The Seen and the Unseen
Our own celebrated Zaklog the Deplorable than most writes:
The idea that we have an unconscious or subconscious mind seems perfectly reasonable to me. I mean, unless my experience of my own being is radically different from yours, do you not sometimes do or say things for reasons you cannot remotely explain? There’s far more going on inside our heads than we can fully account for. With a system as complex as our brains, how could it be otherwise?
My comment:
I cannot answer the question without making a distinction.
Each man, from history to prehistory, has certainly had events happen to him like seeing a dream, forgetting something he once knew and later remembering it, suffering sudden ideas and emotions for which he cannot account and so on.
That is the given. We all acknowledge that there is more to the mind and soul of man than man is aware.
But next is theory. How do was account for the unknown? We all agree that, like Eskimos fishing through ice, there is something alive down there, which from time to time rises up to our hooks, or breaks through the ice and grabs us.
We do not all agree about what is down there, or what means.
Freud and other charlatans pretending to “science” these things by making up Latin words for the parts of the soul, or by inventing non existent entities, events, and racial trauma. That part is all hogwash.
I do believe that there are things out of mind which come into mind and go out again, and many mysteries and strange dealings. I do not believe that the hogwash Freud and others made up about these things, and I certainly do not believe the all-materialism all-the-time assumption they slide into their creepy little theories without ever explicitly so saying.
I read Freud in college. He is a mythographer, not a scientist. He is a mountebank, about as legit as Professor Harold Hill from THE MUSIC MAN.
He attempted to invent a non-Christian myth to explain the human soul, one that rejected common sense, common morality, and the reality of original sin. So his conclusions were wrongheaded to the point of absurdity: having a healthy conscience was called being repressed. Morality was a by product of social pressure, not an observation of reality. Dreams were reliable but reason was not. And on and on.
We men are like Eskimos ice fishing. We have a little hole in the ice, and there we drop our lures and hooks. Whatever is beneath the ice, is the place where fish, ideas, passions, thought, memories whose origins we cannot explain, come from.
Freud says we are seated atop a dead pond with no entrances and no exits and no entrances. No underground streams lead anywhere. According to Freud, every inspiration I have for a story is actually me, but it is a split off part of me lurking in the darkness of which I am unaware. My conscience is also me. The sins that tempt me are also me. Dreams are also me. Prophetic visions are also me, and moreover are me lying to myself. Most of me is engaged in lying to myself at all times. All meaning in life in me, and I am a gullible liar who believes all his own lunacy. So is every man, including Freud, who invented this jabberwocky.
What if we are atop, not a dead pond, but an ocean? What if inspirations come of spirits?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
