Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2001 11:51:18 +0100
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)
Subject: Re: Zollikon: Unconscious


Cologne 05-Nov-2001

Michael Staples <michael-AT-intersubjectivestudies.com> schrieb  Sat, 3 Nov 2001
05:17:46 -0800:

> Michael,
>
> In my last posting I responded to your line that,
>
> "...our attention is mostly absorbed by and focused on one matter, we are
> unaware of most of what is happening around us in the world."
>
> by saying:
>
> So, this is what I think of as being unconscious. Perhaps a better way of
> saying this might be "un-attended-to"? How would that sit?
>
> But that isn't quite right, because I don't think of "most of what is
> happeneing around us" that I am not attending to as being described by
> instead of contained within)my unconscious. There is a special relationship
> I have to a particular
> most-of-what-is-happening-around-us-that-I-am-not-attending-to. Let me call
> this for the moment the "unthought-known" so I can boil it down to only one
> hyphen.
>
> Somewhere there is an airplane flying at 60,000 feet. This occurance is
> something that is happening that I am (was) unaware of. But I don't have the
> sort of relationship to this happening that I do with happenings I consider
> to be described by my unconscious.
>
> The relationship I have to the unthought-known seems like the relationship
> between the secondary form of knowing (calculating, or thematizing, or
> ratiocination) and the more primordial understanding that carries the
> potential for presenting to me in this secondary way. So for instance, it is
> background information that informs my way of being in the world...but it
> isn't just any background information that happens to be part of the world I
> am in.
>
> It's hard not to use object analogies, thought I know such object analogies
> are dangerous. Just the same, there is a difference between there being a
> chair that exists as an object in the world...somewhere...and the chair I
> know in my study, that I am not thinking about now. This second chair is
> known to me as a part of my personal world, but it is unthought of most of
> the day. The first chair is at best a theoretical chair I assume
> exists...somewhere. The texture of knowing differs. The texture of the first
> chair carries the mark of the kind of unthought-known described by "stuff"
> described as unconscious. There is no implication (so far, that I can see)
> that demands that this unthought-known "stuff" be housed inside versus
> outside in a container-like version of the conscious.
>
> What do you think?

Michael,
I'm still thinking about the notion of "unconscious purpose" you brought up in
your previous post. Freud's famous _Interpretation of Dreams_ (1900) is full of
a wealth of phenomena on which he bases his theoretical explanations, albeit
that these explanations are pre-cast within the metaphysics of subjectivity
(which Freud unwittingly and  'naturally' takes to be the adequate scientific
framework).

Freud considers phenomena of parapraxis to demonstrate that there must be an
unconscious, conceived as a deeper-lying subject. It is a theoretical construct
postulated to provide an explanation.

Consider a simple parapraxis such as a slip of the tongue. When my tongue slips,
I say something unintended and call something to presence that was unintended.
In retrospect I can see that I was with those things which slipped out in what
my tongue said. This shows that things can come to presence for me without me
intending it by a subjective act of directing my attention. Insofar, I am not a
subject underlying all my actions.

Another example: I am making coffee with the espresso machine. When it spurts, I
realize that I have fogotten to put the coffee into the metal strainer in the
espresso machine so that only water comes out. I had been lost in throughts,
somewhere else, when making the coffee. This example shows that in being
practically involved with one thing at hand (_pragma_), I am absorbed by another
far away. I can be intensely present with something that is not physically,
bodily present but which is somewhere else, in the past or the future..

One doesn't have to postulate an unconscious for these phenomena, but has to be
careful in looking at them _simply_. They show different ways in which things
can be present or absent for Dasein, or alternatively, that Dasein is a being
out there, not just with things at hand, but with all sorts in things in
temporal space.

Michael
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