In “The Kekulé Problem”, Cormac McCarthy asks why the unconscious communicates with ambiguous images rather than in plain language. Why, when Kekulé was perplexed by the chemical structure of benzene, did the image of an ouroboros come to mind rather than the word “ring”?
The answer is straightforward. The unconscious speaks in images because it has no ideas; the unconscious understands nothing–neither problems nor solutions, neither language nor images. The adaptive unconscious is a physical process (or a network of physical processes), and within the field of consciousness physical processes can produce only sensory representations and feeling. To be sure, the adaptive unconscious processes information, but understanding is not information processing. An inviolable line separates the sensible (that which is experienced or imagined) and the intelligible (that which is understood).
Grasping McCarthy’s error will help in identifying similar mistakes, both from long ago (for example, in Scotus’ theory of concept formation) and at present (for example, in the misattribution of intelligence to large language models).
An Irony
McCarthy’s essay exhibits a stark dissonance. On the one hand, McCarthy tells us that the process that gives rise to our unexpected realizations and our speaking is “opaque to total blackness.” On the other hand, McCarthy recounts his own process of discovery quite transparently. This process is recognizable as the same one Aristotle identifies, and Thomas Aquinas articulates it in a more developed and comprehensive way. That process is outlined in the previous article, What Do Philosophers Know?, in which the following distinct levels are presented:
| Level | Faculty | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | Judgment | Answers: Is or Is not? |
| 2 | Understanding | Answers: What and Why? |
| 1 | Experience | Things, stories, situations as experienced |
| 0 | Wonder | The beginning of all wisdom |
The road to truth begins in wonder. As Thomas Aquinas puts it, “wonder is a kind of desire for knowledge; a desire which comes to man when he sees an effect of which the cause either is unknown to him, or surpasses his knowledge or faculty of understanding.”1 These effects are given in experience. As McCarthy speaks plainly of his own wondering: “I’d been thinking about the Kekulé problem off and on for a couple of years without making much progress….”
Curiosity about some experience drives toward what Thomas refers to as the “first operation of the intellect”: asking and answering “what” and “why?” questions. “The Kekulé Problem” is filled to the brim with questions of this type:
What is at work here?
Why the snake? That is, why is the unconscious so loath to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures?
The bridge that crosses the chasm between these questions and their answer is a eureka moment. Sometimes the insight comes quickly, at other times quite unexpectedly. McCarthy recounts where he was when the insight struck him:
One morning … I came down in the morning with the wastebasket from my bedroom and as I was emptying it into the kitchen trash I suddenly knew the answer.
After the idea arrives comes the formulation of the concept: an inner articulation or sorting out of what one has understood, what Augustine called “the inner word.” As McCarthy describes it: “It took me a minute or so to put it together.” Finally, there is the question of whether one is correct. McCarthy nicely sums up the critical attitude that drives the third level of judgment in the question: “Are you sure?”
McCarthy’s essay both eloquently describes his process of thinking and utterly overlooks the significance of that same process. This oversight is common even in trained philosophers. One need only observe phenomenologists at work and contrast their express account of thinking with the thinking they use in expressing that same account.2 What is needed to grasp the machinations of the mind is a careful self-attention that roots out the contradiction between theory and the act of theorizing. I invite you to the concrete examples in Mathematics: Key to the Soul and At This Unique Distance from Isolation.
Superstition or Science?
McCarthy speaks of the unconscious as a homunculus and its habitat as a “pool of we-know-not-what”:
The unconscious seems to know a great deal. What does it know about itself? Does it know that it’s going to die? What does it think about that? It appears to represent a gathering of talents rather than just one. It seems unlikely that the itch department is also in charge of math. Can it work on a number of problems at once? Does it only know what we tell it? Or—more plausibly—has it direct access to the outer world? … the fact that it appears to be less than insistent upon our remembering every dream suggests that sometimes it may be working on itself. And is it really so good at solving problems or is it just that it keeps its own counsel about the failures? How does it have this understanding which we might well envy?
In the spirit of Thomas Aquinas we might turn from spooky metaphors to a scientific attitude which leads naturally to a definite research program. This would place the adaptive unconscious in the broader context of physical, psychological, and intellectual processes that stand in certain definite relations to each other.
The processes that are physical require physical science. The sciences tell the story of the long journey of solar energy to our planet: its transformation into chemical energy by photosynthesis, its further transformation through digestion, and its eventual role in sparking our neurons. Our sensorium is the product of a set of physical, chemical, biological, and neurological processes, which are understood more or less adequately by the relevant specialists in the physical sciences.
But the full set of relations is not reached by neuroscience. For in addition to the processes we are unconscious of, there are conscious processes that take as their starting point the sensory representations which emerge from underlying physical processes.
Conscious and Unconscious Processes
I offer the following diagram as a way to illustrate one way of accounting for the interaction of these conscious acts, unconscious acts, and contents of consciousness.
The distinction between a conscious or cognitive act and a physical act is simply that the former necessarily relates to understanding (think of your own aha! moments) as desired or achieved, and the latter do not.3 The optical nerve does not require understanding to function.4
I have included sensation and memory as physical processes that contribute to experience. Thomas Aquinas would add the common and cogitative senses, as well as imagination. Neuroscientists tell a much more differentiated story that traces the translation of physical energy to systems in the brain.
Thomas Aquinas would have been quite comfortable with neuroscience. He believed that the “inner senses” were the actions of physical organs,5 and he was enthusiastic about scientific progress. Hearing is a physical activity, and the question of its nature lies in the domain of the physical sciences. The same is true for memory and imagination.6 So, in the diagram, we can take the bubbles for sensation and imagination as placeholders for whatever bodily systems produce images of which we are conscious, as these systems would be explained by neuroscience once it has settled all its outstanding questions.
The processes that bring forth images in our mind are opaque in one important respect. They are opaque to inner experience. We are not aware of the optical nerve in the same way as we are aware of the shade of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s red carpet. The intellect is a process whose origin and term lies within the field of inner awareness. We ask about what we experience, as it is given in experience. We use our imaginations to construct phantasms that provoke insights. But the light of inner experience does not reach beyond the image. For that reason, we need empirical science. We need dissection so we can see (experience in an outer way) the structures of the eye, the nerves, the brain.
Whatever the nature of those physical systems turns out to be, we can become aware of the sensed, remembered, imagined product of those processes. These results can rise to the level of consciousness–or not; they may be processed and acted upon by the adaptive unconscious. This partly diagrammed process is not the only way we might sense or speak; it sketches out how we grow in knowledge. But this is a normative principle, not a natural law. We are human, and so we may ask and answer questions foolishly, without understanding. Anna Karenina tells us: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The same principle applies to the intelligent and the irrational.
Image and Intelligibility
Finally we return to the question posed at the end of the last article. How was it that the ouroboros was about chemistry at all? The ouroboros dates back at least as far as the 14th century in Egypt. Depictions of a snake eating its tail were found in Tutankhamen’s tomb. But they were not in any way about chemistry.
Nor do any purely physical processes provide the essential connection between the ouroboros and benzene. Without Kekulé’s wonder, his “what?” and “why?” questions, the ouroboros is just a picture of a snake’s odd behavior. It is (without qualification) not an answer or an idea in itself. It has meaning because it plays the role of a phantasm within the broader structure of inquiry.
The diagram has essential and inessential elements. But we can see that, whatever the neocortex, frontal cortex, thalamus (etc.) happen to do in producing images, so long as they produce images, the higher intellectual acts have the materials they need. On the other hand, without the levels of consciousness as structured by our wonder, there are no answers about benzene at all.
And so, at last, we arrive at the critical question: if the diagram of knowledge acquisition is inaccurate or incomplete (for example, because we do not yet have a fully developed neuroscience)7, what would the complete and correct diagram have to be like? In posing the question we turn the beam of wonder, like Kekulé’s ouroboros, back on itself.
- Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 32, a. 8.↩︎
- Nor is this limited to phenomenologists. The same dialectical analysis could be performed on Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things.↩︎
- For a more detailed discussion about why understanding marks the dividing line between the immaterial and the material, see What do Philosophers Know?.↩︎
- There is the issue of vertical causality, in which the use to which the optical nerve is put may be responsive to a desire to know: Newton turned his eyes to the heavens, Einstein to his blackboard.↩︎
- For example, he refers to the belief held by physicians that the cogitative sense belongs to an organ in the center of the head. Summa Theologiae I, q. 78, a. 4.↩︎
- By memory here I mean the recollection of the past; not the retention of understanding. See the Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 6. By imagination, I do not mean creative imagination, but the ability to reproduce and rearrange sensible forms absent sensation.↩︎
- It is also incomplete because it does not represent judgment, higher-order understanding, and the differentiation of types of understanding in statistical, genetic, and dialectical forms.↩︎
