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8 Of Philosophers and Madmen
- Northwestern University Press
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125 A human being often conceals the motives of his actions from everyone else, and sometimes even from himself, namely where he shrinks from acknowledging what it really is that moves him to do this or that. —Schopenhauer For both Schopenhauer and Freud the will/id—as the true core of our being, thing-in-itself, and precondition for all that happens—is unconscious . Nietzsche rejected Schopenhauer’s will, and the thing-in-itself; interestingly, he did not reject the concept of the unconscious. Indeed, Nietzsche credited Schopenhauer with calling to our attention “that mode of thought and knowledge of which we are unconscious.”1 These thinkers all, in fact, considered the notion of the unconscious as playing a ubiquitous, pivotal and prevalent role in mental life. Their thoughts on the unconscious (and consciousness) were remarkably similar: all gave similar evidence supporting the existence of unconscious phenomena, and all developed similar notions in regards to the repression of unconscious phenomena. Given their insistence upon a hidden, unconscious quality of the human mind, it comes as no surprise that their positions would have important and similar implications for the issue of freedom versus determinism, as well.2 Of Philosophers and Madmen: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud on the Unconscious, Freedom, and Determinism 8 Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud on the Unconscious These thinkers all cited similar reasons and evidence for asserting the existence of unconscious mental processes; all referred to obvious gaps in consciousness which were not explainable purely on the conscious level, the nature of memories, and the peculiar phenomenon of dreams. Schopenhauer referred to the “imperfection of the intellect,” pointing out the “fragmentary nature of the course of our thoughts.” The human consciousness and thinking are by their nature fragmentary, and therefore the theoretical or practical results obtained by putting such fragments together often turn out to be defective . . . Obviously a consciousness subject to such great limitations is little fitted to explore and fathom the riddle of the world.3 Nietzsche similarly emphasized the undeniable “intermittence” of consciousness throughout the beginning of Human, All Too Human.4 And Freud justified the necessity of the concept of the unconscious, because the data of consciousness have a very large number of gaps in them; both in healthy and in sick people psychical acts often occur which can be explained only by presupposing other acts, of which, nevertheless , consciousness affords no evidence . . . All these conscious acts remain disconnected and unintelligible if we insist upon claiming that every mental act that occurs in us must also necessarily be experienced by us through consciousness.5 It was Freud’s observation of these gaps in consciousness, in fact, that justified his extending beyond the limits of direct experience.6 It was precisely this that made Freud’s theory a meta-psychology, grounded Schopenhauer’s belief that metaphysics was a necessary addition to science, and led Nietzsche to develop his psychological theory. Memories lacking immediate consciousness also provided all three thinkers with evidence of unconscious thought processes. Schopenhauer pondered what we are to make of a memory of which we are not immediately conscious: all he said was, “it is latent.” Freud extended the idea of “latent” thoughts and claimed that this further substantiated the existence of an unconscious. We can go further and argue, in support of there being an unconscious psychical state, that at any given moment consciousness includes only a 126 A P P R E H E N D I N G T H E I N A C C E S S I B L E [44.221.43.208] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:18 GMT) small content, so that the greater part of what we call conscious knowledge must in any case be for very considerable periods of time in a state of latency, that is to say, of being psychically unconscious. When all our latent memories are taken into consideration it becomes totally incomprehensible how the existence of the unconscious can be denied [italics added].7 It was on this point that Nietzsche extended the notion of an unconscious in a way that Schopenhauer did not, and that had a strong impact on Freud. Nietzsche too spoke of memories that arise in us “from a common root, from a fundamental will of knowledge.”8 He asserted “the human being carries around with him the memory of all previous generations,”9 and “a memory analogous to our memory that reveals itself in heredity and evolution and forms.”10 Here, of...