The thoughtless action is the ideal one
How doubt leaves a path of conscious awareness in its wake
By Yervant Kulbashian. You can support me on Patreon here.
All perfect acts are unconscious and no longer subject to will; consciousness is the expression of an imperfect and often morbid state in a person. — Nietzsche, The Will to Power
The consciousness of a man in action is unreflected consciousness — Sartre, Being and Nothingness
The early origins of man’s capacity to reflect come from the painful consequences of violent emotional clashes. — Jung, Man and His Symbols
It’s rare that you find yourself questioning whether you’re opening a refrigerator door or scratching your elbow correctly. You nearly always carry out such actions unconsciously, on the assumption that they are just fine until “proven guilty”, that is, until you have a reason to suspect them. There is simply not enough time available to question every one of your actions (or thoughts, or beliefs). Rather you continue thoughtlessly in your habits until something knocks you out of your complacency. For example, after reading this post, you may now become aware of how you open a fridge. A sudden awareness would arise for what was hitherto done unconsciously, as when a friend draws your attention to the rhythm of your breathing or the frequency at which you blink.
Awareness needs a motivator. There is too much going on for you to be aware of everything — breathing, blinking, the movement of your fingers, the light through the window, etc. — all the time. Some momentary need must set up a query, looking for an answer. To become conscious of what you are doing always hints at a possible or suspected issue; actions that are not dubious or suspect do not need to be made conscious. So although the simple question “what am I doing?” may sound benign, it is actually a form of self-doubt, and opens the door to critical self-reflection. It’s an internalised version of “what are you doing!?!” And just as children who are asked the latter are usually in trouble, to question your actions or thoughts is to subtly “accuse” them.
“Accuse” here should not be taken in the sense of social reprobation; rather it is a more general concern or qualm; a question mark placed around your actions. Any time you hesitate or doubt one of them, a tension — whether mild or severe — has already come into play. The same is in fact true for any question you might ask, no matter how intellectual or objective it sounds. It always raises a tension in the recipient, even if the recipient is yourself. A question asks to be put at ease. This is why people aren’t comfortable being asked incessant questions; they feel like they are being interrogated or accused.
And in a sense they are right. Though it may not seem that way when phrased in gentle tones, the fact is we only ask for an explanation for an action or event when we are not content to let it pass without a second thought. Something is off, something that demands the extra energy and time to discover what is going on. You are searching for something. Even pure curiosity represents a type of dissatisfaction that demands to be satiated. When left unaddressed — such as when you don’t find out how a mystery movie ends — curiosity can cause an inner tension. The same is true when you request a factual clarification. To understand is a form of control: you are attempting to interpret events in a way that makes you feel you have control over the situation, and you persist until it makes sense to you.
The answer to the question “why did I do that?” is therefore always a type of justification or relaxation of your qualms. When you type on a keyboard (assuming you are good at it) you are unaware of the detailed motion of your fingers, at least not in the same way as when you were first learning to type. Only when you mistype, or sense a potential misalignment of your fingertips does awareness of the details come to the fore. A tension causes you to be alert, to pay attention, to become aware of your situation, your actions, even your self.¹ To be aware is necessarily to realise anew, to learn something in the moment. Its goal is to resolve a suspected problem, or at least to reassure the tension that nothing is actually wrong: “Did I really press the ‘F’ key? Yes I did.”
Life is sweetest when one lacks sense,
for lack of sensation is a painless evil,
that is, until one learns to know joy or pain.
— Sophocles, Ajax
The tight relationship between doubt and conscious awareness has not escaped the notice of our predecessors. The story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, and how awareness of their unclothed bodies coincided with the introduction of anxiety and guilt (shame in the eyes of God) can be seen as a prototypical example. Before that moment, one can imagine they were contentedly “thoughtless”, they had no reason to ask questions about their perfect behaviour. Such a state of uncontaminated bliss is the privilege of one who experiences no issues with their actions, because they perceive no resistance to them. The Tree, the source of knowledge or awareness was then seen as a curse, deemed to be the root of human suffering.
But this story, as with many others in this vein, reverses cause and effect. It is not that knowledge brought about inner turmoil, but rather suffering, doubt, and anxiety that makes awareness — i.e. knowledge — necessary. We see the same inversion of cause and effect in many other passages, for example:
Free from all thoughts of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, a man finds absolute peace. — Bhagavad Gita, Mahabharata VI
This is a similar historical misunderstanding. Thoughts of “I” do not cause a lack of peace as suggested. Rather self-awareness (the “I”) is generated by a pressing need or want — by a prior disturbance of inner peace. The disturbance forces you to become aware of yourself. If the disturbance is unexpected, then it will arrive suddenly, before you can prevent it. So you can no more forestall the creation of “I” than you can prevent yourself hearing a sound that you didn’t know was coming.
We see this same misunderstanding play out when we criticise friends for being overly “emotional” or reactive. “Ignore her” you might say; or “don’t think too much about it”. Both pieces of advice attempt to suppress awareness, and thus erase the tension. Such doomed advice predictably fails, however, since a passionate (root: passive) response is a necessary precursor to skill and self-control. You cannot master something you have never yet encountered. Perfect impartiality and level-headedness through all of life’s ordeals is a naive fantasy. At best it is the endpoint of a long road of trial and overcoming. To suppress or ignore a passionate response before you have a chance to confront it is merely to flee from the challenge, to prematurely side-step it.
Only by facing those challenges over time do you discover — become aware of — their resolutions. Through an accumulation of moments of conscious awareness you build up a catalogue of thinking which reflects your history of overcoming. This catalogue becomes your world model: an awareness of the world that you have constructed on a need-to-know basis². Once you have become skilled enough in dealing with most problems life throws your way, your mind can then settle in and breeze thoughtlessly through acquired habits and routines, i.e. unconsciously.
The man who acts never has any conscience; no one has any conscience but the man who thinks. — Goethe, Maxims and Reflections
The same relationship can explain the link between consciousness and conscience. Your wariness about having done the right thing (conscience) motivates your mind to notice your actions, and perhaps to try to correct them, or rationalise them. The mindless soldier who has no reason to hesitate or doubt is unlikely to be aware of any moral failings. Only from outside, from the perspective of a “conscious” person would those actions be regarded as defects. A person who finds themselves impassive when killing an ant is not conscious in the same sense as one who regards all life as deserving protection.
As you expand your realm of concerns so too does your consciousness, in an absolute sense, increase. You become aware of more things. And it is cumulative: one piece of consciousness does not replace another — although they can sometimes interfere. As Nietzsche pointed out, this is the burden of those who are highly conscientious:
My brother, if you are fortunate, then you will have only one virtue and no more: thus you will go more easily over the bridge. Illustrious is it to have many virtues, but a hard lot.— Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Lucky people are simply less aware. Those whose every action succeeds need never learn how to address failure, nor even to be aware that failure is possible. It is not that ignorance is bliss; rather that bliss leads to ignorance. Only when the world decides you have had it too easy does it shatter your bliss and with it your ignorance. Now you must know.
Zeus, has established as a fixed law that “wisdom comes by suffering.”
Even as trouble, bringing memory of pain, drips over the mind in sleep,
so wisdom comes to men, whether they want it or not.
— Aeschylus, Agamemnon
This is why cynical people have so often misconstrued human consciousness as a curse inflicted upon our unlucky species. But these critics are only shooting the messenger. Consciousness itself is not the curse, conscious awareness represents the moment the tension is resolved; it is a salve on an inflicted wound, an island of relief in life’s troubled seas. To denounce consciousness is like denouncing doctors for the existence of disease.
One may perhaps object that there are cases when becoming aware of your actions can lead to anxieties you didn’t previously have; and thus when ignorance would have been preferable. For example, realising that you have accidentally betrayed a close friend can cause you to lose sleep. But that is an unforeseen side effect which should not cast aspersions on the original act of awareness itself. Your thoughts just got unlucky. In the same way, you may learn to take physical actions with the goal of addressing your problems, and yet those actions can, once taken, lead to unexpected pitfalls — e.g. you correctly reach for a cup, but in the process knock over a poorly placed teapot. So too can awareness often have unfortunate side effects.
Still the two moments must be separated. Separating them is generally difficult since the need that brought about the original moment of awareness is usually not visible to you, so you may not know what its causes were; and thus not appreciate the value it brings. To see that value, imagine a person who could never become aware that his actions were perceived as a betrayal by his friends; such a person would certainly be socially disadvantaged.
By realising that your behaviour may be taken negatively, you have the opportunity to correct it going forward. And once you have learned a pattern of self-restraint and careful circumspection that avoids causing issues, you can resume letting your mind play out its comfortable habits — including the new ones you just gained — without conscious awareness of what you are doing. As with tying your shoelaces, every skill obtained through effort eventually becomes routine, so that you can do it unconsciously. When there is no reason to be concerned anymore, then as far as you know your actions are ideal — there is no longer cause for doubt or hesitation, no longer a reason to be aware of what you are doing. The thoughtless action is the one you have found to be best.
¹ There is an obvious parallel between the two modes of thinking described in this post and the dual-processes model of reasoning. The latter proposes that there are two types of reasoning: type 1 is unconscious habitual action, and type 2 is more deliberate, and hence more aware:
The idea that type 1 thinking is unconscious and type 2 thinking is conscious has been a recurring theme in many accounts from Reber onward.
According to [type 2], people have a set of logical rules built into their minds to permit reasoning, which proceeds as a kind of mental proof.
— Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, Chapter 8
It suggests that effortful mental reasoning, e.g. working through inferences, belongs to type 2. However, we noted that all reasoning is an answer to a question or demand, elicited in response to a perceived problem, and worked through until a particular pattern of deduction becomes habitual or automatic. Thus type 2 kicks in only when a concern is raised with type 1.
² As discussed elsewhere, world models are not statistical recreations of empirical experiences, but models of how the world would be useful to you. This is not to say that you only “see what you want to see”, which would be absurd — rather understanding and knowledge are ways of controlling your world.
