René Descartes was born in Tourain, a small town of La Haye, France (1596-1650). He was educated since the age of eight
in the Jesuit school La Fléchè in Anjou where he got the habit of meditating during the morning. He took interest in a large amount of subjects from mathematics to philosophy passing through logic, mechanics and law. This panoplia of interests made him a reference in several dominious.
One of his biggest leggacies was the foundation of Dualism a philosophic theory which gave the first systematic explanation about the relationship between mind and body: the interactionism mind/body is based on the separation between the two entities. The soul and the body are two completely different substances. The essency of the body is the extension. However the soul has no extension and its essency is the thought. Although the body, like a mechanism, is able to execute many tasks without the intervention of the soul, this purely thinking substance can sometimes regulate it.
This is a very interesting theory which affects not only philosophy but also the way we see our life, society and humanity in general. Dualism answears to the mind/body problem but in a wider way than monist doctrines such as materialism and that opens an entire new universe of spiritual existence which is different and yet linked to the material world. This theory can be considered relevant by religious people because it supports most of religious views and by the ones who want to have another perspective on body and soul. It is also important to know what dualism is and its arguments in order to criticise in conscience.
I believe that there really is such thing as soul and that there are clear differences between it and the body. The soul is our mind (spirit) while the body is just the material shell which can be percepted through the senses.
Next I would like to justify my point of view in a more profound and detailed exposition. I will start by giving three arguments of my belief in the dualist theories (even if the body is non-existent the soul will logically persist; critic of Epiphenomenalism; Lao Tzu’s supporting view); then I will expose three problems Dualism still cannot solve (the mental causation theories, the non-dualism and the materialist theory). I will finish with the last argument: the difference in body and mind compositions.
In Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, he proves through philosophical premisses our existence as mind. He begins by saying that to achieve truth we must know what is real and what is not. We have to do so because God is a demoniac creature and he is always trying to trick us through our senses: “suppose that the heavens, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external things that we see, are only illusions and deceptions which He uses to take me in” (René Descartes, 100). He have to separate the truth from the lies and the existent things from the ficticious. The best (and only) process to do this is by using the doubt: if we start doubting of everything, without any convictions or beliefs, we can begin to select what is true in fact. In this way the first thing he sees as real is the mind: “Cogito ergo sum”. If I am doubting it is because I am able to think and to think I need some kind of existence; and to provide thought this existence must be intellectual. It is the cogito, the mind, the only proved existing entity.
At this time, we don’t know if the material world exists, we are still doubting in order not to be fooled by our sensed which proves the possible existence of the mind even without the body: “But I, who am certain that I am, do not yet know clearly enough what I am” (Descartes, 103). They can not be one and the same thing if we can believe one exists even when we do not believe in the other as a reality. We take from here that the philosopher proves the soul as an independent substance, self-suficient and maybe the only reality in the world even if the world is not real itself. Later, Descartes proves the existence of God and, through him, he also proves the existence of the matter defending that it is a clear and simple idea that God puts in our cogito and all ideas provenient from God are real: “the things we grasp very clearly and very distinctly are all true,
is assured only because God is or exists and because he is a perfect being, and because everything that is in use comes from him” (Descartes, 58). Even if this is based in a sofism (God exists because he is one of those clear ideas that are worth believing in; but we can believe this ideas because it is God himself who inserts them in our mind and by this way he gives them legitimacy – A is proved by B and B is proved by A – vicious circle) it only prevent us from believing in the existence of the body while the soul, as an independent reality, is still valid. Therefore we can say that even if there was a body it would be separate from the mind which can exist by itself in the absense of the matter.