6. The Romantic unconscious

Episode six, the romantic, unconscious

[00:00:08] 70th, and much of the 18thcenturies in Europe, style themselves as the age of reason and era suffusedwith confidence that human powers or rationality could comprehend the workingsof nature in such ways to bend it to our will. Nicola, Copernicus, RobertBoyle, Isaac Newton, and other great scientists of the era made astonishingadvances in our understanding of the physical world.

[00:00:29] These pioneers were also aninspiration to others who dreamed of developing a kind of physics of the mind,which would lay bare the inner workings of human mentality in such a way as torender it, not just intelligible, but also capable of being harnessed for thebetterment of humanity. We've already noted that live nuts while hugelyimpressed by the power of reason.

[00:00:48] And as a scientist in the sameleague, as Newton, Boyle, and Copernicus had doubts that at least consciousforms of rationality can teach us all we need to know about ourselves and whatwe make, the choices that we do. In fact, even before live, it's themathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal 16, 23 to 1662 had noted the hearthas reasons that reason does not know.

[00:01:10] Reflect on that remark, if youwill. Pascal seems to be suggesting that there are things that move usemotionally, the heart's reasons, but in a way that our rational selves areblind to reason does not know while the point might seem like common sense.Nowadays at Pascal's time, it would have sounded subversive, but this roguethought to not entirely disappeared during the age of reason and by the latterpart of the 18th century, some people were becoming disillusioned with apromise of rationality to solve mankind's ills.

[00:01:39] This disillusionment went handin hand with the fascination of which Pascal and laminates would have approvedwith parts of the human mind that were not easily understood as mechanisms ofrationality. Instead many were facing up to the fact that emotions could notsimply be harnessed as judgments could, but instead tended to have a life oftheir own.

[00:01:57] Connected with and supportingthis attitude was a sensibility that emphasized man's insignificance in theface of the vast powers of nature in painting. A good representative of thisviewpoint is Caspar David Friedrich, 1774 to 1840, whose canvases depict humanfigures set against a wild, natural background by which they're dwarfed.

[00:02:16] You've probably seen Friedrich'spainting the wanderer above the sea of fog from 1818. Which depicts a Walkerfrom behind as he gazes over a dramatic landscape from a top of precipice, hehas apparently just ascended another example that we're going to J M w Turner,his painting, snow store, Hannibal, and his army crossing the Alps from 1812.

[00:02:36] Not only imagines is one of thegreat events of military history, but also captures the enormous destructivepower of natural forces as compared even with mankind's most impressiveachievements.

[00:02:51] For the romantic movement, notonly was much of nature, vast and, and comprehensible. So as part of ourselves,Some poets at the time described their creative process. Is this tapping intoelements of their psyche beyond the reach of either reason or introspection. Thepoet Friedrich Schiller held that much of his poetry had an unconscious originand that he was more creative when his rational faculties were held at Bay andJohan Ville home fund Gupta said that he wrote most of his famous novel Syrosof young Veritor while practically unconscious.

[00:03:21] More generally many in theromantic movement found themselves in thrall by the idea of a descent into akind of inner underworld, such as a sentence precursors in for instance, theancient myth of Orpheus who journeyed into the underworld, retrieve his wife.He read a sea only to find that impulses within his own unconscious mind wouldlay his plans, the waste,

[00:03:46] but how could one journey intoone's own inner underworld? The answer for many poets and philosophers at theearly 19th century was dreams and or drugs in the early part of the 19thcentury, laudanum was commonly prescribed as a painkiller. It was made ofopium, which was not illegal at the time in which was usually diluted with wineor Brandy laudanum was of course, highly addictive.

[00:04:07] The poet, Samuel Coleridge,living in a farmhouse on the edge of ex-Mormon England had taken laudanum for amedical complaint while sleeping onto the drugs influence. He apparentlydropped that he composed an entire poem in his head after waking coach was withsome difficulty able to remember part of the poem and wrote it down until hewas interrupted by a visitor.

[00:04:26] You may have heard the first fewlines in Xanadu. Did kugel Khan, a stately pleasure dome decree where elf thesacred river ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. Infact, when he published the poem, years later, Coleridge titled it kubelet iconor a vision and a dream, a fragment, but amazingly Coleridge felt that he couldnot take credit for his poem, but rather that it happens to him.

[00:04:52] It was a product of hisunconscious mind, which had only been able to enter during a drug inducedsleep. Once he was awake and a laudanum had worn off, he only had limited accessto and control over that mysterious realm. Coach's young friend, ThomasDeQuincy carried on the tradition. He used laudanum for a variety of elementsand was soon addicted.

[00:05:12] He was no stranger to thehallucinations that the drug induced of one experience he wrote a theaterseemed suddenly opened up and lighted with my brain, which presented nightlyspectacles of more than earthly splendor. Of his drug induced dreams. DeQuincyQuincy wrote, I assumed every night to descend, not metaphorically, butliterally to the sand and do chasms.

[00:05:31] And sunless a business depthsbelow depths from which it seemed hopeless. I could never reascend.Observations like these were collected in de Quincy's confessions of an Englishopium eater, which caused a sensation among the reading public when it waspublished in 1821. As you Chronicles network to Quincy's nightly spectaclespresented him with scenes that although produced by his own mind, appeared tocome to him from an external source.

[00:05:56] This association between theunconscious and the superficially external was taken up as well by some of the19th centuries, most influential authors, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein might beread on a superficial level was a story about a man-made monster, but it mightalso be about the monsters within us, whether we like to admit their existenceor not.

[00:06:13] So too many of that ground, poststories, narrative events, that would be horrible to experience where that hadhappened in reality, but they might also be giving voice to urges or fearsinside of us. That would be painful to acknowledge consciously if you're likeme, you shutter at the thought of being buried alive.

[00:06:29] In fact, the prospect of such anexperience is so pleasant that would rather not think about it at all. And sothere, the fierce sits locked away safely in a dusty corner of your unconsciousmind, at least until you read, pose the premature burial and see that fearmaterialize in the scenes that pose so vividly conjures in opposition, then theJohn locks you with the mind is phosphorescent and thus completely open to viewthinkers, such as Blaise, Pascal and Godfried live.

[00:06:53] And it suggested that there maybe areas of the mind that are hidden from our introspective gays. Those areastend to be of an effect of character pertaining to emotions and moods, and assuch have a life of their own, rather than be subject to our will read as likeColeridge and DeQuincy were fascinated with this inner bell and sought toexplore it either through recollecting their dreams or with the aid of drugs orboth.

[00:07:15] Painters novelists and otherartists were also enthralled by this dimension of human existence and oftendepicted on canvas or in crows literal external events that could serve asproxies for the uncontrollable and sometimes frightening powers about theunconscious mind. .