Against materialism

Abstract

I propose to give two arguments against materialism-or, if you think that's too negative, two arguments for substantial dualism. 'Substantial' is to be taken in two senses: first, the dualism in question, the dualism for which I mean to argue, is substantial as opposed to trivial; some versions of property dualism seem to me to be at best wholly insubstantial. Second, according to the most popular form of dualism-one embraced by Plato, Augustine, Descartes, and a thousand others - a human person is an immaterial substance: a thing, an object, a substance, a suppositum (as my Thomist colleagues would put it), and a thing that isn't material, although, of course, it is intimately connected with a material body. But there is also the view the name 'dualism' suggests: the view according to which a human person is somehow a sort of composite substance S composed of a material substance S* and an immaterial substance S**1. We can sensibly include this view under 'dualism'-provided, that is, that having S* as a part is not essential to S. (I add this proviso because my first argument is for the conclusion that possibly, I exist when my body does not.) Perhaps a better name for the view I mean to defend is 'immaterialism,' the view that a human person is not a material object. Of course it's far from easy to say just what a material object is.2 For present purposes let's put it recursively: a material object is either an atom, or is composed of atoms. Thus atoms, molecules, cells, hearts, brains and human bodies are all material objects; we'll leave open the question whether such things as electrons, quarks, protons, fields, and superstrings (if indeed there are such things) are material objects. What I'll argue for, accordingly, is the view that human persons are not material objects. They are objects (substances), however; therefore they are immaterial objects. My conclusion, of course, is hardly original (going back at least to Plato); my general style of argument also lacks originality (going back at least to Descartes and possibly Augustine). But the method of true philosophy, unlike that of liberal theology and contemporary French thought, aims less at novelty than at truth. Three more initial comments: (i) When I speak of possibility and necessity, I mean possibility and necessity in the broadly logical sense-metaphysical possibility and necessity, as it is also called. (ii) I won't be arguing that it is possible that I (or others) can exist disembodied, with no body at all.3 (iii) I will make no claims about what is or isn't conceivable or imaginable. That is because imaginability isn't strictly relevant to possibility at all; conceivability, on the other hand, is relevant only if 'it's conceivable that p' is to be understood as implying or offering evidence for 'it's possible that p.' (Similarly for 'it's inconceivable that p.') It is therefore simpler and much less conducive to confusion to speak just of possibility. I take it we human beings have the following epistemic capacity: we can consider or envisage a proposition or state of affairs and, at least sometimes, de termine its modal status-whether it is necessary, contingent, or impossible-just by thinking, just by an exercise of thought 4.