Cartesian dualism is no longer intellectually dominant in cutting-edge
philosophy or ecological science.
But institutionally and economically, its structures remain powerful.
The revolt is philosophical and pedagogical — not yet structural.
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
KR VALIDITY OF THE THEORY OF CARTESIAN AND ITS DUALISM
The validity of Cartesian dualism—the 17th-century theory proposed
by René Descartes that the mind and body are two distinct, interacting
substances—is widely considered to be outdated in contemporary science and
mainstream philosophy. While it historically served as a critical
foundation for modern science by allowing for the mechanistic study of the
body, it is now largely replaced by materialist and monist views that see
the mind as an emergent property of brain activity.
Descartes proposed that existence consists of two fundamentally
different types of things:
[Res Extensa (Material Substance)]: The physical body, which takes up
space, is divisible, and governed by mechanical, physical laws. [Res
Cogitans (Thinking Substance)]: The immaterial mind/soul, which does not
take up space, is indivisible, and holds the capacity for consciousness,
thought, and free will. [Interactionism]: Descartes argued that despite
being separate, the mind and body interact, famously proposing the pineal
gland as the site of this interaction.
Arguments Against Validity (Modern Critique)
The Interaction Problem: The most significant objection, raised first by
Elisabeth of Bohemia in Descartes' own time, is that immaterial substances
cannot physically move material ones. If the mind has no physical
properties, it cannot cause a physical change (e.g., lifting a hand).
Neuroscience and Brain Damage: Modern neuroscience shows that mental
processes are heavily dependent on physical brain structures. Damage to the
brain results in direct, predictable changes to personality, memory,
and consciousness,
suggesting that the "mind" cannot exist independently of the body.
Violation of Physical Laws: The interaction of a non-physical mind on the
physical brain would break the law of conservation of energy/mass.
Scientific Advancement: Darwinian evolution and subsequent advances in
biology have connected humans to all other living organisms, undermining
the view that the human mind is fundamentally different from animal
behavior (which Descartes deemed purely mechanistic).
Contemporary Relevance and Alternative Views
Still Intuitive*: Despite its rejection in academia, Cartesian dualism
remains a popular intuitive view, often supporting religious, spiritual, or
near-death experience beliefs.*
Philosophy of Mind: *It is replaced in academia by Physicalism (material
monism), which states that everything is physical, or Property Dualism,
which asserts that while there is only one substance, mental properties are
distinct from physical ones.*
"Ghost in the Machine": *Philosopher Gilbert Ryle notoriously referred to
Cartesian dualism as the "ghost in the machine," arguing it is a category
mistake—treating the mind as an independent "thing" rather than a
description of behavior.*
Psychoneuroimmunology: *Modern health science has moved towards a
"biopsychosocial" model, which acknowledges the intense interconnection of
mind and body, reversing the rigid separation Descartes instituted. *
Cartesian dualism is no longer considered a scientifically valid
explanation of human nature, but it remains historically significant as a
driver of the scientific method and a catalyst for the ongoing, complex
debate regarding the "hard problem" of consciousness.
*1 Cartesian Dualism and Gassendi's Objection*
The seventeenth century philosopher and mathematician
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/mathematicians>
Rene Descartes
famously held that, while the nature and behavior of nonhuman animals could
be explained completely by the physical science of his day, various
features of human beings—including in particular the fact that human
thought and action are not under direct environmental control—seemed to
place them beyond the reach of physical science. Descartes therefore
endorsed *dualism*, the idea that every human being
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/human-being> is a
complex of a physical body located in space and subject to physical laws
and an immaterial mind *not* located in space and *not* subject to physical
laws. *Descartes' contemporary Gassendi famously objected* that dualism
made a mystery of how bodily actions and movements could be caused by
immaterial psychological events: ‘How can there be effort directed against
anything, or motion set up in it, unless there is mutual contact between
what moves and is moved? And how can there be contact without a body?’
(Descartes and Cottingham et al. 1984). Gassendi's objection is an example
of a problem of causation in multiple domains. It turns on the fact that
there is causal contact between the mental and physical domains, something
which is difficult to understand if Cartesian dualism is true. However,
problems of this sort are by no means unique to the relationship between
the mental and the physical, nor to Descartes'specific account of that
relationship, and nor do they arise only from older ideas in science and
philosophy. On the contrary, they arise from a general picture of the world
which is very common in contemporary intellectual culture: *the causal
hierarchy picture*.
The cognitive science of the 20th century, reflecting the focus of
the individual cognitive sciences, was predominantly interested in
perception, memory, problem solving, planning, and other “cognitive”
activities. For the most part, researchers interested in cognition ignored
those aspects that, as a hangover from Cartesian dualism, were considered
“subjective”, such as consciousness and affect. This was due to a variety
of factors, including the inheritance of behaviourist and cognitivist
psychology. Although cognitivism was a reaction to the behaviourism of the
early to mid 20th century and thus directly opposed to many of its claims,
they both shared the assumption that the emotional domain was separate from
the cognitive domain, and furthermore, that emotion was potentially
dissociable from cognition. As a result, cognitive scientists have tended
to consider it unnecessary to understand affect in order to understand the
other aspects of cognition, and for the most part have left research in
this area to a handful of “affective” neuroscientists and psychologists.
So we acquire information about mathematical objects by means
of a faculty of mathematical intuition. Now, other philosophers have
endorsed the idea that we possess a faculty of mathematical intuition, but
Gödel's version of this view involves the idea that the mind is
non-physical in some sense and that we are capable of forging contact with,
and acquiring information from, non-physical mathematical objects. (Others
who endorse the idea that we possess a faculty of mathematical intuition
have a no-contact theory of intuition that is consistent with a materialist
philosophy of mind. Now, some people might argue that Gödel had such a view
as well. I have argued elsewhere [1998, chapter 2, section 4.2] that Gödel
is better interpreted as endorsing an immaterialist, contact-based theory
of mathematical intuition. But the question of what view Gödel actually
held is irrelevant here.) This reject-(1) strategy of responding to the
epistemological argument can be quickly dispensed with. One problem is that
rejecting (1) doesn't seem to help solve the lack-of-access problem. For
even if minds are immaterial, it is not as if that puts them into
informational contact with mathematical objects. Indeed, the idea that an
immaterial mind could have some sort of information-transferring contact
with abstract objects seems just as incoherent as the idea that a physical
brain could. Abstract objects, after all, are causally inert; they cannot
generate information-carrying signals at all; in short, information can't
pass from an abstract object to anything, material or immaterial. A second
problem with the reject-(1) strategy is that (1) is, in fact, true. Now, of
course, I cannot argue for this here, because it would be entirely
inappropriate to break out into an argument against Cartesian dualism in
the middle of an essay on the philosophy of mathematics, but it is worth
noting that what is required here is a very strong and implausible version
of dualism. One cannot motivate a rejection of (1) by merely arguing that
there are real mental states, like beliefs and pains, or by arguing that
our mentalistic idioms cannot be reduced to physicalistic idioms. One has
to argue for the thesis that there actually exists immaterial human
mind-stuff.
The term “biomental” (Ninivaggi, 2013, p. 5) was coined to transcend
the Cartesian dualism of body-mind separateness. Biomental efforts capture
the authentic integrity of the person as a biopsychosocial organism in flux
yet in ongoing integration:
I have coined the innovative phrase biomental child development, in which
the word “biomental” indicates a specific child development perspective.
This term refers to the integrity—nonduality and emergent integration—of
the whole individual at all ages in processes that are both psychological
and physical. It connotes simultaneity, a responsiveness of the total
organism, and the dynamic relatedness among its aspects. In states of
health, this relatedness reflects a synergy that promotes emerging dynamic
integration. The construct and phenomenon of integration—apparently
split-off parts understood to be aspects of a primary whole—is axiomatic in
the biomental perspective, and remains a golden thread running throughout
this text. p.5. *Eastern perspectives have always* recognized the intimate
links between body and mind and the energies pervading them. A health span
that linked wellness to a coupling of body and mind runs through that
literature. The term “biomental” also illustrates this. Formalizing these
forces by the terms qi and prana makes tangible the intangible. Such
paradoxical thought is a quintessential part of Eastern worldviews. Thus,
in discussing mindfulness, Eastern conceptions center attention on subtle
psychological processes, often using concepts scientifically foreign to
Western thought. This contribution aims at helping to bridge this gap in
understanding, at least as it adds to explaining the roots of modern
mindfulness.
Radical empiricism, in contrast, proposed an ontology that
continued his attack on Hegelian absolute idealism but broke sharply with
the commonsense mind–body dualism of his scientific psychology. To
transcend this Cartesian dualism, and the cognitive dualism of thought and
its object or consciousness and its contents, he now proposed pure
experience as the fundamental reality. Pure experience prior to analysis or
conceptualization does not distinguish between thing and thought. The
commonsense categories, he believed, could be recovered from the contexts
in which ingredients of pure experience are embedded and their various
relationships. His apparent move toward philosophical idealism was
qualified by his continuing commitment to pluralism: ‘… there is no general
stuff of which experience at large is made. If you ask what any one bit of
pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same: “It is made of
that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness,
heaviness, or what not”’ (1912/1976, p. 14–15).
Nature was thereby drained of her inner life, rendered a deaf and blind
apparatus of indifferent and value-free law, and humankind was faced with a
world of inanimate, meaningless matter, upon which it projected its psyche
– its aliveness, meaning and purpose – only in fantasy. It was this
disenchanted vision of the world, at the dawn of the industrial revolution
that followed, that the Romantics found so revolting, and feverishly
revolted against. Although Descartes’s dualism did not win the
philosophical day, we in the West are still very much the children of the
disenchanted bifurcation it ushered in. Our experience remains
characterised by the separation of ‘mind’ and ‘nature’ instantiated by
Descartes. Its present incarnation – what we might call the
empiricist-materialist position – not only predominates in academia, but in
our everyday assumptions about ourselves and the world. This is
particularly clear in the case of mental disorder.
In order to avoid these difficulties with substance dualism, many have
argued for “property dualism,” a view that holds there is only one real
substance, one kind of “stuff” as it were, but it has two distinct
properties, one material and one mental. Our experience of color, for
example, can be understood in these two ways. The wavelengths involved are
physical properties detectable by objective measurement and fully
implicated in material causal mechanisms. Color, on the other hand, is a
qualia, an experiential property accessible only to the experiencing
subject (which is why color blindness can easily go undetected); it is only
indirectly amenable to qualitative analysis. In other words, physical
properties are susceptible to objective, public, third-person analyses,
while experiential properties—qualia—are only accessible through
subjective, private, first person accounts. It is how we know them that
differs, not what they are. Notice the underlying structure of this. We
have shifted from substance dualism, which is ontological, to property
dualism, which is, in effect, epistemological: “experience” is the private,
subjectively accessible dimension while neurons, etc., are the public,
objectively accessible dimension. We have replaced a mind-body dualism with
a subject-object dualism. But in contrast to Yogācāra Buddhist analyses of
the interdependence of subject and object, which operate only in
interaction, these two are typically seen as independent—or even
incommensurate—epistemologies. Moreover, one or the other of them is
typically considered paramount. Eliminative or reductive materialism, for
example, claims that the subjective realm of experience only appears to be
independent, but even this can be effectively eliminated: once we know
enough about the brain we will be able to exhaustively explain experience
in material terms, the only real terms there are. This is a modern version
of the old appearance reality problem. *Qualia, what* we appear to
experience, have no truly independent reality and hence require no
nonmaterial explanation—they are purely epiphenomenal, mere by-products of
the material processes which alone are real. In effect, all first-person
accounts are valid only insofar as they directly reflect, or may be wholly
reduced to, third-person accounts. In this view, we can never truly explain
our behavior by appeal illiam waldron | 75 ing to direct experience—to our
desires, feelings, or intentions—since these are merely epiphenomenal.
Explanations of experience must —in principle—be couched in terms of their
material substrate. Indeed, not only is our desire to understand our minds
itself a mere by-product of these exclusively real material processes, but
so is any desire we might entertain to the contrary! We are in effect
automatons only imagining we are agents—such is the logic of reductive
materialism. In part as a response to this unappealing (and ultimately
incoherent) vision, many posit an intrinsic subjectivity, the counterpart
to the objective side of the subject-object dichotomy. If mind is
intrinsically intentional, if it is intrinsically “about something,” then
it possesses its own nature and properties independently of its material
substrate. As Feser (2006, 172) succinctly explains: brain processes,
composed as they are of meaningless chemical components, seem as inherently
devoid of intentionality as sound-waves or ink marks. Any intentionality
they do have would have to be derived from something else. But if
everything that is physical is devoid of intentionality, then whatever has
intentionality would have to be nonphysical. It follows then that since
mind does have intrinsic intentionality it must be nonphysical. But this
too has its problems. If our intentional objects, our qualia, were truly
independent of any material basis, they would not be involved in causal
interactions with the body. We could neither explain why we seem to
experience red when we drive up to a stop sign, since the qualia of this
seeing should occur independent of our retinas and visual faculties; nor
could we explain how this seeming experience of red is connected to our
actually stopping, since, again, the seeing is intrinsically nonphysical
and hence—by definition—unconnected to our nervous system or muscles. The
notion of qualia thus resembles a Cartesian immaterial essence, which
rendered causal interaction between body and mind so inexplicable. And
insofar as the notion of qualia assumes an underlying ontological dualism
between body and mind or an epistemological dualism between first and third
person modes of knowing, it has not yet resolved the mind-body problem.
Indeed, insofar as subjectivity is exclusively defined as first person and
private, and science depends on what is third person and public,
subjectivity in principle remains outside the purview 76 | Buddhist
Critique of materialist science (Feser 2006, 105).
Thus, to the extent that these three considerations are
pertinent— that neuroscience is a theory-laden human enterprise, that
meditators are not innocent informants but acculturated individuals, and
that all adult brains are radically socialized and linguistified—we cannot
assume a truly autonomous third-person knowledge set up against an equally
autonomous first-person knowledge, the correlation of which will give us
indubitably accurate knowledge about the relation between brain and
experience. All of these are inescapably intersubjective; that is, they are
related in their very origins. It is not enough for us to perceive them
coming together after the fact, as it were; we need to conceive of them as
together from the beginning.
Cartesian is far away from all of us; Life is running around the
property dualism; getting rid of dualism and Vishishtadvaita, while living
with the Karma unattached alone can make all do exist. WITHOUT WINGS
NOTHING CAN FLY; BUT TO GET THE WINGS WE HVE TO RIGGLE WITH DUALISM.
K Rajaram IRS 27226
On Fri, 27 Feb 2026 at 08:18, Markendeya Yeddanapudi <
[email protected]> wrote:
> Revolt in Universities against Cartesianism
>
>
>
>
> --Yes — though it rarely appears as an open “revolt against Cartesianism.”
>
> Instead, it emerges as intellectual movements that challenge reductionism,
> mechanistic thinking, and strict subject–object separation.
>
> What you are calling “Cartesianism” — the split between mind and matter,
> observer and observed, human and nature — is being questioned in multiple
> universities worldwide. The shift is gradual, plural, and often embedded
> within existing institutions rather than openly revolutionary.
>
> Here are some significant currents:
> ------------------------------
> 1. Systems Thinking & Complexity Science
>
> Universities influenced by systems theory reject reductionism as
> sufficient for understanding life.
>
> -
>
> The *Santa Fe Institute* Santa Fe Institute works on complexity
> science, studying wholes, emergence, and interconnected systems rather than
> isolated parts.
> -
>
> Programs in systems ecology, network science, and earth systems
> science emphasize interdependence.
>
> These approaches argue that the whole cannot be understood merely by
> dissecting parts — a direct challenge to Cartesian fragmentation.
> ------------------------------
> 2. Ecological Economics
>
> Some institutions are challenging growth-based economic orthodoxy.
>
> -
>
> The *Stockholm Resilience Centre* Stockholm Resilience Centre
> integrates planetary boundaries with economics.
> -
>
> Scholars influenced by thinkers like *Herman Daly* Herman Daly promote
> steady-state economics rather than perpetual growth.
>
> This reframes economics as embedded within ecology, not above it.
> ------------------------------
> 3. Deep Ecology & Environmental Humanities
>
> Certain universities host programs in environmental philosophy and
> humanities that question anthropocentrism and mechanistic worldviews.
>
> -
>
> Inspired by *Arne Næss* Arne Naess and deep ecology.
> -
>
> The *Schumacher College* Schumacher College (though not a traditional
> university) explicitly promotes holistic, non-dual ecological education.
>
> Environmental humanities departments increasingly critique the
> nature–culture divide.
> ------------------------------
> 4. Process Philosophy & Post-Cartesian Thought
>
> Philosophy departments influenced by *Alfred North Whitehead* Alfred
> North Whitehead emphasize process, relation, and becoming rather than
> static substance.
>
> Process philosophy rejects strict subject–object dualism and views reality
> as relational events.
> ------------------------------
> 5. Indigenous Knowledge Integration
>
> Many universities in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are incorporating
> Indigenous epistemologies, which tend to be relational and non-dual.
>
> For example:
>
> -
>
> The *University of British Columbia* University of British Columbia
> integrates Indigenous land-based learning programs.
>
> These approaches emphasize reciprocity with land rather than detached
> observation.
> ------------------------------
> 6. Contemplative Education Movements
>
> Some institutions integrate mindfulness and contemplative pedagogy into
> curricula.
>
> -
>
> The *Naropa University* Naropa University explicitly blends
> contemplative practice with academic study.
>
> This challenges the purely analytic model of knowing.
> ------------------------------
> Important Clarification
>
> There is no coordinated “anti-Cartesian revolution” sweeping universities.
>
> Instead, what exists is:
>
> -
>
> Fragmented reform
> -
>
> Parallel movements
> -
>
> Interdisciplinary experimentation
> -
>
> Growing dissatisfaction with hyper-reductionism
>
> Ironically, the critique of Cartesianism often happens within the very
> institutions shaped by it.
> ------------------------------
> Why There Is No Full Revolt
>
> 1.
>
> Universities are financially embedded in economic systems.
> 2.
>
> Research funding favors technological and market-oriented outcomes.
> 3.
>
> Ranking systems reward measurable output, not holistic transformation.
> 4.
>
> Students seek economic security, reinforcing the cycle.
>
> So change tends to be evolutionary, not revolutionary.
> ------------------------------
> The Present Moment
>
> However, there *is* increasing unrest:
>
> -
>
> Climate activism among students
> -
>
> Degrowth scholarship
> -
>
> Critique of neoliberal university models
> -
>
> Rising ecological anxiety among youth
>
> The dissatisfaction you express is not isolated.
> ------------------------------
> A Realistic Assessment
>
> Cartesian dualism is no longer intellectually dominant in cutting-edge
> philosophy or ecological science.
>
> But institutionally and economically, its structures remain powerful.
>
> The revolt is philosophical and pedagogical — not yet structural.
> ------------------------------
>
> If you would like, I can next:
>
> -
>
> Map out where a genuine structural transformation might realistically
> begin
> -
>
> Identify universities most aligned with holistic ecological education
> -
>
> Or analyze whether a complete break from Cartesianism is even possible
> in modern scientific civilization
>
> *Mar*
>
> --
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