3. Mind & Matter: Cartesian Dualism

Welcome to Section 3 of "Culture, Body and Mind", a course in the Anthropology of Body and Mind. Anthropologists see "matter" (and "mind") as culturally constructed. Accepting this would mean

Revision

In Section 1, we learned to recognize the anthropological approach. Part of the anthropological approach is reflexivity, being able to critically reflect on one's own culture and challenge one's own ethnocentrism.  Then in Section 2, we applied this anthropological approach in considering various ideas of the self, in an attempt to answer the question "what am I"?

This section

In Section 3, we provide one, culturally specific, answer to this crucial question; namely, "I am a mind, a thinking thing all other things in the universe are material non-thinking things". This idea has evolved into what are now standard Western ideas of body and mind. From extreme materialists (think Richard Dawkins) to extreme New Agers (think Neo-Pagans or Wiccans), most Westerners have been strongly influenced by Descartes, many without even realising it! Yet few take the opportunity to analyse the philosophical underpinnings of their ideas. In this Section, we undertake this analysis by looking at Descartes.

Descartes' influence

“Modern philosophy begins with Descartes,” writes Russel (2012). Writing in the early 1600s, Descartes presents the greatest formulation of dualism—a philosophical approach to body and mind that predominates in the West. The idea of matter devoid of soul or spirit provided a philosophical basis for the new science of Isaac Newton and others. For several centuries now, thinkers and more recently anthropologists, even those who disagree with Descartes, have been forced to engage with it. So what is his understanding of body and mind? How are the two connected?
 Read  “Synopsis…” pp. 161-164 and “Meditation II” pp. 170-179 and find out.

According to Descartes you are not your brain. Your brain is a material object.
Rather you are your mind.

I think therefore I am: "cogito ergo sum"

One of the most famous quotations in English is "I think therefore I am". Descartes wrote this in Latin as "cogito ergo sum". So sometimes philosophers call it "the cogito" for short--yep that's the street slang that philosophers use.

Descartes is trying to work out definitely exists in the universe. You can doubt the existence of me (Nicholas Herriman), the screen or paper you're looking at. Maybe you're on drugs and you're just hallucinating; maybe you're actually in a dream; maybe the CIA has a mind implant that's fooling you; maybe you've been stuck in a virtual reality suit as part of a weird experiment. These are all possibilities, however unlikely you might feel these scenarios to be, you can't be 100% sure of the screen in front of you, maybe 99.9% sure, but Descartes wants 100%! He wants something that you cannot possibly doubt. He is something that is, in philosophical jargon, "indubitable". While you are doing all this doubting there is one thing you cannot doubt, he says, is that you are doubting, you are thinking, you have cognition. And that is you; you are the thing that is thinking right now as you read these words and maybe doubting the very existence of the computer screen you're reading them on.

Descartes: Subjects and objects

The basic idea is that there exist two kinds of things:

1.  thinking-things (subjects)
2.  and non-thinking-things (objects)

That's all that exists. Thinking things include the human soul and God. These are subjects: they possess thinking, feeling, a soul. Thinking things don't occupy space; they don't weigh anything. But they can experience (subjectively) objects. When eating ice cream at the beach, the thinking thing that is you experiences an object (the ice cream). Everything else, bricks, skateboards, and plants are objects. No matter how much you mash ice cream into a brick, the brick cannot taste it; a brick cannot subjectively experience other objects.

If you're still having difficulty understanding, perhaps my presentation might help:

Descartes & wax

From Meditation II, we get the famous case of the wax. Descartes writes:

Let us begin by considering the commonest matters, those which we believe to be the most distinctly comprehended, to wit, the bodies which we touch and see; not indeed bodies in general, for these general ideas are usually a little more confused, but let us consider one body in particular. Let us take, for example, this piece of wax: it has been taken quite freshly from the hive, and it has not yet lost the sweetness of the honey which it contains; it still retains somewhat of the odour of the flowers from which it has been culled; its colour, its figure, its size are apparent; it is hard, cold, easily handled, and if you strike it with the finger, it will emit a sound. Finally all the things which are requisite to cause us distinctly to recognise a body, are met with in it. But notice that while I speak and approach the fire, what remained of the taste is exhaled, the smell evaporates, the colour alters, the figure is destroyed, the size increases, it becomes liquid, it heats, scarcely can one handle it, and when one strikes it, no sound is emitted. Does the same wax remain after this change? We must confess that it remains; none would judge otherwise. What then did I know so distinctly in this piece of wax? It could certainly be nothing of all that the senses brought to my notice, since all these things which fall under taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing, are found to be changed, and yet the same wax remains....

But what must particularly be observed is that its perception is neither an act of vision, nor of touch, nor of imagination, and has never been such, although it may have appeared formerly to be so— but only an intuition of the mind, which may be imperfect and confused as it was formerly, or clear and distinct as it is at present, according as my attention is more or less directed to the elements which are found in it, and of which it is composed. 

Only a philosopher could get so much from a candle! See if you can answer the 'wax' questions in the comments below.

Interactionism

The biggest problem, most philosophers agree, with Descartes' philosophy is interactionism. If your mind is so radically different to the material word around you, how could you possibly perceive the world? How could you possibly act on the world? (I feel like Descartes like trying to smash a brick against an ethereal non-material entity.) Descartes recognises this difficulty and argued that God ensures that we are not fooled by our perception. As philosopher Schopenhauer, a critic of Descartes, put it:

And so it was he [Descartes] who discovered the gulf between the subjective or ideal and the objective or real. He clothed this insight in the form of a doubt concerning the existence of the external world; but by his inadequate solution of such doubt, namely that God Almighty would surely not deceive us, he has shown how profound the problem is and how difficult it is to solve.

If Schopenhauer is right, Descartes' mind-body distinction fails to properly explain how perception or acting on the world is possible. But anthropologists, with our methodological relativism, are not particularly concerned with this 'problem'.

Sentience

An important concept often arises when discussing both Descartes and, as we will see in later sections, the anthropology of body and mind. That concept is sentience. Sentience is the ability to perceive, feel, experience, the world. According to Descartes, only humans, thinking things have sentience. You can put a rabbit in a blender; it's no different to putting a banana in blender!

Ontology

Now I also need to introduce the word "ontology".  Ontology is basically an account of what exists. If you are a Shinto priest in Japan, what you think exists is typically different to a Latter-day Saint from Utah. So who is right? When you study ontology in philosophy, then you start to question what actually exists; God, minds?, matter?, cause & effect? In what way do things like numbers exist? You try to provide answers to these questions. You engage with famous arguments that nothing exists independently of perception like Bishop Berkeley. "If a tree falls over in a wood and no one hears it does it still make a sound?" your professor might ask. She might concede that vibrations of air are created by the falling tree but she might deny that sounds exist without someone to hear then. So you can have a lot of fun debating this stuff but you won't learn much anthropology.

That's because in anthropology the approach is different. With regards ontology, anthropologists are not usually interested in what exists in the world. Rather we are interested in what different cultures/societies perceive exist in the world.


Descartes created a new ontology. For Descartes what exists is thinking and non-thinking things. Because he proposed that there are two kinds of things in the universe, we call his theory "dualism". And because it's from Descartes, we call it "Cartesian Dualism". We see this as merely one kind of ontology and, in accordance with methodological relativism, we are not concerned with whether it is correct or not.

The Cartesian universe

Famous 20th Century philosopher, Bertrand Russell described Descartes as effectively ripping the soul out of the universe. Descartes posited a universe devoid of meaning, which was in keeping with the modern science of Newton and the disenchantment of the world. In Russell's own words

Even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temper of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. 

Do you think Russel is too convinced that Western science is correct?

Japanese Anime artist Shinka Makoto portrays a dreamy, fantastic universe.
Maybe it's not as lonely as the universe of modern science.

Descartes & philosophy

As mentioned, Descartes expounded the philosophical system of dualism that underlies the predominant W.ern thought 1700-1970. He provided the first & most thorough exposition of this dualism and lay the groundwork for Newtonian physics.

As such undergrad students of philosophy (like myself in the early 1990s!) spend time asking questions like: was Descartes right when he said animals have no soul? Can or will computers be able to think or just perform operations with electric pulses?

Radical materialist philosophers who emerged in the mid-1900s questioned whether soul existed, they thought our all we humans are is a set of electric pulses; so of course computers can think. But all they managed to do was keep Descartes' idea of matter and purge the universe of soul.

New Agers kept Descartes' soul but they merged into Descartes' matter. So as I write 400 years later, no philosopher has supplanted Descartes ideas. Though as we will see, several had a very good crack at it.

Descartes & anthropology

Anthropologists are interested in the kinds of philosophical questions I grappled with as an undergrad with.  Not all cultures share the idea of Cartesian dualism nor is our specific take on dualism (whether we are idealists, materialists or New Agers for example) necessarily correct. So as anthropologists, it is crucial that we can conceive of Cartesian dualism as culturally specific.

Stanner & The Dreaming

Harry Tjutjuna, Pitjantjatjara, Walytjatjara, north-west corner of South Australia, Australia born c. 1928/1932, Wanka Tjukurpa (Spiderman), 2007, synthetic polymer paint on canvas 154cm h x 182cm w. Collection National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, © the artist, courtesy Ninuku Art Centre

For another example of a non-Cartesian understanding of body and mind, we could turn to Stanner's classic essay "The Dreaming" about the 'Dreamtime' of Aboriginal Australians.

Stanner's account has been critiqued (implicitly, at least) for being sentimental, essentialist and so on. (For a deeper understanding of the implications of Indigenous Australian ideas in relation to subject and object, you should read Munn's "Transformation of subjects into objects"). But we'll put aside the critiques of Stanner for the meantime. If he is correct about the 'one-ness' which the Aboriginal person perceives in the world,  how it is different from Cartesian dualism? What would an anthropology of body and mind look like if it began with the principle of oneness and not of dualism?

Conclusion 

The reason why we read Descartes is to articulate what a lot of us take for granted and see that this is just one way of looking at body and mind. Analysing this theoretical approach also allows us to see its pros and cons and contrast it with other cultures.

The primary weakness with Descartes, from a philosophical perspective, is usually thought to be the problem of interactionism. From an anthropological perspective, Cartesian Dualism is merely an artefact of a certain culture in a certain time. The vision of personhood is neither right or wrong, but is culturally specific. 


Putting aside our taken-for-granted ideas about body and mind sounds easy enough. But to deeply understand other cultures' ideas of body and mind is a constant effort for anthropologists. It is also one of the aims of this course. So we will analyze the idea of non-human persons in Section Four.