Chapter 24

The Unconsciousness of Life Processes

No experience is conscious and no consciousness can experience anything. Consciousness and experience are fundamentally separate processes, and what we call "conscious experience" is actually life-disturbance—the interruption of the living stream by acts of reflection.

This represents the constructive alternative to the nihilism of consciousness theory. Where that theory incorporated life into spirit through a hybrid concept, Klages restores their separation—revealing consciousness not as the container of experience but as its disruption.

When a completely "absorbed" reader only realizes the past ticking of the clock after several seconds or minutes, we are—given that a deaf person would not have been able to do so—undoubtedly justified in calling the process that enabled the reflection a hearing. We must assume this hearing occurred without consciousness.

Since hearing falls under the concept of experience, we have at least a special case providing first direct evidence for the previously only deduced this-worldliness of experience. We may hope to find further witnesses for the proven dual nature of mind and life and to see verified by consciousness itself what translates from metaphysical into psychological language as: no experience is conscious and no consciousness can experience anything.

We spoke of a special case—because usually, it seems, one tends to take note of what is heard while listening. But even the most fleeting glance teaches us this is not an exception, as there is no so-called consciousness phenomenon that would not be an experience under certain circumstances.

We reach—deliberately at random—from the multitude of textbook examples to highlight particularly striking ones, leaving readers to reflect on others or look them up themselves.

The passionate smoker who has decided not to smoke today occasionally finds himself during a walk suddenly and to his amazement with a burning cigar in his mouth, having thus unconsciously performed a rather complicated sequence of movements seemingly guided by the ultimate purpose of smoking.

Accustomed to winding the clock when undressing for sleep, one sometimes does it unintentionally even when merely about to change clothes.

"Who has never," remarks the witty talker James, "pulled the house key out of their pocket when standing in front of the door of a good acquaintance." Huxley tells "of a clever prankster who, upon seeing an old veteran carrying his lunch home, suddenly shouted: 'Attention!'—whereupon the man immediately placed his hands on the seams of his trousers and let his lamb with potatoes fall into the gutter."

The first glance at a new person sometimes reminds us of a known person, although often, after hours of reflection, we cannot figure out which person exactly.

What do we generally know about a friend's features such that we could describe or draw them "from memory," although we are capable of recognizing them from dozens without hesitation?

Of thousands extremely receptive to the slightest hint of derogatory judgment in others' expressions, not even one in a hundred can tell us with precision how derogatory judgment reveals itself in facial expressions.

Someone has studied an extensive book with full understanding, without afterwards being able to assert with certainty whether it was printed in Antiqua or Fraktur. And who has not often continued to read entire paragraphs only with the eyes while the mind was "not on the matter"?

Consider the difference between a child laboriously learning notes and an accomplished musician who plays the most difficult piece "at sight"—to immediately realize that every "ability" is a matter of vitality and of vitality alone.

"The marksman sees a bird, and before he knows it, he has aimed and shot. A flash in the opponent's eye, a momentary pressure of his racket, and the fencer becomes aware that he has instantly parried correctly and countered."

Impressions, conclusions, deductions, combinations without the activity of perceiving, concluding, inferring, combining. Sequences of movements of seemingly most thoughtful expediency, without any thinking and often contrary to intention.

All such examples are fundamentally somewhat comical, because they want to teach us with effort about things that ought to be among the most self-evident of all self-evident truths—provided we did not find ourselves in the strangest of beliefs about consciousness's nature.

A writer suggests that someone who had to accompany an action incessantly with consciousness would probably be restricted to two or three actions for life or would at least need an entire day just to dress or undress. Therefore, it is extremely practical that every action gains ease through repeated execution.

However, it should be noted that a consciousness accompanying life processes could not be conceived, and furthermore, not the slightest action would come into being if such a thing existed.

It is not consciousness that senses, feels, fantasizes, and it is not consciousness that produces movements. Only because such a truism was lost must one resort to examples vividly demonstrating that even life processes seemingly most closely associated with perceiving are separate from the act of perceiving.

The proponent of belief in the intellect's omnipotence will hardly miss the opportunity to call out: there we have the logic of the "Unconscious"! However, we ask for a little patience, and for now merely consider that the processes predominantly cited thus far had repeatedly crossed reflection's threshold and thereby gained the quality of a substitute for consciousness.

If they now proceed without consciousness but nonetheless in exceedingly "logical," "expedient," and error-free rationality, this speaks as little for the existence of hidden mental activity as it does for the thinking of cells, given that their interaction with unsurpassable expediency leads to life-sustaining nourishment or even the healing of countless tissue disturbances.

Either the word "thinking" has no meaning at all or it denotes an activity of consciousness.

The logocentric intention with the concept of consciousness lays the axe to the tree of its own existence, because only then could what does not belong to the external world yet is not a "fact of consciousness" arise as a fact. As if the word "consciousness" were a magic formula, one immediately finds oneself menacingly surrounded and enclosed by a true chorus of ghosts of experiences that unconsciously perform their dance.

A glance at modern literature gives strange and enlightening confirmation. Anyone who casually wanders through narrative literature from oldest to latest times cannot overlook that the closer the present, the more numerous are those figures that do not so much wish, speak, and act as know themselves compelled to do all this by dark necessities of their own being.

In vain would we search for an ancient Hamlet, an ancient Tasso, an ancient Brother Medardus, each driven by inherent life forces more or less in conflict with his conscious personality.

The fatalism of the ancients saw an external necessity of destiny to which even the highest gods were subject. For the fatalism of the moderns, an inner fate rules no less irresistibly.

This conception found both the peak of its strength and its most colorful manifestation in Romantic literature, whose greatest creations present man invariably as a plaything of secret soul forces or the will-less conductor of "magical" currents.

It is the common distinctive aura in almost all the writings of Jean Paul, Hölderlin, Kleist, Novalis, Tieck, Achim von Arnim, Hoffmann, Eichendorff, Lenau. Personally, they differ from each other to the point of being incomparable. Yet the polar feelings of darkest horror and brightest intoxication connect in the deeper fundamental feeling of either cursed or blessed drivenness.

Hoffmann's demonic Rene Cardillac piles murder upon murder, irresistibly captivated by the sparkling gaze of stones and gold. Eichendorff's ever-blissful Good-for-Nothing fiddles and rejoices like the spring wind itself, irresistibly drawn by the alluring blue of distance. Both are pathics—the former of "black," the latter of "white" magic.

The literature of the subsequent period, despite contrary tendencies and predominantly "realistic" means, unexpectedly gravitates toward inner drivenness, insofar as it dares touch deeper questions at all. Since then, a poet's significance is essentially appreciated according to convincingly embodied pathos in their work.

Ibsen's by far greatest drama, Peer Gynt, unfolds the changing panorama of a thoroughly pathic life course. Dostoevsky's figures, which shine into the soul's depths, are without exception "compelled" pathics, whose personalities almost regularly fall to pieces because of it.

Here we have everything that today preoccupies the science of mental illness with preference: the "flight" into the night of forgetfulness, the "twilight states" up to exemplary "splitting of personality," objectifications of every unconscious tactic of behavior, somnambulisms, pseudo-actions of the most calculated purposefulness without—indeed against—the actor's will.

Consider Raskolnikov, after having committed murder, wandering aimlessly—driven only by aversion to any human environment—around the city. "When he reached the quay of the little Neva on the Vasilevsky Island, he stopped at the bridge. 'He lives here, in this house,' thought Raskolnikov, 'but what do I want, I've never gone to Razumikhin myself; it's the very same story as back then and yet, strangely, I've come myself, or rather, wandered here on my own and arrived here!'"

Or: "At another time, it seemed to him he had been lying there for a month, then again, that everything had occurred in just one single day, but that enormous thing, that deed, he had completely forgotten it. Still, he was aware every moment that he had forgotten something he must not forget."

Or: "He walked, eyes fixed on the ground. Suddenly, it seemed as if someone hissed in his ear; he raised his head and realized he stood before that dreadful house, right at the entrance. Since that evening, he hadn't been in this area again, but he didn't walk past it."

What follows is the forced visit to the scene of his crime, carried out under the strongest feelings of resistance.

Who wouldn't think of posthypnotic suggestions here?

It would be completely wrong to assume humanity has since become more pathological. Rather, the reason lies on the surface: the "unconscious" processes have remained what they were, while the perception of them has completely changed.

Legend, myth, and poetry of the ancients—and the Middle Ages—are actually overflowing with depictions, partly of disintegrating, partly of blissful pathic nature. Already the era of Plato possessed a strictly developed theory of the matter.

Can a "psychogenic delirium," medically speaking, be more convincingly portrayed than in Sophocles' Ajax, more brilliantly than Agaue in Euripides' Bacchae, or a theory of pathicism more clearly developed than in Plato's Phaedrus?

But at that time there was no "unconscious," because there was no consciousness in the modern sense. All personality-making impulses somehow inherited or even absent, especially including the erotic, were considered effects of demonic forces on the human soul.

Even today we find words in our language from that period of thought: "inspiration," "enlightenment," "revelation," "enthusiasm," "ecstasy," "possession." A god took possession of a person, sometimes only spiritually, sometimes even physically, revealed the future to him, brightened or clouded his senses, drove the will-less to "holy" or devilish deeds, indeed entered into him to speak and act from within him.

No such splendid noble deed and no such heinous crime that a demon would not have inspired in a human. "Merit" and "guilt" are merely superficial marks, and "free will" had not yet been invented. "Everything is moved by the play of change, and the unsteady life's errancy of men is always transformed."

Consider Phaedra's shameful deed, whose slander prepared a disgraceful and painful end for Hippolytus, whom she loved. And Theseus's reckless folly, who without examination delivered his innocent son to cruel downfall. Yet the poet lets the deity itself excuse both: "Thus did Kypris contrive it, the treacherous one" and "...you ruined him without will; the mortal must, of course, sin when the gods so ordain sin."

Behind the terrible drama stands the jealousy of the goddess of lust, Aphrodite, towards the virginal Artemis, whose enthusiastic servant must atone for his austere chastity.

Pathicism wrests the right to existence even from its grimmest enemy, the proletarian Socrates, who was the first among Greeks to create the counter-goal of ever-understanding consciousness. "Madness"—far different from today's "insanity"—referred to the consciousness-robbing surrender of conscious personality to life drives considered divine, and was thus considered a substantially higher good than the wisest prudence.

We anticipate and set forth the following guiding principles:

I. There are no "phenomena" or "contents" or "processes" of consciousness, but only temporally unextended acts of the mind, which, themselves devoid of experience, provide consciousness from the experienced.

II. Life is uninterrupted experiencing, consciousness is the ever-present performance of the meditative act, each of which can refer to the result of each preceding one, insofar as they are all interconnected by the same stream of experience.

III. In the temporally unextended moment of reflection, the experienced has always already passed away, regardless of whether the reflection occurs immediately or only later.

IV. Mind and life would remain eternally separate and individual entities in unconsciousness, if there were no disturbances in the stream of experience. The scope of meditative acts corresponds to the degree of life's disruptability.

V. The ultimate enabling reason for any disruption lies in the particular life process of feeling. Once assumed, the seemingly constant wakefulness of consciousness requires the temporal structuring of the stream of experience, comparable to regular wave motion.

VI. The meditative act fixes the respective unextended moment where the just-passed wave of experience ends and the one just beginning starts. It replaces structuring with division. The phase change of the experienced becomes the consciousness of the separation of objects.

VII. The question of what is present at the moment of reflection from already-passed experience leads to uncovering a profound difference in the act-bearing boundary quality of experience from act-less intermediate qualities—a difference forming the basis of the doctrine of arbitrary memory and thus of consciousness in the sense of the ability to comprehend and judge.