Joseph Pallattil

What is dualism? Dualism is a theory that there are two opposite principles in everything, for example good and evil. It is a state of having two parts. Therefore dualism is the belief that something is composed of two fundamentally different components.

Here in this article we are going to deal with the Cartesian dualism. Cartesian dualism deals specifically with the dual existence of human being. According to Rene Descartes, “Man is the only dualistic creature.” Rene Descartes believed that a human being consisted of two substances, namely: Body and Mind. The body is the physical stuff that walks, talks and so on. The Mind is the nonphysical substance that thinks, doubts, remembers and so on. Cartesian dualism is his thesis that mind and body are really distinct. He reaches this conclusion by arguing that the nature of the mind is completely different from that of the body and therefore it is possible for one to exist without the other. Descartes arrived at the understanding of human being as a dualistic being, by way of his famous method of doubt. Through his process of doubting, he recognized that, regardless of what the changeable physical world was really like, his mind was still whole and unchanged, and therefore somehow separate from that physical world.

In this dualistic mechanism, what and where is the interaction between mind and body? How the nonphysical mind does interacts with the physical body? Descartes believed that the pineal gland in the brain was the locus of interaction between the mind and body because he believed that this gland was the only part of the brain that was not a duplicate.

The real distinction of mind and body based on their completely diverse natures is the root of the famous mind-body problem: “how can these two substances with completely different natures causally interact so as to give rise to a human being capable of having voluntary bodily motions and sensations?” “As regards the soul and the body together, we have only the notion of their union, on which depends our notion of the soul’s power to move the body, and the body’s power to act on the soul and cause its sensations and passions”. “But we also experience within ourselves certain other things, which must not be referred either to the mind alone or to the body alone. These arises, as will be made clear in the appropriate place, from the close and intimate union of our mind with the body.”