Philosophy of the Unconscious

by Eduard Von Hartmann

  P. 158, 1. 15.—It used to be assumed that the ether alone filled up the space between the celestial bodies. This view is, at the present time, more and more receding before the other, that the permanent gases in a state of extreme attenuation occupy this intermediate space. That the intervals between the planets are filled with permanent gases may at the present time be assumed as tolerably certain, but that also between the several suns of our world-lens the corporeal molecules of the gases are not wanting can now likewise be regarded as probable. Accordingly, if the ether has lost its importance as a hypothetical medium for the filling up of cosmic space, it has in compensation continually gained in recent times in significance as an hypothesis for the explanation of the constitution of matter. Edlund’s remarkable “Theory of Electricity,” for which I venture to prophesy an important future, rests on the assumption that the non-electric state of a body is the condition of static equilibrium between the ether-atoms contained in it and the whole of the ether outside it, whilst positive or negative disturbances of this state of equilibrium represent the two species of electricity (cp. “Naturforscher,” 1872, Nos. 21 and 23; 1873, Nos. 24, 39, 41). The propagation of the light-vibrations, whose transversal direction must pass for strictly proved, is with this state of things only mathematically intelligible if the atoms which are its substrates essentially follow othei laws than the body-atoms subject to the laws of gravitation. Experiments on interference seem to show that the ether as medium of the light-vibrations is to be regarded as at rest in relation to the motion of the earth, so that to our apprehension it seems to stream through the pores of our atmosphere with a velocity which is approximately equal, but opposed to, that of the earth in the mundane space. Recently Maxwell has set up an “electromagnetic theory of light,” which proceeds from the fundamental thought that the medium of electricity and that of light is one and the same medium, namely, the ether (Naturf., vi. p. 159). He has in a theoretical way, as a consequence of his hypothesis, developed the condition that the square root of the di-electric constant must be equal to the refractive power of light; and the empirical confirmation of this law, both for various substances (Naturf., vi. p. 247), and also for different axes of a crystal, by the experiments of Boltzmann is well calculated to give a strong support to the theory of Maxwell. But even apart from electricity and light, the hypothesis of the ether is indispensable for the constitution of the solid, rigid bodies, which can never be explained by merely attracting, but always only by the mutual action of attracting and repelling forces. This has hitherto been recognised by all mathematical physicists; the first interesting attempt to constitute solid bodies merely from attractive forces, and to eliminate the repulsive or ether-atoms from this part of mathematical physics, is that by Pfeilsticker in his memoir “Das Kinetsystem” (Stuttgart, 1873). Unfortunately, however, the suppositions there made (infinity of matter) are of so doubtful a kind, and the indications afforded so scanty and provisional (the memoir is only to be the precursor of a detailed “Kinetology”), that no opinion on the alleged solubility of the problem can be formed. On the whole, therefore, so far the hypothesis of the repulsive ether-atoms will have to pass for just as well-founded as that of the attractive corporeal atoms.

  P. 158, 1. 24.—If one recognises the mutual penetrability of the atoms (cp. p. 170), it undoubtedly follows from the consideration of freely mobile corporeal atoms, that they must vibrate through one another without hindrance (because the velocity with which they travel will be infinitely great as the attraction at an infinitely little distance), and after the backward swing must return to their point of departure to begin their play over again (Pfeilsticker’s “Kinetsystem,” sects, ii. and vi.) A gradual diminution of the amplitude of body-atoms vibrating through one another and final reduction to zero would only be possible with a sort of frictional resistance, which is excluded in the case of freely movable atoms. But the case appears to be different when the empirical fact of relatively rigid combinations of atomic groups is taken note of, however it be explained; for in it there is then given such an arrest of the free movement of the atoms as must finally induce their coming together. If, then, as Pfeilsticker maintains, the rigid corporeal atoms were explicable without repulsive forces, the gradual union of corporeal atoms into a point must also be conceivable, and therefore his assertion seems unjustified that several atoms can only be united in a point if they are originally created in this form. On the other hand, the other remark (p. 29) is excellent, that homogeneous atoms (no matter what their nature), if they are once united in a point, can no longer be separated by internal or external influence, even if they possess no attraction for one another; for every action would always affect both atoms equally, thus never be able to produce a different effect in both.

  P. 170, 1. 10.—My assertion of the perfect penetrability of the corporeal atoms has certainly appeared to many a physicist accustomed to the dogma of impenetrability a philosophical paradox, and it affords me therefore particular satisfaction to be able to point to an authority like Dr. Albert Pfeilsticker, all whose calculations in his “Kinetsystem “depend on the absolute penetrability of the atoms as on a self-evident supposition. When Dr. Alexander Wiesner in his memoir “Das Atom” (Leipzig, Thomas, 1874) controverts “Pfeilsticker’s penetrability theory,” he does this simply on the ground of a remnant of the old prejudice of matter that clings to him despite all his protestations, without which remnant nothing “movable” would remain for him, since, as above remarked, he desires thoroughly to eliminate the notion of force.

  P. 171, 1. 10.—An instructive instance of the fixity of sense-prejudices is afforded by Albert Lange, who, in his “History of Materialism,” gives, in a special section, “Force and Matter” (Thomas’s trans., vol. ii. p. 351–397, Eng. and For. Phil. Library), an instructive sketch of the historical development of the physical and chemical atomic theory, and of the present views of natural philosophers on the relation of force and matter. He there, so far as criticism is concerned, agrees substantially with my foregoing disquisition; remains, however, almost avowedly wavering between Scylla and Charybdis, because he sees the impossibility of retaining the concept Matter, and yet does not venture to take the only consistent step which successfully solves the problem. He blames Büchner because, from his lay point of view, he “cannot sufficiently free himself from the sensuous idea of compound, apparently compact, bodies, such as our touch and eye present them to us. The professed physicist, at least the mathematical physicist, cannot make the least step in his science without freeing himself from such ideas” (p. 370). The result of his historical exposition comes to this: “That the progress of the science has led us more and more to put force in the place of matter, and that the increasing exactness of research more and more resolves matter into force. The two ideas, therefore, do not stand so simply as abstractions beside each other; but the one is by abstraction and inquiry resolved into the other, yet so that there is always something left” (p. 379). Nothing could be objected to the last clause if it only meant that in the previous phases of molecular physics such an unresolved remainder of matter has been left; but it does not follow from that that the process of resolution in question must stop at a definite limit, and must for all time necessarily still retain a matter undefinable and valueless for explanation behind the forces alone of account for scientific purposes. On the contrary, the previous course of science undoubtedly demands the making a clean sweep of the last remnant of the sensuous prejudice blamed in the case of Büchner. If matter, as such, is resolved into forces, the substance supporting the force-effects demanded by the nature of our thinking can no longer be matter as such, which is constituted of these force-effects (p. 293, above); but still less can it be the abstract ghost of a matter remaining after the deduction of all forces, the only definition of which is limited to its being a substantial support of the dynamic effects. But if nothing remains of the union of force and matter but the union of force with the category required by thought of substantial
ity, the problem, insoluble according to Lange, is very easily solved by the simple recognition that it is force and only force to which the predicate of substantiality belongs. Herewith the “indispensable” support of the force-effects at once ceases to be “incomprehensible” (p. 395), and the “limit of natural knowledge” erected by sense-prejudice falls away as a mocking subjective phantom. If matter as such can not be hypo-statised because it is proved to be result of force-effects, if the idea of stuff has been itself volatilised into the mere category of substance, it is, in fact, undiscoverable why it “never at all occurs” (p. 395) to Lange to connect the indispensable category of substantiality with the only quality which turns out, on the analysis of matter, to be its real core, namely, force, i.e., to recognise this itself with Leibniz as the true and only substance. The only assignable reason for this is, that Lange imagines that he can in his philosophising retain, even in the last and highest principles, sensuous intuitiveness, and with the surrender of these must lose the scientific ground under his feet. This is, of course, a prejudice of the crudest sensualistic empiricism, which has no idea that all science just begins with the elevation of sense-intuition into conception. Hence it is but matter of course that his resistance to the surrender of intuitiveness occurs at this point much too late; for the category of substantiality, into which the concept of stuff is for him volatilised, is yet as abstract as possible; and of force, he himself confesses (p. 371) that it “cannot be at all adequately represented in forms of sense: we help ourselves by pictures, such as the lines of the figures in the doctrines of mathematics, without ever confounding these pictures with the notion of force.” Had Lange consistently held fast to this simple truth, the false appearance of incomprehensibility arising from the perverse struggling for sensible intuitiveness in the highest principles would have disappeared of itself.

  P. 200, 1. 27.—Häckel still maintains in his “Anthropogenic” (p. 246) the morphological equivalence of the segments in the articulata and vertebrata, relying on the point that in the embryo of the vertebrate the rest of the vertebræ are ordinarily developed from the anterior vertebræ that are first to make their appearance, as the divisions of the annelids arise by terminal gemmation. But “Si duo faciunt idem, non est idem,” i.e., the morphological meaning of an ontogenetic metameros is only certainly to be perceived from the phylogenetic developmental history of the same. Here, however, on tracing the annelids to their origin, we find a chain of similar individual organisms, whilst the ancestors of the vertebrates nowhere exhibit such a chain, but always only a single organism (e.g., Amphioxus), whose cord is ossified at a certain stage of development in order to attain a firmer skeleton, but at the same time is internally articulated for the sake of retaining greater mobility.

  P. 219, 1. 19.—Häckel asserts that the homogeneity of the mass in the non-nucleated protozoa is proved by the microscopic observation of the pigment-corpuscles, which have been offered the Moner “to devour,” that move unimpeded and uniformly in all directions in the body of the protozoon. Of course, according to this, the truth of the following propositions must be admitted: “Every part may receive and digest food; every part is irritable and sensitive; every part may be moved independently; and every part is, lastly, also capable of propagation and regeneration” (“Anthropogenie,” p. 381). Only we must understand by “part” a piece of an empirical size, and by no means a chemical molecule of the albumen in question; only on this supposition can we speak of a homogeneity of the Moneres in contrast to the nucleated Amœbæ, but by no means in the chemical signification of the word. For that even the lowest animals are not “structureless,” as a solution of albumen, is manifestly shown by the distribution of the granules through the whole protoplasmic mass. The functions of nutrition, movement, and sensation are also performed in the nucleated cells; not by the nucleus, but by the nucleated protoplasm, and only the function of propagation, i.e., the initiative to cell-division, is in the case of the latter centralised at the nucleus, whilst in the Moneres this also is still decentralised. What part in all these functions is played by the granules, on that point I will make no conjectures; at all events, they suffice to enable us to speak of a morphological structure in addition to the chemical structure of the protoplasm, and distinguish the living lumps of protoplasm specifically from all albuminous droplets externally resembling them. If the chemical structure of the proteid substances were alone sufficient to cause the vital phenomena of the protoplasm, it would at least be very surprising that all attempts to produce Moneres from finely distributed albuminous droplets have hitherto remained without result.

  P. 247, 1. 11.—J. H. v. Kirchmann asserts in his memoir “On the Principle of Realism,” p. 43: “In truth, then, the ideation of the Unconscious has all the determinations which make knowledge in man a conscious knowledge,” and seeks to prove this assertion in the following manner: “Now we find in conscious knowledge (1.) that it has a content wholly in the form of knowledge; (2.) that it knows at the same time this form itself, or that knowledge knows, besides its content, at the same time itself as knowledge (is conscious of itself); (3.) that knowledge can embrace the many dispersed ideas received one after another and relate them to one another in the most varied manner, in virtue of the forms of relation inherent in it; and (4.) that knowledge, in spite of the plurality of its content and of its ideas being separated in time, still knows itself as One. Now of these determinations affecting the form of knowledge, the Unconscious thinking of the All-One possesses, according to the explanations of the author, unquestionably those under 1, 3, and likewise 4; for the rationality attributed to it, which is essentially expounded as relation of the single ideas in the form of means to others as ends, belongs indeed to the determination under 3, and the all-unity of the Unconscious leads also to the determination under 4. But even the determination under 2 cannot be denied to the thinking of the Unconscious, because only thereby is the picking out of the suitable means from the whole mass of ideas possible in the special cases of the auxiliary intervention of the Unconscious, and because the contrast of Volition and Ideation must be likewise contained in it as known, since the goal, the suppression of the Will by conscious thinking, can only thereby be represented by it at all.”

  On this the following is to be remarked. Nos. 3 and 4 concern the union of the scattered given empirical thought-material in consciousness, or the connecting relations of the content of thought, which is cut up both in space and time through the narrowness and discursiveness of perception. Unconscious thinking, however, does not need subsequently to collect the inner manifold of its content into a unity, because it is originally an indivisible totality, not an aggregate of scattered fragments. It need not at all become conscious of its own unity, because its internal plurality is not given to it, like conscious perception, but posited by it itself, and indeed is posited in an indissoluble unity. As little as the form of unity has to be subsequently applied to the matter of the unconscious Idea, so little have the relations in which the many moments and parts of this matter stand to one another and the whole. So far as these relations may be contained in intellectual intuition in general, so far do they lurk implicitly in the matter of unconscious perception, without the latter needing to become conscious of their presence in abstract explication; so far, however, as the relations of our conscious thinking depend on its discursiveness, so far can they in general find no entrance into unconscious ideation. The assertion of Kirchmann that his points Nos. 3 and 4 find application to unconscious thinking in my sense is then certainly erroneous. But as concerns the point No. 1, the expression made use of in the same, “form of knowledge,” is altogether ambiguous. If it merely implies as much as “form of ideality” (in opposition to the form of reality or of existence), nothing more is posited by it than the community emphasised by me (and cited by Kirchmann shortly before) of an ideal content without any reality of its own for the unconscious and conscious presentation. If, however, “form of knowledge” means the same as “
form of consciousness,” then it is precisely the point in dispute, whether this determination belongs to unconscious perception, so that Kirchmann cannot render as a reason for its affirmation what is only the affirmation itself.