Philosophy of the Unconscious

by Eduard Von Hartmann

  1 One of the purest geniuses, i.e., least possibly influenced by reflection, and at the same time a thoroughly honest, childlike nature, was Mozart, who expresses himself in a letter (see Jahn’s “Mozart,” vol. iii. pp. 423–425) in the following remarkable manner with respect to his artistic productions: “And now I come to the most difficult point of all in your letter, and one which I should prefer to pass by altogether, because my pen is not at my service for anything of the sort. But yet I will make an attempt, even if you should find it somewhat ridiculous. What, you ask, is my method in writing and elaborating my large and lumbering things? I can in fact say nothing more about it than this: I do not myself know and can never find out. When I am in particularly good condition, perhaps riding in a carriage, or in a walk after a good meal, and in a sleepless night, then the thoughts come to me in a rush, and best of all. Whence and how—that I do not know and cannot learn. Those which please me I retain in my head, and hum them perhaps also to myself—at least so others have told me. If I stick to it, there soon come one after another useful crumbs for the pie, according to counterpoint, harmony of the different instruments, &c., &c. That now inflames my soul, namely, if I am not disturbed. Then it goes on growing, and I keep on expanding it and making it more distinct, and the thing, however long it be, becomes indeed almost finished in my head, so that I afterwards survey it at a glance, like a goodly picture or handsome man, and in my imagination do not hear it at all in succession, as it afterwards must be heard, but as a simultaneous whole. That is indeed a feast! All the finding and making only goes on in me as in a very vivid dream. But the rehearsal—all together, that is best of all. What now has thus come into being in this way, that I do not easily forget again, and it is perhaps the best gift which the Lord God has given me. When now I afterwards come to write it down, I take out of the sack of my brain what has been previously garnered in the aforesaid manner. Accordingly it gets pretty quickly on to paper; for, as has been said, it is properly speaking already finished; and will, moreover, also be seldom very different from what it was previously in the head. Accordingly I may be disturbed in writing, and even all sorts of things may go on around me, still I go on writing; even also chatting at the same time, namely, of hens and geese, or of Dolly and Joan, &c. But now, with respect to my works, how everything altogether assumes just that form or manner that they are Mozartian, and not in the style of anybody else, it just amounts to this, that my nose is just so long and crooked that it has become Mozartian, and not as in other people. For I am unable to characterise it more particularly. It is, however, very natural that people who really have an exterior should also look differently to others both outwardly and inwardly. At any rate, I know that I have as little given myself the one as the other. With this let me off now and for ever, my very good friend; and do not at all think that I break off from any other reason than that I do not know how to go on. You, a scholar, have no idea how bitter this has already been to me.” Comp. for confirmation of this the opinions of Schiller, as expressed in the remarkable poem “Happiness,” suggested in all probability by the patent contrast between the ease of genius as illustrated in the creations of Goethe, and his own reflective work. Comp. further my essay on Otto Ludwig: “From a Poet’s Workshop,” in the “Austrian Weekly Journal for Science and Art,” 1872, No. 41.

  VI.

  THE UNCONSCIOUS IN THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE.

  “As without language not only no philosophical, but no human consciousness at all is conceivable, the foundations of language could not have been consciously laid; and yet the deeper we penetrate into it, the more clearly does it appear that its invention far surpasses in profundity those of the highest conscious product. It is with language as with human beings; we think we behold them come blindly into existence, and at the same time cannot doubt their unfathomable significance even in the smallest particular.” In these words of Schelling (Works, div. ii. vol. i. p. 52) the subject of the present chapter has been foreshadowed.

  Let us consider first the philosophical value of the grammatical forms and the formation of concepts. In every more developed language we find the distinction of subject and predicate, of subject and object, of substantive, verb, and adjective, and the same conditions for the construction of sentences. In the less developed languages these fundamental forms are at least distinguished by their position in the sentence. Whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy will know how much it owes to these grammatical forms alone. The notion of the judgment is unquestionably abstracted from the grammatical sentence by the omission of the verbal form. The categories of substance and accident are derived in the same way from subject and predicate; the discovery of a corresponding natural antithesis of substantive and verb is still an unsolved, perhaps very fruitless philosophical problem; here conscious speculation is still far behind the unconscious creation of the genius of humanity. That the philosophical notions of subject and object, which in strictness were wanting to the consciousness of antiquity but to-day openly govern speculation, have been developed from grammatical notions in which they lay involved unconsciously pre-formed, is certainly not improbable, since their designation already implies it. A corresponding gain to philosophy from the other parts of the sentence, e.g., the so-called more remote object or the third person, is, I am convinced, yet to be expected. Through such bringing into consciousness of the metaphysical thought, to which the verbal form serves as dress, it is true no new relations are created; but such as hitherto have only existed in consciousness in a roundabout way, and as a united whole only vaguely or instinctively, are reduced to conscious unity, and can now for the first time serve as a sure foundation of further speculation; just as in mathematics the circular and elliptic functions and the functions of Abel all at once reduce to system certain long-known series, and thereby for the first time render possible their general use. Lazarus denotes this by the expression, “Condensation of thought.”

  When in the history of the world the human mind is for the first time astonished at itself and begins to philosophise, it finds a language ready made for it, fitted out with all the wealth of forms and notions; and “a great part—perhaps the greatest part—of the office of the reason,” as Kant says, “consists in dismembering the notions which it already finds in itself.” It finds the cases of declension in the substantive, adjective, pronoun, the voices, tenses, and moods of the verb, and the immeasurable wealth of ready-made notions of object and relation. All the categories, which for the most part represent the most important relations, the fundamental notions of all thought, as being, becoming, thinking, feeling, desiring, motion, force, activity, &c., lie before it as ready-made material, and it requires thousands of years only to find its whereabouts in this wealth of unconscious speculation. Even at the present day the philosophising mind commits the error of the beginner of taking too wide a circuit, and so neglecting that which lies nearest to it, and is perhaps also the most difficult. Still to this day there is no philosophy of language, for what really goes by that name is altogether fragmentary, and what is usually offered as such are pretentious appeals to human instinct, which afford no explanation at all (just as in Æsthetics). But if the first Greek philosophers merely kept to the external world, yet philosophy, the farther it has progressed, has ever more clearly perceived that the understanding of one’s own thinking is the first task, and that this is admirably furthered by raising the spiritual treasures which are buried in the language of the discoverer, and that the hoary tradition of language, the garment of thought, should not be desecrated by flaunting rags; for language is the Word of God, the Holy Scriptures of philosophy; it is the revelation of the genius of humanity for all time. How much a Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schelling, and Hegel owe to language the attentive student will not fail to see. Often the source whence they have derived the first incentive to certain results seems to have been tolerably unconscious even to themselves (e.g., in Schelling, the subject of being as not-being or potentiality of being, and the
object of being as merely being).

  The next inquiry has reference to the question whether language improves with the progress of civilisation. Up to a certain point this is undoubtedly the case; for the language of primitive man must undoubtedly have been hardly distinguishable from the vocal and gesture speech of the brutes, and we know that every language which is now a language of inflexions has been brought quite gradually to perfection through the stages of monosyllabic (e.g., Chinese), agglutinate (e.g., Turkish), and incorporating speech (e.g., language of the Indians). But if one understands the above question in this sense, whether after the attainment of that state of culture which must be looked upon from the first as a condition of an inflexional language, language continues to improve with yet higher culture, not only must this question be answered in the negative, but its contrary must be affirmed. Certainly with progressive culture new objects make their appearance, consequently new conceptions and relations, therefore also new words (e.g., all that concerns railways, telegraphs, and joint-stock companies). There results from this a material enrichment of language. This, however, does not contain anything philosophical. Philosophical conceptions (the categories, &c.) remain the same, they become neither more nor less, with few exceptions, as consciousness and the like, conceptions which the ancients of the classical period possessed only vaguely, but not explicitly and consciously. In the same way the series of abstractions, which reduce the endless multiplicity of sensuous phenomena for practical use into abstractions of different orders, experience no considerable changes. For if the special sciences, e.g., zoology and botany, sometimes change their ideas of kinds a little, in part this does not at all affect practical life, in part these changes are excessively small compared with the constancy of most of the classes of notions. The formal part of language, however, wherein consists its properly philosophical value, undergoes a process of decomposition and of levelling pari passu with the progress of civilisation. The levelling of the Romance languages, especially the French, affords an example, an instance far more striking than that of the levelling of the German language in the Gothic, Old High German, Middle and New High German. The position of the parts of the sentence and of the sentences being fixed once for all, leaves no room for liberty of expression; a declension exists no longer, a neuter gender just as little, the tenses are reduced to four (in German even to two), the passive voice is wanting, all final syllables are worn off; the affinity of syllabic stems, so expressive in natural languages, has for the most part become unrecognisable through attrition, thrusting out of consonants and other disfigurements, and the capability of forming compounds is lost. And yet German and French are languages infinitely rich and expressive compared with the dreary smoothness of the English, which, in a grammatical point of view, is again approaching with rapid strides the starting-point of the evolution, the Chinese. On the other hand, the farther we recede historically the greater becomes the wealth of forms. Greek has its middle, dual, and aorist, and an incredible capability of composition. The Sanskrit, as the oldest of the inflexional languages known to us, is said to excel all others in beauty and copiousness of forms. It results from this review that language needs no higher development of culture for its formation, but that such development is rather injurious to it, in that it is never able to preserve from corruption that which the past has elaborated, not even when it devotes a conscious and careful effort to its preservation and improvement (as, e.g., the Académie Française). The linguistic development is carried on not only on the large scale and as a whole, but also in detail with the calm necessity of a natural product, and the forms of language, even at the present day, go on growing, deriding all the efforts of consciousness, as if they were independent creations to which the conscious mind only serves as a medium of their proper life.1 Both this result and also the speculative depth and grandeur of language, as well as, in fine, its marvellous organic unity, which far exceeds the unity of a methodical systematic construction, should preserve us from regarding language as a product of conscious acute reflection. Schelling has said:—“The spirit which created language—and that is not the spirit of the individual members of the people—has conceived it as a whole, just as creative Nature when she forms a skull has already in her view the nerve which is to traverse it.”

  To which the following may be added:—For the labour of an individual, the foundation is much too complicated and rich. Language is a work of the masses—the people. For the conscious labour of many, however, it is too indivisible an organism. Only the instinct of masses, as exhibited in the life of the hive and the ant-hill, can have created it. Further, although languages spring from different centres of development, deviate essentially from one another, yet the course of development is, in the main, so similar on all the different theatres of human culture, and with the most diverse national characters, that the agreement of the fundamental forms and the structure of the sentence in all stages of development is only explicable by a common instinct of humanity for forming language, by an all-pervading spirit which everywhere guides the development of language according to the same laws of bloom and decay.—Those to whom all the foregoing reasons do not appear decisive, must perforce allow the following, taken along with the above, to be conclusive, viz.: That all conscious human thought is only possible by the help of language, since we see that human thought without language (in the uneducated deaf and dumb, and also among healthy men who have grown up without human education), in the most favourable case, very little exceeds that of the cleverest domestic animals. Without language, or with a merely animal vocal language devoid of grammatical forms, a thinking so acute that the marvellously profound organism of universally identical fundamental forms should emerge as its conscious product, is, therefore, quite inexplicable. Rather, all progress in the development of language will be the first condition of progress in the elaboration of conscious thought, not its consequence, in that (like every instinct) it occurs at a time when the culture of the people, as a whole, makes progress in the elaboration of thought a necessity.

  Altogether, in the same way then as, beyond a doubt, the language of animals, in some ways so highly developed, or the language of feature, gesture, and natural sound of primitive man, is in production as in import a work of instinct, precisely in the same way must also human verbal language be a conception of genius, a work of the instinct of multitudes. For the rest, this result is confirmed by the most eminent and gifted linguists of this century. Thus, e.g., Heyse, in his “System of Philology,” says: “Language is a natural product of the human mind; its production is necessarily effected, without thoughtful intention and clear consciousness, from an inner instinct of the mind.” Accordingly, to him language is a product “not of the particular subjective mind, or reflective understanding as free activity of the individual as such,” but “of the universal objective mind, of human reason in its natural foundation.” In like manner, Wilhelm von Humboldt (“Ueber das vergleichende Sprachstudium,” sec. 13) says: “Thinking of the natural instinct of animals, we may call language an intellectual instinct of the reason.” “It is of no avail to allow thousands and thousands of years for its invention. Language could not be invented unless its type were latent in the human understanding…. If any one imagines that the invention of language may take place gradually and progressively, by a reciprocal action, as it were,—that through a portion more of invented language man can become more man, and by this advance again invent more language, he misunderstands the inseparableness of human consciousness and human speech.” Language “cannot, properly speaking, be taught; it can only be evoked. We can only favour the conditions, and then leave it to its own unfolding” (comp. below, p. 303 ff.) “How could the learner, merely through the expansion of his own developing consciousness, master the spoken thought, if there were not in speaker and hearer the same essence, but differentiated for the sake of individual existence and communion, so that a symbol so refined and yet so personal as is the articulate sound suffices to affe
ct both parties harmoniously like a mediator?” “The comprehension of another’s meaning could not rest on a process of internal spontaneity, and intercourse through the medium of speech would be something quite other than the awakening of the hearer’s linguistic faculty, if beneath all individual differences there were not a common human nature.” Humboldt concludes, then, as we shall establish with greater generality farther on, from the nature of language alone: “That discrete individuality is in general only a phenomenon of the conditioned existence of spiritual beings;” that the conscious human mind and language have sprung from the common primitive foundation of the universal spirit. H. Steinthal, in his celebrated book, “Der Ursprung der Sprache,” concludes his excellent objective criticism of his predecessors with the following formulation of the problem:—“Language is not innate in man, not revealed by God—man has produced it; but not the mere organic nature of man, but his mind; and finally, not the thinking conscious mind. What mind then in humanity, i.e., what form of action of the human mind has produced language?” What other answer is conceivable to this than that of the unconscious spiritual activity, which with intuitive correctness acts here in natural instincts, there in intellectual instincts; here in the individual, there in the co-operative instincts; and everywhere alike, everywhere with infallible clairvoyant accuracy answers to the greatness of the need?