| |
|
"Man is Born Like a Garden," says Blake, "ready Planted and Sown". Annotations to Reynolds' Discourse VI.
As the end of the 18th Century approached, a new way of thinking about the human being began to be articulated.
The Romantic reaction against the scientism of the of the 18th Century was to insist above all that the human being was creative rather than robotic.
Not only that, but the process which produced the human being was thought of as creative in the same way: it was a process in which something was brought into existence. It was thought of as a process in which a potential was realized, something adumbrated acquiring solidity and detail.
Life was thus seen as expresssion - expression of the original potential.
Creativity was linked in the mind of the Romantics to freedom. It was possible only because human beings were 'free' and it was the exercise of freedom.
Philosophically room for believing in freedom was cleared by the idea of there being an essence to the human being which was not subject to causality - the noumenal self. The noumenal self as first conceived was necessarily unknown.
These are the keypoints of the Romantic rethinking of the human being: creativity, potential and its realisation, freedom, expression, freedom, and the unknowable inner essence
The human being possessed from the outset, as a kind of inchoate essence, a definite promise of what was to come. Life was a creative process in which the promise was to achieve fulfillment, a process in which the essence of the individual was given expression.
In a key shift, the characteristic patterns of actions a person engaged in began to be seen as the expression of something. The human being began life, according to this new picture, as a set of 'potentials', and gradually, as life proceeded and if all went well, these potentials were progressively realized.
The 'destiny and life-work of all things' wrote Froebel in 1826 is 'to unfold their essence ...' - expressing the philosophy of the 'kindergarten' concept. (Froebel, The Education of Man, first published in 1826, trans. W.N. Hailmann, D. Appleton, 1887. p. 2.)
The concept reached for in setting it out this new conception is 'potential'. Maturity sees fully realized what is up to that point to an extent present only as an adumbration. What is there prior to maturity is real, and the basis for what is to eventuate, but is not simply the same as what eventuates.
This notion of potential is not a concept that mainstream science of the 18th
Century found comfort in. It is teleological in character, when the character
of 18th Century thought was determinedly mechanistic. Even Leibniz, the most
conservative of the Modern revolutionaries, thought of growth not as the realization
of potential but the expansion of a thing that had been compressed, shrunk.
The critics ascribing a key role to the notion of potential - with Herder in
the van - were reaching back to the pre-Modern conceptions of the Scholastics.
[Footnote on Form and its place in Scholasticsim.]
Aristotle made use of the concept of potential.
Herder's thought then is of a human being as a set of potentials which progressively achieve realization.
One easily reads into the 'realization of potential' the idea of an 'inner' reality originally hidden and progressively revealed. But this would be to project onto the Herderian idea something that only achieves articulation in other writers. When a thing is said to have 'potential' there is no necessary implication that this could only be so if there was some discriminable 'entity within' which somehow made the having of a potential possible. The concept of 'potential' has no necessary involvement with such an entity.
At the head of those 'other writers' was of course Kant, propounding, in his determination to preserve the human being from the encroaching ice of deterministic science, the difficult notion of the 'noumenal self'.
Unlike Hume and a distinguished line of others, Kant saw the Enlightenment advance of deterministic science as threatening to put an end to all thought of the human being as a free moral agent, and thus to beliefs that depended on this notion - to Christianity in particular.
Kant's fragile notion of the noumenal self, with which he hoped to provide a refuge for the human being from the hegemony of causality, was the leading inspiration for post-early-Modernity. And in Kant we do indeed have the suggestion - if not coherent presentation - of an 'entity' differentiated from the person as we ordinarily know him or her (ie as we use our senses and thinking to deal with the phenomenal world). It is true that according to Kant's own principles we can have no thoughts about the entity as he conceived of it (hence its fragility). But this complication was ignored by writers who drew from it their inspiration. For them the idea that appealed, and took root, was that 'within' a person, there was some kind of 'core', the core, or essence, or heart, or centre, of the person.
For Kant, the nou self was not 'visible' at all. The conception of a 'something' unstructured by thought ruled it out as a possible object of thought. But for later thinkers the core self was not beyond thought, and it was not beyond knowledge. Nor was it beyond reconfiguration. In the post Romantic period, moulding the core self became the object of education.
An early and seminal attempt to articulate the nature of the human being in the culture brought into existence by the social changes occurring around the turn of the 18th Century was by Hegel, who pronounced the state as one of alienation.
Human beings had created the world they lived in, but it was a world that prevented their fulfillment. As authors of their own frustration they were pronounced by Hegel to be alienated from themselves.
In Hegel therefore you find the Romantic insistence on the concept of the inchoate achieving progressive realization, with its correlative that there is something the the human being that is at any particular time inaccessible because incompletely expressed.
Hegel's handling of the issue of human freedom was distinctive and immensely influential. Science made the denial of causality to human choice problematic. So he insisted on propounding a new kind of freedom, not freedom of choice but realization of potential. The fully free person was the one who became all he or she had it in them to become...
Articulations of the new thinking about the human being are to be found in Jane Austen.
Her central characters typically have a core which is not totally accessible even to them: for the first time sincerity becomes articulated as a virtue, possessed by those who are true to their essential core, their true selves.
The fact that her characters are represented as subject to development is a further reflection of the new thinking: life as the progressive realisation of something which starts out inchoate.
At the end of the 18th Century some new concepts used to articulate a new conception of the human being , and others were newly developed to the same end:
creativity
Most important, the Romantic reaction against the scientism of the of the 18th Century was to insist that the human being was creative rather than robotic.
The process which produced the human being was thought of as creative in the same way: it was a process in which something was brought into existence. It was thought of as a process in which a potential was realized, something adumbrated acquiring solidity and detail. Life was seen as expresssion - expression of the original potential.
Philosophically room for believing in freedom was cleared by the idea of there being an essence to the human being which was not subject to causality - the noumenal self. The noumenal self as first conceived was necessarily unknown.
freedom
potential
realization
expression
sincerity
noumenal
The new conception of the self finally takes shape when the ineffability of the noumenal self, as articulated by Kant, is wiped from consideration. The new self is the real core of a person, as it is for Kant (the reality of the person that is the moral agent subject not to causality but only to the moral law) but an inner reality that is open, at least some of the time, and in at least some circumstances, to the purview of the subject: a self that can be thought about therefore, and talked about: and above all perhaps engineered.
Engineering the inner self becomes in the 19th Century the mission of education. Learning how to do things becomes incidental to the sound construction of the inner 'man' - to the building of character, as it was known.
 |
Created 08:05:05 Prepared by VP Home Page of Web Presentation: Conceptions of the Human Being in the West
|