Cognition: Theory and Practice

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 3 opens by arguing that despite its pointed interest in language, Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine finally traces a movement away from language—away from signa and back to the res that appear as the sole ‘real’, ultimate objects of human acts of understanding. The poem’s energies are now refocused on the nature of human mind, cognition, perception, and imagination. Deguileville adopts a distinctly dualist/Augustinian model of the soul, rejecting the hylomorphic, and by now dominant model of cognition based on sense perception propounded by Aristotle and his Arabic commentators. In order to do so, Deguileville has recourse to a number of alternative theoretical accounts of cognition—from Avicenna’s thought experiment of the ‘Flying Man’ to John of Peter Olivi’s unusual and controversial theory of the soul’s active perception. The poem’s action, however, tends to suggest that the pilgrim’s soul is rather a passive recipient of physical forces from the created world. This also reveals the fragility of Deguileville’s theory of the poetic imagination: for from confirming the independence of the imaginative faculty from the world of matter, the status of mental images is revealed as being ineluctably embodied, and as such susceptible to sensual and concupiscible appetites. Despite his best efforts to reject the carnal allegorical poetics of the Roman de la Rose, then, Deguileville appears forced to concede the cognitive operations of the mind and poetic imagination are inextricably entangled with the world of contingent matter, and thus inherently prone to error, deception, misreading, delusion, and manipulation.