Bishop Joseph Butler of Durham worried about the consequences of Locke’s empiricism: “That personality is not a permanent, but a transcient thing: that it lives and dies, begins and ends continually: that no one can any more remain one and the same person two moments together, than two successive moments can be one and the same moment.” This leads Seigel to suggest that “It is not disengagement that makes [Locke’s] ideas about the self modern, but his recognition that the... Read more
Modernity ignores the social, linguistic, and political context of thought, and the way interest shapes the mind; postmodernity foregrounds all this. Perhaps, but . . . . Descartes said that his travels demonstrates that “all those who hold notions strongly contrary to our own are not for that reason barbarians or savages, and many of them are just as reasonable as we; and . . . the identical man, with the identical mind, nurtured from his childhood among French or... Read more
For premoderns – ancients and medievals – there was a homology between the self and the world. Man was seen as microcosm, and, as Seigel puts it, they believed that “the world, like the self, is structured so as to fulfill intelligible moral ends.” The initial shift in early modernity, and one that created a crisis in the understanding of the self, was not so much anthropological as cosmological. The heavens, the natural world on earth, eventually the human body... Read more
Seigel views with “considerable skepticism” the notion that Descartes constructed “a general theory of the human self and subject on the basis of the cogito .” In his treatise on the Passions of the Soul , Descartes claimed that the soul was linked with the body, which acts on the soul “more immediately” than anything else. Despite his efforts to find a juncture of body and soul in the pineal gland, he also claimed that the soul is “truly joined... Read more
According to Seigel, “Descartes’s view of reason as most pure and solid when it was free of corruption by the world’s confusions implied nothing less than the attempt to break free of all social and cultural experience.” Not for the first time, I wish there were an anthropological history of modern philosophy as motivated by “dirt-avoidance.” Read more
In his history of modern Western views of the self ( The Idea of the Self , Cambridge 2005), Jerrold Seigel offers what he believes is a fresh interpretation of the implications Descartes’s cogito . He asks, Who is the subject, the “I,” implied by the cogito and the sum ? And he answers that it is simultaneously, and necessarily, both the concrete seventeenth century Frenchman Rene Descartes and a pure rationality detached from particularities of time, place, body, culture,... Read more
In his history of modern Western views of the self ( The Idea of the Self , Cambridge 2005), Jerrold Seigel offers what he believes is a fresh interpretation of the implications Descartes’s cogito . He asks, Who is the subject, the “I,” implied by the cogito and the sum ? And he answers that it is simultaneously, and necessarily, both the concrete seventeenth century Frenchman Rene Descartes and a pure rationality detached from particularities of time, place, body, culture,... Read more
Bruce Holsinger shows that “postmodern” theory reaches back beyond the modern period to find resources for anti-modern critique in the medieval world. Early modern thinkers made a similar move: Stephen McKnight notes (in a Mars Hill Audio interview) that early modern scientists like Francis Bacons claimed to be recovering an ancient, quasi-Adamic wisdom that would renew creation and humanity. Read more
Descartes’s original title for Discourse on Method was “Project for a Science that Can Raise our Nature to its Highest Degree of Perfection.” And for a number of years he worked on a treatise in which he “resolved to explain all the phenomena of nature, that is all of physics” and to “make all my thoughts known so that they will convince some . . . and so that the others will not be able to contradict them.” The notion... Read more
Descartes’s original title for Discourse on Method was “Project for a Science that Can Raise our Nature to its Highest Degree of Perfection.” And for a number of years he worked on a treatise in which he “resolved to explain all the phenomena of nature, that is all of physics” and to “make all my thoughts known so that they will convince some . . . and so that the others will not be able to contradict them.” The notion... Read more
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