The Life of the Soul
Between subconsciousness and supraconsciousness
Elements of a spiritual Psychology
by Georg Kuhlewind
Translated by Michael Lipson, Lindisfarne Press. 1982, this edition 1990.
Chapter 1
Phenomena of the soul can of course also be observed in other people, but such observations are not immediate; rather, they depend on the psychological phenomena's exterior forms of appearance. The extent to which the soul's movements reach expression depends largely on the individual and his circumstances. Insofar as they do appear visibly or audibly in behavior or in facial expression, however, it is left to the observer to penetrate the appearance, to categorize it, to interpret it. To that effect, he can do no more than draw on representations, mental images, and experiences that derived from his own life, and on a conceptuality gained through the self-observation of such experiences and images of the mind. This leads to the question: Is psychological self-observation possible? Is there sufficient autonomy, sufficient distance on the part of the observer,as there is in the case of sense perception?
This question can also be put in another form:
Who-what agency of consciousness-is capable of posing questions and making observations about consciousness itself? Strictly speaking, this has to be the first and perhaps the most important topic for psychology and indeed for every science that wants to understand itself-because it establishes the very possibility of such a science.
Everyday experience teaches us that it is possible to exclude a perception, or even all perceptions, despite open, receptive sense organs: not to see, despite open eyes, what is going on in front of us, or not to hear when we are being called. Important and fundamental as this experience could be for a doctrine of the senses, it interests us now from a different and more general standpoint. For this phenomenon, be it brought about involuntarily, through distraction, or willed through concentration on a particular thought, manifests but an extreme form of a general capacity pertaining to normal consciousness: the faculty to be attentive, to use attention selectively according to our will. On the other hand, this phenomenon shows that without conscious and willed attention, little or nothing reaches consciousness of all that the sense organs are able to transmit.
Conscious attention is always selective: we do not perceive everything we could perceive-if we did, we would never go a step further in life because of the countless perceptible details at every point in the perceptible world. Rather, through selective attention, we limit our perception to one specific segment. We ourselves, through our will, determine this selectivity; it is not fixed, as it is with animals.
We can change it: first I look at a picture or land-scape from the point of view of coloration, then I notice the gestures of the figures, then the total composition, and so forth.
The phenomenon of attention shows an autonomy of the conscious subject with regard to the countless impressions to which it is continually exposed. This autonomy extends from selectivity of perception to complete exclusion of impressions, during which the so-called stimuli, the physicochemical processes in the sense organ, in the circuitry of nerves, and evidently even in the brain, continue to proceed normally-what is there to stop them?
Through this autonomy, we face the perceptible world as observers. Apart from extreme cases, such as mortal danger, for instance, the perceptual world effects in consciousness solely what this consciousness qualitatively and quantitatively allows. Impressions exert no compulsion; they do not immediately carry over into action; thus, they are not immediate causes of conduct. Rather, the conscious principle-"I"-decides whether something is to occur, and what. This naturally does not apply to actions that take place routinely and by nervous reflex, though to some extent conscious exercise preceded such actions as well. Where a human being does not act out of knowledge and decision, he either behaves in an unhuman fashion, or he reacts with trained reactions that were once consciously chosen and
learned.
These considerations are of manifold importance to psychology. They stand at the beginning of our study, to establish the possibility of a science of the soul.
If psychology is to be possible, then there must be cognition.
If psychology is to be possible, then there must be freedom in observation, in the cognition of psychological phenomena.
Autonomy does exist in cognizing thc perceptual world. This is proved by the presence (not the content) of natural science, even if the appropriate consequences are rarely drawn from this fact. Is there a similar autonomy of the investigative consciousness in regard to the observation of soul phenomena?
Consciousness can distinguish among its qualitatively distinct components (thinking, feeling, willing, and their conglomerates) those clements that are more or less conscious, i.e. transparent for consciousness and controllable by it. The fact that consciousness suffers this diversity (it did not create it) and that the differences in clarity are there for a specific conscious subject-this is the reason psychological problems, and therefore psychology, exist at all. If everything that could be experienced in consciousness were as transparently clear to it as thinking, a science of the soul would be neither necessary nor possible.
When thinking appears in consciousness in its pure form, unmingled with feelings and will impulses alien to it (thinking itself is always willed, and its evidence always felt), then it is transparent to itself and is at the same time self-observation. It always knows what it is thinking; act and content are one. If a second thinking were necessary to make thought-content conscious, then the content of the second thinking would have to be rethought anew in order to make it conscious in turn, and so on, indefinitely.
On the one hand, self-consciousness depends on the self-experiencing character of thinking; on the other, it hinges on the possibility of remaining conscious in thinking although excluding sense impressions and their memories.
A distinction exists between thinking becoming conscious of itself, and the becoming conscious of other contents of the soul. Perceptions always become conscious through thinking; thinking tells us what they are, even if adults generally do not notice the thinking process-and some philosophies are based on this lack of observation. It emerges all the more clearly when children learn to speak and to think: for the child, for whom most perceptions are new, no such new perceptions occur without visibly intense intuitive thinking. At every point, the child must "form" the appropriate new concepts. In adults, this can be observed during rare, new perceptions; for in the case of habitual perceptions, the conceptuality has already become imbedded in the senses. In other words, for the adult, seeing is imbued with a conceptualizing activity that does not enter his consciousness. Thus he can recognize objects by sight, so to speak, without being conscious of any rational activity. But when I say "I perceive my thoughts, " this perception cannot be distinguished from the production of thoughts and does not occur with the help of something else, of a sense organ, for instance. Rather, thinking perceives itself in its very results.
Thinking and perceiving are realms of the soul's activity in which the subject is normally autonomous: it thinks and perceives at will. In thinking, the content as well is determined by choice; in perception, only the act itself is chosen, while the content is given by the environment and cannot be changed or transformed at will. In the phenomenon of attention and detachment, however, the autonomy of the subject during perception is manifest.
We can easily observe soul contents in relation to which the thinking subject possesses only a restricted autonomy, or none at all. Feelings, and will-impulses charged with feeling-passions-have an independence with regard to the subject, a self-sufficiency, against which the subject often struggles. In such a combat, the subject often either succumbs or becomes ill, which is another way of succumbing.
Feelings, in contrast to thoughts, cannot be immediately summoned, and when they break forth into consciousness, they are in no way observable from a distance, as is possible in sense-perception. When feelings are observable, we are generally dealing with their corpse, a faint image of them. From this cooled-down form to the irresistible conquest of the subject, there extends a continuous scale of intensities to which observability and the observer's relative autonomy stand in inverse proportion. Passions, inclinations, and unseen-through impulses obtain their power from the feeling mingled in them along with the mind's images. This independent soul entity, detached from the subject, is readily encountered when we attempt an exercise of thought,- concentration, for instance. Thinking of a man-made object and imagining it, one finds, after a short time, quite different representations in the mind and thought-fragments in one's consciousness. Now one is dealing with associations rather than with real thoughts. This distraction through associative images that always have emotional entanglements is the work of the independent part of the soul.
The above mentioned liberation from perceptive impressions can be experienced in two ways, depending on the activity in consciousness associated with these impressions. It can occur either through unwilled absence or distraction, while the light of consciousness dims; or it can result from concentration on a self-chosen theme, while the light of consciousness increases. In the first case, as can be seen in retrospect, the content of consciousness turns dreamy, dull, and appears in finished form without one's own doing. In the second case, the content is formed in clarity through current conscious activity.
Autonomy and clarity of consciousness are linked: they increase or decrease simultaneously and with them cognitive capacity and the communicability of conscious contents.
Dimmed clarity of thinking or perceiving is due to disturbances of the cognitive functions. With feeling, however we are dealing with a qualitatively different experience: instead of being subjects, we become objects turned over to feelings-their emergence eludes our will. Feelings that appear in this way are not cognitive elements of consciousness like thinking and perceiving; they do not communicate a "something," but only themselves, as if the eye, instead of seeing something, were to communicate to us its own sensations-itching, movement, pains. These feelings cannot be immediately remembered, as can thoughts or the mind's images and representations. This has to do with their mode of appearance, which overpowers the subject.
Thoughts, perceptions and representations always become conscious, clearly conscious, as past; feelings, on the other hand, emerge as elements of presence, but are conscious in a dim, dreamlike fashion.
We do not consciously experience thinking, perception, and representation as processes; rather, we awaken through them and through their products.
To the extent that we live, as conditioned by our level of consciousness, in a world that is perceived, thought, and imaged by the mind, this can be recognized as a world of the past. With feeling, man lives in a dreamlike presentness, just as he dreamily experiences, without the sharpness of wakeful consciousness, unexpected events for which he has no behavioral routines. Closer observation reveals that actually we always construct the "present" afterwards, with representations, and that in experience we are never wide awake. "Presence of mind" really means a momentary intuitive waking in presentness, yielding a behavior that afterwards, often after much reflection, proves to be the best possible thing to have done. In feeling we are not separated from experience; we remain in the present and are therefore unable to observe, as we do in times of waking consciousness. This gives feelings their warmth, their liveliness, in contrast to thoughts, which have exchanged their life for a past-quality.
Feelings do not transmit direct cognitions; to an outside observer, they characterize the person in whom they appear, the person who experiences them. They are conditioned by a realm of the soul in which the person is not fully conscious, not autonomous. He is predisposed to specific feelings: this endowment is part of his psychological nature; it belongs to his past, like his physical organism. His feeling life, however, occupies an intermediate degree of consciousness, in between the waking consciousness of the mind's imagery and the sleep-consciousness in which he faces his organism. Man's fate can largely be founded on the feelings with which he is endowed. They belong to his most private aspect, to his own essence.
One's own private feelings move along a scale ranging from "this is good for me" to "that is bad for me." Our egoity has its center in these feelings. That is why they lack universality, i.e. validity for others, comprehensibility and communicability; all of this is proper only to thoughts.
Normally we have no knowledge of the will in pure form. It is always bound up with an image in the mind or with a conceptual motif, and often accompanied by feelings. The representations and feelings become conscious, as does the result of the act of will, the perceptible deed; the will itself does not. Initially, there is nothing to suggest that the will can be cognitive, like thinking. There is a hint of this as regards feeling, such as in the feeling caused by the experience of art or in the feeling that accompanies an intuition.
The life of the soul usually consists of a conglomeration of non-cognitive feelings and will-impulses of non-conscious or half-conscious origin, of psychological and mental habit-formations and thought-forms that weave through the whole of it. Mixed into this conglomeration is the occasional lightning-flash of new thinking. This partly serves the self-sentient mentality, the ego, but it is partly the still-untouched universal, autonomous element.
Within the soul, we can distinguish autonomous functions as well as those that reveal a selfcontained independence vis-a-vis the autonomous part of the soul. Thinking is autonomous, and so is perceiving to the extent that it is penetrated by thinking. The feeling entity, on the other hand, is arbitrary and autocratic, as is everything it stimulates and influences: associations, preferences, passions and the like. Characteristically, the autonomous realm of the soul is form free and thus capable of taking on any form, while the arbitrary intrapsychic elements are always seen in prearranged forms: chains of association, forms of feeling, pathways of
sensation with repetitive trajectories, etc. This is why the non-autonomous element is also non-cognitive. Thinking can think any thought; associations or compulsive ideas are not cognitive gestures at all.
It seems that autonomy is initially purchased at the price of presentness: thought-contents, by entering consciousness, are paralyzed, becoming elements of the past. Everything that touches on the conceptual world loses its life. As a result, this (mirrored} thinking, though autonomous, is not sufficiently powerful to master feelings, let alone to understand or deal autonomously with the even less conscious movements of the soul. For psychology, this state of affairs suggests a fundamental difficulty or a challenge. The psychologist faces another person's modes of feeling from the outside; however, since he only has command of mirrored thinking as
autonomous mental function, he is forced to understand by means of rationality the non-rational element in the other's soul, and this despite the insight that the psychological entity causing the problem is never rationally intelligible. This gives rise to the peculiar rationality of analytic psychologies, which try to capture the hidden part of the soul by detective work, drawing conclusions from little clues in consciousness concerning the subconscious irrationality that lurks behind it. Only by achieving a different level of consciousness would the psychologist be in a position really to obtain an adequate understanding of the world of feelings, for instance, in all its liveliness and presentness. Of such goals or methods, there is nothing to be found in the literature of psychology.
In the foregoing observations, we described the paradoxical situation in which psychology and psychologists find themselves. It is absolutely necessary to strive for and practice a profound introspection, so as to be able to build up adequate representations and conceptualities in relation to those independent phenomena of the soul that face autonomous consciousness in their own self-sufficient manner. The psychologist would have to be able to meet feelings, will-impulses of unclear origin, and soul phenomena of non-autonomous sources, with the corresponding conscious elements of understanding, just as he meets the thoughts of another person with the capacity for thought, or the sense of thinking. These elements of understanding, yet to be acquired, should on the one hand achieve at least the degree of clarity exhibited by thoughts; on the other hand, however, they should correspond to the liveliness, the warmth, the fluid, mutually interpenetrating and vaguely contoured nature of feelings. This task cannot be accomplished through capacities normally at our disposal, through autonomous, but dialectically reasonable thinking. To put it simply: feelings, in their essence, can be known only by feelings-but these must be "seeing” feelings, they must really feel, rather than simply feel themselves. Just as thinking is a "speaking" in its very nature, so a "speaking" feeling-a feeling that tells me something-must be developed. Just as thinking, through its open immersion in the element of language (not in the words of a specific tongue) is a universal process that is then reflected in the particular, a process that is individualized and then dies out in the individual,-so feeling, likewise, would have to lift itself into an unfixed language whose fluidity is better suited to reality. Willing has a similar task. We will return to this evolutionary potential in the next chapter. Here we will try to sketch the nature of the evolution.
The task suggested here for the psychologist is identical to an ancient goal whose formulation, "Know thyself," may initially appear less demanding. But the paradox in this maxim is not hard to discover. Who is to know whom? When I turn to myself cognitively, the cognizer and the one-to-be-cognized are identical: even the latter is cognizing; he exists in the act of cognition. The difficulty lies in realizing an awareness within cognizing itself, since habitual everyday consciousness always awakens after the cognitive act, as a consciousness of its result, e.g. of the already-thought. For today's adult,
"Know thyself" means above all the task of experiencing oneself as a cognizer, in the act of cognition, not afterwards. In ancient times, this maxim could also refer to other goals. It is modern man's Apollonian task to progress from a past-consciousness to a bright present-consciousness. At one of its borders, everyday consciousness encounters the limits of its competence, beyond which the normal feeling life seems to begin. Behind this, there spreads a subconscious realm of impenetrable depth, province of a psychology that recognizes nothing outside this realm except everyday consciousness. Were the human soul really structured in this manner, the task of psychology would be hopeless. The question must be asked whether waking consciousness is not able to experience other limits as well. Such limit-experiences then could occasion a modification of this dichotomous image of the soul, and indicate an access to higher cognitive powers such as could cope with the subconscious realm.
Limit-experiences of this other type can be discovered if the challenge to "Know thyself" is met, or at least attempted, with regard to cognitive processes. If the attention is turned to such processes, and not to the soul's darkness with which it cannot cope, then the observer achieves limit-experiences at the border of the bright hemisphere of consciousness as well. These point to a region still brighter than everyday consciousness itself. It may strike the investigator that everyday consciousness can discover its own past-character.
Important conclusions can be drawn from this fact. Is it at all possible that the past exists for an absolute past-consciousness? In the same way, an absolutely determined consciousness could never discover the fact of its determination (it would always obey the determining element, never diverging from it), a consciousness utterly filled by past could neither perceive nor express its own character as such. Past exists only for what is present. And though the present element does not experience itself consciously, it is above everyday consciousness and is the agency that contemplates its own past, its continually produced contents. This agency must therefore operate close to the level of everyday consciousness. The possibility of new ideas, intuitions, and thoughts points to such a nearby presence.
Nothing new can come from what is past. The study of how children learn to speak and think points very clearly to this element as the source of intuition.
Another limit-experience is illuminated by introspection when the thinker seeks to determine how a thought is distinguished from a meaningless (but grammatically and syntactically correct) chain of words. The distinction lies solely in the logicality or evidentness of the thought. But rational thinking will never progress beyond ascertaining this quality. It is in principle incapable of describing, explaining or enumerating all the characteristics of what makes something evident. To do so, it would itself have to make use of evidence once again.
Thinking, of its own accord, follows what is evident, out of a feeling on the part of the thinker, a feeling that guides the thinking. It is not a self-sensing feeling, it "feels" the logicality. Logic is not a normative, but an a posteriori descriptive science: it describes how thinking works. If it were otherwise, if we had to learn logical thinking (by scientific study, for example), then we would have the problem of understanding that science or doctrine without possessing logic. The "how” of thinking-that there is a "how"-is still noticeable for thinking itself, but can no longer be explained. Whoever, through inner attention, discovers the intuitive essence-immediate understanding-as the fundamental element of the cognizing human being, will not fail to notice this element's kinship to evidence. Belonging to the same domain is the barely acknowledged phenomenon that thinking, provided it is thinking something new, is always improvised; we do not know in advance what we are going to think, otherwise we would already have thought it.
The last-mentioned limit-experiences point concretely to sources from which consciousness draws its cognitive powers. Intuition and primal understanding stem from this realm. Before something can be explained, there must exist the capacity to understand the explanation. The source must therefore appear to everyday consciousness as a more light-filled region, or, in a higher sense, a more "speaking," word-like sphere that contains nothing
that has as yet been thought, and is nonetheless the possibility of every thought. As such, it is characterized as a not-unstructured realm, but one defined by no specific form, carrying with it the power and capacity for every form.
It is well-known that the Aristotelian categories cannot be explained, nor can they be somehow "derived." They did not, for instance, arise by abstracting from a multitude of observations; the very ordering of these observations into coherent groups presupposes an ordering principle, and this is itself the category. The category "being" does not come about by observation of many existent things; rather, I recognize them as existent because the category of "being" is known to me before it has a verbal expression. The categories are purely intuitive formations; only in retrospect can they become "abstract,” i.e., not experienced, giving up their life by entering into everyday consciousness, formulated and overlaid with words. Philosophic-intuitive-temperaments can always reactivate and reanimate them; in such people they regain their life. As living idealities, as universal wordlike forms, they make up the scaffolding, the fundamental structure, of our thinking, of our world view.
As with categories, so it is with every new thought, every new idea, every new understanding, everything creative: they originate in the life of the present. The essential thing in picturing this source is to understand that it must lie nearer to the light, nearer to the wordlike than the everyday or scientific consciousness that issues from it. That the understanding cannot be explained by, derived from, or "understood" through non-understanding-this thought contradicts much of what counts as scientific today, although such science is itself contradictory in just this regard. At some point, we have to think clearly through the fact that word, the word-like, cannot arise accidentally, without a "speaking” subject; nor can it be understood without such a subject. Insofar as the cognitive capacities of everyday consciousness stem from a "more understanding” element, normally attainable by consciousness only as a limit-experience, this element can be called the supraconscious. If the psychologist intends to probe and understand the mental region that, as a separate formation, borders on the autonomous area from below, then he must make use of the stronger, more penetrating cognitive energies of the supraconscious.
Through their liveliness and presence, these energies offer adequate means of recognizing and even healing the subconscious.
Through the discovery and recognition of the supraconscious, the observer of the human soul is now in a position to see its landscape differently than is customary in psychology. The image of the soul becomes tripartite: the supraconscious, the spiritual element that reaches into the soul, source of cognitive capacities; the conscious, essentially autonomous thinking, an individualized copy of the spiritual; the subconscious, the structures composed of mental habits, forms, and patterns of behavior that are independent of conscious control and whose existence and origin are not directly conscious. The supraconscious is form-free, and is cognitive for this very reason, the possibility of all forms; whereas the subconscious consists of forms that are, while fluid and changeable to some degree, still very tenacious and self-conservative. Since the middle, conscious region is a sphere of pastness, the psychologist can only appeal to supraconscious energies if he approaches the subconscious. Since the "contents" of the subconscious achieve at most a dreamlike consciousness, they are not "paralyzed" like those of the middle sphere. Here the image arises of the suprahuman, divine conqueror of the subconscious dragon-nature.
Accordingly, the task and precondition of psychological research must be to extend the researcher's faculties of consciousness in the direction of that which is normally supraconscious: with these abilities he could penetrate the area that lies below everyday consciousness. This task is equivalent to a spiritual schooling such as has been followed at every epoch in an appropriate way and described for modern man through the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner: as a schooling of thought, feeling and will, and as the possible transformation of perception-which presupposes a heightening of the three soul-functions. The practical psychologist can hardly put off his activities until he has attained these sought-after capacities. Yet he will be aided considerably if he approaches the soul and the phenomena of the soul in a more adequate manner by forming new and appropriate concepts. The "appropriate" concepts are qualitatively different from those of normal, even of scientific consciousness: They must be livelier, more fluid, more malleable, even more extensive, without losing their clarity. Their formation is possible through the adequate understanding of the results of research that arose through heightened cognitive ability and have been transmitted in conceptual form. Whoever comes in contact with reports of such research should guard against trying to understand them with ordinary, habitual conceptual schemas: this would lead, and has led in the past, to their being widely misunderstood. In the following chapters, we shall attempt to sketch the psychological and mental functions, as well as perception and its possible development. This sketch can also be taken as an introduction to the formation of expanded concepts.
End