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7 Ideals of Paranoia In Schreber's system the two principal elements of his delusions (his transformation into a woman and his favoured relation to God) are linked in his assumption of a feminine attitude towards God. It will be an unavoidable part of our task to show that there is an essential genetic relation between these two elements. Otherwise our attempts at elucidating Schreber's delusionswill leave us in the absurd position described in Kant's famous simile in the Critique of Pure Reason-we shall be like a man holding a sieve under a he-goat while some one else milks it. -Freud SE XII, 34 It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber's delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe. -Freud SE XII, 79 If schizophrenia results from the struggle between the imagination and the understanding, paranoia can be said to result when the understanding wins. More precisely, paranoia arises when the principles of the understanding are extended beyond empirical reality to the order of the Real-thereby impelling the imagination to schematize where no empirical objects appear whatsoever. In this sense, the paranoiac is an obsessional neurotic with a vengeance. Earlier I suggested that in the antinomies we find the imagination positing theses which the understanding rejects in the antitheses. Not to be overlooked, however, is the fact that the antitheses also go beyond the limits of possible experience. When Kant solves the mathematical antinomies by treating both the thesis and the antithesis as false, he in effect cancels their effect, returning reason to the constraints of reality posited by the principles themselves. But when he solves the dynamical antinomies by allowing that both might be true, he allows both the imagination and the understanding to wander into the Real. 130 131 IDEALS OF PARANOIA The idea of the fourth antinomy, the idea of a necessary being-or, in the fourth metapsychological antinomy, the idea of the Other-is, on my account, an idea posited by the imagination. Now, when Kant turns from the antinomies to the ideal of reason, he invokes the idea of an actual being (ens realissimum) that possesses complete reality (omnitudo realitatis). By this he means the traditional idea of God. Of course, in keeping with a classical definition of God as necessary being, it would seem that the idea of the fourth antinomy could also be taken as an idea ofGod. This would suggest that Kant simply imports the idea ofthe fourth antinomy in his treatment ofthe ideal ofpure reason. Yet, this is not quite the case. By itself, Kant maintains, the idea of a necessary being is simply the idea of some necessary being, and as such remains an insufficiently determinate concept to qualify as the idea of God (A586/B614). Reason proposes the concept of an ens realissimum as a way of giving content to the mere idea of a necessary being: The concept of an ens realissimum is therefore, of all concepts of possible things, that which best squares with [schikken] the concept of an unconditionally necessary being; and though it may not be completely adequate to it, we have no choice in the matter, but find ourselves constrained to hold it [so haben wir doch keine Wahl, sondern sehen uns genotigt, uns an ihn zu halten] . ... Such, then, is the natural procedure of human reason. It begins by persuading itself of the existence [Dasein] of some necessary being. This being it apprehends as having an existence [Existenz] that is unconditioned. It then looks around for the concept of that which is independent of any condition, and finds it in that which is itself the sufficient condition of all else, that is, in that which contains all reality. (A586-87/B614-15) Why is this transition from the idea of a necessary being to the idea of an ens realissimum so crucial, and why does a gap remain separating the two concepts from each other? I suggest the following interpretation. The idea of a necessary being is an idea posited by the imagination and opposed by the censorship. However, once the understanding realizes that the gap between reality and the Real-the gap between phenomena and noumena-prevents it from censoring the imagination here, it has reason "bind" this idea by bringing it under a determinate concept (reason's idea of an ens...

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