Subconscious
This is not going to be about the book that I've been re-reading, Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun. I'm still in the middle of it, or just past. The Devils of Loudun is a book that all clever undergraduates read when I was in college. Huxley takes a shocking but minor historical event - the burning of a priest convicted of witchcraft in seventeenth-century France - and uses it as a point of departure for expatiations about ESP, transcendence, "the Spirit," and whatnot. A lot of what he has to say is pure twaddle, but his retelling of the ordeal of Urbain Grandier makes for great reading, and his analysis of the political background is chillingly apt. We will get to all of this when I finish re-reading the book. What I want to write about now is "the subconscious."
In 1953, when The Devils of Loudun was published, all educated anglophones knew what the subconscious was. Just as all Gaul was divided into three parts by Caesar, so Freud divided the mind of man. The ego was the self, embattled by a superego that told it what to do and made it feel awful about its shortcomings - what we usually call a "conscience" - and a subconscious that swarmed with illicit impulses, a sort of muddy mirror image of the superego. Actually, the terminology is not Freud's at all, but that of his English translator, James Strachey. If Strachey had been more faithful to his texts, which spoke of Ich, Über-ich, and Es, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
That's because when I came upon the word "subconscious" in Huxley's book the other night, it struck me that this familiar term has become very rusty. It's still in general use, of course, but it's impossible to take seriously. I don't mean to suggest that there isn't some neural system in the brain that codes "forbidden" thoughts and keeps them well out of conscious awareness. But with the invention of "subconscious," Strachey institutionalized a very rickety idea about the mind, to wit, that its higher functions are conscious. Our reason and our speech - these are conscious faculties, surely?
If you want to know what it is like to be conscious of producing speech, try learning a foreign language. That's consciousness, believe me, and it gets maddeningly in the way. If you have to think about what words you're going to use - something quite different from thinking about what you want to say, what idea you want to express - the bogged-down effort of it all may easily defeat you. If you have to evaluate every sentence on a page for truth values, you will never finish the book. The fact is, our minds are wired to burden our consciousness with as little as possible. (I've been given to understand that the problem of autism is in large part a matter of too much information; instead of seeing a field of daisies, an autistic person counts them.) The more fluent and practiced at anything that you become, the deeper the elements of your expertise sink into unconsciousness. The weasel term that "saves" these processes for dignified human rationality is "second nature," but they would be much better denoted by "subconscious," a term that is, thanks to James Strachey, no longer available for the purpose.
When you speak, you are aware that you are speaking, but not of choosing your words. If you pause to find the right word, you know that you're looking for the right word, but you don't know what the right word is until it presents itself, as if by a miracle. Anything that you do well, you do without thinking. You're a (partly) rational animal, but you don't have to know it, and lots of perfectly rational people don't.
Comments
Did you see the Ken Russell film? Highly recommended because you will either love it or hate it - and you elicit that sort of extreme reaction from much these days. I must admit, I lose interest in Huxley after Antic Hay; and I only read that because it supposedly contains a very accurate pen portrait of composer Peter Warlock (truly a subject for Ken R. if there ever was one!)
Posted by: stephenesque | July 11, 2005 12:30 PM
Russell's film is now better than thirty years old and still seems to hold its own as a marketable product, Amazon will be happy to sell you copy and NetFlix will send it out. Huxley should be so lucky to still be saleable. Recently, you mentioned Adam Gopnik's piece "The Death of a Fish" which appeared in The New Yorker 4 July 2005. In the story Gopnik describes consciousness as being just 'the hum of the machinery', his references in this area are worth exploring. Being in the zone, as the atheletes say, is more enjoyable than consciously directing one's actions, but the outcome is not necessarily better nor more worthwhile. In fact actions that seem to require no thought, well, actually verbalization - whether silent or audible doesn't matter - would be a better term than thought, are generally the result of temendous familiarity with the task at hand. In the cases of athletes and musicians, and likely writers, some actions, the choice of words, for example, are not conscious actions simply because the action has been repeated so often that it is, as you point out, commonly referred to as second nature. Talent and spontaneity are often assumed by the young to be interchangealbe and also to be genetic gifts rather than skills that have been consciously honed to a level of perfection that makes them noteable.
Anything that is done well is, as you say, done without thinking, but it very likely didn't start that way. There are other means of thought besides verbal, but thought seems to precede any meaningful action.
Posted by: George | July 16, 2005 04:30 PM