Descartesâs account of unconscious psychic life centers upon the claim that mental transparency does not hold for material causes of our emotional lives. Since the subject has no awareness of these causes, there will be cases where it cannot tell that its thoughts are by secret impressions implanted in the brain (due to a traumatizing experience), but not from current sensory perceptions (someone who resembles the offender).
(p. 299)
For Descartes, the unconscious is conceptualized in terms of an environmental event resulting in a physical trauma registered upon the brain. However, despite Descartesâs willingness to recognize the possibility of the past impacting our perceptions of the present, the main thrust of his philosophy hinges upon establishing the self-transparency of consciousness. This is why it is necessary for Descartesâs outlook that he consign unconscious processes to the material domain of the body. Yet in separating the mind from the body and emphasizing the role of thought in his definition of selfhood, Descartesâs philosophy inadvertently casts doubt upon the soulâs constant activity. This is most evident with respect to the phenomenon of sleep. If the soul is to go on existing, Descartesâs approach requires that we always be thinking. How, then, are we to explain the state of dreamless sleep? Descartes is required to offer a rather convoluted justification:
You say you want to stop and ask whether I think the soul always thinks. But why should it not always think, since it is a thinking substance? It is no surprise that we do not remember the thoughts that the soul had when in the womb or in a deep sleep, since there are many other thoughts that we equally do not remember, although we know we had them when grown up, healthy and wide-awake. So long as the mind is joined to the body, then in order for it to remember thoughts which it had in the past, it is necessary for some traces of them to be imprinted on the brain; it is by turning to these, or applying itself to them, that the mind remembers. So is it really surprising if the brain of an infant, or a man in a deep sleep, is unsuited to receive these traces?
(Descartes, 1984, pp. 246â247)
The questionable nature of this justification led Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646â1716) to argue that a neurological understanding of the unconscious is insufficient. Owing to the hardline separation Descartes establishes between mind and matter, the unconscious is associated with the material world while the conscious mind is associated only with thinking. Like Descartes, Leibniz wishes to preserve a notion of the soulâs constant activity, but unlike Descartes, he suggests that supporting this notion requires a more nuanced conception of consciousness â one that acknowledges different degrees of intensity, thus establishing a spectrum of mental experience ranging from relatively conscious states to relatively unconscious states. Thus, for Leibniz, not all thought is conscious, and the notion of the unconscious is framed as something mental. The self-transparency of the Cartesian mind can thus be contrasted with the Leibnizian mindâs multifaceted complexity.
It was Descartesâs philosophy that was to exert a more powerful influence on the development of the Western intellectual tradition. While Descartesâs adoption of a skeptical method in order to combat skepticism fell short, his dualist separation of mind from body emphasized a mechanistic conception of the material world that helped clear a path for the development of Western science. Although Descartesâs project was explicitly concerned with establishing the thinking subject as the ground upon which to refute skepticism, the more lasting impact of his philosophy came to be reflected in the implication that if there is to be a basis for certainty then it is to be found in a material world that could now be thought of as though existing in distinction from the thinking subject; a thinking subject that Descartes wished to establish as primary, but which seemed only less certain as a consequence of his emphasis on the cogito. It might be argued that Descartesâs rationalism only fostered the subsequent rise of empiricism.
David Hume (1711â1776) would come to criticize the cogito from an empirical standpoint, arguing that the mind is nothing but a bundle of sense perceptions. The empirical refusal of rationalism had a powerful basis in the politics of the time, for empiricism was considered a revolutionary movement standing for independence of thought and a resistance to religious dogma. The work of Immanuel Kant (1724â1804) can be understood as an attempt to establish a balance between the extremes of rationalist dogmatism and empirical skepticism. His concern is to protect the autonomy of reason â he wishes to deny that reason is merely contingent on habits of belief. Kantâs critical philosophy seeks to argue for an a priori knowledge upon which our experience of the world can be shown to unavoidably rest. In approaching this undertaking, Kant establishes a different form of dualism from the one endorsed by Descartes. While Descartesâs philosophy hinges upon the separation of mind from matter, Kant establishes a distinction between the phenomenal world (our experience of things) and the noumenal world (the things in themselves).
Although Kantâs philosophy sought to protect the autonomy of reason, it did so without adequately addressing the relationship between self and world. In Kantâs view, the law of cause and effect only applies as a function of subjective experience. If this is so, however, it becomes impossible to say how objects in the world (noumena) could give rise to our experiences (phenomena). The German philosophical tradition coming after Kant sought to offer a more comprehensive (and for this reason speculative) philosophy of consciousness. It was out of this endeavor that the philosophical idea of the unconscious proper arose. The term was coined in its German original by Friedrich Schelling (1775â1854) who, under the influence of Jakob Böhmeâs (1575â1624) Christian theosophy, built on Leibnizâs petits perceptions (perceptions that are not apperceived) and Kantâs dunkele Vorstellungen (obscure presentations) to formulate an evolving philosophy of the unconscious. For Schelling, reflecting the idea that reason can never gain mastery of its own conditions, an unconscious ground is asserted such as to express the original unity out of which self and other emerge. Spiritualized nature â the world soul â is conceptualized as the unconscious other in relationship to which self-consciousness comes into existence.
The notion of the unconscious articulated by Schelling was subsequently expanded upon by Carl Gustav Carus (1789â1869), and reframed in the work of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788â1860) as the Will. In 1869, Eduard von Hartmann (1842â1906) published his compendious Philosophy of the Unconscious â a work of more than 1,000 pages surveying the various permutations of âthe unconsciousâ to have arisen in the recent history of Germanic philosophy. Such was the popularity of this idea in the mid-nineteenth-century German-speaking world that by the time Freud and Breuerâs âPreliminary Communicationâ was published some 24 years later, von Hartmannâs book had already made its way through nine editions (Dufresne, 2000).
Broadly speaking, the notion of the philosophical unconscious can be understood as a unificatory principle that reflects a response to the dualisms of both Descartes and Kant. It offers itself as a speculative basis upon which to conceptualize the unity of self-consciousness, the unity of self and world,3 and the unity of mind and body. Reflective of its speculative and inherently murky status, it should be noted that the unificatory function of the philosophical unconscious is enlisted not to annul difference but to preserve it. This is worth underscoring, for it suggests the extent to which the idea upon which psychoanalytic practice is founded might serve to support diversity â this has perhaps been clouded by the extent to which our conceptions of what it means to invoke âthe unconsciousâ have been shaped by Freudian dogmatism, and a consequent concern that orienting practice to this idea is liable to result in abuses of clinical authority. As Kugler (2005) writes:
The realization that our clinical grounds are not as absolute as we once thought does not lead to a radical relativism, nor to a nihilism. It leads, instead, to a psychological realism based upon the awareness that all systems of clinical interpretation gain their authority through a grounding in a god-term, a transcendental âultimate.â But this âultimateâ is no longer so absolute, so ultimate. In therapeutic analysis we must still, on one level, believe in our god-term, and use it as if it were the ultimate explanatory principle. But on a deeper level, we also know it is not. And it is precisely this deeper level of awareness that prevents our psychological th...