Both Conscious and Not:

Insights from Ancient Greek Philosophy and Contemporary Self Psychology on Consciousness, Becoming, Choice, and Vitality

Daniel Teplow • Colorado College

“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.” (1)

- Cormac McCarthy

Plato and Aristotle sought to uncover the depths of the human condition and in doing so, helped elucidate what it means to live as a conscious being. They realized that consciousness makes life complicated: out of the rift created by self-consciousness emerges both the deepest suffering, yet also the possibility of the heights of vitality. Further, the exploration of the relationship between consciousness and vitality incorporates that realm of mind which rationality alone cannot penetrate: the unconscious. It was not until more than two millennia after Plato and Aristotle that Nietszche and Freud led a radical breakthrough in the concept of mind by venturing beyond ego consciousness and proposing that there is a non-conscious dimension of our being that could and ought to be understood. Plato’s maxim to “know thyself” became even more complex in light of these fruitful insights.

Through an integrative exploration of Greek philosophy and contemporary self psychology I will examine the condition of self-consciousness: both the adversities and the opportunities it creates. This will begin with the ontological lack created through self-consciousness, then lead into the avenues for becoming and the notion of choice. Finally, I will examine how these latter possibilities are the foundation for living in a state of vitality.

Lack:

A fundamental and distinguishing part of human existence is self-consciousness. By self-consciousness I mean the ontological condition of being while reflecting on being: subjectivity reflecting on experience as object (2). This simultaneous reflective subjectivity and objectification is phenomenologically experienced as a removal from our experience. This removal and the rift it opens in our being feels like a ripping apart. We can first explore why this reflective subjectivity causes suffering from a psychological perspective. The 20th century psychoanalysts noted that it is not just that we are conscious, but that our reflective cognition has inbuilt propensities towards judgment, most of which comes down upon ourselves. 

Sigmund Freud posited that the superego is a fundamental part of consciousness – the particularly punishing voice of paternal judgment in our heads – it stands above us with an unwavering vigilance that is quick and harsh in its condemnation (3). Freud’s successor Heinz Kohut posited that one of the fundamental poles of the self structure is the realm of ideals. The nature of idealized projections is that we generally have a conception of what we would like to be which always lies beyond us (5). And while our ideals do not have this punishing quality, we are still left with a feeling of inadequacy in visualizing the space that lies between us and those ideals. So, from Freud and Kohut, respectively, we get a judgment from above and an insufficiency from in front. 

To further analyze the ontological condition of lack, we can turn to an existential perspective to detail the issues arising from the awareness of our own limits. To be conscious is to be aware of our own finitude. We are painfully aware of the limits of our being amidst a limitless setting. This primarily manifests in the awareness that there is a time limit in addition to cognitive constraints that limit the scope of our consciousness. Then, because of our awareness of the inherent limitations on our consciousness, we are cognizant of the reality that our knowledge will always lack. But, these limits are not some abstruse subject of pontification: they are painfully, viscerally alive for us. They surface in consciousness when an injury reveals our physical fragility, as we notice the signs of aging, when we see others exceed our intelligence, and when we can’t find the right words we need to communicate with a loved one. Perhaps most significantly, we live with the knowledge of our own mortality: we are beings that live with our own non-being. The bottom line is this: consciousness is cause for strife. But the primary possibility this rupture in being creates is the possibility of becoming. 

Becoming: 

The ontological lack created through self-consciousness destines us to be in pursuit of wholeness. Not only are we in pursuit of wholeness, but we generally feel a teleological task to develop: to become greater. In the Symposium, Plato describes this ontological becoming as the task of pursuing beauty. He states that ultimately we are erotically led by the “beautiful…itself by itself with itself” which is “always one in form; and all the other things share in that, in such a way that when those others come to be or pass away, this does not become the least bit smaller or greater nor suffer any change.”5 Ultimately we pursue not simply beautiful things, but the form underlying those things, the beautiful in itself. So as it is this form underlying all things, Plato asserts that we are teleologically destined to pursue the beautiful: a life of erotically uncovering deeper, more complex levels of beauty through the development of reason. 

This is what it is to go aright, or be led by another, into the mystery of Love: one goes always upward for the sake of this Beauty, starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs: from one body to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, then from beautiful bodies to beautiful customs, and from customs to learning beautiful things, and from these lessons he arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very Beauty, so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful (6).

Plato’s teleology is structured in this progression: lack leads us to love a body, then all bodies, then beautiful social laws, then beautiful things (which I take to generally mean as beautiful ideas), and then finally to know the Beautiful in itself. Then, following the Greek maxim that the mind takes on the object it intends, in knowing the Beautiful in itself we become immortal in a sense. 

We can also see the relationship between lack and a grand process of becoming in Aristotle’s metaphysical exploration of the unmoved mover. The unmoved mover is pure actuality. Pure actuality in itself is thinking without an object: the activity of thinking about thinking about thinking. 

“It is itself, therefore, that it [thinks], if indeed it is the most excellent thing, and the active [thinking] is active [thinking] of active [thinking].” (7)

How then does the unmoved mover actually move things if it is pure actuality? Actuality itself is what is desired by all things that have potentiality. So, out of a fundamental lack due to everything’s potentiality, all things endeavor to further actualize, to strive for wholeness. We can extrapolate then that this movement towards actuality occurs the more we are engaged in activities as opposed to actions, where we do things in which the end is contained in itself. And the most actualizing activity, the act where Aristotle believes we achieve divinity as conscious beings, is in thinking in itself: being a subjective reflection without an object. This is Aristotle’s theoretical state of being where we transcend that original cause of suffering, the painful laceration of subject and object. 

Lack also creates a pursuit of wholeness from a contemporary self psychological perspective. For Kohut, the ideal pole of the self structure “teleologically motivate(s) us to live into the future” in an individualized manner, as it is paired with the realm of idiosyncratic traits.8 It is primarily the ideal pole for Kohut that makes humans developmental in nature. Even if all other realms of the psyche are healthy and integrated, ideals perpetuate and always lie beyond us. For this reason, we are always in pursuit of greater versions of ourselves. For Kohut, the ontological lack entails that we live towards self-actualization where we transform the traumas of the past and become whole in living towards the future in a pursuit of ideals.

While these three thinkers differ on what it is precisely that makes us whole, they all point to the fact that there is a fundamental lack inherent in being a conscious being, which leaves us needing to pursue something greater: to be human is to be becoming. The key difference to note between the Greek conception of becoming and the psychoanalytic conception is that for the Greeks, becoming is ultimately entwined in a metaphysical set of meanings and that this endeavor is pursued primarily through deeper levels of rational understanding. This will be further explored in the last section, which will examine how one may live a meaningful life. Before, we must investigate the notion of choice, the faculty of humans that is both critical in the process of becoming and created through the condition of consciousness.

Choice:

Aristotle sanctified choice as a tenet of the self-conscious life. For Aristotle, choice arises out of sophisticated rational internal dialogue. He states that rationality can be directed in two ways: deliberation and contemplation. Deliberation allows us to practically develop character through adherence to virtues, the mean between the extremes of character states (9). Being virtuous allows us to not be overcome or underwhelmed by emotion. In moderating the passions, we can take appropriate actions, which provides us the space for the second task of rationality, contemplation. Contemplation is thinking as an activity in itself, which, in its purest form, is the most actualizing act: the act that brings us closest to Aristotle’s conception god (10).

However a self psychological framework can strengthen Aristotle's account of choice through its further developed concept of mind. The crucial nuance stems from the understanding that there is an unconscious region of the mind and that the particularities of the conscious and unconscious sectors must be integrated. More, psychoanalysis is further able to characterize the faculties of mind that are involved in the process of choice, so we can elaborate on the Greek notion of dialogue. 

A functioning ego will engage in dialogue with the information at hand. It will take in information from the ‘external’ world and relate it to the existing information at hand in the ‘interior’ world. But this is where deliberation becomes complicated because the information coming from the interior world is often wildly, utterly confusing. So then what is the “I” and how does it choose? Kohut posits that the mind is structured by the ego, id, social unconscious, and the self. The ego is the center of consciousness, rationality, and medium through which we negotiate the internal and external world. It is the experience of I that can engage in dialogue. However, if the ego only corresponds with the social unconscious then we are likely a spokesperson for ideology. If the ego only reasons in accord with the id then we are bodily objects and so is the world. If the ego only engages with itself then we are determined by a need for tyrannical control and we feel radically unreal amidst directionless, gratuitous reasoning. 

We are only capable of choice when the ego is centrally calibrated to a healthy nuclear self. The self is a largely unconscious structure at the core of the psyche and is the locus by which the other sectors of the psyche revolve. The self structure describes what Kohut posited to be the essential human needs through his years of clinical observations. These include the need to pursue ideals, the need for self esteem, the need for idiosyncrasy, and the need for loving relationships. We phenomenologically experience the presence of a healthy self structure through the binding energy that is eros (11). Thus, the self appears to consciousness, guiding a hopefully responsive ego by the language of the unconscious: intuition and feeling. So, the most authentic choice arises when there is a depth of dialogue and the dialogue takes into account the aims of the self. And due to the fact that the self is largely non-conscious, intuition and emotional intelligence are required for this attunement to the self. Thus, the ego exercises rationality in this communication with the self, but it cannot be purely rational. The ego must have developed emotional intelligence in order to comprehend the language required to dialogue with the self. Actions and activities then arise from the locus of this self calibrated dialogue which combines both rationality with embodied wisdom. Only through this self calibrated dialogue are we able to choose, rather than having our life dictated by forces distant from the core of what we are. When we choose in this manner, we know that we are genuinely making decisions and partaking in self-authorship as we feel a tangible sense of aliveness. 

Vitality:

Now we can examine how these two phenomena created by the facticity of self- consciousness culminate in a state of vitality. Vitality is a state of being wholly, lovingly alive in the world. It is living in a state of deeply entrenched meaningfulness: a movement in our entire being. This state of being arises out of the process of becoming which is pursued through choice. In other words, vitality arises when we mindfully pursue that which actualizes us. Only through this phenomenological experience of deep meaning are we able to redeem the ontological lack created by self-consciousness. The lack both creates the tragic reality of suffering yet redeems it by creating the possibility of vitality, the richest state of meaning (13).

This is where psychoanalysis provides crucial input into the notion of vitality. To move our entire being, movement must also include the unconscious realm of our being. Intuition and feeling are primary epistemological faculties engaged in this self-authoring journey of becoming. While rationality is essential in this process, it needs help from our other modes of knowing. And this is where Plato and Aristotle's reification of ‘pure’ rationality has its shortcomings. The deeper levels of meaning available to humans cannot be purely rationally known. Meaning must be experienced by the entirety of our being including the thoroughly embodied, non-conscious realms. We are both conscious and not so the deepest level of meaning will be both conscious and not. For that reason, experience engages meaning deeper and more fully than rational knowing alone. 

I would venture to say that Plato and Aristotle’s logical troubles in proving what is absolutely real while holding reason as the highest faculty capable of reaching the absolutely real highlights the importance of not subordinating intuition and emotion to reason. Plato cannot rationally prove how forms and things are connected if forms are immaterial and eternal, and things are material and mutable. Aristotle cannot rationally prove how or why potential, material entities came into existence by an unmoved mover which is pure actuality, immaterial. The fact that these attempts are logically incomplete and yet they did not accept these shortcomings ironically indicates that their reasoning was influenced by unconscious forces (as is all reasoning). However, I point this out not to detract from their wisdom. There is profound insight in their metaphysical inquiries and the frameworks of meaning they uncovered. Yet we arrive at this wisdom in part through logic, and in part through intuitive processing, coalescing in the experience of meaning. 

These metaphysical inquiries do not only contain wisdom, without engaging in them we cannot experience the depths of vitality. We must embark on these metaphysical investigations to infuse the ontological rift with sufficient meaning. We experience vitality at a level far deeper than is possible if we narrow our exploration to what is only individual and particular in us. Philosopher, John Riker, poignantly explains this with ethics in mind but the sentiment resonates well with metaphysics. 

...persons need to ‘dissolve’ their narrow, self-involved selves and merge with a wider set of meaning and human value. Without this wider set of meanings, our personal strivings have the character of being small, restless, and without final fruit. Such a dissolving of the self into a wider realm of meaning at the same time the self keeps its emergent adventure into singularity is what grants a person the joy of being a coherent Hegelian contradiction: singular, yet universal (14). 

 This is what I believe to be the essential task of Greek metaphysics and philosophy in general. And while I am thoroughly biased, I believe the embodied practice of philosophy is the practice best equipped to navigate this particular realm of being. To truly feel vital we have to perpetually develop a supra-individual understanding of the world that contextualizes our experience. This is something which self psychology and most contemporary discourses are less inclined to do, understandably out of fear of venturing into territory that cannot be quantifiably or empirically proven. Through metaphysical inquiry we allow ourselves to feel a sense of purpose and place within the broader workings of humanity and Being. And we can experience that sense of purpose through the act of exploration itself and through incomplete comprehensions. We don't have to logically prove what is real, eternal, immutable, unchanging, first, last, etc. We don't even have to arrive at definitive conclusions. I would venture to say that any time we claim to determine what is absolute, we close ourselves off in a surge of solipsistic omniscient fantasy. More our philosophizing resembles something more like dogmatic religiosity. And ironically, we close ourselves off to the experience of meaning which always entails a perpetual becoming. We merely live if we forget the harmonious relationship between the question of why and life itself. But, while that essential question is alive in us, we are alive.

Bibliography:

Cohen, Marc, Curd, Patricia, and C.D.C. Reeve. Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc, 2016.

Freud, Sigmund. On Narcissism: An Introduction, In The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1989.  

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. 

Riker, John Hanwell. Exploring the Life of The Soul: Philosophical Reflections on Psychoanalysis and Self Psychology. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017.

Endnotes:

1 McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage Books, 1985, 207-208.

2 Cohen, Marc, Curd, Patricia, and C.D.C. Reeve. “Plato: Republic,” in Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc, 2016, 226.

3 Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism: An Introduction”, in The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1989, 559.

4 Riker, John Hanwell. Exploring the Life of The Soul: Philosophical Reflections on Psychoanalysis and Self Psychology. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017, 74.

5 Cohen, Curd, and Reeve, “Plato: Republic” in Ancient Greek Philosophy, 226.

6 Cohen, Curd, and Reeve, “Plato: Republic” in Ancient Greek Philosophy, 226.

7 Cohen, Curd, and Reeve, “Aristotle: Metaphysics” in Ancient Greek Philosophy, 576.

8 Riker, Exploring the Life of The Soul, 44.

9 Cohen, Curd, and Reeve, “Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics” in Ancient Greek Philosophy, 608.

10 Cohen, Curd, and Reeve, “Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics” in Ancient Greek Philosophy, 620

11 Riker, Exploring the Life of The Soul, 60.

12 Riker, Exploring the Life of The Soul, 61.

13 Riker, Exploring the Life of The Soul, 75.