Introduction: thinking the unconscious
In the entire world one does not speak of the unconscious since, ccording to its essence, it is unknown; only in Berlin does one speak of and know something about it, and explain to us what actually sets it apart.1
So wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in 1873, as part of his ironic response to the success of the Philosophy of the Unconscious (Philosophie des Unbewussten, 1869), written by the Berlin philosopher Eduard von Hartmann.
If the influence of a concept can be gauged by the way in which it is received by the public at large, if not in academic circles, then Hartmann’s volume, which ran to some eleven editions during his lifetime alone and was seen by some as introducing an entirely new Weltanschauung, might be regarded as marking one of the pinnacles of the career of das Unbewusste (the unconscious) during the nineteenth century.2
Although Hartmann’s understanding of the unconscious was, like Freud’s, subjected to a scathing critique at the hands of academic philosophy and
psychology, it nevertheless took some half a century or so for Freud to supersede Hartmann’s public role as the chief theorist and interpreter of the unconscious for the German-speaking public.
Today the concept of the unconscious is arguably still first and foremost associated
with Freud and with his successors such as Carl Gustav Jung and Jacques Lacan; in short: with psychoanalysis in general.
And although the existence of “the unconscious,” or of unconscious affects, continues to be questioned within large sections of the human and psychological
sciences, it is indisputable that many people in the Western world still subscribe to the notion that they have, in some form or another, “an unconscious” – generally understood to be an active component of one’s mental life that escapes one’s direct awareness, but which may nevertheless influence one’s behavior.
It is well known, especially in the German-speaking world but also to a lesser degree in the Anglophone territories, that Freud was not the first person to offer a detailed theoretical account of what is called “the unconscious.”
Yet there has until now been no detailed study in English of the various ways in which the unconscious was conceptualized or “thought” by German-speaking intellectuals during the nineteenth century.
The central purpose of this volume is to fill this gap by providing an in-depth
account of key figures in this conceptual history, not only in terms of how they may or may not have influenced Freud and the origins of psychoanalysis generally, but also in terms of their independent historical and contemporary relevance for other fields such as philosophy, literature, and aesthetics.
In accordance with this analytical framework, this volume has also been edited with a strong commitment to the philology of the German language, in an attempt to avoid the frequent mistranslations and misinterpretations that occur when analyzing cultural traditions in foreign languages
(Anglophone mistranslations of Freud being perhaps the best-known case in point).3
For this reason, all quotations from the German primary sources appear in the original German in the notes, and where a term has a particular resonance in German that cannot be captured in English translation, the original German term appears in brackets in the main text.
Nietzsche’s remarks, although directed first and foremost at Hartmann, also touch upon a series of irreducible philosophical questions with which this volume is confronted.
If, by its very definition, “the unconscious” escapes our conscious awareness, then how is it possible to “think” about it at all?
If we do in some way manage to “think” the unconscious, does it not thereby cease to be unconscious, thus defeating the purpose of the entire enterprise?
Would it not be better to withdraw completely from any rational or “conscious” analysis of the unconscious, leaving the way free for other modes of expression – the visual arts, poetry, or music – to bring unconscious affects to light?
If it is difficult or impossible to “think” the unconscious, how can it even be an object of knowledge expressed in the substantive form “the unconscious”?
And can one in fact assume the ontological existence of “the unconscious,” or is this “object” or “realm” merely an invention of Western (in this case particularly but
not exclusively German) thought?
In short: does the unconscious exist only in the West, only among certain socio-economic or cultural groups, or, as Nietzsche ironically suggests, “only in Berlin”?4
In answer to these questions, the chief English-language precursor to this study – Henri F. Ellenberger’s magisterial The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970) – proceeds on the assumption that “the unconscious” is, more or less like the brain, an aspect of human subjectivity which has an objective existence in all members of the human race, regardless of ethnicity, geography, and cultural or religious difference.
Yet in light of the fact that the human sciences and the humanities in general necessarily play a role in creating their own object – the “human,” understood not only as an empirical or biological organism but also as a thinking subject capable of
self-reflection, self-definition, and therefore also of self-transformation –
this study remains open to the possibility that theorists of the unconscious
actually invent or think the non-empirical “object” or phenomena
which they attempt to describe.5
In this sense, the notion that the unconscious was “discovered” necessarily forecloses upon the question as to whether “the unconscious” or “unconscious phenomena” actually exist objectively and independently of their theoretical elaborations.
Thus, despite its invaluable contribution to the history of Western psychiatry
and psychoanalysis, Ellenberger’s study must be regarded as being methodologically inadequate. In light of this fact, the title of this volume –
Thinking the Unconscious – attempts both to express and to preserve the
fundamental ontological instability of its theme.
Two further important questions raised by the title of this study – why “German” and why the nineteenth century? – necessitate an account here of how and why the question of the unconscious became a central theme of German thought from 1800 onwards, and this account must commence, not at the beginning of the nineteenth, but at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Arnim Regenbogen has correctly pointed out that the history of the unconscious can be understood both as the history of a philosophical problem (Problemgeschichte) and as the history of a concept (Begriffsgeschichte).6
Where and when this problem and this concept first arose is, however, a matter that could endlessly be debated.
Some, for example, have found ideas relating to the unconscious in the ideas of Gautama Buddha (c.563–483 BCE); in Plato’s (427–347 BCE) theory of the recollection of divine memory (anamnesis);7 in the works of Plotinus (204–269 CE); in the theological writings of St. Augustinse (354–430 CE) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–74); in German mystics uch as Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) and Jakob Böhme (1567–1624); and even in poets such as Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Shakespeare (1564–1616).8
With this myriad of sources and possible historical and cultural origins in mind, Ludger Lütkehaus has rightly observed that any comprehensive historical exploration of the unconscious would necessarily have to overstep national and even European boundaries.9
Nonetheless, if our central concern here is the discourses on the unconscious
which took place in nineteenth-century German thought, then the origin of the problem which these discourses seek to address is relatively easy to identify.
Petites perceptions and the unconscious: Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff, and Platner
The problem turns out to have originated in seventeenth-century France.
When René Descartes (1596–1650) posits, in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), the central dualism of modern European thought – according to which being is divided into the categories of thinking and extended substance (res cogitans and res extensa) – he associates res cogitans or thinking substance exclusively with consciousness.
The famous proposition cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”) thus relates the
core of human being – in other words, the soul – exclusively to thought and therefore to consciousness.
Since conscious thought alone guarantees the existence of the human subject, then it is literally impossible, in Cartesian terms, to conceive of unconscious mental states, since to be without consciousness would mean to lack any being whatsoever, as Descartes observes: “it could be that were I totally to cease from thinking,
I should totally cease to exist.”10
Descartes’ definition of the human subject as res cogitans offers both a functional and a material definition of consciousness.
In functional terms, Descartes outlines a structure, substance or ground within human subjectivity (that is, the soul) in which mental contents are cognized; while in material terms consciousness refers to those mental contents themselves which are apprehended: in everyday parlance the “facts,” “stream” or “field” of consciousness.11
In the British empiricism of John Locke and David Hume, the latter (material) sense of consciousness is maintained, while the former is regarded as being unsubstantiated.
Consciousness, for Locke, is merely the “perception of what passes in a man’s own
mind,” while for Hume it is the “inward sentiment” that arises from one’s
perceptions and ideas.12
Since, however, the self or “I” to which these perceptions belong cannot be proven to exist on an empirical basis, the question as to the substantial ground of consciousness is regarded as being unanswerable, the self being, according to Hume’s well-known formulation, nothing more than a “bundle” of different perceptions.13
In Germany, by contrast, Descartes’ functional or substantial conception of consciousness received a more positive reception in the Monadology (1714) of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
At the same time, however, Leibniz attempted to replace Cartesian dualism with a monism that would unify thinking and extended substance.
For Leibniz, the entire universe is constituted of simple, immaterial, and indivisible unities known as monads, all of which are capable, albeit to vastly differing degrees, of having perceptions.
Every monad is unique and develops according to its own internal law, being endowed with what Leibniz variously calls appetite or striving.
Each monad strives to achieve what it regards, from within the limitations of its own position in the universe, to be the apparent good. ~Angus Nicholls and Martin Liebscher, Thinking the Unconscious, Page 1-5
Angus Nicholls and Martin Liebscher – Thinking the Unconscious 19th Century German Thought
