unconcious reasons - e. matthews

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MATTHEWS / UNCONSCIOUS REASONS 55

2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Eric Matthews

Unconscious Reasons

KEYWORDS: reason-explanation, consciousness, purpose

IT ISARGUEDTHAT CHURCHSPUZZLEMENT overthe idea that we can have reasons that we donot know about is itself puzzling. In daily

life, we find no difficulty in understanding thisidea. The problems arise only when we try togive a theoretically satisfactory account of thenotion of the unconscious in the context of a

Cartesian picture of the mind as synonymouswith consciousness. We need to see the differ-

ence between the rational/non-rational distinc-tion and that between the conscious and the

unconscious. We (and other animals) act for rea-sons, not because we have something called con-sciousness, but because we have purposes: weare animals, not machines.

Jennifer Church finds something deeply puz-

zling about the idea that we can have reasonsthat we do not know about. I find this puzzle-ment very surprising, as, I think, would manyothers. Most of our reasons for doing what wedo are not, and could not be, consciously enter-tained, and we did not need to wait for Freudbefore we were aware that some of our reasonsfor acting are so deeply hidden that we need helpfrom others to uncover them. Freud himself is

supposed to have said about the unconscious(Im afraid I cant give the reference for thisquotation, which was dredged up from memo-ry), Das haben die Dichter immer gekanntthat was always known by the poets.

Because human beings are not machines, whosemovements can be given a complete causal ex-

planation in terms of the laws of physics, a rea-son-explanation for most of the ways they be-have is called for. That is, they have reasons fordoing what they do. If they had to consciously

think through, in Churchs words, all of theirreasons for acting, they would never get down todoing anything: before they did anything, theywould have to think through their reasons fordoing it; and, because thinking through is also anaction for which they have reasons, they wouldhave to think through their reasons for thinkingthrough, and so on ad infinitum. I owe this pointto Gilbert Ryle, and may as well give one of his

typical examples (slightly adapted) to illustrateit. The good tennis player acts intelligently: shehas reasons for the movements she makes, but ofnecessity she does not think through these rea-sons, otherwise the game of tennis would neverget started, let alone finished. Indeed, she maywell be unable to explain in words, even after-ward, why she moves her racket this way or that.

As for the Freudian sorts of examples, we

are all familiar, both from literature and fromlife, with the phenomena of self-deception, or ofsimple lack of self-knowledge. Someone, for in-

stance, believes himself to be motivated by thehighest moral principle when he gives money tothe beggar in the shop doorway: but perhaps hisreal reason is a desire to cultivate a certain imageof himself, or to be seen by others to be doing the

right thing, or a fear that the beggar might em-


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56 PPP / VOL. 12, NO. 1 / MARCH 2005

barrass him in some way if he does not give himsomething substantial. I am not suggesting thatpeople always deceive themselves in this way,only that the situation described is perfectly in-

telligible to everyone and so not at all puzzling.Nor is it in the slightest degree unintelligible thatpeople should sometimes act without being ableto say why: I did it on impulse, they say, or Iacted instinctivelywhich is just another wayof saying I just dont know why I acted as I did.

Church herself accepts that our explanations

of behavior are now replete with appeals tounconscious beliefs and desires: but why onlynowhavent they always been? And if weresort to such appeals so commonly, if indeed, asSearle says, their explanatory power is so great,

then that seems to imply that we understandperfectly well what we are saying when we ap-peal to unconscious desires and reasons? If thenotion of the unconscious is so unclear, as

Searle also says, then the puzzlement arises, notat the level of ordinary usage, but at that ofphilosophical theory. Perhaps Church has notcome as far as she thinks from Descartes, whosaw the mind as the name of a substance, akind of object, albeit a unique kind, of whichsomething called consciousness was the es-sence. And perhaps some of her puzzlement couldbe avoided if she descended from this high level

of abstraction and considered more concretelywhat we are actually talking about here. First,we should distinguish between acting for a rea-son and acting rationally. The title of herpaper, and its epigraph, are derived from Pascalsfamous quotation about the reasons of the heart,which are not those which reason knows about:that is, which are not rational grounds, as judgedby the rules of logic. But there is surely a differ-

ence between saying, as Pascal does, that thereare reasons of which Reason does not know, andtalking about reasons that we do not know about.

Talking in the latter way is saying nothing aboutthe rationality or otherwise of our reasons foraction, but only about the fact that we do notmake them explicit, to ourselves or to others.Pace Freud, our unconscious reasons may be as

rational (or as irrational) as our conscious: thetennis players reasons for moving her racket as

she does, although unconscious, are perfectlyrational, designed to help her to win the game.

Equally, Pascals reasons of the heart may beas fully conscious as the reasons of Reason. If

someone believes in God because he has a deepinner feeling that the universe is purposive, thenwhy should he not be able to make that reasonexplicit to himself or to others, as much as if hebelieved because he was persuaded by the logicalarguments of Aquinas or Anselm?

If we follow the lead of such analytic philoso-

phers as Wittgenstein or Ryle, or such phenome-nologists as Merleau-Ponty, we can pose the ques-tions about consciousness and having a reasonfor acting in more concrete terms. What does itmean, after all, to say that someone has a reason

for being afraid of someone met for the firsttime? Doesnt it mean simply that there are fea-tures of her response to that stranger that can beexplained only by such fear? There is no implica-

tion in saying this that she herself could necessar-ily offer this explanation, or that this explana-tion makes her response rational (that it isnormative), still less that it could only be prop-erly offered if this reason was normative forher, that is, presumably that she herself wouldaccept the fear as rational. Yet it is not a causalexplanation: its meaningfulness depends on thefact that she is a being with purposes, who inter-

acts with her environment in a purposive, notjust in a mechanical way. To find someone fear-ful is to respond to that person as threatening,which is a response that is possible only for abeing with purposes that might be threatened.

All this suggests that it would be more helpfulto separate the having of reasons from conscious-ness: indeed, to give up potentially misleading

talk about consciousness and the uncon-scious altogether. Human beings act for rea-sons, not because they have consciousness, butbecause they are purposive beings. Nonhuman

animals also act for reasons, because they too arepurposive: but they are not conscious, that is,they are not capable of making their reasonsexplicit to themselves or evaluating their ratio-nality. It is one of the problematic features of

Churchs account that it seems to rule out apriori the very possibility that nonhuman ani-


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MATTHEWS / UNCONSCIOUS REASONS 57

mals might act for reasons, rather than beingmechanical systems. Like Cartesianism, it lumpsanimals together with machines. This ignoresboth the similarities and the dissimilarities be-

tween human beings and other animals. We arelike other animals in that we can act for reasonswithout saying (or even without being able tosay) what our reasons are; unlike them, in thatsometimes we can make our own reasons explic-it to ourselves and others (although that impliesthat our explicit statement of those reasons may

be mistaken or even deceptive).There is nothing particularly puzzling about

this, as soon as we get away from the Cartesianeither/or: either human beings (or other ani-

mals) are mere machines, like the automata thatwere so popular in Descartes day, or else theyhave some extra element called consciousnessor mind, which makes it possible to explain

some of their behavior by reasons. Churchs dis-cussion of spatial reasoning is interesting enoughin itself, but it seems to miss the point: it is notnecessary to propose another type of reasoningto make intelligible the way in which we can actfor reasons of which we are unaware. All that isnecessary is to see that we already understand

how this is possible if we are not confused bycertain kinds of philosophical theorizing.

unconcious reasons - e. matthews

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