Theory Of The Mind Research Articles

Theories of the Mind

Theories of the Mind

VIII.—NEW BOOKS

VIII.—NEW BOOKS Theories of the Mind. Edited by JORDAN M. SCHER. New York, The Free Press of Glencoe, and London, Macmillan, New York. 1962. Pp. xx+748. BRIAN MEDLIN BRIAN MEDLIN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mind, Volume LXXIII, Issue 292, October 1964, Pages 599–601, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LXXIII.292.599 Published: 01 October 1964

Book Review: Theories of the Mind

Book Review: Theories of the Mind

Locke and the "Dissolution of the Ego"

IT HAS been said that Addison, and the men of letters of the eighteenth century, Locke was 'the philosopher,' somewhat as Aristotle had been for the schoolmen.2 The duo of Newton and Locke always appears as the revolutionary heroes who dominate the beginnings of the modern age. Yet it has been the case with both that much of their influence on creative artists, as well as on ideas about art, remains obscure, for, like the larger part of an iceberg, it lies beneath the surface of things. In the present paper I shall try to suggest a few points of that influence, concentrating on the new model of the mind which emerges, by implication as well as explicitly, from Locke's writings on the mental processes. There will be no attempt to enter into the many and vexatious problems of technical philosophy and psychology, but rather to see the effects that Locke's epistemology produced on the common man's idea of himself and his fellows: that idea which, of necessity, most poets, novelists, and even critics were to use as the basis and much of the very material of their works. A reason for the actual effectiveness of Locke's system-its ability to win almost universal acceptance within a few years, as opposed to the enmity and uproar Hobbes stirred up-is the fact that, like the Glorious Revolution itself with which he had much to do, he compromised. He succeeded i producing a theory of the mind which retained what most men desired while it excluded, seemingly, what they feared. There were two extremes to be mediated. One was the familiar, crude mechanism represented by Hobbes. The philosopher of Malmesbury had made an overhasty attempt to explain all sensation, all dreams, all thought, in terms of purely material, physiological changes in the body, produced by particles of matter outside impinging on the matter of the organism. Connections of these impressions, produced in fortuitous sequences, give rise to all our notions of relations. According to his theory (to which he himself did not strictly adhere), there is nothing else: no separate soul, no living being at the heart of it all, aware of itself and of its awareness. It was all very material and mechanical and, the age rightly felt, false. This was an age of extremes in philosophy. The problem of bringing the mind into relation with a physical world was becoming steadily more acute. Some, like Descartes, resorted to the desperate expedient of a radical split between physical imagination and pure intellection; he could, he says, have only a confused idea as image of a chiliagon, for example, whereas his mental conception is clear and distinct: And thus I clearly recognize that I have need of a particular effort of mind in order to effect the act of imagination, such as I do not require to understand, and this particular effort of mind clearly manifests the difference which 1 This paper is part of a study of aspects of Locke's influence on theories of art and on writers in the eighteenth century.

Sri Aurobindo's Theory of the Mind

If our experience or awareness is our most primary fact, as is today widely believed, then obviously the nature of our present normal consciousness or mind is our first problem. The view we come to take of the mind becomes not only basic and determining for a system of psychology, but also for epistemology and a theory of reality. If Aristotle made of the mind an objective fact, identifying it with the entelechy of the biological organism, then his psychology had perforce to be largely biological and physiological. And if Descartes conceived of it as utterly different from matter, a purely subjective fact, then it became impossible for him to escape a dualism in psychology as in metaphysics; and that became the most tangled problem of Western philosophy for two centuries. James Ward, a most acute psychologist of recent times, saw the exclusive one-sided emphasis of the above two philosophers and sought to give a really balanced view of mental consciousness by affirming that experience is a subject-object relation. This view has found wide acceptance and has given a sound basic position to psychology as to philosophy, where widely divergent schools of metaphysics build upon the same foundation, though they naturally vary the emphasis on the various terms of the subject-object relation.

The Mystery of Human Motive

The value of the theories of Freud, in dealing with juvenile delinquency (publicly debated recently) brings up the whole question of their assessment of the problem of abnormal moral behaviour. For Freud the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is something more than an allegory. It is also a code in which Mr Hyde figures with immense preponderance. ‘It is’, says Jung, ‘a detailed elaboration of man’s shadow-side such as had never been carried out before. It is the most effective antidote imaginable to all idealistic illusions about the nature of man’. (Integration of the Personality. Jung.) The conservative estimate of the theories of Sigismund Freud is that they contain much that is true and much that is new, but that unfortunately that which is true is not new and that which is new is not true. When Freud tells us that the media axiomata of the psycho-analytic theory of the mind rests on the assumption that the cause of all mental processes is automatically regulated by the pleasure-principle (Beyond the Pleasure-Principle), he merely declares himself a disciple of Epicurus. He merely proclaims that the object to which all men are attracted is Pleasure and that when a pleasure is consciously rejected it is only in order to make room (albeit unconsciously) for a greater pleasure. In other words, if we take ‘Pleasure’ in its broadest sense and define the word as meaning conscious satisfaction (not necessarily sensual, and often stimulated only by the prospect of benefit) there are few who do not subscribe to the obviousness of such a limited Hedonism.