Philosophy of the Unconscious

by Eduard Von Hartmann

  The second of the forms to be noticed, the Church, has a more limited and more one-sided function than State and Society; for whilst the latter simultaneously subserve many interests, and satisfy many needs, the Church subserves exclusively the need of the religious sentiment, and indeed not of any religious sentiment, but only of that, which either requires for its full satisfaction a common cultus, or feels itself far too weak to rely on the consciousness and feeling of the individual self, and now seeks, by means of the external institution of the visible Church, a palpable external support in lieu of the internal. As a natural consequence, with the growth of the solidity of the inner spiritual substance of mankind the visible Church must lose in importance. Nevertheless at the present standpoint of civilised nations the Church is still a factor of the highest importance, and will still long remain so, even when it takes the third place (after Society and State).

  As already mentioned, the State is the first of the three forms to unfold itself, and the Church is bound up with it. Even there, where exceptionally (as in Judaism) the State is from the commencement an ecclesiastical State or theocracy, it does not advance beyond the national limitation of theocracy. The idea of a cosmopolitan Church or theocracy can always be only the result of a religious revolution. Thus in India, Buddhism; on the shores of the Mediterranean, Christianity, broke up the earlier national narrowness of ecclesiastical institutions, and thereby inaugurated an oriental and an occidental Middle Age. This cosmopolitism of the Mediæval Church is of the greatest significance, and most important in results both politically and socially, for it gives for the first time a solidarity of consciousness to the members of different peoples and States, thereby extends both extensively and intensively the peaceful intercourse of different peoples with one another, and prepares the cosmopolitan consciousness of modern times, which is based on the social principle of Humanity, and surmounts the barriers of ecclesiastical antitheses, just as the cosmopolitism of the Mediæval Church had burst the barriers of the constitutional antagonisms which it embraced. Thus the Church naturally leads us to the third form, Society.

  Social development exhibits four leading phases, of which the first three are to be looked upon as stages preparatory to the fourth, in which for the first time Society is unfolded as an independent, co-ordinate form.

  The first phase is the free state of nature, where every one only works for himself and his family, as, e.g., among the Indian hunting-tribes. From this condition an ascent to greater comfort, and thereby to greater civilisation, is impossible, because in the atomistic freedom of individuals there is no motive to bring about the division of labour, through which alone that economy of labour is possible, which is indispensable for a production in excess of the momentary needs of life, i.e., of an elevation of national well-being through the accumulation of capital.

  The second phase is that of personal rule, where the lord is the proprietor of the persons or the working-powers of his slaves or thralls. Here the lord soon finds it to his interest to introduce a division of labour among his slaves, whose work now produces an excess beyond their and his requirements, which is applied to establish a stock-in-trade (capital). Thus national wealth grows through accumulation of capital, to the advantage, however, certainly only of the master, not of the serf. The Roman Empire and the Middle Ages afford an example of this stage.

  The third phase, which is only rendered possible by the prolonged agency of the second, is that of the rule of capital In this period the fixed capital; hitherto alone of importance, is surpassed by free capital, and driven more and more to become mobile if it is not to lose disproportionately in value. This process goes on simultaneously and in reciprocation with the greatest mitigation and abolition of bond-service, whereby the power of labour becomes a free commodity, and falls under the general laws of price (which is determined by supply and demand). As capital can organise the division of labour on a far grander scale, a far larger quota of the total labour will also now become superfluous for present needs and available for the future, i.e., for productive investment; thus also the increase of capital and the growth of national comfort must proceed far more rapidly than in the foregoing phase. But here too this increase of national wealth is essentially to the advantage of the possessors of capital alone, since that part of it which falls to the working classes is immediately followed by a numerical increase of the labouring classes, which in the redistribution always keeps the share falling to each individual at the level of the usual indispensable minimum for maintaining life. Experience at least confirms this for the industrial forces of labour accessible to the market of the world.—But free capital also is an Idea, which unfolds and attains maturity, only to perish after its task has been fulfilled, and to make place for other structures. Its historical task also is transitional, and only consists in preparing the ground for the next stage, just as the function of slavery consisted in preparing and making possible the rule of capital.

  The fourth and last phase is that of free association. If, namely, the value of slavery and rule of capital was only to be measured by the degree in which they made possible, and introduced a division of labour, and thereby economy of labour, these always still highly imperfect coercive measures of history, which bring in their train accompanying unutterable misery, must become superfluous as soon as the character and understanding of the workman are developed to the degree of civilisation, in order by free conscious agreement to undertake an appropriate part of the work in the universal division of labour. As before the difficulty was, to educate the freed slave to voluntary labour, so now the difficulty is to educate the labourer, in order that when set free from the yoke of this rule of capital, he may adequately fill in the association the place assigned him. To conduct this education (by means of Schultze-Delitzsch Unions, better school-teaching, labourers’ educational unions, &c.), is the most important social problem of the present day. Free association the future will of itself bring forth, if one cannot yet exactly say, with what means and ways, whether by some kind of peaceful development, or by catastrophes which will exceed in awfulness all that has hitherto happened in history.—In this last phase the actual payment of money (except coins) will be made just as superfluous by the general introduction of banking, as in the foregoing stage barter was superseded by the use of money.

  If the rule of capital has already done much more for the division of labour than slavery, free association will far exceed the former in an incomparably higher degree (think of an indivisible organisation of production and sale on the whole earth analogous to the indivisible political organisation of the whole earth). In correspondence herewith the growth of material wealth will take place much more rapidly than at present, supposing that it be not neutralised or outstripped by the increase of the number of the population, which to be sure has its limits assigned it by the maximum of nutritive plants produced on the whole earth and of fishes yielded by the waters; or, if one takes into account the inorganic conditions of the means of subsistence, by the limited habitable space of the earth’s surface.

  The goal of this social evolution would be, that every one, with a period of work which allowed him sufficient leisure for his intellectual culture, should lead a comfortable existence, or, as one is wont to say with a more sonorous expression, an existence conformable to the dignity of man. Thus, as the final political state would secure to man the external and formal, the final social condition would afford him the material possibility of ultimately fulfilling his positive and proper task, for the fulfilment of which the internal conditions must necessarily be sought in the before-noticed mental or intellectual development.

  If in this entire development we cannot miss a single plan, a clearly-prescribed aim, towards which all stages of development are tending; if, on the other hand, we must allow that the several actions which prepared or led up to these stages had by no means this conscious goal, but that the human being almost always aimed at something else, effected something else, we must also ackn
owledge that something else than the conscious intention of the individuals, or the accidental combination of the several actions, is occultly operative in history, that “far-reaching glance, which already discovers from afar, where this lawlessly roaming freedom is conducted in the bond of necessity, and the selfish aims of the individual unconsciously tend to the perfection of the whole” (Schiller, vol. vii. pp. 29, 30). Schelling expresses this in the System of Transcendental Idealism (Works, i. 3, p. 594): “In freedom there shall be necessity, means then as much as: Through freedom itself, and in that I think to act freely, there shall unconsciously, i.e., without my assistance, come to pass what I did not intend. Otherwise expressed: to the conscious, that is, that freely determining activity which we have before deduced, there shall be opposed an unconscious one, whereby, in spite of the unlimited expression of freedom, something arises quite involuntarily, and perhaps even against the will of the actor, which he himself could have never realised by means of his own volition. This proposition, however paradoxical it may appear, is indeed nothing else but the transcendental expression of the generally accepted and presupposed relation of freedom to a concealed necessity, which is called now fate, now providence, without anything being clearly thought by the one or the other; that relation, in virtue of which human beings, through their free action itself, and indeed against their will, are compelled to be causes of something which they never willed, or conversely in virtue of which something must fail and go wrong, which they have willed with freedom and with the exertion of all their energies” (Ibid. p. 598). “But this necessity itself can only be conceived by means of an absolute synthesis of all actions, from which everything that happens, thus also all history, is developed, and in which, because it is absolute, everything is so weighed and calculated beforehand, that all that may happen, however contradictory and inharmonious it may appear, yet has and finds in it its point of union. This absolute synthesis itself, however, must be placed in the Absolute, which is the intuitive and eternally and universally objective in all free action.” Whoever has well understood this passage, of which it may be said that it represents the view of all philosophers since Kant, and the substance of which has been reproduced in detail by Hegel in the introduction to his “Lectures on the Philosophy of History,” for such an one I have nothing to add.—To any one who prefers to stop at the conceptions Fate or Providence, one can only object that he can therewith frame no clear idea how my act, whether it is the work of my freedom, or the product of my character and the efficient motives, how this my deed is to actualise another than my will, say of a God enthroned in heaven. There is only one way in which this demand is capable of fulfilment, if this God descends into my bosom, and my will is to me in an unconscious way at the same time God’s will, i.e., if I unconsciously will something quite different to what my consciousness exclusively thinks to will; if, further, consciousness errs in the choice of the means to its end, but the unconscious will appropriately chooses this same means for its purpose. Otherwise is this psychical process not at all thinkable, and as much as this is said in the first half of the passage from Schelling.—But now, if we cannot do without an unconscious will in addition to the conscious will; if, ou the other hand, we add the long known clairvoyance of unconscious representation, why bring a transcendent God in addition into the affair, when the individual is sufficient of himself with the faculties familiar to us? What then is this fate or providence but the rule of the Unconscious, the historic instinct in the actions of mankind, as long as just their conscious understanding is not yet mature enough to make the aims of history their own? What is the impulse to form a State but an instinct of the masses like the linguistic instinct, or the gregarious impulse of insects, only mixed with more infusions of the conscious understanding?

  If, in the animal, as we have seen, instinct always appears just when a need is not to be satisfied in any other way, what wonder if also in all branches of the historical evolution the right man is always born at the right time, whose inspired genius perceives and satisfies the unconscious needs of his time? Here the proverb holds good: When the need is most, the help is nearest.

  Why should we trouble a god who stands without and pushes and guides from the outside in the case of the historical instinct of man, when we have not found it necessary in the case of all the other instincts? Only then, if in the progress of the inquiry it should appear, that the unconscious in the individual has nothing individual in it except the reference of this its activity to this definite individual, then will Schelling be right also in the second part of the quoted passage, that the Absolute is the percipient (clairvoyant) in all such action, and its absolute synthesis (inweaving), or as Kant once expresses it (Works, vii. 367), that “Instinct is the voice of God,” but now of the God in one’s own breast, the immanent God.

  If we have found the stopping short at the idea of a fate or a providence to be inadmissible, it is not to be understood, that these ways of looking at the matter, just as that of the exclusive self-activity of individuals in history, are in themselves illegitimate, but only, that they are one-sided. The Greeks, Romans, and Mohammedans are quite right in their idea of εíµαρµέvn) or fate, so far as this signifies the absolute necessity of all that happens in the thread of causality, so that every link of the series is determined, predetermined by the foregoing, thus the whole series by the commencing link.

  Christianity is right in its idea of Providence, for all that happens happens with absolute wisdom, with absolute fitness, i.e., as means to the fore-seen end, by the never-erring Unconscious, which is itself the absolutely logical. At any moment only one thing can be logical, and therefore always only one thing can, and this the one logically demanded, must happen, just as fitly as necessarily (comp. further on C. Chap. xv. 3). Lastly, the modern rationalistic empirical conception is right, that history is the exclusive result of the self-activity of the individuals determining themselves according to psychological laws without any miracle of an incursion of higher powers. But the supporters of the first two views are wrong, in denying the spontaneity, those of the latter, in denying fate and providence, for only the union of all three points of view is the truth. But this very union was self-contradictory, as long as one assumed merely conscious self-activity of the individual. It is the cognition of the Unconscious which at once makes this possible and evident, by bringing into scientific clearness the hitherto only mystically postulated identity of the individual with the Absolute, yet without effacing their difference, which is a no less one than that of metaphysical essence and phenomenal existence (comp. C. Chap. vi.–viii. and xi.)

  1 As the most natural and easiest means to this end appears the bringing together of two persons suited to produce the required individuality by a love kindled in them with the unconscious purpose of begetting this prominent human being (cf. Dr. Carl Freiherr du Prel: “The Metaphysic of Sexual Love in its relation to History,” in the “Aust. Journal for Sc. and Art.,” 1872, No. 34).

  XI.

  THE VALUE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS AND OF CONSCIOUSNESS FOR HUMAN LIFE.

  I HAVE hitherto made sufficiently conspicuous the value of the Unconscious, so that it might appear that I was desirous of exalting the Unconscious in comparison with consciousness. To repel such a charge, to recall the value of conscious thinking, and to compare the worth of the conscious and unconscious and their respective offices, is the object of the present chapter.

  Let us first consider the worth of the Conscious, of conscious reflection, therefore, and of the application of acquired conscious knowledge for mankind.