In 1953, the German philologist Bruno Snell published The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought. His preface exemplifies the dif-ficulties of defining the mind as an object. Despite the bold thesis proclaimed by his title, Snell was not entirely sure that the Greeks had actually discovered some-thing that already existed. Although he asserted that “the rise of thinking among the Greeks [after Homer] was nothing less than a revolution. . . . They discovered the human mind . . . ,” he hedged his claim by writing that the Greek discovery
“cannot be compared with the discovery of, let us say, a new continent” (Snell, 1953, v). Snell wrestled with possibilities that have since loomed large in psycho-logical metatheory. He specifically rejected the possibility (now espoused by some in cognitive science, e.g., Dahlbom, 1993) that the mind might be an artifact.
The mind, Snell wrote, “was not invented, as a man would invent a tool . . . to master a certain type of problem. As a rule, inventions are arbitrarily determined;
they are adapted to the purpose from which they take their cue. No objectives, no aims were involved in the discovery of the intellect” (Snell, 1953, p. viii). Snell also perceived but did not fully articulate the conception of mind favored by today’s constructivists. He wrote, “[I]n spite of our statement that the Greeks dis-covered the intellect, we also assert that the discovery was necessary for the intel-lect to come into existence” (p. viii), hinting that the mind was socially constructed by Greek philosophers, poets, and dramatists during the classical age.
The three alternatives raised by Snell go to the heart of the issues addressed by this book: if and how the mind can be a scientific object. If the mind was truly discovered (or awaits discovery), then psychology,cyxh¬-lo¬goß—the study of the soul—might be a natural science in the usual sense of the term. The second possibility, that mind is a tool, an artifact, suggests that while mind exists as do hammers and modems, psychological science must be reconceived as a science of the artificial (H. Simon, 1981). Natural science concerns itself with spatiotem-poral universals, objects such as electrons or quarks that are the same everywhere
and always. Hammers and modems are real, but as human artifacts, they do not fall under the purview of natural science. Science explains how hammers and modems work, but hammers and modems are objects of engineering, not science (Leahey, “Psychology as Engineering,” this volume).
Mind as artifact shades over into the third possibility, mind as social construc-tion. If mind is socially constructed, then it is uncertain whether there can be any science (as science is usually understood) of mind. Perhaps the study of mind is a historical, not a scientific, undertaking. As Snell remarks, “The intellect, how-ever, comes into the world, it is ‘effected,’ in the process of revealing itself, i.e. in the course of history” (1953, pp. vi–vii). Furthermore, the constructivist thesis gives rise to a darker prospect for scientific psychology. On the artifact interpretation, minds are real but lack the universality of the proper objects of science. In contrast, mind might be a social construction along the lines of the Greek gods, a profound illusion.
Psychologists tend to take for granted the Western tradition descended from the Greeks that is traced by Snell, but other cultures have different views of mind and self. For example, in Selfless Persons, Steven Collins (1982) discusses mind and personality as conceived by Theravada Buddhism. Collins observes with Geertz (1974) that the Western notion of mind, or person, is “a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures” (Collins, 1982, p. 2).
The Buddhist monk Nyanatiloka contrasts Buddhist with Western conceptions of mind (Collins, 1982, p. 5):
[T]here are three teachers in the world. The first teacher teaches the existence of an eternal ego-entity outlasting death: that is the Eternalist, as for example the Christian. The second teacher teaches a temporary ego-entity which becomes annihilated at death: that is the annihilationist, or materialist. The third teacher teaches neither an eternal nor a tem-porary ego-entity: that is the Buddha. The Buddha teaches that what we call ego, self, soul, personality, etc., are merely conventional terms not referring to any real independent entity. And he teaches that there is only to be found this psychophysical process of existence changing from mo-ment to momo-ment. . . . This doctrine of egolessness of existence forms the essence of the Buddha’s doctrine of emancipation. Thus with this doc-trine of egolessness, or anatta, stands or falls the entire Buddhist struc-ture.
Moreover, Theravada Buddhists regard the self, the mind, as a dangerous illusion from which we should free ourselves. According to the Sinhalese monk Rahula,
“[T]he idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ selfish desire, craving, at-tachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egotism, and other defilements, impuri-ties and problems. . . . In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world” (Collins, 1982, p. 4). For Buddhists, it appears, psychology is the study of a no-thing, a misbegotten enterprise. From the postmodern social constructivist perspective, R. Rorty (1979, 1991, 1993) heartily agrees.
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A third book title, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (Morris, 1972), reminds us that more than the scientific character of psychology is at stake in the existence of mind, because possession of mind is strongly linked to personhood.
In the West today we assign supreme importance to the individual human being, bearer of inalienable rights against the state and other humans. As Morris says,
“The hard core of this individualism lies in the psychological experience . . . [of]
the sense of a clear distinction between my self and other people” (1972, p. 3).
Traditionally, a human being is treated as a person who transcends animal status by virtue of possessing a soul, or mind. Even in nonreligious contexts, possession of a mind is critical to one’s status as a person and a citizen. A human in a persistent vegetative state may be ruled to lack a mind and therefore may be deliberately allowed to die, and the death is not regarded as murder. A human being with dementia—literally, deminded—may be stripped of civil rights and assigned a guardian or consigned to an institution. In psychology, questions of personhood manifest themselves in the study of the self, a less religious term than soul and a more personal one than mind.
Mind as a Religious Object
Western conceptions of mind began in religion before moving first to philos-ophy and then to science. However, for two reasons, psychologists have underesti-mated the influence of religious ideas of the soul—thecyxh¬of our science—on conceptions of mind and self. First, psychology is an aggressively secular enterprise, and psychologists like to think that they put religion behind them when they assume their role as scientists. A more subtle reason concerns the dominance of historical scholarship by Christian belief. When we as psychologists read about past thinkers such as Plato and Descartes, not only do we look at them as protopsychologists, we see them through the eyes of historians and classicists who until recently worked within a quietly but univocally held Christian framework. That framework rarely intrudes explicitly, but it filters out the rough splinters, odd conceptions, and ob-scure but vital disputes concerning mind and soul held from Greek times through at least Descartes. Thus we psychologists inherit a conception of the mind subtly shaped by forces of which we know little, drain it of its specifically supernatural con-tent (e.g., survival of bodily death), and fancy that what remains is somehow natural and therefore a proper object of science. I will try briefly to put back some of the lost splinters, conceptions, and disputes to provide a ground against which to see the figure of mind as an object of psychological science.
The Common Pattern
Although there are differences in detail, religions around the world have a re-markably concordant picture of the mind, positing the existence of two imma-terial souls for two distinct reasons (Onians, 1961). The first, universal reason is
to explain the difference between living and nonliving things. Objects with souls are living; those without are nonliving. The second, less universal reason is to explain human personality. Some religions propose that in addition to the breath of life, there is a soul that constitutes the essence of each person’s per-sonality, and sometimes this personal soul is believed to be able to survive the death of the material body, though this is not guaranteed. Modern Christianity, for example, teaches that each human being is composed of a material body and a nonmaterial soul. The soul is said to be the essence of the person, con-taining personal memories and personal identity. Moreover, while the body is mortal, the soul is immortal, leaving the body at death and traveling to an af-terlife in heaven or hell.
The Greco-Roman Trek from Religion to Philosophy
Modern scientific psychology has its roots in Greek philosophy, which initiated secular inquiry into the nature of mind. Notwithstanding the Greek reputation for humanistic rationality, Greek philosophical thought was shaped by traditional Greek religious traditions (Bremmer, 1983) and by the eruptions of new religious forms during the Periclean age (Morgan, 1992).
Bronze Age Greek concepts of the soul are distinctive. In part, they participate in the common pattern just described, but possess unique features all their own (Snell, 1953; Onians, 1961; Bremmer, 1983). To begin with, the Iliad and Odyssey contain no word designating the mind or personality as a whole (but see Knox, 1993). Closest is the wordcyxh¬, the breath of life. To a large extent,cyxh¬is the Greek version of the animating principle: its departure from a wounded warrior means his death. However,cyxh¬is more than merely the breath of life, but is less than the complete individual mind or soul. During sleep or a swoon it may leave the body and travel around, and it may survive bodily death, but it is never de-scribed as being active when a person is awake, and it is never implicated in causing behavior.
Instead, behavior was attributed to several independently operating soul-like entities residing in different parts of the body. For example, there was wrh¬neß, located in the diaphragm, whose function was rationally planning action.Qymo¬ß, in the heart, governed action driven by emotion.No¬oßwas responsible for accurate perception and clear cognition of the world. There were other, less frequently cited minisouls as well. None of these minisouls survived the death of the body, giving the afterlife of the Homericcyxh¬a rather bizarre character. Deprived of its body-souls, the cyxh¬ in the afterlife was a mental cripple, deprived of feeling, thought, and speech and incapable of normal movement. The appearance of the cyxh¬was exactly that of the body at death, complete with wounds. Moreover, not every cyxh¬ went to Hades, because proper burial of the body was felt necessary to effect the transition from life to afterlife. Women, children, adolescents, and the elderly were not ritually buried, so their cyxhai¬were not believed to survive death, and warriors feared death without burial, for example, by drowning at sea.
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On the other hand, buried with honor, a great warrior found an exalted place in the afterlife.
Greek religion and the concept ofcyxh¬underwent a profound change in the late fifth century bce (Burkert, 1985; Morgan, 1992). Traditional Greek religious thought had insisted on a great gulf between the human and divine worlds, down-playing the idea of personal immortality. However, in the wake of the Pelopon-nesian War, continuity between the human and divine worlds was the theme of various new cults, often imported from the non-Greek East. In their practices these new religions induced in worshippers ecstatic states through which they might for a time join the gods, perhaps even briefly becoming the god of their veneration.
Thecyxh¬became a personal, immortal soul, taking after death its rightful place in the divine world of the gods. Plato was influenced by these new teachings, but steered them in a less ecstatic, more philosophical and cognitive direction (Mor-gan, 1992). For Plato, the proper object of the soul’s attention was indeed some-thing divine, but he taught that instead of seeking salvation through ecstatic com-munion with the gods, the soul should seek salvation through philosophical pursuit of eternal, transcendent Truth. In Plato’s hands, the mind became iden-tified with reason, the ability to formulate and know the universal Truths under-written by the heavenly Forms.
So far in the history of the West, the concept of mind was tied up with two concerns (R. Rorty, 1979). The first concern was for human dignity, or person-hood. Having an immortal soul separated people from the material and animal worlds, making humans fundamentally divine, possessing dignity, not simply value (R. Rorty, 1979). This was the prime concern of the new ecstatic cults that Plato sought to tame. The second concern was the acquisition of knowledge. Plato said that knowledge was acquired through reason, and later philosophers followed him in this. The human soul was pure reason (Plato’s spirited and animal souls are similar to the Bronze Age minisouls), separating people from the material and animal worlds and making them capable of grasping the Forms. In Plato’s works there is little or no tension between the new religious conception of the personal soul and his own conception of the soul as pure, knowing reason. After Plato came his student Aristotle, who took Plato’s teachings further away from religion, begin-ning to treat the human mind in a naturalistic, scientific fashion. In his works lie the seeds of tension and ultimate incompatibility between mind as religious object and mind as scientific object.
Aristotle continued to be influenced by the ancient tradition of soul as a life principle. For Aristotle, possession of a soul marked the difference between living and nonliving things. Thus there were plant and animal souls in addition to the human soul. More naturalistically, as a biologist, Aristotle defined the various souls functionally rather than dualistically. According to Aristotle, soul was not a thing that enters a body and gives it life, and that leaves it causing death, but the total collection of life processes that define the kind of being that a plant, animal, or human is. The soul is the formal, defining cause of a creature. Thus a cat has a cat’s soul, a dog, a dog’s soul, and a human, a human soul. However, the soul is not a substance separable from its material embodiment, as is the religious
per-sonal soul or Plato’s rational soul. For Aristotle, the relation of soul to body is the same as the relation of the form of a statue to its matter. The form of the Venus de Milo defines it as such, but it is embodied in marble. The statue’s form is not identical to the marble, because the same form may be embodied in a plaster or bronze replica, but it cannot exist without being embodied in some matter. The soul, as the formal cause of a person, thus has no existence beyond the life of the plant, animal, or person.
Aristotle’s functional conception of the soul worked well for plants and ani-mals, but difficulties arose when he and his followers (especially those working in the Muslim or Christian traditions) turned to the human soul. Following Plato, Aristotle defined the human soul—mind—as reason, the unique human ability to formulate universal truths. In part, this is consistent with his functional scheme, because mind is defined as the function of reason. However, there is a temptation to go further, saying that mind is in some sense separable from the body and perhaps divine, even immortal. First, logic—the heart of reason—exists before and after the lives of particular humans and is universal in scope, being the same in all human thinkers. Second, the universals known by mind transcend physical existence. The form of catness existed before, and will survive the demise of, all felines now living. Thus mind, reason, seems to transcend physical embodiment in particular humans because logic does, and because the objects of reason are themselves transcendent. Aristotle’s treatment of mind (particularly active mind) is notoriously vague on this point, but arguments like these were adopted by Chris-tians such as St. Augustine to establish the existence of immortal human souls (R.
Rorty, 1979).
Conundrums of Medieval and Renaissance Thought
Ultimately, the religious and Aristotelian conceptions of the soul could not be reconciled, because Aristotle’s mind was not the same as the Christian or Islamic soul. Religious thinkers influenced by Aristotle created two heresies about the soul that Descartes later strenuously but vainly tried to avoid (Gaukroger, 1995). Each heresy was occasioned by the fact that Aristotle’s mind was pure reason and knowl-edge of universals and was therefore impersonal. Experience and personal mem-ory—and therefore personal identity—were functions of the animal soul, which was presumably not immortal.
The first heresy was called Averroism, after Averroe¨s, the Latinized name of the Islamic physician-philosopher ibn-Rushd (1126–1198). Averroism resulted from identifying mind with the Christian or Muslim soul. The heresy of Averroism derived from the fact that because the Aristotelian mind contained only general knowledge, not personal memories, it could not be the essence of one’s personality capable of surviving bodily death. Mind was understood by Averroes to be a divine inner light from God that illuminates general knowledge, but that remerges with God at death. Many Christian Aristotelians, including Thomas Aquinas, tried to fend off the implications of Averroism by emphasizing the Resurrection, when the
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mind would be reunited with its body, reconstituting the whole Aristotelian person, form (soul) properly embodied in matter (flesh). However, by the time of the scientific revolution, the hope of imminent resurrection was fading, and Christian theology replaced it with the idea of immediate judgment of a soul that would live forever in heaven or hell.
The other heretical temptation, called Alexandrism after Alexander of Aphrod-isias (fl. 200), arose from dropping Aristotle’s sharp distinction of form and matter and attributing to the matter of the brain the power not only to perceive and remember, but to think and have knowledge. Alexandrism was heretical because it amounted to materialism, denying that humans are anything more than com-plex, mortal animals.
The Alexandrian view became increasingly popular in the Renaissance as naturalistic modes of thought began to replace supernatural ones. There is a par-allel to the distinction between living and nonliving things in magnetism. Magnets seem quite mysterious, almost alive, as they attract metal and repel one another.
A supernatural explanation of magnetism would locate the power of the magnet in an indwelling demon or a spell cast on the magnet by a sorcerer. Renaissance
A supernatural explanation of magnetism would locate the power of the magnet in an indwelling demon or a spell cast on the magnet by a sorcerer. Renaissance