, functions to organize and shape that very mind. What remains to be shown is how a mind
comes to assume some specific shape or character, to be organized by certain experiences of good and bad, in
such a way as to provide a standard or pattern for the kinds of propositional thoughts and judgments about good
and bad that preoccupy philosophy.
Recalling Loewald’s notion of psychic structure as a “action-pattern,” I want now to articulate how those
mental processes responsible for establishing relations with the good—introjection, projection, idealization,
etc.—become patterned, how they assume the status and solidity of a standard in light of which later
relationships are governed. Introjection and projection are especially crucial processes insofar as they function
to establish the “fixed point[s] of psychic structure” (Lear 1999, 100), the poles around which an action-pattern
is oriented. In this way, they provide the specific contours or form of an action-pattern, the basic structural
elements the repetition and elaboration of which transforms the mind’s activity into a system of patterns.
Systems of thinking are organized around such fixed points, and such systems of action patterns come to
function as the standard for subsequent relations to good and bad.
Take, for example, the very ordinary case of a child raised by a loving but ambivalent parent;
experiences of goodness, care, and nurturing are accompanied by the tension of uncertainty, distraction, even
aggression. In this case, the object-relation that is the target of the primal processes, that which will come to
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operate as the fixed point of a psychic structure, is ambivalent, and the kind of processes that are generated will
reflect the mind’s capacity or incapacity to tolerate that ambivalence. Using Laplanche’s terminology, we can
say that the relation or “message” of love transmitted by concrete acts of care (feeding, holding, etc.) is rendered
uncertain insofar as it is ambivalent, accompanied by a “message” of aggression, the latter of which the parent
may not even be aware (cf. Laplanche 1999, 73). What the child internalizes or introjects, then, is a relation of
both love and aggression, and thus what is internalized is a good tinged with anxiety, or with bad.
Following this example out, the primal process of introjection establishes an ambivalent good, and the
inner world, as Klein puts it, shapes in and around this structure. Recall again that such a structure is not an
inner object or figure, but is rather a point in an action-pattern; the phantasies constructed around such points are
not, then, contentful imaginings but provide the schema through which experience is processed. The elaboration
and sophistication of the psyche’s structures takes its general orientation from such points, which is to say that
the mind/world configuration is organized around and in light of such points; on the other hand, such points are
adjusted in light of experience. As Klein insists, “every external experience is interwoven with his phantasies
and on the other hand every phantasy contains elements of actual experience” (54, 1952). This is not to say that
experience is then forever tainted with merely subjective illusion, but, perhaps, that phantasy is a natural and
inevitable formal feature of experience überhaupt. Such phantasies become pathological (closer to what we
might mean by “subjective illusion”) when the points around which they are structured become too rigid, when
they are unresponsive to and fail to learn from experience.
When they are put to good and proper use, such points are subject to elaboration and adjustment in light
of both new experience—that is, such points are responsive to the world—and unconscious activity—that is,
such points remain subject to primary process activity. Put otherwise, a mind’s basic action-pattern both
conditions and is conditioned by experience, and it conditions and is conditioned by unconscious activity. While
the mind learns to operate under the reality principle and learns to take guidance from actual experience, at the
same time it continues to engage in forms of primal processing—internalization and projection, idealization and
denial—processes which function to transform the very constitution of the mind that employs them, and the
world with which they are in transaction. As Loewald writes, “internalization and externalization are not
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manipulations perpetrated on passive and static entities, nor movements performed by such entities. The process
of internalization or introjection involves a change in the internal organization of the elements” (1962, 51).
In a good-enough environment, to use Winnicott’s famous phrase, the child raised by an ambivalent
parent would also acquire the resources to tolerate ambivalence; she might be exposed to consistent good
experiences of stability (for psychoanalysis flexible stability just is a good), which would function to develop
and render dynamic the fixed point of her psyche. In this situation, the point of her psychic organization,
structured in response to the anxiety of ambivalence, would give rise to a capacity to withstand the anxiety that
accompanies the co-presence of love and aggression. In this scenario, new experiences and new object-relations
are themselves internalized and metabolized, functioning to transform what had once been fixed or rigid. To be
clear, the idea is not that a more primitive structure develops into one more advanced, but that the formal
elements of a mind organized by certain forms of thinking are elaborated in and through new experiences. When
all is good-enough, an action pattern or standard of goodness is appropriately stable and at the same time,
appropriately supple, remains open to revision; a mind achieves the requisite degree of constancy while avoiding
fixity.4 What changes, again, are not primarily the objects regarded as good or bad, but the very formal structure
in accordance with which objects are available at all.
In another scenario, we could imagine that the experience of ambivalence was articulated through overt
forms of aggression from the parent, such that the child introjects a more ambivalent object-relation; the stability
or coherence encouraged by love is undermined or destabilized by aggression.
Without developing the
capacities to withstand and synthesize the experiences of love and aggression, and so unable to metabolize and
further enrich the introjected relation, this child’s psychic structure might calcify around a more extreme point,
fixing her psychic action-pattern such that experiences of love generate, say, a fear of aggression. According to
this action-pattern, the introjected object-relation functions as a fixed or rather a fixated point or pole around
which mind and world are organized. Goods are pursued or avoided insofar as they can be apprehended within
the affective and ideational constraints of the structure or pattern.
In this case, the kinds of dynamic
internalizations that might have transformed her psychic organization and occasioned greater synthesis and
4
I owe this distinction to a conversation with Gregg Horowitz.
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toleration of anxiety are lacking, and the phantastically-distorted object relation continues to wield influence on
the mind’s experiences and transactions with the world. If the kind of stability required for coherent experience
is sufficiently disrupted—as in cases of trauma—what is lost is not just, say, trust in the world, but the world
itself, insofar as the mind’s objectivating capacity—its ability to distinguish subjective and objective, real and
fantasied, or real and feared—is undermined.
This should not suggest that in the latter case but not in the former good-enough scenario, good and bad
are accompanied by anxiety; as I have been emphasizing, good and bad are bound essentially to tension or
anxiety, even when everything is more than good-enough. To make this clear, let’s postulate a third vignette in
which the parent is not only good enough but ideally good, such that here love is absolutely lacking in
ambivalence, and the child’s every need is immediately met, such that no tension or anxiety arises; in this case,
we might be tempted to imagine, a perfectly unconflicted relation to the good is established in the child, since
the good was never accompanied by anxiety. It should be clear that this is neither humanly nor conceptually
possible: no human parent can anticipate an infant’s every need, but more important for our purposes, what I
have tried to demonstrate is that the mind’s relation with the good must be conceived in relation to anxiety, to a
kind of burden or demand.
Insofar as the mind’s most basic relationships with good and bad are inspired by
tension due to need, there is a sense in which relations with and considerations of good and bad are as such
anxious or burdened forms of thought, regardless of the better or worse environment in which the idiosyncrasies
of individual psychic structure are formed. As I have sought to demonstrate, the particular forms of thought that
initiate and sustain relations with good, that initiate the psychic structure or dimension of the good, are
responsive to and expressive of the tension associated with needfulness and, later, desire. These irrational forms
of restless thinking operate under pressure, and the specific pressure that provokes their activity is the pressure of
the pleasure principle, the demands that the mind pursue good and avoid bad. If, bearing not only Freud and
Klein but also Kant in mind, the kind of mental processing that establishes relations with the good is a kind
inaugurated in scenarios of needfulness and tension, then the good depends upon the experience of bad—burden
or tension—not just contingently (“for us”) but necessarily. So, as it turns out, the ideally good is in fact not
good enough, it would fail to generate a standard of goodness at all.
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The account of the good for which I have been arguing demonstrates that a kind of conflictedness is not
accidental or eradicable but an inherent and integral feature of the good as such. What this means, though, is not
that we are doomed to a conflicted or unsatisfying relation to the good, but that the kinds of conflict with which
philosophy is usually concerned—choosing between available goods—are conflicts which are themselves
conditioned by a more fundamental level of conflict, which is just to say a more fundamental form of the good.
What this entails is a reconceptualization of what it would mean to consider, adjust, or justify one’s relationship
to the good; if the good is not a kind of content but a conditioning structure, then, as Lear puts it, “there is no
obvious way in which the experience of its power can be modified by conscious thought” (Lear 1999, 100).
What I may be able to reflect upon, endorse, or give reasons for are my first-order choices or actions; but that
very reflection and those very reasons are themselves organized and conditioned by the particular action patterns
that structure the good qua standard. Thus when deliberating between going to a concert and staying home, not
only each option but the very merits and drawbacks of which my deliberation makes use—the dimension of
deliberation itself—is conditioned by the mind’s more fundamental standard of goodness.
If the good is instituted by means of forms of thought fundamentally different than reason (i.e., not
“lacking” or more “primitive” than reason but other), then either giving an account of the good or attempting to
transform it must involve not (only) reason but those very primary forms themselves. Being unable to pursue
what this would involve—which would take us into the domain of psychoanalytic technique—let me say here
just as a gesture, that crucial to such a method is the insight that this form of thinking can be engaged,
challenged, and transformed, not by solitary reflection on oneself or what one takes to be good, but essentially
through relations with another, such relationships providing the field in which introjection, projection,
idealization and phantasy can be enacted, the psychoanalytic relationship providing one space in which these
processes can be engaged and modified.
**
Together, Kant, Freud, and certain post-Freudian thinkers help clarify how the good can operate as the standard
or dimension in which human action and choice are possible at all. I have sought to take Boyle and Lavin’s
insight that the good functions as a standard and demonstrate that consideration about such a standard requires a
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revision both of what we take to be forms of thinking as such and of the relation of such forms to psychic
organization in general. This led me to propose the idea of the good as both conditioned and conditioning, as
playing a fundamental organizational role in the psychic action-patterns in accordance with which experience is
oriented. In their distinctive way, each thinker we have discussed demonstrates that standards or ideals can play
the organizational role that they do only thanks to a kind of burden, that thinking in accordance with a standard
is a form of thinking under pressure.
I want to close, first with an acknowledgment of a possible problem, and then with a suggestion as to
where such an account would have to go next.
In my discussion of Freud and Klein I have used the idea of “good” and “pleasure” somewhat
interchangeably. While the psychoanalytic insight surely involves the thought that experiences of pleasure (and
the pleasure principle) inform or structure experiences of the good (and the guise of the good), and that the two
are importantly distinguishable, I have not provided an account of how pleasure shapes the good (or vice versa),
or how they are separable. I cant try to do that work here but will say this: I follow Boyle and Lavin in holding
the good to function as a standard, and I also want to conceive of a standard as a kind of ideal, and moreover,
following Kant, a projected ideal. With this in mind, it would be fruitful to look at what Freud says about the
ego ideal as the projection of the fantasy of completeness and satisfaction. It might be the case that pleasure and
idealization combine to construct the good, that pleasure alone is not good but only when accompanied by the
processes of projection and idealization, such that any first-order ideas or experiences or objects count as good
depending on how well they approximate that ideal. But that’s all I can say about that here. Let me now close
by indicating where I’d want to go next.
What I have sought to make clear throughout this paper is that the good functions as a standard or
dimension, not for only intentional action and choice, but for human life broadly construed. Focusing too
narrowly on intentionality as the domain of the good both exalts our capacity to rationally reflect on and
determine what we take to be good, and diminishes the reach of the good, isolating it to a particular subset of
human life. Against this tendency, I have advocated that the good must be regarded as refracted through every
aspect of human mind and activity, such that our conception of the former transforms our understanding of the
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latter. On this view, and as I argued with Freud and Klein, the human mind is constituted and determined
through its relationship with good and bad; or rather, the development, transformation, or elaboration of mind
and good are co-constitutive, each inconceivable without the other. What I can only gesture at here is that a
compelling theory of self-consciousness will have to accommodate this insight into the relationship between
mind and good (and the language of “relationship between” already inserts more space or distance than I mean to
suggest).
Recent discussions of self-consciousness and self-knowledge have insisted that these cannot be modelled
on the epistemic relationship holding between subject and object; more fundamentally, neither selfconsciousness nor self-knowledge indicates unique kinds of objects (i.e., the self) but instead unique kinds of
knowing or consciousness, unique non-epistemic modes of awareness. We do not straightforwardly know
ourselves—what we believe or what we desire—because we are in a “good position” vis-à-vis a kind of thing
(my beliefs, desires; my self); rather our very beliefs and desires are constituted by this uniquely reflective selfawareness. Thus self-consciousness is not “tacked onto” conscious beliefs and desires, instead the latter are
conditioned and constituted by the possibility of the former (see Boyle forthcoming). Self-consciousness or selfknowledge constitute, it is said, the form of human consciousness and knowledge, not a second order or extra
iteration of consciousness and knowledge.
Now, in this paper I have argued that the kind of mental activity operative under conditions of good and
bad are not primarily beliefs or determinate desires but unique kinds of processing or organizing, which
themselves condition first-order beliefs and desires. They are “unconscious” not because they represent contents
unavailable to reflection, but because they are not best conceived as contents at all, but instead as distinct modes
or forms of thinking; and these modes and forms essentially contribute to the possibility of consciousness and
experience. If this is so, then we should also say, not only that self-consciousness is the form of human
consciousness, but that unconsciousness also describes the form of human consciousness, and not just a
contingent extra feature. If self-consciousness is not tacked onto but constitutive of certain kinds of mental
states (like beliefs), I would want to claim that it is also the case that the existence of other kinds of mental
states—nonrational but still mental—imply that the subject does not have even tacit knowledge of them, thus
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insisting that unconsciousness is not tacked on (like a basement or secret space) but is constitutive of equally
crucial mental states.
What a robust theory of self-consciousness requires is the acknowledgment that the mental activity
which contributes to self-consciousness includes constitutively unconscious activity, which is to say that such a
theory requires a willingness to grapple with the difficult notions, first, that self-consciousness requires, even
implies, unconsciousness, and second, that the form of self-consciousness is shaped by the form of the good.
These are bold proposals, but I hope to have shown why they are proposals worth taking seriously.
I will close with a thought about an intuitive distinction between self-consciousness and self-knowledge.
While the former might be best conceived as the form of human consciousness, self-knowledge implies
something like a commitment or effort on the part of the knower. “Self-knowledge” should not suggest anything
like turning back upon oneself to reflect on one’s character, but can rather be conceived as the kind of
knowledge that arises from an appreciation of the nature or tendencies of one’s practical orientation in the world
and of the limits to what can be known of that orientation. Self-knowledge is, we might say, something for
which we are responsible, which is to say that we are responsible for how we live, for our evaluations of what is
good and what bad. But the real difficulty of this responsibility, why it can be so painful to take on, is that its
scope includes that of which we cannot be self-conscious, that of ourselves which we cannot know.
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