The metaphysics of consciousness constitutes one of the most contested and generative axes in the depth-psychology corpus, cutting across traditions from Aurobindonian integral idealism to Jungian analytical psychology, from McGilchrist’s hemispheric philosophy to Derridean deconstruction. The central question — whether consciousness is ontologically primary or derivative — receives sharply divergent treatments. Sri Aurobindo argues from a thoroughgoing spiritual monism: consciousness is the very substance of existence, and matter is no more than a ‘status of being of Spirit.’ McGilchrist, marshalling testimony from Planck, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg, insists that consciousness cannot be reduced to anything more fundamental and that the materialist project of grounding mind in matter is self-defeating, since matter itself ‘evanesces’ under scrutiny. Pauli occupies an intermediate position, resisting both Eastern ‘suprapersonal cosmic consciousness without an object’ and naive physicalism, proposing instead that the unconscious stands in a complementarity relation to consciousness analogous to quantum complementarity. Derrida, by contrast, approaches consciousness through the critique of self-presence, arguing that consciousness manifests only as self-presence and that this privilege encodes the entire metaphysics of the subject. The depth-psychological tradition is thus the site of a genuine encounter between idealism, panpsychism, complementarity theory, and post-structural critique — making this entry indispensable for situating the broader library.
‘Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.’
McGilchrist, citing Schrödinger, advances the thesis that consciousness is irreducibly fundamental and cannot be explained by or reduced to any more basic physical substrate.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
‘Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.’
This passage establishes consciousness as the foundational natural fact, against which all reductionist programmes — whether eliminativist or functionalist — are shown to fail.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
‘I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.’
McGilchrist deploys Planck’s testimony to ground a strong idealist metaphysics in which consciousness, not matter, is the ontological primitive of the universe.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
‘I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.’
Planck’s formulation, cited approvingly by McGilchrist, presents consciousness as the precondition for all existence claims, inverting the standard materialist ontology.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
if there is a greater and deeper self-knowledge and world-knowledge, a knowledge by identity, a consciousness to which that knowledge is normal and a Being of which that consciousness is the eternal self-awareness
Aurobindo argues that surface mind’s flux-based account of existence is superseded by a deeper consciousness-as-being in which subject and object are ‘sides of its identity,’ constituting a thoroughgoing metaphysical idealism.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
no-one has the slightest idea of a mechanism by which consciousness could emerge from unconscious matter; in any case matter evanesces as we look at it more closely and turns out to be every bit as inscrutable as consciousness itself.
McGilchrist dismantles the materialist grounding programme by showing that matter, far from providing a solid mind-independent basis, dissolves under scrutiny in ways structurally analogous to consciousness.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
no-one has the slightest idea of a mechanism by which consciousness could emerge from unconscious matter; in any case matter evanesces as we look at it more closely and turns out to be every bit as inscrutable as consciousness itself.
The passage argues that neither matter nor consciousness admits of reduction to the other, undermining eliminative materialism and opening space for a panpsychist or idealist ontology.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
if the material cosmos is an emanation or projection of a grounding consciousness it will as a matter of course have the necessary, apparently fine-tuned, conditions to come into existence
McGilchrist proposes that a grounding consciousness model resolves the fine-tuning problem by explaining why the cosmos is intelligible to conscious beings generated from within it.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
On this definition of physicalism, ‘life’ and ‘consciousness’ are just words we have for epiphenomenal illusions with no causal influence on what happens.
McGilchrist, via Segall and Nagel, exposes the reductio ad absurdum of physicalism: if consciousness is epiphenomenal, the explanatory project of science itself loses its grounding subject.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
On this definition of physicalism, ‘life’ and ‘consciousness’ are just words we have for epiphenomenal illusions with no causal influence on what happens.
The passage critiques physicalist reduction by demonstrating that on its own terms, consciousness becomes causally inert, rendering the materialist programme self-undermining.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
a duality of subject and object is already postulated by the concept of consciousness. In the place of the oriental universal consciousness lacking an object, western psychology has set up the idea of the unconscious
Pauli argues that consciousness structurally entails subject-object duality and that the Western psychological equivalent of the Eastern universal consciousness is the unconscious, whose relation to consciousness mirrors quantum complementarity.
, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994thesis
mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call ‘chance’ when they are made by electrons.
McGilchrist marshals Dyson’s panpsychist claim that quantum indeterminacy already entails proto-mental properties, making consciousness a cosmic rather than merely biological phenomenon.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
‘consciousness, like gravity, mass, and charge, may be one of the irreducible properties of the universe for which no further account is possible.’
McGilchrist cites Ramachandran and Blakemore to position consciousness alongside fundamental physical constants, suggesting it is ontologically primitive and not derivable from more basic entities.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
‘consciousness, like gravity, mass, and charge, may be one of the irreducible properties of the universe for which no further account is possible.’
This passage assigns consciousness the status of an irreducible property of the universe, analogous to fundamental physical forces, foreclosing reductionist explanation.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
the matter of the most material universe is nothing but a status of being of Spirit made an object of sense, envisaged by the Spirit’s own consciousness as the stuff of its forms
Aurobindo articulates a thoroughgoing spiritual monism in which matter is ontologically subordinate to spirit-consciousness, the material world being a mode of self-objectification by cosmic consciousness.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
consciousness offers itself to thought only as self-presence, as the perception of self in presence. And what holds for consciousness holds here for so-called subjective existence in general.
Derrida argues that the metaphysics of consciousness is inseparable from the metaphysics of presence: consciousness has been constituted in philosophy as pure self-presence, a founding gesture that Derridean deconstruction targets.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
the experiential world is the product of two metaphysical forces or drives, which he called Geist and Drang. Drang is primary, and is a more elemental force, Geist a secondary, comparatively rarefied, intellectual force.
McGilchrist invokes Scheler’s dual-force metaphysics to position consciousness as the product of an interplay between elemental drive and spirit, with the brain acting as a filter or resistive sculpting medium.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
the experiential world is the product of two metaphysical forces or drives, which he called Geist and Drang. Drang is primary, and is a more elemental force, Geist a secondary, comparatively rarefied, intellectual force.
Scheler’s metaphysical dualism of Geist and Drang, as cited by McGilchrist, frames the phenomenal world as arising from the resistance between a primary vital drive and secondary spiritual force.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
There is, in the physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s terminology, ‘a psyche long before there is consciousness.’
McGilchrist, drawing on Pauli, distinguishes psyche as a broader ontological substrate that precedes consciousness, suggesting consciousness is a delimited, emergent configuration within a more fundamental psychic field.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
There is, in the physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s terminology, ‘a psyche long before there is consciousness.’
Pauli’s claim that psyche antedates consciousness is mobilised by McGilchrist to decouple the psychic from the merely conscious, opening the ontological register of depth psychology to a pre-personal cosmic dimension.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
If everything that concretely exists is intrinsically experience-involving, well, that is what the physical turns out to be; it is what energy (another name for physical stuff) turns out to be.
McGilchrist endorses Strawson’s panpsychist position that the physical is intrinsically experience-involving, dissolving the apparent gulf between consciousness and matter by reconceiving matter as experiential at its base.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
If everything that concretely exists is intrinsically experience-involving, well, that is what the physical turns out to be; it is what energy (another name for physical stuff) turns out to be.
The passage argues for a panpsychist resolution to the mind-body problem by identifying energy itself as experiential, suggesting that the hard problem dissolves once matter is no longer conceived as experientially inert.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Spirit itself is pure substance of being presenting itself as an object no longer to physical, vital or mental sense, but to a light of a pure spiritual perceptive knowledge in which the subject becomes its own object
Aurobindo posits Spirit as a self-reflexive substance in which the subject-object distinction collapses, providing a metaphysical account of consciousness as the self-aware foundation of all existence.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
restriction is the very being, the very character, of consciousness. And the reason for that distinctness, that particular capacity of acuteness of consciousness, is the body, which restricts you to a certain place in space and a certain time.
Jung argues that the body is the metaphysical ground of the particularity of consciousness: without bodily restriction, consciousness would dissolve into an undifferentiated totality and thus cease to be consciousness at all.
, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988supporting
phenomenology could push to its extreme limit the formalist demand and could criticize all previous formalisms only on the basis of a thinking of Being as self-presence, on the basis of a transcendental experience of pure consciousness.
Derrida identifies Husserlian phenomenology as the consummation of the metaphysics of presence, in which the formalist drive reaches its apex precisely because it is grounded in the self-evidence of pure consciousness.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
We are constantly reacting to things without being conscious of them at the time.
Jaynes establishes a categorical distinction between reactivity and consciousness, arguing that most adaptive behaviour proceeds without consciousness, which thus cannot be identified with the totality of mental life.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
we cannot afford the luxury of giving in to the fear of ‘metaphysics,’ of truth, the absolute, and identity. To be sure, the criticism brought forth against classical metaphysics by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and a host of others is valid in many regards.
Giegerich argues that depth psychology must engage seriously with metaphysics, conceding the validity of post-modern critique while insisting that the soul’s needs require metaphysical commitments that cannot be abandoned.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
archetypal psychology requires no foundation in another so-called reality and why it is not dependent upon an external philosophy, science, or metaphysics.
Hillman adopts an anti-foundationalist stance, contending that archetypal psychology’s grounding in the image is self-sufficient and does not require metaphysical support from outside the psychological field.
, Mythic Figures, 2007aside
How often in our frustrations with trying to solve the mysteries of mind do we comfort our questions with anatomy, real or fancied, and think of a thought as a particular neuron or a mood as a particular neurotransmitter!
Jaynes criticises the reflexive neurological reduction of mental states as an avoidance of genuine metaphysical engagement with the problem of consciousness.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976aside