CHAPTER II

A RELATIVE CONCEPT OF CONSCIOUSNESS--AN ANALYSIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN ITS ETHNIC ORIGIN

In presenting a psychological discussion that presupposes the altered basis of the relativists, I am under no illusion as to the wide disparity between the mathematical conception of the relativists in regard to the universe and the clinical preoccupations of a psychopathologist. It is now conceded, however, that the theory of relativity is not without its revolutionary influence upon our scientific thought processes generally. And so, although I am not competent to an appreciation of the theory of relativity in the objective sense of the physicists, I hope I shall not seem presumptuous in attempting a discussion of consciousness that demands as its basis a viewpoint that is analogous to theirs.

As I understand it, the inadequacy of the Newtonian system of astronomy is its autogenous exclusion of data requisite to a principle which presupposes a basis of universal applicability. Assuming an unqualified absolute to reside within the limits of its own circumscribed area, it posits a principle which fails to take account of factors operating within the larger constellation wherein its own system is but a contributory element. So that, in estimating the components requisite to a more inclusive scale of computation, the Newtonian postulate omits to reckon with the principle of the time-space element that is constitutive of the extension intrinsic to itself and that is, therefore, mathematically indispensable in an encompassment of the universal and all-inclusive astronomical purview with respect to which its own system becomes but relative and extrinsic.

Little by little the necessities of a widening outlook have demanded a gradual broadening of conceptual principles generally. Of late I have been led to views that appear to warrant the conclusion that, in the sphere of psychic phenomena no less than in the realm of physics, a system of absolutism, preclusive of data existing outside its own autogenously circumscribed principle, wholly dominates our presumably conscious world. Accordingly, if we are to reckon with consciousness upon a true and inclusive basis, it is required that the system of absolutism thus embodied shall give way to a conception of relativity in the conscious sphere comparable to the principle of relativity in the physical universe.

I do not see why, in his mental and emotional reactions, man may not so far free himself from the traditional superstitions of imbued inference as to recognize at last that, even with respect to conceptions that are the basis of his own mental operations, there is a difference between the values that seem and the values that are. I do not see why he may not recognize that processes which he has hitherto regarded as habitually inevitable are not by any means organically necessary, but that the two may in fact be essentially contradictory one of the other. If in the objective world man may ungird himself of the accustomed limitations of a hitherto accepted Euclidean geometry, may he not within the sphere of his subjective consciousness also rid himself of prepossessions which, though they appear to us now as no less basic, may ultimately prove equally non-essential?

We have recently waged a world-war which, according to the state of mind of its participants prior to its occurrence, was the admittedly inevitable recourse, but which, in the opinion of thinking men subsequent to its enactment, is now equally admitted to have been a wholly unnecessary eventuality. How then, upon our present basis of mentation, may we conclude what is an adequate criterion by which we may determine a dependable process of thinking? If we may know our states of mind only after we have vented the emotions that first incited them, of what use is it to know them? If states of mind can produce calamities that gather their toll of human life by the millions and we can, by subsequently taking thought, come to regard them as unnecessary, what must be felt toward states of mind that have produced such calamities? Surely it is not the part of intelligence to feel regret of a disaster only after the disaster has befallen. If disaster need not befall, would it not be wiser to deplore it beforehand and so avert the disaster? This would seem the logical course, but the truth is that the logical course is not accessible to man in his present state of unconsciousness. Man may think logically but he cannot be warranted to act logically. For, in his present stage of development, his actions are predominantly under the guidance of his emotions and his thought can therefore only follow after.

Consciousness is the individual’s acquiescence in sequences that are determined by the necessities of organic law. Unconsciousness is the individual’s resistance to these organic processes. As consciousness is anterior to its own realization, so unconsciousness ever follows in the wake of its own event. We think to-day only in terms of what ought to have been yesterday, and the event of to-morrow embodies again the reaction to the issues of to-day. Thus our actions are always but the unconscious reflections of the day preceding, and in our unconsciousness it is only in the aftermath of the morrow that we interpret the omens of to-day.

If man’s judgment is competent to apprehend the data of events subsequent to their occurrence, why may it not be equally possible, through our prior apperception of the mental states leading up to them, to envisage the same events with the same clarity anteriorly and thus forestall the useless mistakenness and destruction that now follow inevitably with their enactment? Surely it is clear that, in continuing to preserve unaltered this same state of mind whose world-wide consequences we have just witnessed, we may be, at the present moment, preparing a similar if not a yet greater catastrophe, the while we are at the same moment as completely oblivious of it. Indeed, from a position that is anterior to the emotional inducements to which our mental states are inevitably subject in our present absolute view, it will be seen that an unconscious and destructive disposition toward life is as inseparable from an absence of self-cognizance on the part of the social mind as the factors of disintegration and unconsciousness are inseparable within the life-sequences of the individual unit.

In its necessary limitation with respect to the relativity of consciousness in its universal compass, the constellated system of processes which at present comprises the sphere of the mental life will, in my view, ultimately appear analogous to the traditional system of Newton with respect to the universe of relativity in the encompassment of objective mathematics. As in the intrinsic principle of absolutism comprising the Newtonian system of gravitation, so in the self-determined principle of absolutism, comprising our present system of psychology, a dimensional factor has been left out of account, the inclusion of which completely shifts the basis of former calculations and so distorts our habitual reckonings as to demand the fundamental reconstruction of accepted values.

But while the principle of relativity comprehended by the objective formulae of the physicists is mathematically beyond my reach, the conception of relativity within the subjective life appears to me not only compellingly clear, but organically necessary. Indeed, in the absence of this conception of the relativity of consciousness, it is no longer possible for me to reckon adequately with the processes of the mental life. For in default of a working basis broad enough to embrace the dimensional element of the system, individual and social, whereof we ourselves are a component part, there is lacking the scientific comprehensiveness requisite to a universal principle of evaluation.

It is worthy of note that between the objective or mathematical theory of relativity of Einstein and the subjective or organismic theory of relativity here considered there is to be traced, however inconclusively, a philosophical parallelism that is significant. My feeling is, though as yet it is little more than an intimation with me, that this cosmological parallel between the subjective and objective spheres of relativity marks a concomitance that is consistent throughout. I do not see how it could be otherwise since the subjective and the objective spheres of life, embodying the bipolar aspects of the phenomenal world, represent but obverse phases of one and the same universe. The analogy that interests me here, however, has to do with the feature that is equally the basis of the two modes of relativity, namely, the feature which entails the abrogation of absolute standards of evaluation and the recognition of the kinetic factor that is organic to both. In the objective interpretation of astronomy this factor comprises the mathematical space-time coefficient of the physicists’ fourth dimension; and in a subjective interpretation of consciousness it comprises correspondingly the kinetic element that determines the functional coefficient of the organic life as a whole.

The thought represented in “the organic life as a whole” is, like the inclusive scheme of the physicists, to be understood only by exclusion, that is, by exclusion of a point of view that is not organic, or by exclusion of the absolute system, individual and social, comprising our present static basis of consciousness. As this organismic conception of consciousness is relativity itself within the subjective sphere, its encompassment can no more be apprehended in our present scheme of psychological evaluation than the relativity of the physicists can be apprehended on a static Newtonian basis.

Einstein’s theory of relativity is not intelligible on the absolute basis of the older system of astronomy, of which conception the newer mathematical theory is, by reason of its wider inclusiveness, the logical replacement. Likewise, the theory of subjective relativity or the organismic conception of consciousness cannot be understood on the basis of the absolute principle resident in the Freudian conception of the unconscious, of which principle the organismic conception is, by inclusion, the more encompassing formulation.

Hence this organismic conception of consciousness, subsumed under the postulate of relativity, will be understood only as we discard entirely the absolute conception represented in our present system of psychology. Because of our own absolutistic basis, we do not realize that the absolutism intrinsic to the dynamic system of our present individualistic conception of consciousness maintains a position that is relatively not less static than the older descriptive systems of consciousness in relation to the dynamic psychology of Freud. The Freudian system is dynamic in respect to the system it has superseded but static in respect to the principle by which it must now in turn, I believe, be superseded, precisely as our own Newtonian system is dynamic with respect to the older Ptolemaic system of astronomy it has transcended but static with respect to the mathematical principle of relativity which now in turn has transcended it.

Of course, the fact that the intrinsic limitation of our astronomical systematization has led us arbitrarily to regard time and space as absolute entities, rather than as the functional co-ordinates of matter, has no immediate bearing whatever beyond the need of adjusting a quite infinitesimal error in the astronomical reading of certain minimal deflections. It does not in the least alter the practical conduct of human affairs. For the grocer and the apothecary our standards remain undisturbed. So also in the more intimate adaptations of our human relations, the absolute basis of mensuration that has actuated our reckonings with respect to the objective world about us has not for a moment touched our subjective mode or the affective sphere of our living. But when this artificial basis of self-determined absolutism operates within the organic sphere of man’s affective life, wherein is the very centre of his being, there are recorded errors whose consequences reach to the core of life itself. It is here, in the absolute system of evaluations pertaining to the affective reactions of human conduct, that there is needed the correcture in reading the deflection, both individual and social, that comprises man’s unconsciousness.

We have yet to learn that it is in the common affects of men that there resides the basis of their collective biology. Only in the affective reactions comprising the native, organic continuum of life may we trace the menstruum of our human consciousness. And so, in approaching the affective or organic implications entailed through the arbitrary systematization that is our own absolutism, we are entering upon the study of the distorted sensations and reactions in which is embodied, I believe, the essential pathology of consciousness represented in the neuroses.

In considering the conception of the relativity of consciousness we shall acquire a clearer insight into the more comprehensive scheme subsumed under it, if we will begin with an analysis of the rudimentary processes comprising our personal judgments and consider the elements into which our primary impressions may be resolved.

Our judgments are formed from the material of our impressions or, as we say, we reason from observation. This being so, what must be the substance of our observations and what the nature of the processes of reason thus derived? To observe is to stand apart from and record the impressions reflected to us from the object observed. So that upon consideration our observations are seen to consist of the reflected images or mental pictures of the world of objects by which we are surrounded. That is to say, impressions of objects consist of the aspect or surface which is reflected to us from them and which is thus mirrored in the reflecting surface of our own perceptions.

But in this very process of observation an unwarranted assumption has already been posited in advance--the assumption, namely, that the position intrinsic to the observer is an all-inclusive and authentic one. Already it presumes a universe of which the onlooker’s own self-limited position is the basis. It does not account for the integral component that is the observer’s own organic dimension. In brief, the very point of view of the observer lays claim to the prerogative of an absolute cosmogony whereof he is himself the unconsciously static, self-determined centre. Whatever the point of view, it is invariably “the point of view” of the observer. So that in constituting ourselves perceptual foci from which, according to our self-appointed terms, we look out as from a background upon the phenomena of life, we have unconsciously become artificially detached spectators of a merely static aspect of life. This is what I mean by the autogenous exclusion of data extrinsic to the self-determined system of which we ourselves are only a part, but which, in the light of the relativity of consciousness as a whole, is revealed, on the contrary, as an arbitrary system determined by our own static absolutism. Regarded from the point of view of relativity, to adopt such a detached, observational outlook toward life is to view it in the merely flat, bidimensional plane of the image. It is not to experience life through participation in the extension of its full-dimensional actuality.

Upon analysis, then, our world of subjectively tabulated impressions becomes but an artificial world reflecting the artificial systematization that is our own detached observation of it. Our unconsciousness is our failure to realize that bidimensional reproductions of actuality are not actuality. Our own organisms as well as the surrounding objects of actuality are elements that are equally to be included in the organic continuum of our human experience. The mental pictures comprising our bidimensional impressions of objects, however adequate as pictures, are not adequate as expressions of actuality in the sense of the dynamic extension comprising our own organic inclusion.

Contrary, therefore, to the casual assumption current among us, we do not apprehend the objects about us as they exist in their cubic outline, but only in the bidimensional “foreshortening” that is our own mental or pictorial impression of them. Our so-called objective apperception of the world of actuality is in fact superficial and unreal. Our alleged world composed of impressions is pictorial rather than actual. It is static rather than kinetic. In consequence of the bidimensional visual plane in which our objective fields are reflected, it is inevitable that our environmental actuality should appear in the form of pictures before us. Looking out upon the world from a bidimensional basis, we can perceive it only in terms of the reflected image formed upon our own bidimensional mental background. It is due also, then, to this contributing factor of a flat or reflected visual image within ourselves that there is registered within ourselves a flat or reflected mental image of the world about us. For in virtue of the bidimensional picture in which our impressions are necessarily reflected, our mental perception of objects is likewise necessarily pictorial and bidimensional.

Such is the probable ethnological account of this misconstruction of actuality that underlies our mental world. The significance of such a pictorial and artificially foreshortened representation of the objective world and its mental influence in foreshortening the tridimensions of actuality in general cannot be overstressed. We need to realize the circumstance of our remote or bidimensional position of merely mental or impressionistic observers. From this position the mentally reflected and artificially pictorial outlook with which the world of solidarity is individually viewed by us represents but the portrait of life whereof the reality is the inclusiveness of life as experienced through our subjective continuity as functional elements in the organic whole. So that while it is most true that we reason from observation, yet if our observation is imbued with a bidimensional or superficial bias, then our reason is also influenced by this same bidimensionally imbued bias. If our observation is not subjectively inclusive of the objective world about us, in the same measure our judgments are not inclusive of it.

It is this non-inclusiveness of consciousness that constitutes our mental systematization. In this perceptual relationship to life, due to our detached basis of interpretation of it upon grounds of the apparent aspect rather than of its solid actuality, consists the arbitrary absolutism of our present system of consciousness. Due to this organic misconception of consciousness, we habitually prefer the picturesque semblance of the aspect to the pragmatic inclusiveness of the actual. This is why we tend to explain life rather than to live it. This is why the adduced hypothesis of life counts with us more than life itself. But an account of life that does not include the consciousness that is our own kinetic function and repudiate the static pictures of life arbitrarily projected by us does not compass life in the full orb of its rounded actuality. A principle of life that does not embrace the principle arising out of the bias of our own self-made systems of personal absolutism and unconsciousness is not adequate to encompass life in the rounded sum of its functional inclusiveness. It is needful to recognize that, in the unconscious absolute underlying the personal relatedness of each of us to every other, there is involved an organic resistance or a mutual repulsion among the elements of the societal personality that forms an impasse to its concerted function. On the contrary, in the mutual inclusiveness of our individual organisms as elements within the confluent sum we thus compose, there is embodied the organic continuum that underlies the societal organism of man as a whole. It is this homogeneous substrate of man’s consciousness in its totality that is implied in the principle of the relativity of consciousness.

If, however, an ethnological account is adequate to explain the remote, pictorial relation in which we stand with respect to the world of objective actuality, such an account is not adequate to an understanding of the pictorial view we have unconsciously come to assume toward the world of subjective actuality or in relation to the organisms with which we constitute a common species and with which, being subjectively akin, we are organically identical. If phylogenetic theory accounts for the deflections from reality of the reactions of consciousness in the large, it does not account for the deflections of consciousness in the particular reactions of the personality that determine our relations to our individual fellows. Thus far we have considered this absolute system comprising our personal basis only in relation to the objective world or to the world of things; we have not yet considered it subjectively or in relation to the individuals with whom a common affectivity renders us organically identical. It is only within the subjective sphere of our affects, representing man’s organic racial continuum, that this distortion of our outlook is manifested in its deepest poignancy.

It is, therefore, only in its ontogenetic mode that we may fully realize the organic deviations within the consciousness of man, due to his bidimensional and unreal apperception of his fellows, and to his consequently false inferences resultant upon an artificially remote and pictorial attitude toward them. It is here alone, I believe, that is to be traced the philosophy of the deflections observable in the above-mentioned reaction of personal resistance as it appears not only in the difform reaction characterizing the isolated personality of the neurotic individual, but also in the uniform reactions presented in the relatively no less deflected group-expressions comprising the collective personality of the social consensus. It has become more and more clear to me that it is this error of our mental refraction, due to the subjective deflection comprising the bidimensional judgment of each in assuming a pictorial rather than a real relationship to others, that is the essence of our resistances. In this surface reflection, that is the personal attitude of each toward every other and that embodies the psychology of our resistances, is represented man’s traditional systematization, both individual and social. For, in judging or viewing life on the absolute basis of how it appears to me, I automatically render it beholden to my personal interpretation of it. In my autocratic attitude of onlooker I necessarily repudiate the inherency of the individual or object looked on. Thus, as the self-assumed centre of the universe, the individual is completely detached psychically from the organic actuality of everything within his observation, and, in his present mental attitude, whatever he thinks that he knows and feels is unconsciously constrained by the illusory supremacy of his personal wish. This is the insidious fallacy of the reflected aspect. This constitutes the personal absolute or systematization which, in dominating our present mode of consciousness, completely distorts the universe of reality. It is such a reflective attitude of personalism and unconsciousness that is our exclusion of data that lie outside the system intrinsic to ourselves and that may be included only in the fuller comprehension of an organic relativity.

This reflective attitude entails an autocratic interpretation of life on the basis of one’s own personal evaluation, and its effect is to sever the natural bond between the elements of the societal body. As the inevitable concomitant of this habitually reflective attitude toward life there is mental dissociation rather than an assimilative participation such as may only be realized in the inclusiveness of consciousness as an organic whole. Only an organic coalescence in our common affectivity, as contrasted with our present attitude of detached, bidimensional perception of one another, will open the course to spontaneous development in yielding the natural way to the instinct of mating and reproduction wherein alone is the basis of a constructive societal life. For resistance is of the affective life. It is a phenomenon that is essentially organic in that it marks an obstruction within the societal personality of man in the relation inter se of the elements, individual and social, of which our societal personality is composed. In our blind inversion of the essential processes of life, we fail to recognize that there can be no healthful growth of the organism apart from the soil to which it is indigenous. If isolation and an artificial medium are death to the growth of vegetation, they are death no less to the societal instinct of our common consciousness in which is found the natural medium for the growth and activity of man. In the measure in which we allow ourselves to participate in and become intrinsic and contributory elements in the world of organic actuality about us, will our pictorial mode of envisagement yield place to the subjective experience of a dimensional inclusiveness that is complete in its actuality. To view the world of actuality in its merely static, cross-sectional appearance is to know only the photography of life. Its kinetic reality may be known only through the subjective inclusion of our organic participation in it.

We cannot return too often to original sources in repudiating conceptions whereof they are the basis. We experience reality only in the measure in which we disavow the symbols of unreality. In proportion as we apprehend subjective fallacy may we encompass the reality underlying it. It is where our conceptual constructions of life leave off that our constructive conceptions of life begin. We have seen that the mathematicians have come to regard as theoretically worthless those objective calculations whose standards of evaluation are not measured in accordance with the principle of an inclusive relativity. Likewise a formulation of values in the subjective sphere of consciousness lacks an adequate principle of evaluation if it does not rest upon the relative principle comprising the organic and inclusive conception of consciousness in its societal totality.

If, in the dissociation of the consciousness of man from his organic individuality, he is unconsciously assuming a personal absolute that is merely a reflection of the mass absolute assumed by the collective social unconscious about him, then what we call the consciousness of man with its presumable function of dependable evaluation is at all times but a system of images, and his vaunted prerogative of a personal absolute is only a dissociative reaction due to his own secondarily adaptive systematization. Upon this basis, what we call our opinions are, after all, not our opinions, and our so-called beliefs are not beliefs at all. For all our formulations and systematizations with respect to human consciousness are but rationalizations serving as convenient foils for the blind assertion of the personal absolutism that is but the autocratic prerogative of our own dissociation, both individual and social.

While theoretically, the objective findings of Freud are of unquestionable validity throughout, as has been fully corroborated through the repeated investigations of those of us who have studied the manifestations of the unconscious in ourselves and in others, my researches within the last years have convinced me that our objective finding is not the point--that what we have called the objective evidence has been all along but our personal or adaptive evidence and that, being unconsciously based upon habitual bidimensional inference, this basis has no relation whatever to life in its organic inclusiveness. The system of Freud is thus adequate only on the adaptive basis of normality. By normality I mean the consensus comprising the personal absolute vested in the unconscious of the collective mind determining the social average.

It is disconcerting, I know, now that we have but recently settled ourselves to enjoy in comfort the established principles of Freud’s psychology, to think that we may be compelled through the requirements of wider accommodation to seek other ground. Nevertheless, if the position in which we have settled to study the complexes of men is itself just another complex of the social mind whereof the individual mind we would study is but a reproduction, it is clear that we have no choice but to recognize the autonomy of our absolutistic values of reckoning and to readjust our measures of consciousness in accordance.

Surely, if the whole meaning of our mental orientation is a disorientation, if our rationality is everywhere but irrationality, if with all of us alike the vicarious image comprising the reflection of our systematized selves takes precedence over the native reality of our primary organic individuality, there is no other course than that we wipe the board clean and approach the problem of consciousness completely anew. For, clearly, since our present process of mentation is not spontaneous or from within out, it is necessarily adaptive or from without in. Hence, as the reflection of the absolute principle that is the personal basis of each, it can never lead to a realization of the relativity of our conscious life nor to the acceptance of the organic individuality that is the all-embracing life of man in the inclusive principle wherein alone his consciousness truly resides.

It is the position of this thesis that, when we neglect to take account of the organic mass consciousness of man to which the personal systems of men, single and collective, are but relative, we fail to reckon with a significant dimension entering into the determination of the subjective life of man. On the basis of the time-space extension of the astronomers’ fourth dimension it is possible to compute errors of deflection only through a conception of the universe which regards our own planetary system as a function of and hence relative to a more encompassing programme of planetary motion. Concomitantly, it is possible to evaluate accurately man’s place in the subjective scheme of consciousness only through a conception which regards his present personal and social absolute as being itself relative to a more comprehensive background comprising the relativity of man’s consciousness as a whole. There is the need to recognize that in the sphere of consciousness, as in the realm of physics, it is in the kinetic dimension comprising the organic participation and inclusiveness of life itself that consists the functional component which actuates the other three dimensions and which, in uniting all, embodies the relativity of consciousness as an organic reality.

In this transition from bidimensional picture to tridimensional actuality, from contemplation of aspect to participation of function, a gulf is spanned that bridges a most significant hiatus in the course of man’s evolution. It is no less an interval than that which separates the mode of man’s unconsciousness from the mode of his consciousness. For in this transition we are no longer dealing with the mere static dimension of the pictorially reflected image of actuality, but there enters the kinetic extension of an organic inclusiveness corresponding to the functional or space-time extension of the physicists’ universe of relativity--a universe which, in the psychological no less than in the physical sphere, entails the abrogation of our prevailing system of absolutism and its replacement through the conception of the relativity of the conscious life as a whole.

With a view to measuring the deflections of personality, by and large, in the light of the relativity of consciousness, it is necessary that they be regarded first in the concrete expression of their individual and social forms, and that subsequently we study these aberrations of consciousness in the yet wider expression of their sociological implications generally.