Abstract

The article connects the work of Hans Jonas and Sigmund Freud. Jonas builds an ethics based on the idea that «the subject is not enough». Value derives from what objects ask to our ethical sensibility, because they are in themselves objects of value which require to be preserved in the present and in the future. Sigmund Freud considers the unconscious as the place of our mind where the subject is not the only master. In this light, ethics has to do with the objects of the unconscious, which represent the external and the internal world to which our subjectivity always refers to. In the relationship to objects as seen from a point of view where Jonas and Freud cooperate, psychoanalysis finds its ethical goal.