To the few critics attending to the works of Conrad Aiken, it has been obvious that Aiken - from the very outset of his career in 1914 - strove to be a philosophical poet. Houston Peterson, whose The Melody of Chaos appeared in 1931, claims that the intellectual genealogy of Aiken's themes can be traced to the "long disintegrative tradition" (Peterson, 102) of western thought, that is, to those thinkers who challenged the traditional, absolutist concepts of self, identity, truth. beauty, good and evil. He lists, among others, such philosophers as Hume who doubted that there was such a thing as a single, stable self; Nietzsche, who attacked the very concept of absolute truth as well as notions of absolute good and evil; and Darwin, whose theory of evolution suggests the 'low', animal origins of our human virtues.

 Other writers, of course, have noted  -  not always favorably - the strong philosophical bent in Aiken's work. Julian Symons, for example, rather contemptuously dismisses the philosophy as excessively influenced by  such German pessimists as Shopenhauer.

  Frederick Hoffman's Conrad Aiken links his work to the New England Transcendentalists for whom Aiken felt a special affinity, expressed most clearly in "Literature in Massachusetts" (1937). Jay Martin and Harry Marten, among others, recognize that epistemological concerns play a large role in Aiken's writing. The one writer, other than Houston Peterson, who seems to have the clearest and fullest understanding of the enormous extent to which Aiken's writing is philosophical  is Stephen Tabachnik who states that Aiken's work

  has a characteristic that much contemporary poetry and
  fiction lacks: a real coherence, a staggering thematic and
  symbolic unity, a philosophical argument that stretches over
  forty years across the novels, poems, short stories and a
  play.

   ("The Great Circle Voyage of Conrad Aiken's Mr.
     Arcularis" in American Literature, XLV, #4, June, 1974)
 

Unfortunately, neither Tabachnik nor Peterson provide a systematic exposition of Aiken's philosophy of consciousness - which is the very heart of Aiken's work.  His poetry - if not, his entire literary and critical achievement -  is, from its start, informed by a coherent philosophy of consciousness from which he never deviated but  which he explored and developed  in a writing career spanning over fifty  years. In outline, this philosophy can be reduced to five principles.

 The first is that whatever else it may be, consciousness is primarily self-consciousness. In this, he follows John Locke who, in Essay Concerning Human Understanding , writes that consciousness is "the perceptions of what passes in a man's own mind." (11, I.19). Perceiving what transpires in our own mind is, of course, self-consciousness.  It might also be said Aiken is a Cartesian, believing with Rene Descartes that "Cogito, ergo sum", that awareness of our own sensations, emotions, and thoughts - self-consciousness -  is the starting point and foundation of all other knowledge. If human beings wish to know anything with certainty, they must inescapably begin by knowing themselves.

 Rather than simply theorizing or telling about consciousness like a philosopher, Aiken, as a poet, shows us what it is like to experience the primacy of self-consciousness, applying this principle to the ordinary and sometimes bizarre circumstances of daily life. Self-consciousness being the pre-condition of all other knowledge, it follows that the  problem of identity, of knowing who we are, becomes the primary issue facing all human beings. The quest for identity - and the enormous challenges it raises  - is one of the main themes of Aiken's work from the start of his career.

 Complicating the quest for identity is the second principle of Aiken's philosophy of consciousness: all is flux. Aiken, like Whitehead and other process philosophers, is a Heraclitean in the sense that he believes that nothing in this universe, either within man or outside him, is or even can be, stable. How can we ever hope to find a stable, enduring, identity when nothing is only what it is, but always on its way to being  something else? When nothing can ever be finished? Indeed, does the word 'identity' even have any meaning under such circumstances? And, if there is no such stable 'thing' as identity, what happens to the morals by which we guide and guard our " identities"? As this study will show, for Aiken there is only one moral absolute:  open-ness to change. That alone brings us into harmony with the essential nature of the universe and ourselves.

 Not only is change ubiquitous, but also, it often turns things into their opposites. Even morals are not excepted. What is good in one situation may be evil in another; filth may become pure and purity transform into filth; chaos turns into order and order into chaos; truth and lies may be transmuted into one another. Moreover, these opposites are interdependent, none real without the other,  or, as expressed in the title of one of his poems, "[e]vil is the palindrome of live." Evil is as inevitable  as good. This view can make us optimistic since good will emerge from evil as Milton shows in Paradise Lost, but also pessimistic since good inevitably degenerates into evil. Like Nietzsche, Aiken tries to think "beyond good and evil" and also beyond optimism and pessimism, taking up a position, that, in light of the unavoidability of change, is simply realistic. The universe is as it is, and what we think about it is ultimately irrelevant.

 The third principle of Aiken's philosophy of consciousness is that there is a fundamental rhythm in our psychological lives, a kind of heart-beat, in which we alternatively focus inward on ourselves and outward on the world. He calls these the "concentric" and "eccentric" phases of consciousness. During the concentric, inward turning phase, we dream and imagine ourselves in a wide variety of situations, feeling and thinking our way through them. The mind or Self of the dreamer becomes, in effect, the world in which the dream-selves or dream-egos live and act. The dreamer is a world, but this world  is changed by the actions of his dream-egos since the dreamer gains a lot of self-knowledge in this phase. Furthermore, the dreamer is often so wrapped up in his dreams that he is no longer aware of any distinction. In Blake's language, he becomes what he beholds, and, therefore, actually is all of his dream-egos. In a way, this solves the problem of personal identity but not in the expected manner of finding a single, stable thing to be and call ourselves.

 The "eccentric" phase of consciousness focuses attention on the world around us - no easy feat in light of the infinite flux of everything, and the fact that we can know the world only through our own experience of it. Aiken seems to accept Kant's notion that we know only phenomena, that is, things as they appear to us, but cannot know the noumena, that is, things as they are in themselves. There is a solipsistic trend in Aiken's philosophy of consciousness, but a solipsism he breaks through in a manner reminiscent of Schopenhauer who also resisted the perceptual cage into which Kant had locked him. How, then, can we actually know the world? The answer is clear: by understanding that the world, like us, is unremitting flux, change, transformation ... We can know the external world because we share the same nature or essence - endless change - or, as Aiken and Schopenhauer put it, music.  Music is the purest form of change known to man in their view. However, to know the world in this way, that is, to know the world essentially, means that we must first accept our own essence as change, that is, must know ourselves essentially - and this can cause problems.  The more we know ourselves, the more we know the world. Self-knowledge and world-knowledge are one.

 The forth principle of Aiken's philosophy of consciousness is repetition.
In a surprising anticipation of fractal theory, which shows how incredibly complex configurations (such as the Mandelbrot set) may be built by repeating simple shapes, Aiken believes that the universe is a composition of themes and variations. Mimicry, imitation, parody, copying - these are the ceaseless activities which build
the universe. Like a series of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls, one universe nestles
inside another,  essentially like it but smaller. The concentric mind/Self, for example, is a world to its dream-egos, but the concentric mind/Self is itself merely a dream-ego of a greater being yet, or, as Aiken calls it, a god - meaning, thereby, a god to us, a relative god. In other words, the principle of repetition allows us to conclude that the essential structure and conditions of our lives are everywhere repeated  on a smaller or greater scale. Here too, self-knowledge becomes world-knowledge. By knowing ourselves as noumena we can know the noumenal nature of the world as well.

 The fifth and final principle underlying Aiken's philosophy of consciousness is evolution. For change to be more than mere random reshuffling, it must  be evolutionary, it must have a direction, a goal, a telos. For Aiken, this telos is the expansion of consciousness. This expansion requires lifting unconscious material, the contents of the id, into consciousness and, thereby, giving us self-knowledge of the hidden, often shameful aspects of ourselves we would rather ignore. Without this self-knowledge, we cannot  be whole, complete beings, nor can we ever be our own masters for the urges and memories we hide from ourselves have a powerful, though secret, influence on our actions, feelings and thoughts. To be true masters in our own house we must be know what's in the basement.

 There is, moreover, an ethical side to the evolution or expansion of consciousness. As already noted, self-knowledge is world knowledge: in knowing ourselves essentially, we come to know the world essentially as well, for we share the same nature as change and flux. Essentially speaking, we are one with the world and all things in it, or, as Hinduism puts it, "Tat tvam asi", "That are thou". This belief lends itself readily to an ethic of understanding and perhaps, compassion, for it soon becomes clear that the suffering  - or guilt - of others is unavoidably reflected in our own being as well.  Whatever others do we have ourselves repeated, parodied, imitated in some different version.

 The evolution or expansion of consciousness also means that humans are to become gods, that is, superior beings characterized by greater inclusivity, a widening and deepening of self-knowledge, understanding and compassion. God is simply a being much further evolved in this process than the rest of humanity. Such a concept of God is reminiscent not only of Schleiermacher, who said that "God" was only a projection of our idealized, human better selves, but also of the process theology of Charles Hartshorne who believed God Himself was subject to process.

 The motive force driving the evolution of consciousness is our desire to love and be loved. Love, attraction, is a cosmic force in Aiken's view because love, in its various forms from gravity through sexual desire to the deepest devotion, is what brings order out of chaos. Because this order is temporary and inevitably dissolves into chaos, all humans are on a perpetual quest for love because that is the only way
to bring moments of order into our lives. In Aiken's work, the desire and need for love is portrayed as the Eternal Feminine, a female figure, be it a mother bending over a cradle or Lillith or Ruby Matrix, who draws her suitors, out of and beyond the narrow confines of their falsely assumed fixed identities.

 Using these five principles - the primacy of self-consciousness, endless change, the concentric and eccentric phases of consciousness, repetition and the evolution of consciousness - Aiken constructed the literary world inhabited by the characters in his poems. He explored what it is like to experience life in such a world, which, in his view, is an accurate reflection of our own.  His extra-ordinary persistence in this exploration of a particular philosophy of consciousness is one of the things that makes his work so rewarding to study.

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Ian Kluge, who teaches senior English and Comparative Civilizations, is also a poet
playwright and journalist. This article is based on his forthcoming book Conrad Aiken's Philosophy of Consciousness (World University Press) scheduled to appear in the late fall of this year. He and his wife, Kirsti, have four children.
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