Aware: Dualism and the onus of proof

It's a work in progress. Includes animal breath.

One is often told or reads that the natural assumption of human cultures more or less universally is that humanity is composed of two parts – the body and the spirit. But I wonder if this is actually the case. There is evidence of early religions and philosophies  being effectively materialistic, in that even if they allowed resurrection the body needed to be reconstituted first (e.g., Ezekiel 37, which is probably a parable for Israel itself). Qoheleth, or Ecclesiastes in the Christian tradition, is explicitly monistic:

I said in my heart with regard to human beings that God is testing them to show that they are but animals. For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knows whether the human spirit goes upwards and the spirit of animals goes downwards to the earth? (3:18-21)

The term “breath” here is ru’ah, which is literally breath, but is also used for “spirit”.¹ Likewise in Greek writings, the soul is psuché which is the word for breath, and also used for “soul”, and Latin is anima, which is the motive power of organisms (i.e., animals). None of these in themselves imply dualism. It is clear by observation that there is a difference between living and dead bodies – one breathes and moves, and the other doesn’t. So the (in our terms) physical process of breathing is what indicates the life of an animal and humans.

This isn’t an argument that there was no supernatural or preternatural thinking, in terms of spirits, invisible gods, and so forth, before a certain period or stage in civilisation, and there was certainly belief in afterlife, but afterlife took place in either a physical realm (Semitic Sheol, Nordic Hel and Valhalla, and early Christian hell and heaven) or was a shadow of actual life (Roman Elysian fields, the Greek underworld that heroes can actually visit and retrieve lost loves). Even animists thought of spirits as a kind of physical thing which could be manipulated.

The person who sometimes gets tagged as the originator of the view that the soul or mind is separate from the body is Plato, Both he and Aristotle were dualists (in differing ways) but I suspect they are not the originators of this view, but that there is some Asian influence here. In the millennium prior to the Greek period of philosophy, the Indo-Aryans in the Indus Valley formulated the Vedic religion and traditions that eventually evolved, around the period of Plato and Aristotle, into Hinduism. I suspect this influence reached the Hellenes via Persia.

These Indo-Aryans either invented or extended the notion of the transmigration of souls (perhaps from their ancestral Yamnaya culture in the central Asian steppes, but probably not), which implied that souls and the body were separable. The result was a pre-Hindu, or perhaps proto-Hindu, religious tradition. Hinduism proper did not evolve until later, so perhaps there was a two-way influence between the Hellenic cultures and the Indian cultures as they traded, and perhaps proselytised.

My point, though, is that the separation of the soul from the body had to develop. Beliefs in spirits (in “animism”) precedes dualism by a long time, but at best this involved something like spirits of place, spirits of ancestors and a physical, or at least embodied but shadowy, afterlife. It did not make metaphysical claims, since spirits (usually as breath or wind) were a part of the embodied world.

Dualism seems to have come to a head under the doctrinal nature of Christian theology and the influence of Greek philosophy (filtered through a series of misunderstandings of Plato and Aristotle, but that’s a whole other story). For example, the church fathers, the founding theologians of Christianity, emphasised the soul’s separation from the corruptible physical state (e.g., Augustine), but this did not get a full treatment until Aristotle’s form-substance distinction made it possible for late medieval theology by Aquinas and others to treat the soul as an indivisible substance not made of matter. But this Hellenistic concept was not original to biblical ideas. However, the soul-body distinction set up the mind-body distinction introduced by Descartes. In fact, soul = mind in philosophy and theology.  So, dualism is not, in my view, the default or naive view all humans have. It was something that developed over time, in particular places, and which is successful because it hijacks existing human tendencies to see agency in the world.

Why this is important has to do with the question of who has the onus or burden of proof. If the default view of humanity is dualism, as dualists like to assert, then the onus is on the monist. Common sense is often the target of reductive explanations in science. The Galilean thought experiment of two different sized cannon balls dropped separately from a tower, and what they would do if chained together, is a case in point. The physics of the time owed much to Aristotle’s Physics, including the name, and in many ways, Aristotelian physics is a rigorous discussion of common sense physics, including such axioms as nothing moves without a mover, and lighter things fall more slowly than heavier things.² Galileo felt the need to demonstrate the fact that this late classical misreading of Aristotle which was, at the time, the scholarly consensus, insofar as scholars cared much for physics, was false. Of course, medieval scholars had argued against this reading of Aristotle (or, as they had thought, Aristotle himself) for some centuries before Galileo, but since most of the intellectuals of his day were theologians primarily, only developments in astronomy (by Kepler and Tycho especially) led to such arguments in the western scholarly world.³

I say all this to illustrate an often overlooked fact: outside of the law, there is no standing burden of proof on anyone in a dispute. Who is on the front foot, and who is on the back foot, depends on a range of factors. What is the consensus? What are the traditions, and the connotations or associations of each? What stage of debate has been reached – is it mature or just starting up? And so on. Most of all, though, what needs a defence depends very much on what the authorities, political and religious as well as scholarly, find to their benefit, and what sanctions are made on those who debate. In short, there is no such thing as a disinterested⁴ argument. Power relationships affect what can, and is assumed to be able to, be said.

This has a type of logical form known as erotetics, or the logic of questions and answers. This was introduced by Archbishop Richard Whately in the early nineteenth century, and revived in the mid twentieth, A version of it appears as “contrastive explanation” in the philosophy of science, by Bas van Fraassen and Alan Garfinkel. According to this, an explanation (or, in R. G. Collingwood’s view, any statement whatsoever) is made in answer to a question that presumes a set of viable alternates, which Peter Lipton called “the foil”. An example would help.

Willie “The Actor” Sutton, patron saint of erotetics.

In the early twentieth century, there was a bank robber of some renown, Willie Sutton, who was supposed to have responded to an interviewer who asked “Willie, why do you rob banks?” To which he replied “Because that’s where the money is.”⁵ The interviewer’s foil was “ROB BANKS/EARN MONEY HONESTLY” while Willie’s was, if this is not apocryphal, “ROB BANKS/ROB OTHER PLACES”. His answer explains why he robbed banks and not corner stores or police stations. In so explaining his actions, very pragmatically, he makes the result rational from his perspective. Of course you are going to rob banks if you want money. What else would you rob?

Intellectual arguments are like this, and to make matters more complex, the foils can change the meaning of the questions over time. Aristotle’s view of soul (psuchē) was that it was a specific kind of motivating force. There were three kinds of soul: growth or nutrient soul, motion or animating soul, and rational soul (in Greek, noûs). Emotions, for example, were motions, while reason was something that only humans (anthropoi) had. But when Aristotle was incorporated into Christian theology along with Plato, the notion of soul changed to become a substance that survived death, more in line with Platonic than Aristotelian metaphysics. By the time Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus had merged Catholic theology with the recently revived Aristotle in the west, there was one meaning of soul, and it included mind. The mind-body problem was set up as the default way to identify the explanatory targets in the west thereafter. That problem posed a challenge to monists to resolve this division, and so the monists were on the back foot.

But suppose we don’t take this as the default? What then? Well, the dualists need to show reasons for adopting an even more complex metaphysics that, say, straight out physicalism. What justifies, philosophically speaking, that extra domain of reality? Why go that way? That is basically my argument here: adopt only what is needed to account for the world as experienced. And intuitions and verbal quasi-definitions won’t do it. 

This is a kind of anti-Cartesian argument. In his search for certainty, Descartes espoused a radical skepticism, and from that derived his dualist metaphysics. To achieve that, he needed to appeal to an even more fragile notion – God and His benevolence – to account for how it is that a body will behave in concert with a mind (given that mind is not physical). Later, Bishop Berkeley went whole hog, denying there even was a mind-independent reality. In my opinion, neither radical skepticism nor the priority of mind are reasonable strategies for explaining us being aware. In short, this is erotetically inverted.⁶

One of the reasons for this inversion of the question is, I think, anthropomorphism. Human cognition is designed to set human interests at the centre of everything. After all, what else would a cognitive organism evolve to put first? But we have been careful in science to avoid anthropomorphism for several hundred years (and arguably, the history of early modern science is one of evading this error where it is a mistake), although philosophy is rather less careful. If we assume no prior commitment to dualism, to the centrality of the “human” mind, and to our linguistic practices of nounification, we might change the entire focus of the discussion.

1. There is another biblical word, nephesh, which is often translated as soul, but which is used in the Bible to denote a living being, human or not.

2. Although there is a fair bit of myth-making here. Aristotle was well aware of the resistance of air. The claim that Aristotle thought that light things would fall more slowly in natural motion (but not in a vacuum, or voids, as Aristotle denied the atomism required for vacuums to be real) seems to be based on two Neo-Platonist commentators, Simplicius of Cilicia and John Philoponus, in the fifth century CE. In fact, the idea of differential rates of falling seems to be based on the latter’s argument.

3. Note that in the eastern Christian world, the Islamic world, in the Indus Valley, in east Asia and so forth, discussions were at different stages to the west. Also note that astrology motivated nearly all these regions to think about the heavens, especially the late medieval west.

4. Meaning “without an interest in the outcome”, not “uninterested”.

5. The received opinion is that he did not say this. But I think it likely he did, and sowed confusion after, as was his style. See this site.

6. Erotetic Inversions is the name of my band, when I form one