The Dual Aspect of the Mind and Body

The dual aspect of the mind and body.

The view is derived from the metaphysics of Benedict de Spinoza. The mental and the material are different aspects or attributes of a unitary reality, which itself is neither mental nor material.

Benedictus de Spinoza was a philosopher of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish origin. He was one of the foremost exponents of 17th-century Rationalism. His given name, which means “Blessed”, varies among different languages.

Spinoza’s philosophy has been associated with that of Leibniz and René Descartes as part of the rationalist school of thought.

Spinoza’s metaphysics consists of one thing, substance, and its modifications (modes). For Spinoza the whole of the natural universe is made of one substance, God, or what’s the same, Nature.

Following Maimonides, Spinoza defined a substance as “that which is in itself and is conceived through itself”. Being conceptually independent means that the same thing is ontologically independent, depending on nothing else for its existence and being the ’cause of itself’ (causa sui).

Spinoza defined God as “a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence”. This means that God is identical with the universe, an idea he encapsulated in the phrase “Deus sive Natura” (‘God or Nature’), which has been interpreted by some as atheism or pantheism.

Spinoza believed that God is “the sum of the natural and physical laws of the universe and certainly not an individual entity or creator”. The view was described by Charles Hartshorne as Classical Pantheism.

Spinoza argues that “things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than is the case”, concepts such as ‘freedom’ and ‘chance’ have little meaning.

Jonathan Bennett claims that Spinoza takes the emotions to be cognitive in some important respect. Bennett says the picture presented is “unflattering, coloured as it is by universal egoism”.

In philosophy of mind, double-aspect theory is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of, or perspectives on, the same substance.

The distinction between mind and matter results from an epistemic split that separates aspects of the underlying reality. The status of the psychophysically neutral domain is considered as ontic relative to the mind–matter distinction.

During the 17th century, the Western world started to see the mind and body as two distinct entities. In this view, the body was kind of like a machine, complete with replaceable, independent parts, with no connection to the mind.

This Western viewpoint had definite benefits, acting as the foundation for advances in surgery, trauma care, pharmaceuticals, and other areas of allopathic medicine.

In the 20th century, researchers began to study the mind-body connection and scientifically demonstrate complex links between the body and mind.