A kind of dualism

Mind, matter, life-world

Today, no one can still seriously entertain substance dualism, Cartesian or otherwise. And we find ourselves once again in the midst of the age old conflict between materialism and idealism. Going by what seems popular today, materialism is winning. But as a result, many are looking back to traditions or singular free-thinkers proclaiming the truth of idealism. 

Idealism remains looming as a spectre over all of philosophy. There is no possible argument against it. Everything you have ever known or experienced happened within your own consciousness or experience. Everything you could possibly know or experience, will still be happening within your consciousness. Whether you want it to or not. 

If you still care about absolute certainty, idealism is as enticing as it ever was. The more so the more the world deceives you. ‘But what about the outside world? What about science?’ well, what about it? Why would absolute truth care about upholding your conditional truths? That things become a bit strange and paradoxical, does still not make it so that you know anything outside of your consciousness. When doing philosophy —considered as a search for truth by way of pure thought—, we should not always care about practical implications. 

Yet, with the idealist route, so little of our life can be understood, so little of the world known, and even less changed. If you follow the phenomenological reduction towards the absolute I, there is little to be found, except for yourself, and God maybe. 

I cannot help but wonder if ‘dualism’ can not have a new life. Perhaps not in the sense of a substance dualism, but in the sense of a dualism of methods. Which is, perhaps, all that Descartes ever wanted to bring home to us. This distinction between mind and body, the former living light, and the latter dead matter, is really secondary to a deeper dualism of methods. And besides, how could we claim that Descartes saw our body as dead matter, merely pure extension, when it was animated by spirits through and through. And how could we say that he saw nature as mute, when he proclaimed that the power of love runs through everything. 

So, a dualism of methods, to put an end to the senseless and tiring debate between materialists and idealists. Between soulless science and religious zealotry. Two ways of looking at it all; from the perspective of the world, or from the perspective of the self. To let us be guided by the light of the world, or by our ‘lumen naturale.’ One way explaining generation and becoming, the other leading to the ever present origin. One guiding us through the world, the other making sure we don’t get lost in it. Avoiding the idiocy of the world-denier, but simultaneously protecting ourselves from the stupidity of those who think they can think themselves away. 

This is the possibility that Descartes shows us: not to explain the mystery away, but to accept it, to keep it alive, to affirm it as a fact of life. 

There is something stupid, in thinking that the science of body can explain away the phenomenologist’s truth, or the truth of the mystic —the only true phenomenologist. And equally stupid, is thinking that phenomenology is an argument against science. To not deem it necessary to know biology, because we already know all there is to know about life through living. 

Such a dualism of methods would not propose a ‘synthesis’, but merely a keeping alive of the tension, an affirmation of the conflict, wherein the difference is not overcome by something like a ‘vitalism of matter’, a ‘speculative realism’, a ‘panpsychism’, or an ‘idealist materialism’. Rather, it is the coexistence of hard idealism and hard materialism. The kind of idealism that doesn’t deny the absolute abyss of radical doubt. And the kind of materialism that doesn’t deny the absolutely mental phenomena discovered by scientific method, in favour of some bland worship of death matter. 

Descartes’ machine was animated with spirits, and Leibniz’ machine was infinitely complex, a spiritual automaton. A machine wherein no part is still, but every little part is moving, in harmony with all the other machines that make up the universe-machine. All the way up, and all the way down: spiritual machines ad infinitum.  

“Thus each organized body of a living being is a kind of divine machine or natural automaton, which infinitely surpasses all artificial automata. For a machine constructed by man’s art is not a machine in each of its parts.[…] But natural machines, that is, living bodies, are still machines in their least parts, to infinity.” (Leibniz, The Monadology, §64)

Who even knows what such a machine can do? Certainly not some ‘new atheist’ bugman, and certainly not some starving spiritual seeker. 

What is praiseworthy in Descartes is his lack of fear. He had found himself, ‘I think, I am’, no doubt about it. And then he went on to ruthlessly investigate man as if he were a machine. But whatever he found, nothing could dissuade him from the certainty of the self-knowledge he had found through other methods. Compare this to us, who fear that neuroscience or philosophical deconstruction will destroy subjectivity. Who resist any and all progress, because we are afraid that we will be left behind. Or those other freaks, who think that any affirmation of a doctrine that even smells of idealism is the sign of the worst philosophical conservatism, who think that any notion of subjective identity serves only to protect the powers that be. 

Dualism can be conceived of as a precise mechanism of defence, to protect against a reductionist idealism unconcerned for the reality of nature, and against a reductionist materialism unconcerned for the reality of spirit. 

So, dualism, the capacity to entertain at once the cold eye of science, the living experience of the life-world, and the contemplative doubt of the mystic. And to acknowledge, that no single one of these domains has the power to explain away entirely the worth of the others. Maybe, such a dualism can reveal to us a spirit that is ruthless in all of its investigation, that is not afraid of going down any road of thought or experience, knowing that nothing is ever lost. Matter, mind, and the life-world in between. All are open for the dualist, while the hard materialist lives his life reacting against soul, and the idealist wages a war against the world.