Chapter 23

Critique of the Prevailing Concept of Consciousness

Klages calls the concept of consciousness "simply the Achilles' heel of modern thinking." Where sensationalism confused experience with sensory data, the theory of consciousness commits an even worse error: confusing experiencing with knowledge of experiencing. This falsification creates what Klages calls "a hybrid concept that imperceptibly incorporates life into the spirit"—thereby completing the nihilistic trajectory we have been tracing.

The concept of consciousness, Klages argues, forms the fundamental flaw of contemporary thinking, blocking access to the actual nature of experience and life itself.

The current meaning of consciousness is found by questioning the name. The word "consciousness" is the subjectively used infinitive to the statement: I am aware of something—I know about something, think about it, remember it, take note of it.

Since Augustine—elaborated by Descartes' Meditations—consciousness theory establishes the proposition of self-certainty of consciousness. Moreover, since self-reflection is in any case the acknowledgment of something, to which conceptual simplicity is an indispensable characteristic, everything knowable is "summarized" by the relating self.

The German word for consciousness captures this relating-function with exceptional precision, which is why German philosophy has been so thoroughly captured by this concept.

To be related with consciousness to the felt, perceived, imagined, dreamed, fantasized, I must have felt, perceived, imagined, dreamed, fantasized. Consequently—so the argument goes—consciousness consists of such processes as feeling, perceiving, imagining, dreaming, fantasizing.

If the Eleatics exchanged reality with being, then the theorist of consciousness succumbs to the even worse confusion of experiencing with knowledge of experiencing, in such a way that he incessantly talks of experiences while never having anything else in mind than the consciousness of them.

All so-called "psychology" in the scholastic sense is a self-denying theory of knowledge, just as conversely the so-called theory of knowledge could just as well have been called "psychology." It lacks not a touch of comedy when the dispute does not settle as to where exactly the boundary between the two lies.

The inevitable counterpart of consciousness is the humorous "unconscious." This appears externally in two meanings: functional and dispositional.

Functional sense: someone engrossed in exciting reading misses the clock's ticking but can nonetheless recall it later—thus he has heard it "unconsciously." Dispositional sense: what someone has "in consciousness" at the moment lags far behind what they have knowledge of—thus their knowledge bears the character of "unconsciousness."

The naming intention refers to processes assumed to be either not yet or no longer "in consciousness" but which could potentially reach there. It is natural to posit consciousness-like processes that, although they may never become conscious, resemble consciousness phenomena in every way.

The "unconscious"—differing only in degree or location from consciousness but otherwise similar in kind—relates to it as darkness relates to light, rest to movement, silence to sound.

Exactly in this form, the un-thought first appears in Leibniz's system, whose "unconscious" ideas are emphatically "infinitely small," "dark" ideas or consciousness differentials. His "unconscious" presents itself unreservedly as unconscious consciousness.

If a physicist instructed us that visible light arises from invisible light or from darkness, audible sound from inaudible sound or silence, perceptible movement from imperceptible movement or rest, one would undoubtedly find this absurd. Is it not noted that instead of an explanation, one offers only a duplication of what is to be explained—letting "consciousness phenomena" arise from the very same phenomena of a so-called unconscious?

Once one has doubled any "content" of consciousness, one has doubled consciousness altogether. And once doubled, it will soon unexpectedly triple, multiply by ten, multiply by a hundred. Consistently, there is currently besides "the unconscious" a "preconscious," "subconscious," "superconscious," "paraconscious," and whatever other relational words may place variants of consciousness alongside consciousness.

If there exists, besides consciousness, another consciousness whose "contents" are the same only without the exponent of consciousness, then both necessarily appear under the image of two realms or spaces between which continuous exchange of said "contents" takes place.

An idea is now in the bright space of consciousness, now in the dark space of the unconscious. It "sinks" from one into the other or "rises" from this into that. It naturally crosses a "threshold" of the light-space or falls back "under" the threshold into the dark space. It is what it is, but at one time "supraliminal," at another "subliminal."

Moreover, since a space eventually becomes full, pressing "contents" sometimes have to wait in the anteroom due to "narrowness of consciousness." A struggle for space occurs in the illuminated room, which is why the weaker party occasionally gets thrown out and is condemned under threat of severe penalties to avoid the disputed place. A goalkeeper or guardian of the threshold ensures that such banned or "repressed" contents actually remain outside—but is either short-sighted or corrupt, often letting them slip through under crude disguises.

We suggest as a doctoral question: how many "contents" actually enter consciousness? Can this be generally specified or only for the individual? What happens to consciousness if it should ever be completely empty by chance—or can that be ruled out and why?

The mythologies of the ancients were often wildly fantastic yet always colorful and usually substantial. The mythology of dual consciousness is abandoned by all gods of fantasy but—perhaps precisely because of this—unfortunately outstandingly simple.

One might suspect we are attacking figurative speech. Our earlier remarks should have sufficiently communicated that we attach no importance to whether one prefers abstract or concrete, non-visualizable or richly pictorial communication. There is hardly a soul researcher who would not assure us that by consciousness he means nothing spatial, even if he must speak of its "contents," "narrowness," "threshold."

It is not the fact of figurative speech in question, but the completely misleading metaphor.

If we replace the unconscious with the life-ground, the doctrine has not revealed the faintest detail of its nature but has deliberately blocked our path to it through complete logicization of experience.

Whoever surrenders to it never again finds the way to the unconscious, because instead of it he is deceived by an unconscious consciousness.

It is in the unconscious that the nihilism of the concept of consciousness is first revealed. When experience allows for reason, its counterpart enables a hair-splitting understanding of experience. The disempowerment of experience through its integration into the thinking mind is only completed by the projection of mind into vitality.

Anyone who might still hesitate when offered knowledge of living instead of experience must concede defeat after being extensively shown that the entire foundation of life is permeated and saturated by an unconscious calculating reason.

Although the act of consciousness gains knowledge of both the experienced and experience itself, it is unavoidable to somehow distinguish them—thus once again dividing consciousness into the bright realm of knowing and the dark realm of mere experiencing consciousness.

This led to the awkward theory of "perceiving" and "apperceiving" consciousness, which reveals the truly Laocoön-like struggle with serpent entanglements of inextricable contradictions.

Consciousness is supposed to initially only "have" "contents," and only at a higher level is knowledge of it added. The merely possessed or "perceived" content is indeed "in" consciousness but not "for" consciousness—it is "experienced" by consciousness but not yet "noticed" by it.

We ask in contrast: if someone "in thought" looks at the evening sky and does not notice a star there, why is the star nonetheless "perceived" by him? How does one make the visual process a "process of consciousness" when consciousness is occupied with something else? Who has ever been in the peculiar situation of finding something "in" their consciousness that simultaneously had no existence "for" their consciousness?

The play with prepositions "in" and "for" seems no more successful at serving the finer deception of consciousness's divisibility than the play with "under" and "over" served the cruder notion of dual consciousness.

Anyone who makes experiences into "contents" of consciousness has no longer any possibility of stepping out of consciousness at all, and consequently leads inevitably into that doctrine which sees in reality itself a product of the activity of the self.

Theodor Lipps, undoubtedly the sharpest analyzer of consciousness of the very recent past, provides the most honest work defending this fiction. One must inwardly participate in the agonizing struggle to clarify the difference between "perception"—conscious "having" of a "content"—and "apperception"—conscious "thinking" of an "object."

Starting from an apparently opposite point, Lipps ends up in the most consistent logification of inner life to date—a Fichteanism of psychology—after fundamentally condemning himself to take experiences as data of consciousness.

The almost inevitably developing series of principles has the following main form: reality is factuality; factuality is experienced demand of an object to be thought; all individual reality belongs to one reality; unity is found only in the "summarizing" act of consciousness; consequently, reality is the creative act of a transcendent self, whose volitions are "perceived" by the individual self as demands.

The core has emerged: the so readily conceded external world has become the content of detached reason, the continuously invoked experience into a kind of echo of their commands, reality as a whole has become the conceptual web of the pure subject.

Anyone who seriously talks about experiences of consciousness has already transformed experiences into thoughts, appearances into objects, the entire reality into a construct of "apperception." And he thereby abolished consciousness itself because he took away the precondition for all finding and understanding: externality.

True soul researchers are most deeply engaged by no question other than what the essential difference between feeling and sensing is. And now one should not hesitate to admit that the possibility of determining it is cut off by the imprisonment of both processes in an allegedly experiencing consciousness.

The almost tragic overthinking is rooted in the painful conflict between the unavoidably pressing conviction of feeling's self-governance and the inability to delineate what is felt against the liveliness of what is sensed, after both have been enclosed in consciousness.

If what is sensed and felt truly reside in consciousness, then none of them can be found outside consciousness. There is no way out to derive the particular epistemic value of sensation.

The very fact that one seeks in knowledge what can only be found in experience forms the ever-renewing incentive for that deceptive "self-observation" and "self-dissection." The modern soul researcher is constantly on the lookout to unceasingly intercept and capture what has just been "in" his consciousness—comparable to a man desperately trying to catch the movement of his gaze in the mirror or to gain knowledge from the moment of falling asleep.

What has been achieved? Klages has demonstrated that the concept of consciousness is the Achilles' heel of modern thinking—a hybrid concept that imperceptibly incorporates life into spirit, completing the nihilistic annihilation we have been tracing.

The "unconscious" is not life but unconscious consciousness—a duplication that blocks access to actual vitality. The theory of "perceiving" and "apperceiving" reveals inevitable contradictions. Anyone who makes experiences into contents of consciousness transforms reality into a construct of the pure subject, abolishing consciousness itself by removing externality.

Before constructive work can begin, we must more sharply demonstrate the consciousness-difference even of life processes whose occurrence appears inseparably connected to consciousness ability.