Descartes and the Problem of Dualism
Forward
I decided to look at Descartes and his philosophy from the viewpoint of my understanding of Philosophy of Freedom. Particular mention of Descartes can be found in Ch.3.
René Descartes arrived at the point of discovering and establishing his existence through thinking, and left us with the problem of dualism…
René Descartes (1596 – 1650), considered to be the founder of modern philosophy, uncovered and established his existence through thinking, and went on to leave us with the enigma of dualism to solve, something which philosophers have been wrestling with ever since, right up to present day thinking arising from the relatively recent neuroscientific discoveries about the brain.
The inner quest which René Descartes set himself was to remove all that he knew, all the knowledge he had accumulated, and which he could demonstrate to himself could be doubted - for instance, he could ‘know’ something which was unverifiable inherited belief, or something he could have been tricked into believing – and see if there was anything left that he could be certain of.
The Archimedean Point
At the beginning of his quest, Descartes was already thinking, and so he was already, as he would later discover, existing. However, after his thinking-meditation process, he discovered or uncovered the fact that he existed, and he knew he existed directly, with absolute certainty - it was his direct experience, and he established his own self-standing existence. It is like the difference between hearing about someone and meeting someone. He brought his existence into full, clear, reality in the world of human thinking consciousness, beyond all doubt, against any test of doubt, for even if a wicked spirit tricked him into believing he was thinking, then Descartes could not deny that he must exist in order to be tricked, and that as someone who was being tricked into having the experience of thinking, he would be thinking he was thinking.
When Descartes touched the certainty of his existence as a thinking being, the problem of dualism in him became visible to him; he found, without a doubt, that he existed as a thinking being, facing a ‘world’ of observable things. A kind of split occurred, two ‘things’ became visible, two things were thought into existence, his ‘I am a thinking being’ and the ‘world’ of everything around and beyond his identity as ‘I am a thinking being’. Descartes discovered that this dualism took place in the essence and reality of his mind-body nature as a human being, within his mind-body consciousness and way of being. In this way he became a ‘dualist’. He realised his ‘body’ was part of the ‘outer world’ of matter,’ of observable things, whereas his inner thinking being was not. He was a world-nonworld being. He observed that the human mind was utterly different from the human body, the two things were quite distinct. As he framed it, mind is a thinking, non-extended thing and body a non-thinking extended thing, they did not overlap, they seemed to exist independently of one another. He identified a grand seemingly incompatible polarity right in the heart and essence of his own being as a human. If the mind is separate and does not overlap with the body, how could our non-material, ‘spiritual’ mind cause our body to move, and equally, how can anything from the material body connect with or enter the spiritual realm of our minds? He created a puzzle, what is called nowadays thet mind-body problem, for the future thinkers of humanity to solve. It is important to remember that this puzzle is situated within our consciousness, it is ‘our’ duality of ‘I-thinker facing the world’, of our mind-body incarnation, of our dual experience – and not an issue to be solved ‘out there’ in the world of ‘not-I’.
Carl Jung and the Self
Carl Jung described the meeting of our everyday earthly ‘self’ with a greater, true ‘Self’, and described this meeting as ‘numinous’, inspiring spiritual awe, and a ‘mysterium tremendum’ a ‘terrible mystery’. He wrote ‘The experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego’, a defeat for our earthly ego and sense of selfhood. Jungian Edward F. Edinger writes of something which can be experienced, at least by those willing to try, a ‘centre’ to our being,
“The discovery of this centre, which Jung called the Self, is like the discovery of an extra-terrestrial intelligence. Each of us is no longer alone in the psyche and in the cosmos…at first, the encounter with the Self is indeed a defeat for the ego, but with perseverance, Deo volente (God being willing), a light is born from the darkness. One meets the ‘Immortal One’ who wounds and heals, who casts down and raises up, who makes small and makes Large, in a word, the One who makes one whole.
He writes further of the Self as an ‘unseen Partner’, and that the outer experiences of our lives and our inner consciousness experience can be seen and taken by us as ‘messages’ from this partner. The word ‘Partner’ comes from the Latin partire, to part, to divide, and has come to mean division and sharing, and from 1749, it came to describe a partnership as in a marriage, a close relationship of mutual support and love. This ‘Self’ is often called the Higher Self in modern spiritual literature. It remains a theory for those who do not search to experience it, or do not yet manage to experience it. Under this view the ‘lower’ or ‘earthly self’ is freely invited to work towards its Higher Self, which is in turn part of a universal Selfhood. For our current selves, as human beings on earth, we can strive to become more truly who we are, and work towards who we can become, connected with a greater aspect of ourselves in a loving and supportive relationship. We can work on ourselves and search for and prepare for this meeting, to strive to contact and get into partnership with our Higher Self, and ultimately, to build up such a state or being of understanding that the Higher Self can be ‘born’ into this understanding within us, ‘born’ in us, as a light in the darkness of our ordinary consciousness.
Descartes touched a firm base - and at the same time a dualism…
We do not know whether Descartes’ had a ‘numinous’ experience of encounter with his Self, however, he did touch a firm base, and we can repeat his thought experiment in our own thinking laboratory. If we study Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter 3 we can find and walk stepping stones of certainty which emerge from doubt, which lead us towards the founding of ourselves as thinking beings. Descartes established the fact of his existing self, and once he had established for himself his existence as a self, there was a problem to solve about the nature of this earthly self, a problem of duality. There were now two things, the world, and ‘I myself’. As an earthly self, I am operating in a physical body, interacting with what we call a physical world, yet in my thinking self, my mental aspect (sometimes called ‘spiritual’) this activity and its fruits do not appear from outside me, from the ‘world’ as I observe it, a concept for example cannot be found or sensed directly in the material world. Thinking some way requires me to be ‘doing’ it, actively. The world appears as though ‘given’ to me, I don’t create it or make objects appear or events unfold, but I do think about the world as I observe it. How do these two parts of ourselves live together? How can the conscious thinking, which is non-material, communicate with or in any way influence unresponsive matter which, as we know, can only be affected or moved by something material, following material laws? Seen from the material side, how can something ‘spiritual’ be found ‘in’ matter, and how can it in any way influence the matter down here in the material world, or be communicated with, or be physically relevant in any way, as its existence can ever be experienced or verified scientifically in the material world?
The problem of dualism
This issue has come to be called ‘the problem of dualism’. It is in essence this relationship problem in the heart of our human nature, this ‘dualism’ that Descartes pointed out to us, this maddening incompatible polarity, which has vexed human thinkers ever since. Chapter 1 opens with a question that each of us can ask ourselves, which goes something like this:
Is a human being free in thought and action?
…or compelled by the iron necessity of purely natural law?
Can I make up my own mind and act accordingly, as a spiritually free agent, or does the physical aspect of my nature mean that physical natural laws which govern the world also govern me? If we think this through thoroughly, we will see it appears as a dualism, an incompatible polarity, one which we are invited to investigate thoroughly, work through and solve for ourselves with the guidance of Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom.
The modern rejection of dualism
Today, most modern thinkers and scientists are united in rejecting dualism as a valid or meaningful point of view for explaining ourselves or what is ‘out there’, because of dualism's unsolvable ‘problem’. Neuroscientists of all kinds from their studies of the brain and with the rejection of dualism, are increasingly drawn to this position on human consciousness: that it is ‘in reality’ an emergent phenomenon of the brain, even if we haven’t yet understood how. This is the new starting point for them, asking and hoping to answer the 'hard question' of how the brain produces consciousness, in the hope that one day it will be resolved in the light of new classical scientific evidence and understanding.
From dualism to monism
Most modern scientists and thinkers, especially those concerned with human consciousness, opt instead for a monism of one kind or another (sometimes called ‘non-dualism) the belief that there is only one ‘thing’, that mind and body for example, are one and the same thing, that they can be explained by one type of ‘stuff’. In the article 'Exploration of two monists' I take a closer look at two people who promote a monist view of our inner consciousness and the observed world, one materialist, and one spiritualist.