PSY:Historical Conceptions of an Enduring Issue

2

Comparing the view of Aristotle and Descartes

Edgar Rangel

Department of Psychology, Grand Canyon University

PSY-810: History and Systems of Psychology

Dr. Stacey Bridges

February 9, 2022

Comparing the view of Aristotle and Descartes

The intention to inquire more about knowledge has led to huge concerns amongst the philosopher while trying to understand the purpose of life. They are also concerned with investigating the connections between the material and the immaterial. Despite numerous arguments that can be made and the words are used to describe the possible aspects of life, it is still impossible for humans to agree or achieve an excellent understanding of life. Nevertheless, while supporting and arguing against the opinions or arguments presented, the focus is to arrive at the potential reasons that math and science cannot offer.

Various philosophers have presented their arguments and made some notable contributions towards understanding the relationship between the soul or mind and the body. The philosophers such as Aristotle have made some contributions to understanding the aspect of the soul and its role in the grand scheme of life. In contrast, Descartes has taken the more metaphysical point of view while discussing the impact of the individual's mind. Descartes believed that the reason exerted control over the brain via a pineal gland.

The gland, in his view, is the primary location where the soul resides and is responsible for the formation of all human ideas. According to his argument using the treatise of man, the approach of the human body is constructed by the gland that is moved in the manner in which the soul or any other cause. According to Descartes, cartesian dualism connects the soul and the body, or substance dualism. Consequently, he believed that the mind was separate from matter and could influence it.

Descartes believed that body and mind/soul are distinct, and this is a thesis that is presently considered mind-body dualism. He concluded by arguing that the nature of the reason that involves thinking, the non-extended thing is different from the body, which he deemed extended and non-thinking. He believed that either the mind/soul or the body could exist independently without the presence of the other. There is no way for the body to feel or think; only the mind feels material.

Descartes's argument resulted in the emergence of the well-known issues of the mind-body causal interaction that is still debated up to date. The primary question asked by Descartes in offering he argued that how it can be possible for the mind to cause some parts of the body limbs to move, for instance, putting a hand up to respond to the question asked. He also aimed to discover how the body's sense organs lead to the sensations within the mind when their nature still shows some significant variations.

Descartes also believed that the mind was non-physical, and it tends to permeate the whole body. Nevertheless, the mind and the body are involved in an interaction process via a pineal gland. In this case, Descartes's argument is categorized as interactionalism. This perspective is based on the idea that the mind and the body are two distinct substances, but each affects the other.

On the other hand, the interpretation of Aristotle’s account concerning the body and soul have been broadly different. Some philosophers, such as Thomas Slakey, believed that Aristotle was trying to expand more on the perception as an event within the sense-organs. Jonathan Barnes considered the work of Aristotle as hesitantly leaning towards the opinion that desire and thoughts are whole non-physical. He, however, felt the emotions and the sense-perception as the intermediate position. Aristotle considers these aspects part of the physical and the non-physical components (Sorabji, 1974). Based on Aristotle’s work, the object produces the changes in the organism, resulting in the changes in the sense organ or the perception.

Aristotle considered the soul or mind as the actuality of a body that has life. In this case, energy refers to individual sustenance, growth, and reproduction. A person who believes that living things are made up of matter and forms, according to him, views the soul to be a natural or organic body. According to Aristotle, the mouths of animals and the roots of plants have specific functions in the organic organism.

Aristotle grouped soul based on hierarchical order with the plants with vegetables or the nutritive soul that possesses the power to grow, nutrition, and reproduce. Animals, on the other hand, consists of the capabilities of perception and locomotion, and this implies that they have a sensitive soul. Humans, according to Aristotle, can think and reason, and he called this "the reasoning spirit." Contrary to Descartes, Aristotle never considered the soul the immaterial interior agent that acts on the body. In his perspective, the soul and the mind were two separate entities. He saw the soul as a collection of abilities with distinct functions and outcomes. The ability to grow is unique from the ability to feel, and the sense of sight is different from the mind of hearing.

Contrasting the nature of Introspection

Introspection concerns the aspect of internal inspection that designates the idea of looking inside. It focuses on the knowledge that the subject can investigate their mental situations. This situation involves the personal observation, analysis, interpretation, and characterization of the individual's own cognitive and emotional processes. Titchener’s structuralist psychological work was based on the utilization of the introspective technique whereby the trained subject exercises the observer’s role and the descriptor of their psychological processing (Giustina, 2021). For their provocation, various categories of stimuli were applied. The stimuli differed based on their tasks and the type of mental content researched.

Titchener used a robust approach when using the introspective technique. Specifically, he rejected the research on unconscious processes that included the constructs like instinct. Therefore, the study was focused on describing conscious psychological experiences. Titchener believed that it is easier to acquire reliable information concerning the nature of the mind by adopting introspection and personal knowledge (Giustina, 2021). He also thought that this was the only approach or the technique that could help in the successful analysis of the mental processing more reliably since he was able to affirm that psychology must be used as a discipline based on introspection.

Comte argued that introspection is retrospection and that humans are unaware of their occurrent states since they have them, but the instant memories of these states. Because these memories do not form part of the stream of consciousness, the impossible splitting in the conscious self is always avoided. Comte also believed that introspection is distorting the first-order mental activity being introspected (Boring, 1953). The distortion part of the argument offered by Comte was considered to be a severe issue for the introspectionists psychologists in the late 19th-century ad early 20th century.

Comte believed that the very notion of the introspection of the interior observation is the basic sophism and pure illusion. It amounts to the man’s supposition of viewing themselves and thinking clearly in absurdity. Comte denied the idea of introspection, and the formulation was done in its infancy, exercising a clear impact on the formative and the subsequent development. The Comte denunciation of psychology applies to some psychology categories characterized by outstanding defects. The defects include the introspective method and the overemphasis of the intellect. While arguing against this type of psychology, Comte insisted that there are only two potential techniques that can be used, i.e., the study of physiology and the brain structure and other organs, and the study of the products of the mind located in the culture and the history of the individuals (Boring, 1953). Comte attempted to utilize both, but he was mainly concerned with studying the products of the minds within the culture and people's history.

Comte concluded that positive techniques tend to be successful for all, especially those who consider a study of the intellectual and the moral functions as inseparably linked with that of other physiological nature and as suitably investigated by adopting the same techniques and similar spirit. Therefore, Comte believed that the metaphysical psychologists were not operating based on the scientific fold. While arguing against the introspective process, Comte believed that man could observe what is external to him, and there are some roles of their organs and the thinking organ (Boring, 1953). He ascertained his argument by stating that humans can even observe themselves based on their passions since distinct cerebral organs exist.

Kant supports the idea that humans have no impression, therefore, lacking the ensuing notion of the empirical self. He supports this idea by stating that practical consciousness accompanying diverse representations is dispersed and not associated with the subject's identity. It implies that when humans introspect in their inner sense, they get specific mental states like boredom, happiness, and particular thoughts (Boring, 1953). Therefore, man lacks any intuition of the subject of the mental situation.

Kant supported the idea of the mines and the togetherness of the individual's introspective mental status, just like the data required to support an explanation. Kant links the synthesis operations to the possession of initial concepts or categories not based on the experience (Boring, 1953). Therefore, while making his argument that the synthesis is needed to illustrate the mines and the togetherness of the individual's mental condition, and through linking the synthesis to the utilization of the categories, Kant stated that humans are unlikely to experience the aspects of the mines and togetherness of their mental condition without necessary using the types.

Kant believed that there is only a single reason for the individual's appreciative knowledge of their psychological states as individuals' own and all conditions linked to each other. Based on those states, a person has spontaneous authority to synthesize the individual's representations according to general principles or rules (Boring, 1953). Since Kant leverages some factors of human ability for personal knowledge in his argument while illustrating the aspect of the legitimacy of the categories, the degree to which he offers his argument ideas for the radical limits on human ability for self-awareness might be surprising.

References

Boring, E. G. (1953). A history of introspection. Psychological Bulletin, 50(3), 169-189. https://doi-org.lopes.idm.oclc.org/10.1037/h0090793

Giustina, A. (2021). Introspective acquaintance: An integration account. European Journal of Philosophy.

Griffiths, P. E. (1996). Darwinism, process structuralism, and natural kinds. Philosophy of Science, 63, S1-S9.

Sorabji, R. (1974). Body and soul in Aristotle. Philosophy, 49(187), 63-89. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3749985