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Home>Early Modernity>Introductory Overview
It is usual to place at the centre of the revolution in thinking about the human being that marked the beginning of Modernity in the Sixteenth and Sevententh Centuries new thinking about 'the mind' . But the modern 'mind' took shape only as part of the complete rethink we know of as 'the scientific revolution', when a new way of thinking about 'material' things - 'corporeal things', 'body' or 'bodies' - was actually the more fundamental change.
New thinking about 'material things' grew in the light of the revolution in physics that was at the heart of the scientific revolution. I must give an account of what was involved here in some detail, but in a sentence what happened was that established preModern notions of matter and form came to be rejected, and the concept of a 'physical body' as something that could exist with a shape and a size and perhaps one or two other properties but without a form developed instead. Since the form is what was thought of as unifying a material thing under the pre-Modern scheme, an alternative account of complex material things was required. The new notion was that they were bound together by forces.
Some people in the Early Modern period thought that material bodies, in the Modern sense just summarised, were all there were. Hobbes was one of these.
But most thinkers took it that there were things that existed but which were not material things. They thought there were also minds (or just the one).
Famously, notoriously, Descartes was one of those who thought that not everything was corporeal. Besides a person's body, Descartes proposed, there was a person's mind.
Others clarified and refined the new concept, and by the time John Locke 's contribution in his Essay on Human Understanding had been assimilated a sharp picture of the Modern mind was to be seen.
Locke's talk of it as a kind of cupboard was the basic observation, a cupboard in which were to found ideas. And the key feature of an idea, as Locke refined it, was its function as a representative. An idea was a mental item which represented something else.
One of the more outrageous girders in the bridge Aquinas built between Aristotelian metaphysics and Pauline theology was the identification of the human Christian soul and the hylomorphic form. The human being, like every other material existent, was matter-with-form for Aquinas. The human form had a distinctive power - conferring on the matter-with-form that was the human being the capacity to understand. So far so Aristotelian. But Aquinas posited that the form of the human being was capable of continuing life after the human body, at least temporarily, disintegrates. The form of the human being became in Thomist thought, the human soul.
"[T]here is no other substantial form in man besides the intellectual soul..." (ST Q.76 Art.4. p308)
"We must assert that the intellect which is the principle of intellectual operation is the form of the human body" ST, Q76 Art I pegis p.292.)
With the collapse of hylomorphism, except in Christian theology, this identification was no longer made any sense. But instead of abandoning the possibility of thinking about, and hoping for, immortality, a new identication was somehow forged, this time between the human soul and a distinctively Modern conception, the Cartesian mind.
> The human soul in early modernity |
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 proceded from causes, but the intellectual energy of the influential thinkers was devoted to things other than establishing patterns of causation.
So the focus of the early modern period, even in thought about human beings, was on the origination of change.
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 Early Modern conception of the sources of behaviour |
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.
> Contextual Developments |
This adds up to what Foucault calls a two-dimensional conception of the human being.
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Revised 14:01:08 Prepared by VP Home Page of Web Presentation: Conceptions of the Human Being in the West
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