Cartesian Dualism

From Geography

Cartesian Dualism is one of the different concepts of duailsm

In order to explain the notion of ‘Cartesian dualism’, it is first necessary to introduce briefly the more general concept of this dualism, which refers to ideas about the relationship between mind and body, the immaterial and the material.

Dualism is an ancient notion, which played an important role within the old Greek philosophical tradition. The main idea within this ancient school of thought can be summarized as follows: “The Greeks held that a man's soul was of an entirely different essence than his body. Furthermore, they held that these dual entities had no interaction with one another. Indeed, the Greeks saw them as alien to one another, the body being the prison house of the soul”, implying a dichotomy between body and soul, an absolute split between them (Custance, 1997).

The French philosopher (but also scientist, psychologist and mathematician) René Descartes (1596-1650) tried to overcome, or at least cope with this dichotomy between, as he called it, the two separate worlds of the rex extensa (matter) on the one hand, and the rex cogitans (mind) on the other (Zierhofer, 2002). Descartes believed in the existence of a nonmaterial, indivisible soul, which finds expression in a mechanically operated body (Custance, 1997). He was concerned with the way that the nonmaterial (mind or soul, the reality of which Descartes proved with is famous ‘cogito ergo sum) could interact with the material (body; the reality of which, for Descartes, needed no proof): “Though the two realities were of an entirely different nature, they could react upon each other, the soul on the body and the body on the soul. How this reaction takes place is a mystery nevertheless; only Descartes spelled it differently--dualism.” (Custance, 1997). So, Descartes claimed the existence of two substances, the mind substance, on the one hand, which is different than brain substance or physical matter. The mind is non-materialist – not matter, and also cannot be fully explained by matter. With his ideas, Descartes became the father of the mind/body theory of interactionism (Custance, 1997).

His distinction was conceived in many ways, “but for modern science the identification of matter with law-like causality, on the one hand, and mind with free will and agency, on the other, became constitutive” (Zierhofer, 2002, p. 2). This, according to Zierhofer (2002) transformed the problem into one of “how to take `determinism' and `indeterminism' into account simultaneously” (p. 2). With this, the issue presented here is in essence also a geographical one, given the fact that “any discipline which focuses on human beings and their relations to their world has to deal with this problem in one way or another, and although it assumes different forms and adopts different vocabularies it is the methodological axis around which the history of the humanities and social sciences has revolved” (Zierhofer, 2002, p. 2). As Zierhofer argues, “modern epistemologies use the categorical distinction between `nature' and `culture' as a basic device to deal with the same issue” (2002, p. 2). It is on this dichotomy that the distinction between physical and human geography is based, both with their own research objects, methodologies etc. (Zierhofer, 2002).

References

Custance (1997). Cartesian Dualism: Mind and Brain Interaction. Accessed 12 october 2010. on http://www.custance.org/old/mind/ch2m.html

Zierhofer, W. (2002) Speech Acts and Spaces. Manuscript. In: Environment and Planning A. Vol. 34, No. 8, pp. 1355-1372.