ABSTRACT
In a sense, the full force of the mind-body dichotomy would not be felt for so long as Christian theology retained its influence within Western thought. In Descartes’ conceptual framework, mind and body were ultimately united by God, as they formed complementary aspects of creation. Similarly, Locke held that thought and matter were conceptually distinct, but that God was capable of adding a mind to a material thing in order to produce a unified rational creature (Cottingham 1988: 123). It was only when the Enlightenment established a secular version of the new philosophy that the cognitive and the physical came to be understood as utterly irreconcilable (Cassirer 1951: 97). In this view, the mind is not the same kind of substance as the physical world, but is composed of thought itself (Olafson 1995: 7). Irrespective of whether the mind had any innate content, or whether it was simply a ‘blank slate’ that could be filled by experience, it had come to be seen as transcendental, existing prior to its insertion into the material and social world. For if mind and body are separate, then the ability to think rationally is anterior to one’s having any physical world to think about. One consequence of this formulation was that language began to be understood in a very particular way. This involved the transformation of the ideas inside human heads into utterances or inscriptions in the external world, before they could be internalised by another mind. This gives language a somewhat ambivalent character, composed of encapsulated ideas in communicative form which are distinct from any material thing that they might represent or discuss.
