11.02.08
Dualism and J.G. Bennett’s (triadism of) function, being, will
Denise O’Leary has some links on the mind/brain debate. I will upgrade this comment to a post, tomorrow, but I should note that it is too easy for scientists to dismiss ‘spiritual psychologies’, which can be full of holes, but get one thing straight through simple negation. The Cartesian tradition, say what you will, arose at the same time as the Scientific Revolution (and Descartes was one of its founders), and has remained an invariant ever since.
I have studied more spiritual psychologies of all types than I can remember, and here is a link to a discussion of the Samkhya approach filtered through the philosopher J.G. Bennett, The Will and the will (it’s a bit murky, because it requires a lot of introductory material which is absent). Bennett’s systematics, in my view, is flawed, although his now out of print The Dramatic Universe is a brilliant book. Behind its New Age character lies a hybrid, among other things, of the ancient Classical Samkhya, and Schopenhauer.
But, whatever the case, he had an ingeniously different approach to Cartesian dualism, a kind of ‘triadism’ (?), with three root concepts, Function, Being, Will.
He redivided the pie in a completely different way, as ‘materialism’ disappeared into ‘being’, with the remainder shunted into ‘function’. The key was the ‘Will’ which straddles essence and existence in degrees of crystallization.
The result is a variant of the ‘triadism’ that sometimes arises in the west, that of body, soul, spirit, the latter three terms tending to provoke confusion. Body resembles function, although we take it as ‘material’, while soul, a very confused term, relates (not identical to) Being, while ‘spirit’, another lost cause of bad usage, relates to will, a term that should be used only with the kind of Schopenhaurian discipline, and certainly never confused with the term spirit. The point is that Bennett’s updated/modernized terminology is actually present in antiquity, even in some rare versions of Christian theology, soon corrupted with hopeless confusions.
Bennett’s work, sadly, ended in metaphysical swampland, and the clarity and consistency of Schopenhauer (or Kant ultimately) remains preferable, and unmatched.
The point of all this, which is a long study, is that scientists are likely to crap out in the end with their naive monism, as the ID folks now join the list of their tormentors.
Bennett’s distinction of ‘being’ and ‘existence’ evokes an ancient idea, and could certainly help discussions of divinity, the ‘existence’ of ‘god’ being quite contradictory as a concept, the resolution lying in the distinction given of being and existence. (In fact, in Bennett’s system, he regrettably though with daring cogency, reintroduces ‘god’ by definition as a factor in the reconciliation of the triad of will, a tactic that would reduce the confusions of ‘god talk’ by atheists and theists both to something at a lower noise level.
The point here is that with the notion of ‘being’ it becomes possible to distinguish real entities that don’t necessarily exist (essential will) (in relation to a greater sphere of being) but which are relevant to any discussion of the self.
The debate of the brain/mind cited by O’Leary references, for examples, the debate over OCD (obsesive compulsive disorder) and the relation of this to the power of attention.
In the scheme of Bennett/Samkhya, the attention is a power of the ‘will’ sector of the triad, although it is forever confused with function.
As any Zen Buddhist would note, ‘attention’ is the whole enchilada. That is the point of entry to the relationship of existence and essence (although doing philosophy on the subject won’t help!).
A second point for scientists, and everyone else, is to have a sense of the dangers of eliminative scientism which reduces the ‘whole man’ to a mechanical assembly. That gesture will in the end produce a ‘man’ in quotation marks totally divorced from the complex architecture of the self, which is object of millennia of tradition, however confused.
It is too easy to reject the ideas of ‘self’ as unscientific, and while confusions abound, there seems no alternative but to brave the shoals of metaphysics in search of man, as a species being, with his complex appartus of self-consciousness.
Alfred Wallace said as much.