Unreflective consciousness

Unreflective consciousness is a mode of thought in which consciousness turns toward its object rather than taking its own activity as an object of awareness. In image-based understanding, it can make meanings appear as things: thought is embodied in a spatial form and apprehended through that form. This makes understanding concrete, but it also creates a risk. When the spatial arrangement is mistaken for the meaning itself, the course of thought can be distorted.

Orientation Toward the Object

In unreflective consciousness, thought is consciousness of things, not consciousness of itself. Understanding a word does not consist in noticing an abstract concept as a concept; it can instead involve bringing the corresponding thing before consciousness. The word proletariat, for example, may be understood by constituting the proletariat as an object that appears to consciousness. The resulting presence is not a perception of an actually present object: the object is given as imaged and therefore as absent. The attitude toward it is quasi-observation, since the apparent object does not provide new information beyond the understanding already involved in constituting it.

This orientation differs from reflective thinking, in which thoughts appear as thoughts while they are being formed. In reflective reasoning, premises can be treated as rules for drawing a conclusion, and consciousness can consider whether its reasoning agrees with itself. Such ideation is not accompanied by images: an image would be unnecessary, and, if it appeared merely as an image rather than as consciousness of an object, it would lose its signification. By contrast, when knowledge is transformed into imaging knowledge, thought becomes frankly unreflective. It no longer attends to itself as thought; it is directed toward what it constitutes.

The distinction also clarifies why describing an image requires a reflective turn. While consciousness produces an image of Pierre, Pierre is the object toward which that consciousness is directed; the image is not a little object contained inside consciousness. To describe the image as image, a second act must redirect attention from the object to the way it is given. That reflective description concerns a different orientation from the unreflective act it examines. The distinction supports a broader methodological point: immediate description of how an image appears must be separated from explanatory hypotheses about what an image is.

Knowledge Given Spatial Form

Unreflective understanding can make a word’s meaning appear through a spatial schema. In the example of the word proletariat, comprehension takes the form of constituting a corresponding thing before consciousness. Spatial form is used because consciousness seeks to grasp the meaning intuitively, as though in the presence of an object. The schema’s spatial determinations are not initially treated as signs standing for relations; they are apprehended as the relations themselves. The object nevertheless remains absent, and the apparent act of observing it is quasi-observation.

Experiments discussed in the book show that the passage from knowledge to image is not simply the addition of a vivid illustration to an otherwise unchanged thought. Reports collected by Schwiete include an indeterminate image of an opening, although the opening has no determinate form, and an image of two dissimilar objects that lack spatial characteristics by which they could be distinguished. Such cases are still described as images, despite containing little or no intuitive detail. They suggest that a particular form of knowledge can already be oriented toward the sensible before a complete image is constituted. This is a modification in the way knowledge is given, not merely an empty meaning supplied with more descriptive content.

The contrast between pure knowledge and image-based understanding also appears in the account of mountain. Knowledge may grasp it as a rule or as a direction toward something that could be climbed, rather than as an intuitively present mountain. In Karl Bühler’s classification, knowledge in a pure state is a consciousness of relations: sensible matter serves as support for relations rather than being fully represented. The image-based mode instead seeks to present the object spatially. The two modes can address the same subject, but they do not give it in the same way.

Schemas, Comprehension, and Their Limits

A symbolic schema can arise with an effort of understanding, rather than being deliberately summoned as an illustration. Flach describes representations that appear with comprehension and bring the solution of a problem or the understanding of a proposition. Trying to produce such a representation directly yields, in his account, an illustration of thought instead. His observations also distinguish difficult intellectual work from easy comprehension: schemas were not obtained when a problem was too easy or could be solved by memory, where simpler verbal or illustrative responses might occur.

The schema is therefore associated with a particular way of comprehending, not with every act of thought. The experiments of Messer add that comprehension can occur through words alone, or directly without either images or words. The same phrase may be understood with a schema on one occasion and without one on another. The object being considered does not by itself determine which mode occurs; the relevant motives belong to the structure of the consciousness that approaches it. Unreflective image-based comprehension is one way thought can take up its object, not a compulsory stage through which every understanding must pass.

When it does occur, thought is constituted in and through its object. Further thinking can appear as a new determination of that object: deciding that a vaguely represented coach driver has a moustache, for instance, amounts to seeing the imaged face acquire that feature. The object seems to develop through successive appearances, although these are quasi-apprehensions rather than observations of a present thing. Such judgements also carry a sense of risk or commitment, since a new determination is being made of the object as it appears.

Conceptual Thought and the Risk of Distortion

Concepts can appear in unreflective thought in several forms. When the meaning is uncertain or approached indirectly, thought may begin with an individual object belonging to the concept, as when someone seeks the concept man by producing an image of a particular man. Alternatively, the class itself may appear as an indeterminate object: not this or that individual, but man as a class made into an object. A further possibility arises in an effort of abstract comprehension, when the concept appears as a symbolic schema presenting a system of relations. The same concept can thus be approached by seeking among individual things, by making the class itself appear, or by turning from things toward relations.

The spatial form that enables this last kind of comprehension can also mislead. When the subject recognizes that a schema is not the idea itself, its spatial features need not constrain the idea; thought can move from one image to another without treating any one of them as exhaustive. But when the schema is taken to be exactly the essence or relation under consideration, its material structure becomes identified with its ideal structure. Spatial symmetries, positions, and even the things or persons included in the schema can then shape what thought concludes.

The danger appears when those spatial features begin to govern thought according to their own arrangement rather than remaining subordinate to the idea. A worker striking a wall with a hammer is given as an example of a schema that may contain material relations as well as the intended ideal structure. If the subject treats the material relations as no more than a way of presenting the thought, the idea’s development can remain undistorted. If the schema’s spatial relations are allowed to stand for the whole idea, thought shifts to reasoning by analogy and can be warped. Unreflective consciousness is therefore both a mode of access and a point of vulnerability: it makes abstract understanding present in a form that can be grasped, but that form must not be confused with the full meaning it presents.