Of Duality

Many of us trained in cognitive science, psychology, or Western philosophy of mind are avowed monists.  That seems sensible.  But we do not always agree what that means.  A convenient but short-sighted account is to focus on Rene Descartes and the notion that Mind and Matter are separate realms interacting in some mysterious way (or not at all).  This is certainly an unpopular notion nowadays, but to reject it is by no means to stop being a dualist.  There are many dualisms.  Some in particular that Wei Wu Wei focusses on are the notion that in immediate experience there should be both One Who Sees and That Which Is Seen, or a perceiver and a percept, if you will.  Indeed, conventional psychological accounts of mental function demand that there be two roles here: the Subject who sees and the object that is seen.  This is dualist.  It is a dualism built into language, as we can hardly reduce the phrase “John saw the wall” any further.

This is a frequent topic of Wei Wu Wei:

A perceiving is in itself pure, i.e. impersonal and real.  The interpretation that follows introduces subject and object, and the result is a concept that is unreal.

That is why there is no perceiver, nothing perceived, and only the perceiving really is.  It is a manifestation of pure consciousness.

(Ask The Awakened, §15)

This is a theme at the heart of Neutral Monism, a strand of cognitive philosophizing that boes back at least to William James, and possibly to Baruch Spinoza.  Here, for example, is William James:

The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that.

(James 1904, 23)

or here, Edwin Holt:

If, as Aristotle said, ‘thought and its object are one,’ so are sensations and perceptions one with their ‘objects.’ In fact, there are not sensations or perceptions and their objects. There are objects, and when these are included in the manifold called consciousness they are called sensations and perceptions.

(Holt 1914, 219)

Neutral Monism has a long and colorful history, and not everything that falls under that heading is compatible with everything else.  The interested can find more in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

References

Holt, E. B., 1914, The Concept of Consciousness, London: George Allen & Company.

James, W. 1904, “A World of Pure Experience”, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1(20, 21). Reprinted in James, W., 1912, 39-91.

—–, 1912, Essays in Radical Empiricism. Reprinted: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1996.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: holt, james, monism, perception, spinoza