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Hanly has written a scholarly discussion of Freud’s epistemology and related it to Kant’s. He concludes with a rejection of Kant’s position:
Kant’s epistemology is an ingenious denial of this unpleasant reality and of the ontological anxiety (anxiety about our mortality) that it arouses in us. Kant’s argument is that this trend in our knowledge of man and his place in nature is only phenomenal. I think that the evidence thus far is that nature and the universe is what is real. In this respect, I can be quite generally accused of “transgressing an ontological border” although, to repeat, in my own opinion, the evidence of scientific discovery, thus far, suggests that there is no border to be transgressed. [See this issue, p. 335]
In contrast to Kant, he puts Freud’s “reasonable, realistic, and modest conclusion”: “No our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere” (The Future of an Illusion, p. 241 quoted on p. 335). Whatever the merits and faults of our paper, we are pleased to have inspired Hanly to this intellectual tour de force and thorough clarification of his own epistemological position. For Hanly, it is not Kant’s critical idealism, but critical realism that is most in line with Freud’s thinking. For the critical realist, the truth, the objective view of the world, is within the reach of science. Truth is expanding, and it is only a question of time and development of methodology before the (definitive?) truth is established.
Hanly’s arguments are partly empirical, Copernicus gave us a new world picture, and Galilei’s observations confirmed its truth. As Freud said, what science cannot give us, we cannot get elsewhere. This is also the view of critical idealism, and we are convinced that Kant would have approved Freud’s reflection. The disagreement concerns whether absolute truth can be secured by scientific methods, or if we have to accept limits to absolute truth. Are we crossing an