How the dualism of Descartes ruined our mental health

How the dualism of Descartes ruined our mental health 

James Barnes is a psychotherapist working in San Francisco, and a writer with postgraduate degrees in philosophy and religion.

While it is true that there is value in ‘normalising’ irrational experiences like this, it comes at a great cost. These interventions work (to the extent that they do) by emptying our irrational experiences of their intrinsic value or meaning. In doing so, not only are these experiences cut off from any world-meaning they might harbour, but so too from any agency and responsibility we or those around us have – they are only errors to be corrected.

In the previous episteme, before the bifurcation of mind and nature, irrational experiences were not just ‘error’ – they were speaking a language as meaningful as rational experiences, perhaps even more so. Imbued with the meaning and rhyme of nature herself, they were themselves pregnant with the amelioration of the suffering they brought. Within the world experienced this way, we had a ground, guide and container for our ‘irrationality’, but these crucial psychic presences vanished along with the withdrawal of nature’s inner life and the move to ‘identity and difference’.

In the face of an indifferent and unresponsive world that neglects to render our experience meaningful outside of our own minds  –  for nature-as-mechanism is powerless to do this  –  our minds have been left fixated on empty representations of a world that was once its source and being. All we have, if we are lucky to have them, are therapists and parents who try to take on what is, in reality, and given the magnitude of the loss, an impossible task.

But I’m not going to argue that we just need to ‘go back’ somehow. On the contrary, the bifurcation of mind and nature was at the root of immeasurable secular progress –  medical and technological advance, the rise of individual rights and social justice, to name just a few. It also protected us all from being bound up in the inherent uncertainty and flux of nature. It gave us a certain omnipotence – just as it gave science empirical control over nature – and most of us readily accept, and willingly spend, the inheritance bequeathed by it, and rightly so.

It cannot be emphasised enough, however, that this history is much less a ‘linear progress’ and much more a dialectic. Just as unified psyche-nature stunted material progress, material progress has now degenerated psyche. Perhaps, then, we might argue for a new swing in this pendulum. Given the dramatic increase in substance-use issues and recent reports of a teenage ‘mental health crisis’ and teen suicide rates rising in the US, the UK and elsewhere to name only the most conspicuous, perhaps the time is in fact overripe.

How the dualism of Descartes ruined our mental health 

James Barnes is a psychotherapist working in San Francisco, and a writer with postgraduate degrees in philosophy and religion.

A lot of turgid prose, setting up substance or interactional dualism as a straw man to blame for all the evils of the prevalent scientistic reductionist materialism. 

Scientistic materialism says meaningless matter and energy are all that is - in this belief system the "spiritual" is just a superstitiously believed in fantasy. Consciousness is merely the workings of brain neurons.

Proper interactional dualism admits the reality of a spiritual immaterial existence, at the same time as also the reality of the material existence of matter and energy. In this belief system the brain and body allow spirit to manifest in the physical. There is a large body of paranormal empirical evidence for this.

The dualism of Descartes is not responsible for and should not be blamed for the anomie and alienation and existential despair of spiritless, meaningless materialism.

A lot of turgid prose, setting up substance or interactional dualism as a straw man to blame for all the evils of the prevalent scientistic reductionist materialism. 

Scientistic materialism says meaningless matter and energy are all that is - in this belief system the "spiritual" is just a superstitiously believed in fantasy. Consciousness is merely the workings of brain neurons.

Proper interactional dualism admits the reality of a spiritual immaterial existence, at the same time as also the reality of the material existence of matter and energy. In this belief system the brain and body allow spirit to manifest in the physical. There is a large body of paranormal empirical evidence for this.

The dualism of Descartes is not responsible for and should not be blamed for the anomie and alienation and existential despair of spiritless, meaningless materialism.

But is Descartes' dualism genuinely interactive? I don't completely disagree with you but I think this is a historical question - David Griffith for example has written about the Church's desire to separate the Divine from the material world as counter to esoteric teachings going on during the Renaissance.

In fact it seems you and the author aren't in complete disagreement - his argument seems to be we arrived at the modern materialism because of the claims of Cartesian dualism?