Opinion: Don’t blame Descartes—the dualism runs deep

On November 10, 1619, during a Saint Martin’s Eve celebration in Germany, a twenty-three-year-old French soldier slipped into a small room with a stove to do some thinking—and it changed the course of history.

Philosophy, it has been said, is one long footnote to Plato, but modern philosophy—indeed, much of the modern world—is arguably one long footnote to René Descartes. On that night near Ulm, the Catholic philosopher conceived of the unification of all the sciences into one great rational system, a mystical vision accompanied by three vivid dreams—and followed by a vow to make a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Loreto.

The fruit of Descartes’s search, as intro to philosophy students the world over have learned since, was his famous cogito (“I think, therefore I am”) and a sharp dualism of mind and body. On these two pillars rose the whole tradition of modern rationalism—and the tidal wave of scientism, skepticism, and subjectivism associated with it.

Descartes’s influence has made him the prime philosophical target among fellow Catholics. (A runner-up is John Duns Scotus, who at least has the advantage of being a Scholastic and a Blessed.) Thomists such as Jacques Maritain and (to a lesser degree) Etienne Gilson saw in Descartes an intellectual defector who threw the holistic spirit of medieval philosophy into the ash heap of history—the inflection from Aristotle and Thomas to Kant and Hegel.

And at the heart of the critique of Cartesianism was the French philosopher’s stark mind-body dualism.

As a young Catholic revert interested in philosophy and disoriented by the Meditations, I fell fairly quickly into this thinking, largely through reading Walker Percy. “The Self since the time of Descartes,” he wrote in Lost in the Cosmos, “has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection.”

A “dread chasm,” he added in Love in the Ruins, “has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house.”

Percy’s critique of Cartesian “angelism,” I later learned, was picked up from Maritain, so a careful reading of the latter’s Dream of Descartes soon followed. Descartes, it seemed, was the great villain who loosed substance dualism upon the world—especially, if Alexis de Tocqueville was right, upon America, “where philosophy is least studied, and where the precepts of Descartes are best applied.”

Percy and Maritain were, I think, basically right in their critique of Descartes. But over the years, I’ve also realized that heaping all our mind-body problems on his head—as I was once all too eager to do—is misguided. The fact is that substance dualism is a much deeper and broader current than Descartes’s philosophical project.

In the first place, Descartes himself wasn’t exactly a Cartesian dualist. He did argue that mind and body were distinct substances, but as a good Catholic, he was at least eager to show that they were, in the end, deeply connected. For Descartes, our five senses form a kind of bridge between the two, demonstrating that we’re not present in the body “as a pilot is present in a ship.” Instead, the mind is “very closely conjoined” to the body to “form a single entity with it.” Man—and here he joins his voice to the whole chorus of Catholic thinkers running from Augustine to John Paul II—is “a composite of mind and body.” The idea that Descartes was happy to sever man from his body is simply a caricature.

But secondly—and more importantly—Cartesian dualism emerged out of a wider river of human thought with several tributaries, as spotlighted by Bishop Barron in his recent homily for All Souls Day. One major tributary was Plato himself, whom Descartes drew comparisons to after publishing the Meditations. Another was Gnosticism, which merged Platonic dualism with grand mythological frameworks and resurfaced again and again in the first millennium. Arguably, Martin Luther’s own retreat into solitude exactly a century before Descartes—his “tower experience” in 1519—opened to a third, which Charles Taylor has called “excarnation”: a dualistic pull away from bodily expressions of Christian faith (“works”), and thus from the body itself.

In short, the impulse to seal the self off from the body is a much longer, older story. In fact, as I’ve argued in The Way of Heaven and Earth, the whole philosophical and religious trajectory of radical mind-body (or soul-body, or spirit-flesh) dualism is itself just one volume in an even bigger saga—a division of heaven and earth haunting the history of ideas. Descartes isn’t the root cause of our dysfunction—only a symptom.

Substance dualism continues to resurface in our culture in strange ways, from “body swap” stories to New Age spirituality to transgender ideology. We remain enamored with the idea that the “real me” is something utterly distinct and separable from my body. And while Descartes didn’t exactly get us off that train, and may have even pressed the gas, he didn’t put the wheels in motion. Neither, for that matter, did Plato, since substance dualism stretches beyond even him. The fault lies not in our sages but in ourselves—in the perennial human temptation to split the world in two and persuade others to do the same. And whoever started it, the weightier question is: Who can stop it? Who can integrate the mind and body once more—or show us how integrated they already are?

That cold November night in the heart of Germany may have changed history, but history also repeats itself. An ancient, sundering spirit is always crouching at the stove-room door, and “its desire is for you” (Gen. 4:7). It’s time to stop blaming that would-be “master of nature,” and to start mastering our age-old desire for division.