Distinctions in Dualism

(i.e., Eastern and Western perspectives on Descartes)

The “modern” era of Western philosophy is often demarcated by the writings of a single man: René Descartes. After my cursory readings of Plato and Aristotle, I was eager to see how the paradigms of inquiry had evolved, 2000 some years later. (Clearly the intervening millennia cannot be simply skipped over; there’s a complex progression of theology that intertwines with philosophy, which I’m looking forward to eventually digging into.) Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, was firm in his admiration of Descartes - even as he needled the perceived shortcomings in the Frenchman’s methodology. By all accounts, he was a disciplined and virtuous man, who brought the same rigor to the realm of philosophy that he did to the traditional sciences.

Descartes was born in France at the turn of the 17th century. His talents were apparent early on, as he pursued a wide-ranging Jesuit education - covering physics, mathematics, Catholic canon, civil law, among other subjects. At the time, the pervasive system of philosophy throughout Western Europe was Scholasticism, the theistic tradition that was forged by Church luminaries like St. Ambrose and St. Thomas Aquinas. Scholasticism (which merits its own exploration) fused Aristotelian inquiry with Catholic theology - employing discursive methods to produce definitions and distinctions that were instrumental to the development of Church doctrine. While Descartes is often credited with breaking the hegemony of Scholasticism, he was a deeply pious man who, throughout his life, seemed unshakably focused on reconciling God’s nature with the realm of rational inquiry.

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes has little patience for the ambiguous claims and shaky epistemology of his predecessors. His overarching goal is to apply rational precision to metaphysics, and distill a set of universal axioms that can withstand logical scrutiny. By this point in his life, Descartes had achieved noteworthy progress in geometry and optics; why treat philosophy with less rigor?

Over the course of six concise meditations, he arrives at a set of claims about the nature of God, and the connection between the human mind and body, which continue to stir deliberation to this day. There has been a rich history of critique and counter-proposal to Descartes’s Meditations, in the Western philosophical progression. In my view, based on recent explorations of the Samkhya and Yoga schools, there’s also a worthwhile comparison to be made with Indian metaphysics.

The Light of Reason

Descartes begins the first meditation with a clear identification of what can be called into doubt. Namely, in a break with the Aristotelian foundations of Scholasticism, he is categorically skeptical of any knowledge gathered through the senses. In what’s become known as the Dream Argument, Descartes explores whether or not true reality can ever be distinguished from a gripping dream - given how viscerally real our deepest dreams can seem. We conventionally accept dreams as not being “real”; but, then, on what differential basis do we accept our supposedly-waking lives to be real? He references the notion of the deceiving Demiurge, an evil analogue to God, that could be feeding us misinformation through our senses - rendering our waking lives as much an illusion as our dreams. The meditation concludes with Descartes admitting that, from the perspective of pure physicality, there is nothing truly defensible about our sense-fed perceptions of the world.

The second meditation has Descartes plunging deeper into the depths of his perception, in search of a bedrock truth. As he explores the nature of mental processes and the discrepancy between our inner representations of things and what could actually “exist” in the physical world, he begins to sketch a clear delineation between the mental and physical realms. While the physical world is mediated by our senses, and thus prone to potentially endless deception - there still seems to be something at the root of our mental activity, no matter how many layers we peel away; something that thinks and probes. This perennial thinking does not seem reducible, or deniable; and it leads him to distill the most famous axiom in Western philosophy:

Cogito, Ergo Sum (I think, therefore I am)

Descartes continues on, asserting that even if there is a Demiurge that is relentlessly deceiving us, there has to be something that is being deceived; that is our true, ever-thinking self. To affirm that the self is a cohesive construct, he illustrates the example of candle wax. Even if it is remolded or completely melted, our minds can still readily identify that wax as being the same thing, in essence. This consistency in essence, Descartes argues, is similarly true to our thinking self - regardless of what specific thoughts (or deceptions) it might be temporarily entangled with. Moreover, he claims that a set of natural principles must logically underpin the essence of the self, in the manner that mathematical and scientific laws govern the transformations of the wax under e.g., heat, chemical exposure, etc.

At this point, Descartes widens his aperture the conception of God: what can we deduce about the nature of an omnipotent entity, when our only firm ground is the thinking self? His central claim, at this juncture, is that the idea of God must be innate to our minds. The idea itself is of something infinite and unbounded, and therefore could not have originated from any material observation (distorted or authentic) that our minds gather in daily life. Only finite ideas can logically flow from sensory inputs and mental processes that are similarly finite in nature; Descartes appeals to mathematics here, describing transformations that are constrained by purely definite dimensions.

In what is now famously known as Descartes’s Ontological Argument, he posits that the mere idea of a supreme God, within our minds, proves that such a God does indeed exist. Specifically: the idea of a perfect and infinite being must originate from a perfect and infinite source, logically; we can peel back as many layers of intermediate causation as we want - but eventually there must be some valid source of the attributes of “infinity” and “perfection”. Put another way: a perfect and infinite essence, by definition, must exist in any universe that contains such concepts - since these concepts could not have rationally emerged from anything except something that was, in fact, perfect and infinite.

This argument builds upon the earlier work of St. Anselm, and seemingly hinges on the assumption that existence is preferable and “more perfect” when compared to non-existence. With this ontological claim in hand, Descartes revisits the spheres of the mind and body. Given the conception of the self and the conception of a perfect and infinite God have both been determined as innate through purely mental activity - it logically follows that the mind is functionally distinct from the physical realm. Where does this leave the fidelity of our sensory inputs, and our conception of the material world? The needle that Descartes attempts to thread is interesting, and leans further into theological reasoning: he claims that a perfect and infinite God precludes the idea of deception (an imperfect act), and therefore our intuition of a material world is fundamentally true. However, we cannot assume that our human perception of physical phenomena is a totally accurate representation of God’s creation.

Descartes, at this point, makes a reorientation: since we have established that God is not a deceiver, what then is the source of our potential misperception (or limited perception) of the physical phenomena throughout His universe? Naturally, the error lies within us; we are by definition separate from God, and we exist in some space between omnipotent perfection and nothingness. Moreover, any perceived errors at a local or personal level could actually be instrumental to a grand, globally error-free set of calculations being carried out by God; it is impossible for us to conceive of the considerations held by an infinite intelligence.

Critique & Categorization

One of the prominent critiques of Descartes’s proof for the existence God, first raised by Marin Mersenne, is known as “The Cartesian Circle”. In essence, it claims that Descartes is considering his mental perception of a perfect and infinite God as de facto truthful, while - in a separate meditation - independently citing God’s perfection as the reason why his mental perceptions are fundamentally truthful (and not instead the result of deception). Descartes later attempted to clarify to the point, stating that God’s perfection only guaranteed the fundamental truth of our memories - whereas the idea of God was self-evidently truthful. Suffice to say, there have been no shortage of follow-on critiques in the intervening centuries.

Descartes’s categorical separation of the mental and physical worlds came to be known as substance dualism, or Cartesian Dualism. While it provides a clean schema for Descartes’s meditative exercises, it produces what's now commonly known as the mind-body problem; how can the activities of the mind influence the body, if they are fundamentally distinct substances? 20th century philosopher Gilbert Ryle described Cartesian Dualism as amounting to a “ghost in the machine”, where the mind and soul are irreconcilably locked away from physical causality. In his later writings, Descartes offered an array of peculiar suggestions, such as the role of the asymmetric pineal gland, in an attempt to clarify the mechanism that allowed the mind and body to communicate.

This causal discrepancy has remained the central critique of Cartesian Dualism. Subsequent thinkers have produced alternate version of dualism, which make weaker claims. Predicate Dualism admits that there are certain mental phenomena that cannot be reduced to the grammar and descriptive devices of the physical world; but it does not claim that the mental and physical worlds are inherently separate. Property Dualism goes a step further, claiming that there are indeed two types of properties - mental and physical - which have real qualitative differences. However, the two properties are ultimately subcategories of a single substance.

Dharmic Perspectives

In prior posts, I’ve taken an introductory look at the Samkhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy - which both contain a foundational dualist claim: there are ultimately two essences that operate in conjunction with one another, known as prakriti and purusha. Together, they constitute all of reality - encompassing the realms of both ordinary and extraordinary phenomenon. Prakriti is the primary cause behind every manifested element in the material universe. In its fundamental state, it is imperceptible; containing an even arrangement of its three intrinsic qualities (known as the three gunas). Purusha, its complementary essence, is defined as pure consciousness. Its nature is considered transcendental - and beyond any possible perception that is mediated by the mind or senses.

Samkhya’s dualism is constructed differently than prominent Western (e.g., Cartesian) forms of dualism. The mind, inclusive of the intellect and the ego, is viewed as a material manifestation that is solely in the realm of prakriti. In this way, there is no ambiguity about how the mind interfaces with the rest of the body, or external reality; they are all part of the same material substrate, and adhere to consistent laws of causality. Purusha, as pure consciousness, is considered to be the observer, but completely inactive; its likened to a mirror that can reflect the subtle elements of the mind (e.g., the ego, the rational faculty) back upon themselves, causing the prakriti-constructed elements to act in ways they otherwise wouldn’t. The exact nature of purusha - as paradoxically both instrumental to the universe and completely inactive - has been the subject of debate for millennia, among Samkhya scholars and in dialogues with other Indian schools of philosophy.

Buddhism offers a range of perspectives (which I’m hoping to properly dig into soon), and tends to apply scrutiny to the idea that the mind exists as a discrete and stable phenomenon. The Yogachara school, for instance, views the entire flow of the universe as a complex web of causation - which is superficially lumped into different categories and attributed to various agents, but is all ultimately the unfolding expression of an ever-changing universe. In their estimation, any teachings that strengthen arbitrary distinctions - whether subjective or objective, mental or physical - only deepen confusion and lead to further suffering. Even the aforementioned attempts to soften Descartes’s claims (e.g., property dualism) are interpreted as reifying a set of grammatical or qualitative distinctions that, ultimately, do not exist.

Onward

Thanks for the reading. Having taken a first dip into the world of Western dualism, I’m looking forward to eventually reading through Kant, Popper, and others that further explored the philosophy of the mind. I’m currently taking a rudimentary venture through Buddhism as well, which has already revealed a wealth of thought-provoking perspectives. The next post will be back to Indian Philosophy, taking a look at the Nyaya school.