Comparison Of Dualism In Descartes Philosophy Of Mind

Descartes’ philosophy of mind in terms of immaterialism is closely associated with Dualism. His proposition is that mind and body are not identical, or can be rephrased as, mental phenomena are non-physical.

Descartes’ whole structure of philosophy is presented by the way of Dualism to some extent. He distinctly divides the world into several entities of different nature and characters, each of which is independent. So in terms of mind-body relationship, he proposes the mind-body dichotomy. But when he has anatomized the major difference between the two, he had to get back to it because he is bothered with the explanation of the synergy and interaction between mind and body. So he is facing with the major confrontation between the dualism and the mind-body synergy in my way of interpretation.

Dualism is tenacious and flexible because it is not running counter to people’s intuition – mind and body are different. This is the most common opinion towards the mind-and-body issue, which is something we take for granted. In our daily lives, the difference between the state of mind and state of material is obvious: First of all, subject of material occupies space; it takes up space and is presented dimensionally. The subject of mind is invisible and therefore does not take up space. Second, attributes of mind are different from those of material. For example, when pain is inflicted upon our body, we can only FEEL it but according to neurologist’s account there’s nothing in our nerves that is found identical to the characteristics of pain. Third, the cognitive characteristics that we have for knowledge are different. Put it this way, perception towards material is ‘public’, or say, every individual who has certain intact body structure ...

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...perceive and to think, we need to have a BODY to carry the thinking and perceiving activity. Subject matter are more transparent and clear than object matter. For example, we see, we touch, we imagine wax so we come to the conclusion that wax does exit; the subject matter that carries these activity are self-explanatory.

To put it in a nutshell, ‘Cogito ergo sum’ is the starting point of the whole structure of Descartes’ philosophy. But it is the ‘epitaph’ of his ‘universal doubt’. ‘Cogito ergo sum’ is not pure immaterialism. Rather it’s pure theory of perception. It is fallible to conclude that Descartes is immaterial; it is very vulnerable and susceptible to attack, because the immaterialism is derived from Descartes whole body structure of his philosophy. While in light of ‘I think, (therefore) I exist’, it is not pure immaterial or material to say the least.