In reading back over recent xmca postings, I was fascinated particularly by
the discussion of the elusive quote "to find the soul it is necessary to
lose it" ...
To say this would make most sense to me, in English at least, if the
original thought was: "to find the psyche, it is necessary to let it go",
i.e."to discover the nature of the psyche, we must first de-center it in
our studies".
Perhaps this makes sense to me because it is the strategy I have long tried
to follow ... not to assume the necessity of a concept of mind
(consciousness, agency, intentionality, etc.), but to discover just when
and where and why it is needed or useful (if it is). Meanings get made,
actions get done, people are involved as participants in these processes
and activities. How well can all this be described and understood and
accounted for _without_ assuming a priori the traditional notion of a mind
or psyche?
An entirely empty center, of course, is not the only strategy for
de-centering mind or psyche. One can also diminish the various sorts of
ideological privilege attached to the notion ... its role as stand-in for
the christian Soul, or as representative of the politically autonomous
bourgeois Individual ... and somewhat democratize its relations to
Non-mind: e.g. raising the status of the body in our theorizing,
re-integrating the mind with the material situation-environment (situated
cognition) and with other minds/bodies (distributed cognition), and
artifacts (AT, ANT), or other post-Cartesian approaches ..... etc.
But I still like the more radical idea of trying to _find out_ just
why/whether, when, where, and how we might _need_ some notion like that of
mind ... and which aspects are needed for what (consciousness, agency,
identity, intentionality, reflexivity ...). It's famously said that if God
had not existed, man would have had to invent the deity (and perhaps did).
Is this true of Mind? or not? or are only some of the features historically
associated with the idea useful, and others really not? And if we go
post-Cartesian so that Mind is not independent or autonomous but only an
aspect of something more material, more ecologically comprehensive ... then
how do we get to that point starting, not from fixing up an unsatisfactory
notion of mind, but from not assuming such a notion in the first place?
My approach to these issues has mostly been in terms of theory building,
but I think it's also important to pose these questions historically and
culturally ... just when and how did the various modern notions of and
about Mind appear in european culture, and what happened differently in
other cultures? Soul somehow became Psyche, and Psyche somehow became Mind
... the Homunculus and the Faculties appear in the story .... there is an
important pre-history of psychology. I know bits and pieces of versions of
this story (Foucault tells some interesting parts of it) ... but there must
be more specialist historical accounts ...
Any suggestions about who has written insightfully about the social and
political history of the concept of Mind .....??
JAY.
PS. Note that my interest in historical accounts is mainly for at least
partially "externalist" accounts, the ones that link the history of the
idea of mind to its larger social and political context, rather than purely
"internalist" accounts that just trace how the idea changed as it passed
from century to century and philosopher to philosopher entirely within its
own ambient discourses.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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