The Quest of Consciousness

Biologists may speak metaphorically of a "search" even on the molecular level. But the quest is a search that is aware of itself and able to articulate its own goals; for its specifically human foundations, then, we must turn

to psychology and linguistics. The fundamental distinction of psycho-analytical theory, as developed in Freud's last two decades, is not between unconscious and conscious but between id and ego. The id is the undifferentiated region of the psyche shut off (though never entirely) from consciousness and the outer world. Here "contradictions and antitheses persist side by side" (1959c, 20), the laws of logic are suspended, and time has no place. Though a source of vast psychic energy and potential conflict for the ego, to which it is "a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations" (1965, 73), the id impassively resists disruption of its self-contained equilibrium by any external disturbance. The only ordered movement evident in its inarticulate turbulence is an endless repetition manifested in the compulsive "ceremonial" of the neurotic which Freud compared to a religious rite, describing religion itself as "a universal obsessional neurosis" (1959a, 2:34)—a judgment to which he held firm throughout his long life.

The message cryptically communicated by the id in dreams and neuroses stems, as Freud especially emphasizes in his late writings, from "the archaic heritage which a child brings with him into the world, before any experience of his own"—a "phylogenetic" heritage (1949, 124; cf. 1939, 128) corresponding to instinct in animals. Instinct is not only conservative but regressive, "an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things " embodying the inherent inertia of organic life (1928, 67–68), so that "the aim of all life is death " (70). In this turbid sediment of the mind ruled by the past and repetitively asserting its sameness while slipping backward toward primal nonentity the quest for an indeterminate future has clearly no possibility of coming into being.

The ego of Freud's late writings is "the organized portion of the id" (1959b, 23), somewhat as life is the organized portion of matter. It is quintessentially an open system, since it "owes its origin as well as the most important of its acquired characteristics to its relation to the real external world" (1949, 58). Freud stresses no quality of the ego more than this openness to the world, without which the id "could not escape destruction" (1965, 75). In contrast to the automatism of the id, blind to the impediments of reality, the ego must be flexibly responsive to contrary needs which it continually strives to balance. Despite its relative weakness, it is the truly active component of the mind which, by its "freely mobile function" (1959b, 79), counteracts the id's obsessive compulsion to repeat what has already been. It not only bridles and guides the powerful id, substituting the reality principle for the id's pleasure principle, but inventively mediates between the conflicting demands of those unreconciled principles and strives to pacify the unpredictable conflicts to which they recurrently give rise.

It follows that the ego's pathological states result from disruption of this openness to the external world (1949, 58) by which the ego maintains its precarious balance. Neurosis derives from conflict between ego and id, and psychosis from "a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and its environment (outer world)" (1959a, 2:250–51). Neurosis tries to ignore reality whereas "psychosis denies it and tries to substitute something else for it": the healthy ego, in contrast, mediates between id and reality by seeking active achievement in the outer world. "It is no longer," Freud succinctly concludes (2:279–80), "auto-plastic but alloplastic ." Because it shapes not itself alone but the other, the balanced ego escapes the repetitious monologue of the ritualized id and enters into conversation with an unpredictable interlocutor; it is not only open to the external world but actively engaged in transforming a reality of which, through its openness, it is inextricably part.

In sharp contrast to the id, the ego—to the extent that it can resist submitting to its overawing attendant—is capable of development in a purposeful direction "from obeying instincts to inhibiting them" in the "progressive conquest of the id" (1960, 45–46) to which psychoanalysis, by redirecting the ego toward reality, importantly contributes. Freud repeatedly returned in his later writings to the implications of his early hypothesis that progressive renunciation of instincts "appears to be one of the foundations of human civilization" (1959a, 2:34; cf. 1961b, 7; 1961a, 44); and even though the specter of an unappeasable guilt ominously rising from the depths of a repressive civilization lurked like a beast in the jungle (or an Unbehagen in der Kultur) in the darkening light of Freud's final decades, he remained convinced that civilization can only have arisen, and can only be sustained (if at all), by sublimation of the sexual instincts "through the mediation of the ego" (1960, 20).

To the development of the ego humanity owes the history of which that development is an integral part, for no more than biological life can the ego be understood apart from its history. In certain individuals this progressive ego-differentiation through the always imperfect repression of instinct becomes a restless drive toward an always unreachable future goal—a drive to which not only the individual psyche but human civilization owes its growth and its margin of freedom. "What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization." In these few, Freud writes (1928, 76–77), the difference between satisfaction demanded and achieved "will permit of no halting at any position attained, but, in the poet's words, 'ungebändigt immer vorwärts dringt '. . . . So there is no alternative but to advance in the direction in

which growth is still free—though with no prospect of bringing the process to conclusion or of being able to reach the goal."^[5]

The mobile ego thus redirects the potent energy of repressed instinct from regressive inertia to aspiration toward an unattainable future—an aspiration that Freud associated not with the childish illusion of religion but with science. The ego "represents what may be called reason and common sense" (1960, 15), and Freud, an Aufklärer in dürftiger Zeit , held fast despite his worst forebodings to the belief, reaffirmed at the very time Hitler was seizing power, that "our best hope for the future is that intellect—the scientific spirit, reason—may in process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man" (1965, 171). Only an Eros guided by the rational ego can draw the mind progressively further from threatened subjection to the death-devoted id, and this supremely purposeful work is the work of human culture itself, "not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee." For the id is the changeless past, the ego the indeterminate future, the id what is reified and alien to us as evolving rational beings, the ego our essential self, and Wo es war , this most pessimistic of realists never ceased to hope, soll ich sein: "Where id was, there ego shall be" (1965, 80).

For Freud, not only was the human id a phylogenetic inheritance but its differentiation from the ego already existed in simpler organisms. Only the extent of its development was unique to the human species, and the task of psychoanalysis was to foster that development. Nor was Freudian psychoanalysis alone in this emphasis; Jung, though far more sympathetic to the archetypal and therefore inheritable unconscious (which for him was not a menacing "it" but a beckoning mother), knew that the human being could no more return to that universal matrix than leave it wholly behind. He too stressed that it is "man's turning away from instinct—his opposing himself to instinct—that creates consciousness" (1971, 4). Only active assimilation by the conscious mind can avert disruption of the psyche by the chaotic prima materia from which it is increasingly differentiated.

Man only discovers the world, Jung writes (1956, 2:417), "when he sacrifices his containment in the primal mother, the original state of unconsciousness"; therefore the libido must not stick fast like Theseus and Peirithous to the underworld but "tear itself loose from the maternal embrace and return to the surface with new possibilities of life" (2:420). In this emphasis on purposeful differentiation of consciousness from the unconscious, Jung and Freud are fundamentally one—though for Jung,

[5] The German words ("presses ever forward unsubdued") are spoken by Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, Part One, scene 4.

in total contrast to Freud, "the great psychotherapeutic systems which we know as the religions" (2:356) have consistently opposed the regressive tendency against which both repeatedly warned.

Despite the "discovery of the unconscious" widely regarded as the signal accomplishment of modern psychoanalysis, then—or rather in consequence of that discovery—for both Freud and Jung it is the organized activity of the \conscious mind formed through interchange with external reality that most fully distinguishes the human species. The phylogenetic unconscious of psychoanalysis is all but impermeably self-enclosed, but consciousness is a process that continually opens toward a reality that transcends, includes, and reacts back upon it. The unconscious is inherited, but consciousness develops through interaction with others. By its purposeful differentiation from the repetitive unconscious, and its engagement with an unpredictable and changing world, consciousness is by nature incessantly in quest of the unknown.

No psychologist has contributed more to understanding the human mind's interactions with the world than Piaget. In early infancy the absorption of reality into the undifferentiated self, which Piaget designates "narcissism" or "absolute egocentricity," is nearly complete. The origins of this condition are biological, since the organism and its environment are at first a continuum. The child can engage in no true dialogue because she lacks "the art of seeking and finding in the other's mind some basis on which to build anew" (1932a, 133). No quest is possible so long as she fails to differentiate any object from herself or to conceive of any need born of its lack. "Objective" thought requires the subject to posit an object distinct from yet in continuing relation to itself: "the objectivity of thought is closely bound up with its communicability" (137). This process is eminently dynamic, and developing awareness of purposeful movement, "introducing a progressive differentiation within the primitive continuum of life and purpose" (1929, 236), is essential to its realization.

During the first phase of this process (250–51), self and things are confused in "participation between all and everything, and desire can exert a magical activity over reality." In the second phase, differentiation begins; in the third, thoughts and words are no longer "conceived as adherent in things" but are "situated in the head." The condition of separation in which the quest (like van Gennep's rites of passage) always begins is not, Piaget thus suggests, the sudden outcome of any one event such as the trauma of birth or weaning from the mother's breast but results from the gradual differentiation by which each individual becomes conscious of a world distinct from herself and of a self potentially deprived of its object. The same development of consciousness that gives

rise to objective and thence to logical thought gives rise, by the separation it entails, to the possibility of unfulfilled desire and of a quest by the alienated self to overcome its lack of the global object from which it has been intrinsically but not incommunicably severed.

Two factors contributing to differentiation of consciousness as Piaget portrays it are especially important preconditions of the quest. One is emergence, at about a year and a half to two years, of "the capacity to represent something with something else, which is known as the symbolical function," manifested not only in speech but in play, postponed imitation through gestures, and mental pictures or interiorized imitations (1973, 16–17). Symbolism is a crucial step in development of consciousness because it entails relation between two initially differentiated "somethings," and because it exhibits intentionality independent of immediate need by evoking "the not actually perceived intended" (117). The development of increasingly adaptable symbolisms enables intention to be articulated and action to be oriented toward a goal represented in advance. As Bertalanffy affirms (1968, 20, 17), symbolism, the "differentia specifica of Homo sapiens ," "makes true or Aristotelian purposiveness possible" by anticipating a future goal that may determine present action.

The second differentiating factor is the child's insistent asking of "why," reflecting a more advanced distinction of subject and object. The interrogative mood expresses heightened uncertainty about a world no longer at the subject's command, and the question "why?" evinces nascent awareness of the possibility that purposes in that unfathomable world might reveal "discord between desire and its realization" (Piaget 1932a, 235). Here in the obstinate questionings of the child is an embryonic quest both purposefully directed toward an indeterminate future goal (the answer sought but not known) and urgently concerned with purpose or meaning itself. To the extent that the mind chooses to undertake this effort, its development from egocentric self-absorption to objective and communicable knowledge is both precondition and prototype of the spiritual quest as a conscious human activity.

Piaget consistently emphasized the continuity of biology and cognition as assimilative open systems characterized by differentiation and growth. The most advanced instrument of this open-ended developmental process is the intelligence, characterized, in opposition to habituated training, by "a reversible mobility constantly widening in scope" (1971, 253). Intelligence not only reflects but constructs "objective" reality, since objectivity is "a process and not a state" (64), and intelligence, by its distinctive mobility, is the cognitive process par excellence. Only by organizing itself through evolution of its categories

can intelligence organize the world it is perpetually constructing, and this progressive organization, which presupposes both initial differentiation and continual interaction of self and things, is the goal of the mobile equilibration that constitutes intelligence itself.^[6] Otherwise put, the goal of the developing consciousness in Piaget's "genetic epistemology" is meaning and truth—not as subjective projections or hypostatized absolutes, but meaning (in Mead's words) as "something objectively there as a relation" (1934, 76) and truth (in Piaget's) as "an organization of the real world" (1971, 361–62). Without the discrimination of things from self in which the development of adult consciousness originates, no quest would come into being (for there would be no object to seek); but without the interaction between self and things by which intelligence organizes an objectively meaningful world, none could possibly be accomplished.

In contrast, then, to the inertial self-absorption of both Freud's id and Piaget's egocentric infantile consciousness, the adult consciousness, or ego, is for both an open-ended process continually organizing itself and its world in response to external reality and advancing toward provisional conquests of coherent meaning from inner and outer chaos alike. Such a restlessly forward-moving psyche has a precursor in the "Faustian" consciousness inherited from the Renaissance. "The human understanding is unquiet; it cannot stop or rest, and still presses onward," Bacon wrote (37; Novum Organum 48), "but in vain. Therefore it is that we cannot conceive of any end or limit of the world; but always of necessity it occurs to us that there is something beyond." But the consciousness of Freud or Piaget, as distinct from that of Bruno or Bacon, is rooted in the biological constitution of the human animal, which tempers the no longer limitless dynamism to which it gives rise and guides its choice of directions by genetically transmitted impulses and restraints.

Because the goal of so dynamic a consciousness is in the process of evolving (like consciousness and like the organism itself), it can never be predetermined or finally attained. Unlike the unconscious, which is "the principle of all regressions and all stagnations," consciousness, Ricoeur remarks (1974, 113), "is a movement which continually annihilates its starting point and can guarantee itself only at the end" toward which it incessantly advances but never fully arrives. And because it is reflexively

[6] For Piaget (1967, 4), "the higher functions of intelligence and affectivity tend toward a 'mobile equilibrium.' The more mobile it is, the more stable it is." And equilibrium (151) is not passive but essentially active. The concept is central to his view of structure in biology, psychology, and linguistics.

aware of its own self-transcendent and self-creative activity, which thus becomes fully purposeful, "consciousness is not a given," Ricoeur affirms (108), "but a task ." Through its awareness of forward movement toward a contingent goal in the unforeseeable future as the task it has purposefully taken upon itself and cannot abandon, human consciousness becomes, in its innermost nature, a perpetual quest.