Reason and emotion in the early Enlightenment

"Deliberations about moral action still tend to be connected, however subtly, to the Cartesian notion of a self split between steady, supervising reason - imbued with knowledge of what constitutes right action - and fluctuating passion - itself ‘right’ insofar as a beautiful object, say, might ‘rightly’ trigger the desire to possess it. But this Platonic, divided self is not as clear-cut in its duality as stereotypical notions of the rationalist, post-Cartesian, Enlightenment era would have it.

Hadrian's stylus

Let us start off with two claims: a) despite the indubitable dependence of the mind on the brain, attempts to account for higher consciousness in physical terms seem to be locked within a hall of mirrors; b) even if this state of affairs is indeed illusory, the fact that the illusion holds indicates that its cause cannot go away. Some philosophers have found good reason to disagree with these claims. Nevertheless, this is not the place to unpack their conceptual content, nor to explain how they fit together, and for the sake of what follows I ask you to take them as given

Humoural Bodies and Balanced Minds

Humoural theory provides a historical continuity to the definitions of mind and mental illness. Where do we stand today on this continuum, equipped as we are with modern tools to complete the naturalist picture of the mind? Mind and body used to be interconnected. Where does the body stand now that the brain is the mind? To answer such questions, we can look back not only into our history, but also out towards Indian metaphysics of mind, which overlap in surprising ways with the Greek classical heritage. Noga Arikha is a historian of ideas, particularly interested in the relation between mind and body, and in tracing the genealogy of the concepts that pertain to it. Though she began her studies by focusing on early modern Europe, her interests encompass a wide range of periods and cultures, and her work straddles a multiplicity of disciplines, from philosophy, the cognitive and mind sciences, and anthropology, to the histories of science, psychology, medicine, art, and food. She endeavours to bridge the divide between the ‘two cultures’ &#8211; the sciences and the humanities &#8211; and to bring to a general audience accessible accounts that analyses the origins of our deepest concerns about our embodied selves. She is the author of Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (Ecco, Harper) and more recently with Marcello Simonetta of Napoleon and the Rebel: A story of Brotherhood, Passion and Power on the relationship between Napoleon and his beloved brother Lucien (June 2011, Palgrave McMillan).Noga Arikha, ‘Humoural Bodies and Balanced Minds’, lecture presented at the conference Situating Mental Illness: Between Scientific Certainty and Personal Narrative, ICI Berlin, 29 April 2011, part 1, video recording, mp4, 26:17 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e110429-1