The Greek conception of the psyche or soul
may be said to be ultimately concerned with
the essence of the human being, and various
dispositions, composites, or natures have
been attributed to its organization.
By today's standards, what we typically refer
to as Mind as a totality, including the unique
features that comprise individual personality
and subjectivity, the Greeks tended to emphasize
its multimodal features as universal dimensions
of the human condition.
Because the notion of consciousness is a modern
(not an ancient) concept, early cultures did
not have a word for the 'unconscious' in the
way it is commonly used today, therefore the
nature of the soul was not examined in this
light.
But the unconscious depths of the soul were
not entirely neglected, as many preSocratic
philosophers attempted to delineate.
Testimonia from Aristotle notes that it was
Thales who attributed a "motive force" to
the notion of the soul (De Anima, 405a20),
hence a purpose or telos that animates mind
as a life-principle.
For Anaximenes, our souls "hold us together"
(Fr. 2), what Democritus equates with thought
(De Anima, 405a9) as well as a "lust for pleasure"
(Fr. 159).
Perhaps it is in Heraclitus where we first
get some glimpse of unconscious process when
he points out that the soul follows an inner
law of growth (Fr. 115) that has no limit,
"such is the depth of its meaning" (Fr. 45),
yet one that is corrupted by "impulsive desire,"
for "whatever it wants it will buy at the
cost of the soul" (Fr. 85).
The desirous or lustful features of the soul
were often separated from its more rational
faculties attributed to the intellect, reason,
or mind (nous), the "bright jewel" of which
is wisdom (Gorgias, Fr. 11).
For the Pythagorean school, like the Egyptians,
the soul was immortal: life on earth was a
sojourn and preparation (through purification,
self-discipline, and self-harmonization) for
entering the afterlife, the destiny of which
was to prepare for eternity.
And for Philolaus, a contemporary of Socrates,
the immortal harmonia of the soul becomes
"incorporeal" as it separates from the body
upon death (Fr. 22).
Because the ancients believed in reincarnation,
metempsychosis, and the transmigration of
the soul, they believed that they had lived
before and that learning or education was
a matter of recollection (anamnesis).
Philip Wheelwright (1966) explains:
The fundamental truths are already known to
us, in the depths of our unconscious selves,
and the purpose of education should therefore
be to stir these hidden parts of us into activity,
rather than to impose truths upon them from
outside sources.
(pp. 209-210)
Here we can appreciate how the Socratic method
of dialectic was designed to question truth
claims imposed by others and elicit knowledge
that was previously forgotten, such as was
demonstrated in Plato's famous dialogue, Meno.
Plato's treatment of the psyche in his Dialogues
is vast and varied, but he takes up the Pythagorean
concept of the soul as comprising three parts:
intelligence, reason, and passion.
In the Republic, he discusses the desirous
or appetitive soul as pursuing pleasure and
avoiding pain, and that the "lawless," base,
"beastly and savage part" concerned with gratifying
"its own instincts" (9:571c) is found in everyone.
Plato not only anticipates the Freudian unconscious,
he also stipulates how desire can override
reason and a sense of shame belonging to our
ethical compass.
It is here that we may see how Plato was the
first psyche-analyst when he articulates the
intimate relationship between desire, reason,
and morality, how the soul possess a natural
constitution that is instinctually driven,
develops habits in relating to others and
the environment, and that our true characters
awaken during sleep when the soul is at rest,
whether this be the "rational, gentle and
dominate part" (9:571c) or disquieted passion,
unruliness, and anger (9:572).
In fact, Plato accounts for good and evil
within the soul, or a "better part and a worse
part," which is subject to "control" and "self-mastery"
(4:431a).
When the soul is able to attain a sense of
"self-consciousness" (9:571d), the more primitive
forms of our nature are "tamed," which "settles
down in a compromise" between our competing
tendencies (9:572d), only to find a middle-ground
or synthetic function where unbridled desires
are transformed into lawful order and democratic
inclinations.
Here are the seeds of Freud's tripartite theory
of the mind.
Although stemming from Sophocles, following
these remarkable passages in Book IX, Plato
may be even credited with elaborating upon
Oedipal rivalry and competition when he compares
a son's insolence, outrage, and autocracy
toward others as a reaction formation to a
thrifty and niggardly father who personifies
self-restraint, renunciation of pleasure,
and inner discipline.
Here Plato succeeds in showing how the ruling
passions of the unconscious are under the
influence of that "tyrant Eros" (9:573d) responsible
for every "erotic" and "evil" impulse, including
the "atrocity of murder" that lives "in utmost
anarchy and lawlessness" (9:575) in our sleeping
souls, which is based in part on habit and
nature (9:573c; 575) in reaction to and defiance
of "the control of his father and the laws"
(9:574d).
This could read straight out of Freud.
It is no accident that he referred to psychology
as his "tyrant."
The division of the psyche is further described
by Plato as a dialectical structure composed
of opposites (Phaedo, 70e), "in fact, of all
contraries" (Laws, 10:896d), where psychological
dispositions such as thought, feeling, sensation,
perception, memory, and judgment transpire
in order to "write words in our souls" (Philebus,
39a).
It is also the harbinger of moral qualities,
such as excellence, ends and virtues (Republic,
1:353d), aesthetics, and the "pursuit of knowledge"
(Cratylus, 420b).
The soul is also the house of creativity (Symposium,
209), truth and reality (Republic, 9:585d),
beauty (Republic, 3:402d), and wisdom (Epinomis,
974c).
Furthermore, the soul is not only "the cause
of good and evil," "right and wrong," but
a "universal cause" (Laws, 10:896d) of all
mental activity, which affects a person's
overall character (Laws, 10:904c).
Being both rational and irrational (Republic,
4:439d), of pleasure and pain, the psyche
is the essence of man.
Although Plato states that the psyche possess
temperament and physical constituents that
belong to our embodiment (Phaedo, 86d), hence
showing the interdependence of the mind and
body, following the preSocratics, he ultimately
believed that the soul was immortal (Phaedo,
71e-73; 105e).
I will not critique this notion here given
the long contentious debate in the history
of philosophy and theology, however, we can
metaphysically infer a type of unconscious
infinity that we may by analogy apply to the
soul, what Freud (1933) refers to as a timeless,
boundless immediacy that is "virtually immortal"
(SE, 22: 74).
While Plato provides a rich backdrop to the
question, nature, and discourse on the quandaries
of the soul, it was Aristotle's treatise on
De Anima that continued to dominate our conception
of mind until modern day psychology was established
as a distinct discipline.
For Aristotle, the object of psychology is
to discover the "essence" of soul and its
attributes or properties (402a8).
In Book I of his treatment On the Soul, he
lays out the mind-body problem by asking whether
the soul is divisible into parts, and if so,
whether they are distinct from the body.
Here he contextualizes the notion of parts
as a plurality of functions with discernible
properties as distinct from the whole, as
well as the problematic of separating out
affections such as sensation, appetite, passion,
perception, emotion, etcetera from our experiential
embodiment including thinking (403a5).
Aristotle concludes that in order to act or
be acted upon, soul has to possess a body
as a prerequisite of its existence.
Therefore, any study of the soul falls within
the "science of nature" (403a29) as a composite
of embodied events.
This is the making of modern psychological
science.
It is in Book II where Aristotle gives an
answer to the question, What is soul?
Here he provides his famous distinction of
matter (as potentiality) from form or essence
(as actuality) and concludes that soul is
a compound of the two as life (412a5-15).
Here psyche and soma form a unit or union
as a living being.
Soul is not only a living thing with degrees
of actuality and potentiality, it is an enactment
of actualized potential as a capacity (412a27).
Aristotle continues to delineate various functions,
characteristics, or "psychic powers" (414a30)
of the soul that belong to organized natural
(living) bodies such as self-nutrition, growth,
decay, and so forth, with hierarchical degrees
of enhancement in animals such as sensation
and perception, and for humans, intellect
or thought.
For Aristotle, the capacity to sense, perceive,
and desire is common to all animal species,
but what differentiates the human being from
animals is the outgrowth or "derivative properties"
(415a15) of cognition.
Here there are three advanced faculties humans
possess: (a) imagination, which in turn relies
on (b) memory, and (c) reason, which is unique
to man (415a11).
Aristotle viewed imagination (fa?tas?a) as
a derivative of sensation whereby the manifold
of sense objects and after-images appear to
the soul as distinct psychical phenomena,
even while dreaming (427b27-429a9).
The distinguished Aristotelian scholar (Sir)
David Ross (1923) notes that the acts of imagination
involve "not a conscious state of mind but
an unconscious modification of the mind" (p.
148) due to the fact that mental processes
are operative before recollection takes place,
which is dependent on memory.
Until mind re-collects the deposits of sense
perception recorded within the tableau of
the unconscious, they persist in a state of
potentiality before they are made actual by
the imaginative faculty.
In extending Aristotle's views, we may also
say that potentiality as such is an unconscious
presence that is always there, the task of
which is to make it actual through recollection.
Here Aristotle anticipates Hegel's psychology,
which we will examine shortly, where there
is a sort of unconscious intelligence that
mediates images and stored objects within
the abyss of the mind.
Originally laid down and retained as sensations,
after-images can take on a life of their own,
as we may observe in fantasy, and are reproduced
by the faculty of imagination as re-presentations
that are unconsciously derived.
This is why Aristotle states: "Thinking is
different from perceiving and is held to be
in part imagination, in part judgment" (427b28-29).
Notice that imagination and thought intermingle.
Here we may appreciate why Hegel (1830) claims
that "phantasy is reason" (EG s 457).
In other words, unconscious valences intervene
during any act of thinking, especially fantasy.
It is important to emphasize that these advanced
forms of cognition are epigenetic achievements:
they develop from primordial organic processes
such as biological instincts and gain a synthetic
organizational ability or endowment responsible
for reflective thought and behavior.
This is why the soul is determinative; it
executes a causal impetus over the life activities
of a living thing through animate action as
agency.
For Aristotle, the soul is the psychic facility
that allows us to live as sentient and thinking
beings (414a13), but with this single caveat:
it cannot exist without a body.
The standard (Ross) translation reads: "the
soul cannot be without a body, while it cannot
be a body; it is not a body but something
relative to a body" (414a18-20).
In comparison, the Creed (1965) translation
is similar: "neither can the soul exist without
the body nor is it a body; it is not a body,
but has something to do with a body, and for
this reason it is present in body" (p. 250).
On the one hand soul possesses a body, but
on the other it is not a body.
In other words, the soul is embodied but it
cannot be reduced to matter or a material
substance.
This is Aristotle's language for what today
we may refer to as non-reductive materialism.
If mind is embodied (as inhering within mass
extended in space), where the "affections
of the soul are enmattered accounts" (403a25),
then what becomes of the question of immateriality
generally attributed to the soul?
Keep in mind this question is prefaced on
the historical Christianization of the word
"soul," which typically signifies an immaterial,
incorporeal, or supernatural independent existence
the so-called immortal psyche assumes over
the physical cessation of the body at death,
where in other languages, such as in German,
soul (Seele) is devoid of these theological
connotations, as is mind or spirit (Geist).
Unlike Plato, for Aristotle the soul is not
an independently existing substance nor is
it incorporeal.
It is neither a material object nor is it
separated from the body.
In other words, soul in not separable from
the body nor is it conceived as a body.
Herein lies the paradox of inseparability
of soul from body: while the psyche is not
a body, it is not immaterial, yet it remains
embodied.
Psyche and soma are not different substances,
rather they are differentiated elements of
the same substance, hence conjoined within
a monistic structure.
Yet Aristotle may be said to introduce a contradiction
here, and even waffles on the notion of form
and matter being independent of one another.
While they may be categorically separable,
hence thought of as distinct through the act
of abstraction, ontologically they are not.
Furthermore, mind and body are not ontologically
identical, hence they are not the same and
cannot be collapsed into one another (contrary
to the 'identification thesis' advanced by
modern materialism); nor are they merely categorical
distinctions, because the soul qua form transcends
its biological counterpart in terms of its
capacities, functions, organizational complexity,
and self-defining agency, which by definition
gives it greater powers and valuing properties
matter itself does not intrinsically possess,
although sentience, desire, and perception
are necessarily embodied and cannot exist
independent of soul.
By today's standards, Aristotle has set the
stage for a discourse on the irreconcilability
of the dialectic between psyche and substance,
what we often see in contemporary cognitive
neuroscience as a duality or polarity between
mind and brain.
The tendency today among the biological sciences
to boil down mind to brain states, or neurochemical-physical
systemic substances, vitiates the philosophical
need to preserve the integrity of soul as
a vitalizing, self-directing, regulatory process
of generative, valuative self-creative agency
that transpires within the embodied parameters
of its natural givenness or thrownness.
Aristotle's views on the soul preserves both
the natural scientific attitude of explaining
the physical world as an empirical object
of investigation as well as valuing the transcendental
properties of mind that resist reductionist
strategies hell bent on displacing its determinative
freedom through the mendacity and simple-minded
devolution of materialism.
Although soul is an actuality, it is in its
self-capacity to actualize itself as the coming
into being of potentiality that signals its
agentic potency.
It is in the prowess of agency that soul achieves
its pinnacle as thought.
This is one reason why we do not phenomenally
equate our minds with our bodies, for our
reflective experience of our internal experiences
is a higher-order accomplishment of self-consciousness;
or in Hegelianese, a sublation (Aufhebung)
of mind.
We do not relate to our Self as brain, but
rather as a transcendent organizational being
with a qualitative mediatory purpose (as self-imposed
pursuit and meaning) that determines the course
of how we wish to act over our body, despite
the fact that our bodies (including brain
dependence as supervenience) have functional
and organic constraints over how we choose
to think and behave.
What is extraordinary about Aristotle's arguments
is that he both venerates the naturalized
notion that mind cannot exist independent
from our embodiment, what contemporary science
would reiterate is simply an empirical fact,
while at the same time refusing to reduce
mind to matter or material substance, which
admonishes scientific prejudices favoring
reductionism by allowing mind to enjoy concurrent
degrees of freedom in causal efficacy, form,
qualia, and self-definition.
Here the existential capacity to think, reflect,
choose, and deliberately act qualitatively
differentiates the human soul from its simple
biological (causal) constitution.
For Aristotle, the crux of what it is to be
a psychic entity or possess mind ultimately
subordinates individuality and personal experience
to a general collective essence, for soul
is universal form that applies to all.
This is why soul entails a metaphysical factor,
for it epitomizes a universality within a
concrete particularity.
We participate of a general, impersonal psychic
essence that may be said to apply to all people
regardless of historicity, gender, race, location,
or time, an anima mundi so to speak.
From Aristotle to Hegel and Whitehead, we
may see why Logic (as the essence of pure
thought thinking about itself and its operations)
may be attributed to a supraordinate process
animating the universe.
And what is most peculiar to this universal
form is that it obeys an unconscious logic,
a logic of the interior, something concealed
yet manifest.
Setting aside for the moment the ancient tendency
to import an immaterial, incorporeal, and
immortal dimension to the soul that carries
with it naive, incredulous supernatural properties,
the Greeks were the first to give serious
thought to the essence of the psyche as a
complex psychological composition and governance
responsible for interceding all human experience
including the quest for the spiritual and
the equiprimordiality of desire pining for
satisfaction.
To this day the ancients' meditations on psychic
reality remain an unequivocal bedrock for
understanding human phenomena including the
psychodynamics of motivation, cognition, and
reason, individual and social psychology,
mental well-being and suffering, communal
relations, political and economic unconscious
structures, ethical, aesthetic, and cultural
cultivation, and the convoluted process of
civilization forged on power, aggression,
violence, love and compassion, social negotiation,
and democracy.
From tragedy to thanatology, the struggle
over bodily passions, affective impulses,
rational choice, and ethical comportment,
including reconciling the good with the bad,
pleasure and pain, creativity amongst destruction,
truth over opinion, and folly from wisdom-all
transpiring within a dialectical underworld
vacillating between sex and death-is the hallmark
of modern consciousness.
It is rather remarkable that in all of the
philosophies of the unconscious we will examine,
from the summit of German idealism to psychoanalysis,
existentialism, and process metaphysics, we
may rightfully appreciate what Whitehead (1929)
means when he says that all of Western European
philosophy is merely a "series of footnotes
to Plato" (p. 39).
The notion of depth psychology, with its topography
of the soul, including the interdependence
of drive, desire, and pathos instrumental
in the ascendance of reason, aesthetics, and
ethical self-consciousness, may be viewed
as an ancient discovery; but like Hades and
the notion of aletheia, one that remained
hidden in those times, concealed yet always
present.
Just as the Delphic maxim inscribed in the
pronaos at the Temple of Apollo cautioned
all visitors to "Know Thyself," the psychoanalytic
attitude upholds the value of insight and
self-knowledge over the shrouded interior
of the life within.
