ABSTRACT
The critique of bourgeois psychology is by no means an exercise in ‘negative thinking’. It provides a description of the real world: the modern world. Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche lay bare the reality of decomposed subjectivity. They reconstruct the world from its point of view, or rather from its varied and incompatible points of view. The experience of modern life cannot be conveyed, they claim, by any system of rational concepts. Incompleteness and contradiction (rather than ignorance and error) are its fundamental conditions, however much it succeeds in rendering the ‘objective’ necessity of nature as a rational order. The standard of personal truth could never be subsumed within a hypotheticodeductive ‘system of the world’.
