3 The Fundamental Antinomy of Human Beings and World

Foreword. This antinomy, also mentioned in the subtitle of the book, is the basic fact which inspires and permeates this study and constitutes its guiding line. It is, in my opinion, a summary expression of Freud's discoveries about the nature of the unconscious. In this chapter I shall try to explain what is meant by it and what its concept involves or implies, so that, when further on we come across various examples, it may easily be seen that they are manifestations of it.

Definition. By ‘antinomy’ I intend the usual meaning of the word, i.e. the incompatibility between two assertions which can claim equal rights to be true. ‘Incompatible’ means, according to the Oxford Dictionary, ‘mutually intolerant; incapable of existing together in the same subject’. Now, we saw in Chapter 2 that the Freudian unconscious is a set of bi-logical structures. This means that one aspect of them corresponds to the rail of classical logic and the other is the expression of the principle of symmetry, which constitutes the second rail along which psychoanalysis develops, and describes the violations of this logic precisely in the same aspect of the same argument. Therefore, it can be affirmed that there is in the very structure of humans a fundamental antinomy resulting from the co-presence of the two modes of being which are incompatible with one another and, in spite of this, exist and appear together in the same subject. This is incomprehensible to our normal thinking. They appear together yet remain incompatible and never fuse to form a wider unitary concept which comprises both. They are, in