Thoughts on the Modern
 
 


The world of Descartes places a window between the perceiver and the world perceived. As we gaze through this window we are transformed into spectators, the world into a spectacle. (Gaston Bachelard, 1964)
 
 
 
 
 

Note: These excursions in thought are for those of us who enjoy thinking about the structure and dynamics of psychology.  The questions at the end of the primary reading are designed to verify that you have read the primary reading  for  Continuing Education Credits. There will be no questions asked regarding these additional readings that will apply to gaining Continuing Education Credits.

 

Conceiving of the body as an object tends to divorce knowledge of the involuntary from the Cogito and bit by bit makes all psychology fall on the side of the natural sciences. (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 354)

 Cartesian space is a 17th century codification of an old idea. It is therefore not entirely accurate to pin all that phenomenologists refer to as "Cartesian" on René Descartes. We attribute the first sharp distinction between mind and body to Plato. In the Phaedrus he wrote that, "We are enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about, imprisoned in the body, as in an oyster shell" (Plato, 1920 2, p. 254). But Plato was most likely promoting a split born long before him in which each thing existing had an original form or Archê (which we might equate with the original substance of the psyche). In fact, one way of classifying major Greek philosophers is by their position with respect to the Archê (Edinger, 1993). Every major philosopher from Thales of Miletus (624-546 BC) to Aristotle had his own idea about this. Many current historians attribute the principle differences between Plato and Aristotle, for instance, to their differing positions regarding Archê (Diamandopoulos, 1972, p. 145-146; Warnerwick, 1972, p. 148-151).
 

The Pythagoreans thought the Archê was "number." By this, they did not mean a number, but the ordering principle of number per se. One has to admire the elegance of this position. Jung came to much the same conclusion. But the Pythagoreans did something else with their idea. They dissociated their version of Archê’s substance from the physical. Other philosophers had figured Archê as an expression of some physical element like fire, water, earth or air (Edinger, 1993). The Pythagoreans, in a manner similar to the Orphic’s view of soul as an animating principle of matter (Sixth Century BC), considered the Archê an abstraction.

Prior to the seventeenth century, The prevailing midieval view in Europe (prior to the seventeenth century) was dominated by Greek formulations whose origins ran observably through the Roman Empire. We sometimes draw a line from Aristotle and Plato directly through their Christian interpreters, St. Thomas Aquinas for Aristotle, and St. Augustine for Plato (Jaspers, 1962a). Platonic and Aristotelian thinking provided two philosophical platforms for European philosophies. But within these two platforms no particular disagreement about mind’s dissociation from matter existed. Instead, arguments revolved around the nature of the dissociation.

It is no secret that the Romans were initially lenient toward local religions. The Empire’s official doctrine, drawn from the Greek Pantheon, coexisted with the pragmatic realities of running an efficient empire. Early Roman’s did not evidently much care who worshipped what as long as they paid their taxes. All this changed with Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, and the resulting constraints he introduced caused many of the artists in the Empire to packed up and leave.

One might concede here many alternative readings of history. Mine is admittedly serving the points I am attempting to make with respect to the Cartesian formulation of mind. However, while suggesting the church recruited the remaining creative energy in Europe to emphasize doctrines constructed upon Hellenized versions of mind/body dissociation might draw debate, I am probably safe in suggesting that throughout the Middle-Ages, Platonic and Aristotelian divisions marked the controlling paradigm. In the fifteenth century, however, an important event occurred that altered this course. In 1453 the Eastern capital at Constantinople was captured by invading Turks. This cut off the trade routes around the Aegean and Black Seas, throwing Europe headlong into an "Age of Exploration" as it scrambled to find alternative routes of trade.

One might consider in one’s framing of the fifteenth century, the sudden need to become technologically creative as a response to the desire to scare up collateral trade routes. This would be an "Economic Reading" of the era and the resulting series of Renaissance "Awakenings" in Europe. One might alternatively view this as Europe’s collective ego undergoing an Archetypal flight from the grips of its Great Mother -- the Church. This would be a "Psychological Reading" of the era. Certainly, the plight of Constantinople caused a definitive economic ripple of instability in the West suggesting the trauma of leaving a nest. And if one were to continue this line of thinking, one might also note the subsequent tolerance for collective ego development in the shape of a specific kind of scientific creativity designed to sniff out new avenues for the accumulation of wealth and power. Was this a variation on the theme of the hero’s journey, rebelling against the mother church? In any case, the zeitgeist of Descartes’ world was undoubtedly an amalgam of newly released creative thinking coupled to the need for a philosophical doctrine to distinguish the order of conceptual regularities from the disorder of Middle Ages angst. Galileo arose as the hero who would avidly pursue these conceptual regularities into the realm of things.

Unfortunately, Galileo was so eager to find regularity that he saw it where it was not. Much of his discovery resulted from the theory built to predict it, in the kind of Heisenberg twist found throughout much of Cartesian reasoning. From within its own rule-bound system of coordinates (first refered to on page 10), the regularity Galileo saw was little more than an illusion disregarding small nonlinearities. It was not the model of truth and reality it professed to be (Gleick, 1987).

In a general sense, science defines conventions which might be described as the rules of the game for empirics. And their fruitfulness does seem to justify these rules (Popper, 1959). But there was a price to be paid paid as the European spiritual projections fell into matter. The cost of material fruifullness was the paradigm of dissociation.

The deregulation of interests by the church opened the door to increasingly unregulated exploration. Formerly controlled documents from antiquity like the Alchemical Emerald Tablet of Hermes Tismegestus made their way to Florence. Modern thinkers like Cosimo de Medici promptly translated them and made them available to those with similar interests. Martin Luther began developing interests in alternative theological interpretations. Leonardo da Vinci developed all manner of theologically questionable interests. One thing led to another and by fifteen hundred the Italian Renaissance was in full sway. By the end of the "Age of Reason," scientism had solidified its split-off position, now strong enough to challenge the religion it once served. In his System of Nature (1770) Baron Paul Henri Holbach contended that God was an unscientific illusion who had obscured morality, corrupted politics, hindered the advance of science, and extinguished happiness and peace in the heart of man (Satin, 1969). The scientific world view prevailed and man’s relationship to spirit was altered. This new epoch articulated a dichotomy of inner experience and outer world, subject and object, private reality and public truth. The language of traditional epistemology betrays this as Susann Langer (1957) wrote, when "we speak of the ‘given,’ of ‘sense-data,’ ‘the phenomenon,’ or ‘other selves,’ [and] we take for granted the immediacy of the internal experience and the continuity of the external world" (p. 12).
 

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Michael Staples