This book focuses on Kant and Freud to carry forward a philosophical investigation of the first-person perspective in cognition and morality that Béatrice Longuenesse has started to develop through several articles and two books (Longuenesse Reference Longuenesse2017, Reference Longuenesse2020). The joint consideration of Kant and Freud leads to an intertwining of historical and philosophical dimensions. The connection is based, first, on conceptual parallels between Kant’s ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ and Freud’s ‘Ego’, and between Kant’s and Freud’s views of moral ideals and conscience. These parallels are shown to be conducive to a joint elucidation of both theories and to valuable theoretical insights. While both Kant and Freud deal with ‘structures of our mental life in reasoning and guiding action’, the originality and advantage of Freud’s view lie in providing a ‘naturalistic account of the genesis of those features’. The conceptual similarities and the project of naturalisation, in turn, are rooted in a historical genealogy going back to the Kantian legacy in the nineteenth century and particularly to the so-called ‘physiological Kantianism’ of Hermann von Helmholtz, Friedrich Lange, and other philosophers and scientists. Finally, the conceptual and the historical layers of this investigation are weaved together by a constant correlation to the notions and problems of contemporary cognitive sciences.

Lecture One, ‘Conflicting Logics of the Mind’, expounds the systematic reasons to explore the connection between Kant’s and Freud’s theories of the ‘structures’ of mind, starting from a parallel examination of Kant’s ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ (TUA) and Freud’s ‘Ego’. Crucial to the whole enterprise are two claims concerning the former.

(1) Longuenesse points out that the TUA is not the only kind of unity of apperception in Kant’s philosophy. It is rather a universal condition of experience that must be individually realised, and this individual realisation, the ‘empirical unity of apperception’, is subject to disruptions, in cases – such as drunkenness and strong emotions – that Kant lists in the Anthropology. This distinction between the transcendental and the empirical unity of apperception has been often ignored by interpreters – for example, in Hermann Cohen’s purely transcendental revival of Kantian philosophy, or in William James’ critique of Kant’s ‘pure I’ in the Principles of Psychology. The reconsideration of these two layers establishes a logical continuity between Kantian philosophy and Freud’s psychoanalysis, as the functions and structures of the mind depend on the empirical I for their realisation.

(2) Since the unity of apperception must be empirically realised and this realisation can fail due to disruptive factors, this unity is not a priori guaranteed as a structure of the individual mind. Rather than as a ‘given unity’, Longuenesse interprets the TUA as ‘an ongoing, goal-directed effort at unifying representational contents in such a way that they are available for judging and reasoning, and for guiding action’. This notion, in turn, is readily comparable to Freud’s Ego as a ‘coherent organisation of mental processes’ in The Ego and the Id, Freud’s ‘core notion’ of the Ego, which is even more intrinsically subject to disruption and fragile than Kant’s I. Besides the I, Longuenesse highlights more structural features of Freud’s psychology that echo Kantian philosophical notions. For example, she examines Freud’s characterisation of the ego as ‘reason’, arguing that it can be conceived as an idealisation of mental activity. Overall, both Kant and Freud appear to isolate similar ‘structures’ and ‘functions’ of mental processes in their theories of cognition and morality and to investigate the dynamical factors underlying their empirical instantiation.

The joint interpretation that I just sketched is an example of Longuenesse’s method for connecting Kant and Freud, which is further applied in the other three lectures. Let me examine its layers in more detail. First, the ‘naturalist’ view of apperception belongs to the legacy of nineteenth-century ‘physiological Kantianism’. Helmholtz formulated a notion of ‘organisation of the mind’ that – through the mediation of his student Theodor Meynert, who was Freud’s teacher – is linked to Freud’s notion of the ‘Ego’ as ‘organisation’. This historical bridge is not only correct but also promising for the development of a non-reductive view of mind in the framework of contemporary cognitive sciences. I will come back to this point in my concluding remarks.

Second, as suggested by the phrase on the availability of mental contents ‘for judging and reasoning, and for guiding action’, the terminology is borrowed from contemporary philosophy of mind – in this case, the concept of access consciousness. Elsewhere, Longuenesse uses the notion of phenomenal consciousness and other technical terms in the field to characterise Kant’s concepts, thereby ‘translating’ them in terms that are not only more familiar to contemporary readers but readily associated with scientific projects in cognitive neuroscience and psychology. This approach, in turn, casts light on Freud’s notions of the Ego and the Id. The fact that Longuenesse focuses on Freud’s metapsychological theory of the psyche, setting aside the admission that Freud conceived of its future physiological transcription, is also related to the main philosophical motif of the book: the critique of ‘naturalism’.

In this regard, the two perspectives of the history of Kantianism and contemporary cognitive sciences blend nicely, for the term ‘naturalism’ refers in both contexts to a reductive view that must be challenged. It can be noted that ‘physiological Kantianism’ precisely started as a reaction to the rise of reductive materialism in the nineteenth century (Pecere Reference Pecere2021). Indeed, the phrase ‘physiological Kantianism’, coined by historians and critics, must not suggest the mistaken idea that Helmholtz and Lange defended an entirely physiological account of mind. On the contrary, they deliberately opposed the reductive, physiological materialism of their time while also rejecting post-Kantian speculative idealism and endorsing the scientific investigation of neural correlates of mental processes. This was what their notions of ‘organisation of the mind’ were about. In this regard – as is made perfectly clear by Longuenesse and captured by the title of the book – their approach can be compared to Freud’s, whose ‘empirical-psychological account of mind’ did not boil down to neurophysiology, as well as to the approach of contemporary antireductionist cognitive scientists who defend the irreducible role of first-person experience – such as Longuenesse herself.

Lecture 2, ‘Kant on Consciousness and Its Limits’, thoroughly investigates Kant’s notions of representations with and without consciousness. Following Kant’s classification of representations, Longuenesse analyses sensations, intuitions, concepts, and ideas through the lenses of both the eighteenth-century context (e.g. Wolff and Crusius) and the notions of phenomenal and access consciousness. Thus Kant’s views – and the originally Cartesian terminology of degrees of clarity of ideas – are translated in terms of contemporary philosophy of mind. This brings analytical clarity and allows establishing a common ground for further analogies. For example, Longuenesse points out that Kant’s view of consciousness sounds similar but is not identical to David Rosenthal’s Higher Order Theory of Consciousness because Kant’s consciousness is rather a sensing than a thought and is a quality added to representations rather than a higher-order representation (footnotes 16 and 40). In this regard, Longuenesse finely addresses the difficult passage (B422n) where Kant defines consciousness as an ‘indeterminate empirical intuition’ and reads it as referring to an act of synthesis that can be phenomenally conscious (it is a ‘feeling of an existence’: Prol §46, 4: 334n) and is access conscious, for it can lead to the formulation of determinate judgements. An especially important case, in this context, is when representations are conscious (e.g. in a judgement), but the mental operations that led to them are unconscious. Longuenesse’s conclusion is that – contrary to Freud’s claims of precedence – Kant had both a theory of unconscious mental representations and a theory of ‘mental activities of which we are not conscious but whose role we infer from the transitions between familiar representations of which we are conscious’.

Against this background, Lecture 3 – ‘Consciousness, Memory, and Freud’s Concept of the Unconscious’ – highlights the genuinely original elements in Freud’s concepts of the unconscious, especially focusing on the ‘dynamic unconscious’ as related to memory, drives, and affects. Based on the previous conceptual work, Longuenesse carefully clarifies the conscious and unconscious aspects of repressed memories, dreams, and drives. For example, the dream is characterised as phenomenally conscious but access unconscious.

The examination of drives and affects is the culmination of Longuenesse’s Freud interpretation. Longuenesse rightly highlights the connection of conscious affects with an ‘original ideational content [that] is lost’. In this sense, the Ego is mostly unconscious, and one of the aims of psychoanalysis is precisely to render unconscious contents access conscious for the benefit of the patient. From this perspective, Longuenesse examines Mark Solms’ provocative remark (in Solms Reference Solms2013 – and cf. Solms Reference Solms2021) that, because affects are always conscious, the Id (das Es) is always conscious. Longuenesse disagrees with this conclusion, pointing out that the Id contains the ‘delegates’ of the drives, which are indeed conscious, but the original contents of those drives might be lost – and in fact, according to Freud, usually are. This important point shows that Longuenesse elaborates an interpretation of Freud’s analysis that highlights the crucial process of making unconscious mental contents conscious. This is precisely the point where Kant’s ideas on apperception and its possible empirical disruption appear close to Freud’s.

This connection is developed in Lecture 4, ‘Freud and Kant on Morality’, which starts from Freud’s explicit connection of moral ideals to Kant’s categorial imperative. Longuenesse’s aim, here, is to show that ‘Freud’s story’ of ‘psychological development’ and Kant’s story of ‘justification’ are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, to investigate the psychological genesis of morality, with Freud, ‘can help us understand how the latter can have not only rational authority but also motivating power’. This objective is reached through an analysis of Freud’s notion of love and how it is connected to moral ideals. The connection is provided by the story of the loss of the original object of love in the child and the consequent development of self-love, which, in turn, produces the formation of an Ego ideal, and hence of moral conscience as respect of the standards set by this ideal. This serves as an alternative naturalist account of moral conscience with respect to Kant’s idea of the necessary moral representation of a transcendent world of intelligible beings. This is one of the major results of Longuenesse’s investigation, and it sounds even more thought-provoking if we consider that Kant’s first connection of moral conscience and the transcendent world of spirits was established in the Dreams of a Spirit Seer, dealing with Emmanuel Swedenborg’s visions of the afterlife. In that essay, Kant himself saw a connection between the origins of moral sense, the claims of metaphysics, and the risk of mental disruption.

But there is more to this comparison. Longuenesse also compares Freud’s developmental story with Kant’s account of the origins of morality in Conjectural Beginning of Human History and What Is Enlightenment? This juxtaposition is related to a story of individual development, but one that must be historically characterised. As Longuenesse puts it: ‘It took the long development of humankind toward the eighteenth-century Enlightenment for human beings to take each other, as human beings, to be ends in themselves and to act only on maxims that could be endorsed by all other human beings qua rational beings’. This introduction of Kant’s idea of the Enlightenment allows us to draw some conclusions on Longuenesse’s parallel path in this book and its resulting benefits for the interpretation of both Kant and Freud.

Concerning Kant, what is gained is a naturalistic, non-metaphysical account of intellectual and moral activity: ‘it is with respect to the metaphysics of the mind (what Freud called “metapsychology”) that Freud radically departs from Kant (following on the footsteps of Helmholtz), Meynert, and the tradition of “physiological Kantianism”’. Longuenesse points to a ‘naturalisation’ of Kant’s a priori ‘structures’ and ‘functions’ that has been long attempted in twentieth-century philosophy but does so through an original reworking of the nineteenth-century neo-Kantian notion of the ‘organisation of the mind’, where normative and naturalistic elements coexisted. This approach is historically sound and fruitful for the elaboration of a non-reductionist philosophy of mind. In this regard, Longuenesse’s historical insight might be further developed. For example, the philosopher who developed Helmholtz’s physiology of sense organs into a ‘corrected Kantianism’, Friedrich Albert Lange, understood the I as a by-product of the synthetic process, and while he considered the act of synthesis as grounded on neurophysiological processes, he defended a non-reductive view of aesthetic and moral values in the perspective of social progress (cf. Pecere Reference Pecere, Wolfe, Clericuzio and Pecere2022: 331–8). Lange, in turn, based many of his psychological and pedagogical views on the works of Johann Heinrich Herbart – a student of Fichte and Kant’s successor in Königsberg – who developed a theory of apperception as a ‘process’ and a mathematical account of the ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ mental activity that could be also connected to Freud’s education, original ideas, and formulations, such as the characterisation of the Ego as a ‘dominant mass of ideas’. Overall, this confirms the consistency of the project of physiological Kantianism pursued by Longuenesse in the light of contemporary cognitive sciences.

With respect to Freud, what is gained is an emphasis on psychoanalysis as a theory and practice of human autonomy, grounded on the first-person perspective and the claims of reason. This emphasis stands in contrast with the dominant reductive tendency of contemporary neuropsychology. As Longuenesse puts it: ‘what differentiates both Kant and Freud’s concerns from those of cognitive and affective neuroscience is that their investigation concerns the mind in its first-personal, experiential aspect, the aspect which is characterised in the terms of folk psychology: beliefs, desires, and feelings as subjectively experienced. The central concern for both of them is: How can human beings become the agents of their own lives?’. The emphasis on reason and autonomy, as intrinsically belonging to the activity and development of the conscious self, is a characteristic of Kant’s philosophical view of the Enlightenment; hence, Freudian psychoanalysis, in Longuenesse’s perspective, is ultimately shown to belong to the modern philosophical and social project of the Enlightenment.

Overall, both motifs of Longuenesse’s book – the naturalisation of Kantian philosophy and the interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis as a path to rational autonomy – provide a fresh and fruitful perspective on the two thinkers and, through a very subtle conceptual work, establish a solid ground for further investigations.