Mente, complejidad y modularismode Kant a Freud

Abstract

This Doctoral Thesis is based on the research of the professor Eugenio Moya Cantero into the thought of the Prussian philosopher Inmanuel Kant that he carried out at the beginning of the century in his monographs ¿Naturalizar a Kant? Criticismo y modularidad de la mente (2003) and Kant y las ciencias de la vida (Naturlehre y filosofía crítica) (2008). Eugenio Moya interpreted Kant’s thought from a perspective that I adopt here as methodology, i.e. the (soft) naturalization of Kantian transcendentalism. This naturalization of the Kantian epistemology involves two theses stated by Abner Shimony in Naturalistic Epistemology (1987): 1) human beings, including their cognitive faculties, are entities in nature, interacting with other entities studied by the natural sciences; and 2) the results of natural scientific investigations of human beings, particularly of biology and empirical psychology, are relevant and probably crucial to the epistemological enterprise. This approach challenges the traditional interpretations of Kant, which have coincided in placing a radical anti-naturalism, that is, an absolute opposition between transcendentality and facticity at the core of his thought. That naturalism and the consequent relativism of the insurmountable gap between the transcendental and the empirical levels is also supported by the interpretation that Michel Foucault made of Kantianism in the Introduction to his translation of Kantian Anthropology in 1964, in which he defended the thesis that Anthropology repeats the Critique. This thesis finally posited the transcendental subject of the first Critique as an ideal model of man that served Kant for his empirical-anthropological analysis of the subject. The aim of the Doctoral Thesis consists in reconstructing the Kantian conception of reason as a complex, modular and dynamic system that is based on the idea of a human nature, and whose standard functioning theorized in the first Critique constitutes an idealized and representative of the human race model of the objective knowledge (truth) and of the mental health simultaneously. In this framework, madness appears in Kant as a maladjustment of that system. But since real human subjects are far from embodying that ideal system of the mind, the convergence towards it and towards mental health is circumscribed to a social organization that allows the collective and participatory search for empirical truth configured as a consensus gentium. Sigmund Freud upheld the idea of a topic of the human mind and the convergence of truth and mental health in agreement with Kant. This aim of the Doctoral Thesis is fulfilled through the attainment of the following research results: 1. To offer an interpretation of Kant's philosophy that articulates the relationships between the transcendental and the empirical levels in a way capable of putting new perspective on the whole of Kant's thought. 2. To connect the Kantian conception of the mind with contemporary neuroscientific research on the basis of the idea of a human nature. 3. To relate Kant’s ideas of reason and human nature with his conception of the historical development of the human being (Philosophy of history). 4. To expose Kant’s conception of the mind as a complex, modular and dynamic system based on his idea of a human nature, whose functional continuity constitutes both objective knowledge (truth) and mental health. 5. To show Kant’s conception of madness as a maladjustment or failure of the normal functioning of the mind system. 6. To analyze the continuity of the Kantian concept of topic of the human mind and Kant’s connection between truth and mental health in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis.