Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 8, 2022

The Philosophical Boundaries of the Unconscious: A Contemporary Turn in Continental Philosophical Subjectivity and Apriorism

(Abstract)

Li Kelin

Ever since psychology introduced the theory of the unconscious, philosophical theories’ arguments for consciousness have been directly challenged. The unconscious, seen as the opposite of consciousness, seeks to demonstrate that people have so far failed to understand either consciousness or the entities and meanings rooted in it. The unconscious erodes the substratum of universal experience; through habit, it questions the absoluteness of the subject, and through meaninglessness it dissolves the clarity of meaning by breaking through the dark holes on the logical plane. In the face of the challenges of the psychology of the unconscious, the loss of traditional theory has been the impetus for philosophy to reflect on itself and redefine its core issues. From Husserl’s phenomenological defense of the a priori subject to Deleuze’s decomposition of the coupling between the subject and the a priori, the discussion of the unconscious suggests two theoretical orientations and approaches to argument: the understanding of the subject shifts from the constructor of experience to the carrier of experience, and the hermeneutic approach to the a priori is replaced by generation and breakthroughs from essential reduction. Deleuze started from within the theory of consciousness, contributing in complex detail to the self-proliferation of conscious content, annihilating the transcendental status of the concept of consciousness and arrogating to it the boundaries once set by the theory of consciousness. Whereas phenomenology defined the boundaries of the study of consciousness through the unconscious, post-war French philosophy attempted to break down the boundaries of thought and reshape the mission of philosophical research.