The Walk · 8 of 14
BELOW AWARENESS
Can something happen in the mind without appearing to consciousness?
Before Freud. Grades of awareness, then minute perceptions of which we are unaware.
Foreground / submerged
Can something happen in the mind without appearing to consciousness?
A pond. What is on the surface and what is under it. Not a map of the unconscious.
Hear
Long before anyone spoke of an unconscious in the modern clinical sense, philosophers asked whether the mind could act in the dark.
Cudworth already permits drowsy perception, half a cogitation, and natural activity without express consciousness.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German philosopher and mathematician, writing against Locke, describes an infinity of minute perceptions, petites perceptions, of which we are unaware.
The roar of the sea is made of waves we would not notice alone. Habit can hide a mill's noise.
Perception is not yet apperception, awareness of one's own perceiving. Later centuries will transform the question again: association, habit, repression, automaticity, unreported seeing.
Sigmund Freud, the Viennese physician who founded psychoanalysis in the decades around 1900, did not invent the dark of the mind. He renamed and clinicalized a problem that was already open.
The question returns. What happens outside awareness, and how would we know?
Documented
Already in Cudworth
If consciousness has grades, then some mental or soul-activity is less than fully present.
Plastic nature is not a human unconscious, but it is a seventeenth-century refusal of the claim that all activity of a living soul is express awareness.
Primary text
Petites perceptions
Leibniz's New Essays, written 1704 and published 1765, make minute perceptions central. They explain unnoticed change, the force of habit, and how distinct awareness can arise by degrees.
Apperception is not the whole of the mental.
Open question
Later names
Nineteenth-century psychology, psychoanalysis, and later cognitive science each recut the field. Continuity of theme is not identity of theory.
A later name is not, by itself, a line of descent.
The question returns. Is everything mental conscious?
Sources
Cudworth, Ralph. The True Intellectual System of the Universe. London: Richard Royston, 1678.
Translates Plotinus's synaisthēsis as con-sense or consciousness. Distinguishes grades of awareness and allows mental activity that is not fully conscious.
Plastic natures operate without express consciousness.
Leibniz, G. W.. Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain. 1765.
Minute perceptions of which we are unaware, illustrated by the roar of the sea. Distinguishes perception from apperception.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Seventeenth-Century Theories of Consciousness.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. substantive revision, consulted 2026.
Spine for the linguistic transition, Cudworth, Hobbes, Locke, and grades of awareness.