Pre-Cartesian Mediterranean thought conceived personhood as possessing reason, not a representing mind

Evidence

Native scholars in the country Lyautey was seeking to colonise did not share this conception of human personhood. They did not conceive of the person as possessing a mind in this sense – that strange myth of a separate, non-spatial entity within which occur the ‘mental processes’ of representation. They shared with other Muslim scholars what used to be the common scholarly conception of personhood throughout the Mediterranean world, going back to Aristotle. They conceived of the person as possessing reason, a power or faculty. Reason was the power of grasping universals amid particulars, the unchanging sameness amid differences. It was one among numerous human faculties, albeit the most important since it was the mark or resemblance within human beings connecting them with the universal and the unchanging. For Muslim scholars, knowledge was a question of increasing this power of reason, deepening the grasp of universals. For Descartes, on the other hand, knowledge became the quest for certainty, understood as the correct modelling of an ‘external reality’ in the internal exhibit of the mind. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 548

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Cartesian-vs-Aristotelian epistemology contrast in prior chapters on representation, and to scholarship on the colonial imposition of Western personhood. — connects to: Descartes’ indubitable ‘I’ redirected philosophy inward toward certainty of the self.; Kierkegaard inverted Descartes so that existence precedes thought — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 59; the MOC “The Forge and the Other: How Power, Discourse, and Encounter Cast the Self”
• DEFINE: Clarifies what a pre-Cartesian, faculty-based conception of reason and personhood meant, in contrast to mind-as-representation.