We shall have to pay much attention to a most serious case of dualism. That is the one in which the "I" is irreconcilably opposed to the "not-I".
Some might say, "A certain dualism is inevitable here. Any person who has begun to have any consciousness whatsoever of his own identity is obliged to feel the relation between his personal self and everything outside that self in terms of a certain opposition."
But to tell the full truth, another viewpoint may just as well be prevailing. That very same relation may be conceived perfectly well as a fairly harmonious one. True, a certain bipolarity here may be real enough, and quite unavoidable. But is an almost tragic pointedness of the bipolarity equally unavoidable?
Here the historical observer very soon undergoes a clear experience. In philosophical speculation an extreme dualism introduces itself with considerable force in this field at a very early stage. Even the Greek philosophers of nature established a distinction between things as they are, immediately perceived by the senses, and things as they are--"in reality".
And down through the centuries the general tendency of speculative thought has been to regard the conception by the senses as the "false" one. In fact, the idealists were to go much farther in this direction than the philosophers of nature had ever thought of going. Of course, Parmenides, too, charges the human senses with a certain deceptiveness (for instance, they make us believe that things are multiple and subject to movement). Anaxagoras and the Atomists teach that what we hear and see, etc., are not "the last elements" of things. But, nevertheless, those first Greek philosophers do, at least, accept the way our senses perceive things as inevitable and as the only possible way of perception. Their peculiar bias is rather that they reduce the essence of man to his bodily nature. There is no possibility of rising to any "higher" and "more ideal" form of perception. So they differ from Plato, for instance, in this: that they accept man and his world as they are commonly known.
However, right in the middle of their willing acceptance, these philosophers also have a certain resignation. In that curious "humanism" of Protagoras, for instance ("Man is the measure of all things"), there is, admittedly, something like a "relativity of truths", which is certainly not the perfect ideal of childlike simplicity: things are to me such as they appear to me. To you they are as they appear to you. The same wind blowing is warm to one individual and cold to the other. He tries to explain this through a double movement: "the active movement" of the object perceived and the "passive movement" of the subject that perceives (or the senses of the human being). Accordingly nothing is simple. As soon as we perceive a thing, a certain duality arises. It is the duality of the thing perceived and the person perceiving. Truth becomes relative: my feeling is true for me, yours is true for you.[1]
However, the relation between the interior world of man's consciousness, and the exterior world of things surrounding him, is not yet as problematic as it becomes with Plato. There is, after all, a considerable confidence that man, thanks to his natural senses, is fairly able to grasp the realities of his environment.
As for Aristotle, we know what important role he ascribed to the exterior object, for the whole process of sensation. That object, moreover, is not only the condition of every sensation, but even its very cause. The object must exert a positive influx on the human sense. The subject is sensitive only in a more passive way; he is a potential perceiver. But the object first has to perform an act and a movement.[2]
There must be a contact between the object and the subject for any sensation, but the first impulse comes from the object perceived. Not that Aristotle underestimates the part the subject has in this process of sensation. In fact, it can only be explained through a synthesis of the subject and the object.
Here we think Aristotle's remarkable sense of totality, of oneness and wholeness, in fact his antidualistic tendency, comes in.
He admits the obvious diversity between the notion of colours or sounds on one hand, and that of sight or hearing on the other. But in the very act of seeing, the colour and the sight are no longer two distinct things. They are one and the same fact, a vital process, one identical metaphysical reality. For then the physical quality of the exterior object passes into the act of sight, and the sight passes into the quality.[3]
It was the modern genius Galileo, however, who, in a most fatefully dualistic manner, introduced the distinction between the primary qualities of things, such as dimensions, weights, etc., or any other fact capable of being measured, and the secondary qualities, such as form, colour, smell, etc., which escape the control of "scientific" measurements. So, for the sake of science, he made a line of separation between the quantitative and the qualitative. The former constantly showed remarkably good behaviour: they could be pressed into some known mathematical formulas. The latter did not yield to any such serious methods of scientific exactness. Accordingly, they were doomed to be increasingly neglected and looked down upon as rather nonsensical.
We cannot help agreeing heartily with Alexis Carrel that this evolution was most unfortunate for man and for everything that is most profoundly human.[4] For, verily, with man, just the things that are not to be measured have always proved to be of greater importance to his life than those that can be measured.
And that fatefully abstract distinction between primary and secondary qualities, introduced by Galileo, was certainly not rendered less accentuated, or less fateful, by the Cartesian introduction of a distinction between a res cogitans and a res extensa, as we shall soon see.
Carrel describes the discrimination undertaken by Galileo as bluntly artificial. Sanctioned by Descartes, that discrimination was destined to place our civilization upon the road which would lead science to its highest triumphs and man to his lowest downfall.
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