Return of the Repressed: Spinozan Ideas in the History of the Mind and Brain Sciences

Abstract

Spinoza’s account of the nature of the human mind, though marginalized by his contemporaries because of its religious and political implications, has persisted—remaining in print since 1677—as an intermittently surfacing undercurrent in the subsequent history of Western thought about the mind and brain. Sharing in the mechanistic assumptions of natural philosophers like René Descartes and Thomas Willis, Spinoza rejected the dominant reductionism by insisting that integrated systems could not be accounted for as a sum of their parts but that the structure and behavior of the parts themselves could only be understood in terms of the larger whole. Though a rationalist, in an insight that anticipated and influenced David Hume, he insisted that human reason was subordinate to the affects. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, Spinoza’s work was to be “rehabilitated” by the German Romanticists and, through them, introduced into the debates of the early researchers into neuro-physiology. Something very close to his holism surfaces in the more systematic conceptions of later thinkers like Charles Sherrington and John Hughlings Jackson. In the mid-twentieth century Antonio Damasio reintroduced an avowedly Spinozan conception of the mind as the image of the body; other, more recent, researchers have developed ideas which, while not explicitly Spinozan, model mind and brain activity in ways that resonate strongly with Spinoza’s ideas about “top-down” causality in which the structure and behavior of the parts are influenced by those of the whole.

We know ourselves to be part of the totality of nature.

—Spinoza, Ethics 4apdx32