Early Modern Overview

The early Moderns celebrated the insight that human behaviour and human thought were essentially movements, changes in the world, and as such had to be caused by precedent changes. Both action and thought were 'movements', and the question they saw fit to highlight was: What brings such movements about?

The idea of thoughts and bodily movements being 'movements' caused by other changes was not new to modernity, but focussing on it was.

Scholastic thought recognised that the changes undegone by things proceeded from causes, but the intellectual energy of the influential thinkers was devoted to things other than establishing patterns of causation. Aquinas

Book I: Of God As He Is In Himself

Book II: God The Origin of Creatures

Book III: God the End of Creatures

Book IV: Of God in His Revelation

Topics of Summa Theologiae

PRIMA PARS.
Sacred Doctrine. The One God. The Blessed Trinity. Creation. The Angels. The Six Days. Man. The Government of Creatures.

PRIMA SECUNDÆ PARTIS.
Man's Last End. Human Acts. Passions. Habits. Vice and Sin. Law. Grace.

SECUNDA SECUNDÆ PARTIS.
Faith. Hope. Charity. Prudence. Justice. Fortitude. Temperance. Acts Which Pertain to Certain Men.

TERTIA PARS.
The Incarnation. The Life of Christ. Sacraments. Baptism. Confirmation. The Holy Eucharist. Penance.

SUPPLEMENTUM TERTIA PARTIS.
Penance (continued). Extreme Unction. Holy Orders. Matrimony. The Resurrection. Appendices

So the focus of the early modern period, even in thought about human beings, was on the origination of change.

This contrasted with the outlook of pre-Modernity, where the assumption was that things had 'natures' which endowed them with a natural behaviour. It was natural to the stone to move, if possible, towards its proper place in the order of things.

The drive to understand the origination of change applied to the world of thought gave rise to an attempt to discover and set out the laws which were presumed to govern the behaviour of the elementary units of the mental world -' ideas'.

The course of thinking, and the course of bodily movements, alike in being thought to be governed by laws (on the model of Newtonian laws), were alike bound on that account to display strict patterning. The patterns they displayed might be complex, but were necessarily strict: a simple consequence of their being, or flowing from, law-governed processes.

The word reached for in referring to these patterns in human behaviour and thought was habit. Human beings were thought of as portfolios of habits.

This is not to forget that the early Moderns ascribed a key role in their understanding of human behaviour to reason.

The reconciliation of the operation of reason with the determinism implied by their commitment to, and foregrounding of, the principle of causality was very much on the agenda of philosophers, but coherence aside the common ground was that reason played a role in the determination of a good deal of human behaviour, but that its operation did nothing to compromise its patterning. Behaviour was thought of as the sum of habits, whether reason was considered to be playing a part or no.

Descartes brought about a new way of thinking about 'mental' life of human beings, a way of thinking that entered into the foundations of what such a thing was. He insisted that a person was to be identified with their (newly conceived) 'mind', and this entered deeply into the thinking of the period.

Descartes suggested that human being is to be thought of as having two components – body and mind. Others (eg Berkeley) thought a human being was a spirit - a mental substance without alloy. Still others (eg Locke) thought it quite conceivable that thinking was something a body did and not a substance that Descartes had claimed. (Hobbes agreed.)

The common ground, at least after Descartes (who had one foot in Scholasticism), was the conception of the mind as an arena for representations.

Summary

This adds up to what Foucault calls a two-dimensional conception of the human being. It is understanding the human being as a structure, a structure of 'behaviours', thought of as belonging to a causal framework, 'behaviours' for which the proper word was habits.

In the transition to the 19th Century habits came to be seen as the manifestation on the surface of hidden ongoing processes... processes of thought.

The appearance of habits of behaviour (and thoughts) is to be understood as (flowing from) ceaseless thinking in process (thinking of which the person is partially unaware).

Associated with the two dimensional conception of the human being was a new placement of the human being vis-a-vis other human beings: individualism, which arose in conjunction with capitalism in the Early Modern period.

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Created 08:06:05

Prepared by VP

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