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Unconscious Reasons
Eric Matthews

KEYWORDS: reason-explanation, consciousness, purpose

CHURCHS PUZZLEMENT over the idea that we can have reasons that we do not know about is itself puzzling. In daily life, we find no difficulty in understanding this idea. The problems arise only when we try to give a theoretically satisfactory account of the notion of the unconscious in the context of a Cartesian picture of the mind as synonymous with consciousness. We need to see the difference between the rational/non-rational distinction and that between the conscious and the unconscious. We (and other animals) act for reasons, not because we have something called consciousness, but because we have purposes: we are animals, not machines. Jennifer Church finds something deeply puzzling about the idea that we can have reasons that we do not know about. I find this puzzlement very surprising, as, I think, would many others. Most of our reasons for doing what we do are not, and could not be, consciously entertained, and we did not need to wait for Freud before we were aware that some of our reasons for acting are so deeply hidden that we need help from others to uncover them. Freud himself is supposed to have said about the unconscious (Im afraid I cant give the reference for this quotation, which was dredged up from memory), Das haben die Dichter immer gekannt that was always known by the poets.
T IS ARGUED THAT

Because human beings are not machines, whose movements can be given a complete causal explanation in terms of the laws of physics, a reason-explanation for most of the ways they behave is called for. That is, they have reasons for doing what they do. If they had to consciously think through, in Churchs words, all of their reasons for acting, they would never get down to doing anything: before they did anything, they would have to think through their reasons for doing it; and, because thinking through is also an action for which they have reasons, they would have to think through their reasons for thinking through, and so on ad infinitum. I owe this point to Gilbert Ryle, and may as well give one of his typical examples (slightly adapted) to illustrate it. The good tennis player acts intelligently: she has reasons for the movements she makes, but of necessity she does not think through these reasons, otherwise the game of tennis would never get started, let alone finished. Indeed, she may well be unable to explain in words, even afterward, why she moves her racket this way or that. As for the Freudian sorts of examples, we are all familiar, both from literature and from life, with the phenomena of self-deception, or of simple lack of self-knowledge. Someone, for instance, believes himself to be motivated by the highest moral principle when he gives money to the beggar in the shop doorway: but perhaps his real reason is a desire to cultivate a certain image of himself, or to be seen by others to be doing the right thing, or a fear that the beggar might em-

2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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barrass him in some way if he does not give him something substantial. I am not suggesting that people always deceive themselves in this way, only that the situation described is perfectly intelligible to everyone and so not at all puzzling. Nor is it in the slightest degree unintelligible that people should sometimes act without being able to say why: I did it on impulse, they say, or I acted instinctivelywhich is just another way of saying I just dont know why I acted as I did. Church herself accepts that our explanations of behavior are now replete with appeals to unconscious beliefs and desires: but why only nowhavent they always been? And if we resort to such appeals so commonly, if indeed, as Searle says, their explanatory power is so great, then that seems to imply that we understand perfectly well what we are saying when we appeal to unconscious desires and reasons? If the notion of the unconscious is so unclear, as Searle also says, then the puzzlement arises, not at the level of ordinary usage, but at that of philosophical theory. Perhaps Church has not come as far as she thinks from Descartes, who saw the mind as the name of a substance, a kind of object, albeit a unique kind, of which something called consciousness was the essence. And perhaps some of her puzzlement could be avoided if she descended from this high level of abstraction and considered more concretely what we are actually talking about here. First, we should distinguish between acting for a reason and acting rationally. The title of her paper, and its epigraph, are derived from Pascals famous quotation about the reasons of the heart, which are not those which reason knows about: that is, which are not rational grounds, as judged by the rules of logic. But there is surely a difference between saying, as Pascal does, that there are reasons of which Reason does not know, and talking about reasons that we do not know about. Talking in the latter way is saying nothing about the rationality or otherwise of our reasons for action, but only about the fact that we do not make them explicit, to ourselves or to others. Pace Freud, our unconscious reasons may be as rational (or as irrational) as our conscious: the tennis players reasons for moving her racket as

she does, although unconscious, are perfectly rational, designed to help her to win the game. Equally, Pascals reasons of the heart may be as fully conscious as the reasons of Reason. If someone believes in God because he has a deep inner feeling that the universe is purposive, then why should he not be able to make that reason explicit to himself or to others, as much as if he believed because he was persuaded by the logical arguments of Aquinas or Anselm? If we follow the lead of such analytic philosophers as Wittgenstein or Ryle, or such phenomenologists as Merleau-Ponty, we can pose the questions about consciousness and having a reason for acting in more concrete terms. What does it mean, after all, to say that someone has a reason for being afraid of someone met for the first time? Doesnt it mean simply that there are features of her response to that stranger that can be explained only by such fear? There is no implication in saying this that she herself could necessarily offer this explanation, or that this explanation makes her response rational (that it is normative), still less that it could only be properly offered if this reason was normative for her, that is, presumably that she herself would accept the fear as rational. Yet it is not a causal explanation: its meaningfulness depends on the fact that she is a being with purposes, who interacts with her environment in a purposive, not just in a mechanical way. To find someone fearful is to respond to that person as threatening, which is a response that is possible only for a being with purposes that might be threatened. All this suggests that it would be more helpful to separate the having of reasons from consciousness: indeed, to give up potentially misleading talk about consciousness and the unconscious altogether. Human beings act for reasons, not because they have consciousness, but because they are purposive beings. Nonhuman animals also act for reasons, because they too are purposive: but they are not conscious, that is, they are not capable of making their reasons explicit to themselves or evaluating their rationality. It is one of the problematic features of Churchs account that it seems to rule out a priori the very possibility that nonhuman ani-

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mals might act for reasons, rather than being mechanical systems. Like Cartesianism, it lumps animals together with machines. This ignores both the similarities and the dissimilarities between human beings and other animals. We are like other animals in that we can act for reasons without saying (or even without being able to say) what our reasons are; unlike them, in that sometimes we can make our own reasons explicit to ourselves and others (although that implies that 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 Cartesian either/or: either human beings (or other ani-

mals) are mere machines, like the automata that were so popular in Descartes day, or else they have some extra element called consciousness or mind, which makes it possible to explain some of their behavior by reasons. Churchs discussion of spatial reasoning is interesting enough in itself, but it seems to miss the point: it is not necessary to propose another type of reasoning to make intelligible the way in which we can act for reasons of which we are unaware. All that is necessary is to see that we already understand how this is possible if we are not confused by certain kinds of philosophical theorizing.