Hoefer, Bernadette (Author)
Seventeenth-century Europe is characterized by reference to a heated philosophical debate between Descartes and Spinoza concerning the mind/body dichotomy. While the Cartesian cogito has long succeeded in insisting on the primacy of the mind, Spinoza's ideas on this pressing matter have been assuredly excluded from the dominant societal discourse. It is only now with recent discoveries in the neurobiological field that this Dutch thinker is praised for having been among the first modern intellectuals to conceive of the human being in its _union_ of body and mind, and in a way that markedly anticipates modern medical views. The longstanding dismissal of Spinoza is especially grating in that various significant French writers of the seventeenth century illustrate in their works a monism close to the one encountered in Spinoza's writing and reveal to what extent Descartes' thesis was under severe attack, among them Jean-Joseph Surin, Moli&e`re, Racine, and Lafayette, who proclaim an alternate view of the human experience through their depiction of illness that today we classify as 'psychosomatic', stressing the interdependence, rather than the bifurcation of body and mind. These authors reveal, by means of a variety of genres (autobiographical narration, drama, and novel/novella) and of diverse manifestations of illness (melancholia, hysteria, possession, depression, or hypochondria), that mind and body form one substance with two modes. Hence, seventeenth-century France is crucial in the establishment of a view of human existence that anticipates contemporary neurobiological and psychological discoveries concerning psychosomatic illness. Furthermore, the frustration conveyed through crises of bodily illness reflect clandestine, indeed repressed challenges to the monarchies of Louis XIII and Louis XIV and constitutes a subversive source of criticism to the 'body politic' promulgated by Absolutism, which 'desensitizes' the soma, exteriorizes and subordinates it to the control of rational (masculine) forces. As an attempt of philosophical, political, and cultural subversion, these authors establish through illness a primary self-fashioning that emanates from bodily manifestations, the body expressing _initially and transparently_ the repression of an entire society of psychosomatic distress, thereby foreshadowing the union between body and mind as understood in the twenty-first century by medical science dealing with somatoform disorders.
...MoreDescription Focus on the influence of Spinoza's ideas in France. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66/11 (2006): 4041. UMI pub. no. 3195689.
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