It's not uncommon now (especially where I live in the California Bay Area) for people to feel that there is something wrong with drawing a sharp separation between the mind and the body, rationality and emotion, thinking and feeling. Usually in these discussions the Enlightenment philosopher Descartes gets the blame for this, with his depiction of animals as mindless automata, and of people living in separate bodily / physical and mental / spiritual worlds that interact with each other through some piece of the brain. But some form of these separations has been with us since the earliest recorded speculations of the Greek natural philosophers.
As the ancient natural philosophers tried to make sense of the world around them, there was a constant tension in their thoughts between the ideal or rational and the sensual and direct aspects of our experiences. Some argued that the world was in such constant flux that we could not trust the evidence of our senses to tell us anything lasting about the nature of reality. Others stressed the felt and concrete immediacy of the evidence of our senses, and claimed that to understand reality we would have to learn the order of nature underlying the seemingly chaotic changes.
We in the West have been stuck with these opposing points of view ever since, and I would argue, to the great detriment of our understanding of the role that motivation, emotion, judgment and value play in our ability to interpret and act in the world around us. For, while both ways of thinking have been been with us since the Greeks, it has not been a fair fight since Plato. In an astonishing feat of intellectual prowess, Plato took up the rationalistic fragments of his predecessors and forged them into a worldview that remains the core of mainstream thinking in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science today. Plato resolved the tension between consistency and change or variation in our perception of the "world of sensed things" by positing a parallel world of abstract, "ideal" objects that is the true home of our mental life.
For example, think of the fact that we are easily able to recognize a particular animal as a horse, even though the horses of our experience come in many colors, sizes and temperaments. Plato would say that while our senses may report an ever changing parade of differences between these animals, each individual is just a specific instance of the "ideal" concept of a horse from the world of ideas. Just as our body and senses allow us to see the particular features of an individual horse, our mind -- connected to the generic, conceptual realm of rational representations -- allows us to recognize each horse as an example of the ideal. With this single masterstroke, Plato created the foundation of modern theories of internal representation of knowledge and doomed our raw, immediately sensed experience to an also-ran in the search for our understanding of understanding
itself.
Next up: What's wrong with that?
It's not uncommon now (especially where I live in the California Bay Area) for people to feel that there is something wrong with drawing a sharp separation between the mind and the body, rationality and emotion, thinking and feeling. Usually in these discussions the Enlightenment philosopher Descartes gets the blame for this, with his depiction of animals as mindless automata, and of people living in separate bodily / physical and mental / spiritual worlds that interact with each other through some piece of the brain. But some form of these separations has been with us since the earliest recorded speculations of the Greek natural philosophers.
As the ancient natural philosophers tried to make sense of the world around them, there was a constant tension in their thoughts between the ideal or rational and the sensual and direct aspects of our experiences. Some argued that the world was in such constant flux that we could not trust the evidence of our senses to tell us anything lasting about the nature of reality. Others stressed the felt and concrete immediacy of the evidence of our senses, and claimed that to understand reality we would have to learn the order of nature underlying the seemingly chaotic changes.
We in the West have been stuck with these opposing points of view ever since, and I would argue, to the great detriment of our understanding of the role that motivation, emotion, judgment and value play in our ability to interpret and act in the world around us. For, while both ways of thinking have been been with us since the Greeks, it has not been a fair fight since Plato. In an astonishing feat of intellectual prowess, Plato took up the rationalistic fragments of his predecessors and forged them into a worldview that remains the core of mainstream thinking in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science today. Plato resolved the tension between consistency and change or variation in our perception of the "world of sensed things" by positing a parallel world of abstract, "ideal" objects that is the true home of our mental life.
For example, think of the fact that we are easily able to recognize a particular animal as a horse, even though the horses of our experience come in many colors, sizes and temperaments. Plato would say that while our senses may report an ever changing parade of differences between these animals, each individual is just a specific instance of the "ideal" concept of a horse from the world of ideas. Just as our body and senses allow us to see the particular features of an individual horse, our mind -- connected to the generic, conceptual realm of rational representations -- allows us to recognize each horse as an example of the ideal. With this single masterstroke, Plato created the foundation of modern theories of internal representation of knowledge and doomed our raw, immediately sensed experience to an also-ran in the search for our understanding of understanding itself.
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