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Chapter 1
The concepts of mind and person
When we reflect on the psychological concepts in our language, ordinary language should have, if not the last word, then at least the first word, as the philosopher John Austin said. In this context, it is interesting that the word âmindâ is actually not very commonly used in ordinary language. When the term is used, it is often in a context where we are talking about peopleâs difficulties. We can talk about people having âpsychological problemsâ and we understand what is meant by âa fragile mindâ (and of course âa strong mindâ as well), but only rarely do we talk about the fact that âthinking is a mental processâ or that âthe mind can be confined to the brainâ. In that sense, both âmindâ and âmentalâ are scientific and semi-technical words. In this bookâs perspective, this means that we should be wary when theorizing or constructing scientific models of âthe mindâ. What is it exactly that we are theorizing about and constructing models of? This is particularly important when dealing with the sciences that examine human experiences and actions, because if the results produced by these sciences cannot be traced back to something that is literally meaningful for the people who are the subject of the research, then there is reason to doubt the legitimacy and validity of the research altogether.
This differs from the natural sciences, where there is no requirement that theories about quarks and superstrings need to mean something to so-called âordinary peopleâ. But if psychologists tell people that they (psychologists) have discovered that feelings are something completely different than what we thought they were, then there is good reason to doubt that it is actually feelings that these psychologists have discovered something about. Again, as mentioned in the introduction: the psychological realm is something that is âcloseâ to us and something we are all familiar with, so there is a limit to how ground-breaking the âdiscoveriesâ made by the sciences that study the mind can actually be. That is not to say that you cannot discover anything new about the mind, but even Freudâs (1856â1939) psychoanalysis, which was very revolutionary and shocking to many peopleâs understanding of the self, had to draw upon terms taken from ordinary language (âfeelingâ, âsexualityâ, âdreamâ, etc.) in order to be formulated, and psychoanalysts have to use such terms extensively in the same way as the terms are used in everyday language for the theory to be at all meaningful. This is an absolutely fundamental point, and it means that the sciences of the mind and psychology must always have a perspective from âwithinâ human existence â at least in part. There are limits to how far the sciences of the mind can be from recognizable and everyday matters (from what is sometimes referred to as âfolk psychologyâ) before these sciences are no longer about what they intended to be about at the outset. For example, it is perfectly legitimate and necessary to study the importance of the brain for the mind, but if this leads to psychological concepts and explanations from everyday life being replaced by more âscientificâ neurological concepts and explanations, then you quickly end up in a situation where you are no longer talking about something psychological. As we shall see in the next chapter, this is the problem with what is known as âeliminative materialismâ, a philosophical position which, among other things, aims to replace our vocabulary from âfolk psychologyâ with a more âscientificâ vocabulary. The achievement of this aim would mean that, for example, instead of saying âit hurtsâ we should say âmy C-fibres are stimulatedâ. One of the problems with this is the fact that it is not interesting for the person who was hurt that his C-fibres are stimulated as such â rather, what is interesting is that his finger was hit by a hammer and it hurts!
However, terms like âmindâ and âconsciousnessâ are more common in everyday language than âpsycheâ. The latter term is older and virtually synonymous with the term âmindâ and I will use them interchangeably throughout the book. âPsychological stateâ can be translated into âstate of mindâ, and the slightly outdated âsentimentâ translates into âemotionâ, which is a more modern psychological term for what we call feelings in everyday language. The term âconsciousnessâ is a bit different. âConsciousnessâ is probably more widespread in ordinary language than âmindâ (for example in questions such as âis he conscious?â). There is a branch of philosophy that we call âphilosophy of mindâ in English, and this term is often translated into other languages as âphilosophy of consciousnessâ. In Danish it is thus âbevidsthedsfilosofiâ. The philosophy of consciousness has become a major and important area in international philosophy, and there is also great interest in consciousness research within the fields of psychology and neuroscience. But even though the concept of consciousness is closely related to the concept of the mind, it cannot replace it. The most obvious reason is that not all psychological phenomena are conscious, although there may be grounds for considering that they must potentially be conscious in order for us to be able to correctly classify them as psychological. All phenomena of consciousness are psychological, but not all mental phenomena are conscious, which means that the concept of the mind is broader than the concept of consciousness. The human ability to solve complex problems, for example, is an ability that can be said to belong to the mind (and thus rightfully studied by psychology), and this is true regardless of whether problem solving is done consciously or not. Not all forms of problem solving are conscious in the sense of involving experiences of certain qualities (or qualia), and the concept of problem solving is not an experiential concept, but a normative concept in that it is about solving problems correctly. Consciousness is not, however, a normative concept, but an experiential concept; it is about what we experience and what we are aware of. The distinction between the normative and the experiential disciplines of psychology is elaborated in further detail below. For the time being we can say that the term âconsciousnessâ refers specifically to our awareness and our ability to perceive the world, whereas the term âmindâ also refers to all sorts of other ways of being in the world that are not necessarily directly related to perception and experience, but which instead have to do with acting or thinking, for example.
A third term that I have already used, which is related to âmindâ and âconsciousnessâ, is the âmentalâ. One can talk about âthe mental realmâ as akin to âthe mindâ. In principle, this book could have used this term in its title, but it is not as flexible, linguistically speaking, since it does not work very well as a noun (it is reasonable to speak of âthe mindâ, but âmentalityâ doesnât really work all too well). That is why I ended up using the term âmindâ, which has the disadvantage of being somewhat abstract and technical, but which in turn is broad enough to capture what this book is really about.
Like so many other words, the term âmindâ has a predecessor in the ancient Greek in the form of psyche. In Greek mythology, Psyche (from the Greek psukhÄ meaning soul or breath of life) is a goddess who is married to the probably more well-known god of love, Eros. The goddess Psyche personifies the soul and is depicted as a woman with butterfly wings. Psyche and Eros had a daughter together named Hedone, who is the goddess of pleasure. We have an interesting Greek family of gods representing the soul, love and pleasure, and the first-mentioned lent her name to the human mind or psyche. It is thought-provoking that pleasure is an offspring of the soul and love: It is love that gives rise to pleasure and not the other way round. Incidentally, however, Psyche was not born a goddess, but was a princess whose beauty could compare with Aphroditeâs (the goddess of beauty).
For the Greeks, Psyche did not represent the soul in the Christian sense, nor is it equivalent to a modern understanding of the mind as the seat of thoughts and emotions. In Greek thought, such as that of the philosopher Aristotle (384â322 BC), about whom we will hear more below, the psyche is practically a biological concept. The mind is spirit, but first and foremost a biological kind of spirit. The mind is the first principle of living things, so all living things â animals, plants, humans â have psyche in virtue of being alive. The Greek psukhÄ also means respiration, and when you âexpireâ (from Latin meaning to breathe out) literally, you cease to be alive. In Danish we say âudĂ„ndeâ, which literally means that âspiritâ goes âoutâ. According to Aristotle, the human mind distinguishes itself from the minds of other animals and plants in that it is rational. We can think and talk because we can use concepts, and, as rational beings, we can act on the basis of more or less good reasons. We can do this because we are raised, educated and cultivated by our social circumstances; âpolis andra didaskeâ, said the Greeks (âthe city is manâs teacherâ). Since the times of the Greeks, the belief has been that we, as psychological beings, belong to biology (nature) on the one hand, and to society (the city) on the other. This duality is also the focal point of this book. Persons have minds because they result from cultivated nature in âcitiesâ (a broad term here standing for organized social relationships).
Before human beings began investigating the mind scientifically by using various psychological methods, and before we started treating psychological disorders with psychotherapy and psychotropic drugs, other concepts and practices were relevant for what we now regard as the mind. A large portion of these concepts and practices were religious and were associated with what is conceived of as the soul in Christianity. We must be wary here of uncritically thinking that the Greek concept of psukhÄ, the Roman concept of anima and the Christian concept of the soul correspond to what we today call the mind (Danziger, 1997). There have been a number of crucial conceptual transformations in the course of history. A large portion of theories about the mind in modern psychology depend on a basic concept of an âinner worldâ, but this is far from the Greek concept of the mind as a biological principle and from the Christian idea of a substance of the immortal soul.
As the philosopher Charles Taylor has argued, the modern idea of the psychological realm as an inner world of thoughts and feelings is âa function of a historically limited mode of self-interpretation, one which has become dominant in the modern West and which may indeed spread thence to other parts of the globe, but which has a beginning in time and space and may have an endâ (Taylor, 1989, p. 111). Taylor thus relativizes the notion of the psychological realm as an inner world to a specific culture and historical epoch, the beginning of which can be approximately determined as the eighteenth century. Interpreting the psychological realm as an inner, private world is a historically and culturally specific notion, derived from the Christian conception of an immortal soul; this conception, however, also existed prior to Christianity, among certain ancient Greek philosophers, for example. But for Aristotle, the concept of the mind was something altogether different, and therefore it is difficult to believe that the historically changing discourses about âthe psychological realmâ have always been about the same thing. In certain respects there are also similarities among the concepts of the mind that have dominated in different epochs. Both the Christian conception of the soul and the modern conception of the mind, for example, have been involved in governing human life in a similar manner. In medieval society, people were to live their lives in a certain way in order to achieve salvation of the soul and avoid perdition, which was a process that could be controlled by the Christian clergy. In modern society, the goal of existence, according to some psychological self-help literature, has correspondingly been the realization of the psychological self, mediated by listening to and accepting what psychotherapists, coaches and other self-improvement experts have to say. It is not difficult to see structural similarities between the way the soul was involved in the pre-modern governance of human life and the way in which conceptions of the mind shape our lives today (Rose, 1999). For many of us, developing ourselves, our personalities or our minds is not a right but an obligation that is imposed on us in the educational system (when, for example, we have to develop our social and emotional skills) or at work (when we are sent to personal development courses or when we are coached by our managers) (Brink-mann, 2017). In this sense, conceptions of the mind are not only scientific but also political and woven into various societal power relationships, just as the religious conceptions of the soul have always been.
Kurt Danziger, an influential historian of psychology, argues that the modern idea of the psychological realm as a distinct research field with its own subject matter can hardly be said to have existed before the eighteenth century (Danziger, 1997, p. 21). Before that time, its existence was thought of in religious, ethical and medical terms, but not yet in psychological terms. In short, people did not think of themselves as having a mind in the modern sense. But in the eighteenth century, British empiricist philosophers, perhaps especially David Hume (1711â1776), started to regard the mind as a piece of machinery with Newtonâs mechanical physics as a scientific model. When this mechanical psychology was combined with the experimental practices for investigating the life of the soul, which were developed by German physiologists about 100 years later, we had, for the first time in history, isolated the mind in the modern sense, which academic psychology takes for granted today. Some very specific conditions had to be met in order for it to make sense to start regarding the mind as a scientific object, and there are indications that these conditions are in large part linked to the historical processes of individualization. Psychology did not emerge as a science of the individual mind until the individual entered into history as an independent figure and God, tradition and society took the backstage. This is why we also see that psychology historically spread most quickly in relatively individualistic Western cultures, and it is not until much later that more collectivist cultures like Arabic or East Asian societies have developed psychology, which they have often imported from the West despite the fact that they already had well-developed scientific disciplines in other areas. Our conceptions of the mind are always historically and culturally influenced, and sometimes we are not even talking about the same thing, although we may use the same word: the mind.
Two main tracks in the history of ideas about the mind
Even though I think there is reason to caution against reading the Western history of ideas uncritically, as if the changing ideas about the psyche/soul/mind have always been about the same thing, I will tentatively identify the two main tracks in thinking about the human mind that still influence our conceptions today. These main tracks can be called (1) the mind as consciousness and (2) the mind as rationality. The first track focuses on the mind primarily as a mechanism for experiencing the world, while the second track regards the mind as a designation for our ability to think and act rationally. These two tracks are still both very important in current psychological research: the consciousness standpoint underlies much of neuropsychology, where consciousness is often sought to be reduced to something neurological, whereas the rationality standpoint primarily underlies various forms of cultural psychology, and it is a version of this that I shall defend in this book. I should emphasize, however, that the two tracks are not mutually excluding in the sense that the former track denies that people can be rational or that the latter track denies that we experience the world. That is not the point, but it is, rather, to find the foundational principle of the mind in either consciousness or rationality.
The mind as consciousness
Figure 1.1 aims to provide an overview of the historical development of conceptual relationships (inspired by Hacker, 2007, p. 27).
We can trace the consciousness approach to the mind back to the father of Western philosophy, Plato (427â347 BC), because of his argument that a human being consists of a body and a soul, and that it is the soul that essentially is the human; this idea finds particular expression in the dialogue Phaedo. The notion that all human beings carry something immaterial within them, which is what individualizes them (i.e. that which makes the individual who he or she is), was of great importance for the originator of modern philosophy, RenĂ© Descartes, who, in the first half of the seventeenth century, developed his dualistic theory of two essentially different metaphysical substances: the extended substance and the thinking substance (Descartes, 2002). The thinking substance is the human mind, which Descartes understood as consciousness. For Descartes, to think something is to have conscious awareness of something â an idea, as he called it, or a âmental representationâ, as many modern cognitive scientists call it.
Figure 1.1 Conceptions of the human mind
Descartesâ concept of the âideaâ is akin to Platoâs, but whereas Plato saw ideas as referring to the basic cosmic forms that underlie and organize the world and appear to us phenomenally through our sense perception, Descartesâ philosophical revolution consisted in attributing these ideas to manâs inner self. In popular terms, he put the universe into the human mind and believed that the only things that people could ever perceive are the ideas that appear in their consciousness. An important transitional figure in the conceptual history from Plato to Descartes is the Church Father Augustine (354â430). For probably the first time in history, Augustine elaborated the very notion of the inner world that has been so central to modern manâs self-understanding. Descartes could then subsequently assert that the inner world was populated with ideas. Consciousness is understood here as a kind of container in which there are certain objects, ideas or experiences that presumably correspond to phenomena in the outer world. But strictly speaking, we can only assume this â we can never know it â because when the only thing we can recognize is the content of our own consciousness, everything else (the outer world, other peopleâs existence) becomes purely hypothetical, and we do not really have any reason to believe that anything other than the content of our own consciousness should exist. This absurd conclusion is called solipsism â the idea that oneâs own mind (understood as consciousness) is the only thing that exists.
Descartes had ...
