Dualism

The term dualism dates from 1794. A modern definition of dualism is "a theory that considers reality to consist of two irreducible elements or modes; the quality or state of being dual or of having a dual nature; a doctrine that the universe is under the dominion of two opposing principles one of which is good and the other evil: a view of human beings as constituted of two irreducible elements (such as matter and spirit) e.g. mind-body dualism: the idea, inherited from Plato and Descartes and Mill and many others, that the human body can be meaningfully distinguished from the human mind."

Dualism is defined as "Any view that postulates two kinds of a thing in some domain is dualistic; contrasting views according to which there only one kind of a thing are monistic. The most famous example of the contrast is mind-body dualism, contrasted with monism in the form either of idealism (only mind)or more often physicalism (only body or matter). Cartesian dualism is the cluster of vews about mind and body associated with Descartes. Other dualisms include those of form ad content, of concept and intuition, freedom and causation, being and becoming, reason and passion. In every case there are philosophers who insist that the way forward is to transcend these dualisms." – Blackburn

Dualism, in philosophy, is defined as "the use of two irreducible, heterogeneous principles (sometimes in conflict, sometimes complementary) to analyze the knowing process (epistemological dualism) or to explain all of reality or some broad aspect of it (metaphysical dualism). Examples of epistemological dualism are being and thought, subject and object, and sense datum and thing; examples of metaphysical dualism are God and the world, matter and spirit, body and mind, and good and evil. Dualism is distinguished from monism, which acknowledges only one principle, and from pluralism, which invokes more than two basic principles."

"In religion, dualism means the belief in two supreme opposed powers or gods, or sets of divine or demonic beings, that caused the world to exist. It may conveniently be contrasted with monism, which sees the world as consisting of one principle such as mind (spirit) or matter; with monotheism; or with various pluralisms and polytheisms, which see a multiplicity of principles or powers at work. As is indicated below, however, the situation is not always clear and simple, a matter of one or two or many, for there are monotheistic, monistic, and polytheistic religions with dualistic aspects.

"Various distinctions may be discerned in the types of dualism in general. In the first place, dualism may be either absolute or relative. In a radical or absolute dualism, the two principles are held to exist from eternity; for example, in the Iranian dualisms, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, both the bright and beneficent and the sinister and destructive principles are from eternity."


The Jewish View of Dualism

"There is a biblical basis to the idea of the existence in man's nature of an instinctive tendency or impulse (yeẓer as in Ps. 103:14 from yaẓar, i.e., to "form" or "create" as in Gen. 2:8), which, left to itself, would lead to his undoing by prompting him to act in a manner contrary to the will of God (whence the term yeẓer ha-ra or "inclination to evil"). Thus, in Genesis 5 it is stated that "every inclination of the thoughts of his — i.e., man's — heart is only evil continually" and again in Genesis 8:21 "for the inclination of man's heart is evil from his youth." The doctrine of the two inclinations (or drives) is a major feature of rabbinic psychology and anthropology.

"As a personification of the permanent dualism of the choice between good and evil, the rabbinic notion of the two inclinations shifts this dualism from a metaphysical to a more psychological level (i.e., two tendencies in man rather than two cosmic principles). According to the rabbis, man was created with two opposing inclinations or tendencies, one impelling him toward the good and the other toward evil. This, in their opinion, was indicated by the employment in the term Vayyiẓer used in regard to man's creation in Genesis 2:7, of two yods (Ber. 61a). However, even the so-called yeẓer ha-ra, which corresponds roughly to man's untamed natural (and especially sexual) appetites or passions, is not intrinsically evil and, therefore, not to be completely suppressed. Without it, a human being would never marry, beget children, build a house, or engage in trade (Gen. R. 9:7). It is only when it gets out of hand that it becomes the cause of harm. An effective antidote is the study and observance of Torah (cf. Kid. 30b). This would suggest that the Torah is conceived as an ordering, guiding, and disciplining principle with regard to the untamed natural urges. While the yeẓer ha-ra is created in man at birth, the yeẓer ha-tov, which combats it, first makes its appearance 13 years later at the time of his bar-mitzvah, i.e., when one assumes the "Yoke of the Torah" and with the onset of the age of reflection and reason (cf. Eccles. R., 4:13, 1). Unless it is checked and controlled, the yeẓer ha-ra will grow like habit. At first it resembles the thread of a spider's web but at the end it is like the stout rope of a wagon (Suk. 52a). Another parable describing the yeẓer ha-ra is that of a wayfarer who starts out by being taken in as a guest and ends by making himself the master of the house (ibid. 52b). Greatness does not necessarily render a human being immune from the power of the yeẓer ha-ra, which manifests itself in such traits as vindictiveness and avarice (Sif. Deut. 33), anger (Shab. 105b), and vanity (Gen. R. 22:6). In fact, the greater the man, the stronger are such tendencies apt to be in him. The yeẓer ha-ra operates only in this world. It does not exist in angels or other spiritual beings (Lev. R. 26:5). "In the world to come," said the amora *Rav, "there is no eating or drinking, procreation or barter, envy or hate" (Ber. 17a). The yeẓer ha-ra has been personified by being identified with Satan, man's tempter in this world and his accuser in the world to come, and also with the Angel of Death (BB 16a; cf. Suk. 52b). In Genesis (3:1ff.) the serpent is presented as man's tempter. Whether the devil, Sammael, merely employed the serpent as an instrument of himself assumed the form of a serpent is not clear from the text of the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch."

Bibliography: Porter, in: Biblical and Semitic Studies… Essays… (1901), 91–156; G.F. Moore, Judaism…, 1 (1927), 479–93; S. Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology (1936), index; C.G. Montefiore and H. Loewe, Rabbinic Anthology (1938), index S.V. Evil Inclination. S. Klein-Braslavy, Maimonides Interpretation of the Adam Stories in Genesis (A Study in Maimonides' Anthropology) (1986), 212–17 (Heb.); B. Braun, "True Will, or Evil Inclination: Two Ḥaredi Thinkers' Concept of Freedom," in: Hagut, 1 (1998), 97–125 (Heb.).


The Catholic View of Dualism:

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

"First, the name has been used to denote the religious or theological system which would explain the universe as the outcome of two eternally opposed and coexisting principles, conceived as good and evil, light and darkness, or some other form of conflicting powers. We find this theory widely prevalent in the East, and especially in Persia, for several centuries before the Christian Era. The Zend-Avesta, ascribed to Zoroaster, who probably lived in the sixth century BC and is supposed to be the founder or reformer of the Medo-Persian religion, explains the world as the outcome of the struggle between Ormuzd and Ahriman. Ormuzd is infinite light, supreme wisdom, and the author of all good; Ahriman is the principle of darkness and of all evil. In the third century after Christ, Manes, for a time a convert to Christianity, developed a form of Gnosticism, subsequently styled Manichaeism, in which he sought to fuse some of the elements of the Christian religion with the dualistic creed of Zoroastrianism. Christian philosophy, expounded with minor differences by theologians and philosophers from St. Augustine downwards, holds generally that physical evil is the result of the necessary limitations of finite created beings, and that moral evil, which alone is evil in the true sense, is a consequence of the creation of beings possessed of free wills and is tolerated by God. Both physical and moral evil are to be conceived as some form of privation or defect of being, not as positive entity. Their existence is thus not irreconcilable with the doctrine of theistic monism.

Second, the term dualism is employed in opposition to monism, to signify the ordinary view that the existing universe 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 a monistic origin of all things. The theistic doctrine of creation gives a monistic account of the universe in this sense. Dualism is thus opposed to both materialism and idealism.

"Historically, in Greek philosophy as early as 500 BC 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 all eternity. 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 to God. Evil and disorder in the world have their source in the resistance of matter which God has not altogether vanquished. Here we seem to have a trace of the Oriental speculation. Again there is another dualism in man. The rational soul 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 of matter and form — a potential and an actualizing principle — runs through all branches of his system. Necessarily coeternal with God, Who is pure actuality, there has existed the passive principle of matter, which in this sense, however, is mere potentiality. But further, along with God Who is the Prime Mover, there must also have existed from all eternity the World moved by God. In his treatment of cognition Aristotle adopts the ordinary common-sense view of the existence of individual objects distinct from our perceptions and ideas of them. Man is an individual substantial being resulting from the coalescence of the two principles — form (the soul) and matter.

"Christianity rejected all forms of a dual origin of the world which erected matter, or evil, or any other principle into a second eternal being coexistent with God, and it taught the monistic origin of the universe from one, infinite, self-existing spiritual Being who freely created all things. The unfamiliar conception of free creation, however, met with considerable opposition in the schools of philosophy and was abandoned by several of the earlier heresies. The neo-Platonists sought to lessen the difficulty by emanastic forms of pantheism, and also by inserting intermediate beings between God and the world. But the former method implied a materialistic conception of God, while the latter only postponed the difficulty. From the thirteenth century, through the influence of Albertus Magnus and still more of St. Thomas Aquinas, the philosophy of Aristotle, though subjected to some important modifications, became the accredited philosophy of the Church. The dualistic hypothesis of an eternal world existing side by side with God was of course rejected. But the conception of spiritual beings as opposed to matter received fuller definition and development. The distinction between the human soul and the body which it animates was made clearer and their separability emphasized; but the ultra-dualism of Plato was avoided by insisting on the intimate union of soul and body to constitute one substantial being under the conception of form and matter.

"The problem of dualism, however, was lifted into quite a new position in modern philosophy by Descartes. Indeed, since his time it has been a topic of central interest in philosophical speculation. His handling of two distinct questions, the one epistemological, 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 to Descartes the soul is res 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 the Platonic 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 of Descartes were driven to invent the hypothesis of occasionalism and Divine assistance, according to which it is God Himself who effects the appropriate change in either body or mind on the occasion of the corresponding change in the other. For this system of miraculous interferences Leibniz substituted the theory of pre-established harmony according to which God has coupled pairs of bodies and souls 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 those psychologists and philosophers at the present day who reject the doctrine of the soul as a real being capable of acting on the body which it informs. The ultra-dualism of Descartes was immediately followed on the Continent by the pantheistic monism of Spinoza, which identified mind and matter in one infinite substance of which they are merely "modes."

"The cognitional question Descartes solves by a theory of knowledge according to which the mind immediately perceives only its own ideas or modifications. The belief in an external world corresponding to these ideas 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 own ideas, but he assumed a real external world which corresponds to these ideas, at least as regards the primary qualities of matter. Berkeley, accepting Locke's assumption that the mind immediately cognizes only its own ideas, raised the question: What grounds have we for believing in the existence of a material world corresponding to those ideas? He concludes that there are none. The external cause of these ideas is God Who awakens them in our minds by regular laws. 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 from God. 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 we know to exist are ideas 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 innate mental 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 the Kantian dualism to idealistic monism. The strongest and most consistent defenders of dualism in modern philosophy have been the Scotch School, including Reid, Stuart, and Hamilton. 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:

"Does there exist a material world outside of our minds and independent of our thought?

"Supposing such a world to exist, how does the mind attain to the cognition of it?

{The Poison Pill of Materialism in the Catholic Position}

"The former question belongs to epistemology, material logic, or general philosophy; the latter to psychology. It is true 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 only know its own states or representations, and that what we suppose to be an independent, material world is, in the last analysis, only a series of ideas and sensations plus belief 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 of idealism, the independent, extramental reality of the material world. Among its chief arguments are the following:

"Our belief in the existence of other minds is an inference from their bodies. Consequently the denial of an external material world involves the rejection of all evidence for the existence of other minds, and lands the idealist in the position of "Solipsism".

"Physical science assumes the existence of a material world, existing when unperceived, possessing various properties, and exerting various powers according to definite constant laws. Thus astronomy describes the movements of heavenly bodies moving in space of three dimensions, attracting each other with forces inversely proportioned to the square of the distance. It postulates the movement and action of such bodies when they are invisible as well as when they are visible through long periods of time and over vast areas of space. From these assumptions it deduces future positions and foretells eclipses and transits many years ahead. Observations carried out by subsequent generations verify the predictions. Were there not an extramental world whose parts exist and act in a space and time truly mirrored by our cognitions and ideas, such a result would be impossible. The branches of science dealing with sound, light, heat, and electricity are equally irreconcilable with idealism."

In refutation of the above materialistic Catholic view, we recommend F. H. Bradley's Appearance and Reality.

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References

Blackburn, Simon. "Dualism," Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 3rd ed. Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 141.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Dualism". Encyclopedia Britannica, June 19, 2017, accessed January 29, 2021.

Jewish Virtual Library. "Inclination, Good and Evil," Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2008 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved. Accessed April 20, 2021.

Maher, Michael. "Dualism." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 5. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909. Accessed January 29, 2021.

Merriam Webster Dictionary. "Dualism." Merriam-Webster.com, accessed January 29, 2021.

Stefon, Matt and Bianchi, Ugo. "Dualism". Encyclopedia Britannica, April 27, 2016. Accessed 29 January 2021.


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