Consciousness: Feser on dualism by Descartes (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, February 02, 2021, 21:31 (1391 days ago) @ David Turell

Our body is soul and material without a problem of interaction:

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2021/01/princess-elisabeth-of-bohemia-on-soul.html#more

"The letters exchanged between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia – especially their 1643 exchange on the interaction problem – are among the best-known correspondences in the history of philosophy. And justly so, for they help to elucidate the true nature of that crucial problem and the inadequacy of Descartes’ response to it.

"Contemporary property dualists suggest that a material substance, the human body, can have both physical and non-physical attributes. What Elisabeth is suggesting is that an immaterial substance, the soul, might have both physical and non-physical attributes.

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"This is an interesting proposal that amounts to a version of what is these days called property dualism, but of a very different kind than the sort usually on offer today. Contemporary property dualists suggest that a material substance, the human body, can have both physical and non-physical attributes. What Elisabeth is suggesting is that an immaterial substance, the soul, might have both physical and non-physical attributes.

"But there are two problems with this idea considered as a solution to the interaction problem facing Descartes. First, it turns out that even body-to-body interaction is not as unproblematic as Elisabeth (and most other people who comment on the interaction problem) assume. For Descartes’ abstract mathematical conception of matter is so desiccated that it is hard to see how it can have any efficacy at all with respect to anything, whether physical or non-physical. Occasionalism – attributing all causality to God rather than to anything in the created order – was a natural position for Cartesians like Malebranche to take, and Descartes himself arguably took it with regard to everything except soul-body interaction.

"A second problem is that if you are going to attribute physical properties to the soul in order to explain how it interacts with the body, why not go the whole hog and make the whole body itself an attribute of the soul? That way you don’t have to posit any interaction between soul and body at all, because they will no longer be distinct substances.

"Indeed, you’d be very close to returning to precisely the Scholastic conception of soul and body that Descartes was trying to replace. You’ll be treating a human being as one substance, not two, but a substance with both incorporeal powers (thinking and willing) and corporeal ones (seeing, hearing, digesting, walking, etc.). And I would say that that is indeed the correct solution to the interaction problem: to dissolve it by giving up the Cartesian thesis that soul and body are distinct substances, so that there aren’t any longer two things that need to “interact.”

"As I have often suggested, the real problem with Descartes’ position is not that he has trouble explaining how soul and body interact. The problem is that he thinks of them as interacting in the first place. It is that he posits two substances rather than one. And the reason this is a problem is that he thereby simply fails to capture the truth about human nature.

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“'How, if soul and body are two independent substances, can the soul affect the body in the specific way that it does (rather than in the way a ghost or an angel would)?” The problem is explaining how the body could be a true part of you rather than a mere extrinsic instrument that is no more part of you than any other physical object.

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"This is why Elisabeth’s point about body-to-soul causation is so important. If soul and body are two distinct substances, then even if the soul could, as a substance of a higher ontological order, produce effects in the body (even if only in the way an angel might), it is nevertheless entirely mysterious how the body could produce effects in the soul (any more than a stone or a tree could have any effect on an angel or demon).

"This problem does not arise for the Scholastic conception of soul and body, because, again, it does not regard them as distinct substances in the first place. A human being is one thing, not two, albeit a thing with both corporeal and incorporeal activities. And since it is one thing, the question of interaction does not arise."

Comment: This fits my view of soul body dualism as two interacting aspects of 'me', one material and one immaterial.