Descartes’s account of Dualism

Torsa Chakraborty, Jadavpur University

René Descartes is often credited with being the “Father of Modern Philosophy.” This title is
justified due both to his break with the traditional Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy prevalent at
his time and to his development and promotion of the new, mechanistic sciences.

The modern problem of the relationship of mind to body stems from the thought of René
Descartes, a 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician, who gave dualism its classical
formulation. Beginning from his famous Cogito, ergo sum (Latin: “I think, therefore I am”),
Descartes developed a theory of mind as an immaterial, nonextended substance that engages in
various activities such as rational thought, imagining, feeling, and willing. Matter, or extended
substance, conforms to the laws of physics in mechanistic fashion, with the important exception
of the human body, which Descartes believed is causally affected by the human mind and which
causally produces certain mental events. For example, willing the arm to be raised causes it to be
raised, whereas being hit by a hammer on the finger causes the mind to feel pain. This part of
Descartes’s dualistic theory, known as interactionism, raises one of the chief problems faced by
Descartes: the question how this causal interaction is possible.

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes embarked upon a quest in which he called all
his previous beliefs into doubt, in order to find out of what he could be certain.[7] In so doing, he
discovered that he could doubt whether he had a body (it could be that he was dreaming of it or
that it was an illusion created by an evil demon), but he could not doubt whether he had a mind.
This gave Descartes his first inkling that the mind and body were different things. The mind,
according to Descartes, was a "thinking thing" (Latin: res cogitans), and an
immaterial substance. This "thing" was the essence of himself, that which doubts, believes,
hopes, wills and thinks. The body, "the thing that exists" (Latin: res extensa), regulates normal
bodily functions (such as heart and liver). According to Descartes, animals only had a body and
not a soul (which distinguishes humans from animals). The distinction between mind and body is
argued in Meditation VI as follows: I have a clear and distinct idea of myself as a thinking, non-
extended thing, and a clear and distinct idea of body as an extended and non-thinking thing.
Whatever I can conceive clearly and distinctly, God can so create.
The central claim of what is often called Cartesian dualism, in honor of Descartes, is that the
immaterial mind and the material body, while being ontologically distinct substances, causally
interact. This is an idea that continues to feature prominently in many non-European
philosophies. Mental events cause physical events, and vice versa. But this leads to a substantial
problem for Cartesian dualism: How can an immaterial mind cause anything in a material body,
and vice versa? This has often been called the "problem of interactionism."
Descartes himself struggled to come up with a feasible answer to this problem. In his letter
to Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine, he suggested that spirits interacted with the body
through the pineal gland, a small gland in the centre of the brain, between the
two hemispheres.[7] The term "Cartesian dualism" is also often associated with this more specific
notion of causal interaction through the pineal gland. However, this explanation was not
satisfactory: how can an immaterial mind interact with the physical pineal gland? Because
Descartes' was such a difficult theory to defend, some of his disciples, such as Arnold
Geulincx and Nicholas Malebranche, proposed a different explanation: That all mind–body
interactions required the direct intervention of God. According to these philosophers, the
appropriate states of mind and body were only the occasions for such intervention, not real
causes. (These occasionalists maintained the strong thesis that all causation was directly
dependent on God, instead of holding that all causation was natural except for that between mind
and body).[14]

THE NATURE OF MIND

The Second Meditation continues with Descartes asking, “What am I?” After discarding the
traditional Scholastic-Aristotelian concept of a human being as a rational animal due to the
inherent difficulties of defining “rational” and “animal,” he finally concludes that he is a thinking
thing, a mind: “A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also
imagines and has sense perceptions” (AT VII 28: CSM II 19). In the Principles, part I, sections
32 and 48, Descartes distinguishes intellectual perception and volition as what properly belongs
to the nature of the mind alone while imagination and sensation are, in some sense, faculties of
the mind insofar as it is united with a body. So imagination and sensation are faculties of the
mind in a weaker sense than intellect and will, since they require a body in order to perform their
functions. Finally, in the Sixth Meditation, Descartes claims that the mind or “I” is a non-
extended thing. Now, since extension is the nature of body, is a necessary feature of body, it
follows that the mind is by its nature not a body but an immaterial thing. Therefore, what I am is
an immaterial thinking thing with the faculties of intellect and will.

It is also important to notice that the mind is a substance and the modes of a thinking substance
are its ideas. For Descartes a substance is a thing requiring nothing else in order to exist. Strictly
speaking, this applies only to God whose existence is his essence, but the term “substance” can
be applied to creatures in a qualified sense. Minds are substances in that they require nothing
except God’s concurrence, in order to exist. But ideas are “modes” or “ways” of thinking, and,
therefore, modes are not substances, since they must be the ideas of some mind or other. So,
ideas require, in addition to God’s concurrence, some created thinking substance in order to exist
(see Principles of Philosophy, part I, sections 51 & 52). Hence the mind is an immaterial
thinking substance, while its ideas are its modes or ways of thinking.

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM

“Next I examined attentively what I was. I saw that while I could pretend that I had no body and
that there was no world and no place for me to be in, I could not for all that pretend that I did not
exist. I saw on the contrary that from the mere fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other
things, it followed quite evidently and certainly that I existed; whereas if I had merely ceased
thinking, even if everything else I had ever imagined had been true, I should have had no reason
to believe that I existed. From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is
simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order
to exist. (6:32–3)”
This argument moves from the fact that he can doubt the existence of the material world, but
cannot doubt the existence of himself as a thinking thing, to the conclusion that his thoughts
belong to a nonspatial substance that is distinct from matter.
The argument is fallacious. It relies on conceivability based in ignorance. Descartes has not
included anything in the argument to ward off the possibility that he, as a thinking thing, is in
fact a complex material system. He has merely relied on the fact that he can doubt the existence
of matter to conclude that matter is distinct from mind. This argument is clearly inconclusive.
From the fact that the Joker cannot, at a certain moment, doubt the existence of Batman (because
he is with him), but he can doubt the existence of Bruce Wayne (who might, for all the Joker
knows, have been killed by the Joker's henchmen), it does not follow that Bruce Wayne is not
Batman. In fact, he is Batman. The Joker is merely ignorant of that fact.

One of Descartes’ main conclusions is that the mind is really distinct from the body. But what is
a “real distinction”? Descartes explains it best at Principles, part 1, section 60. Here he first
states that it is a distinction between two or more substances. Second, a real distinction is
perceived when one substance can be clearly and distinctly understood without the other and vice
versa. Third, this clear and distinct understanding shows that God can bring about anything
understood in this way. Hence, in arguing for the real distinction between mind and body,
Descartes is arguing that 1) the mind is a substance, 2) it can be clearly and distinctly understood
without any other substance, including bodies, and 3) that God could create a mental substance
all by itself without any other created substance. So Descartes is ultimately arguing for the
possibility of minds or souls existing without bodies.

Therefore, it can be presumed that Descartes is clearly opting for an ontological dualism, where
both the mind and body are regarded as distinct substances and are interacting with each other,
pointing to a causal relation between them.

ARGUMENTS FOR INTERACTIONISM

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes embarked upon a quest in which he called all
his previous beliefs into doubt, in order to find out of what he could be certain.[7] In so doing, he
discovered that he could doubt whether he had a body (it could be that he was dreaming of it or
that it was an illusion created by an evil demon), but he could not doubt whether he had a mind.
This gave Descartes his first inkling that the mind and body were different things. The mind,
according to Descartes, was a "thinking thing" (Latin: res cogitans), and an
immaterial substance. This "thing" was the essence of himself, that which doubts, believes,
hopes, and thinks. The body, "the thing that exists" (Latin: res extensa), regulates normal bodily
functions (such as heart and liver). According to Descartes, animals only had a body and not a
soul (which distinguishes humans from animals). The distinction between mind and body is
argued in Meditation VI as follows: I have a clear and distinct idea of myself as a thinking, non-
extended thing, and a clear and distinct idea of body as an extended and non-thinking thing.
Whatever I can conceive clearly and distinctly, God can so create.
The central claim of what is often called Cartesian dualism, in honor of Descartes, is that the
immaterial mind and the material body, while being ontologically distinct substances, causally
interact. This is an idea that continues to feature prominently in many non-European
philosophies. Mental events cause physical events, and vice versa. But this leads to a substantial
problem for Cartesian dualism: How can an immaterial mind cause anything in a material body,
and vice versa? This has often been called the "problem of interactionism."
Descartes himself struggled to come up with a feasible answer to this problem. In his letter
to Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine, he suggested that spirits interacted with the body
through the pineal gland, However, this explanation was not satisfactory: how can an immaterial
mind interact with the physical pineal gland?
Because Descartes' was such a difficult theory to defend, some of his disciples, such as Arnold
Geulincx and Nicholas Malebranche, proposed a different explanation: That all mind–body
interactions required the direct intervention of God. According to these philosophers, the
appropriate states of mind and body were only the occasions for such intervention, not real
causes. These occasionalists maintained the strong thesis that all causation was directly
dependent on God, instead of holding that all causation was natural except for that between mind
and body.[14]

THE OBJECTION

The Cartesian account of mind and body had many critics even in Descartes’s own
day. Hobbes argued that nothing existed but matter in motion; there was no such thing as mental
substance, only material substance. Materialism of a sort was also supported by Descartes’s
correspondent Pierre Gassendi, a scientist and Epicurean philosopher. A generation
later Spinoza was to refashion the whole Cartesian metaphysics on bold lines. In place of the two
distinct substances, each complete in itself yet each liable to external interference should God
will it, Spinoza posited a singlesubstance, God or Nature, possessed of infinite attributes, of
which the mental and the material alone are known to men. The “modes,” or manifestations, of
this substance were what they were as a result of the necessities of its nature; arbitrary will
neither did nor could play any part in its activities. Whatever manifested itself under one attribute
had its counterpart in all the others. It followed from this that to every mental event there was a
precisely corresponding physical event, and vice versa. A man was thus not a mysterious union
of two different elements but a part of the one substance that, like all other parts, manifested
itself in different ways under different attributes. Spinoza did not explain why it was that
physical events could be correlated with mental events in the case of a human being but not in
that of, for example, a stone. His theory of psycho-physical parallelism, however, has persisted
independently of his general metaphysics and has found supporters even in modern times.
1. The difficulty arises when it is noticed that sometimes the will moves the body, for
example, the intention to ask a question in class causes the raising of your arm, and
certain motions in the body cause the mind to have sensations. But how can two
substances with completely different natures causally interact? Pierre Gassendi in
the Fifth Objections and Princess Elizabeth in her correspondence with Descartes both
noted this problem and explained it in terms of contact and motion. The main thrust of
their concern is that the mind must be able to come into contact with the body in order to
cause it to move. Yet contact must occur between two or more surfaces, and, since having
a surface is a mode of extension, minds cannot have surfaces. Therefore, minds cannot
come into contact with bodies in order to cause some of their limbs to move.
Furthermore, although Gassendi and Elizabeth were concerned with how a mental
substance can cause motion in a bodily substance, a similar problem can be found going
the other way: how can the motion of particles in the eye, for example, traveling through
the optic nerve to the brain cause visual sensations in the mind, if no contact or transfer of
motion is possible between the two?
2. Princess Elisabeth, among others, asked: if mind is unextended and matter is extended,
how do they interact? This problem vexed not only Descartes, who admitted to Elisabeth
that he didn't have a good answer (3:694), but it also vexed Descartes' followers and other
metaphysicians. It seems that, somehow, states of the mind and the body must be brought
into relation, because when we decide to pick up a pencil our arm actually moves, and
when light hits our eyes we experience the visible world. But how do mind and body
interact? Some of Descartes' followers adopted an occasionalist position, according to
which God mediates the causal relations between mind and body; mind does not affect
body, and body does not affect mind, but God gives the mind appropriate sensations at
the right moment, and he makes the body move by putting it into the correct brain states
at a moment that corresponds to the volition to pick up the pencil. Other philosophers
adopted yet other solutions, including the monism of Spinoza and the pre-established
harmony of Leibniz.
3. It is evident from Descartes’s account of substance dualism that he is opting for an
ontological dualism. He bases his theory of interactionism on the fact that the mind and
the body are two distinct substances and are capable of existing without each other. He
tries to support this claim by mentioning God in this aspect. The distinction between
mind and body is argued in Meditation VI as follows: I have a clear and distinct idea of
myself as a thinking, non-extended thing, and a clear and distinct idea of body as an
extended and non-thinking thing. Whatever I can conceive clearly and distinctly, God can
so create. This can give rise to some confusion. Here the notion of clarity and distinctness
of entities are assumed by the virtue of God Himself, as He is but a deceiver. Again,
God’s existence is established by the clear and distinct ideas. This somehow involves
circularity, thus rendering the whole premise questionable.
4. Another important question that can be asked to interactionism is the one regarding
agency. One of the most pervasive features of our ordinary everyday experience is the
fact of agency and its efficacy in producing change in the world by means of bodily
activity. Descartes describes in Meditations that “I am a thinking thing” which can as
well exist without the body. That is to say, he has reduced the essence of a person to his
consciousness alone. Unlike other western philosophers, he does not hold that I can be a
composite of body and mind; neither has he explained any notion of an embodied mind
 or soul. Moreover, he had not been able to explain the influence of the mind over the
body. So here is the problem: I am not my body or the composite of my mind and body.
Also I am not sure how my body is controlled by my mind. Then who is responsible for
my bodily activities? Well, we don’t really have any definite answer here.
5. A more recent related objection is the argument from physics, which argues that a mental
substance impacting the physical world would contradict principles of physics.[1] In
particular, if some external source of energy is responsible for the interactions, it would
violate the law of conservation of energy.[10] Two main responses to this have been to
suggest the mind influences the distribution but not the quantity of energy in the brain
and to deny that the brain is a causally closed system in which conservation of energy
would apply
6. Taking the argument a step further, it has been argued that because physics fully accounts
for the causes of all physical movements, there can be no place for the a non-physical
mind to play a role.[2] The principle, in slightly different iterations, has variously been
called causal closure, completeness of the physical, physical closure, and physical
comprehensiveness.[2] This has been the foremost argument against interactionism in
contemporary philosophy.

CONCLUSION

In the Meditations and Principles, Descartes did not focus on the metaphysical question of how
mind and body interact. Rather, he discussed the functional role of mind–body union in the
economy of life. As it happens, our sensations serve us well in avoiding harms and pursuing
benefits. Pain-sensations warn us of bodily damage. Pleasure leads us to approach things that
(usually) are good for us. Our sense perceptions are reliable enough that we can distinguish
objects that need distinguishing, and we can navigate as we move about. As Descartes saw it,
“God or nature” set up these relations for our benefit. They are not perfect. Sometimes our senses
present things differently than they are, and sometimes we make judgments about sensory things
that extend beyond the appropriate use of the senses.

Nowhere in the Meditations does Descartes address the problems created by dualism. Although
he holds that direct interaction between the two essential elements exists, motion, human beings
ect. depend on it, Descartes fails to provide a mechanism for this to take place. Faulting
Descartes based on this fact alone seems premature and a bit unwarranted. As we have seen
dualism is a necessary outcome of his philosophy, not an input Descartes has read in. Instead of
taking the point of view that dualism is something deep and underlying found when doing
Cartesian philosophy that leads to problems, perhaps we should consider the fact that there are
deep and underlying problems found when doing Cartesian philosophy that leads to dualism.
Problems addressing the boundary or possible overlap of metaphysics and physics might
possibly be the source of Descartes’ dualism. In the end we find that although dualism plays an
essential role in Descartes’ philosophy and appears to be necessary in an endeavor of this nature,
it cannot be certain whether dualism is the cause of fundamental problems or if fundamental
problems are the cause of dualism.
This problem gave rise to other varieties of dualism, such as occasionalism and some forms
of parallelism that do not require direct causal interaction. Occasionalism maintains that apparent
links between mental and physical events are the result of God’s constant causal action.
Parallelism also rejects causal interaction but without constant divine intervention. Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz, a 17th-century German rationalist and mathematician, saw mind and body as
two perfectly correlated series, synchronized like two clocks at their origin by God in
a preestablished harmony.
Again, there are writers such as Gilbert Ryle who would like to take the Aristotelian theory to its
logical conclusion and argue that mind is nothing but the form of the body. Mind is not, as
Descartes supposed, something accessible only to its owner; it is rather something that is obvious
in whatever a person does. To put it crudely, mind is simply behaviour. This leads to the
feasibility of physicalist monism down the line.
Although, Cartesian Dualism does not stand tall in the face of its criticisms, neither does it
provide a plausible standpoint for dualism, it has its own virtue as a method. Descartes was the
first person to hand us out a systematized account of substance dualism. He has tried utmost
carefully to explain the ontological status of the necessary entities, and then he proceeded to
describe the nature of their union and function. It has its flaws and pitfalls no doubt, but it
provides a guideline of do’s and don’ts to whoever wants to formulate an account of substance
dualism.

Torsa Chakraborty
SRF, Dept. of Philosophy
Jadavpur University
April,2018