Disentangling mind-body dualism

Don't put Descartes before the horse

I’ve suffered a string of technical difficulties since returning from Greece, mainly due to my own incompetence, resulting in several botched attempts at recording the next episode of the Life Sentences podcast. Very frustrating, I can assure you.

However, I’ve finally worked out the problem. Podcast episodes will resume very soon.

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Another perceptive, challenging comment from loyal reader Ed in response to my last post entitled You are not a mortal container:

My Protestant-formed ears struggle to square ‘you are a mind’ with ‘you are not a mortal container’. I end up thinking of Descartes’ ‘ghost in the shell’ and how destructive that has been for modernity: the severing of humans from the natural world, the conception of the mind in mechanical terms, and a great divide set between body and spirit.

I understand that sense-perception is not wicked, rather clouded, but that still doesn’t quite feel enough. Christ’s conjoining of the two natures seems to elevate materiality (in my limited understanding of John of Damascus), and this elevation has something to do with 1 Cor. 15’s ‘seed raised spiritual’. Probably part of the problem comes from seeing ‘spiritual’ as immaterial woo-woo (see Descartes) and ‘material’ as the solid facts of this world. Which of course the Scriptures reject: God is eternal and pre-material, and the stuff of this world is passing away. 

I realise the Fathers aren’t speaking to French philosophers or modern Evangelical concerns about Gnosticism, but I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on this.

There is so much in that comment worth pursuing, too much for one post. So I think, in addition to this one, I’ll also devote the next written post or perhaps even the next two to Ed’s comment. Here let me try my best to address what he says at the start about Cartesian mind-body dualism, the influence it has had on our modern ideas about ourselves, and how it fits in, or not, with what the Church Fathers taught.

My own formation was also in Protestantism, specifically late-20th-century American Evangelicalism, so like Ed, my theological or philosophical spidey-sense starts tingling at the spectre of early-modern rationalism. During the late middle ages and into early modernity, a new picture of the human being emerged among thinkers in Western Europe. This rationalist turn in intellectual sensibility was one of the streams that, joining several others, fed into both the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation which the Roman Catholic Church launched against it. The thing which appealed most about the Orthodox tradition when I first became aware of it was the fact that its theology, and therefore its anthropology, adhered to the earlier picture and, on the whole, repudiated the modern one. So the last thing I’d want is for my readers to think that my presentation of the Church Fathers corroborates the views of early-modern rationalists like Rene Descartes.

Rene Descartes and the cold blackness of his way of seeing things.

The story is too complicated to rehearse here. But in short, starting in the late 13th century, a new philosophical movement known as nominalism began its ascendancy, associated with two Franciscans from the island of Albion: John Duns Scotus, a Scot, and William of Ockham, an Englishman. Over the following centuries, as the nominalist revolution unfolded and deepened, people began to regard discursive reason as the highest and most essential operation of the mind: the mind, at its best, uses step-by-step logical reasoning to arrive at clear, indubitable facts. At the same time, the mind itself became increasingly equated with the assertive autonomous will: what the human mind essentially is, is the power to choose, and as it exercises that sovereign power, it employs discursive reason to decide which way it will choose. 

If this picture of the human mind strikes you as eerily familiar, dear reader, that is because you are heir to that revolution. Pay close attention and you’ll realise that, without thinking very hard, you regard your subjective self as a capacity for choosing between options, and that when you’re very clever, you make ‘rational choices’ that accord with your enlightened self-interest. This is how all of us late moderns experience ourselves whenever we’re unconsciously vibing with the Weltanschauung. And this is as true for actions as for beliefs. We choose what brand of toothpaste to buy after subjecting the packaging to careful ‘rational’ analysis; we choose what beliefs to affirm after subjecting the world around us to careful ‘rational’ analysis. Choosing rationally is what it means to be intelligent. (That all this so-called rationality is really a chimaera need not detain us here.)

Modern Evangelicalism is deeply implicated in this way of understanding human nature. Your will is sovereign and free, and everything is down to choice. Yes, moral action, but more drastically, the eternal destiny of your soul as well. Heaven and hell lie in the balance: which will you choose? That Jesus Christ is your Lord and Saviour? Or that he is not? And it’s all so clear, so rational, so demonstrably true. Just read Mere Christianity and, after that, these other million or so books of apologetics that prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that what the Bible says is true—indeed, literally true. Use your brain. Think. See how obvious it is? Look here, a recent archaeological discovery. More solid proof. Just choose the truth. Choose Jesus as Lord. And once you’ve chosen him, just listen to this 60-minute sermon each Sunday. It’ll walk you through it all again and again, week after week re-convincing you that it’s all so logical, all so obvious. And on and on. Faith becomes a rational exercise, as compelling as two plus two equals four. Until the sheer implausibility of the whole charade becomes impossible to ignore. At which point, untutored in true faith and the devotion it inspires, so many abandon Christianity entirely.

Back to Rene Descartes. Having himself been an heir of that earlier philosophical revolution, he played a huge role in its further development. He was, of course, a French mathematician and philosopher, and during the second quarter of the 17th century, he published works of world-historic impact. His professional career was almost exactly contemporaneous with the Thirty Years’ War, during which, across the broad expanse of Germany, in spasms of previously unimaginable levels of brutality, including mass civilian carnage, old Europe was crucified. If the intellectual revolution of the High Middle Ages can be understood as having violently inseminated mediaeval Europe with the child Modernity, then the mother did not survive parturition. Thus, the death throes of what remained of the old world were simultaneously the birth pangs of the new. In geopolitics, the ‘modern international system’ was born; in thought, however, Descartes’ new rationalism emerged, blinking into the cold light of a new mathematical dawn.

In the Thirty Years’ War, you were lucky if this were the worst to befall you.

Descartes was not a nominalist, but building on the intellectual groundwork laid by nominalism, he asserted that an individual mind, by using discursive reason alone, can achieve certain, objective knowledge. He located this certainty in mathematics above all. Mathematics was, in his view, the purest expression of what he set out upon his intellectual quest to discover: clear and distinct ideas, concepts that are both self-evident and logically irrefutable. The pure rationality and precision of mathematics seemed immune to any doubt; doubt which for him was both the authentic starting point of all genuine thinking and also what he most wished to overcome. This is where the will comes in: as an assertive autonomous will, the mind can choose certainty through giving its assent to the self-evident truths which discursive reason discloses to the intellect. His famous maxim, ‘I think, therefore I am’, catalysed the movement from radical scepticism to the certainty of a self-evident idea.

Now, when Descartes turned his gaze outward to the sense-perceptible world of nature, he knew the senses could never provide the same certainty as mathematical reasoning. Yet, seeking indubitable knowledge, he concluded such certainty could only be found within the order of nature by applying mathematical principles to nature. Descartes believed—despite the fact that, as disclosed to the senses, extolled by poets, and consecrated by artists, nature abounds with physical qualities like colour, form, harmony, and beauty, not to mention noetic qualities like meaning and truth—he believed that if nature were truly to be intelligible, then all such qualia must ultimately be reducible to quantity, to measure, to what mathematics can determine with certainty. Nature was recut according to the cloth of mathematics: structured and rules-based, a precise, smoothly functioning mechanism.

The human body was no exception. Applying his mechanistic model of nature to the body, Descartes stripped the body of its organising life-principle, the spiritual soul, and rendered it like anything else in nature: a complex system of parts functioning automatically according to immutable mathematical principles. The soul, he believed, was nothing other than the mind as he understood it. As for the body, he wrote: ‘I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth.’ Just as clocks have gears and wheels and pendulums and weights, so do bodies have sinews and bones and muscles and joints. The body is nothing more than an automaton; deep down, everything about it, from the cut of its jib to the glimmer in its eye, is nothing other than a machine in motion, moving like clockwork: quantifiable, measurable, regular.

Whatever he was, Descartes wasn’t stupid. He realised that the intellect and its powers of will and discursive reason could not themselves be reduced to the new rationalism. In short, he was aware of what today is called the problem of consciousness: that consciousness in fact resists explanation through mathematical or mechanical analysis. He therefore posited two completely distinct spheres of reality, the mental and the physical, the one immaterial and spiritual, the other material and mechanistic. Hence, Cartesian mind-body dualism: mind and body as entirely separate substances. He never used the expression ‘the ghost in the machine’, which wasn’t coined until the 20th century, but Cartesian mind-body dualism is why, in his thought, the mind is characterised in that way. Our bodies are mere machines and the rational mind haunts them somehow.

Spirit, George Roux, 1885

Toward the end of his life, Descartes tried to bridge the gap between the two spheres, at one point suggesting that emotions provided the link between the body and the mind. He could tell that the mind was subject to emotional disturbance, which it suffered passively, and he even used the term ‘passions’ for the emotions as in the classical and patristic traditions. But though he recognised the impact of emotions on the mind, his commitment to a mechanistic view of nature led him to give the emotions a merely mechanical bodily origin; and anyway, his whole philosophical system rested on keeping the mental and the physical strictly separate, leaving him unable to explain how the two realms interact. Ultimately, his attempt to reconcile the two was not considered successful. Mind-body dualism has been an enduring challenge in Cartesian philosophy, and would animate and inspire philosophical debate and development in the centuries that followed. The debate still rages today.

The question is, do the Church Fathers teach something like mind-body dualism? For as we saw in episode 3, St Basil the Great once said this:

‘Be attentive to yourself’ means pay attention not to what is yours…but to yourself alone. For we are different from what belongs to us... What we are is the soul and the nous made in the image of the One who created us. Our body and its senses are what belongs to us.

Elsewhere, in a sermon entitled On the Origins of Humanity, St Basil wrote this:

I recognize two human beings: one the sense-perceptible, and one hidden under the sense-perceptible, invisible, the inner human. Therefore we have an inner human being, and we are somehow double. And it is truly said that we are that which is within. For I am what concerns the inner human being, the outer things are not me but mine…Therefore the body is an instrument of the human being, an instrument of the soul, and the human being is principally the soul in itself.

Is this teaching simply Cartesian mind-body dualism? Absolutely not. On the surface the two ways of thinking do have this in common: the mind/soul and the body are separate. But the similarity ends there.

In the next written post, I will try to explain why.