Dualism

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(FromLatinduo, two).

Like most other philosophical terms, has been employed in different meanings by different schools.

First, the name has been used to denote the religious ortheological system which would explain theuniverse as the outcome of twoeternally opposed and coexisting principles, conceived asgood andevil, light and darkness, or some other form of conflicting powers. We find this theory widely prevalent in the East, and especially inPersia, for several centuries before theChristian Era. TheZend-Avesta, ascribed to Zoroaster, who probably lived in the sixth century B.C. and is supposed to be the founder or reformer of the Medo-Persian religion, explains the world as the outcome of the struggle betweenOrmuzd and Ahriman.Ormuzd isinfinite light, supreme wisdom, and the author of all good;Ahriman is the principle of darkness and of allevil. In the third century after Christ, Manes, for a time a convert toChristianity, developed a form ofGnosticism, subsequently styledManichaeism, in which he sought to fuse some of the elements of theChristian religion with the dualistic creed ofZoroastrianism (see MANICHAEISM and ZOROASTER).Christian philosophy, expounded with minor differences bytheologians andphilosophers fromSt. Augustine downwards, holds generally that physicalevil is the result of thenecessary limitations of finite created beings, and that moralevil, which alone isevil in thetrue sense, is a consequence of the creation of beings possessed of free wills and is tolerated byGod. Both physical and moralevil are to be conceived as some form of privation or defect of being, not as positive entity. Their existence is thus not irreconcilable with thedoctrine of theistic monism.

Second, the term dualism is employed in opposition to monism, to signify the ordinary view that the existinguniverse contains two radically distinct kinds of being or substance — matter and spirit, body and mind. This is the most frequent use of the name in modern philosophy, where it is commonly contrasted with monism. But it should not be forgotten that dualism in this sense is quite reconcilable with amonistic origin of all things. The theisticdoctrine of creation gives amonistic account of theuniverse in this sense. Dualism is thus opposed to both materialism andidealism.Idealism, however, of the Berkeleyan type, which maintains the existence of a multitude of distinct substantial minds, may along with dualism, be described as pluralism.

Historically, in Greek philosophy as early as 500 B.C. we find the Eleatic School with Parmenides as their chief, teaching a universal unity of being, thus exhibiting a certain affinity with modern German monism. Being alone exists. It is absolutely one, eternal, and unchangeable. There is no real becoming or beginning of being. Seeming changes and plurality of beings are mere appearances. To this unity of being,Plato opposed an original duality--God and unproduced matter, existing side by side from alleternity. This matter, however, was conceived as indeterminate, chaotic, fluctuating, and governed by a blind necessity, in contrast with mind which acts according to plan. The order and arrangement are due toGod. Evil and disorder in the world have their source in the resistance of matter whichGod has not altogether vanquished. Here we seem to have a trace of the Oriental speculation. Again there is another dualism in man. The rationalsoul is a spiritual substance distinct from the body within which it dwells, somewhat as the charioteer in the chariot.Aristotle is dualistic on sundry important topics. The contrast between the fundamental conceptions ofmatter and form--a potential and an actualizing principle--runs through all branches of his system. Necessarily coeternal withGod, Who is pure actuality, there has existed the passive principle of matter, which in this sense, however, is mere potentiality. But further, along withGod Who is the Prime Mover, there must also have existed from alleternity the World moved byGod. In his treatment of cognitionAristotle adopts the ordinary common-sense view of the existence of individual objects distinct from our perceptions andideas of them. Man is an individual substantial being resulting from the coalescence of the two principles--form (thesoul) and matter.

Christianity rejected all forms of a dual origin of the world which erected matter, orevil, or any other principle into a second eternal being coexistent withGod, and it taught themonistic origin of theuniverse from one,infinite, self-existing spiritual Being who freely created all things. The unfamiliar conception of free creation, however, met with considerable opposition in theschools ofphilosophy and was abandoned by several of the earlierheresies. Theneo-Platonists sought to lessen the difficulty by emanastic forms ofpantheism, and also by inserting intermediate beings betweenGod and the world. But the former method implied a materialistic conception ofGod, while the latter only postponed the difficulty. From the thirteenth century, through the influence ofAlbertus Magnus and still more ofSt. Thomas Aquinas, the philosophy ofAristotle, though subjected to some important modifications, became the accredited philosophy of theChurch. The dualistic hypothesis of an eternal world existing side by side withGod was of course rejected. But the conception of spiritual beings as opposed to matter received fuller definition and development. The distinction between the humansoul and the body which it animates was made clearer and their separability emphasized; but the ultra-dualism ofPlato was avoided by insisting on the intimate union ofsoul and body to constitute one substantial being under the conception of form andmatter.

The problem of dualism, however, was lifted into quite a new position in modern philosophy byDescartes. Indeed, since his time it has been a topic of central interest inphilosophical speculation. His handling of two distinct questions, the oneepistemological, the other metaphysical, brought this about. The mind stands in a cognitional relation to the external world, and in a causal relation to the changes within the body. What is the precise nature of each of these relations? According toDescartes thesoul isres cogitans. Its essence is thought. It is simple and unextended. It has nothing in common with the body, but is connected with it in a single point, the pineal gland in the centre of the brain. In contrast with this, the essence of matter lies in extension. So the two forms of being are utterly disparate. Consequently the union between them is of an accidental or extrinsic character.Descartes thus approximates to thePlatonic conception of charioteer and chariot. Soul and body are really two merely allied beings. How then do they interact? Real reciprocal influence or causal interaction seems impossible between two such disparate things. Geulincx and other disciples ofDescartes were driven to invent the hypothesis of occasionalism and Divine assistance, according to which it isGod Himself who effects the appropriate change in either body or mind on the occasion of the corresponding change in the other. For this system ofmiraculous interferences Leibniz substituted the theory of pre-established harmony according to whichGod has coupled pairs of bodies andsouls which are destined to run in parallel series of changes like two clocks started together. The same insoluble difficulty of psycho-physical parallelism remains on the hands of thosepsychologists andphilosophers at the present day who reject thedoctrine of thesoul as a real being capable of acting on the body which it informs. The ultra-dualism ofDescartes was immediately followed on the Continent by thepantheistic monism ofSpinoza, which identified mind and matter in oneinfinite substance of which they are merely "modes."

The cognitional questionDescartes solves by a theory ofknowledge according to which the mind immediately perceives only its ownideas or modifications. Thebelief in an external world corresponding to theseideas is of the nature of an inference, and the guaranteeing of this inference or the construction of a reliable bridge from the subjective world of thought to the objective world of material being, was thenceforth the main problem of modern philosophy. Locke similarly taught that the mind immediately apprehends only its ownideas, but he assumed a real external world which corresponds to theseideas, at least as regards the primary qualities of matter. Berkeley, accepting Locke's assumption that the mind immediately cognizes only its ownideas, raised the question: What grounds have we forbelieving in the existence of a material world corresponding to thoseideas? He concludes that there are none. The external cause of theseideas isGod Who awakens them in our minds by regularlaws. The dualistic opposition between mind and matter is thus got rid of by denying an independent material world. But Berkeley still postulates multitude of real substantial minds distinct from each other and apparently fromGod. We have thus idealistic pluralism. Hume carried Berkeley's scepticism a step farther and denied the existence of permanent spiritual substances, or minds, for grounds similar to those on which Berkeley rejected material substances. All weknow to exist areideas of greater or less vividness.Kant repudiates this more extreme scepticism and adopts, at least in the second edition of his chief work, a form of dualism based on the distinction of phenomena and noumena. The mind immediately perceives only its own representations. These are modified by innatemental forms. They present to us only phenomena. But the noumena, the things-in-themselves, the external causes of these phenomenal representations, are beyond our power of cognition. Fichte rejected things-in-themselves outside the mind, and reduced theKantian dualism to idealistic monism. The strongest and most consistent defenders of dualism in modern philosophy have been the Scotch School, including Reid, Stuart, andHamilton. Among English writers in more recent times Martineau, McCosh,Mivart, and Case have carried on the same tradition on similar lines.

The problem of dualism, as its history suggests, involves two main questions:

The former question belongs toepistemology, materiallogic, or general philosophy; the latter topsychology. It istrue that dualism is ultimately rejected by the materialist who reduces conscious states to functions, or "aspects" of the brain; but objections from this standpoint will be more suitably dealt with under materialism and monism. The idealist theory since Berkeley, in all its forms, maintains that the mind can onlyknow its own states or representations, and that what we suppose to be an independent, material world is, in the last analysis, only a series ofideas and sensations plusbelief in the possibility of other sensations. Our conviction of the objective reality of a vivid consistent dream is analogous to our conviction of the validity of our waking experience. Dualism affirms, in opposition to all forms ofidealism, the independent, extramental reality of the material world. Among its chief arguments are the following:

Granted, then, thetruth of dualism, thepsychological question emerges: How does the mind come toknow the material world? Broadly speaking there are two answers. According to one the mind immediately perceives only its own representations orideas and from these it infers external material objects as the cause of theseideas. According to the other, in some of its acts it immediately perceives extended objects or part of the material world. As Hamilton says: "What we directly apprehend is the Non-ego, not some modification of the Ego". The theory which maintains an immediate perception of the non-ego he calls natural dualism or natural realism. The other, which holds a mediate cognition of the non-ego, as the inferred cause of a representation immediately apprehended, he terms hypothetical dualism or hypothetical realism. Thedoctrine of immediate or presentative perception is that adopted by the great body ofScholasticphilosophers and is embodied in the dictum that theidea, concept, ormental act of apprehension isnon id quod percipitur sed medium quo res percipitur — not that which is perceived but the medium by which the object itself is perceived. This seems to be the only account of the nature ofknowledge that does not leadlogically toidealism; and the history of the subject confirms this view. But affirmation of themind's capacity for immediate perception of the non-ego and insistence on the distinction betweenid quod andid quo percipitur, do not dispose of the whole difficulty. Modernpsychology has become genetic. Its interest centres in tracing the growth and development of cognition from the simplest and most elementary sensations of infancy. Analysis of the perceptive processes of a later age, e.g. apprehension of size, shape, solidity, distance, and other qualities of remote objects, proves that operations seemingly instantaneous and immediate may involve the activity of memory,imagination, judgment, reasoning, and subconscious contributions from the past experience of other senses. There is thus much that is indirect and inferential in nearly all the percipient acts of mature life. This should be frankly admitted by the defender of natural dualism, and the chiefpsychological problem for him at the present day is to sift and discriminate what is immediate and direct from what is mediate or representative in the admittedly complex cognitional operations of normal adult life.

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