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Reason, nature and the human being in the West: Part 2

2.2 The Modern Concept of the Mind and the punctual self

Summary The Modern concept of mind involved the displacement of the Scholastic form. conceived of all experience of the world as mediated by mental representations - ideas created a private world for the subject grouped what Scholasticism had regarded as independently defined phenomena under the single category of 'thinking' conceived of thinking on the model of 'seeing' objects of quasi-observation used 'idea' as the mental equivalenet of the 'atoms' of physics was thought of as related to body in different ways by different thinkers

The Form Displaced

The framework based of the concept of form was overthrown in the scientific revoluion of the 17th century.

THE MODERN SELF

Charles Taylor:Hegel Cambridge, 1975, CUP. The Sources of the Self, Cambridge, 1989, CUP.

Charles Taylor presents an interesting account of the way in which the concept of what a human being is - the concept of the 'self' - shifts from the medieval and the Modern period.

The medieval and Modern self distinguished

Taylor suggests it is fruitful to interpret the shift from medieval conception of the "world" in which the human being lived to the modern as a shift in the conception of the self. "The modern subject is self-defining, where on previous views the subject is defined in relation to a cosmic order" (Taylor's Hegel p. 6).

The notion which he uses to move across the frameworks is "the subject". In medieval world, "the subject" is defined in terms of its relation to the wider order beyond it, the "cosmic order". In the modern world "the subject" is defined differently, not in terms of a relation between the subject and what is outside the subject. It is self-defined.

This he says is the notion of self that Descartes is pioneering with his cogito, introducing the idea of a self remaining even while everything else, including God, is thought away.

Taylor introduces the notion of "self-presence" to refer to that state of the self - the "subject" - which is most desirable - when a person "comes most fully to" him/herself.

In the medieval period, "self-presence" is a matter of locating oneself within the wider order. (And then the idea of achieving self-presence in the absence of a wider order, or in ignorance of the wider order, is nonsensical.)

It is achieved through the exercise of reason, because that wider order was conceived of as an order of ideas.

Later, self-presence is achieved by the subject disengaging from any projection of meaning onto things and concentrating on the inner processes of cogitation.

To have a rational grasp of the world in medieval times was to understand the order things fell under. And that order was an intellectual order: an order consisting in relations between ideas. The desirable state of the self was achieved through reason, because the order to which the person related was an order of ideas.

In the modern period, the notion of meaningful order was dispensed with. The notion of the self as something that is defined in relation to the cosmic order and the notion that the cosmic order is one of meaning are correlative.

The underlying unstated framework of the conservative opponents of the scientific revolution could be said to be: if the human being comes to self-presence through his/her grasp of his/her place in the meaningful order of the cosmos; and if science presupposes self-presence; then science must be founded on the notion of the cosmic order being one of meaning.

(Taylor notes then that the transition from medieval to Modern involves two shifts. The first is a shift in how people thought of themselves, the emergence of the Modern notion of the self. The second is the shift in how the Universe or cosmos was thought of, the abandonment of the notion that the order of the cosmos was one of meaning, and its replacement by the idea that the universe was a soup of things related only causally.

He then suggests that these two things were correlated.

The old order thought of the self as defined by the relation of the individual to the cosmic order, which was conceived of as an order of meaning.

You cannot just abandon the idea that the cosmos is ordered by meaning. For then you have destroyed the means whereby the self was defined.

The actual solution was to begin to see the self as self- defined.

But what is meant by defining the self, either as contemplator of a meaningful order, or as something that is not dependent on an order outside itself?

Taylor attempts to answer this in terms of a distinction which he claims is a universal of human experience. I would put what I think he is getting at like this: some human experience is persistently unified and some is not. What he says is:

"at times we can be "in touch" with ourselves, with our central concerns, we can be clear about who we are and what our purposes are; while at other times we are confused, unclear, or distraught, torn this way and that, or obsessed with the inessential, or just giddily forgetful" (Hegel, p.6).

He goes on to say that we catch this distinction in a variety of ways:

Charles Taylor Courtesy Dr. Scott H. Moore (Department of Philosophy, Baylor University who has study material on Taylor

"Many concepts and images can be used to describe these opposed conditions: harmony vs. conflict, depth vs. superficiality, self-possession vs. -loss, self-centring vs. dispersal (Hegel, p.6)."

He says he is going to use the terms "self-presence" and "dispersion" to refer to this distinction. It is a distinction that transcends the Medieval/Modern divide, says Taylor.

And then he can put his thesis like this:

the difference, or one fundamental difference, between Medieval and Modern is that the Medieval framework says that "self- presence" is a matter of a person being in touch with the cosmic order, while the Modern framework has it that "self-presence" is concentrating on our own processes of observation and thought.

Taylor claims that the religious reforms of the early Modern period though they weren't meant to desacralise and thus to contribute to the construction of a Universe not ordered through meaning in the long run had this effect.

Catholic Christianity preserved from Paganism the sense that all sorts of things were especially sacred. Protestantism looked on this as idolatry.

"It is probable that the unremitting struggle to desacralize the world in the name of an undivided devotion to God waged by Calvin and his followers helped to destroy the sense that the creation was a locus of meanings in relation to which man had to define himself (H, p.9)."

There was however a further innovatory feature of the new concept: the idea of the self as a "self-defining subject".

"The modern subject is self defining, where on previous views the subject is defined in relation to a cosmic order" (Taylor, Hegel, p. 6).

VP

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