Philosophy of the Unconscious

by Eduard Von Hartmann

  In the fourth and last place, it is to be noted that the fructifying conception is never wanting, even in the rational works of mere talent, but is merely limited to such small amounts that they elude ordinary introspection. But when once what is characteristic in this process has been comprehended in the case of rare genius,—and we consider that there are innumerable degrees from it to talent, from talent to the talentless worrying the bare understanding by the help of learnt rules,—an abundance of examples will soon present themselves which more or less exhibit the character of inspiration from the Unconscious; as, for instance, when one is engaged in any work, this or that improvement suddenly occurs at quite another time, and the like. To any one doubting this, I shall, in conclusion, prove that every combination of sensuous presentations, when it is not left purely to chance, but is to lead to a definite end, receives the help of the Unconscious.

  The laws of the association of ideas or sequence of thought contain three essential moments: (1.) the evoking idea; (2.) the idea called up; and (3.) the special interest leading to the calling up of the idea. As for the interrelations of the first two apart from the third, and the laws of their connection, they must be referred essentially to the mechanical causality of the molecular vibrations of the brain, to the greater or less affinity of the cerebral vibrations corresponding with the exciting idea to the various latent dispositions in the brain (called by the improper expression, “slumbering ideas of memory”). (Comp. pp. 33, 34.) Such a limitation of our consideration to the exciting and the excited idea would, I conceive, be justified only if there are conditions in human life in which man is free not only from every conscious purpose, but also from the sway or co-operation of every unconscious interest, every passing mood. This is, however, a condition hardly ever occurring, for even if one in appearance completely abandons his train of thought to accident, or if one abandons oneself entirely to the involuntary dreams of fancy, yet always other leading interests, dominant feelings and moods prevail at one time rather than at another, and these will always exert an influence on the association of ideas. Of still greater influence, however, must of course be some special motive determining the train of thought to a particular goal, and this point (cited above as No. 3) it is also with which we have here particularly to deal.

  For example, if I look at a right-angled triangle, all manner of ideas may become connected with it without any particular reason; but if I am asked for the proof of some proposition which I should be ashamed not to know, I have a particular notion for linking on to the presentation of the triangle those ideas which are serviceable for the demonstration. It is this interest in the end then which conditions the manner of the association of ideas in the different cases. For if, in the case of the triangle, otherwise any other possible idea might occur to me, only not exactly that one which I want, and this interest in the discovery of the proof brings it about that suitable ideas arise which otherwise most probably would not have been called up, still a motive must be the cause of this. But now, who is the intelligent being who seeks out, among innumerable possible ones, the idea corresponding to an end on this stimulus of some motive? It is certainly not consciousness; for in semi-conscious dreams always only such ideas as correspond to the main interest of the moment, but unintended, occur; in the intentional search of consciousness in the drawers of memory, on the other hand one is often just left by it in the lurch. Aids may doubtless be used if what is wanted will not occur to me, but it is not got by importunity; and often, when one is thrown into perplexity by such failures, the idea in question comes hours, nay, days afterwards, suddenly rained in upon consciousness, when one least of all was thinking of it. One sees, then, that it is not consciousness that selects, since it is completely blind, and receives each piece which is fetched from the treasury of memory as a gift.

  If consciousness were the selector, it would indeed be able to see by its own light what was eligible, which, as is well known, it is not, since only that which is already selected emerges from the night of the Unconscious. If, then, consciousness were the selector, it would grope about in absolute darkness, could accordingly not possibly choose appropriately, but only take at random what first came to hand. That unknown one, however, does choose judiciously in fact, namely, in accordance with the special purpose. According to psychology, which only knows of conscious psychical activity, there is here a manifest contradiction. For experience testifies that an appropriate selection of ideas takes place before their emergence, and denies that this selection is undertaken by consciousness. For us, who have already become acquainted with the purposive activity of the Unconscious on many sides, there is here only a fresh support of our view. It is just a reaction of the Unconscious upon the motive of the conscious will, which, in the form of its manifestation and in its occasional non-appearance on severe partial tension of the brain, perfectly agrees with the creative power of the artist.

  The reflection just made holds good of the association of ideas in abstract thinking as well as in sensuous imagining and artistic combination. If a result is to be arrived at, the right idea must readily offer itself at the right time from the storehouse of memory; and that it is just the right idea which appears, for that the Unconscious alone can make provision. All aids and artifices of the understanding can only facilitate the office of the Unconscious, but never take it away.

  A suitable and yet simple example is wit, which is a mean between artistic and scientific production, since it pursues artistic aims with, for the most part, abstract material. Every witticism is, according to the common expression, a flash. The understanding may perhaps make use of aids to facilitate the flash; practice, especially in the case of puns, can impress the material more vividly on the memory, and altogether strengthen the verbal memory; talent may endow particular persons with an ever-sparkling wit,—in spite of all that, every single witticism remains a gift from above; and even those who think they are privileged in this respect, and have wit completely in their power, must have the experience that just when they most wish to compel it, their talent denies them its services, and that nothing but worn-out absurdities or witticisms learnt by rote will out of their brain. These folk know also quite well that a bottle of wine is a far readier means of setting their faculty a-going than any intentional effort.

  If we have gathered from the foregoing that all human artistic production depends on an intrusion of the Unconscious, it will no longer excite surprise to find the laws of beauty contained as much as possible in those organisms of Nature which we have recognised as the most immediate apparition of the Unconscious. This point could not well have been mentioned before; it is, however, one important reason the more for the regular coming into being of organisms according to pre-existing IDEAS.Let one only look at a peacock’s feather. Every barb of the feather receives its nutriment from the shaft; the nutriment is the same for all barbs; the colouring matters are for the most part not yet present in the shaft, but are first separated from the common nutritive fluid in the barbs themselves. Every barb receives different colouring matters at different distances from the shaft, which are sharply separated from one another. The distances of these borders of colour from the shaft are different in the case of every barb. How are they determined? By the aim of giving closed figures, peacock’s eyes, in the juxtaposed layers of the barbs. And how can this end be determined? Only by the beauty of the marking and brilliancy of colour.

  How insufficient, from the æsthetic point of view, does the Darwinian theory appear! It shows that, on the supposition that the capability of producing coloured markings in the plumage is transmissible by inheritance, the æsthetic taste of the animals in sexual selection must enhance the beauty of the plumage in the course of generations through predominant propagation of beautifully-marked individuals. Undoubtedly! Thus a more may be developed from the less, but whence comes the less? If the coloured marking is not already present in the plumage, how is a sexual selection possible in the coloured marking? Accordingly, that
which is to be explained must be already there, if in less degree. The Darwinian theory rests on the assumption that such ability—in this case that of producing coloured marks—is transmissible by inheritance. The transmission of a capacity to successors presupposes, however, its presence in the progenitors. And supposing the conception of inheritance were tolerably clear, which it by no means is (least of all when the separate inheritance of different qualities in the different sexes of the same kind is taken into account), it by no means explains the capacity itself in the descendant, but only how this individual has obtained the possession of this capacity. The capacity itself remains, even with Darwin, the qualitas occulta; he makes no attempt at all to penetrate into its essence; he only proves, indeed, that inheritance combined with sexual selection is able, in part intensively, to enhance such an already existing capacity in single instances, partly to procure their further distribution extensively. It contributes nothing at all to the explanation of its essence and its first origination. It can, for example, never show how the individual bird begins so to distribute the deposits of colour on its feathers that they, apparently irregular in the several feathers and barbs, produce in their juxtaposition regular and beautiful markings. But, lastly, if sexual selection be rightly given as a reason for the intensive and extensive enhancement of such capacity, the next question is this:—How does the individual attain to a sexual selection in respect of beauty? If we can only answer this question, especially in the case of marine animals of a low grade, who are surely to be credited with but little conscious æsthetics, by supposing an instinct the unconscious aim of which is concerned with beautifying the species, Darwin is manifestly involved in a circle. We shall, however, perceive in this instinct a means employed by Nature for attaining its end with less trouble than if, foregoing the assistance of the transmission of slight improvements of the bodily constitution, all at once it willed the production of the greatest possible beauty in all individuals singly. In other words, we admire a less troublesome indirect attainment of the end, instead of one more difficult and indirect, as before in the mechanisms of the individual organism; and to have discovered this mechanism in its universality is the indisputable merit of Darwin; only one cannot, as the Materialist, believe that therewith the last word has been spoken.

  In a similar way one may see in the improvement of the florescence how the impulse to beauty lies in the mysterious life and motion of the plant itself which in the wild state is only too much oppressed and stifled in the struggle for existence. As the plants are in a measure freed from this struggle the endeavour after beauty breaks through, and from the most insignificant blossoms of wild plants there arise the most splendid flowers under our very eyes. And be it observed, the enticement of insects required to effect fertilisation by means of a more vivid colouring cannot possibly account for this embellishment, since our most beautiful garden flowers have full, that is, unfruitful blossoms, and can only be increased in a non-sexual way. Here we have the proof that the impulse to its beautiful unfolding lies in the plant itself, and, in the case of wild-flowers, is only supported, but by no means produced, by the preference of the insects which visit them. Darwin has never made an attempt to explain how those varieties or departures from the normal type are possible which excel the latter in beauty, and which man has only to preserve from perishing in the struggle for existence, that this superiority may be maintained.

  But the same holds good of all beauty in the vegetable and animal kingdom, even that of the general form. I declare it to be a first principle that every living thing is as beautiful as it can be, regard being had to its mode of life and propagation. As we saw before that the absolute fitness of every arrangement is limited: on the one side, by other aims, whose realisation it would oppose, on the other side, through the resistance of the rigid material, to whose laws the organising principle must bend and adapt itself, precisely in the same manner is the beauty of every part limited in all directions by its conformity to the end in view, where it is of practical importance for the being, and secondly, through the resistance of the stubborn material, whose laws must be respected. Thus, e.g., the tendency to the unfolding of the greatest brilliancy of colour possible among the weaker animals (small birds, beetles, butterflies, moths, &c.) is limited by the necessity of their concealing themselves from their persecutors by assimilation to the colour of their surroundings, unless they are secured from their eventual foes by a disagreeable smell or taste (e.g., Heliconidæ), or by an impenetrable hard shell (hard beetles). Wherever, in a species. the higher claims of existence and its power of competing in the struggle allow of the unfolding of a certain beauty in form and colour, there it forces its way unchecked, even when it appears perfectly purposeless and worthless for the competition of the species in the struggle for existence. (Think of the splendour of colour of lower marine animals, or the beauty of certain caterpillars, which are not propagated as such, in which accordingly no sexual selection can take place, so far as their beauty is concerned, in the pupa state.) Among animals adapted for rapid flight the need of hiding themselves is a matter of small concern, but immediately becomes important when flight is out of the question, e.g., among brooding birds. Here we see, in all birds which brood in the open nest, that that sex to which the office of brooding exclusively belongs wears a duller dress than the other. Of smaller birds, both sexes can only wear a robe of brighter hue among those species which brood in a closed nest concealing the brooding bird, whilst a distribution of the unconcealed office of brooding between the sexes excludes both from a brilliant plumage. In like manner, almost all species of butterflies not absolutely protected by an intolerable smell or taste are more or less polymorphous; i.e., whilst the males are beautifully coloured and marked, the females, which must live after copulation till the maturity and deposition of the eggs, are more dingy in hue, or they copy in their external appearance tolerably remote species enjoying a special protection. Where a gorgeous plumage would be an injurious endowment during the whole of life, Nature frequently still seeks to pay its tribute to beauty by a glittering wedding garment, which is exchanged after a short time for a duller garb, as if it wished to glorify with a gleam of poetry the life of the feathered airy dweller in its happy spring of love by a fleeting ray of beauty.

  Interesting as the contemplation of organic nature is from the æsthetic point of view, we cannot enter upon it here for want of space, and must content ourselves with the foregoing suggestions, the development of which we leave to the reader. If we, however, assume our assertions to be admitted, the difference between the artistic production of man and of Nature lies, in the last resort, not in the essence and origin of the conception of the Idea, but only in the mode of its realisation. In Nature’s beauty the Idea is nowhere presented to a consciousness before the execution, but the individual, who is at the same time marble and sculptor, realises the Idea perfectly unconsciously; in human artistic production, on the other hand, the instigation of consciousness intervenes. The Idea is not directly realised as natural existence, but as cerebral vibrations, which confront the consciousness of the artist as construction of fancy, whose conversion into external reality depends on the conscious will of the artist.

  If, in conclusion, we sum up the result of this chapter, we obtain the following:—The discovery of the beautiful and the creation of the beautiful by man proceed from unconscious processes, whose results, the feeling of the beautiful and the discovery of the beautiful (conception), are presented in consciousness. These moments form the starting-point of farther conscious work, which, however, at every instant needs more or less the support of the Unconscious. The underlying unconscious process is entirely withdrawn from introspection, but it undoubtedly unites in every single case the same terms, which an absolutely correct Æsthetics would give in discursive succession as the foundation of the beautiful. That such a transformation and resolution into concepts and discursive thinking is at all possible, affords proof that we have not to do in the unconscio
us process with anything essentially foreign, but that in this and the analytic processes of æsthetic science only the form is distinguished as intuitive and discursive thinking in general, but that thought in itself, or the logical element, and the moments, from whose intuitive logical union beauty results, are common to both and identical. This holds good, without doubt, just as much for the elementary judgments of so-called formal beauty, as for the material beauty of the highest ideas presented in adequate sensible manifestation. (Leibniz called the discovery of musical proportions an unconscious arithmetic, and the beauty of geometrical figures is in direct ratio to the wealth of mathematical ideas and logical-analytical relations, which in the æsthetic intuition of the same determines the judgment as its unconscious and implicit content.) If the notion of the beautiful was not susceptible of logical analysis, if the beautiful were not merely a particular manifestation of the logical, we should certainly be obliged to recognise in the creative Unconscious, besides the logical essence, which we have hitherto found to be the only active element, an additional somewhat, heterogeneous, out of all relation with it. But the history of Æsthetics indicates too unmistakably the goal of this science, the derivation of all and every beauty from logical moments (in application to real data of course), to allow of our being diverted by the imperfect character of current explanations from believing in this final aim.