In a recent post New Forms of Human Mind and New Forms of Human Civilization, I discussed the Thomistic teaching that the human mind shapes itself in active responses to its environments in the context of cultural transitions.
Recently, I was reading Political Theory & Modernity by William E. Connolly and his discussion of Nietzsche brought me to a slightly different way of putting the problem.
Professor Connolly tells us that Nietzsche realized that the Enlightenment vision of completing understanding and control of nature wouldn’t work if our environments and the entire universe have characteristics or entire entities that don’t fit into the human mind. What exists and what works can’t necessarily be rationally broken down to the pre-existing categories of a pre-existing mind which works according to abstract forms of thought and some abstract knowledge which…comes from somewhere by some magical process.
Nietzsche was right. That is, he was right if mind is what Enlightenment thinkers, and many other modern and premodern thinkers imagined mind to be, an ethereal entity of some sort. There is no a priori reason to think concrete stuff will fit into the slots available in such a mind. St. Thomas Aquinas actually falsely taught we do have such an ethereal mind to handle our abstract reasoning but his mind was plastic and shaped itself to its environments by way of active responses.
I say: what works works. This insight leads not to some grayish, mechanical utilitarianism but rather to the realization that what exists is, and has to be, the embodiment of truths. Things are true. I go on to claim that truths are thing-like and suddenly we are in an entirely different realm of thought. In Christians terms, what exists is the manifestation of some thoughts of God and we can shape our minds to be embodiments of the very thoughts which God manifested in Creation. I make this claim along with St. Thomas Aquinas (properly updated) and along with some modern brain-scientists. See What is Mind?: Is Christian Morality a Natural Morality? and What is Mind?: Pragmatism and Thomistic Existentialism for discussion of my way of viewing the processes of shaping a human mind and also the view of the neuroscientist Walter J. Freeman.