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Home>Early Modernity>Introductory Overview
Let us just notice how the Thomist (sometimes called 'hylomorphic') framework collapsed.
The conception of 'understanding' as a matter of sharing forms (as featured by both Ancient and Thomist thought) is still there in Francis Bacon, even as he sounded his great clarion-call for the revolution (The Advancement of Learning, 1605) at the beginning of the 17th Century. It only falls under the sustained attack of Descartes, Hobbes and decisively John Locke who followed.
The Revolutionaries
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No one notion displaced the form of course (or else the change would not have been terribly important). What was constructed rather was a new vantage point from which everything looked different.
I am tempted to say that the relationship of the human being to the world was re-conceptualised: but that is itself to see things from the new perspective. It is our Modern picture of the human being as an entity distinct from 'the world' and on that account constituting the kind of thing that must have some sort of 'relationship' with the world, that is the 17th century innovation.
| More detail here, and specifically on Descartes' contribution here. |
Locke and other early Modern philosophers placed the notion of the 'idea' at the centre of the new notion of 'the mind'. The 'idea' they thought of as the equivalent of the atom ('corpuscle' was the early Modern term) of physics. Physics came towards the end of the 17th Century to propose that physical phenomena were to be explained in terms of the corpuscle and the forces acting upon it. Locke and others proposed that human mind was to be thought of as made up of mental corpuscules and it was to be studied scientifically with a parallel assumption parallel to that of the physicists - that everything mental was to be understood in terms of 'ideas' and the 'mental forces' to which they were subject.
The key feature of the idea-atom was that it stood for something else. Perceiving (and other types of mind activity) became thought of as something that involved three things: object, idea and perceiver. What the perceiver was directly aware of on the new account was the idea. The perceiver perceived the object only in virtue of the fact that in some way the idea 'represented' (stood for) it. This is the representative view of perception, and translated into other forms of mind activity comprises the representational view of thinking. Thinking is manipulating representations.
The Modern concept of representation takes shape simultaneously in a number of domains at the birth of Modernity, of which it is a key expression. Representation in political thought is constitutive of the new theories of democracy. Representation in mathematics is constitutive of the new algebra. The art of the Modernity begins with a new notion of representation, (the rejection of which is regarded by some commentators as heralding its end). For the rise and significance of the Modern notion of 'representation' see H.F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, Berkeley, 1967, University of California Press. |
I think we might say that what the new thinkers did, with Descartes leading the way, was to draw screens around the human being, as round a hospital patient.
From that point on, the shadows cast on the screens by objects beyond had to take the place of the direct communion with the ordinary things around us that had been assumed before.
In perception, it is the mind's eye now that does the 'seeing': and what it sees are the images of things as they are thrown up on the screens.
The world is accessed in perception only via representations - the shadows on the screen.
Charles Taylor explains the contrast between Ancient/medieval and Modern conceptions of knowledge like this: "Thought and feeling - the psychological - are now confined [after the Cartesian revolution] to minds. <MORE> And here is Kenny identifying the shift between this conception and the Thomist framework it displaced: "According to some philosophers, in sense experience we do not directly observe objects or properties in the external world; the immediate objects of our experience are sense-data, private objects of which we have infallible knowledge, and from which we make more or less dubious inferences to the real nature of external objects and properties. In Aquinas' theory there are no intermediaries like sense-data which come between perceiver and perceived. In sensation the sense faculty does not come into contact with a likeness of the sense-object. Instead it becomes itself like the sense-object..." (Kenny, AM, p.35.) |
But perception, understood in this way, is then taken as the model for other activities: doubting, understanding, affirming, denying, willing, refusing, imagining, feeling. All are now treated as species of one genus - thinking; and thinking is regarded as a function of the inner eye and the representations that pass before it.
This then is the invention of the mind; and it constitutes one of the foundation stones upon which the Modern framework of conceptions is built.
It was, as Rorty explains,
' a single inner space in which bodily and perceptual sensations [...] mathematical truths, moral rules, the idea of God, moods of depression, and all the rest of what we now call 'mental' were objects of quasi-observation.'
Richard Rorty, Mirror of Nature, Blackwell, Oxford, 1980, p.50.
Aquinas worked with a distinction between matter and form, while the early Moderns thought in terms of a distinction between body and mind. Was the alleged revolution against Scholaticism perhaps less dramatic than it is made out to be? Maybe all that changed were the words, and that the two distinctions amounted to more or less the same thing? The deflating proposition would be that the human form in the thought of Aquinas became the human mind in the thinking of early Moderns like Descartes and Locke. Is there anything in this?
I try and explain some of the key differences here. In summary:
| The Mind- an Inner Kingdom?
"Historically, there was one conception of mind which dominated philosophical thinking in the centuries when Aristotle was accepted as the doyen of philosophers, and there has been a different one since Descartes inaugurated a philosophical revolution in the seventeenth century." [more ...] Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, London, 1993, Routledge, pp 16,17. |
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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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