What is meant by Cartesian dualism? How does Spinoza solve the issue?
Cartesian dualism is the concept of dualism, dealing with the dual existence of man.
He
believed that man consisted of:
Mind
Matter
He
believed that the human body and mind were two independent realities. The
entire universe is composed of things that fall into only 2 categories – body
& mind. With the criteria of I think, therefore I exist, he finds that he
is aware of himself as a conscious being that doubts, asserts, denies etc. Even
sense perceptions such as seeing, hearing, feeling are properties of his
consciousness and not of his body. He thus arrives at knowledge that he is
distinct from the body because he can know that he exists and that he has many
powers. He concluded that mind and body must be distinct substances, conjoined.
To be distinct means that it is possible for the self to continue to exist when
the conjunction is broken by death. Thus by freeing from the reliance on sense
experience as a basis for certainty, he establishes that we are essentially
mind, even though we have bodies, and that matter is extension. He says, if we
rely on sense experience, we will never know that mind is non-extended reality.
Matter is essentially extension that the sense experiences are produced in
mind. Matter thus has no inherent forms or final causes within it; it operates
mechanically. But he fails to explain the interaction of how mind and body
works. He has no answer to this problem.
For
Spinoza mind and body are the same substance. Thus, mind and body are
ontologically the same thing, the same reality or substance. The mind is
inseparable from the body, and vice-versa, the same reality or substance.
Spinoza makes a distinction between thought and extension as two different
attributes of the one ontological substance. Mind and body are attributes of
substance, the only two out of infinity of attributes that we are aware of.
Each thing is both and thought and extension. The thought is what is known
through ideas and the extension is what exists and is sensed physically.
Thought is a mental property and extension is a physical property. He said,
thought and extension are parallel realities. Spinoza believed the mind and
body are different conceptually but not ontologically. They are two different
ways of description. Thus, reality can be described in terms of casually
ordered physical bodies or as logically ordered sequences of ideas. Yet, there
cannot be two different casual sequences, one of the mind and one of the body,
but the same sequence conceptually viewed in different ways. The mind and body
act simultaneously, so we cannot even say that one determined the other.
Thought is the consciousness of extension and extension is the manifestation of
thought, and neither has any freedom from the other. This is how he solved the
problem of Cartesian dualism.
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