Toward an Organismic Theory of Mind

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

In the history of philosophy, out of which also emerged the foundation of modern psychology, one millennial debate lasting from the ancient Greek to the present concerns the nature of reality. Whereas, some thinkers focused on the pervasiveness of change, others, as the first opening quote suggests, were seeking that which does not change. Plato and Aristotle laid the foundation for the latter side of the debate that placed primacy on stable, self-identical, and true things. That which is present, reality, is thought in terms of ousia (essence, existence), a concept that subsequently is taken up in the Latin substantia, substance (Heidegger 1997). Every substance is “subiectum [subject]”—that (a) which exists from itself and (b) in which qualities, attributes, or actions in here. The ontological choice, as the second introductory quotation shows, has its equivalence in most (but not all) languages: the subject–predicate relation as the foundation of truth sentences. This choice is important, as it determines, for example, the relation between what we understand as mind, on the one hand, and as the material world including the human body, on the other hand. The perennially discussed gaps (abysses) between body and mind, subject and object, or the individual and the social all can be traced to implicit or explicit theories of substance. Those very oppositions arise as soon as we understand mind (thought) as substance that stands over against everything else as non-mind. The latter, as Descartes worked out, exists in the form of extended physical bodies. Bodies, occupying specific points in space, are distinguished from other bodies occupying different point in space because no two material bodies can occupy the same space. In that one step, we thus also drive a wedge between the minds associated with the different bodies. The different minds inherently have different egos associated with the differently experienced cogito [I think] that appears in the subject affirming (ego) cogito ergo sum [I think, therefore I am].