The Unconscious without Freud by Sand Rosemarie Sponner;

Author:Sand, Rosemarie Sponner;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

Plotinus

An entirely different concept about the morality of the unconscious mind had been offered almost a century before Augustine. Plotinus (204–270 A.D.) the last of the great classical philosophers, was the ancient thinker who most clearly recognized unconscious mental activity and who made extensive use of the concept in the development of his system. His thought, like that of Aristotle and Plato, permeated the intellectual life of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance, and when the “modern” era of philosophy began, in the seventeenth century, it was available to the men who laid the foundations for the discipline of today. It is well to keep in mind that certain “modern” ideas which seemed to surface suddenly during the Enlightenment had roots in the distant past. For instance, in the seventeenth century Benedict de Spinoza distinguished between conscious and unconscious desire. He referred to the latter as “appetite” and commented that “I recognize no distinction between appetite and desire for whether a man be conscious of his appetite or not, it remains one and the same appetite” (1911, 173). This will seem less startling if it is recalled that in the third century after Christ Plotinus had already dealt with unconscious desire: “not all that occurs at any part of the Soul [his capital letter] is immediately known to us; a thing must, for that knowledge, be present to the total soul; thus desire locked up within the desiring faculty remains unknown except when we make it fully ours” (1911, 364).

Plotinus understood the everyday unconscious. He illustrated it with homely examples from everyday life, the same examples that turned up again in the nineteenth century: the unconscious that takes over the performance of habitual activities, like walking (1911, 292), the unconsciousness of the deeply absorbed reader who is oblivious to the surroundings (1911, 41), and the lack of awareness of danger by a person engaged in a courageous action (1911, 41). He supposed that a memory, when unconscious, could be more powerful than one which was conscious (1911, 289) and believed that some actions could be more perfectly carried out unconsciously, consciousness having a “blunting” effect (1911, 41). He assumed that unconscious mental action was continuous although rarely perceived. He compared the conscious soul’s access to the unconscious with that of a person who could only get a glimpse of certain activities by using a mirror. When the mirror was improperly placed, or absent, as was usually the case, the person could not see what was going on, although the activities did not cease (1911, 40).

To this vision of the personal unconscious, Plotinus added ideas that were to play an important role in the future. He conceived of the unconscious, not merely as a collection of unconscious mental contents, but as a separate, hidden part of the mind, ordinarily inaccessible to consciousness, ceaselessly active and possessing its own distinct mode of cognition. Further, he thought of this unconscious part of the mind not only as superior to consciousness, but as related to the divine.

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