The Act of Creation
Page 16
The history of discovery is full of such arrivals at unexpected destinations, 'and arrivals at the right destination by the wrong boat. Kepler set out to prove that the universe is built on simple geometrical or musical principles -- and found that it was built 'on a cartload of dung': the elliptic orbits. He cekbrated his discovery with a quotation from Virgil's Eclogues where Truth appears as a teasing hussy: you chase after her until you almost collapse; then when you have given up she smilingly surrenders.
At times one almost suspects that all these references to mysterious inspirations and sudden flashes of insight, all these protestations about 'I have no idea how I did it' and je ne cherche pas, je trouve, may stem from an unconscious desire to appear as the privileged master of some Socratic demon. Yet the evidence for large chunks of irrationality embedded in the creative process, not only in art (where we are ready to accept it) but in the exact sciences as well, cannot be disputed; and it is particularly conspicuous in the most rational of all sciences: mathematics and mathematical physics. From Kepler and Descartes to Planck and de Broglie, the working methods of the great pioneers seem to have been inspired by Einstein's jingle, improvised for the benefit of an unknown lady who asked him for a dedication on a photograph:
A thought that sometimes makes me hazy: Am I -- or are the others crazy?
In the popular imagination these men of science appear as sober ice-cold logicians, electronic brains mounted on dry sticks. But if one were shown an anthology of typical extracts from their letters and autobiographies with no names mentioned, and then asked to guess their profession, the likeliest answer would be: a bunch of poets or musicians of a rather romantically naïve kind. The themes that reverberate through their intimate writings are: the belittling of logic and deductive reasoning (except for verification after the act); horror of the one-track mind; distrust of too much consistency ('One should carry one's theories lightly', wrote Titchener); scepticism regarding all-too-conscious thinking ('It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully accomplished. This seems to me connected with the fact called the narrowness of consciousness Enge des Bewusstseins,' -- Einstein). This sceptical reserve is compensated by trust in intuition and in unconscious guidance by quasi-religious or by aesthetic sensibilities. 'I Cannot believe that God plays dice with the world,' Einstein repeated on several occasions, rejecting the tendency in modern physics to replace causality by statistical probabilities. 'There is a scientitic taste just as there is a literary or artistic one', wrote Renan. Hadamard emphasized that the mathematician is in most cases unable to foresee whether a tentative line of attack will be successful; but he has a 'sense of beauty that can inform us, and I cannot see anything else allowing us to foresee. This is undoubtedly the way the Greek geometers thought when they investigated the ellipse, because there is no other conceivable way.' Poincaré was equally specific: 'It may be surprising to see emotional sensibility invoked à propos of mathematical demonstrations which, it would seem, can interest only the intellect. This would be to forget the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true aesthetic feeling that all real mathematicians know. The useful combinations [of ideas] are precisely the most beautiful, I mean those best able to charm this special sensibility.' Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, wrote in his autobiography that the pioneer scientist must have 'a vivid intuitive imagination for new ideas not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination'. The quotations could be continued indefinitely, yet I cannot recall any explicit statement to the contrary by any eminent mathematician or physicist.
Here, then, is the apparent paradox. A branch of knowledge which operates predominantly with abstract symbols, whose entire rationale and credo are objectivity, verifiability, logicality, turns out to be dependent on mental processes which are subjective, irrational, and verifiable only after the event.
The Unconscious before Freud
The apparent paradox arises out of certain misconceptions about the process of thinking and about the methods of science. Both originated in the Age of Enlightenment, and hardened into a dogmatic creed during the nineteenth century; the rapid expansion of the area of knowledge exacted its price in a temporary loss of depth. The depth-psychologies of men like Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung bore through the shallow crust, but each drove its shafts into one particular direction inhabited by demons of a particular breed. The concept of the unconscious acquired a mystical halo and a clinical odour; it became a kind of Pandora's box, which sceptical psychologists asserted to be empty, while to others it served as a stage-magician's trunk, equipped with a trapdoor underneath and secret drawers. A good many of these violent reactions originated in the mistaken belief that 'the unconscious mind' was, like the Relativity Theory and sub-atomic physics, an invention of the twentieth century.
In fact, however, the unconscious was no more invented by Freud than evolution was invented by Darwin, and has an equally impressive pedigree, reaching back to antiquity; a brief historic retrospect may help to see it in a broader perspective and a more balanced context. The larger part of the quotations which follow are taken from L. L. Whyte's book on The Unconscious Before Freud (1962) -- a remarkable contribution to that neglected branch of historiography, the History of Ideas.
I shall not bore the reader with obscure quotations from the Upanishads, or ancient Egypt and Greece. At the dawn of Christian Europe the dominant influence were the Neoplatonists; foremost among them Plotinus, who took it for granted that 'feelings can be present without awareness of them', that 'the absence of a conscious perception is no proof of the absence of mental activity', and who talked confidently of a 'mirror' in the mind which, when correctly aimed, reflects the processes going on inside it, when aimed in another direction, fails to do so -- but the process goes on all the same. Augustine marvelled at man's immense store of unconscious memories -- 'a spreading, limitless room within me -- who can reach its limitless depth?'
The knowledge of unconscious mentation had always been there, as can be shown by quotations from theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas, mystics like Jacob Boehme, physicians like Paracelsus, astronomers like Kepler, writers and poets as far apart as Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Montaigne. This in itself is in no way remarkable; what is remarkable is that this knowledge was lost during the scientific revolution, more particularly under the impact of its most influential philosopher, René Descartes, who flourished in the first half of the seventeenth century.
As modern physics started with the Newtonian revolution, so modern philosophy starts with what one might call the Cartesian Catastrophe. The catastrophe consisted in the splitting up of the world into the realms of matter and mind, and the identification of 'mind' with conscious thinking. The result of this identification was the shallow rationalism of "l'esprit Cartesien," and an impoverishment of psychology which it took three centuries to remedy even in part. But it also had a further, unexpected consequence. To quote Whyte:
Prior to Descartes and his sharp definition of the dualism there was no cause to contemplate the possible existence of unconscious mentality as part of a separate realm of mind. Many religious and speculative thinkers had taken for granted factors lying outside but influencing immediate awareness. . . . Until an attempt had been made (with apparent success) to choose awareness as the defining characteristic of mind, there was no occasion to invent the idea of unconscious mind . . . It is only after Descartes that we find, first the idea and then the term 'unconscious mind' entering European thought. [1] Only gradually did the reaction set in -- the realization that 'if there are two realms, physical and mental, awareness cannot be taken as the criterion of mentality [because] the springs of human nature lie in the unconscious . . . as the realm which links the moments of human awareness with the background of organic processes within which they emerge'. [2]
Among the first to take up the cudgels against Descartes's 'Cogito ergo sum' was the Ca
mbridge philosopher Cudworth:
. . . Those philosophers themselves who made the essence of the soul to consist in cogitation, and again, the essence of cogitation in clear and express consciousness, cannot render it in any way probable, that the souls of men in all profound sleeps, lethargies, and apoplexies . . . are never so much as one moment without expressly conscious cogitations; which, if they were, according to the principles of their philosophy, they must, ipso facto, cease to have any being. . . . It is certain, that our human souls themselves are not always conscious of whatever they have in them; for even the sleeping geometrician hath, at that time, all his geometrical theorems some way in him; as also the sleeping musician, all his musical skills and songs. . . . We have all experience of our doing many animal actions non-attendingly, which we reflect upon afterwards; as, also, that we often continue a long series of bodily motions, by a mere virtual intention of our minds, and as it were by half a cogitation. . . . [3]
John Locke sided with Descartes, declaring boldly: 'It is impossible to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive.' John Norris (1657-1711) retorted with equal boldness:
We may have ideas of which we are not conscious. . . . There are infinitely more ideas impressed on our minds than we can possibly attend to or perceive. . . . There may be an impression of ideas without any actual perception of them. [4]
This was written in 1690.
At about the same time the Earl of Shaftesbury wrote:
One would think, there was nothing easier for us, than to know our own minds. . . . But our thoughts have generally such an obscure implicit language, that it is the hardest thing in the world to make them speak out distinctly. [5]
Leibniz -- Newton's rival as a mathematician, and Descartes's opponent as a philosopher -- tried to determine quantitative thresholds of awareness. He came to the conclusion:
Our clear concepts are like islands which arise above the ocean of obscure ones. [6]
We now enter the eighteenth century. Leibniz's concept of the unconscious found many followers in Gemany, among them Christian Wolff:
Let no-one imagine that I would join the Cartesians in asserting that nothing can be in the mind of which it is not aware. That is a prejudice which impedes the understanding of the mind. [7]
Lichtenberg, a hunch-backed genius, satirical writer, and professor of physics at Göttingen, regarded dreams as a means to self-knowledge, and thoughts as products of the Id:
It thinks, one ought to say. We become aware of certain representations which do not depend on us; others depend on us, or at least so we believe; where is the boundary? One should say, it thinks, just as one says, it rains. To say 'cogito' is already too much if one translates it by 'I think'.
The same protest is echoed by Lamartine: 'I never think -- my thoughts think for me.'
Kant is probably the driest among the great philosophers -- who would have suspected him among the forerunners of Freud? -- :
The field of our sense-perceptions and sensations, of which we are not conscious, though we undoubtedly can infer that we possess them, that is, the dark ideas in man, is immeasurable. The clear ones in contrast cover infinitely few points which lie open to consciousness; so that in fact on the great map of our spirit only a few points are illuminated. [8]
The German physician and philosopher E. Platner -- of whom I confess never to have heard before -- was, according to Whyte, the first to use the term Unbewusstsein, unconsciousness, and to assert that thinking is a constant oscillation between conscious and unconscious processes:
Consciousness is no essential part of an idea. Ideas with consciousness I call apperceptions following Leibniz; ideas without consciousness perceptions, or dark images. The life of the mind is an unbroken series of actions, a continuous series of ideas of both kinds. For apperceptions alternate with perceptions throughout life. Ideas with consciousness are often the psychological results of ideas without consciousness. [9]
As we approach the nineteenth century, the single voices grow into a chorus in praise of the creative faculties of the unconscious mind. It is perhaps most audible in Germany; among those who join in are, to mention only a few, Herder, Schelling, Hegel, Goethe, Fichte. Here, for instance, is Goethe:
Man cannot persist long in a conscious state, he must throw himself back into the Unconscious, for his root lives there. . . . Take for example a talented musician, composing an important score: consciousness and unconsciousness will be like warp and weft. [10]
Jean-Paul Richter, an outstanding novelist (unfortunately little known in England):
The unconscious is really the largest realm in our minds, and just on account of this unconsciousness it is an inner Africa, whose unknown boundaries may extend far away. Why should everything come to consciousness that lies in the mind since, for example, that of which it has already been aware, the whole great realm of memory, only appears to it illuminated in small areas while the entire remaining world stays invisible in the shadows? And may there not be a second half world of our mental moon which never turns towards consciousness? The most powerful thing in the poet, which blows the good and the evil spirit into his works, is precisely the unconscious. . . . [11]
I. H. Fichte (a psychologist, son of the philosopher) postulated the existence of pre-conscious states:
Beneath active consciousness there must lie consciousness in a merely potential state, that is a middle condition of the mind, which though not yet conscious, none the less positively carries the specific character of Intelligence; from those conditions of preconscious existence the true consciousness must be explained and developed step by step. [12]
In France the Cartesian spirit survived longest -- until the second half of the nineteenth century in fact, when Charcot and his colleagues revolutionized psychiatry (Freud, at one time, had studied under Charcot). But in England the concept of the unconscious had a long and distinguished line of ancestors, some of whom I have already quoted. Here is Abraham Tucker, an influential philosopher, writing around 1750:
. . . our mental organs do not stand idle the moment we cease to employ them, but continue the motions we put into them after they have gone out of our sight, thereby working themselves to a glibness and smoothness and filling into a more regular and orderly posture than we could have placed them with all our skill and industry. [13]
The term 'unconscious cerebration' was coined by W. B. Carpenter, nineteenth-century physician and naturalist:
. . . That action of the brain which, through unconscious cerebration, produces results which might never have been produced by thought. [14]
Other characteristic English coinages are Wordsworth's 'caverns in the mind which sun can never penetrate', Coleridge's 'twilight realm of consciousness', William James's 'fringe consciousness', and Myers's 'subliminal self'. In 1860 Sir Thomas Laycock wrote that --
no general fact is so well established by the experience of mankind or so universally accepted as a guide in the affairs of life, as that of unconscious life and action. [15]
And Maudsley, writing a few years later:
The most important part of mental action, the essential process on which thinking depends, is unconscious mental activity. [16]
For the climax of this story we must return to Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. The pioneers of German experimental psychology were Fechner ('Fechner's law') and Wilhelm Wundt. Fechner's attitude is summed up in his famous metaphor of the mind as an iceberg, with only a fraction of it above the surface of consciousness, moved by the winds of awareness, but mostly by hidden under-water currents. Wundt continued where Fechner had left off:
Our mind is so fortunately equipped, that it brings us the most important bases for our thoughts without our having the least knowledge of this work of elaboration. Only the results of it become conscious. This unconscious mind is for us like an unknown being who creates and produces for us, and finally throws the ripe fruits in our lap. [17]
At about the same time, in 186
8, Erich von Hartmann published his Philosophy of the Unconscious, which became a best-seller. From a period novel by the popular Spielhagen we learn that in 1870 two main topics dominated conversation in the intellectual salons of Berlin: Wagner and the Unconscious. We are reminded of the scene in the London salon of Disraeli's play, where the fashionable topic of Evolution is discussed -- fifteen years before anybody had heard the name of Darwin. Whyte lists six philosophical works published within ten years after von Hartmann's which carry the word 'unconscious' in their titles. In the literature of the period Nietzsche was the towering giant. He took over the unconscious Id from Lichtenberg (which Groddeck then took over from Nietzsche, and Freud from Groddeck); it is one of the leitmotifs in Nietzsche's work:
Where are the new doctors of the soul? . . . consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic, and is consequently the most unfinished and least powerful of these developments. Every extension of knowledge arises from making conscious the unconsciousness. The great basic activity is unconscious. For it is narrow, this room of human consciousness.
Whyte concludes: The general conception of unconscious mental process was conceivable (in post-Cartesian Europe) around 1700, topical around 1800, and fashionable around 1870 -- 1880. . . . It cannot be disputed that by 1870-1880 the general conception of the unconscious mind was a European commonplace and that many special applications of this general idea had been vigorously discussed for several decades. [18]