Inwardness
and Existence
Subjectivity in/and Hegel,
Heidegger, Marx,
and Freud
Walter A. Davis
A profound, challenging, wide-ranging book, back in print for a new generation
“Inwardness and Existence accomplishes what no book before or after has even approximated: it demonstrates with great lucidity and insight the shared philosophical project that animates psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, and Hegelian dialectics. Davis roots the reader in the enterprise of questioning what is given and probing beyond what is safe in order to demonstrate that psychoanalytic inquiry, Marxist politics, existential reflection, and dialectical connection all move within the same orbit. No one who reads it will ever think about existence itself in the same way again. Davis’s landmark work will profoundly transform anyone who reads it.”—Todd McGowan, author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan
"If the book we are reading does not wake us up, as with
a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?"—Kafka,
from the epigraph
“Davis takes the historical strains between determinism and agency, content and process, inwardness and the external (or historical contingency and processsual immediacy) into dynamic, rupturing explorations of categories which provoke the reader’s analytic process. His writing is elegant and energetic, saturated with stress, the heady rush of analysis, and the challenges of hard work.”—Leighton Brooks McCutcheon, Journal of Mind and Behavior
“Praiseworthy because it grapples with the fundamental assumptions of these competing traditions, and does so with clarity and conviction.”—David M. Thompson, Philosophy and Literature
Walter A. (Mac) Davis is professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press, and Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9/11.
Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)
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BACK IN PRINT
February 2008
424 pp. 6 x 9
ISBN-13: 978-0-299-12014-6
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Reviews
Academic and University
Publishers Group | The Philosopher's Index | Philosophy & Literature | Journal
of Mind and Behavior |
Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity
in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud
By Walter Davis
"Walter Davis sets out to show that
genuine subjectivity—and an adequate theory of subject—begins
only when one steps beyond the conceptual limitations of humanism
and deconstruction. In taking that 'step beyond,' he invites
the reader to join him in the effort to recapture the complexity
of personal existence.
Davis argues that the attainment of a variable theory of subject,
requires the achievement of a principled dialectical integration
of our context of thought that are frequently opposed: Hegelian
phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. His
method is to proceed via a series of textual 'interrogations'
designed to 'free each movement from its conceptual limitations
in order to extract a core theory that necessarily becomes part
of a larger structure of thought.'"—Academic and University
Publishers Group, New Book Information, Literature—July
1989
From The Philosopher's Index
"The fundamental conflict in criticism
today is between deconstruction and humanism, between the poststructuralist
proclaimers of 'the death of the subject' and those who would
reaffirm traditional humanistic concepts and values. Rather than
taking sides in the debate, the author sets out to transcend
it, to show that genuine subjectivity—and an adequate theory
of subject—begins only when one steps beyond the conceptual
limitations of both humanism and deconstruction. In taking that
'step beyond,' he invites the reader to join him in the effort
to recapture the complexity of personal existence by confronting
the question: what is the human subject's relationship to himself
or herself? The author argues that the answer to that question
requires the achievement of a principled dialectical integration
of four contexts of thought that are frequently opposed: Hegelian
phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis."
(edited) The Philosopher's Index, Vol. 24, No. 3
From Philosophy & Literature
"The topics addressed in Walter Davis's Inwardness
and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and
Freud unfold naturally from his goal of demonstrating the
priority that theoretical inquiry should grant to the notion
of a situated subjectivity that is dialectically established
and maintained. Once this view of subjectivity has been flushed
out by way of the first chapter's discussion of Hegel's Phenomenology,
subjectivity itself is interrogated dialectically in three chapters
that each explore an important challenge to agent-centered subjectivity.
Thus, existentialism acts as a prohibition against forgetting
that the subject is not 'an a priori identity within the order
of thought' (p. 111) but rather 'that being whose very being
is at issue' (p. 107); Marxism points to the delusion in hoping
that we can 'establish a principle of identity . . . that can
be used to control or center our situatedness in a field of social
forces' (p. 179); psychoanalysis recommends that we view subjectivity
as an attempt to 'enter the world of concrete relations with
others' (p. 248) that must always be carried out in the face
of a possible agency-disrupting return of the repressed. The
aspect of the book that most engages is Davis's successful demonstration
that these three traditions can themselves Gain in methodological
precision from engagement with the concept of a radically self-critical
subject. To the illusory ease with which some participants in
these traditions have announced the dissolution of the subject,
Davis responds by calling for "a comprehensive understanding
of our situatedness as the very condition that gives us our subjectivity"
(p. 24). His book is praiseworthy because it grapples with the
fundamental assumptions of these competing traditions, and does
so with clarity and conviction."—David M. Thompson, University of Chicago, Philosophy
& Literature, Oct. 1992, Vol. 16, Iss. 2
Here is a long, and very specific, review from the Journal
of Mind and Behavior
"As an enterprise, western philosophy endeavors to reconcile
the human activity of interpretation, bound within the reflective
course of the cultural cogito, with experience, a realm
of engagement and occurrence which remains indifferent to, and
confounding of, philosophy's various methods. Philosophy's history
charts this struggle to bridge between interpretive logic and
lived experience—to maintain dynamic contact between the
deepening spirals of inwardness and existence. Failure is evident
in every discourse where the theoretician's rational logic, his
or her argument, slides into abstractions and intellectual disengagements
of metatheory anchored in a priori assumptions. These assumptions
attempt to stabilize an interpretation at the cost of severing
contact with the unremitting transformations of experience.
Consciousness functions as a psychodynamic, spactio-temporal
focal point. It relies upon its patterns of logic and emotions
to account for its field of perceptions, to engage through interpretation
all that is not. Consciousness' rational logic works to recapture,
integrate and order what it perceives as an external, lost landscape
of ex-perience, At the same time, through reflectivity
consciousness encounters the logical conundrum that its methods
are contingent upon experience, and/or that it may be inventing
its own reality inclusive of experience.
The structure of dialectic logic can be understood as a conceptual
arena wherein rational logic gazes up from its own internal house-keeping
to face its conflicted relation to experience. In Inwardness
and Existence Walter Davis intends to ground dialectics in
action, in the immediacy of consciousness and the radical implications
of truth as cyclic disaccord. To do so he explores the complexity
of history, or memory, as a current event.
Interpretation of history is traditionally more an attempt to
preserve or co-opt that an effort to revitalize. Dialectic challenges
both static historicizing and future wishing for their attempts
to avoid the fray of rational polemic's struggle with the processual
decay of immediacy. Davis offers the reader an opportunity to
initiate a "concrete dialectic," an argument of intellectual
complexity and emotional charge. Davis' contextually immediate
"interrogations." (p. 3) of history maintain a disruptive,
contentious engagement of Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Freud. He
does not intend to encapsulate or meliorate for a tamer audience
the painful controversies losses and paradoxes which galvanized
these thinkers. Davis' intention is to produce a text which perpetuates
these actions in the reader as well as in himself. Dialectic
interpretations of philosophy can take on metatheory as a crafted
series of psychological defenses which both moves toward the
conflict/question at hand and also elides it. Davis exposes this
process in his subjects' texts which necessarily thrusts him,
and the reader, into a "hermeneutics of engagement"
(p. 5): the situated immediacy of one's own analysis.
Hegel
Davis interrogates Hegel's descriptions of struggle between
reflection and experiences. Hegel considered reflection to be
consciousness' method of contact with, and influence on, events.
A conceptual force maintained by reflection is the self-confirming
logic of the cogito and its abstract reification in rationalism.
Yet, the experience of reflection's 'doubling' self-investigations
can transform rationalism into dialectic cycles of analytic process.
Hegel's struggle was with reflection's conceptual use in confliction
ways: as able to rationally abstract experience, to become experience,
and even transcend mere description of experience toward a higher
order of being. Hegel's dialectic 'solution' was to engage reflection
as processual conflict able to bifurcate interdependent identifications
for consciousness to call experience.
The phenomenological structure of conscious reflection engenders
sets of competing attributions, e.g., mind/body, internal/external,
master/slave, whose controversial intertensions define both the
situatedness of the subject and his or her experience in the
moment. In dialectics, rational logic takes on these arguments
but not toward melioration, which would restrict both consciousness
and experience. Dialectic interrogation intensifies one's contact
with the struggle/anxiety which is experience. Such a methodology
analyzes 'subject,' as increasingly complex interrogations delimiting
self and other.
Davis is so positioned between deconstruction's endless and abstract
deferral of submission to context and Kant's insistence on the
security if the priori. Davis reads Hegel's subject as 'defined
by the impossibility of achieving what it lacks, the status of
a substance' (p. 46). Hegel thus sets a contemporary stage for
the dynamic struggles of the post-structural and post-modern.
Unhappy consciousness, stoicism and skepticism are promoted by
Hegel as the slave's mature engagement of servitude. In addition,
Davis exposes the resistance which enable Hegel's monumental
phenomenology while drastically abstracting and protecting him
form the full force of his own immediacy in experience: Hegel's
summary rationalism. By confronting subtle reifications in Hegel's
logic Davis offers readers opportunities to strengthen the conflict
field of their own immediate cycles of logic and affective valence.
Heidegger
Davis reads Heidegger's existentialism as an achievement
of dialectic effort. Existentialism cannot be abstract and has
no substantive a priori. When misinterpreted as a phenomenology
of Being, or a path toward an inner core of the subject, it becomes
reified. Existentialism is immediately an interrogation of subjectivity,
actively present in questions of 'who am I' and 'what shall I
do.'
'Subjectivity exists in a process of becoming in which everything
is at issue' (p. 109). In existential encounters the degradation
of subject is held in dynamic tension with the subject's inability
to escape itself. The tragic and stoic position of Davis' dialectic
is between process and determinism: neither the modern's facts
(qua humanism) nor the post-modern's abstract negations
of subject tap the vast complexities of the immutable yet processual
field occurring between reflectivity and events.
In contrast to neo-Kantian anchors of the priori in cognition
(e.g., Habermas), Davis argues that an existential a priori cannot
be constrained by cognition as it engages experiences directly
as it is lived and suffered. Put ironically, the existential
a priori is anxiety itself which, at best, can cognize only as
questions.
Existentialism ceases whenever anxiety is elided or sublated.
In this sense, Heidegger struggled against Hegel's progressive
evolution of dialectic which requires a system of logical progression
and thus relative containment of anxiety. The existential point
of view implicates a rupture, a burst of experience that requires
no hierarchical lattice of rational forms. Heidegger's own stylistic
security in rationalism in which immediacy cycles to an abstract,
analytic method, devoid of specific actions and ultimately Kantian
in its dependence on analytic formalism. 'As with Hegel, we read
Heidegger best when we read against the grain, not toward a deconstruction
of the text, but toward a discovery of a central contradiction
that makes it possible to liberate a determinate meaning from
his text is other than the one its conceptual limits dictate'
(p. 144).
Davis describes psychological agency as social drama.
Reflectivity in existentialism question itself through the hard,
dramatic action of 'reversal,' Dramatic reversal employs contextually
grounded reflective inversions to evade the reductive substantialism
of neo-Kantianism, naturalism, behaviorism and determinism. It
also refuses the abstract uselessness of deconstruction's "acting-out"
attempts to escape context. 'Dramatic agency, not substance,
constitutes the identity of the existential subject' (p. 151).
At the core of psychological agency is an unremitting pressure
to make decisions, the cognitive counterpart and cogenitor
of emotion. Contrary to modernity's interpretation, existentialism
refuses consciousness' mythology of an "internal" identity.
Considering our emotions "private" is one hallmark
of such distortions. In fact, emotions are concrete actions,
situated in our field of experience and beckoning dialectic confrontation.
Marx
Marx argued for historical and social definitions of subject.
He brought ideology to the problem of subject and revealed that
individual 'autonomy' functions as a conceptual shield making
the hegemonic 'social' actions and political refusals which generate
its fiction. Challenging the authenticity of this split between
the individual and social-political reveals histories themselves
to be mechanisms of psychological defense.
Modernity's rational interpretations of Marx have invoked utopian,
Platonic impositions of community structure both abstract and
rigidly defended from the inherent conflicts of a reflective
consciousness. Ironically the modern's fictive reifications of
Marx institute a bourgeois, isolate identity, shielded from the
internal/external ideological conflicts defining its situatedness.
Davis' interrogation of Marx makes clear that ideology permutates
all constructs of subject destroying both historical and autonomous
a priori havens.
Davis aligns with Marx's concepts of subject as an immediate
effect of historical contingency. Accreting subject from the
mutability of human memory is inevitably an act of ideology whose
hegemony can either be defended as substantial and formal or
challenged through processual transformations of analysis. A
core Western mythic assumption has been that, 'the identity of
the self and the intelligibility of experience lie in correspondence
to "reason''' (p. 179). Davis positions his argument between
neo-Kantian projects of propositional logic (as varied as Habermas
and Althusser), which attempt to artificially limit the impact
of ideology on reason itself, and Derrida's exposure of all languages
of subject as housing essentialisms which fail before historical
and grammatical scrutiny. Davis argues for a post-factual nor
extrinsic. Rather, they organize immediate conflicts for
a subject who is realized through interrogation. Hegel's inwardness
of subject must confront Marx's social context and vice versa
as the interrogator intensifies the stressors of one's own lived
dialectic drama.
Reflection encounters its most dynamic purpose and complexity
as action. With this perspective Davis gains a concrete
understanding of the action of philosophy: '[Philosophy] . .
. gives us the clearest picture of the contradictions of its
historical moment. Reading philosophy reveals, not what sovereign
reason discovers as universally true, but where we stand in history'
(p. 183).
Philosophy's failure through modernity can be found in its propositional
abstractions. Most philosophies actively distance from what makes
each model uncomfortable by erecting an ideology which also comprise
the foundation stones of the author's psychological defense.'
. . . To understand oneself one must grasp the ways in which
one's immediacy—one's feelings, opinions, experience, one's
so called privacy—is a function of the contradictions of
one's times' (p.218).
Freud
Davis woks his arguments with Hegel, Heidegger and Marx to
invigorate Freud's model as a tragic drama where the self is its conflicts. Core to each self is its experience of "trauma,"
a dialectic event of loss and establishment. In psychoanalysis
symptoms describe a subject's essential investments as well as
losses. Even more, redundant symptoms are a gateway to the dialectic
engagement of trauma where reflectivity comes closes to experience.
Through trauma the past is reconstructed with in frameworks of
desire. Our recollections of trauma focus conflicts into immediate
nodal exacerbations of experience and contingency. Experience-as-self
gains its most potent voice between the conflicting identifications
of victimization and authorship.
Freud's 'neurosis' is revitalized by Davis as sourcing from an
individual's attempt to intervene in the confusions of family.
'Neurosis is always, initially, a legitimate act of protest'
(p. 246). Neurosis' binding mechanism, repression, does not relieve
or sublate conflict; it increases conflict's range and investment
as one's activities. 'The unconscious is one term in a dramatic
process where desire is the foundation of human agency and the
repression of desire our primary mode of operation (p. 252) .
. . . It is an evolving system of disclaimed acts, motives, desires,
conflicts—and its structure corresponds to the life history
of which it is the underside.' (p. 255).
Psychoanalysis works to intensify the ability to take on conflicts,
not in abstraction or intellectualization but through the tragic
drama of experience. Such activity questions any momentary psychological
assumption of cognitive or affective primacy (i.e., is this quality
of my experience due to a reason or a feeling?) by implicating
the twisted cords of reason/affect in the conflict structure
and problematic of reflectivity. A defining achievement and horror
of human psychology is reflectivity and its core characteristics
are its cognitive/affective capacities of conceptual inversion
which play off of each other to maintain an interpretive field
of experience for the subject.
Emotions in this model condense and displace their situatedness.
To unpack anxiety and other affects is to explore their contexts.
In post-Marxist terms, affect is an ideology drawing focus off
of its historical contingency while presenting a gateway to interrogate
experience as historical context. Affect is not a release of
defense but rather is part of ego's active defensive structuring.
Like all defensive operations it both obscures and gratifies
its motivational arguments.
Davis organizes psychological defense mechanisms and their maintenance
of repetition compulsions under the concept of 'fractionation'
(p. 258). Under fractionation the existential and dialectic complexity
of trauma is closed-out and simplified in favor of repetitive,
linear patterns of behavior. Fractionation skirts its own dynamism
through freezing the cyclic process of reflectivity into the
rigidity of mirror images. In arrested reflection both the rational
logic and socialized emotions of consciousness are held out as
stable foundations of an ego which is, in fact, attempting to
meliorate its conflict base. The psychoanalytic interrogation
of repression and its repetition compulsions doubles reflectivity
upon itself constituting Davis' 'active reversal' (p. 259).
'Active rehearsal' is an agonizing task of transitioning desire's
over-investment in internal objects out toward the real world.
History maintains dual roles in reversed reflectivity as both
memorialized self-confirmation of stability and as an
existential moment rewritten as fast as it is encountered. Such
an activity cannot submit to any formalized notions of psychological
determinism, nor to hollow expansions of a "conflict-free
sphere" for an ego thinly cloaking powerful, and immoral,
fantasies of free will.
Davis is critical of ego psychology and object relations schools
as essentially fostering the intellectualized practice of fractionation
in their promotions of mirroring (qua deficits), the healthy,
autonomous and self-satisfied ego, and friendly, process dampening
notions like Winnicott's "good enough mother." He points
out that such utopic rational foals conceal a gross recidivism
rate in western psychotherapy. Within the American analytic field
Davis most closely aligns with Schaefer's language of action
and drama, yet he bases his though far more deeply in conflict.
Contra American psychology, what the subject has lost is not
its mother as object, but rather itself. In this model it is
precisely frozen, positive reflections that substantialize consciousness'
emotions and prevent their analysis. The cognito and its affects
play off each other in an abstract, ego-confirming tautology.
Western therapies of the self and ego propose that the proper
handling of emotions requires controlled, insightful abreaction
and the cultural sedatives of balanced, homeostatic health. Penetrating
this mirror fiction through 'active reversal' places the subject
in the immediate intensity of conflictual experience at the cost
of imagined security.
Psychoanalysis is not an act of cognitive adjustment, attitude
change, gestalt transcendence, object-constancy, nor emotional
abreaction. Psychoanalysis is an act of dramatic immediacy where
rational and its emotions must work hard to encounter their paradoxic
underpinnings.
Davis argues that psychoanalysis challenges the ego to recognize
a co-generative interdependency between the super-ego and the
id, thereby liberating the id's artistry and allowing the super-ego
to develop a morality and ethics of contingency. Necessary to
this work is for ego to distinguish between the emotional character
armor of its fractionation and the experience of core conflicts.
The experience, or emotions, of core conflicts are neither a
priori, 'private' nor substantial. Rather, such work locates
ambivalent, socially active 'appeals and gestures' implicating
loss.
Davis closes by distinguishing his "dialectics of situated
subjectivity" from dialectics distorted by the rational
paradigm of modernity into counterfeit humanism. He is critical
of structuralism's reification of dialectic into abstract binary
logic which fosters its own tautologies. He is also critical
of deconstruction's abject dependencies on structuralism's binary
format for its artificially induced negations of content. Davis
bases dialectics in process, immediacy and historical press.
He feels dialectics has the capacity to intensify experience,
as core conflict and self-knowledge, and reach beyond language
to an immediacy of being neither complacent nor hegemonically
socialized.
Davis takes the historical strains between determinism and agency,
content and process, inwardness and the external (or historical
contingency and processual immediacy), into dynamic, rupturing
explorations of categories which provoke the readers analytic
process. His writing is elegant and energetic, saturated with
stress, the heady rush of analysis and the challenges of hard
work.
In his effort to detail core conflicts and the liberation of
id/super-ego expression, and to ground dialectics in experience
free of abstraction/neurosis, Davis encounters logical conundrums
derived from his own rational polemics. For example, he constrains
his consideration of the breadth of language phenomena to the
domain of ego. This allows him to conceptualize an analysis which
ruptures language, qua ego, as it encounters core conflicts
of experience. Here, his lack of developed discourse with Lacan
is noteworthy and problematic.
Davis is summarily critical and dismissive of Lacan whom he feels
hypostatized the oedipal complex into a unilateral event where
the symbolic could only be a conditioning patriarchy. Lacan's
argument that language configures experience is interpreted by
Davis to conscript Lancanian analysis to the internal, abstract
and intellectualized domain of an ego chasing the circular tautologies
of linguistic structuralism.
Freud's achievement was to reveal Western culture's charade of
constrained sexuality. He expanded sexuality into a psychodynamic
interpretive logic whose endless differentiations attempt to
engage all that sexuality was considered not to be: i.e., sexuality's ex-perience, or, the unconscious. Davis also asserts sexuality
as identity's broadest conceptual arena where affect and cognition
reveal their historical contexts, interpersonal motives and social
conflicts as insubstantial determinants.
Lacan, following Freud, expanded modernity's impoverish view
of language as merely an abstract rational tool describing experience.
By linking the uses and forms of language with psychodynamic
expansion of language structure does not promote structuralism,
formalism, or any rational ideology including the modern's static
false-patriarchy.
A paradox is evident regarding any theory's ability to conceptualize
beyond its borders towards realms of experience, core conflicts,
self-recognition or being. Each individual's interpretive attempts
imaginatively fixate on the existence they are not. This toil
of consciousness concretely demarcates dialectic struggle and
the powerful rational appeal of the illogic of the a priori which
offer mirages of leisure amidst hard work. Reading Lacan "against
the grain" can evade the structuralism and mystic formula
of his epigoni to encounter a reflectivity and a symbolic of
radically challenging proportions and intentions. Lacan may be
Davis' most potent counterpart and adversary."—Journal
of Mind and Behavior, Autumn 1991, Vol. 12, No. 4
Reviewed by Leighton Brooks McCutchen, Shelburne Falls Clinical
Group
Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)
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