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Authors: Frank Tallis

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These are exciting times. With the advent of brain-scanning technology it is now possible to map the brain. Already the geography of the unconscious has been illuminated by the fallout of colliding sub-atomic particles. Many brain scan images – showing brightly lit areas of biological activity – are nothing less than snapshots of the unconscious at work. Preconscious processes, rapidly assembling the infrastructure of personality.

The unconscious, only recently rejected as a historical curiosity, has made its way back to the heart of neuroscience. It is now widely recognised that without a thorough understanding of unconscious processes in the brain we will never have a thorough understanding of ourselves. Once again, the unconscious is an idea with a future – but to appreciate that future, we must first consider its past.

1
Depths below depths

W
hen the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz discovered John Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
he was greatly impressed. This work, published in 1690, was a meticulous analysis of how knowledge becomes consolidated in the mind. Although excited by Locke’s ‘essay’, Leibniz harboured some reservations and subsequently penned a brief critique. Unfortunately, Locke took a very dim view of Leibniz’s personal communication and chose to ignore it. Still convinced that his critique was sound, Leibniz wondered if Locke might have simply misunderstood what he had written. So, in the interests of clarity, he expanded his arguments to fill a book –
New Essays on Human Understanding.
But just as Leibniz completed it, Locke died. Disinclined to challenge an adversary who suffered from the considerable handicap of being dead, Leibniz sportingly decided not to publish; however, his
New Essays
did finally appear in 1765, almost fifty years after his own death.

New Essays
is of major importance, not only because it contains a well-argued response to Locke but also because it contains the first significant entry into philosophical discussion of unconscious mental operations. Although others (such as St Augustine, Montaigne, and Descartes) had speculated about inaccessible memories or actions undertaken in the absence of awareness, never before had unconscious processes received such detailed consideration.

Leibniz’s new way of understanding the mind, as a marriage of conscious and unconscious parts, initiated a tradition that eventually influenced the entire development of German psychology (up to and including Freud); however, the significance of Leibniz’s work was not fully appreciated when
New Essays
was published. Indeed, proper recognition would be delayed for almost a century. This was because Leibniz’s book appeared when the Age of Enlightenment was approaching its zenith, and during the Enlightenment the power of reason had been given considerable emphasis in all accounts of mental life. Leibniz’s proposal, that there might be unconscious processes at work in the mind affecting the formation of ideas, judgement, and decision making, was in stark contradiction to the prevailing view. In an age that respected mastery and control, Leibniz’s ideas were both unwelcome and perhaps more than a little disconcerting. It was absurd, surely, to suggest that man (equipped with ‘god-like reason) should be influenced by mental events so insubstantial as to escape his ordinary notice. Or so it was thought.

Whether considering the motion of gases or the orbit of Mr Halley’s comet, reason was showing that all phenomena were lawful. Even the passage of time itself could be measured with greater accuracy. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries table clocks and long clocks began to appear in the drawing rooms of Europe. These clever devices, with their springs and bobs, click wheels and ratchets, provided the age with a guiding metaphor. The universe was like an enormous clock. The universe ran like clockwork. The idea that human society and the human mind itself might run on similar principles was welcomed as yet another pleasing symmetry.

Locke’s
Essay
with which Leibniz was to take posthumous issue contains all of the hallmarks of Enlightenment thinking: complex mental phenomena are broken down into more fundamental constituents and ‘opposition to reason’ is described as ‘a sort of madness’. Moreover, in the fourth edition Locke began to explore potential laws which might determine how certain ideas (e.g. size and shape) become associated. Locke believed that self-reflection could unravel the mind completely Although he recognised that ideas might exist outside of awareness – stored in memory – such ideas could easily be uncovered at will. There were no inaccessible recesses or shadowy corners. The machinery of mental life could be exposed through introspection, just as one might peer into the back of a table clock to examine its cogs and springs. This was the key difference between Locke and Leibniz. For Locke the mind was transparent, but for Leibniz the mind was semi-opaque.

Leibniz was, without doubt, an extraordinary individual: uncommonly gifted and enjoying an embarrassment of intellectual riches. He is perhaps most famous for discovering the calculus – a systematic method of calculating areas, volumes, and other quantities very much superior to anything that existed before. Unfortunately, Newton was working on the same problem at exactly the same time, resulting in an acrimonious priority dispute. Nevertheless, it was Leibniz’s method of calculation that proved to be less cumbersome, giving continental mathematicians a significant advantage over their loyal but misguided English counterparts. In addition to discovering the calculus, Leibniz also devised binary arithmetic — a means of representing all values with only ones and zeros and better known today as the ‘language’ used by all digital computers. Indeed, it can be argued that Leibniz anticipated computer science itself by inventing a machine (the wooden prototype of which he demonstrated in London in 1673) capable of ‘reasoning’ by manipulating a symbolic language (over 150 years before Babbage’s Analytical Engine). As if this wasn’t enough, he designed a submarine, anticipated some features of Einstein’s theory of relativity, improved some basic engineering designs, promoted a public health system (which included a fire-fighting service and street lighting), assisted in negotiations that secured Georg Ludwig of Hanover’s succession to the British throne, and helped establish the German State Bank. He was no slacker.

Be that as it may, when John Locke read Leibniz’s preliminary critique of his
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
he allegedly responded by saying:

Mr L’s great name had raised in me an expectation which the sight of his paper did not answer. This sort of fiddling makes me hardly avoid thinking that he is not the very great man as has been talked of him.

Although Leibniz was undeniably an inveterate ‘fiddler’, there can be no denying that his fiddling was of the highest quality. Moreover, when he finally decided to ‘fiddle’ with mental phenomena, it was inevitable that his mighty intellect would deliver a revolutionary and penetrating account of the mind.

Leibniz did not make a sharp distinction between awareness and its absence. He believed that even when the mind is ostensibly inactive, such as in dreamless sleep, at some level mental processes are still operating. In addition, he postulated a continuum of consciousness. At the top of this continuum, he placed
apperceptions
(that is, the occurrence of clear and distinct mental experiences). Below these were less well defined
perceptions,
and below these
minute perceptions,
which occur wholly outside of awareness because they are ‘either too minute and too numerous, or else too unvarying’; however, minute perceptions do not always remain unconscious. They can rise into awareness, as when an individual focuses attention on a previously unnoticed sensation or noise.

Leibniz attributed a central role to minute perceptions with respect to the creation and maintenance of our sense of identity. According to Leibniz, the sense of having a single, continuous identity, extending from childhood through to old age, arises because of a sub-stratum of unconscious memories. Some of these memories enter awareness completely (allowing the individual to cross reference his or her past), while other memories merely hover at the fringes of awareness, providing a tenebrous context against which current mental events can take place. Leibniz also suggested something else that must have been particularly unpalatable to his peers; something which we today would call
unconscious motivation.
Again, minute perceptions played a key role. Leibniz suggested that minute perceptions might influence choices (and subsequent behaviour) without ever being detected in awareness. In other words, human beings were creatures with limited self-knowledge or insight. They might not be wholly aware why they choose to act in one way rather than another. Understandably, the concept of unconscious motivation never gained much currency in an age where introspection was thought to reveal the ordered workings of a wholly transparent and rational mind. The clear implication was that human beings were fundamentally irrational – a ridiculous idea. Unthinkable.

It is ironic that Leibniz employed a mechanical image to explain how minute perceptions influence behaviour, thus inadvertently subverting the most potent symbol of the Enlightenment. For Leibniz, minute perceptions resemble ‘so many little springs trying to unwind and driving our machine along’. He goes on to explain:

That is why we are never indifferent, even when we appear to be most so, as for instance whether to turn left or right at the end of a lane. For the choice that we make arises from these insensible stimuli, which, mingled with the actions of objects and our bodily interiors, make us find one direction of movement more comfortable than the other.

Leibniz’s response to Locke (with its emphasis on unconscious determinants of behaviour) was a controversial publication in the Age of Reason. In addition, Leibniz’s reputation may have suffered when the French writer and wit, François Marie Arouet, more famously known as Voltaire, ridiculed him as the absurd philosopher Dr Pangloss in
Candide
(1759). Subsequently, Leibniz’s revolutionary ideas about the workings of the mind were somewhat neglected.

Even so, as the well-oiled wheels of the table clocks turned, marking time with increasing precision, the world was edging forward to meet a new century; a new century in which mechanistic models of mind would be rejected and the concept of the unconscious fully embraced. ‘Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire’, wrote the poet William Blake, “tis all in vain!’ And he was right. The tectonic plates of art and philosophy suddenly shifted. Within a few decades the citadels of reason would be reduced to rubble.

The romantic movement began in Germany towards the end of the eighteenth century; however, the romantic sensibility continued to be influential to the end of the nineteenth, affecting cultural life worldwide. Although conventionally considered an artistic movement, the influence of romanticism spread well beyond the aits. Indeed, the representatives of romanticism offered a new model of man and, inevitably, a new model of mental life. Moreover, right from the very beginning, the existence of the unconscious was fully accepted and integrated into romantic psychology. The poet Friedrich Schiller suggested that his poetry had an unconscious origin and argued that the creative faculties were improved when liberated from reason; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his influential
The Sorrows of the Young Werther
(?774) while ‘practically unconscious’; and philosophers such as Artur Schopenhauer began to describe man as an irrational creature driven by unconscious forces. Why the sudden change?

Romanticism was very much a reaction against the central values of the Enlightenment. Indeed, the principal themes of romanticism were established in the wake of a philosophical backlash. The Enlightenment had arisen in the capitals of Europe, where man had been defined as a social and rational animal. Subsequently the romantics exchanged the city for the countryside, society for solitude, and reason for emotion.

The romantics venerated nature, and this is clearly evident in early eighteenth century romantic art – the most typical examples of which were produced by painters such as Caspar David Friedrich. Friedrich (and his contemporaries) were preoccupied with nature’s power and majesty, and subsequently specialised in landscapes. Human beings occasionally appear, but they are usually depicted as insignificant – dwarfed by immense mountains and louring skies, huge cataracts or sheets of ice. Solitary figures look out over vast expanses of rolling mist, or huddle on beaches in moonlight. Many of the greatest triumphs of the Enlightenment were urban, architectural (Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral, for example). The raw materials of nature – slate, marble, granite – had been disciplined by mathematics and labour; however, it is difficult to imagine Friedrich’s proud rocks being shaped into Corinthian columns or decorative cornicing. For Friedrich and the romantic fraternity nature was wild and elemental. It represented something beyond the scope of reason, ratio and compasses.

The solitary artists, rejected lovers, and lonely wayfarers in romantic landscapes also reflect the special emphasis romanticism gave to the individual. Enlightenment thinkers had wrestled with political and economic issues -analysing social structures and planning social reforms. With the advent of romanticism, the individual became the focus of interest. Writers and artists demonstrated an increasing awareness of the complexity of mental life. The struggles between different elements of society were now of less concern than the struggles arising within the individual – the conflict between head and heart, body and soul, conscious and unconscious forces.

As romanticism gathered momentum, the faculty of reason was approached with less reverence, which permitted more serious consideration of the subjective, irrational, and visionary. Deep feelings, or passions, previously viewed with some suspicion (on account of being wrongly associated with mental illness) were increasingly perceived as desirable and enriching. Even mysticism (rejected by Enlightenment thinkers as superstitious nonsense) became more acceptable. Indeed, one of the pivotal beliefs of romanticism was that behind visible nature was a mysterious ‘fundament’ or
Grund.
Subsequently, the romantic movement’s professed love of nature concealed an ulterior motive: union with a kind of universal unconscious – the cosmic equivalent of the soul’s penetralia.

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