Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind

by George Makari

Overview

A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind.

Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine, but fully neither.

In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian George Makari shows how writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing, but a natural one. From the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon, seminal thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, and Kant worked alongside often-forgotten brain specialists, physiologists, and alienists in the hopes of mapping the inner world. Conducted in a cauldron of political turmoil, these frequently shocking, always embattled efforts would give rise to psychiatry, mind sciences such as phrenology, and radically new visions of the self. Further, they would be crucial to the establishment of secular ethics and political liberalism. Boldly original, wide-ranging, and brilliantly synthetic, Soul Machine gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western mind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393353464
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/29/2016
Pages:	672
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

George Makari is a psychiatrist, historian, and author most recently of Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind. Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, he lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Prologue xi

Part I The Lost Souls of Modernity

Chapter 1 A Soirée with Mr. Spirit and Mr. Flesh 3

Chapter 2 Science and the Thing That Thinks 42

Chapter 3 Witches, Melancholies, and Fanatics 65

Chapter 4 A Crisis of Conscience 86

Part II The English Mind

Chapter 5 "Myself in a Storm" 103

Chapter 6 The Sagacious Locke 127

Chapter 7 Bedlam in Britannia 150

Chapter 8 Sympathy, Idea, Nerve 166

Chapter 9 The Cure of a Lunatic King 188

Part III From French Esprit to Alienation

Chapter 10 The French Sensationalists 211

Chapter 11 Vitalism, the Missing Link 239

Chapter 12 Honest Jean-Jacques and the Morals of Sensibility 267

Chapter 13 Dr. Mesmer's Invisible Fire 298

Chapter 14 Journey to the End of Reason 329

Chapter 15 Citizens and Alienists 354

Part IV The Serpent That Ate Its Tail

Chapter 16 Kant and the Age of Self-Criticism 397

Chapter 17 Rhapsodies for Psyche 425

Chapter 18 The Promise of Phrenology 450

Chapter 19 The Mind Eclipsed 475

Epilogue 503

Notes 513

Acknowledgments 599

Illustration Credits 601

Index 605

Editorial Reviews

"An erudite exploration of the high-stakes struggle to make space in the modern world for that part of our being we call our minds."

Anne Harrington

"George Makari has written an all-encompassing and invigorated account of how we have come to think about the acts of thinking and feeling. This is a book brimming with knowledge and lucid observations, one that helps us to understand the evolution of our contemporary sensibility."

Daphne Merkin

"In this sweeping, authoritative, and lively account, George Makari chronicles the emergence of the modern mind as an appealing yet unstable object of scientific inquiry, and shows why the long-standing goal of establishing boundaries between it and the brain and even the soul has proven so elusive. Illuminating and highly engaging."

Elizabeth Lunbeck

08/17/2015
Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Makari (Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Pychoanalysis) performs an extended excavation of the mind, an entity that has repeatedly resisted significant unearthing, in this grand study. As Makari shows, the very idea of the mind is also relatively modern. In an account that spans 155 years, from 1660 to 1815, Makari examines the disparate disciplines of medicine, religion, philosophy, and politics, uniting them in a vivid pursuit of the mind, while also highlighting the many individual minds that contributed to each discovery. Over the course of this long narrative, two distinct concepts of the mind—as soul and as machine—repeatedly diverge and are then reconciled, so that the history of the mind emerges not as a linear narrative but rather a series of ruptures. Makari might alienate some readers with the sheer volume of information produced by this thorough approach, yet he conveys that information with flair, humanizing the great thinkers of the past with the vibrant detail of characters in a novel. For all its length, this history of the elusive concept that defines human identity is consistently, startlingly immediate. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, the Wylie Agency. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Remarkably vivid. . . . It is still true that nothing less than the meaning of life depends on how we think of minds, souls, persons, and selves. Makari’s book is a fine reminder of a contested space and a contested debate that we continue to inhabit after all these many years."

Los Angeles Review of Books

"An electrifying narrative of the intellectual disputes that gave rise to the Western conception of the mind . . . highly engaging."

Economist

"In the replacement of the ancient doctrine of the soul with the secular conception of the mind, Makari discerns an epoch-making shift . . . an impressively multifaceted narrative."

Booklist (starred review)

"The remarkable achievement of George Makari’s Soul Machine is to show how differently . . . many of the ideas we take for granted about our own minds are relatively recent in origin. . . . This book succeeds where few others have."

American Scholar

"An enlightening and gracefully written account of a vital aspect of our history that few of us are aware of—the replacement of the soul by the mind, and the struggle to understand its foundations in the brain."

Steven Pinker

"Fascinating . . . masterful intellectual history."

Daily Beast

"George Makari’s extraordinary Soul Machine is the urgent narrative of an idea. Firmly grounded in the bloody politics and intellectual battles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this lucid, brilliant book tells the complex, exciting, and passionate story of something that continues to baffle us: the human mind."

Siri Hustvedt

"Brilliant, compendious . . . Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind is essential reading. The story he tells so engagingly is of a vast, polyphonic argument about what it is to be a human being."

Wall Street Journal

"An electrifying narrative of the intellectual disputes that gave rise to the Western conception of the mind . . . highly engaging."

Economist

★ 08/01/2015
Makari (psychiatry & director, DeWitt Wallace Inst. for the History of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical Coll., Cornell Univ.; Revolution in Mind) explores and defends the concept of mind, an idea that evolved through millennia. Competing with the traditional soul, which "provided believers with universal dignity, repose before a bewildering, brutal world, and consolation in the face of death," the mind concept arose in 1660, then quieted somewhat in mid-19th century before a new and still active eruption of debate. "The mind was a radically destabilizing, heretical idea that grew out of intense, often violent, conflict." Among, and often against, scholars were prophets, doctors, "political spies, bitter refugees, witches, quacks, and pornographers." Makari is a fine writer who is fascinated by France, which is central to this tale of woe and wisdom. He begins with Thomas Hobbes in 1660 and ends before 1900 and Sigmund Freud. Major figures include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Franz Mesmer, Philippe Pinel, Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Madame de Stael. VERDICT This in-depth survey of history, psychology, and philosophy doesn't presume but provides insight and expertise to general readers as well as scholars. It doesn't mention but nicely complements Otto Rank's Psychology and the Soul.—E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC

Library Journal

2015-06-04
Throughout Western history, the nature of humans' inner lives has vexed philosophers, physicians, scientists, and theologians. Makari (Psychiatry/Weill Cornell Medical Coll.; Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, 2008) offers a thorough examination of debates about soul, spirit, and what we now call "mind." The author primarily focuses on 17th- through mid-19th-century British and European thinkers. Is mind, he asks, "a necessary theory, a physical thing, a language game, or a deep-seated prejudice?" Language itself has caused myriad problems. The French, for example, were at a loss to translate John Locke's choice of words—and invention of neologisms—to represent inner life: "consciousness" and "self-consciousness" were not rendered clearly by terms such as la conscience (implying ethical awareness) and esprit, which signified spirit or soul. Besides Locke, Makari examines major theorists such as Newton, Descartes, Diderot, Voltaire, Hobbes, Bacon, Hegel, and Schelling. While these names may be familiar to readers with a background in intellectual history or philosophy, less familiar figures from Makari's large cast of characters unfortunately emerge less as fully delineated personalities than as purveyors of abstract ideas. The author creates a lively narrative about Franz Anton Mesmer, the eccentric, egotistical perpetrator of animal magnetism, who captivated many in pre-revolutionary Paris and repelled others who feared that he conceived men as "magnetic machines with no will and therefore no capacity for self-governance or self-knowledge." Political and social change, the author argues, were intrinsically connected to the acceptance or rejection of various thinkers. "When the French Revolution drove out the Church and the protectors of the soul," he writes, "a fully formed secular, modern lineage of the mind was waiting, ready to emerge." Despite advances in neurophysiology and research into mental illness, Makari maintains that we still think of dualities when it comes to mind ("the mind-body problem, the Nature/Nurture problem, free will versus determinism"), a view that many readers will share. An erudite book that reveals how and why the understanding of consciousness still eludes us.

Kirkus Reviews