Freud's and Hegel's synthesized ontology: Instinct, sublimation, cultural unconsciousness, and Spirit

The aim of the dissertation is to do a comparative study of the ontological views of Freud and Hegel with a view to synthesize them. A synthesized view is desirable for it would provide a bridge between their two positions, which initially seems radically disparate. On the one hand, the synthesized ontology would provide Freud's solipsistic, hallucinatory subject a link back to objective being. On the other hand, it would resist the assimilation into Hegel's rational Spirit such that irrational being would retain a proper role.;The dissertation develops Freud's ideas about instinct and its relation to meaning, culture, and sublimation. I develop his ideas from his earliest to latest works, including the Project and Moses and Monotheism. The movement shows the progression of his ideas from the solipsism of the dreaming subject to culture. Only the latter makes sense of the former, and the process mediating the two is sublimation. The dissertation focuses on the Phenomenology of Spirit in regards to Hegel. It is the work wherein he addresses life and desire. I show that the common motif throughout this work is the sacrifice of natural being for the sake of the spiritual one. This culminates in religious consciousness in which the divine man gives over his nothingness in death, but is resurrected into Spirit. Freud helps to thematize natural being as a calamitous nothingness. He helps Hegel to acknowledge contingency without overcoming it.;Subject is both conscious and unconscious. As it turns out, culture is too. There is an unconscious archaism that forms the arché of teleological Spirit. Neither is human being reducible to instinct, nor is it to rationality. Sublimation helps us to understand the subject that may transform instinct into cultural ideals and objects. Spirit sets the conditions for the whole. Spirit is the futural tertiary movement that unites essence, its othering and return. The vicissitudes of instinct are mute in the face of Spirit always ahead of itself in genuine possibilities.