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Introduction
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Introduction: The Theme of Apprehending the Inaccessible in Western Philosophy 3 In meditation as in action we must make a distinction between what is accessible and what is inaccessible; failing this, little can be accomplished either in life or in knowledge. —Goethe Man is very well defended against himself, against being reconnoitered and besieged by himself, he is usually able to perceive of himself only his outer walls. The actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path. —Nietzsche Man carries the ultimate fundamental secrets within himself, and this fact is accessible to him in the most immediate way. Here only, therefore, can he hope to find the key to the riddle of the world, and obtain a clue to the inner nature of all things. —Schopenhauer [The id] is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality. —Freud What manifests itself as the inaccessible is the mystery. —Heidegger The “Inaccessible” in the History of Philosophy Throughout the history of Western civilization, philosophers have relentlessly pursued what may be called “inaccessible domains.” Many have sug- gested that such realms are rarely if ever open to direct (or even indirect) experience, and yet have also claimed that they form the very basis for all beings or Being. Such domains are taken by many to be of paramount importance . Furthermore, depending upon the orientation, these domains have been understood and approached in a variety of ways. It is not at all surprising, then, that one of the major functions of such disciplines as philosophy and psychoanalysis has been to disclose and elucidate, to whatever extent possible, inaccessible domains. The pursuit of an underlying “something” or dimension has taken many forms throughout the history of Western philosophy.1 Among the Presocratic philosophers there was a quest to ascertain that “substance” or being which underlies everything. Familiar examples come to mind: Anaximander spoke of apeiron, the “primordial stuff” (the limitless, eternal surrounding ); Heraclitus pursued the eternal logos (the underlying principle governing all things);2 Parmenides sought Being, the One; Plato spoke of a unifying principle (namely, the “Good”) which makes possible and underlies all levels of knowledge and reality; Locke referred to “that, I know not what,” which he believed must hold all of our sensations together. More recently, Kant’s “Copernican revolution” played a crucially pivotal role in the metaphysical bifurcation of the universe into: that which we are able to experience (to access)—the phenomenal world; and that which is and yet we cannot experience (is inaccessible)—the noumenal world. For the purposes of this text—that is, in light of the subsequent development of Freudian psychoanalysis—it was Kant’s ideas that served as the fulcrum for future developments concerning the question of what is accessible and what is not. For the Kant of the first Critique, the noumenal world was considered to be utterly inaccessible to human beings. All we could hope for was to refine our understanding of the phenomenal world (to access our understanding of it in the appropriate manner via transcendental philosophy). Kant went even further, of course. He spoke of “discovering a [hidden] purpose in nature behind this senseless course of human events,” and of humans “unconsciously promoting an end.”3 Transcending his earlier position, Kant continued in his third Critique to develop a view of the universe as including an emerging, sprawling underneath which ultimately comprised the ultimate foundational essence of who we are. Following this prodigious seed, the romanticists spoke of nature as spirit; Hegel discussed the cunning of reason which fulfills its own hidden purposes during the dynamic process of the Absolute Consciousness coming to know itself (although Hegel, of course, rejected Kant’s noumenal world as inaccessible and thereby irrelevant); and Marx emphasized the functioning of “ideology” where the economic infrastruc4 A P P R E H E N D I N G T H E I N A C C E S S I B L E [54.242.75.224] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:47 GMT) ture controls our actions and governs our ideas without our even being aware of this. Finally, both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche contended that there was a “hidden” to be uncovered (apprehended). For example, Schopenhauer sought to uncover the “cosmic will,” and “unconscious desires.” Schopenhauer wrote, “it can be explained that in all we know, a certain something remains hidden from us as being quite unfathomable.”4 Nietzsche sought to...