Hidden Minds Read Free Page A

perceptions with respect to the creation and maintenance of our sense of identity. According to Leibniz, the sense of having a single, continuous identity, extending from childhood through to old age, arises because of a sub-stratum of unconscious memories. Some of these memories enter awareness completely (allowing the individual to cross reference his or her past), while other memories merely hover at the fringes of awareness, providing a tenebrous context against which current mental events can take place. Leibniz also suggested something else that must have been particularly unpalatable to his peers; something which we today would call
unconscious motivation.
Again, minute perceptions played a key role. Leibniz suggested that minute perceptions might influence choices (and subsequent behaviour) without ever being detected in awareness. In other words, human beings were creatures with limited self-knowledge or insight. They might not be wholly aware why they choose to act in one way rather than another. Understandably, the concept of unconscious motivation never gained much currency in an age where introspection was thought to reveal the ordered workings of a wholly transparent and rational mind. The clear implication was that human beings were fundamentally irrational – a ridiculous idea. Unthinkable.
    It is ironic that Leibniz employed a mechanical image to explain how minute perceptions influence behaviour, thus inadvertently subverting the most potent symbol of the Enlightenment. For Leibniz, minute perceptions resemble ‘so many little springs trying to unwind and driving our machine along’. He goes on to explain:
    That is why we are never indifferent, even when we appear to be most so, as for instance whether to turn left or right at the end of a lane. For the choice that we make arises from these insensible stimuli, which, mingled with the actions of objects and our bodily interiors, make us find one direction of movement more comfortable than the other.
    Leibniz’s response to Locke (with its emphasis on unconscious determinants of behaviour) was a controversial publication in the Age of Reason. In addition, Leibniz’s reputation may have suffered when the French writer and wit, François Marie Arouet, more famously known as Voltaire, ridiculed him as the absurd philosopher Dr Pangloss in
Candide
(1759). Subsequently, Leibniz’s revolutionary ideas about the workings of the mind were somewhat neglected.
    Even so, as the well-oiled wheels of the table clocks turned, marking time with increasing precision, the world was edging forward to meet a new century; a new century in which mechanistic models of mind would be rejected and the concept of the unconscious fully embraced. ‘Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire’, wrote the poet William Blake, “tis all in vain!’ And he was right. The tectonic plates of art and philosophy suddenly shifted. Within a few decades the citadels of reason would be reduced to rubble.
    The romantic movement began in Germany towards the end of the eighteenth century; however, the romantic sensibility continued to be influential to the end of the nineteenth, affecting cultural life worldwide. Although conventionally considered an artistic movement, the influence of romanticism spread well beyond the aits. Indeed, the representatives of romanticism offered a new model of man and, inevitably, a new model of mental life. Moreover, right from the very beginning, the existence of the unconscious was fully accepted and integrated into romantic psychology. The poet Friedrich Schiller suggested that his poetry had an unconscious origin and argued that the creative faculties were improved when liberated from reason; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his influential
The Sorrows of the Young Werther
(?774) while ‘practically unconscious’; and philosophers such as Artur Schopenhauer began to describe man as an irrational creature driven by unconscious forces. Why the sudden