The Cartesian Theater and Whitehead’s solution

Topic

As we discussed in the break room with Kazi there’s this central problem on philosophy from Descartes and onwards that can be thought with the metaphor of a theater. Descartes used to distinguish to kinds of substances, res extensa (the material, objective, the “body”) and res cogitans (the spiritual, subjective, the “mind”). These two substances are differentiated and are never equal.

This distinction some authors attribute it to his education in greek and aristotelian philosophy, where everything is either a subject or an adjective. Every thing has an essence which is transformed due to its accidents or forms. Descartes develops an ontology, a theory of reality and everything in it, that encompasses this distinction and makes it the main quality of reality: A thing is either material or spiritual, neither anything else nor something in between. In this sense we all live in this theater, where or body is inhibited by the soul and Life is “out there”, like a play or a movie.

The mind-body problem is certainly this, how can we re-connect reality and subjectivity if they are different things? Kant reformulates this later on as the “subjective-objective” problem, which plagues all the german idealists of his time. If we assume that we are nothing more than a soul in a lifeless body, how is experience even possible in the first place? How is it possible that we are affected by the material things if we esentially are not material? This is, in broad strokes, what has been called “dualism” throughout the history of philosophy.

We are in no shape of answering these questions in the book for the time being, but many questions in this first encounter can be traced to this metaphor of life as a movie and we the expectators. Whitehead tries to come to terms with this problem in this first part, we’ll eventually see where this can take us.

Greetings to all! Good night