Dualism in Descartes and Classical Philosophy

so within philosophy oftentimes it's said that there are a number of problems that philosophy is trying to answer these are sometimes described as the classical problems of philosophy now the interesting thing about these classical problems of philosophy is a lot of them really aren't classical problems at all but they develop some time within the 17th century specifically through the philosophy of someone like Rene Descartes and what is often known as modern philosophy the philosophy that develops in the modern world the post-reformation world's moving away from discussions that were in the Middle Ages and in the classical Greek era in Roman eras as well but one of those classical problems supposedly is the mind-body problem and this posits that there is a problem in terms of the relationship of body and mind which says that essentially we are physical beings in one sense but we are also mental beings in another sense and there is a difficulty among philosophers in trying to figure out how those two things work together so there are certain questions that people raise such as how can something that is mental or non-physical impact that which is physical sometimes you know more materialist philosophers will say that doesn't make sense because you can't a mental thing can't transfer energy to a physical thing so therefore it can have no impact on a physical thing at all and in this discussion really starts with with Rene Descartes the reason I say it starts with with Rene Descartes is he develops his own kind of unique understanding of the relationship between the mental end and the physical so in short and we could get into de cartes philosophy in many other ways but just to kind of summarize what what the problem is that he sets up is he argues that the human person is essentially these two different substances two very different substances completely different substances which is where the term substance dualism comes from that there are two different kinds of substances one is a mental substance and the other is a physical substance and these two kinds of substances make up the human person now there are two very different kind of things so a lot of questions rise then is how can these two very different kinds of things essentially existing on two totally different planes interact with each other at all and Descartes really didn't have a way to understand how the physical and mental interact at all so when we're talking about the mental this this connects with the idea of the soul it's it's the non-physical aspect of of the human person now Descartes had a kind of unique view at least among Christians of how he viewed the physical world and he viewed the physical world mechanistically meaning that he thought that the physical world was basically just a machine that God created and this soul substance was in some ways just kind of a a separate thing infused into this otherwise just purely mechanical world that was in in the human person so a way to you know show this impact in his thought for example is to look at how he looked at animals so he basically viewed animals as machines that they had no inner consciousness at all which i think is a very strange view and so in de cartes view then animals don't have souls only humans have souls so we have a basically mechanistic world or mechanistic universe with just this one thing that becomes mental or maybe supernatural depending on how you define that term which is the human soul and so the human soul is of a completely different kind than basically everything else in the physical or natural world and from that point there is of course a very big divide between soul or the mental and then the physical world and there's this question of how do these two interact if they're so different and following Descartes people start to throw out the idea of a soul altogether or anything that is purely mental altogether now Descartes had some some strange ideas for example he would say that perhaps there is you know the pineal gland this thing in the brain where which kind of connects the mental and physical substances together some people say that that there is this coherence between mental events and physical events in the brain that they just so happen to coincide but one is not actually impacting the other but that every time something is happening in in the mind simultaneously there are things that are actually happening in the brain but there is no necessary causal connection between the two which is a very strange kind of view so after that people start to just throw out this idea of the soul altogether and well if everything else is purely mechanical why can the soul itself or the human person not just be purely mechanical as well so maybe we are just machines like the rest of nature is and then that idea gets basically thrown out after that in an materialist philosophy but if you look at thinkers before Descartes you you see that they don't view the natural world as just this basically soulless machine but they they view all of the world as having a purpose or or a tell us or teleology there there is an end in mind even in natural things so it's not just like a machine where it's got a bunch of parts that run but that there are individual things that God Himself has created that work for particular ends or purposes and so it's this notion that there is a purpose in everything that exists and everything exists for its particular purpose and so that's true of everything in the natural world that's true of plants that's true of you know the water cycle that's true of animals and so we can ask this question you know what are they for what is their end what is their goal and so everything has purpose inherent within it which is what differentiates it from a machine that is just randomly put together or happens to work in a certain fashion so when we're talking about things like meaning or soul we're not just then speaking it in a classical view we're not just speaking about the human person as if we're something that's so distinct from the rest of creation but that there is a purpose in all of creation and so if you look at Aristotle and Plato in the medieval tradition it was generally understood that there are souls of a kind in other things that exist as well there is this principle of life that exists within the animal kingdom's as well as within plants now they define different kinds of souls you know the nutritive soul is what a plant has that basically it just needs nutrients that there's a potato soul that animals have where they have desires for to you know to please their basic you know appetites and I don't mean that in a way of you know sinful appetites but but just their basic needs and they run based on instinct and things like this and humans are distinct in that they have a rational soul so what is distinctive about humans is that we can actually stop and think and reason in a way that no other thing in creation can and so that sets humans apart is something categorically different and while humans are said to have in a mortal soul other things are not said to have an immortal soul or an eternal soul and the only reason of course in a Christian perspective we have an eternal Souls because God sustains it whereas in classical philosophy there's something inherently just immortal about what a soul is so that it lasts forever necessarily that's what you find in someone like Plato which is obviously a difference between that in the Christian view but so to say that there is a soul or purpose or meaning or teleology within the natural world is not to say that that is all eternal in the sense that the human soul is eternal but it's a recognition that not everything is just purely physical in the natural world as a whole and the natural world as a whole is it is sense pointing us to God because everything has an end or a goal or a purpose for which it functions in that purpose the source of those purposes are God and the end or the Telos of of everything that exists is God as well so from him through him to him are all things right scripture speaks in this way so that everything comes from God and goes back to him in that is inherent in the structure of the natural world so what you find in Descartes when he gets rid of that is there is this you know divide between natural physical reality and spiritual reality which really is just is just relegated to this substance that the sole substance in man now the way that Aristotle and in the later Thomas tradition defines an understanding of body and soul is not just in terms of two substances now it might be said in Plato that that he's a kind of substance duelist and I know some people have equated des cartes view with that of Plato and there certainly are similarities but Plato's view of the natural world is so different than de cartes that I'm not sure how helpful it is to really even connect the two but Aristotle has his own way of explaining this relation between body and soul so that he doesn't see them as two totally fundamentally different substances but he sees them as two parts of the same human reality so yet to understand this you have to have a little bit of an understanding of Aristotle's view of reality which he calls hila morphism where that's at least the name that's been I don't know if Aristotle used it I don't think he did actually but it's the name at least that's been placed on on his view and he used to categorize his view which is to say that all things that exist are a composite of form and matter except for God or absolute being necessary being which is God himself as Christians we know is the triune God but so so he believes that form and matter make up all things matter meaning you know the stuff that makes things up form meaning the the what that thing is right so you know what I'm sitting on right now is a chair right is it in the form of a chair but the matter is you know the wood that puts this chair together so the stuff that makes it up is the wood but the form or the thing that it is is a chair right so that's a very basic simple explanation but the way that Aristotle then and in Thomas Aquinas explained relationship between body and soul is that they're both aspects of the same thing and in that language it's said that the soul is the form of the body so the body's the matter the soul is the form so they're two aspects of the same thing that make up the human person and you know I think that that is a little bit more of a biblical way to understand the relationship between body and soul than you find in something like a substance dualism so well there certainly are similarities in that you know both views confess that there is both the material and and a non-physical aspect to the human person I think scripture is very clear that there is a strong unity between body and soul and that we are comprehensively made as both body and soul we're not complete without body and soul which is why the goal in the Christian life ultimately in an eternal sense is for body and soul to be united into one single individual not just to be souls separated from our bodies so I think that his view makes the best sense or at least I would say maybe it's the best human way of explaining this relationship between body and soul not to say that there is no better way to explain it scripturally but it's as good as a good as one as we got I think and I think it explains it better than either the substance dualist approach which I think has too strong of a divorce between body and soul or the materialist approach which basically says body is soul so I think those are those are problematic so I think that the way that you know Aristotle Thomas and that tradition defines it is the best we've got currently right that makes the most sense of things and descript for all data I think

Channel: Dr. Jordan B Cooper

Views: 44,694

Rating: 4.8097982 out of 5

Keywords: Descartes dualism, descartes mind body dualism, descartes mind body problem, descartes mind and body, substance dualism, property dualism, philosophy of mind, Descartes and Aristotle, Dualism in Aristotle, Dualism in classical philosophy, Aquinas dualism, mind body Aquinas, mind-body problem, mind-body dualism, mind-body problem philosophy, modern philosophy, problems with Descartes, mechanistic view of the universe, teleological vs mechanistic, Edward Feser mind body

Id: VmNHLlQzdCw

Length: 12min 23sec (743 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 09 2019