In 1977 I
opened in Prague a seminar on Plato for young people who were deprived of
higher education. We met once a week. In preparation for each session I chose a
text of Plato which I read during the week in the original and then presented
to my students in the seminar. This opened to me unprecedented insight into the
interplay of my consciousness and my subconscious. For during the week the text
‘went in’ in Ancient Greek, in the seminar I reproduced it in the Czech language. In
what ‘form’ did Plato’s thought reside in my subconscious? In Ancient Greek, Plato’s
sentences were entering the narrow straits of my consciousness word by word,
passing through it, and sinking into my subconscious, losing their verbal form;
my understanding of what Plato was saying transcended verbal expression in my
subconscious; this is why his thoughts, which ‘went in’ in Ancient Greek, could
‘get out’ in my Czech.
In 1978 I
invited Oxford dons to my seminar; the first to visit us was Dr Kathleen
Wilkes, in April 1979. She spoke without notes. I let her talk as long as I
could follow the thread of her narrative. I stopped her each time at the point
when I would have lost what she was saying if I let her go on. In this ‘timing’
of her talk I relied entirely on my subconscious, for my consciousness was
absorbed by listening to her. Each time I reproduced in Czech what she had said
in English. What had been entering the narrow straits of my consciousness and passing
into my subconscious in her English was emerging from my subconscious into the
narrow straits of my consciousness in my Czech.
***
We may become
aware of the interplay between our consciousness and our subconscious whenever
we listen to the radio and observe how the words enter our consciousness, pass
through it, and sink into our subconscious. [Why radio? When we listen to a
person speaking, we are absorbed by that person’s speaking and have no mental
space for observing what is happening in our consciousness and our subconscious.]
When we observe how narrow is the strait of consciousness in which the words we
listen to are actually present to our consciousness, we begin to realize that our
understanding of what we listen to is the result of the interplay of our consciousness
with our subconscious, completed in the subconscious – we have ‘a feeling’ that
we understand.
Asked to
show that we understood what we had listened to, we must ‘look’ into our
subconscious and put our understanding into words. As we undergo the process of
expressing our understanding in words, we can observe again how the words
emerge from our subconscious, pass through our consciousness, and word by word sink
into your subconscious. Each sentence is pre-formed in the subconscious,
acquires its form as it passes through our consciousness, and becomes a
meaningful whole in our subconscious. Our understanding, and thus the subconscious
involved in acquiring it, deepens as a result.
Aristotle’s
concepts dunamis (potentiality) and energeia (actuality) may
help us to conceptualize the interplay between our consciousness and our
subconscious. Energeia signifies
‘being in action’, not just actuality, and as such is suited to describe what’s
going on in our consciousness; dunamis
signifies power and ability, not just potentiality, and as such is suited to describe
our subconscious.
***
We can become
aware of the interplay between our consciousness and our subconscious in what
we think, say or listen to when it is being said, but not in what we perceive
by our senses outside the sphere of thinking. The question therefore is,
whether our subconscious is involved in ‘sensory’ perception of the world
around us. To answer this question, we must consider the ways in which we ‘perceive’
the world with our eyes. I put ‘sensory’ and ‘perceive’ in quotation marks, for
physics and neurophysiology inform us that we do not actually perceive the outside world with our eyes. Physics
informs us about the world outside us,
which comes to the fore in scientific experiments and can be registered by
scientific instruments. It tells us that our eyes are affected neither by the
objects we see around us nor by their images, but by the waves of ‘light’ scattered
by those objects. – I put ‘light’ in quotation marks, for there is no light in the world outside us. – Neurophysiology tells us that the ‘light’ waves
affect photoreceptors on the retina of our eyes, which in their turn affect
optic nerves. These effects are then processed on the way to the brain. Again,
just as there is no light in the outside
world which is the domain of physics, so there is no light in the brain itself,
which is the domain of neurophysiology. On the basis of the physiological
processing of the optic information in the brain that something in us generates light in us and the world which we see in
that light as being outside us. In
‘Self-knowledge as an imperative’ on my website I have adopted for this
‘something in us’ the term human spiritual nature, HSN.
HSN is as
real and necessary as the scientific data provided by physics and
neurophysiology. Unfortunately, physicists and neurophysiologists fail to see
this fact; the ‘outside world’ of human experience intrudes into the way they
think and talk about the findings of their sciences. Let me give two examples
of such intrusion. Light is defined on Google as follows: ‘Light is a
transverse, electromagnetic wave that can be seen by humans.’ In fact, electromagnetic
waves cannot be seen by humans; HSN produces light on the basis of brain
processes initiated by the effects of electromagnetic waves on the
photoreceptors in our eyes.
For the
second example I refer to R. Carpenter’s and Reddi’s Neurophysiology. The authors open their chapter on ‘The nature of
sound’ with the words: ‘Sound is generated in a medium such as air whenever
there is a sufficiently rapid movement of parts of its boundary – perhaps a
moving loudspeaker cone, or the collapsing skin of a pricked balloon.’ (5th
edition, Hodder Arnold 2012, p. 108). In fact, what is generated ‘by a moving
loudspeaker cone or the collapsing skin of a pricked balloon’ is not sound, but
‘a local movement of molecules that tends to make the pressure differences
propagate away from the original site of disturbance’. The authors write
further on: ‘The sound impinges on the eardrum tympanic membrane’ (p. 112). In
fact, it is not sound that impinges on the eardrum, but the waves propagated
from ‘the original site of disturbance’. There is no sound in the outside world of
physics and there is no sound in the brain explored by neurophysiology. Sound
is the product of our HSN.
These
conceptual contaminations are not innocuous. Carpenter and Reddi write: ‘It is
not easy to think clearly about our own sensory systems, as we all have this
overpowering feeling of sitting inside our head as in a cinema, with all this
sensory stuff being projected in front of us and providing us with “conscious
sensation” … we naturally therefore imagine that the purpose of sensory systems must be to deliver as accurate a picture
of the outside world as possible to this little man in the head … If the only
purpose of sensory systems was to relay as exact an image as possible of the
outside world to the little man in the head, there would be no need for
“sensory processing” at all.’ (pp. 77-78) – If sounds were generated in the
air, propagated through the air and impinging on the eardrum, they could go
directly ‘to the little man in the head’.
***
Since we can
experience the interplay of our conscious and subconscious activities in the
realm of language, we can use this experience for our benefit, choosing
activities that best suit and most effectively cultivate and invigorate our HSN.
Ancient Greek gave rise to the poetry of Homer and was cultivated by his poetry;
it enabled Aristotle to develop his thoughts and was in turn enriched by
Aristotle’s thinking. Homer represents the beginning and Aristotle the
culmination of the cultural development of the Greeks. In Homer the activity of
thought is valued only as means to ends, Aristotle views thought contemplating
thought as the best and most pleasurable activity. Homer marked a gigantic step
towards Aristotle, for when the Ancient Greeks were listening to rhapsodes (professional
reciters of poetry: rapsantes aoidên, ‘stitching
up poetry’, Hesiod fr. 357) reciting Homer, they could live for hours in the
poetic world of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Then came the writers of
tragedies who presented on stage the lives of great men and women involved in
tragic conflicts – Agamemnon and Clytemnestra (Aeschylus); Antigone, Creon,
Oedipus, Tiresias, and Iocasta (Sophocles); Medea and Jason (Euripides) – and
the writers of comedies, who made their audiences laugh not only at the leading
poets, philosophers and politicians of the day, but even at their gods (Strepsiades asks
Socrates in Aristophanes’ Clouds: ‘Who
makes rain?’ Socrates answers: ‘The Clouds’ [capital C, for in Aristophanes’
comedy Clouds figure as Socrates’ deity]. Strepsiades remarks: ‘And I thought
it was Zeus pissing through a sieve.’) Herodotus and Thucydides invited the
Greeks to travel in thought into their past, and thus enrich and cultivate their
reflection of and interaction with the present. Philosophers of nature transcended the limited
world of sensory perception and embraced nature in its totality in their
thought. Then Socrates promoted the quest for self-knowledge as a key to a truly
good life. And then came Plato; think of Aristotle contemplating all this when
you reflect on the delight that he derived from ‘thought contemplating
thought’. – All this we can make our own
by appropriating the Ancient Greek language.
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