Online at: http://politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/8728/

Materialism and Feelings: Bringing Marx and Freud to the Same Table

By Gary Tedman
Archives - Dates and Topics 2009 online headlines for July 2009 click here for related stories: science

7-01-09, 11:00 am

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It is hard to envisage human beings doing anything were it not for emotions: feelings motivate us; they make us move (literally). There seems to be a direct link between feeling something via the senses, and feeling something emotionally, indicated by the fact that we can use the word feeling to mean both sensory feeling and the emotions. Certain activities, responses, of our bodies are instinctive and impel emotions: to breathe, to feel hunger, to need sleep, to feel sexual desire.

Feelings seem able to bypass ideas and to have a direct effect on our actions, yet, most of our feelings are understandable if we stop to examine ourselves. We feel something because we think this or that about it.

Sometimes, however, we can have feelings that we do not fully understand, or we can have feelings that even seem to contradict our consciously held ideas. These are sometimes described as unconscious feelings.

What is an unconscious feeling? In "Unconscious Feelings," a short chapter in his 1915 book The Unconscious, Freud asks the rhetorical question whether it is admissible to talk of unconscious feelings and emotions as it has been deemed admissible to talk about unconscious ideas. He thinks not.

He arrives at this conclusion by the following reasoning. He believes that the antithesis between conscious and unconscious is not applicable to instincts. For him, an instinct can never become an object of consciousness. Only the idea that represents it can. Even in the unconscious, he says, an instinct cannot be represented other than by an idea. He goes on to say that if the instinct did not attach itself to an idea or manifest itself as an affective state we could know nothing about it.

For Freud only loose phraseology allows us to talk of "unconscious instinctual impulses." What this really means is an instinctual impulse "the ideational representative of which is unconscious."

Here, Freud thus allows an affective state, or the experience of feelings, to be the expression of an instinct, and explains how we might be mystified as to why we feel it if its ideational representative is repressed. Does this mean that feelings must have an idea associated with them, and possibly are unable to exist without this, that in this sense feelings are subordinate to ideas?

Freud has it that it is the essence of affects that they should be known to consciousness. Therefore, the possibility of the attribute of unconsciousness would be completely excluded for feelings. Yet Freud admits that even in psychoanalytic practice we are accustomed to speak of unconscious love, hate, anger, etc., and come up with phrases like "unconscious anxiety," and asks whether there is more meaning in the use of these terms than there is in talking of unconscious instincts.

He thinks not, but admits that two cases are not on equal footing. He demonstrates how an affect can be considered unconscious: It may happen, for example, that an emotional impulse is perceived but misconstrued. Because of the repression of its proper representative it has been connected with another idea. It is now regarded by consciousness as the manifestation of that idea. If, though, we restore the "true connection" we call the original affective impulse the "unconscious" one.

But, this affect was, as we see, never truly unconscious; it is only its idea that had been repressed.

But what leads us to the proper representative of an affect? More crucial, perhaps, is the question: why is there a sense of the proper in the first place?

Affects seem to be, according to Freud, constant across the unconscious to the preconscious and the conscious; it is, we repeat, the ideas that may undergo repression. The idea seems to be primary in this sense.

However, clearly, also according to Freud, affects can undergo certain "quantitative vicissitudes": the affect remains either as it is, or it is transformed into a "qualitatively different" quota of affect, such as anxiety. Or, it is suppressed and prevented from developing at all. For Freud, all repressed affects are, if exchanged, exchanged for anxiety. Unconscious ideas continue to exist after repression as actual structures in the system of the Unconscious, whereas affects exist here only as potential beginning. So there are no unconscious affects as there are unconscious ideas, strictly considered. Moreover, repression can succeed in inhibiting an instinctual impulse from becoming manifest as a particular emotion. Consciousness normally, as Freud says, has control over affectivity as well as motility (remember the very term emotion derives from motion, and the property of being moved), which shows that repression not only may withhold things from consciousness, but prevent the development of affect and the setting-off of muscular activity.

Yet, control by the consciousness over the development of affects is less able than the control over motility as such, and Freud describes a constant struggle for ascendancy over affectivity that goes on between the two systems, the conscious and the unconscious.

In Freud’s terms the idea and consciousness seems to, in the end, have ascendance over the feelings, yet at every stage we can ask the question as to what motivates resolution of psychic conflicts if it is not some form of emotional impelling. For, there would be no problem, and so no conflict, if we did not suffer somehow, if it were all just a question of different ideas alone. In other words, from Freud’s metapsychology we might be led, wrongly I think, and against the spirit of his enquiry, into a rationalist epistemology where "correct and logical ideas" win out over mere feelings and have "unemotional control over them." Which would mean in effect a philosophical return to the humanist ideal Subject, to the human Spirit (Hegelian), and to "mind over matter."

Freud at first began explaining psychic phenomena from an entirely physical-neurological standpoint, to explain the discontinuities in conscious mental activity, but later abandoned it in favor of the psychological. The neurological explanation was evidently too crude. The structure of the psyche is distinct from the structure that neurology uncovers. On the other hand, Freud never abandoned the philosophical perspective that underlay the physical-neurological approach, and he remained assured that the physical was the source of mental phenomena. Freud was, philosophically speaking, a good materialist on this question.

Nonetheless, in the distinction between the neurological and the psychological, or the physical and the psychical, we seem to fall into the trap of making an "inner" and "outer" formation of the mind. Ideas might be seen as "inner things" that may (at some point) correspond to events in "outer" nerve cells. Still more, by theoretically separating ideas from affects we tend to have further reason to conceive of ideas as mental rather then physical. And this gets close to the Cartesian dualistic conception of soul and matter.

Freud’s unconscious system of ideas is clearly a mental entity made up of connections between distinguishable units called ideas. The idea of "ideas" is also commonly associated with consciousness, with being "aware." Hence, consciousness and ideas are almost synonymous. But what is consciousness from a materialist (Marxian) point of view?

Freud distinguished the conscious from the unconscious; but, both tend to rely on the same concept of ideas. Consciousness seems to imply the awareness of a self, an "I," and ideas are commonly thought to be trains of images or representations making up thoughts. It is understood that these thoughts are expressed by words in sentences.

Are "conscious thoughts" sentences in natural language then? They seem to be there before language is used to articulate them. Should we separate the sense of consciousness from the train of ideas; should we even be convinced that there is such a thing as the "conscious"? Clearly, there is no conscious system of ideas always ever-present to us, all at once. We are not fully aware of a system of linked ideas behind our thinking. When we think, we simply think in the present moment and these thoughts seem impelled, motivated, but from where these come from, we have no immediate awareness. We know, normally, or feel, that these ideas follow some sort of logical pattern, but we are not aware of this pattern as a system, just as we are unaware (unless we make the effort to study it) of the paradigm of natural language in which we construct new sentences. We can, in this respect, never grasp our thought-in-process. It is always/already gone, become accessible only in the non-conscious, which is not it.

What we have termed consciousness, therefore, in its active sense, is paradoxical, it is always absent to itself.

We can nevertheless argue that we never really think of things without feeling something about what we are thinking. While Descartes may have represented his thought processes as a logical stream of rational concepts separated from feelings, we know that he must have felt something about what he was writing and thus was motivated to state it. Indeed, what seems to be an element of the irrational in Descartes narrative is the very non-appearance of desire. It is perhaps significant for us to note here that Freud’s metapsychological paper, entitled Consciousness, is apparently missing. How strangely appropriate that this fact reflects the missing sensual condition of western consciousness, perhaps a kind of Freudian slip of class history.

The problem is the mental separation of consciousness from awareness as sensual feeling. We should not posit a destination point for sense, where sense data arrives like passengers at a train station, and only then do things get complicated. Thus it is actually the idea of consciousness that represents the real difficulty in the apparent opposition between the physical-neurological account and the mental-psychic accounts. Eject the Cartesian and humanist inspired idea of consciousness as a form of self-present idea-awareness, a self-eminence with self-will and so self-responsibility, and there is no division between the physical and the psychical as such. Feeling is the presence of the physical in the psychical. So the chain of determining sensual events in perception does not come to a point where it ends to become something different, something "non-determined," something "spiritual," in the human consciousness.

What we can say is: if we already assume a division between the two sides, between spirit and matter, then we will be looking for a site of transfer in a way that predetermines our disappointment at not seeing it (not "finding ourselves"). There was no epistemological disappointment for Freud, because he always analyzes the subject, including himself, based on his materialist idea of the immanence of the human body, including the psyche, in the processes of realia. The difficulty of the border crossing was already decided to be only a difficulty within the sciences, one that would be solved, as it were, on that side of the fence, and not a philosophical-religious problem.

As we know, Freud improved his concept of psychical structure with the ideas of the Ego, Id and Super-Ego. The Ego was not simply consciousness or self but had most of its structure in the unconscious, just as we have suspected it would.

Nevertheless, the terms conscious and unconscious still had a great deal of importance for Freud and still seem to frame the whole debate today; the unconscious is, peculiarly, now better understood than the conscious. But from our point of view this is now not so strange at all. Historically speaking the unconscious has always presented less of a mystery than consciousness, especially to ordinary people. The rational professional philosophers have, however, seemed to fear and repress this knowledge of the unconscious. This repression is probably transference of the actual site of the problem; as, peculiarly, it is the position from which they speak that they should fear knowing most, for it is the site of their downfall as "pure thinkers" (Adorno has criticized this "pure thinking" as "identity thinking").

Engels in his “Dialectics of Nature” never quite applied his theory of physical dialectical contradictions and development to the actual human physiology; he left-off at the level of the species, the family and the state, and his brief discussion on evolution. Yet Engels is important for us because he sets us straight about the dialectic and because he begins to distinguish between the dialectics of physical nature and that of a social-historical dialectic, which has been the site of an ongoing (and quite productive when it is not simply rhetorical) dispute between Hegelian Marxists/Marxist humanists (camp 1), and anti-humanist/anti-Hegelian Marxists (camp 2). Marx in 1844, I suggest, was already ahead of Engels (as far as we know) on this matter, and included in his early work statements concerning the human senses that are immensely subtle and which still stand today as milestones, if rather enigmatic.

If the human senses are, as he says "theoreticians in their practice" (I refrain from making a division between early and late Marx because this is a product of camp 1’s position), it seems as if he understands precisely that the operation of sense is immediately always/already passionate. I use this latter term with an inflection of its older meaning as "suffering": sense is "immediately mediated" by the passions, by affects.

For Freud, as we have seen, it appears to be some kind of rational (idea) that finally governs the "proper" relation between passion and the idea. So, there are two themes pulling us here: the ordering rationale that allocates to the passions a "proper" idea, and the ideas that are actually attached to the passions. This is why Freud can talk about emotions having their proper representatives. His two sets of ideas, though, seem to gang-up on the affect: they rule both its order (the "proper") and form the content of that order (the "internal" idea stuff). But still, ideas are ideas, and so, fundamentally, we are talking of the same thing here, are we not? Does this mean that the content of the ideas actually rules the proper (the order) then?

I think our conclusion must be that, in this regard, ideas do not come first, and we cannot allow for this assumed priority, mainly because it takes us back to the Cartesian divide. The "proper" must be something else.

What, though?

We are drawn to the idea derived from Marx and Engels that it must be the close relation between sensual perception and spontaneous feeling, not considered as pure mentality, but as that which always provides an organic order, supplied, at first, by the senses themselves: the "theoreticians in their practice." If we are to avoid idealism, which is the notion of the proper as an ideal related eventually to God, but retain a concept of some kind of proper, some form of correspondence to reality, then the proper must be this: the mysterious material that is worked upon by the psychic apparatus.

In short, this material already has its "proper" inbuilt. When repression acts to prevent the proper representative of a feeling coming to mind, this is why the repression and its substitute rationality seems to be, after all, illusionary and misplaced, even often to the subject "in" the illusion (that is, if they are seeking help), because it does not conform to perception/intuition, or not exactly.

This brings us to talk about the two kinds of common sense here. Common sense as mainstream sense is usually bourgeois sense, i.e. the sense of rightness that ruling ideology gives to things; I will call this common sense 1. Common sense 2 is the spontaneous perception and feeling of what actually exists and is right, which is achieved by the human nervous system (feelings). Almost always cs1 and cs2 are in conflict with each other, but they also merge, are often conflated, and become tangled up in strange ways. Freud never really delved into this problem of distinguishing, for his subjects, the one from the other (as Marx did); he only noted the existence of a proper representative that the subjects themselves had already referred to or seemed to need in order to resolve their problems.

For an individual this works, but one gets the sense from Freud that he was also up against the illusionary ideology of the wider world in which the subject lived, the world that Marx understood and explained.

--Gary Tedman is a frequent contributor to Political Affairs.


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