The Renaissance polymath Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa defined occult qualities as those whose “causes lie hid, and man’s intellect cannot in any way reach and find them out.”1 Though his Three Books of Occult Philosophy or Magic was condemned by Catholic and Protestant authorities, it remained influential in esoteric circles.
The Scientific Revolution dealt the greater blow to “natural magic.” Galileo was born about three decades after Agrippa’s death. Through empirical method, those apparently hidden forces were to be brought into the bright light of “man’s intellect.” What was hidden from the senses, such as magnetism, was amenable to mathematical explanation.
Yet the faith in an occult dimension–that is to say, a level impenetrable to the intellect–survived in new guises, even those that profess adherence to scientific thinking. Atheism is one example: it denies the complete intelligibility of reality. Magical thinking also tends to crop up when it comes to consciousness and language. Our specimen for scientifically minded superstition will be Cormac McCarthy’s essay, “The Kekulé Problem.”
Cormac McCarthy postulates an inner force whose covert machinations produce our conscious discoveries and our speech:
If I am talking to you then I can hardly be crafting at the same time the sentences that are to follow what I am now saying. I am totally occupied in talking to you. Nor can some part of my mind be assembling these sentences and then saying them to me so that I can repeat them. Aside from the fact that I am busy this would be to evoke an endless regress. The truth is that there is a process here to which we have no access. It is a mystery opaque to total blackness.
McCarthy appeals to a familiar experience. Have you ever been stumped by a problem only to have the idea arrive unexpectedly on a walk, in the shower, or even in a dream? McCarthy’s particular example is August Kekulé’s discovery of the structure of benzene.
Kekulé described his experience inconsistently. Here is one of his accounts:
I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.2
Benzene, it turns out, is a ring. But why is it, McCarthy asks, that answers tend to come to us in images? Why is it a snake in the dream rather than a chemical formula? From what dark reservoir do these ambiguous images surface?
McCarthy hypothesizes that these answers come from the “unconscious.” He is no Freudian, drawing instead on the modern empirical sciences. By the “unconscious,” he means a specific biological system (or network of systems) that we share with animals.3
Timothy D. Wilson, in his book Strangers to Ourselves, identifies five marks of this “adaptive unconscious”: it acts (i) quickly and (ii) unconsciously, (iii) without requiring a conscious decision. Although it (iv) does not require effort, it is also (v) not easily controllable.
This system is adaptive: when you first learn to ride a bike, you have to be very aware of your balance, your manipulation of the pedals and the handlebars, and so on. But once you know how to ride a bike, you don’t have to think of those things–they become automatic. Something similar can happen with language: one can speak before one thinks.
The remarkable thing about the adaptive unconscious is that you take action on the basis of your senses prior to and independently of any conscious decision. This is quite useful! Have you ever automatically pulled your hand back before it was caught in a door? Did the loose dog on a walk appear immediately dangerous to you? The adaptive unconscious seems to decide most of our interactions with the world; otherwise, we would hardly get anything done. It is not difficult to see why McCarthy suggests that the unconscious may have more direct access to the “outside world” than our mind.
The unconscious is a biological system. Language, on the other hand, does not arise from our biology. Language originates from an idea, just like ballet or the trampoline. And what is that idea?
So what are we saying here? That some unknown thinker sat up one night in his cave and said: Wow. One thing can be another thing. Yes. Of course that’s what we are saying. Except that he didnt say it because there was no language for him to say it in.
Language is not the “mystery opaque to total blackness.” It can be understood by reflecting on what it was that Helen Keller realized at the well. Cormac McCarthy’s occult hypothesis regards the motivations of the unconscious and its manner of speaking to us:
since the unconscious understands language perfectly well or it would not understand the problem in the first place, why doesnt it simply answer Kekulé’s question with something like: “Kekulé, it’s a bloody ring.” To which our scientist might respond: “Okay. Got it. Thanks.”
Why the snake? That is, why is the unconscious so loath to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter.
Think about times you have stumbled across peculiar clues by which the answer to some puzzle came into focus. Why is the insight so roundabout and unpredictable? If we have an unconscious problem-solving process running in the background (what McCarthy calls the “night shift”), and if it understands language (else, McCarthy says, it couldn’t work on the problem), why does it choose to answer in images?
McCarthy offers a two-part answer. First, he believes that the unconscious has been doing without words for about 2 million years, while language is likely only a hundred thousand years old.4 Second, it is more practical to store knowledge in a non-linguistic format whose nature is opaque to consciousness:5
When you pause to reflect and say: “Let me see. How can I put this,” your aim is to resurrect an idea from this pool of we-know-not-what and give it a linguistic form so that it can be expressed. It is the this that one wishes to put that is representative of this pool of knowledge whose form is so amorphous. If you explain this to someone and they say that they dont understand you may well seize your chin and think some more and come up with another way to “put” it. Or you may not.
We will return to this “amorphous pool of we-know-not-what” in the next article. But McCarthy’s point here is that this amorphous pool allows us to compress information so that we can generalize and get the gist without being dependent on the specific words. Unless you are a bard yourself, you likely do not remember the Iliad verbatim, yet perhaps you still know the story.
The next installment turns from exposition to critical evaluation. But I will offer one hint. McCarthy asks why the unconscious gives “answers” in images like the ouroboros instead of in words. But why does the ouroboros seem like an answer to the question about the unsaturated structure of benzene? The ouroboros may be found at least as far back as the 14th century BC in Egypt. Surely those depictions in Tutankhamun’s tomb are in no way about benzene? How does the ouroboros come to be about chemistry at all? And could another image (say, the hexagonal shape of a honeycomb) have prompted the same discovery?
Quoted in Alan Dronsfield and Pete Ellis, “August Kekulé and the Carbon Ring Structure,” Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20070216002324/http://www.woodrow.org/teachers/ci/1992/Kekule.html.↩︎
Something like a modern version of the cogitative sense.↩︎
“the fact that the unconscious prefers avoiding verbal instructions pretty much altogether—even where they would appear to be quite useful—suggests rather strongly that it doesnt much like language and even that it doesnt trust it. And why is that? How about for the good and sufficient reason that it has been getting along quite well without it for a couple of million years?” “The Kekulé Problem”↩︎
“Apart from its great antiquity the picture-story mode of presentation favored by the unconscious has the appeal of its simple utility. A picture can be recalled in its entirety whereas an essay cannot. Unless one is an Asperger’s case. In which event memories, while correct, suffer from their own literalness. The log of knowledge or information contained in the brain of the average citizen is enormous. But the form in which it resides is largely unknown. You may have read a thousand books and be able to discuss any one of them without remembering a word of the text.” “The Kekulé Problem”↩︎
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.