Philosophy of the Unconscious

by Eduard Von Hartmann

  P. 32.—According to Herder, “Nature thinks better than man.” Haym declares (Preuss. Jahr., Bd. xxxi., 1873, Heft I, p. 43) that he is speaking of the unerring Unconscious, which “includes in itself a kind of omniscience and omnipotence, of the one organic Principium of Nature, of the organic Omnipotence distributed everywhere, supporting or restoring life,” from which he might just as well deduce the growth of crystals or the instincts of animals, or, lastly, the life, endeavour, and fate of man. On the preceding page Haym quotes a sentence from a letter of Jacobi to the Princess of Galizin: “Our consciousness develops from something that as yet had not consciousness, our thought from something which has not yet thought, our reflection from something which has not yet reflected, our will from something which has not willed, our rational mind from something which was never rational soul. A mechanical lever—which need not therefore be quite void of sense—was everywhere the first.”

  P. 39, 1. 3.—An excellent account of the services of the philosophical physiologists may be found in Volkelt, “The Unconscious and Pessimism,” p. 78–86. Why Carus could not become the standard-bearer of a new school, of a band of adherents collected round the flag of the Unconscious, is there shown on p. 83–86 (comp, also A. Taubert, “Der Pessimismus und seine Gegner,” p. 160).

  P. 40, 1. 12.—The somewhat modified position which Wundt takes up in his most recent work with regard to the notion of the Unconscious is noticed in the Appendix, “On the Physiology of the Nerve-Centres” (comp, above, p. 208–210).

  P. 41, 1. 14.—For the rest, the sentence quoted has been anticipated by George Christopher Lichtenberg, in whom is found the following passage: “We become conscious of certain ideas which do not depend on ourselves; others—so at least we believe—depend on ourselves; where is the boundary? We only know of the existence of our own sensations, ideas, and thoughts. It thinks, one ought to say, just as one says, It lightens. To say cogito is already too much, as soon as one translates by I think. To assume to postulate, the ego, is a practical necessity.”

  P. 42.—In a manner independent, as it would seem, of the Continental evolution, the conception of the Unconscious has gained a place in English literature in the last decennia; it is a philosopher, a historian, and a physician in whom it has found its clearest expression. Hamilton has inferred the existence of unconscious ideas chiefly from the circumstance (comp. “Lect. on Metaph.,” i. p. 352 ff.) that on the revival of a former train of thought sometimes a whole series of intermediate links seems to be overleapt—an argument certainly of little value in this form. The best clue to Carlyle’s position in respect to the conception of the Unconscious is afforded by the essay entitled “Characteristics” (which first appeared in the Edinburgh Review, No. cviii., and was afterwards reprinted in his collected essays). Of all English authors Maudsley has most decidedly and most thoroughly grasped and defended the conception of the Unconscious, except that he seeks to interpret the Unconscious as far as possible materialistically. The Appendix is sufficiently occupied with Maudsley’s views (comp, above p. 253–256) to render it unnecessary to characterise them further here. Lastly, Lewes ought to be cited as an English author who has admitted the notion of the Unconscious in a certain direction.

  However defective and incomplete may be the notices here collected, they may yet suffice for the purpose of showing that the principle of the Unconscious, as everything historically important, has been arrived at by a gradual process of formation and growth; that all phases and schools of philosophy, from the oldest times to the present day, more or less strive after this principle (comp. J. Volkelt, “Das Unbew. u. d. Pess.,” the first part, “History of the Unconscious”), and that in the present work I have only more plainly asserted and shown the deep significance of this principle, as well as most com pletely established it, but have by no means aired it as a brand-new discovery (or, as it has been more maliciously called, “invention”).

  P. 46, note, last 1.—That it is in general lawful, nay, even imperative, to introduce into philosophical inquiries the notion of probability, which in modern natural philosophy is already universally acknowledged to be the sole foundation of all human knowledge; and that even in philosophy, when discussing problems which admit of various solutions, an effort must be made to determine the probability of the assumption of different conceivable hypotheses as far as seems possible, can only be disputed by two parties, namely, on the one side, by that school which regards the problem of philosophy exclusively as the ascertainment of an absolute certainty, and declares all other knowledge save a supposed absolute one to be essentially unphilosophical; and, on the other hand, from the opposite quarter of an absolute scepticism, which questions the possibility of all knowledge, not only absolute, but also relative, and denies to man the capability of establishing any distinction between truth and untruth. Almost all past philosophy has oscillated between these two extremes. When the pretension to absolute knowledge has once more justly become ridiculous for a time, scepticism regains the upperhand, and it is then set up as the sole problem of philosophy to show that philosophising is nonsense. In fact, it is hardly comprehensible how to-day, after so many failures of systems giving themselves out to be absolute truth, after such clear disclosures of the gradual attainment of truth, after such distinct perception of the insufficiency of the instruments of human knowledge in presence of the overwhelming extensive and intensive magnitude of the universe, there can still always be found ingenuous people who declare the problem of philosophy to be that of absolute knowledge, and venture to assert all knowledge to be unphilosophical which renounces the claim to absolute certainty. That certain knowledge is and must remain the ideal of our cognitive efforts is not to be doubted; but one might at the present day sufficiently know that ideals are just what are not to be found in actuality; that they rather only form the asymptote, which the curve of historical development more and more approaches without ever meeting. But equally mistaken is it on the other side, when the impossibility of realising the ideal as such is perceived, straightway to reject the ideal as a phantom without any real significance, or to declare real and ideal to be infinitely wide apart, and therefore incommensurable. Were scepticism right, all our supposed knowledge would be equally wide of the truth (for if it once touched it by accident, we could indeed know nothing of this concidence); accordingly all possibility of an historical evolution of knowledge, all possibility of science, all perceivable or declarable distinction between knowledge, faith, and crazy imagination would be abolished. One only needs to become conscious of these consequences of a thoroughgoing sceptical principle to see how insupportable it is for the human mind; and so it comes to pass that humanity ever again relapses from scepticism into the dogma of the attainability of absolute knowledge, only, after a little time, once more to exhibit its utter untenability. We are saved from this barren circle only by the open acknowledgment of the relative truth and relative untruth of the two extremes. The dogma of absolute knowledge is right in setting up its ideal, and in the belief that the endeavour after this ideal is not fruitless. Scepticism is right in denying the complete attainability of this ideal to be ever humanly possible. But the former is wrong when it misapprehends the distinction between ideal and reality, and denies off-hand validity to everything, which cannot claim to be faultless realisation of the ideal; the latter is wrong when it abolishes the possibility of distinguishing in human knowledge different degrees of approximation to the ideal or remoteness therefrom. It must be strenuously maintained that a different dignity appertains to different degrees of cognition, because without this even practical life becomes a senseless hurly-burly. If, however, one chooses to ascribe to scientific knowledge a higher dignity than to unscientific imagining and thinking, to the knowledge conscious of its material proof a higher worth than to the groundless conviction of a faith which rests merely on postulates of feeling, or on the personal authority of him who transmits it, or maybe on morbid fixed ideas, then there is no other means available bu
t to quantitatively determine the degrees of the approximation of knowledge to the cognitive ideal of certainty, whether this determination be made in numerical form or in the less distinct shape of an emotional estimate of quantity without numerical expression. If Leibniz was right, that there is no assertion, however false, in which there does not lie a grain of truth, and no truth, however sublime, with which there is not some untruth mingled by reason of its expression in language, then there is also no thinking, believing, or knowing in which an unclear feeling does not point to the intermixture of true and untrue elements. It behoves us to scientifically purify this feeling, and to determine the proportion of true and untrue elements, in order precisely to define the degree of approximation of our knowledge to certainty. If one wished to express the dignity of our knowledge by the proportion of its true and false elements, as happens in a wager about the truth of an assertion, one would have a proportion between two variables, which would render difficult the comparison between several such proportions. It is better therefore to express the worth of the knowledge by the ratio between the true elements contained therein and the totality of the elements supposed to be true, or, in other words, one takes the constant cognitive ideal of certainty as standard of worth, as I, and expresses the degree of the approximation of knowledge to certainty by the degree of approximation of a proper fraction to unity. Whoever has once made himself familiar with this mathematical mode of expression will soon feel its natural fitness, and easily get accustomed to fix his indefinite emotional estimate of the worth of a cognition by means of a coefficient of probability, whose magnitude may always be conceived as fluctuating between a least and a greatest limit, and accordingly as affected with a probable error.

  P. 51.—Objections have been raised from various sides against this employment of the calculus of probabilities, which, however, have betrayed for the most part far too considerable a defect of comprehension for it to be rewarding to occupy ourselves more closely with them, and which one and all do not enter upon the point, which I have already indicated (vol. i. p. 48, note) as that, where the concrete applicability of the argumentative processes in question may most easily miscarry.

  I will only mention here one opponent, partly because his fallacious objections possess a certain plausibility, partly because he has called my attention to the necessity of a supplement to my argumentation for the benefit of readers slow of comprehension or ill-disposed, which I had thought I might leave as superfluous to the intelligence of the reader himself. Albert Lange, in his “History of Materialism” (2d ed., vol. ii. p. 280–283, and p. 307–309), disputes the applicability of the entire inferential process to the problems of Nature, so far as concerns regressive inferences from phenomena to their causes, and that on the ground that the actual as a special case of very many possibilities must always appear extremely improbable a priori, a circumstance, however, which would not affect its reality, as the fraction of probability means nothing more than the degree of our subjective uncertainty (p. 282 1. 15–11 fr. b., p. 283 1. 3–6 fr. a.) He supports this denial on the ground that the whole theory of probability presupposes an abstraction of the efficient causes, of which we are entirely ignorant, whereas certain general conditions are known to us on which we base our calculation (p. 282 l. 11–7 fr. b.) Were the latter assertion correct there would be no reply to the suggested inference therefrom; but in fact it requires an important modification. If, namely, the co-operating causes which we abstract were absolutely unknown in all respects, there could be no talk of probability at all; the calculus of probability is, on the other hand, only possible on the supposition that the co-operating causes of which abstraction is made are accidental causes. But by accidental causes in the sense of the calculus of probabilities are to be understood such as are not in this form indispensable to the occurrence of the phenomenon in question, therefore also are not constantly met with in the same, but so change that their influence is more completely compensated the more frequently the occurrence is repeated. The estimate afforded by the calculus of probabilities rests on the supposition of a complete compensation of the accidental co-operating causes in infinitely numerous repetitions. Such accidental causes are, e.g., in inorganic nature the causes which condition the falling of the die on this or that side, in organic nature those which give rise to monstrosities and arrested developments.

  Only by leaving out of sight this fundamental assumption of the calculus of probabilities can Lange deny the admissibility of a regressive inference from perceived effects to the nature of the causes. If, e.g., I approach a game of rouge et noir, in which I see red appear twenty times in succession, there is certainly no doubt that this event may be produced by a mere combination of accidental causes; but little as this possibility is to be doubted, yet the extraordinary small probability of the same gives me the right to conceive also the other possibility, that a constant cause is present which favours red. Lange will certainly charge no one with drawing a wrong conclusion, who should hesitate to risk his money in such a game, because the suspicion (i.e., the inference of probability) at once occurs that the play is contrived with a view to deception, although the possibility is always conceded that this suspicion may be erroneous. But if Lange admits the validity of such an inference, he cannot refuse the like to my examples; he must then be able to prove a priori that the class of constant causes which I suppose is impossible. His objection, totally devoid of all proof, in fact amounts to this. The inferential process he cannot by rights impugn, but he only tries to question, from the prejudiced standpoint of a materialistic-mechanical view of the world, the admissibility of the hypothetical goal to which it is applied. From the point of view of the calculus of probabilities, such a procedure would only be legitimate if from the first such an enormous probability were assigned to the mechanical view of the world, forbidding the resort to metaphysical principles (not merely to mythological personal spirits), that even the counter-instances of the highest probability had no power to shake that probability. Were this the case, all philosophy and metaphysics, as Lange thinks, would be impossible; whether it be so is first to be determined by my investigation, and in the meantime it appears to me an unscientific prejudice, a mere petitio principii, whose untruth will become more and more apparent.

  Lange tries to strengthen his protest against the resort to metaphysical principles by a simile, when he asserts that by the same method upon the frequent recurrence of good luck in games of chance one might prove with equal probability the co-operation of a Fortuna or a spiritus familiaris. In the first place, there is here wanting the elimination of constant material causes presupposed by me in my discussion, i.e., before such inference to a Fortuna an exact investigation must be made whether the dice or the arrangement of the game of rouge et noir is not affected by errors which act as constant causes. But suppose this inquiry were carried out with extreme precision, and had yielded a negative result, nothing, in fact, could be alleged against the inference to a Fortuna as constant cause save the circumstance, that the non-existence of such a mythological personage has on other grounds a considerably greater probability than the evidence for its existence furnished by the game. That this is actually the case it will not be necessary to prove; but precisely on that account the example can prove nothing against the introduction of impersonal metaphysical principles for the explanation of the processes of organic formation, since for the non-existence of these such an overpowering probability is by no means established. Lange has, therefore, by no means, as he purposed, pointed out a methodological error in my explanation, but he has only revealed the blinding power of the materialistic prejudice by which he is possessed.

  But now it is further to be considered that the parallel drawn between a man winning ten times in succession and the origin of organic fitness in Nature proves nothing for an altogether different reason, in that, namely, Lange speaks only of one man who gains in a single case ten times in succession, whereas the marvellous conjunction of the conditions of orga
nic adaptation is repeated in innumerable cases simultaneously and successively. That this particular man is favoured by a Fortuna would only be a conclusion analogous to that of a purpose in organic Nature, if this man not only gained in one game ten or twenty times on doubling his stakes, but had this unheard-of luck his whole life long on all the gaming-tables of the world, and if a failure of this unheard-of luck belonged in his case as much to the class of exceptions as abortions to the exceptions of purposive organic formation. Conversely Lange would only then be right that the reality of the a priori improbable in organic Nature does not summarily compel the regressive inference to a constant cause, if the occurrence of this a priori improbable harmonious fitness were as rare an exception among innumerable unsuccessful malformations and deformities as the ten or twenty times successive gain is a rare exceptional case in games of chance (altogether corresponding in the degree of its rareness to the a priori theory of probability). This colossal difference is so evident as to make its oversight by Lange very surprising; it would by itself suffice to render impotent all the attacks of Lange upon my exposition.