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Home>19th Century>The dynamic self
From the beginning of the Early Modern period - since Descartes and Locke - people were thought of as essentially minds.
Minds were associated with bodies, and it was possible to think that minds were material, an aspect of bodies, as in Hobbes. It was also possible to think that there were only minds, as by Berkeley. But whether associated with bodies or not, the conception was of the human being as essentially a mind. (The relevant chapter in the book by Raymond Martin and John Barresi, Naturalization of the Soul, bears the title The Self as Mind).
What category of thought did the mind belong to in this early period? Descartes famously argued that the mind was - in the language of early Modern philosophy - a substance. Locke thought of it as a kind of cupboard (fitted with an internal robot arm, enabling it to manipulate the ideas which were the cupboards contents). For Berkeley the mind was still a kind of receptacle for ideas - there weren't any objects independent of mentality, but there were minds, minds peopled with thoughts shared by the Almighty. The mind sought after unsuccessfully by Hume was also an enduring structure which somehow encompassed individual thoughts.
People continued to be thought of as minds after this early Modern period: but certain key transformations took place in how the mind was thought of.
The first shift took place around the beginning of the 19th Century: the mind began to be thought of as made up of thought processes.
Then, in the twentieth century, thought processes came to be thought of as information-flows in the brain.
So there were two key transformations subsequent to the early Modern revolution, which established the person as the mind. There was a transformation in what the mind was considered to be: it came to be thought of as a complex of mental activities - ie of thinking, as contrasted with the housing of thoughts. And subsequent to that there was a transformation in what thinking was considered to be.
The idea of the mind as a mental cupboard came under challenge towards the end of the 18th Century. David Hume famously searched for such a thing - by 'introspection' - and reported that he had drawn a blank, going on to insist that we should think of the mind as nothing but a momentary thought - which sometimes is the (mistaken) thought that it itself belongs to a collection of thoughts which belong to an enduring entity, namely me. But the new conception of the mind took its characteristic shape only with the turn of the century.
Developments in the scientific study of 'living' matter were the inspiration, the fundamental perspective succinctly expressed in a document towards the end of the period, presenting the organism as:
"a workshop of material and dynamic transformations, maintaining its physical and chemical constitution through a perpetual exchange of matter and force with the outside world."
Herzen, Physiologie de la volonté , Paris, 1874, p.129. Quotations from Herzen taken from Jean Starobinski, Action and Reaction, English edition, New York, 2003, Zone Books. (1st published in French, 1999.) p.147.
This conception in physiology begins its formation at the close of the 18th Century when a new understanding was developing of what underlay the different structures that were to be found within the body of a 'living' thing.
The older notion, an application of 'corpuscularian' theory, had been that such structures were assemblies of particles subject to the influence of a limited number of 'forces'. The new understanding was that what had been thought of as 'structures' within the body were in fact complexes of processes.
The new conception grew out of the application of chemical analysis to substances found in or produced by animals and plants. Chemical 'analysis' practised systematically from dddd, showed what 'chemicals' a substance was made up of, and revealed the proportions of the various components identified. The use of oxidizing agents, developed to begin with by Lavoisier, revolutionized the accuracy of analysis. Better and better agents were identified, until by the 1830s analysis had been refined into a standard laboratory technique that was reliable and accurate.
In the first decade of the 19th Century therefore you have more and more substances found in living things being subjected to analysis: and the picture emerges of the living thing as engaged in producing a range of (now 'organic') substances. But - the question suggested itself - what happened to such substances once produced? They would surely interact together, producing a new complex of products which would engage in further interaction.
With this answer, there was a shift from the idea of the living thing as a chemical works producing a range of substances to the idea that the living thing was nothing but a complex of chemical processes.
"... living bodies, as a result of their organic action and faculties, as well as the mutations which bring about in them organic movements, form themselves their own substance and secretory material..." (J.B. Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy, First published 1809, e-text of extracts, translated and edited by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC, Canada.) |
There were chemical interactions going on, a great number of them, but no 'factory', independent of them, within which they were carried out. If there appeared to be a structure, a factory, within which processes were carried out, this was misleading. In fact the apparent 'structures' were to be thought of (on the new conception) as themselves complexes of processes. That is to say, processes yielded the factory's products: but the appearance of the factory as a static more or less unchanging structure was now thought to be generated by processes. The living thing began to be thought of as - nothing more than - a complex of chemical processes. [more on processes]
There is another feature of the new model of what was now known as the organism to bring out. It is that the organism was thought to be in constant interaction with its environment, with food and respiratory gases entering into it more or less continuously, and more or less continuously too heat and movement being generated and material of various kinds being voided.
There was thought to be in other words an ongoing programme of material exchanges with the environment.
In this respect the organism was thought to resemble a waterfall, in fact. Material entered, became involved for a time in the goings-on which constituted the system, and passed out. A system might be thought of as consituted by a network of chemical processes without being thought of as in constant excahnge with its suroundings, but organisms were considered not to be so. Both things were considered true of them: they were complexes of chemical changes, and the material forming the chemicals which formed their constituent processes passed in from outside and passed out again in a constant flow.
So the 18th Century conception of an animal body (or a plant) as a configuration of particles was replaced in the 19th Century by the idea of the organism as consisting at any particular moment of a set of material particles, particles configured into a complex of chemical processes, but particles which constantly moved through the organism's metabolism, so that there was a sense in which it consisted of a different set of particles from moment to moment, as some moved out and others moved in.
It is this idea - the idea of a set of processes through which matter flowed - that transfers, about the turn of the 18th Century, to thinking about the mind. I am going to call it the 'dynamic' conception of the mind.
The mind begins to be thought of, or puzzled over as by Hume for example, not as a cupboard storing mental particles ('ideas') but as a complex of ongoing mental processes, the processes consisting of some equivalent of 'material particles' in flow. Different theorists had different versions but this is the root schema - drawn from the new conception in physiology.
Schopenhauer is an early exponent (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1819). Mind for Schopenhauer is essentially what he calls a 'will', drawing on and thinking he can coherently adapt the Kantian 'noumenal self' for this purpose. (The individual 'will' he supposes can be thought of as part of something he calls the 'universal will', but that perhaps need not detain us.) Schopenhauer wants us to understand the individual will not as a statically-conceived structural feature but an activity. It is he says "an endless striving". (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation p. 164.)
| Some detail on the changes in thinking about organisms here. |
He explicitly draws the analogy I have just referred to - the analogy between this conception of the will and the understanding of the organism that was taking shape as he wrote. The will, says Schopenhauer, like the physical organ of a living animal, must be understood as constant activity - 'endless flux', 'eternal becoming':
"... [T]he constant renewal of the matter of every organism can ... be regarded as the mere phenomenon of ... continual pressure and change, and physiologists are now ceasing to regard such renewal as the necessary reparation of the substance consumed in movement. The possible wearing out of the machine cannot in any way be equivalent to the constant inflow through nourishment. Eternal becoming, endless flux, belong to the revelation of the essential nature of the will." Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, first published as Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in 1819, Dover edition translated from the German by E.F.J.Payne, New York, 1966, Dover, p. 164.
Schopenhauer does not distinguish explicitly between the two dimensions of the new physiological thinking - x as a network of processes and organic processes as involving constant throughput of material constituents - but both elements are clearly in play as he theorises about the mind. It is is activitiy, and is in constant flux.
Hegel applied the same dynamic conception to his understanding of a people and its history. His conception of Geist, that is to say, is a dynamic conception. The Geist, the 'soul' of a people, is conceived of, of course not as a static structure, but as in constant process of realisation. The Geist, in fact is what people do. It is the constant flux of actions of individuals (and so of whatever institutions individuals make up) which constitute the development of the people towards its goal. |
Hegel is the perhaps the most significant philosopher in the early 19th Century, and he is also clearly committed to understanding the mind of a person in dynamic terms. (Of course he stays with the Modern identification of a person with their mind.) The mind he says "for ever produces itself" (Philosophy of Mind, Wallace Translation, Introduction, Section 385, e-text). For Hegel, says Roger Smith, historian of the human sciences, 'there is not a conscious self which thinks or observes; rather, the purposive activity of thought or observation is the conscious self as it comes into being.' (Smith, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences, p.357.)
Hegel's concept of 'dialectic' caught the new approach to change that had been brought into play in physiology. In the 18th Century, it was assumed that the goal was to understand the chain of causation that brought about a particular event. In the 19th Century, the assumption instead was that events in the world often belong to processes so that the task was to understand those processes and how they interacted.
Friedrich Engels in his discussion of Hegel in 1878 (originally in Anti-Dühring) puts this a little oddly perhaps. The dialectical perspective is dissatisfied, he says, with the 18th Century conception of change, which takes 'things and their material reflexes, ideas,' as 'isolated ... to be considered one after the other...fixed, rigid, given once for all.' (Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, II, [The Science of Dialectics], paragraph 5. Feuer, Fontana, p.124.) What we find with close thought however is that 'cause and effect are conceptions which hold good only in their application to individual cases,' and that 'as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.' (Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, II, [The Science of Dialectics], paragraph 9. Feuer, Fontana, p.125.)
But he identifies its source clearly:
'Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically...' (Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, II, [The Science of Dialectics], paragraph 11. Feuer, Fontana, p.126.)
He uses the same scientific examples as Schopenhauer: the dynamic conception of the organism.
'In like manner, every organized being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment, it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment, some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time, the matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organized being is always itself, and yet something other than itself.' (Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, II, [The Science of Dialectics], paragraph 8. Feuer, Fontana, p.125.)
The great merit of the Hegelian system, Engels continues, is that ' for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development...' (Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, II, [The Science of Dialectics], paragraph 13. Feuer, Fontana, p.127.)
Dialectical change is change that is conceived of as process rather than event.
But if the mind is thought of as process or network of processes, what is it that corresponds to the physical atoms and molecules which participate in the ceaseless dance of organic metabolism? Could they be the Early Modern 'ideas'? [Reason why they can't be]
The processes in which mental particles participate can be named: those processes are thought-processses. But this doesn't make clear what it is that enters into those processes in the way that atoms and molecules enter into the processes that constitute metabolism.
What are the atoms and molecules of thought? The constituents of thought?
One can see immediately that the idea of mental processes invites a development of the notion of mental items which are in a sense below the level of awareness. What one is aware of is the thought-process, and it is not at all clear that this involves awareness of the mental constituents of such.
I'm going to say no more on this question at this point. I think the fact is there wasn't a clear answer to this question as the new conception of the mind as a set of thought processes took shape. No clear answer, and as far as I can see no clear posing of the question either. For many of the sponsors of the new idea the interest lay of course elsewhere.
...
The dynamic conception of the mind is to be found in most of the writers who thought of themselves as opposed to the science and scientism of the 18th Century.
Maine de Biran is one: self is consciousness and consciousness is 'an active striving power'. For Herbart, the mind is 'a dynamic assemblage of interacting presentations (Vorstellungen)' (Roger Smith, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences, p.360)
Here - to take a further example - is the best a modern expositor can make of the self - the mind - in Schelling:
"What Schelling proposes is a vision of the Absolute as One, as a single multi-faceted, self-creating, continuously developing cosmos of which nature is one aspect, the human mind another... " Solomon, Continental Philosophy since 1750, Oxford, OUP 1988, p.54.
From the enveloping fog the notion of the individual self as 'self-creating' and 'continuously developing' emerges rather clearly. No distinction is made between person, mind or self; and what we have here is what I am calling the 'dynamic' conception of 'it'.
Fichte
And so the abandonment of the 'structural' -ie the 18th Century pre-dynamic) conception of the mind is manifest in all the influential writings of the immediate idealist progeny of Kant: Fichte and Schiller as well as Hegel and Schopenhauer and Schelling.
But what of those who took Kant's positivist side as central, his insistence that the limits of intelligibility were close, and that the only approach to knowledge we could aspire to, besides some knowledge of its preconditions, was bound to rely on sense experience of the phenomenal world?
We are speaking here of those who drove psychology into a sustainedly empirical outlook: Brentano, Mill, Maine de Biran (?). We are also speaking of the writers who after the Associationism of the 18th Century, as developed by Locke and Hartley and Hume came to exert the decisive influence on how 'people' thought of the human being - creating the half-buried strata of assumptions that formed the common ground of everyday thinking in the 19th Century about what a person was.
The person was still essentially their mind. And the mind was a network of thought processes. I have pointed to these assumptions as they appear in the idealist heirs of Kant. But Kant and his idealist heirs were not the only ones to think about the person and to try and understand what we are. Bypassing Kant and his idealist legacy were the heirs of Locke and Hartley who thought it worthwhile to approach the question from an empirical point of view. Kant himself thought this too of course, but it's not obvious that his idealist heirs did. At any rate their work was not to address the question empirically. This was instead a task engaged in by thinkers in a number of different 'disciplines' (speaking now of the post-Helmholzian era): what was since 1800 called biology; physiology; and natural history: Lamarck, Bernard, Darwin.
Mill catches the divide neatly if quirkily when he identifies in 18dd two camps of 'metaphysicians', united in their belief that there are 'laws of the mind' . One believes these are 'laws of association' and the other 'the Categories of the Understanding'. (Mill, Examination, (p.145-7)
(What kind of a tragedy was it that philosophy as a discipline aquiesced in the loss of the empirically informed study of the human mind? On the one hand it robbed philosophy of the right to say anything important in this hugely significant area. Its prouncements between Hume and let us say Dennett were either breathtakingly conservative or sourced in the science of their day. Schopenhauer and Bradley on the one hand, Russell and Ryle on the other.)
The post Humean empirical tradition then: what evidence is there that they took a dynamic model of the mind?
Some dates Herder's Schopenhauer's "The World as Will and Idea" Hegel's Mill's Engels' Anti-Duhrung Bernard's "From and experimental pont of view" |
In J.S. Mill the abandonment of the theatre conception is marked by the use of the word 'sensation' for the current content /activity of consciousness in place of Hume's 'ideas' and 'impressions', and Locke's 'ideas'. Material objects for Mill are 'permanent possibilities of sensation' (Examination of SWH's Philosophy) - and he applies the same approach to 'minds'. 'The belief that I entertain that my mind exists, when it is not feeling, nor thinking, nor conscious of its own existence, resolves itself into a belief of a Permanent Possibility of those states.' (Examination, London, 1865, p. 241; quoted in Ryan, The Philsophy of John Stuart Mill, p.99.)
And apart from that belief? The mind as we know it is a 'succession of manifold feelings' (Examination, p235; Ryan, p.99.) - "that continued series of feelings which I call my life" Mill (Examination, p214,215; quoted in George Grote's Review of Mill's Examination.
So far we have followed the new formation of the mind as it becomes a complex of mental processes. The complex constitutes thinking. The mind does not endure according to this concept, in the sense that the bodily organ such as the liver doesn't endure when it is thought of as a complex of metabolic processes. There is also a sense in which both do endure of course. I am simply pointing to the sense in which they don't.
Can we say anything more about the concept of the mind in the 19th Century, now that we have brought out its being constituted by processes?
Pace Hegel, pace Schopenhauer, being constituted by processes does not introduce any strictly developmental notion. To be a process it is true that a programme of changes has to be thought of as having an end - the end of keeping going. (Otherwise all you have is a series of changes.) But a system might keep going without developing.
The conception of the human being as necessarily engaged in continuous development came into the 19th Century via the romantic movement. Herder was responsible for its introduction in that context, but he was relaunching a way of thinking that had simply been upstaged by the dominance of mechanistic thought in the earlier 18th Century: essentially the Scholastic concept of an animal as prima materia organised by a form, a form which drove the neonate along the programme of changes that yielded in the end a fully mature example of its kind.
The romantics made no explicit serious appeal to the Scholastic form in order to give support to the emphasis they put on 'development'. The weight was left to be carried by the familiarity of the assumption that natural things naturally developed - from acorn to oak, from child to adult. It was aserted that a child possessed potential
[stuff on potential]
Most of these characteristions of the human being, the human mind or the human self, possess a teleological dimension. Schopenhauer's will strives, and so does Maine de Biran's 'consciousness'. Schelling's cosmos is subject to continuous development.
You have teleology in fact the moment you introduce process.
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Created 02:01:05 Prepared by VP Home Page of Web Presentation: Conceptions of the Human Being in the West
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