Philosophy of the Unconscious

by Eduard Von Hartmann

  9. The support of artistic production by conscious labour and criticism.—I can here appeal in the main to what has been said in Chap. V., B. Although the Unconscious has to furnish the invention, yet in the first place criticism must step in to prevent feeble execution and to purify what is good from excess of phantasy; and secondly, conscious work must fill up the pauses, when the inspirations of the Unconscious are silent, and the conscious concentration of the will must carry the work to completion with iron industry, if enthusiasm for the same is not to perish of ennui on the road.—

  What has been hitherto said with regard to the value of conscious reason and knowledge could, having regard to our main object, only consist of hasty hints, which may have been all too trite; the opportunities for interesting psychological remarks could not but be passed over unused, and the living clothing of the dry abstraction be left to the reader, and yet such a comparison could not be omitted, in order to offer a counterpoise to the value of the Unconscious, which was made prominent in all the earlier chapters.

  I may perhaps be permitted to state these points quite succinctly once again.

  1. The Unconscious forms and preserves the organism, repairs its inner and outer injuries, appropriately guides its movements, and mediates its employment by the conscious will.

  2. The Unconscious supplies every being in its instinct with what it needs for self-preservation, and for which its conscious thought does not suffice, e.g., man the instincts for comprehending sense-perception, for the formation of language and political constitutions, and many other things.

  3. The Unconscious preserves the species through sexual and maternal love, ennobles it through selection in sexual love, and conducts the human race historically steadily to the goal of its greatest possible perfection.

  4. The Unconscious often guides men in their actions by hints and feelings, where they could not help themselves by conscious thought.

  5. The Unconscious furthers the conscious process of thought by its inspirations in small as in great matters, and in mysticism guides mankind to the presentiment of higher, supersensible unities.

  6. It makes men happy through the feeling for the beautiful and artistic production.—

  If now we institute a comparison between the Conscious and Unconscious, it is first of all obvious that there is a sphere which is always reserved to the Unconscious, because it remains for ever inaccessible to consciousness. Secondly, we find a sphere which in certain beings only belongs to the Unconscious, but in others is also accessible to consciousness. Both the scale of organisms as well as the course of the world’s history may teach us that all progress consists in magnifying and deepening the sphere open to consciousness; that therefore in a certain sense consciousness must be the higher of the two. Further, if in man we consider the sphere belonging both to the Unconscious and also to consciousness, this much is certain, that everything which any consciousness has power to accomplish can be executed equally well by the Unconscious, and that too always far more strikingly, and therewith more quickly and more conveniently for the individual, since the conscious performance must be striven for, whereas the Unconscious comes of itself and without effort. This convenience of abandoning oneself to the Unconscious, its feelings and inspirations, is tolerably familiar, and hence the conscious use of reason is so decried in all and every one by the indolent. That the Unconscious can really outdo all the performances of conscious reason, is what we should not only à prion expect of the clairvoyance of the Unconscious, but we see it also realised in those fortunate natures which possess everything that others must acquire with toil, who never have a struggle of conscience, because they always spontaneously act correctly and morally in accordance with feeling, can never comport themselves otherwise than with tact, learn everything easily, complete everything which they begin with a happy knack, and live in eternal harmony with themselves, without ever reflecting much what they do, or even experiencing difficulty and toil. In respect to action and behaviour, the fairest specimens of these instinctive natures are only seen in women, who then surpass all imagination in their bewitching womanliness.—

  But now what disadvantage lies in this self-surrender to the Unconscious? This, that one never knows where one is or what one has; that one gropes in the dark, while one has got the lantern of consciousness in one’s pocket; that it is left to accident, whether the inspiration of the Unconscious will come when one wants it; that one has no criterion but success, what is an inspiration of the Unconscious, and what a wrong-headed flash of whimsical fancy, on what feeling one may rely, and on what not; finally, that one does not practise conscious judgment and reflection, which can never be entirely dispensed with, and that then in any case which occurs one must put up with wretched analogies instead of rational inferences and all-sided survey. Only the Conscious one knows as one’s own, the Unconscious confronts us as something incomprehensible, foreign, on whose favour we are dependent; the Conscious is possessed as ever-ready servant, whose obedience may be always compelled; the Unconscious protects us like a fairy, and has always something uncomfortably demonic about it. I may be proud of the work of consciousness, as my own deed, the fruit of my own hard labour; the fruit of the Unconscious is as it were a gift of the gods, and man only its favoured messenger; it can therefore only teach him humility. The Unconscious is, as soon as it is there, complete from top to toe, has no judgment on itself, and must therefore be taken just as it is,—the Conscious is its own measure, it judges itself, and improves itself, and is to be changed any moment, as soon as a newly-gained cognition or changed circumstances require it. I know what in my consciously obtained result is good, and what it lacks for perfection, therefore it gives me the feeling of security, because I know what I have; but also that of modesty, because I know that it is still imperfect. The Unconscious leaves no room for improvement. A man can never acquire greater perfection in the works of the Unconscious, because his first as his last appear as involuntary inspirations,—consciousness contains in itself the infinite perfectibility of the individual and of the race, and therefore fills man with the infinite striving after the perfection which blesses. The Unconscious is independent of the conscious will at any moment, but its functioning is altogether dependent on the unconscious will, the fundamental emotions, passions, and main interests of mankind,—the Conscious is subject to the conscious will at every moment, and can entirely emancipate itself from interest and the emotions and passions. Action in conformity with the inspirations of the Unconscious consequently exclusively depends on the innate and acquired character, and is good or bad accordingly,—action from consciousness may be regulated according to principles which reason dictates.

  After this comparison there will be no hesitation in admitting consciousness to be for us the more important and herewith confirming our previous conclusion from the organic series and the progress of history. Wherever consciousness is able to replace the Unconscious, it ought to replace it, just because it is to the individual the higher, and such objections to it as that the constant application of conscious reason renders pedantic, costs too much time, &c., are mistaken, for pedantry only arises from imperfect use of the reason, when in applying general rules one does not take account of the particular differences, and reflection costs too much time only with deficient material of knowledge and unsatisfactory theoretical preparation for practice, or with irresolution, which can only be obviated by the use of reason itself. One ought, therefore, to try to expand the sphere of conscious reason as much as possible, for therein consists all the progress of the worldprocess, all the salvation of the future. That this sphere is not positively transgressed, for that provision is made by its impossibility; but another danger certainly lurks in such an attempt, and this is the place for warning on that head. Conscious reason, namely, is only denying, criticising, contrasting, correcting, measuring, comparing, combining, classifying, inducing the general from the particular, ordering the particular case according to the general rule; but it is
never creatively productive, never inventive. Here man is entirely dependent on the Unconscious, as we have seen before, and if he loses the faculty of hearing the inspirations of the Unconscious, he loses the spring of his life, without which he would drag on his existence monotonously in the dry schematism of the general and particular. The Unconscious is, therefore, indispensable for him, and woe to the age which violently suppresses its voice, because in one-sided overestimate of the conscious-rational it will only give heed to the latter. Then it falls irrecoverably into a vapid, shallow rationalism, which struts about in childish senescent knowingness, without being able to do anything positive for its posterity, as the time of the Wolff-Mendelssohn-Nicolai mock-enlightenment at which we now smile. Not with rude fist should one crush the tender germs of the unconscious inspirations, when they shall come again, but watch for them with childlike devotion, and tenderly touch and cherish them. And this is the danger to which every one is exposed who one-sidedly tries to make his existence entirely dependent on conscious reason, when he desires to transfer it to art and feeling and everything, and tries to renounce the rule of the Unconscious wherever it seems to him possible. Wherefore occupation with the arts is so necessary a counterpoise to the rationalistic education of our time, as that in which the Unconscious finds its most immediate expression, certainly not such a technical art-exercise as is carried on at the present day from fashion and vanity, but initiation into the feeling for the beautiful, into the comprehensive and the true spirit of art. Equally important is it to make youth more acquainted with animal life as the unadulterated spring of pure Nature, in order that it may learn to understand in it its own essence in simplified form, and may quicken and refresh itself therein as a relief from the unnaturalness and distortion of our social states. Further, one ought to be quite particularly on one’s guard against making the female sex too rational, for where the Unconscious must first be reduced to silence, success is only attained at the cost of repulsive caricatures; but where the unconscious tendency harmonises with the demands of consciousness, it is a useless and in general injurious task. Woman namely is related to man, as instinctive or unconscious to rational or conscious action; therefore the genuine woman is a piece of Nature, on whose bosom the man estranged from the Unconscious may refresh and recruit himself, and can again acquire respect for the deepest and purest spring of all life. And to preserve this treasure of the eternal womanly, the woman also should be as far as possible shielded by the man from all contact with the rough struggle of life, where it is needful to display conscious force, and should be restrained in the sweet natural bonds of the family. Undoubtedly also the high worth of woman for man is found only in the period of transition, when the division between Conscious and Unconscious has already taken place, but the reconciliation of the two has not yet been completed. This transitional stage in which at the present day all civilised nations still are, will also not be spared the individual in his period of development for the whole future, and therefore the eternal womanly will remain for all time an indispensable, complementary, and educating moment for the youth of the male sex. It is not saying too much that for a young man noble female intercourse is far more helpful than male, and in a greater degree the more philosophical the man’s bent; for female intercourse is related to the male, as the survey obtained in actual life to the survey in books. Lack of male intercourse may be compensated by books, of female never.—Lastly, we ought constantly to keep before our own and others’ eyes all that we owe to the Unconscious, as a counterpoise to the advantages of conscious reason, in order that the already half-exhausted spring of everything true and good may not completely dry up, and humanity enter upon a premature old age; and to direct attention to this need was one powerful impulse more, determining me to reduce to writing the thoughts presented in this work.

  C.

  METAPHYŚIC OF THE UNCONSCIOUS.

  “Come to Physics, and see the Eternal!”—SCHELLING,

  I.

  THE DIFFERENTIAE OF CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL ACTIVITY AND THE UNITY OF WILL AND IDEA IN THE UNCONSCIOUS.

  1. The Unconscious does not fall ill, but conscious mental activity can sicken if its material organs suffer disturbances, whether from bodily causes, or through violent shocks, arising from violent mental emotions. This point, so far as we are able to enter upon it, has been already touched upon in the chapter on the Vis Mediatrix (vol i. 161–168).

  2. The Unconscious does not grow weary, but all conscious mental activity becomes fatigued, because its material organs become temporarily unserviceable, in consequence of a quicker consumption of material than nutrition can repair in the same time. Undoubtedly, fatigue may be avoided by occupying a different sense, or by changing the object of thought or of sense-perception, because then other organs and parts of the brain are brought into requisition, or at least the same organs are constrained to a different kind of activity; but the general fatigue of the central organ of consciousness is not to be prevented, even by the change of objects, and with every new object takes place the sooner, the longer attention has already been absorbed with other objects, until at last complete exhaustion ensues, which is only to be compensated by fresh absorption of oxygen during sleep. The more we approach the sphere of the Unconscious the less is fatigue observable, as, for example, in the department of the feelings, and the less defined they are in consciousness, for so much the more does their proper essence belong to the Unconscious. Whilst a thought is probably not to be retained in consciousness without interruption for more than two seconds, and thinking grows weary in a few hours, one and the same feeling remains, with fluctuating intensity it is true, but uninterruptedly, often for days and nights, nay, for months, and if it at last becomes blunted, yet, in contrast to thinking, the receptivity for other feelings does not appear to be impaired, and these then do not grow weary earlier than they would otherwise have done. The latter assertion only so far needs limitation, as the frame of mind is to be taken notice of at the same time.—Before falling asleep, when the intellect becomes weary, the feelings which oppress us emerge the more powerfully because they are not impeded by thoughts, so strongly indeed that they often prevent sleep. Even in dream vivid feelings are often much more frequent than clear thoughts, and very many dream-images manifestly owe their origin to present feelings. Further, let any one remember the restless night before an important event; the waking of the mother at the slightest cry of her child, accompanied with total insensibility to other stronger noises; the awaking at a fixed hour, if a decided volition has been exerted to that end, and the like. All this proves the unwearied persistence of the feelings, the interest and the will in the Unconscious, or even with quite weak affection of consciousness, whereas the wearied intellect rests, or at the most idly gazes on the juggle of dreams. Where we have to do with that condition which, of all those that are at all accessible to our observation, lies most deeply in the Unconscious and least emerges into consciousness, the ecstasy of the mystics, there, agreeably to the nature of the case, the fatigue is also reduced to a minimum, for “a hundred years are as one hour,” and even bodily fatigue, as in the winter sleep of animals, becomes almost obliterated by the incredible slackening of all organic functions;—think of the ever-praying pillar-saints, or the Indian penitents and their distorted postures.

  3. All conscious Ideation has the form of Sensibility; unconscious Thought can only be of a non-sensuous kind.—We think either in images, when we directly receive the sense-impressions and their transformations and combinations from memory, or we think in abstractions. These abstractions are, however, also merely abstracted from sense-impressions, and however much is allowed to drop out in abstracting, so long as anything is retained at all, it can only be something that already inhered in the whole from which abstraction was first made, i.e., even the abstract ideas are for us only remnants of sense-impressions, and have consequently the form of sensibility.—That the sense-impressions which we receive from things have no resemblance
to these is already sufficiently known by natural science. Further, every sense-perception is eo ipso united with consciousness, i.e., it always excites the latter, whenever it does not light on an already existing sphere of consciousness and is apperceived by this. The Unconscious, accordingly, if it willed to represent things in the form of sensibility, would not only represent them inadequately, but it would always, in this mode of perception, step out of the sphere of unconscious into that of conscious mental activity, as it does in fact do in the individual consciousness of organisms. If we then inquire into the nature of the unconscious spiritual activity of the Unconscious, it follows from what has been said that it can not take on the form of sensibility. But now as consciousness on its part, as we have seen above, can represent nothing at all unless in the form of sensibility, it follows that now and never can consciousness frame a direct conception of the mode and manner in which the unconscious idea is presented; it can only know negatively that the former is represented in no way of which it can form any idea. One can, at the most, form the very probable supposition that things are represented in the unconscious idea as they are in themselves, since it would be far from intelligible why things should appear to the Unconscious otherwise than they are; rather things are what they are just because they are represented by the Unconscious thus, and not otherwise. Certainly this explanation throws no light on the nature of the idea itself, and we do not become wiser in respect to the mode and manner of unconscious representation.

  4. The Unconscious does not vacillate and doubt; it needs no time for reflection, but instantaneously grasps the result at the same moment in which it thinks the whole logical process that produces the result, all at once, and not successively, which is the same thing as not thinking it at all, but discerning the result immediately in intellectual intuition with the infinite penetration of the purely logical. This point also we have already often mentioned, and have everywhere found so thoroughly confirmed, that we might employ it as an infallible criterion, in order to decide, in any particular case, whether we had to do with the action of the Unconscious or with a conscious performance. Wherefore the conviction of this proposition must be essentially gained from the sum of our previous considerations.—Here I shall only add the following:—The ideal philosophy demands an intelligible world without space and time, which is opposed to the phenomenal world, with its forms valid for conscious thought and being, space and time. How Space is posited only in and with Nature we shall see later on; here we are concerned with Time. Now, if we may assume that the Unconscious compresses every process of thought, along with its results, into a moment, i.e., into no time, the thinking of the Unconscious is timeless, although still in time, because the moment in which there is thought has its temporal place in the remaining series of temporal phenomena. If we, however, reflect that this moment in which there is thought is only perceived in the coming-to-manifestation of its result, and the thought of the Unconscious in each special case only acquires existence for a definite entrance into the phenomenal world (for it does not need reflections and resolutions), the conclusion is obvious that the thought of the Unconscious is only so far in time as the entering into manifestation of this thought is in time, but that the thought of the Unconscious, apart from the phenomenal world and from entrance into it, would in fact be not only timeless, but also non-temporal, i.e., out of all time. Then, too, we should cease to speak of ideational activity of the Unconscious in the strict sense; but the world of possible representations would, as ideal existence, be enclosed in the bosom of the Unconscious, and the activity, as being something temporal, at least time-positing, in its very notion, would only begin in the moment that from this quiescent ideal world the one or other of all possible presentations enters into real manifestation, which comes to pass precisely through this, that it is laid hold of by the will as its content, as we shall subsequently see at the end of the present section. We should have hereby comprehended the realm of the Unconscious as the metaphysically tenable side of Kant’s intelligible world.—It is in thorough agreement with this that duration only enters into conscious thought through the material organ of consciousness; that conscious thought only requires time because the cerebral vibrations on which it rests require time, as I have briefly shown in Sect. B., chap. viii. (vol. i. pp. 346, 347).