Vanity and Estrangement: The Existential Consequences of Physicalizing the Senses

The seventeenth-century application of the new natural philosophy to humans transformed sensation into a blind causal process, devoid of inherent meaning. The estrangement between humans and world implied by this change was unacceptable to attentive thinkers of the time, just as the rejection of the traditional, meaningful objects of the senses (species, substantial forms, etc.) was irreversible. Thomas White, a Catholic theologian, avoided the estrangement by demanding that both mind and world comprise the same matter-in-motion ontology. His ally Kenelm Digby reinstated an authentic communication between objects and senses by introducing a material, quasi-Epicurean analysis, which Walter Charleton later embraced. White and his rival Joseph Glanvill, an apologist for the Royal Society, considered Descartes' concept of the soul as another attempt to bridge this gap between humans and the world. This article reconstructs the exciting arena in which these ideas were debated, ideas that conventional historiographical categories fail to capture. Abstract: The seventeenth-century application of the new natural philosophy to humans transformed sensation into a blind causal process, devoid of inherent meaning. The estrangement between humans and world implied by this change was unacceptable to attentive thinkers of the time, just as the rejection of the traditional, meaningful objects of the senses (species, substantial forms, etc.) was irreversible. Thomas White, a Catholic theologian, avoided the estrangement by demanding that both mind and world comprise the same matter-in-motion ontology. His ally Kenelm Digby reinstated an authentic communication between objects and senses by introducing a material, quasi-Epicurean analysis, which Walter Charleton later embraced. White and his rival Joseph Glanvill, an apologist for the Royal Society, considered Descartes' concept of the soul as another attempt to bridge this gap between humans and the world. This paper reconstructs the exciting arena in which these ideas were debated, and which conventional historiographical categories fail to capture.