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Overview

I first set out what was articulated about the nature of the human being in the early Modern world. I look with one eye on the explicit views you find in philosopher/psychologists like John Locke, thinkers who addressed the question and articulated their answer in their own time. With a second eye I will try and scan more widely, to spot the assumptions being made about the human being when other things are the primary focus - as when D'Alembert, for example, discusses the best approach to stage acting, or Joshua Reynolds pronounces upon the education proper to the artist.

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?

This perspective had not been completely unavailable, or completely neglected even, by the Scholastics. But their focus had been elsewhere. And for them, as for Aristotle, the foundational belief that human beings were capable, in virtue of their rationality, of initiating trains of causation remained at the very centre of their self-understanding.

For the Early Moderns, mental changes as much as bodily ones were taken to at least pose the question of what brought them about. Their physics dealt with physical movements, and an exactly parallel science, a quasi-physics, was conceived of as working out the laws that governed the interaction of the mental 'atoms' of which the mind consisted. Where did the chains of causation in either sphere originate? For the early Moderns this was not a comfortable question.

Human behaviour for them sometimes took the form of movements in the determination of which the mind played no part. It fell to the science of the material to explain the occurrence of these. The causation of other behaviour depended on a role for the mind. The 'will', which was considered a function of the mind, was thought to enter into the causal antecedents of movements of this kind: whether the will was itself determined by antecedents (physical or mental) was contested, but the on all sides the concept of the 'will' was there, to articulate the common ground that some movements of human beings / bodies were determined by mental events and some were not.

The Scholastic understanding of human movement relied upon hylomorphic physics, which sought to explain events in terms of things having a place in the universe that was natural to them, and a 'tendency' they each of them possessed to locate themselves there. The 'will', for the Scholastics, was one of these 'tendencies'.

Though both frameworks - Scholastic and early Modern - speak readily of 'the will' only in the Modern world is the will thought of as issuing in mental events ('volitions') which enter, sometimes, into the causal antecedents of action.

The early Modern conception of how human behaviour and action - movement, as they thought of it - was to be understood achieved general recognition as 'associationist psychology'. Launched by Locke (Essay, 1689), it is also clear and strong in its essentials in David Hume (Treatise, 1739).

The interaction of ideas in accordance with the laws of mental mechanics (which associationism thought of itself as in process of discovering) was naturally thought of as resulting in human behaviour that displayed clear patterning. Human behaviour on the whole was considered to show pervasive regularity, the outcome of the, at least, very widespread operation of associationist laws. Their term for such patterning of human behaviour was 'habit'. In some ways they thought of the human being as essentially a bundle of habits.

The index to my discussion of these features of early Modernity and its background is here.

As the end of the 18th Century approached, a new way of thinking about the human being began to be articulated. 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. I present some of the texts which support this here.

This talk of 'potentials' was the launch of the idea that there was something 'hidden' at the heart of the human being. In the writing of Kant, the 'hiddeness', the way in which the supposed core of the human being was inaccessible even to its owner, received immensely powerful sponsorship. Kant very properly felt some decent reluctance to say anything at all about the nature of the 'self' (the 'noumenal' self), since it was in principle according to his theory simply and entirely beyond thought. But those who took his thought forward quickly abandoned his inhibition. The ineffable dimension of the human being which was the noumenal self then turned into an entity. The human being was spoken of as possessing a 'self', a self of which they were only half-cognisant. This 'turbid' self gained recognition as the earthquake of Romantic thought was absorbed and the Enlightenment rebuilt in the 19th Century.

The revolution which transformed the early Modern conception of the self was not however the 'turbidity' that arose in the wake of Kant's concept of the noumenon. It was rather the way in which the mind, with which the self had been identified since Descartes, began to be thought of in dynamic rather than structural terms. Just as the organic body came to be considered to be an ongoing network of chemical processes so the mind began to be understood as an ongoing programme of thinking. I discuss the 19th Century conception here. (Index here)

In the twentieth century, the conception was still of the person as the mind, and the mind as a programme of thinking: but the understanding of what thinking was underwent change. The telephone exchange, and then the computer, became models for the brain, and thinking itself, by now almost indisputably thought of as grounded in the brain, began to be thought of as information flows - articulated eventually as programs. The index to my discussion of this phase is here.

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