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Authors: Arthur Koestler

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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 1868, 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]
I have confined this digest to unconscious thinking; there is an equal
abundance in relevant quotations which refer to the motivational,
affective, and pathological aspects of the unconscious, and of the
dream. My intent was not to belittle either the greatness or the
originality of Freud -- that would be as stupid as trying to run
down Newton because he had 'stood on the shoulders of giants'. But
while Newton was aware of this -- the expression is his own -- Freud,
curiously, was not. He never realized how respectable the idea was on
which he built his edifice.
The Mechanization of Habits
The feeling of mystery -- or of wary scepticism -- which mention of 'the
unconscious' evokes is part of our mental heritage, derived from the
Cartesian tradition. The tenacity of that tradition, deeply engrained
in our thinking habits, makes us constantly forget the obvious fact --
rubbed in by everyday experience --
that awareness is a matter of
degrees
. Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to
different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of
gradations, of degrees of awareness. We may call, as Leibniz did,
conscious events 'light', unconscious ones 'dark' -- provided that
we remember the infinite shadings from lighter to darker grey between
them. The dark end of the scale extends well below the human level to
an unknown limit -- which may possibly be some form of 'protoplasmic
consciousness'; Bergson even asserted that 'the unconsciousness of
a falling stone is something different from the unconsciousness of a
growing cabbage'.
In human beings we find at the bottom of the scale the self-regulating
activities which control the viscera and glands, the circulation of
the blood and other physiological processes of which we are normally
unaware; yet in their ensemble they may supply that vegetative or bovine
consciousness of being warmly alive and kicking. From here on the scale
of awareness ascends to the more or less mechanical -- i.e. less or more
conscious -- exercise of practised skills: from walking along a road to
picking one's way through puddles in the rain, to climbing an exposed
rock-face; from tying one's shoe-strings to knotting a broken shoe-string;
humming a tune absentmindedly -- singing it to an audience; adding up a
column of figures mechanically -- checking it, after a mistake has been
discovered, with great attention. At the top of the scale we find the
quasi-hypnotic state of utter concentration on a problem, or absorption
in a thriller, blind and deaf to one's surroundings.
Equally continuous gradients of awareness are found in the exercise of
perceptual and cognitive skills, the working of memory, the ebbs and tides
of emotion. We are conscious only of a fraction of the input into our
eyes, ears, and skin; yet the intake is registered nevertheless. We are
unaware of the ticking of the clock, but aware that it has stopped. While
reading we are unaware of the shape of the letters because the skill
of transforming them into words is fully automatized, and awareness is
focussed on the meaning behind the shapes -- a phenomenon known as the
'transparency' of language. We summon memories asleep in the dormitory
of the mind, while others barge in uninvited. Oddest of all, we hold
ourselves and others responsible for forgetting something which ought to
have been remembered. The schoolboy who has left his gym-shoes at home,
the maid who has forgotten to put sugar on the breakfast tray, are held
responsible for unconscious acts of omission.
The greater mastery and ease we gain in the exercise of a skill, the
more automatized it will tend to become, because the code of rules which
controls it now operates below the threshold of awareness. But the degree
of conscious attention which accompanies the performance depends also
on a second factor: the prevailing environmental conditions, the lie of
the land -- whether it is familiar, or contains unusual features. The
inexperienced driver must concentrate even on an empty road. The
experienced driver functions automatically; but he must concentrate in
heavy traffic.
We may then, somewhat paradoxically, describe awareness as that experience
which decreases and fades away with our increasing mastery of a skill
exercised under monotonous conditions. Mastery of the code and stability
of environment are the two factors which lead to the formation of habit;
and habit-formation is accompanied by a gradual dimming and darkening of
the lights of awareness. On the other hand, we may regard this tendency
towards the progressive automatization of skills as an act of mental
parsimony; as a handing-down of the controls to lower levels in the
hierarchy of nervous functions, enabling the higher levels to turn to
more challenging tasks. Thus the typist can go on transcribing letters
while thinking of her boy friend; and the boy friend can drive the car
while discussing with her their weekend plans -- thanks to the benevolent
workings of the principle of parsimony, which seems to be an essential
factor in mental progress.
To revert to an earlier example: the beginner, hopefully facing a
chessboard, feels uncertain about the manner in which bishops and
rooks are permitted to move, and has to consult his textbook or his
teacher. After some practice it becomes impossible for him to move a rook
diagonally without a feeling of aesthetic and moral revulsion, of having
committed an obscenity or violated a sacred taboo: the rules have become
automatized, encoded in the circuitry of his nervous system. At a still
later stage he learns to apply certain stratagems just as automatically:
to avoid 'pins' and 'forks', not to expose the king, to seek open rook
files, etc. In games simpler than chess the same type of situation will
recur over and again, and the appropriate stratagems will be codified in
their turn. Computer engineers have actually built electronic brains in
which both the rules
and
the stratagems of simple board games, such
as noughts and crosses, are built into the 'memory' of the machine. They
can beat any opponent if he blunders, and draw if he plays a correct
game. The machine illustrates the process of relegating familiar tasks
to lower levels of the mental hierarchy which function as unawares --
or nearly -- as involuntary reflexes.
But how does all this relate to mental creativity? Only indirectly. The
intervention of unconscious processes in the creative act is a phenomenon
quite different from the automatization of skills; and our unawareness
of the sources of inspiration is of a quite different order from the
unawareness of what we are doing while we tie our shoe-strings or copy a
letter on the typewriter. In the creative act there is an
upward
surge from some unknown, fertile, underground layers of the mind;
whereas the process I have described is a
downward
relegation of
the controls of skilled techniques.
In fact I have so far discussed only one aspect or dimension
of consciousness: let us call it the linear scale, or
linear
gradient
of awareness. At one end of the scale we found routines
performed without awareness; at the opposite end the single-minded,
hyper-awake concentration on a problem, where consciousness is focussed
into a narrow beam with darkness all round. But such a one-dimensional
interpretation of the varieties of consciousness, as a line running from
automatism to obsession, seems highly unsatisfactory. Consciousness is a
multi-dimensional affair, as I hope to show in the pages that follow. The
'linear' gradient of awareness which I have discussed is only one of
these dimensions -- though nevertheless an important one. It is along
that gradient that learning is transformed into habit, that the control
of new skills, once mastered, slides down under its own gravity as it
were, into the basement, making room upstairs for new acquisitions.
A pianist, after practising a piece for some time, can 'reel it off
in his sleep', as the saying goes. The exact opposite of this process
is illustrated by the famous case of Tartini composing the
Devil's
Trill Sonata
while asleep. The first example shows the unconscious
as a repository of habits which no longer need being 'attended to';
the second, as a breeding ground of novelties.
It is essential to bear both processes in mind -- and not to
confuse them. Most Behaviourists accept only the first: they regard
habit-formation as the essence of mental progress; original ideas, on
this view, are lucky hits among random tries, retained because of their
utility value -- just as biological evolution is held to be the outcome
of random mutations retained because of their survival value.
Among those prepared to accept the positive role of the unconscious, there
is a frequent tendency to confuse 'downward' and 'upward' traffic -- to
equate automatism with intuition. Some highly developed, semi-automatized
skills have a great amount of flexibility -- the result of years of hard
training; but their practitioners are devoid of originality. Tightrope
walkers, acrobats, night-club pianists, and calculating prodigies display
virtuosity; a virtuoso is defined by the
Oxford Dictionary
as 'a
person skilled in the mechanical part of a fine art'. Needless to say,
virtuosity may combine in the same person with creativity; but in itself
it is no more than the highest elaboration of a routine with fixed,
automatized rules of the game and a malleable strategy.

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