The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition by Sellars John;

Author:Sellars, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Conclusion

In the phrase medicina mentis (“medicine of the mind”) the genitive mentis can have two meanings, one subjective (i.e. the medicine that the mind administers to the passions in order to heal unruly emotions) or objective (i.e. the medicine that is administered to the mind through external means of control). The subjective genitive (mind’s medicine) is implied in the way in which Descartes understood the cure: the mind is inherently healthy and it is the only true treatment. By contrast, the objective genitive (medicine for the mind) is the sense understood by Bacon: the mind is ill (chronically ill, as it were) and needs urgent treatment. As I argued in this chapter, this is in fact a significant difference. Through it we can gauge how Bacon’s ideas on method and emotional therapy were received by some major philosophers of the early modern period. More generally, my principal aim in this chapter was to resituate Bacon within the map of early modern philosophy, including metaphysics and moral philosophy, and against the background of the persistent appeal of Stoic therapies of the mind during that time. Apart from a number of issues concerning method, experimental knowledge and empiricism, Bacon is still not taken seriously as a proper philosopher. This form of historiographic snobbery is evident when one looks at the way in which the evolution of modern thinking is still presented in general surveys of early modern philosophy. And yet in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781), Kant wrote that the Copernican revolution of the mind had begun with Bacon and his Novum organum. Obviously something must have got lost in the later reception of Bacon’s philosophy. The main reason behind this fall into historiographic oblivion lies in the fact that the mathematical meaning of method prevailed over the medical one, and models of disembodied rationalism obfuscated the role played in knowledge by all sorts of material constraints. As a result, the medical import in Descartes’s and Spinoza’s methods for healing the mind turned back to the status of metaphorical sense originally championed by the Stoic thinkers. While for Bacon the medicine of the mind was a pivotal section in his systematic account of moral philosophy, Descartes placed that very medicine as the starting point of the philosophical exercise in the form of, first, a skeptical remedy and, then, logical training. In the hands of Descartes and then Spinoza, Bacon’s medicine of the mind turned into disembodied mathesis.

This evolution is particularly evident in the Medicina mentis (Medicine of the mind, 1687) by Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1651–1708), an interesting example of cross-pollination between Bacon’s and Spinoza’s medicines of the mind. While Bacon, in order to help the mind amend its structural defects and individual limits, had placed his hopes in the progress of technology seen as a spontaneous outgrowth of nature’s own ingenuity, Tschirnhaus turned to mathematics as the best “medicine” against self-delusion. In line with Descartes and Spinoza, and following the example of mathematics (algebra in particular)

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