It is wrong to think of Descartes as having a theory of the mind: because he invented it - at least in its Modern form. Everyone one else just accepted the basic notion and addressed problems arising out of it. Overwhelmingly, the question was: what can be the relation of the Cartesian mind to the material world?

The way to explain the Cartesian concept of Mind is to explain the Scholastic ideas that it replaced.

Scholasticism: the framework of ideas which was articulated in the later centuries of the medieval period, beginning in the 11th Century, encompassing Aquinas (1225-1274) in the 13th C, then running forward into the 16th and 17th centuries when it was destroyed by the first thinkers of the Modern period. It consisted in the assimilation of Aristotelian thought by Christian theology.

The Scholastic Notions of Form and Essence

We can be quite precise of course about the notions that are basic to medieval thought as it went on in universities. The notion of form is especially worth studying because it is alien to us and because it played a central role in the scientific revolution which brought the medieval period and its conceptions to an end.

The idea that is commandeered from Aristotle by Scholasticism is that an individual animal - e.g. an individual horse - is various bits and pieces (e.g. heart, skin, bone) organised in a certain way. The organisation is provided by the form. (See e.g. R.S. Woolhouse: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, London, 1993, Routledge.) 'Substance' is the term of art for an individual thing organised by a form.

The form of a thing is not an extra component - not an extra bone or bit of flesh or niphridium: it's the way the components that make up the thing are organised.

So far therefore we have the notion of a substance as a set of bits and pieces organised by a form.

Some individual things, according to the Scholastics anyway, do not have forms providing their organisation. A stone would be an example. One can sense intuitively the distinction they were anxious to acknowledge. A stone has much less in the way of organisation than a living thing. The scholastics treated it as an aggregate - a mere assemblage of smaller bits.

Things made by human beings are also examples of what the Scholastics regarded as aggregates.

Again, intuitively one can understand how it might be thought that human beings supply the organisation for artifacts, so that unlike animals which are not put together by human beings, they do not 'require' forms.

(I am speaking here of the Scholastic account. It was derived from Aristotle, but his presentation of his own view is confounded rather by his taking a house as his paradigm of a thing with a form. Other things that he says support the thesis that in spite of this unfortunate example he in fact believed that forms were exclusive to living things.)

The Role Of 'Form' in the Scholastic Account Of Understanding

If we now have an idea of what the Scholastic notion of a 'form', we can move on to explore one way in which this notion was central to their outlook on themselves and on the relationship to things around them.

They thought of human understanding, for example, as a matter of our intellects becoming informed by a 'form'. (Our modern word 'informed' harks back to this whole way of thinking.)

For Aquinas, the part of us that is responsible for understanding is the intellect.

The intellect first renders 'intelligible' the form of the thing being understood, and then grasps and retains that form.

Because the form is what makes a thing the sort of thing that it is, it seems to follow that understanding something involves becoming that sort of thing! - since it is a matter of coming to share the form of the thing being understood.

This is obviously a very difficult implication to take on board, and scholars disagree about how it is to be undertood. 'Intelligible in actu est intellectus in actu' - these are the enigmatic words which express the Thomist thesis, translated by Kenny as 'thought in operation is identical with the object of thought'. (Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, London, 1993, Routledge.)

Maybe the thought that today makes most sense to us in coming to terms with this idea is the notion that as one contemplates God the more Godlike one becomes onself.

The Scholastics themselves saw the difficulty and solved it in typical fashion by saying that the way in which the form of a thing being understood informed the intellect was different from the way in which it informed the thing itself.

(I say this a typical Scholastic move because it sees the problem and solves it to its own satisfaction by an accommodation which sheds not the least bit of light.)

One thing we should resist in trying to get our minds round the Scholastic form and the role it plays in the Scholastic understanding of understanding. The thought is that understanding x involves coming to share its form. What we must not do I'm sure is think of coming to share a thing's form as like breaking off a piece of the thing and putting it in our pocket. The notion of 'sharing a thing's form' has probably a closer parallel today in understanding something we are reading.

The meaning of a piece of text is not a component of the text which we can somehow get our hands on. Its meaning is rather something we think of ourselves as 'internalising' or 'absorbing'. In some such way as this does the intellect, according to Aquinas, come to share in a thing's form.

The notion of a form played a similarly central role in the Scholastic understanding of the other actvities which we today subsume under 'thinking', for example,

The form is at the heart of how the Scholastics thought of perception as well. Perception they understood as involving sharing the form of a thing. Because a thing's form was what made it the kind of thing that it was, there was a sense in which the relationship between perceiver and thing perceived was absolutely intimate. Can I put it this way? In seeing it, you in a sense, for a time, had some kind of share in its being. For a moment you and it had in common the thing which made the thing what it was.

You have to contrast this with the Modern understanding: that when you see a thing you are actually in touch not with the thing itself but with a stand-in for the thing, a representative of the thing, a mental thing we call an 'image'.

There is a big difference, and it goes to the heart of how human beings see themselves in their world.

It emphasises the alien character of Scholastic thought though to realize that for them perception was a bodily function and not one that fell to the 'intellect'. In perception, the sense faculty, not the intellect, was thought of as 'abstracting' the form of the perceived thing from a 'phantasm' of a thing ('phantasm': "something like a mental image" Kenny, AM, p.37).

The Aristotle-inspired view which, broadly, conceives of a thing as matter 'informed' is known as hylomorphism.

Here is Kenny explaining the significance of hylomorphism and its successor, which I suppose could be called representationalism:

"According to some philosophers, in sense experience we do not direcetly observe objects or properties in the external world; the immediate objects of our experience are sense-data, private objects of which we have infallible knowledge, and from which we make more or less dubious inferences to the real nature of external objects and properties.

In Aquinas' theory there are no intermediaries like sense-data which come between perceiver and perceived. In sensation the sense faculty does not come into contact with a likeness of the sense-object. Instead it becomes itself like the sense-object..." (Kenny, AM, p.35.)

So it is said that Modernity, with its contrasting theory of the mind and of the relationship between our experience and the world (which now becomes the 'external' world), cuts us off from the world and locates us in a quasi-theatre in the head. There we look not at the things about us - trees, tables, other people - but at mental stand-ins for those things - ie representations.

What do you think?

If the Scholastics thought of an animal as matter 'organised' by a form, how do we think of one?

Do you think that when we see a thing, what we are actually aware of is not the thing at all, but an image of the thing?

Discussion site

The Modern rejection of hylomorphic framework

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.)

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.

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:

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.

Where the hylomorphic view had seen perception (eg) in terms of a person sharing the form of the object seen, according to the new perspective the object is represented before the mind by an idea. Ideas are 'mental' entities, the only items with which the mind can deal directly, but they stand for the non-mental things about which the thinker has occasion to think.

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.

' 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.

The connection between mind and 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.

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.

Reprise

A key part of the revolution for which Descartes was significantly responsible is this: Scholasticism embraces the picture of a person who is seeing, understanding, reasoning, as a being who is in direct touch with the many things that are around them: other people, animals, pebbles, God.

'in direct touch' - note the metaphor I turn to in trying to make clear this alternative to Descartes' set of ideas.

For Scholasticism, in perception you in some sense came to share for a period the existence of the what it was you were perceiving. In a sense you became for a fleeting moment horsey, or through long meditation, God-like.

For the new way of thinking, you are in direct touch, when you perceive, not the thing perceived but with a stand-in for the thing perceived, namely an idea.

Descartes created the space for ideas to exist in.

He thought of the space as accessible only to the individual, but one that wea perfectly accessible to the individual. You are the one that knows what's in it, but you really do know what's in it.

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History of Philosophy in 17th & 18th Centuries

Descartes and the Modern concept of the Mind

The Scholastic Notions of Form and Essence

Form as grounding properties

The Role Of 'Form' in the Scholastic Account Of Understanding

The Modern rejection of hylomorphic framework

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.

Descartes' contribution to the Revolution

The connection between mind and body