Das Unbewusste. The unknowable

Abstract

The publication of the debate held on the occasion of the publication of Massimo Fagioli’s Das Unbewusste. The unknowable (Nuove Edizioni Romane, Roma 2007), in Rome on 9.12.2007, follows on from the papers, published in the last number of the magazine. The questions and answers developed some of themes raised in the papers delivered: the spiritual and religious character of the concept of a distinct unconscious, starting from Schelling, with the term das Unbewusst; the annulment of human reality by rational thought, from Spinoza, to Hegel up to Heidegger; the ineluctable relationship, in medicine and in particular in psychiatry, between knowledge and aim of a cure. In conclusion Fagioli has highlighted the social and political consequences of the observation of the fact that the passage from the adjective unbewusst to the noun das Unbewusste implies a definition of the unconscious no longer as a condition, but as a substance: an analogous process, in fact, may lie at the bottom of racist phenomena.