The Cartesian Mind

It is argued that there are two changes introduced by Descartes. One is that a new category was introduced, which subsumed what had been treated earlier as several different things or faculties or powers. The new category was labelled ‘thinking’, a label that had been used before but in a different sense. Feeling, day-dreaming, seeing, calculating etc etc were understood from the Cartesian perspective as sub-types of thinking. The other Modern thought, not actually promoted by Descartes himslef, was that the new phenomenon of thinking was essentially representational.

These points are valid. But what more fundamental to Modernity was the rejection of the idea that movements, either of intellect or body were to be understood as flowing from the ‘tendencies’ that together comprised human nature. In place of this whole approach you had the idea that such movements were to be explained in terms of effective causation.

In Scholastic thought, feeling and seeing etc belonged to the human being certainly, but so, and essentially, did the body. Eternal life demanded its resurrection.

Under Schloasticism ‘desires’ were thought to involve aims. If I explained that you took the spark plug out because you desired to light a cigarette, this would be understood as claiming that you had an aim and that you were pursuing it.

But for Locke, A desire becomes a feeling of uneasiness. A seminal shift.

The subject now pursues the aim of removing the uneasiness. In most cases Locke thinks what happens is that the feeling of uneasiness determines the will.

This is the key installation of the mind as the arena within which the government of behaviour takes place. Before, to have a desire was to have an aim. After, there is a condition on the aim: it has to be entertained by the mind. Before you could have an aim without it necessarily figuring in awareness. Afterwards you could not. Desire is a feeling of uneasiness which makes you (ordinarily) decide to do something to relieve it. The feeling has to occur in a mind – it makes no sense to think of having a feeling of which one is oneself unaware. And, moreover, the will is a ‘power of the mind’ so that it too cannot be exercised without the person being aware of its operation.

Teleology therefore is not eliminated by science. But it is confined under Modernity, to the mind – and under early Modernity, to the conscious mind.

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Created 08:06:05

Prepared by VP

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