Philosopher's Dualism vs Layperson Dualism?

Something I've been thinking about - the philosophical conception of dualism is two distinct categories, usually for our purposes one substance that is our bodies and one substance that is the stuff of our souls.

But for the lay person does this really come down to two distinct substances? Rather isn't the concern the distinction between the life we live in our earthly body and the life we would live in our afterlife?


For example certain Eastern traditions would talk about grades of substance, with the lower grade constituting this base world and higher grades going back up to some Source.

Also some stuff about soul/body distinction relating to grades of matter from the Islamic world:

"The concept of this dimension of light, an archetypal dimension because it grounds every being in another self which keeps eternally ahead of him,can provide us with the key to a celestial world inhabited by figures who are constituted and governed in their being by a law of their own, a law with its very own logic. The responses we have just read refer to the twofold plane or twofold state of being which characterizes Mazdean ontology,and which is designated by the two terms menok and getik. We must take care not to reduce the contrast they express to a Platonic schema pure and simple. We are not dealing precisely with an opposition between idea and matter, or between the universal and the perceptible. Menok should, rather,be translated by a celestial, invisible, spiritual, but perfectly concrete state.Getik designates an earthly visible, material state, but of a matter which is in itself wholly luminous, a matter immaterial in relation to the matter that we actually know. For, and this is the peculiarly Mazdean conception,a transition to the state of getik means in itself not a fall but rather fulfillment and plenitude. The state of infirmity, of lesser being and darkness represented by the present condition of the material world, results not from its material condition as such but from the fact that it is the zone invaded by the demonic Contrary Powers, the arena of struggle and also the prize.

Here the stranger to this creation is not the God of Light but the Principle of Darkness. Redemption will bring the flowering of the 'tan i pasen', the"body to come," the corpus resurrection is; it does not tend to destroy the getik world, but to restore it to its luminous state, its archetypal dimension."
-Henri Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis

And this idea of the material and immaterial sharing a relationship akin to matter/light follows us into the modern era (specifically 90s-early 00s, when we reached the apex of our popular music ):




"who is this energy that never left or came? 
give rise to passion the only glory of this human story

I give my heart and soul to the one

we spend all of our lives goin' out of our minds
looking back to our birth, forward to our demise
even scientists say, everything is just light
not created, destroyed but eternally bright "

I've always thought of dualism as being about the distinction between mind stuff and matter stuff. Thus idealism proposes that there is only mind stuff and materialism that there is only matter stuff. Oh and, by the way, mind stuff and soul stuff are, for me, the same.

I guess that I would be classified as a "lay person".

I've always thought of dualism as being about the distinction between mind stuff and matter stuff. Thus idealism proposes that there is only mind stuff and materialism that there is only matter stuff. Oh and, by the way, mind stuff and soul stuff are, for me, the same.

I guess that I would be classified as a "lay person".

I mean lay person would be anyone whose primary concern is the soul that lives on after the body rather than the philosophical idea of Descartes that there exist two distinct categories of substances.

So the lay person isn't concerned with the exact composition of the soul, but rather its existence. This raises the question of how much we know about the underlying substance of the presumed physical world, and whether the truth about matter's substance leaves the door open for the existence of souls.

For example, if the Information is Fundamental(*) then even if Consciousness arises from some integration/combination/processing of Information it need not be destroyed upon the death of the body.

In short, even if Consciousness isn't Fundamental it doesn't mean the it dies when the body dies.

(*)Personally I don't even know if Information is a coherent concept, let alone a fundamental part of reality. Meanwhile I do think Consciousness has to be part of Reality's Ground.

I must say, for a number of years I was baffled by references to 'dualism' on forums such as this. It seemed that everyone was agreed on what it meant. But eventually it dawned on me (I can be slow at times) that people were talking about something quite different to the dualism with which I'd been familiar for decades. I suppose there exist parallel universes after all. In mine, the term dualism refers to there being two deities, the lesser one being responsible for the creation, and it being a non-benign influence. I still get disturbed when I hear people substitute the term "the creator" for the word "god", as it means they are subservient to this lesser being.

Now that isn't necessarily what I believe, but it is certainly how I understood the term. Am I the only one to do so?

I must say, for a number of years I was baffled by references to 'dualism' on forums such as this. It seemed that everyone was agreed on what it meant. But eventually it dawned on me (I can be slow at times) that people were talking about something quite different to the dualism with which I'd been familiar for decades. I suppose there exist parallel universes after all. In mine, the term dualism refers to there being two deities, the lesser one being responsible for the creation, and it being a non-benign influence. I still get disturbed when I hear people substitute the term "the creator" for the word "god", as it means they are subservient to this lesser being.

Now that isn't necessarily what I believe, but it is certainly how I understood the term. Am I the only one to do so?

Your understanding then was certainly different to mine (as I summarised above). In reading your post about the two deities I immediately thought of gnosticism. This is from a Gnostic website:

Human nature mirrors the duality found in the world: in part it was made by the false creator God and in part it consists of the light of the True God. Humankind contains a perishable physical and psychic component, as well as a spiritual component which is a fragment of the divine essence. This latter part is often symbolically referred to as the “divine spark”. The recognition of this dual nature of the world and of the human being has earned the Gnostic tradition the epithet of “dualist”.

Your understanding then was certainly different to mine (as I summarised above). In reading your post about the two deities I immediately thought of gnosticism. This is from a Gnostic website:

That's more or less the same idea. I came across it particularly in relation to the Cathars, a belief labelled heretical and leading to the destruction of its adherents and their writings.

That's more or less the same idea. I came across it particularly in relation to the Cathars, a belief labelled heretical and leading to the destruction of its adherents and their writings.

Yes, I got into the same stuff some years back ... the Albigensian Crusade, etc. I drove around that part of France (Languedoc) in the early 2000's looking at Cathar and other religious symbolism in the old churches and buildings. Fascinating. One of the books I read during that time was by Richard Smoley - he has an interesting take on the Cathars and gnosticism: 

https://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Faith-S...B002URBQFO