Emanations from the Nocturnal Pit

'Intelligence is not only consciousness and actual existence, but qua intelligence is the subject and the potentiality of its own specialisations. The image when thus kept in mind is no longer existent, but stored up out of consciousness. To grasp intelligence as this night-like mine or pit in which is stored a world of infinitely many images and representations, yet without being in consciousness, is from the one point of view the universal postulate which bids us treat the notion as concrete, in the way we treat, for example, the germ as affirmatively containing, in virtual possibility, all the qualities that come into existence in the subsequent development of the tree. Inability to grasp a universal like this, which, though intrinsically concrete, still continues simple, is what has led people to talk about special fibres and areas as receptacles of particular ideas. It was felt that what was diverse should in the nature of things have a local habitation peculiar to itself. But whereas the reversion of the germ from its existing specialisations to its simplicity in a purely potential existence takes place only in another germ ? the germ of the fruit; intelligence qua intelligence shows the potential coming to free existence in its development, and yet at the same time collecting itself in its inwardness. Hence from the other point of view intelligence is to be conceived as this subconscious mine, i.e. as the existent universal in which the different has not yet been realised in its separations. And it is indeed this potentiality which is the first form of universality offered in mental representation'.

- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770 – 1831), 'Philosophy of Mind'.

Hegel's theory of the subconscious may be understood thus: I have a mental image of a rose, I picture the image of the rose as occupying space, but this space in which I imagine the rose is as inward and imaginary as the representation of the rose itself; I thereby recollect the rose. This image of the rose is transient, it disappears, but it is not eradicated from my mind, for it is stored within my subconscious, prepared to appear again at any moment. This we can explain through contrasting the implicit and the explicit, the potential and the actual.

My ego is simply implicit in itself; it is an empty and featureless universality; but what of my concept of the rose? My ego endeavours to apprehend the world through concepts, universals; in fact, it is itself the Concept, a conception of concepts, a movement of logical thinking towards its own self-comprehension. Which is to say, my ego, as the Concept, or as the Universal, is a self-differentiating universality; that is, it is the potentiality of its own specific contents.

The disappeared image of the rose retreats into the 'night-like pit' of my mind's potentiality. To conceive of my image of the rose, or my idea of the rose, as actually existing in my sub-conscious would be as absurd as to suppose that the rose exists in the seed in the sense that a microscope that is sufficiently powerful could reveal the red petals, and all the other actual parts of the rose, in the seed itself.

My image of the rose is a picture of the rose as it is removed from its relations and connections with other particular things; and thus it loses its particularity as it acquires a universal character; it is a generalized image; and this is my recognition of a rose as a rose. My mind continually produces from my subconscious, or from my subconscious there continually emanates, a flux of such images and remembrances. This is my reproductive imagination, in which such images are representative or universal in character, and each fresh impression as it comes into my ego is subsumed under such a universality; and the particular image comes to stand for something more than itself, namely, a universal.

This implicitness of the night-like pit could possibly feature in an understanding of mental illness; the subconscious does play a central role, according to Hegel, in the development of mental illness, mental derangement, insanity, spiritual sickness, however you may wish to conceive of it. Hegel's suggestion that 'it was felt that what was diverse should in the nature of things have a local habitation peculiar to itself', together with his characterization of the implicitness and potentiality of the night-like pit, bring to mind these lines of Theseus, from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream':

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold -

That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven.

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination,

That if it would but apprehend some joy,

It comprehends some bringer of that joy.

Or in the night, imagining some fear,

How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

William Shakespeare, (1564 – 1616).

It is an overactive productive imagination that governs the insane (as well as lovers and poets, but they are just as mad)... they see ogres and demons everywhere; whereas poets give the impression of having some kind of seizure, as they mix up the earthly with the spiritual and heavenly, and provide poetic descriptions of things that have no existence in this world. With such potent imaginations, they believe their happiness to have been delivered to them by a supernatural being, and, when amidst nocturnal darkness, if something was to startle them their imaginations would take a piece of shrubbery for a wild bear. As Hegel explains:

'The spiritually deranged person himself has a lively feeling of the contradiction between his merely subjective presentation and objectivity. He is however unable to rid himself of this presentation, and is fully intent either on actualizing it or demolishing what is actual'.

In modern parlance, this incapacity for discernment between inner subjective states of mental conflict and the objective reality of the external world characterises much mental disorder, as understood by psychology today. When delusional, a person will endeavour to hold fast to the belief that his or her subjective presentation is objectively valid, despite any contradictory evidence to it. Hegel explains further:

'The concept of madness … implies that it need not stem from a vacant imagination, but that if an individual dwells so continually upon the past that he becomes incapable of adjusting to the present, feeling it to be both repulsive and restraining, it can easily be brought about by a stroke of great misfortune, by the derangement of a person's individual world, or by a violent upheaval which puts the world in general out of joint'.

Hegel thus anticipates Sigmund Freud, (1856 – 1939), for whom a neurosis was a subconscious preoccupation with past and conflicting libidinous impulses and drives, or past experiences and feelings; such are then transferred onto the present, and in projecting the conflict in this manner the neurotic ego's functional capabilities become undermined and debilitated; he or she that suffers thus is then incapable of effective adaptation to his or her objective environment. Hegel's understanding of mental disorder is similarly grounded upon a dialectical upheaval that arises between desire and reason, a struggle to attain mastery over the mind's experience of pain and suffering. But then, by this picture mental disorder becomes a regressive withdrawal back to the night-like pit; rational consciousness reverts to the life of feeling, in an attempt to alleviate the mind's distresses.

But this is the night-like pit with which we are here engaged, and it is thus somewhat mysterious and obscure. Edgar Allan Poe, (1809 – 1849), in 'The Imp of the Perverse', theorises that we all in fact have self-destructive inclinations. In this tale a murderer who was unlikely ever to be connected with the murder confesses to it anyway, and is subsequently hanged. It was not from any feelings of guilt that he was thus inspired so to do; it was rather from a desire to make public what he had done even though this was most certainly not what he should do, from the perspective of his best interests. He was possessed by the imp of the perverse; this is perhaps Poe's notion of the subconscious, and of repression. He explains how it influences our behaviour:

'We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss - we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink away from the danger. Unaccountably we remain ... it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height ... for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it'.

Jean-Paul Sartre, (1905 – 1980), similarly accounted for vertigo as anguish to the extent of not so much fearing to fall over a precipice but of throwing oneself over it, given the ever present possibility, granted by our freedom, that we may succumb to an overwhelming desire to let ourselves fall over the precipice:

'Vertigo announces itself through fear; I am on a narrow path - without a guard-rail-which goes along a precipice. The precipice presents itself to me as to be avoided; it represents a danger of death. At the same time I conceive of a certain number of causes, originating in universal determinism, which can transform that threat of death into reality; I can slip on a stone and fall into the abyss; the crumbling earth of the path can give way under my steps. Through these various anticipations, I am given to myself as a thing; I am passive in relation to these possibilities; they come to me from without; in so far as I am also an object in the world, subject to gravitation, they are my possibilities ... My reaction will be of the reflective order; I will pay attention to the stones in the road; I will keep myself as far as possible from the edge of the path. I realise myself as pushing away the threatening situation with all my strength, and I project before myself a certain number of future conducts destined to) keep the threats of the world at a distance from me. These conducts are my possibilities. I escape fear by the very fact that I am placing myself on a plane where my own possibilities are substituted for the transcendent.

…...

'Anguish is precisely my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not-being. To be exact, the nihilation of horror as a motive, which has the effect of reinforcing horror as a state, has as its positive counterpart the appearance of other forms of conduct (in particular that which consists in throwing myself over the precipice) as my possible possibilities. If nothing compels me to save my life, nothing prevents me from precipitating myself into the abyss. The decisive conduct will emanate from a self which I am not yet. Thus the self which I am depends on the self which I am not yet to the exact extent that the self which I am not yet does not depend on the self which I am. Vertigo appears as the apprehension of this dependence. I approach the precipice, and my scrutiny is searching for myself in my very depths. In terms of this moment, I play with my possibilities. My eyes, running over the abyss from top to bottom, imitate the possible fall and realise it symbolically; at the same time suicide, from the fact that it becomes a possibility possible for me, now causes to appear possible motives for adopting it (suicide would cause anguish to cease). Fortunately these motives in their turn, from the sole fact that they are motives of a possibility, present themselves as ineffective, as non-determinant; they can no more produce the suicide than my horror of the fall can determine me to avoid it. It is this counter-anguish which generally puts an end to anguish by transmuting it into indecision. Indecision in its turn, calls for decision. I abruptly put myself at a distance from the edge of the precipice and resume my way'.

Similarly, the imp of the perverse is a metaphor for an impulse to perform the wrong action, and to utter the wrong thing, wrong that is given the context of a particular situation, the sole motivation for which being that it is simply a wrong action, or a wrong utterance, that can be performed. The imp is an impulse, directing a person, who is in other respects quite honest and good, towards devilry, misconduct and wrongdoing.

Charles Baudelaire, (1821 – 1867), in the prose poem 'Le Mauvais vitrier', ('The Bad Glazier'), describes a man who is delusional, and who shatters the transparent panes of glass that are carried by a window maker; his belief is that the world would be a better place if viewed through colourful tinted windows:

'There are certain natures, purely contemplative and unsuited for action, that nevertheless are compelled by mysterious and unfamiliar impulses into acting with a speed they would never have previously dreamed possible.

….

'One morning I got up feeling sullen, sad, disconcerted, and fatigued by idleness, with what seemed to be a desire to do some grand and radiant deed! And then I opened my window, alas!

(Observe, I entreat you, that the need in people to perform such acts is not the result of a conscious plan but rather of fortuitous inspiration in its ardent fervour not unlike that called hysterical by doctors - Satanic by those who know more than doctors - which urges us without resistance into a host of actions both inappropriate and dangerous).

The first person I noticed on looking out my window was a glazier, a glass-seller, the sharp discordance of his cries drifting up to me through the stale and heavy Parisian smog. It’s not possible for me to say why I was filled with such a sudden and tyrannical hatred for this poor man.

'Hey, hey!' I cried, motioning for him to come up. Not without pleasure did I reflect that my room was on the sixth floor and that he would climb those flights with difficulty, lest his fragile goods be damaged.

At last he appeared. With great curiosity I examined all of his panes and finally said: 'What? You have no coloured glass? No pinks, no reds, no blues, no magical panes? No panes of the gods? Impudent creature! You sell your wares to the poor, and yet you have no panes that are able to make life beautiful!' And I abruptly pushed him, groaning and stumbling, out to the stairs.

I then went out on my balcony and grabbed a small flowerpot; when the man reappeared at the door I let my engine of war fall right on the back of his pack, the reverberations from the impact sending him reeling. Falling on his back he managed to break all of his poor, portable merchandise with a crash akin to lightning striking a crystal palace!

And intoxicated by madness I screamed furiously: 'Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!'

Though such capricious endeavours are not without peril, and one must often pay dearly for them, what does an eternity of damnation compare with an infinity of pleasure in a single second?'

In Hegel we can find a possible explanation for such conduct. The manifestations of mental disorders are principally connected with the regions of that which he terms the feeling soul, as opposed to the active soul; a feeling soul that has a sense of self and yet regards its sensations and feelings as distinct from itself; it is passive in its relation to them. Implacable and inharmonious contradictions and oppositions, concerning which there seems no possibility for reconciliation, between the subjective and the objective ensue, and confronted with such persistent contradiction and discord, subconscious spirit occupies its attention with a backwards retreat into the originary serenity of the night-like pit, and thereby projects a feeling of concord from within itself.

Desire may be said to have a kind of dual aspect; in this case it is constitutive of a regression towards a previous longing that is in effect a summoning of the deluded mind back to the most primitive and deepest components of its own quietude. For deluded spirit, this primitive and originary realm of the subconscious mind pulls back the conscious mind to its primary form; and subjective spirit is once again an undifferentiated unity. No more is spirit impelled by the rational mind to seek for unity within an objective external world; rather, it resorts back to its prior form, projecting its desires within its own fantastic imaginings; in effect, at a fundamental level spirit regains its lost unity through falling into a slumber; it has answered the summons to return to the night-like pit; the dialectic of delusional states has worked itself out.

From the night-like pit spirit flows; from the night-like pit delusions and mental derangements are given shape and their peculiar features; the self-same pit within which perhaps the confusions and delusions, and the neuroses, and the sufferings and the distresses, of the mind may play themselves out, and resolve themselves. Or perhaps not.

O Rose, thou art sick!

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy,

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

- William Blake, (1757 – 1827).