Rejecting Cartesian Dualism
The first draft of my Phil 13 challenge prompt response.
Rene Descartes conceives of the mind as “a pure substance” which is indivisible, essential, and independent from the body—if such a body even exists.1 Descartes is right to say that the body is divisible—such a conclusion is trivial—but to argue the mind is not is much more dubious. The mind, when not disunified by corporeal, neurological problems, is that which “doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imaginews and senses.” However, this is not always true. A person suffering from Tourette Syndrome, for example, may think and judge all the same, but the will, i.e., the volitional “part”/”component” of the mind has been lost. Cases in which personality, memory, feeling or some combination thereof being lost while intellectual cognitive ability is preserved all serve to contest the idea of the mind as indivisible and wholly separable from the corporeal form we assume.
Moreover, Descartes argues that he simply “clearly and distinctly” perceives the mind to be one thing—well, others “clearly and distinctly” perceive the sun to revolve aroun d the Earth. Are they right? Obviously not. Descartes’ entire premise is that we cannot trust those things that we perceive to be clear and distinct truths from without because the senses can deceive us. It is not obvious that the Cogito is somehow different from other things that we believe to be true. I argue that, by his own lights, Descartes’ sense-perceptive doubt ought to apply to the phenomenon of our mind being one, ethereal, indivisible thing.
The wax example provides us with another reason to reject Descartes’ argument that the mind is alienable from the body/corporeal reality.2 What is it that Descartes “actually grasped solely with the faculty of judgment” about the solid and then melted wax? Just as the mind and the body are inseparable, the imagination and the intellect are not so removed from each other as Descartes contends. The “geometric truths” Descartes grasps intellectually are either visually imagined or imaginable, i.e., imagined abstractly in the mind’s eye, or, more frequently, their conceptual, mathematical form is synthesized by the facts of reality as perceived by the senses.
By Descartes’ own lights, just as “there can be in me no idea of heat, or of a stone, unless it is placed in me by some cause that has at least as much reality as "[that heat or stone]”, the idea of corporeal existence must have at least as much reality as corporeal existence itself. Furthermore, there is not a clear and distinct perception of the mind entirely abstracted from the corporeal. I challenge the reader to go ahead and try to imagine what their mind is without being associated with their central nervous system. Even in one’s dreams
Finally, and truly by Descartes’ convictions and not my own, existence is part of God’s essence and God imparts upon men the “clear and distinct” idea of tangible, corporeal reality. Even dreams are perceived, i.e., seen, heard, felt, within one’s mind. Now, the physical realuty of these dreams is obviously not real, as even Descartes admits is revealed by our perception thereof being disconnected from waking reality for want of memory. I, like Descartes himself in Meditation 6, “fail to see how God could be understood not to be a deceiver, if these ideas were to issue from a source other than corporeal things.” One such ideas is “that I and the body constitute one thing” (italics my own).
At least, this is how Meditations opens.
To be fair, the mind is clearly separable from many non-essential components of one’s eminently divisible body, e.g., digits, limbs, digestive tract, and peripheral nervous system.