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"perhaps you will say ... understanding itself is a [mental] state" Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 146 [check]
Descartes thought that some of the things we did were ‘controlled by our will’ (Descartes, Philosophical Writings, Vol I p.315.). For them, the controlling operation was either the mind or within the mind and as such was something a person was necessarily aware of. ('[W]e are always aware of the acts or operations of our minds' Descartes, Meditations, Objections and Replies, On Meditation 2; Selected Philosophical Writings, p.130.)
The determination of all other actions depended for Descartes ‘solely on the arrangement of our limbs and on the route which the spirits, produced by the heat of the heart, follow naturally in the brain, nerves and muscles.’
If we use 'mechanical' as shorthand for the arrangments and movements Descartes is characterising here, all actions which are not brought about mechanically are brought about by proceedings in the mind, or by the mind, of which we are, for Descartes, necessarily aware.
For Descartes it seems, the thought that is the act of will behind every action which is not determined mechanically is itself not determined by any mechanical train. It originates a chain of change, but it is not itself a link in such a chain.
Here Descartes differs from Hobbes, who holds that so-called acts of will are simply the links in fully accredited causal chains of 'appetites'. As such of course they are items of which the people that have them are unequivocally aware. As Susan James has it, for Hobbes:
'to act voluntarily ... is to act on the last appetite that arises from a longer or shorter process of deliberation, during which we assess the likely outcomes of competing passions.' James, Passion and Action, p.282.
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The exercise of reason and the operation of the will are one and the same for Descartes. A rational animal is one the 'movements' of which are sometimes determined by the will.
Hobbes disagrees
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If this suggests that the person was essentially an observer of the processes determining behaviour it is misleading. The person was considered to be aware of the determining processes going on in their minds, but in one of those illogicalities which are tolerated because zero tolerance leaves you with nothing, a person was also considered to be an actor within the mind as well: an agent somehow and to some extent in control of the determining processes of which s/he was also a spectator.
'I shall try to give such a full account of the entire bodily machine that we will have no more reason to think that it is our soul which produces in it the movements which we know by experience are not controlled by our will than we have reason to think that there isa soul in a clock which makes it tell the time .' Descartes, Philosophical Writings, Vol I p.315.
''Thus every movement that we make without any contribution from our will - as often happens when we breathe, walk, eat and, indeed, when we perform any action which is common to us and the beasts - depends solely on the arrangement of our limbs and on the route which the spirits, produced by the heat of the heart, follow naturally in the brain, nerves and muscles. this occurs in the same way that the movement od a watch is produced merely by the strength of its spring and the configuration of its wheels.' Descartes,The Passions of the Soul, Selected Philosophical Writings, p.225.
'having thuis considered all the functions belonging solely to the body, it is easy to recognise that there is nothing in us which we must attribute to our soul except our thoughts. These are of two principal kinds, some being actions of the soul and others its passions. Those I call its actions are all our volitions... On the other hand, the various perceptions or modes of knowledge present in us may be called its passions, in a general sense..." Descartes,The Passions of the Soul, Selected Philosophical Writings, p.225.
| An etext of Descartes' Passions of the Soul is here. Thanks to Patricia Easton. |
So when there is an action to the determination of which 'the will' contributes, the contribution of the will takes the form of a thought.
Hume still spoke of 'the will' as the determinat of rational action, and he considered that the will was determined
'there is no known circumstance that enters into the connection and production of the actions of matterthat is not to be found in all the operations of the mind.' Hume, Treatise, Part III Section I (Everyman ed. p.118)
'a spectator can commonly infer our actions from our motives and character; and even when he cannot, he concludes in general that he might, were he perfectly acquainted with every circumstance of our situation and temper, and the most secret springs of our complexion and disposition.' Hume, Treatise, Part III Section I (Everyman ed. p.121)
'The will exerts itself, when either the good or the absence of the evil may be attained by any action of the mind or body.'Hume, Treatise, Part III Section XI (Everyman ed. p.148)
Action
Susan James sets out different theories of action like this.
The Scholastics understood action as flowing from passions interacting with each other and with 'the will' and or 'rational appetite'. This kind of analysis relies on conceiving of the soul as consisting of several distinct parts, so that appetites and passions can each behave at least semi-independently. (James, p.256) James says this there is recognition of two types of conflict: between reason and appetite and between appetite and appetite (p.256).
One way of trying to think about the unconscious is this.
Think of a case of ‘multiple personality’. A person has the persona Mary on day, and the next has a quite different persona June. ‘Mary’ thinks of ‘June’ as of a different person. And vice versa.
If this is an intelligible possibility, consider now the two personas as existing at the same time.
Is this intelligible?
If so, consider the possibility of ‘Mary’ not knowing about ‘June’, but ‘June’ knowing about ‘Mary’ and feeding thoughts and prompting action in ‘Mary’, without ‘Mary’ realizing where these thoughts and promptings originate.
Is June now Mary’s ‘unconscious’?
In arguing that a major change in our answer to the question What is a human being? took place between the 18th and 19th Centuries am I doing anything other than notice that the unconscious was invented?
When the idea of 'the unconscious' took the shape devised by Freud in the early 20th Century, the concept of the self as possessing a turbid depth was presupposed.
The idea of the self as being or having a potential was not in itself an idea that involved 'the unconscious'.
The 18th Century had a distinctive assumption about how behaviour was goverened. They thought of it as governed in all important respects by the agent's conscious mind. A clear expression of this idea comes in the notion of the practical syllogism developed in an earlier world. Actions are the outcomes of processes of mental reasoning. This gives rise to the problem of the weakness of will. How can anyone do x, if they believe x to be wrong? We moderns don't have a real problem here. Our behaviour is not governed entirely, or at all, by what is going on in our conscious minds. [??]
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Created 08:06:05 Prepared by VP Home Page of Web Presentation: Conceptions of the Human Being in the West
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