Some Thoughts on the Modern Mind

I would like to know what can be said of the present state and prospects of “the modern mind.” One of course hears that the modern mind has been displaced by the postmodern mind. I am not alone in finding this claim dubious. It presupposes that the modern era is over—its tasks having been either accomplished or discredited.¹ I believe that we can recognize the present of the modern mind—and what it might take to surpass it—only by first recalling the beginning of the modern era and asking who and what established its characteristic trajectory, its premises and tasks. It will then be necessary to ask whether the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche anticipates the termination of the modern era. But it will also be necessary to consider certain contributions of four twentieth-century philosophers to the characterization of the modern mind. For reasons that I will have to make clear, I will devote most of my time to the least well known of the four, the American philosopher John William Miller.

From Descartes to Nietzsche

René Descartes (1596–1650) is credited with the primary philosophical formulation of the nature of the modern mind, its premises and projects. These premises and projects are implicit in and can be unpacked from its alleged absolute beginning, the cogito, ergo sum. The res cogitans is defined by its acts, which are specifically and solely acts of thought. It is a res only in a minimal sense; it is not a material entity (res extensa) but a relation to entities. It must make itself be: In a basic sense, its being is but a becoming, and that becoming is made apparent in acts of self-determination, that is, free acts, its own projections or directions. In modern philosophy, acts will be central.

As a beginner, this mind must posit its own ends; it can be a follower only by choosing to be a follower. Descartes evidently sees the cogito’s inherent independence in the critical thinking of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo—launching a trajectory that challenges the authority of deeply imbedded tradition in favor of novel projections, hypotheses, and possibilities. Accordingly, Descartes envisages an emerging program, an era of a new science. This is the modern mind in formation, in project, and in prospect. For Descartes, its openness to the future, or independence, cannot be accomplished by selective criticism but only by general dismissal of its inheritance from the past. Descartes signals this by his wholesale rejection of the thought of Aristotle, the primary seat of the old science. Real science is to be mathesis universalis, and only that.

The natural world is decisively, and without remainder, redefined as consisting solely of the extension and motion of elementary particles that mathematics is capable of describing. Descartes asserted, “Give me extension and motion, and I will construct the universe.” Nature—including the human body—is nothing but the mechanical motion of elementary particles. Biology is effectively reduced to physics, and it is only with Charles Darwin, a full two centuries hence, that biology will be fully and decisively reinstated. In the meantime, the world of ordinary direct experience, in which all human beings, Descartes included, must live, is out of account: It is solely phenomenal, reduced to appearance—that is, it is not authorized by the new science. Hence reality is the exclusive domain of the mathematical physicist, and the validity of ordinary experience will not be altogether restored until the twentieth century.

For Descartes the sole exception to the material order is the independent subject, which is to become the modern mind, whose domain is to be its bodily machine and the mechanics of nature at large. What Descartes signals is “the era of subjectivity.”² The rise of the new science has the effect of expelling the mind from nature, setting it as subject over against the newly conceived order of nature, nature regarded as object, correlate of the subject, requiring objectivity. Descartes then envisages a stringent mundane progression from a less perfect to a more perfect subject–object relation, which is to have the...