The Will/Id in Schopenhauer/Freud (respectively) represent what could be called a “sense of life.” They think of it as pre-personal and connected to the social. The sexual impulse, for Freud, was fundamental to the Id. This was, in turn, fundamental to the personality of the human being. It was also representative of the individual’s connection with the mass consciousness.
“Arthur Schopenhauer,” by J Schäfer, taken from [Wikipedia.Com]; this image is in the public domain.
Freud’s idea of the Id was perhaps (or perhaps not) coincidentally similar to Schopenhauer's will. Like the will, this idea builds on Kant’s work on epistemology. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he discusses knowledge as relying on so-called “apriori” (prior to experience) understanding. This is related to the experience of space (objective apriori) and time (subjective apriori). What made Kant’s idea so provocative was his introduction of the pre-consciousness. Descartes, before him, had talked about consciousness as a thing in itself, separate from other objects in reality, but he did not address the mechanism of knowledge acquisition itself.
In order to explain how sensory input becomes knowledge, Kant had to model a full-fledged pre-consciousness to assemble the manifold into perceived objects of being. Kant’s pre-consciousness seems to roughly correspond to Freud’s ego. According to Freud and Schopenhauer, the Id is the actual only real thing in itself. It is by the Id, through the ego, that we ascribe beingness to objects of reality. This process takes place in the ego, which concretizes what Kant would call the manifold of experience.
The Will, however, represents something which I do not believe Kant ever attempted to delve into. It is beyond the confines of Kant’s apriori and is the originator of the pre-personal instincts. Additionally, the Will is the repository of the mass consciousness. Understanding the essence of man as Will is helpful in understanding Heidegger (and vice-versa). In Heideggerian terms, the Will is that part of the human being that interacts with Dasein directly. Although Heidegger himself would not use the term, the appropriating events of Dasein have a kind of mass consciousness which appropriate man on the level of his essence. The Id is simultaneously the essence of man and the source of the essences which man projects onto Dasein in the clearing of being.
Id, which is both the essence of man and the source of the essences of those objects which man draws as radically other from amidst the nothing, is driven by what Freud calls Eros and Thanatos. But really, Eros and Thanatos are one and the same. The drive of life is the chaotic expansion of life through love and violence; love and violence are two aspects of the same thing. That is the spread of life, beingness, and meaning until it occupies all of the nothing. Once it has occupied the nothing, it withdraws and dies and redefines itself. And then the expansion cycles again.
The self is only marginally aware of what is going on with this process. For the most part, it is shielded from the relentless beauty and brutality of the expansion and self-destruction that takes place with all life. To look into the Id is to look upon the face of God. The truth is that, while Freud viewed the Id as the most primal aspect of the human being (and yes, in some sense it is), it is also the highest forum of human experience.
It is by being in contact with the Id that one is able to experience the spiritual aspects of human life. When we mistake the projected rules of the Superego for spiritual guidance, what follows is misery. When we allow our selves to be absorbed into Dasein by quieting the ego and allowing the Id to come forth, spiritual understanding occurs.
Originally posted to [PJCornell.Com]; this article is copyrighted (2018) by Cornell Enterprises, which is the sole proprietorship of Philip John Cornell. Some rights reserved. If shared in part or in whole, it must be prominently attributed to "PJ Cornell," and if shared online, a link to this content or [PJCornell.Com] must be provided.
