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"Man is Born Like a Garden," says Blake, "ready Planted and Sown". Annotations to Reynolds' Discourse VI.
[Draft is here. I'm having to rethink the whole take on this period.]
In between the early Modern period and the 19th Century comes the Romantic movement, and its herald the Sturm und Drang writers of proto-Germany. We find there several starnds that were to coalesce into the 'dynamic' conception of the mind.
One aspect of the human being in Romantic thought is the 'seed-self', as articulated by Herder, the idea that the human being begins as a set of potentials (potentials specific to the individual), which, unless thwarted, achieve gradual realization as the life of the individual moves forward.
It is this conception that is picked out by eg Taylor as the essential legacy of Romanticism by Taylor.
But there is another aspect to Romantic thought which is of more significance to the emergence of the 19th Century way of thinking about the human being. It is its insistence that what is distinctive about the human being is creativity, and this edges towards the idea that the human mind as a kind of bubbling spring, a continuing flow of thoughts.
Maine de Biran (1766–1824) belongs to this Romantic reaction against the structural conception of the mind. In place of the mind's perceived ‘passivity’ he put the idea of the mind as the awareness of initiation of action, that is to say awareness of the activity of the will.
The Early Modern analogy had seen consciousness as perceiving. Now the suggested parallel was between consciousness and acting.
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Created 08:05:05 Prepared by VP Home Page of Web Presentation: Conceptions of the Human Being in the West
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