The Modern rejection of the hylomorphic framework

The Revolutionaries

Machiavelli (1469 - 1527)
Bacon (c1561 - 1626)
Galileo (1564 - 1642)
Hobbes (1588 - 1679)
Descartes (1596 - 1650)
Boyle (1627 - 1691)

Let us just notice how the 'hylomorphic' framework collapsed.

The conception of 'understanding' as a matter of sharing forms (as featured by both Ancient and Scholastic 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. (More detail here, and specifically on Descartes' contribution here.)

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.

Rejection of the three kinds of soul

No one notion displaced the form of course (or else the change would not have been substantial). 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.

Locke and other early Modern philosophers thought of the 'idea' as the equivalent of the atom ('corpuscle', was the early term) of physics. Physics proposed to explain phyisical phenomena in terms of the atom and the forces acting upon it. The human mind was to be studied scientifically with a parallel assumption - 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.

Basic intro to representation

For its rise and significance see H.F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, Berkeley, 1967, University of California Press.

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).

From Thinking Machines

"...mathematics provides the paradigm of thought as representational - once it frees itself from the conception that it is about things or lines or shapes. This liberation occurred first in the sixteenth century iinnovation of François Vieta, who proposed that we should let marks stand as 'representatives' and thus invented a mode of thinking that dealt with symbols: and symbols were manifestly different from the plurality of things that they indifferently stood for. Viteta's algebraic symbols were ready colonists of the new territory, the mind.' (VP, Thinking Machines, Oxford, 1987, Basil Blackwell, p. 18.)

There is a passage when Descartes is replying to an Objection where you can see the revolution struggling to take shape. (Meditations and Replies, First Objections, Cottingham p. 132-133.)

In fact, Descartes himself did not quite give ideas the 'representational' role that came to be central. His was the first of a two-pronged revolutionary assault.

One was to re-categorise what had previously been regarded as a variety of different kinds of thing; and the other was to establish a representational model of generic activity - thinking - under which the variety had been subsumed.

These two thrusts were in fact sequential. Descartes mounted the first, but did not himself agree (eg with Hobbes) that thinking was an operation upon representations. (See Descartes, 3rd set of objections and reply, 4th Objection and reply, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes pp. 125, 126.)

Descartes' Meditations and his struggle to formulate his new concept.

WITH DESCARTES LEADING THE WAY, THE NEW THINKERS DREW A SCREEN 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.

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.

But perception, understood in this way, is then taken as the model for other activities: doubting, understanding, affirming, denying, willing, refusing, imagining, feelin. 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.

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>

The connection between mind and body

One particular question it raises:

What is the relation of the mind to the body?

This is construed by Descartes as a question about the relation between an immaterial thinking substance and a material extended substance

Descartes himself pursues this question, and puts forward a number of suggestions. Famously he suggests that the connection occurs, and occurs through the Pineal gland.

The pineal gland seemed special to Descartes because alone of the structures of the brain it appeared single, undivided, and was located in the middle of the brain. The idea was that a fluid called animal spirits filled the nerves and communicated with muscles and sense organs at one end and the mind at the other. In its central position, the pineal gland was in a good position to interface with the animal spirits as they rose to the brain, or descended to the musculature.

Suggestions put forward by others include:

That there is no connection. Mental and physical are two films run in parallel started off together by the creator. This is the view known as 'Pre-established harmony', espoused by Leibniz.
There is no direct connection. God is responsible for bringing about the right pairs of mental + physical events. (This is the occasionalism championed by Nicholas Malebranche (1638-1715). Priest. A Cartesian, but unhappy with Descartes' account of the relation of the body to the soul.

"By introducing consciousness as the defining characteristic of mind, Descartes in effect substituted privacy for rationality as the mark of the mental." [More...]

Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, London, 1993, Routledge, p.18.

Ian Watt relates the rise of the novel to Descartes' individualism.

We might ask: what other options might there be?

No such thing as body
No such thing as mind

One corollary of Descartes' account of the human being: the authority of the first person.

It is the first person who knows best what he or she is thinking. With later thinkers, what one is thinking - the contents of one's mind - becomes the basis of all knowledge.

A profoundly individualistic theme.

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