Zßrcher Philosophische Vorträge 7
Dale Jacquette Schopenhauer on the Metaphysics of the Unconscious
Schwabe
ZÜRCHER PHILOSOPHISCHE VORTRÄGE HERAUSGEGEBEN VON WOLFGANG ROTHER
SCHWABE VERLAG BASEL
ZÜRCHER PHILOSOPHISCHE VORTRÄGE 7
Dale Jacquette
Schopenhauer on the Metaphysics of the Unconscious
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Consciousness is the mere surface of our mind, and of this, as of the globe, we do not know the interior, but only the crust. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation 2, 136
Abstract
Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the unconscious in its relation to consciousness is contrasted with later psychoanalytic concepts of individual and collective unconscious influences on conscious thought, causally affecting behavior and the physical expression of cognitive and emotional states. Schopenhauer seals off consciousness from penetration by unconscious elements, while Freud and Jung consider the possibility of unconscious desires, fears, hopes, and the like surfacing perhaps therapeutically into a subject’s awareness. The similarities and differences between Schopen hauer’s metaphysics and Freud’s and Jung’s assumptions about the relation between consciousness and the unconscious are critically considered. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the unconscious conditions but denies the logical possibility of unconscious elements emerging from behind the curtain into consciousness. Freud and Jung in the psychoanalytic tradition are theoretically committed on the contrary to the causal possibility of an unconscious element emerging with its identity intact into an individual conscious thinker’s subjective streaming moments of consciousness. Das Unbewusste
One sometimes thinks of the unconscious as though it were a vast uncharted continent that is discovered and explored for the first time by the pioneers of inchoate psychological processes. Like the New World in the late fifteenth century, it was there all along, although its existence and char acter remained unknown in Europe until some brave pioneers opened a new realm of possibilities for later investigation. Schopenhauer, Freud, and still more, C. G. Jung, among numerous others especially of their followers, first planted a flag for the unconscious that has now made its own inevitable transition from scientific psychoanalysis to popular folk psychology. These thinkers did not all agree on the metaphysical relation between conscious
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and unconscious psychological states. There is conflict enough certainly about the ontology of consciousness in contemporary philosophy of mind, leaving unconsciousness for the moment out of account. Recognizing the existence of an unconscious psychological reality as cognitively functioning and perhaps ultimately motivating character of mind, while explaining its connections with conscious mental events, further exponentially complicates the effort to understand the nature of consciousness. The concept of the unconscious implies that there is something beneath the surface of awareness. It is natural to picture a force that may drive thought and action in ways that of necessity are outside the conscious control of a self and its empirical phenomenologically experienced self-directed acts of will. What we like to think of as our rational behavior might then be only a conscious rationalization of an underlying unconscious potentially irrationally directed compulsion of unconscious thought determining what otherwise seems subjectively to be rational deliberately intended action. If consciousness is a self-presenting manifestation of unconsciousness, however, then we cannot expect to understand consciousness and the self ’s deliberate choices based on an agent’s desires and beliefs, if we do not understand the unconscious foundation on which we are supposing the agent’s consciousness to supervene or stand as the further mental effects of an unconscious mental causation. The further supervenience relation of subconscious and conscious events on still more fundamental neurophysio logical events is an equally important chapter in this development of the metaphysics of mind. It must for now be filed away as a topic to be consid ered on another occasion. Here the concern is exclusively with the relation if any between consciousness and the unconscious at ontic dependence levels above the purely physical neurophysiological supervenience base. Assuming that we can be persuaded in the first place that there is such a thing as an unconscious psychological event or occurrence, the suggestion remains that consciousness in some sense supervenes on the unconscious, even if transitively it further supervenes ultimately on an individual think ing subject’s neurophysiology.
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Conscious, Unconscious (Subconscious), Non- or Not Conscious
It is useful in this connection before proceeding to distinguish between conscious, unconscious (also referred to in some of the relevant literature as subconscious), and nonconscious or not conscious events. The terms are simi lar in meaning but not synonymous, and important philosophical differ ences are marked by their informed choice. Conscious events monitor the information contents of streaming moments of our awareness of external perceptual circumstances or our own cognitive and proprioceptive and other affective processes. If the unconscious exists, then conceivably it might play a pivotal role in how we think and behave. It might be imagined to exert an influence from behind the scenes where conscious determination and will power cannot find them, let alone bend them to its purposes. The exact opposite might equally be assumed to be true, perhaps with a greater weight of anecdotal evidence more powerfully on its side, that the unconscious can intrude into and causally affect consciousness. What follows is an inquiry directed toward developing a preferred interpretation especially of Schopenhauer’s concept of das Unbewusste. Schopenhauer is accorded this centrality in the chronicle of unconsciousness studies partly for historical reasons. Schopenhauer is often and reasonably enough said to be the grandfather of the unconscious as a philosophical psychological category of explanation in the sense of being virtually and most conspicuously first in the field. Schopenhauer is acknowledged as presaging, first, Eduard von Hartmann, in his 1869 Philosophie des Unbewußten, and then prominently though with only belated acknowledgement of affinities in the psychoanalytic theory and clinical therapeutic practice of Freud and Jung. It is proposed that there are two essentially different categories of the unconscious or models of unconsciousness that are not always (adequately) distinguished. For reasons of exposition, a Freud-Jung Model 1 of the unconscious is first explained, in order to contrast it with the essay’s main interest in understanding Schopenhauer unconsciousness Model 2. Freud is vindicated as having correctly recognized only precursor analogies between his and Schopenhauer’s concepts of the unconscious. Freud need not be read uncharitably as disguising an intellectual debt to Schopenhauer, or as having been historically preempted by Schopenhauer in
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the discovery of an unconscious side of thought. The analysis offered below is invoked to explain exactly why and in exactly what sense a comparison of the two models of the unconscious should come to the same conclusion that Freud reached. It is to the effect that Schopenhauer’s concept of the unconscious is similar to but still very distinct from that of psychoanalytic theory in certain key phases of its development. As to when in his background Freud encountered Schopenhauer’s ideas in writing, we have to offer no independent confirmation or disconfirmation of the usual account based on Freud’s autobiographical testimony. From a Schopenhauerian standpoint there are good reasons not only for distinguishing but rejecting the Freud-Jung Model 1 of the unconscious, except as an exercise in surface empirical psychology rather than the transcendental metaphysical grounding of the possibility of consciousness presented in Schopenhauer Model 2. Crediting Freud for understanding the differences between his concept of the unconscious and Schopenhauer’s does not imply that Freud or the Freud-Jung Model 1 of unconsciousness is a preferable concept to Schopenhauer Model 2. Their differential acceptability is dependent on very different explanatory purposes. Two Opposed Models of the Unconscious
We can graphically represent the principal differences between these two models of the unconscious. The Freud-Jung Model 1, though historically later than Schopenhauer’s concept, is different in at least one important respect. The assumption in Freud-Jung Model 1 is that the unconscious can emerge into consciousness, which is denied in Schopenhauer Model 2. Model 2 holds instead that what is unconscious can affect but unconscious elements cannot break through or pass beyond the experiencetranscending division between what is unconscious and what is conscious, preserving its identity intact. The main difference is shown in this comparison of diagrams. The first reporting on Model 1 depicts an unconscious entity surfacing into consciousness. A repressed desire in psychoanalytic theory might be brought into consciousness in this sense, a person made aware of the fact perhaps through a program of therapy as adversely affecting the individual’s every-
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day life. It is the very same entity, according to Model 1, the same desire α in the illustration, that is supposed to cross over from the world of unconsciousness into conscious awareness, as a person suffering neurosis begins to understand and can begin to come to terms with a forbidden or shameful longing or disquieting past humiliation. What had been unconscious is made conscious on the model, transitioning from one psychological order or dimension to its complement. The picture describing the surfacing of an unconscious element into consciousness looks like this:
Freud-Jung Model 1 of the Unconscious
Where the entry of an identical psychological entity makes a violent or damaging entrance from the unconscious into consciousness, as when it is physically or psychologically destructive for a subject to become suddenly aware of a previously repressed unconscious element, the emergence of unconsciousness into a thinking subject’s conscious states of awareness can be represented in this cartoon-like fashion:
Dramatic Consciousness-Disrupting Emergence of Unconscious Element into Consciousness
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Several of Freud’s case studies of the treatment of psychopathologies fit this application of Model 1, in which a subject to one degree or another experiences conscious trauma as a result of the emergence into consciousness of what had been a subconscious element buried away until that moment in the deep recesses of the mind’s unconsciousness. Schopenhauer Model 2 in contrast considers that certain of the mind’s unconscious elements might exert an effect on the character of consciousness without ever breaking the barrier separating consciousness from unconsciousness. Without consequently ever emerging into consciousness as the same element, satisfying identity conditions for its translocation from an unconscious to the conscious psychological realm. Schopenhauer is explicit in his philosophical writings considered in detail below that the relation of the unconscious to the conscious is mutually exclusionary. It can crudely be represented by somewhat the same conventions. The Schopenhauerian model, with an important note of caution, has this form:
Schopenhauer Model 2 of the Unconscious
The difference is that for Schopenhauer the unconscious transcends the determination of individuality provided by the spatiotemporal identity conditions that Schopenhauer refers to as the principium individuationis, together with the four categories of principles of explanatory sufficient rea son. This implies that contrary to the oversimplification of the diagram of Model 2, it is not possible for Schopenhauer to identify an individual unconscious element of thought as any particular thing α. Human investigators are sealed off epistemically from the unconscious, whose presence and activity are never directly descriptively known, but only inferentially. What is strictly preferable from a Schopenhauerian perspective is to hold that
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the unconscious cannot even in principle be individuated into elements, and can never emerge into the conscious awareness of any thinking subject. The unconscious can nevertheless partly determine the character of consciousness. It can only do so, however, if Schopenhauer is right, noncausally, contrary to the psychoanalytic tradition as represented in the diagram for Freud-Jung Model 1. To say that the unconscious in Schopenhauer bends or shapes the character of consciousness as a consequence can only be intended metaphorically. Equivocation between these and more finely nuanced subdivisions of the two models are rampant in unconsciousness studies in psychology and phi losophy. Whether a Freud-Jung Model 1 or Schopenhauer Model 2 is a pre ferred choice depends entirely on what we may need and want the models to accomplish. The question is the useful structure we require of them to lend our explanations of what even from a casual perspective are very different phenomena. Psychoanalysis as a theoretical and therapeutic science of normatively good psychic health seeks out syndromes causally adversely affect ing normal mental functioning in unresolved conscious-unconscious conflicts. Whereas Schopenhauer Model 2 in pure classical form again has the burden of supporting the transcendental idealist thesis of the underlying real identity of all superficially distinct individual conscious and unconscious thinking subjects. Differences between individuals as distinct objectifications of will as imperceivable Kantian Thing-in-itself (Ding an sich) are triv ial and superficial for Schopenhauer. The world in reality is one thing and its multiplex appearances under the mind’s categories and pre-experiential forms of perception is something else again. The unconscious for Schopen hauer is not Thing-in-itself, although it mirrors in another way the same relation within the life of the individual mind that is found in the metaphys ics of Schopenhauer’s world taken in its most global implications. The explanatory differences between Freud-Jung Model 1 and the advantages of Schopenhauer Model 2 over its competitor form are logically detachable from the specifics of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. We need not accept a dual metaphysics of the world as appearance and pure willing or will in reality for the sake of taking advantage of explanatory gains by invoking a parallel distinction between an unconsciousness that is capable versus one that is inherently incapable of entering consciousness. Loosely Schopenhauerian conceptions of the relation between consciousness and
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the unconscious can adopt the general pattern of Schopenhauer Model 2 against the analysis entailed by Freud-Jung Model 1 gratefully in extraKantian variations without adopting all components of Schopenhauer’s transcendental idealist philosophy. Schopenhauer’s Text in Two Key Passages
Schopenhauer is sometimes thought to have inaugurated the category of the unconscious and unconsciousness. He appears to do so in the general sense we have already been considering in the following locus classicus para graph in The World as Will and Representation: In general, the thought-process within us is in reality not so simple as its theory, for here the whole thing is involved in a variety of ways. To make the matter clear, let us compare our consciousness to a sheet of water of some depth. Then the dis tinctly conscious ideas are merely the surface; on the other hand, the mass of the water is the indistinct, the feelings, the after-sensation of perceptions and intuitions and what is experienced in general, mingled with the disposition of our own will that is the kernel of our inner nature.1
Schopenhauer resorts to metaphor as his only vehicle capable of explain ing the metaphysical relation holding between consciousness and unconsciousness. It appears on reflection to be the best that anyone in Schopen hauer’s ideological situation can possibly offer, given a prior commitment to an imperceivable transcendental reality objectified in the world of phenomenal appearance. What can possibly be descriptively said to distinguish consciousness from unconsciousness, if the unconscious lurking beneath the surface of conscious experience is unindividualizable and subject to none of the explanation types that govern all occurrences in the perceived world, including what is perceived phenomenologically in acts of internal observation? Schopenhauer draws what he thinks is the obvious inescapable conclusion: Now this mass of the whole consciousness is more or less, in proportion to intellectual liveliness, in constant motion, and the clear pictures of the imagination, or the distinct, conscious ideas expressed in words, and the resolves of the will are 1
Arthur Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation [3rd ed. 1859, 1st ed. in one volume 1819], trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York 1958) 2, 135.
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what comes to the surface in consequence of this motion. The whole process of our thinking and resolving seldom lies on the surface, that is to say, seldom consists in a concatenation of clearly conceived judgements; although we aspire to this, in order to be able to give an account to ourselves and others. But usually the rumination of material from outside by which it is recast into ideas, takes place in the obscure depths of the mind. This rumination goes on almost as unconsciously as the conversion of nourishment into the humors and substance of the body. Hence it is that we are often unable to give any account of the origin of our deep est thoughts; they are the offspring of our mysterious inner being.2
Schopenhauer earlier in the same second volume of The World as Will and Representation had previously argued: We might almost imagine that half of all our thinking occurred unconsciously […] I have made myself acquainted with the actual data of a theoretical or practical affair; now after a few days, without my having thought of it again, the result as to how the matter stands or what is to be done about it will often occur to me quite automatically and be clear in my mind. Here the operation whereby this was brought about remains just as hidden from me as does that of a calculating machine; it has been simply an unconscious rumination.3
Schopenhauer of necessity, as mentioned, arrives at the hypothesis of the unconscious only inferentially. He reasons to the best explanation that there must exist an unconscious side to conscious awareness. If there is no better way of explaining how decisions are reached and solutions discov ered in some circumstances without apparent exercise of conscious control, then theory is driven to accept the existence of unconsciousness. Gears must be grinding away beyond the reach of conscious thought, Scho penhauer argues, in order to produce results that may not have been consciously anticipated. As essential background to understanding Schopen hauer’s metaphysics of the unconscious, it is worthwhile to consider a generic hierarchy that applies to both Freud-Jung Model 1 and Schopenhauer Model 2. For both ways of thinking, consciousness and the unconscious are distinguished from autonomic purely physiological functions of the brain and nervous network in maintaining breathing, heartbeat, and the like. Autonomic functions in a previously introduced classificatory terminology are not conscious and predicationally nonconscious, neither conscious 2 3
Ibid., 135‒136. Ibid., 55‒56; 58‒59.
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nor unconscious. The categories for all models of the unconscious are gen足 erally represented in these mutually exclusionary extensions:
General Conscious-Unconscious Distinction
The reasons for the minimally two-level division between consciousness and unconsciousness in philosophical psychology are not far to seek. The brain is called upon to process enormous quantities of continuously dy足 namically changing information. Even when we consider ourselves at rest rather than work, watching a DVD movie at home on TV, we are as always rapidly digesting as much of the available picture of the world that our sens足es and internal enlanguaged thinking can provide. Different thinkers in turn process approximately the same transmis足 sions from information sources in different ways. Why should they not? Consider how different physiologically one human being is from another, persons of different genders, races, geophysical origins, cultures, historical circumstances, not to mention the sheer inherited genetic individuality of any given person from another and the gene expression dependent on local environment to which every living thing is subject, even as witnessed
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in the differences between one other than human higher animal to another. If there are external physical differences from individual to individual, why should there not be at least similarly significant differences in the Bauplan and functioning of every distinct individual human brain? It is if anything only more reasonable to suppose that among human beings such differences prevail to an even greater extent. Scientific psychology looks for correlations and commonalities. A philo sophical psychology might find it far more interesting all told to consider what cognitive science does not always fully appreciate, by reflecting on the differences, discrepancies, and recalcitrances between different brains and their different ways of processing, again, approximately the same ambient information. These signature ways of processing information must appear when a presentation of information to the senses approaches identity as a limit in the case of multiple perceiving test subjects. How approximate the intake of environmental information is channeled to different perceivers can be controlled experimentally, among other methods, by ask ing multiple subjects to respond verbally or in other expressive ways to questions about, or give or involuntarily make responses to cues during their viewing of, identical videos experienced in virtual reality. An experimental apparatus of the sort minimizes at least spatiotemporal perspectival differences between different test subjects. If further proof of the brain’s cognitive workload is not needed, then the next step is to consider how the brain might divide up total information processing responsibilities. A reasonable hypothesis is that the brain concentrates its processing into at least two categories. There is what the subject needs to know (consciousness), and what the thinking deciding and acting subject does not strictly need consciously to know, in order to sus tain its existence and pursuit of vital purposes (unconsciousness). An anal ogy would be that whereby a television news program is reported by newsreaders who are not generally investigative reporters themselves. The persons we see on TV reading the news are like the events of consciousness, and the team of news investigators working in the background, eventually preparing reports for news readers to present on the media, are like the consciousness-backgrounding information collecting and processing events of unconsciousness. We as conscious agents, thinkers, formulators and followers of rational inference rules, decision makers and agents, do not need
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to know everything that the brain is called upon to process, just as consum ers of the nightly news we do not need to know everything about an investi gative reporter’s love life in order to become aware of recent news events by watching a television documentary, scanning the relevant details on-line or reading a newspaper. Another reason for the exclusivity of consciousness is already encountered in the fact that when we are focused on a task, say, paying attention to keyboard typing on a computer screen, we are not as fully aware of all the surrounding visual, auditory and tactile information in particular streaming in through open sensory stations. The fact that there are degrees of consciousness further suggests that consciousness itself might grade off insensibly into something beneath consciousness altogether. It is possible that what mystic religions and mental excellence regimens have sometimes described as release from the bonds of perception and being anchored to the physical body is achieved when we depart from consciousness without fully parting from unconsciousness. Availing ourselves of all these reasons, we may be equipped with good explanations as to why there might be a division between consciousness and unconsciousness, roughly as we have been using the words, favored by natural selection. Brain Activity Supervenient on Neurophysiology
We can now view the metaphysical relations linking all psychological occurrences to a physical level neurophysiological supervenience base. The psychological is divided into the conscious, unconscious, and autonomic. The unconscious and autonomic functioning of mind are categorized together as not or other than conscious, with the autonomic as before belong ing also to the nonconscious as being not or other than conscious, now joined in this exclusionary category in a more complete categorization by the neurophysiological. The neurophysiological is depicted somewhat simplistically as the supervenience base for all psychological activity, shown by the snake-shaped ascending arrow S passing through all psychological lev els of unconsciousness and consciousness from the thinker’s neurophysiol ogy. The combination of symbolic devices offers a comprehensive diagrammatic representation of essential relations:
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Category Overlap of Nonconscious and Psychological Events
Conscious states in every instance, according to the illustration, are onetwo transitive asymmetric supervenience steps away from the neurophysio logical supervenience basis of all psychological, phenomenal, phenomenolog ical, occurrences. The working assumption is that all psychological activity ontically depends on the physical state of the subject’s neurophysiology, especially brain and nerve networks. The above diagram makes explicit a commitment to psychological phenomena also that are not conscious, al though it is neutral as to whether a reductive program of the psychological to purely neurophysiological can succeed. Descartes’s and John R. Searle’s psychological transparency theses are thereby, despite their differences, defeated in one stroke.4 If the analysis depicted is correct and its implications are accepted, then there are consciously inaccessible epistemically opaque unconscious elements. The theory, while leaving it open logically as to whether conscious brain activity is re 4
See Gary Hatfield: Transparency of Mind: The Contributions of Descartes, Leibniz, and Berkeley to the Genesis of the Modern Subject, in: Hubertus Busche (ed.): Departure for Modern Europe: A Handbook of Early Modern Philosophy (1400‒1700) (Hamburg 2011) 361‒375. Descartes’s commitment to a form of the transparency of consciousness thesis is affirmed especially in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). John R. Searle: Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion and Cognitive Science, in: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (1990) 585‒642. Searle in The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge 1992) writes, 152: ‘The notion of an unconscious mental states implies accessibility to consciousness. We have no notion of the unconscious except as that which is potentially conscious’. See also Amy Kind: What’s So Transparent About Transparency?, in: Philo sophical Studies 115 (2003) 225‒244.
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ductively explainable in terms exclusively of its supervenience base prop erties, reflects an ontic dependence relation as holding from neurophysiol ogy all the way through psychological states of unconsciousness and conscious awareness. Supplementary argument suggests much to the contrary of reductionist enthusiasms that conscious properties, unlike their ontic precursors and supervenience base substrata, have emergent properties that not only supervene on neurophysiology, autonomic and unconscious or unconscious brain activity, but that cannot be adequately explained in terms of the not conscious supervenience bases and relations on which conscious mental activity supervenes. These emergent properties include in particular the qualia and intentionality (object directedness) of each passing moment of consciousness. If intentionalist philosophy of mind is correct, this is then to say of each and every thought that it is about an intended object. It is hard to offer more here than synonyms, such as being aware or alert to occurring events, especially of the streaming contents of thought as they proceed or get interrupted and collide, concentrating or focusing attention on them, sometimes as a result of excluding extraneous thoughts in order to cognitively highlight whatever it is about which we consider ourselves to be conscious. Those choices are arguably linguistically competent, but they do not begin to unpack the concepts of consciousness and the unconscious in a reductive philosophical analysis. Assuming we have had first-person experience of consciousness, even if we do not have a good philosophical theory or analysis of the concept of consciousness at hand, then we can at best say in contrast and in the most ontically neutral terms that unconsciousness as generally understood by Freud, Jung, and Schopenhauer, among others in this family of thinkers, is broadly speaking cognitive or subcognitive information processing of which the conscious subject is gen erally not conscious, in the service of the subject’s cognitive and emotive contents of consciousness, manifested especially in considered judgment and decision making.
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Impact of Schopenhauer’s Concept of the Unconscious on Psychology and Intellectual History
Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of consciousness and the unconscious analogically mirrors his general distinction between the world as will and as representation. That there must be an unseen transcendent reality support ing the deliverances of sensation and perception is something Schopenhauer is prepared to discover almost anywhere he looks. Schopenhauer’s abductive inference to the existence of the unconscious explains several otherwise mysterious facts about what is given to conscious reflection in consciousness. Sebastian Gardner acknowledges these aspects of Scho penhauer’s introduction to philosophy of the category of a thinking sub ject’s consciousness-affecting unconscious psychological activity, when he writes: Schopenhauer returns time and again to the theme of the superficiality of consciousness, which he compares to the surface of a globe or a sheet of water, the depths of which are largely unknown to us, but are where our thinking and resolv ing take place truly. Ideas are regarded by Schopenhauer as unconscious in themselves: for an idea to be rendered conscious, an extra operation is required, turn ing (as in Freud’s account of the method of free association) on the laws of association. Hence the fragmentary character of the stream of consciousness, our inability to ‘give any account of the origin of our deepest thoughts’, and the possibility of astonishment at one’s own mental life.5
Christopher Janaway reinforces Gardner’s estimation, commenting more generally on the later influence of Schopenhauer’s concept of the unconscious on philosophical, psychological, and even literary and artistic theory and practice. Janaway observes: A full account of Schopenhauer’s influence during this period would include discussions of Wagner and Thomas Mann, of Burckhardt, Wundt, Vaihinger, and von Hartmann. It would note that Freud found in Schopenhauer’s views about the will and the intellect a prefiguring of his own conception of the unconscious. Schopenhauer did not play a direct role in the genesis of Freud’s thought, but a proper study would ask to what extent he contributed to a prevailing climate of receptivity towards the notion of an unconscious essence to the self, and to the 5
Sebastian Gardner: Schopenhauer, Will, and the Unconscious, in: Christopher Janaway (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge 1999) 376.
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Gardner continues his explanation of Schopenhauer’s development of the ontology of the unconscious in relation to consciousness: Underlying this model of mental life is Schopenhauer’s idea that will ‘brings forth consciousness for its own ends’. Consciousness and the knowing ego, on his account, are ontologically dependent on the will because they are its instrument: in so far as we take an objective view of cognition, we find its complete explanation as a tool of the will, a ‘brain-function’ evolved in response to the increased discrim inatory needs of complex organisms. Cognition is thus by its nature ‘already some thing secondary, a mere product’. The will itself is entirely without consciousness and is independent of cognition.7
Later, Gardner significantly adds to his characterization of the fundamental distinction between what we have identified as Freud-Jung Model 1 and Schopenhauer Model 2. He focuses as discussion here has done on Schopenhauer’s understanding of the unconscious, contrasting it with the eventually more popular, more dedicatedly empirical, psychoanalytic arche type. Gardner offers his valuable perspective: Let us return to the respect in which Schopenhauer does not anticipate Freud’s thinking about the unconscious. What makes Freud’ theory of the unconscious more than a mere regimentation, or terminological recasting of notions implicit in ordinary psychology, is its account of the mind as composed of distinct systems, containing different sorts of content, governed by different laws, serving different functions, associated with different developmental stages, and exhibiting a degree of mutual independence. In other words, Freudian theory is bound up with a partitive conception of human personality. We find only a trace of this in Schopenhauer: to the extent that Schopenhauer is willing to speak of parts of the mind, what he envisages is only parts in the familiar, weak sense of aspects of personality found in ordinary psychological talk. Hence the absence from Schopenhauer, noted earlier, of any single concept doing duty for Freud’s unconscious or id.8 6 7 8
C. Janaway: Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (Oxford 1989) 15‒16. S. Gardner: Schopenhauer, Will, and the Unconscious, 376. Ibid., 385.