Your Brain On Cartesian Dualism

This is your brain

This is Cartesian Dualism

This is your brain on Cartesian Dualism

When I was a freshman in high school English class, I was taught that there are three and only three kinds of narrative storylines: (a) human vs. his or herself, (b) human vs. human(s), and (c) human vs. Nature or God. It seemed to me that human existence sure had a lot of conflict and that we didn’t seem to get along with anybody. What I didn’t know then as a child, but do now as an old scholar, was that the conflictual nature of human can be framed as manifestations of the philosophy of Rene Descartes (1596-1650).

Sound like a stretch in logic. Possibly, but let’s think about it for a moment.

Descartes separated the mind from the body.
He debased the body as a mere animal-machine devoid of soul; a material object among all the other material objects in the world.
The Mind-Brain dominates the Body-Spirit.
He raised up the mind to a divine level as a spiritual link to God.
Cartesian thinking pervades the Western mind set and is the foundation of science, medicine, and technology; this is both miraculously great and despairingly tragic.
Thus, it enables wondrous achievements, but with destructive effects hidden in the shadows of those achievements; e.g., nuclear weapons or capitalistic prosperity from environmental destruction.
We treat the world like a collection of inanimate objects when it is actually a living biological system.
We treat others like objects when they are living beings.
We treat our bodies like objects.
Because we treat our bodies as separate from who we are we project upon them on all kinds of things… hypochondriacal delusions, somatopsychic pains, addictions, bodily self-abuse, bodily self-destruction.
People live in a perpetual state of abstract disembodiment; i.e., they live “in their heads.”
The body is just a concept.
We are absent from our bodies.

The Cartesian Mind: A Perpetual State of Partial Dissociation

The Cartesian self is a disembodied self. It is removed from the body and from the world. It is separate from the physical and holds a transcendent place over it. Only the Cartesian mind (and God) is alive. Everything else is dead. The Cartesian Self is essentially schizoid—disconnected from his or her self, from others, and from the world–and irresponsibly destructive because the material world of Nature doesn’t matter.

The Cartesian split between body and mind has conditioned Western culture to think about a person’s mind as being separate and unrelated to his or her body. This has led to the metaphorical and collective decapitation which makes the body evil, an object for sexual and commercial exploitation, and, if taken to a pathological extreme, to a condition of dissociation. Dissociation is the experiential disconnection of the mind from the body. This can occur in trauma, chronic pain, brain damage, and schizophrenia, but also in everyday life in a milder form when a person disidentifies his or her self from their body. People dissociate themselves from their bodies in a variety of ways including denial, repression, or numbing of bodily feelings or pretending to be someone other who one really is. That is, disembodiment manifests in false behaviors making a false self who is a stranger to his or her own body. This reduction in somatic sensitivity plays a central role in physical and psychological disorders (Jourard & Landsman, 1980).

HUMAN vs. THE SELF: Self-Objectification

Dissociation is a natural ability of the human mind when it experiences an overwhelming experience which cannot be alleviated. Trauma is a primary factor which can drive a person out of their body, figuratively thinking. Trauma drastically reduces interoceptive perception and sensitivity and emotional self-regulation (Schmitz et al., 2023). Because one dissociates out or away from their body necessarily means to perceive it and treat it as a foreign object. This is self-objectification.

Dissociation is not just the only cause of self-objectification. It is a state which may be initiated by one’s own free will. The dynamic of self-objectification is the three-fold chain of events starting with accepting being objectified, internalizing this view, and then behaving accordingly. The first process that helps a person to self-objectify is spatial cognition. Body consciousness has an egocentric perspective and an allocentric perspective. The egocentric representation of the body in space orients toward the environment and objects in relation to ourselves. The allocentric view is taking a perspective outside of ourselves regarding objects especially those not visible to us. These two frames of reference depend on memory storage and retrieval. Therefore, the allocentric brain processes predominate when feeling objectified. It is possible for a person to become trapped in this self-reinforcing cycle. This is known as the allocentric lock hypothesis which was developed to explain, in part, the psychological fixations of anorexia nervosa. The effects are threefold. First, it gives the person the fixated experience of having the “wrong” body and, no matter what they do to modify their bodies, the results never match their internalized ideal. Second, self-objectification rearranges a person’s memory which is then out of synch with present reality. Finally, it motivates striving for unrealistic goals in everyday social interactions and situations. There is no winning for people locked into self-objectifying processes (Riva, Gaudio, & Dakanalis, 2015).

Self-objectification carries with it a number of psychological consequences. The first is that since self-objectification hampers body awareness, it often leads to eating disorders. People with eating disorders often feel overwhelmed by their sensations and feelings which then reinforces the need for self-alienation (Petrucelli, 2016). Such disordered eating not only spans the pathological types, but also everyday, subclinical behaviors such as fad diets and skipping meals. It is directly related to body dissatisfaction, body shame, appearance anxiety, body-self surveillance, and low body esteem. The early studies of body boundary support this phenomenon and further found that the greater the self-objectification, the greater the psychological fragility of the body-ego boundary (Fisher, 1970; Werner & Wapner, 1952).

HUMAN vs. HUMAN: Objectification of Others

The study of object perception is quite old and the first researchers quickly realized that the way people perceive objects affects the psychological distance and identification they have with those objects. If a person feels connected to an object, then they have a depolarized attitude toward it as opposed to those with polarized attitude in which they do not identify with the object. This polarized/depolarized attitude also applies to our bodies and the bodies of others when perceived as objects. As a person invests psychologically and emotionally in his or her body appearance, the more they will objectify it. That is, the relational distance between the self and the body becomes much greater.

This process of objectification occurs when people are treated as things instead of people. When we objectify, for example, we treat “as an object what is really not an object, what is, in fact, a human being” (Nussbaum 1999, p. 218). Here the focus is on people and interpersonal relationships, but it extends to animals and plants as well and indeed the entire natural world.

Specifically, when a person’s body parts or functions are separated from the person, reduced to the status of instruments, or regarded as capable of representing the entire person, he or (most often) she is said to be objectified (Bartky 1990; Fredrickson & Roberts 1997; Gruenfeld et al. 2008; MacKinnon 1987; Nussbaum 1995, 1999). For example, economists and philosophers have argued that in capitalism, employers objectify their employees, reducing their employees to their work qualities (Marx 1964). To the employer, the sum of the employees corresponds to their capacity to get the job done. Likewise, in medicine, physicians may objectify a patient, reducing their patients to their symptoms (Barnard 2001; Foucault 1989).

There are seven ways to objectify a person’s body. First, one can treat the body as a tool to be used for some purpose with or without the body owner’s assent (instrumentality). Second, one can treat a body as if it was unable to act as an independent, self-willing individual (denial of autonomy). Third, a body can be treated as it were entirely devoid of self-motive power; like a sack of potatoes (inertness). Next, a body can be treated as it were equivalent and interchangeable with any other body; as a homogenous commodity (fungibility). A body may be treated as being so irrelevant that its boundaries may be violated at will (violability). Sixth, a body may be taken as a possession to be owned or bought and sold (ownership). Lastly, one can treat the body of another as if it had no feelings (Nussbaum, 1995).

Girls and women of today are exposed to more objectifying images than women of previous generations. And, given the now omnipresence of social media, women can even suffer the effects via social media by displaying their own images online. Portraying the self online to others increases self-objectification in young women as found in one study of 221 women between the ages of 18 to 25 especially if the exposures are coupled with traditional objectifying media imagery (De Vries & Peter, 2013).

Sexualization and sexual objectification are often thought of as synonymous, but they are actually two different things. Sexualization is the phenomenon which focuses attention on a person’s appearance and can take several forms: a focus on physical beauty, sexual attractiveness, or both. Sexual objectification is mentally converting another person into a mere body-object for the fulfillment of sexual desires. Both phenomena are positively correlated; as sexualization increases so does objectification. The sexualization of men includes them being perceived as less masculine than others while the sexualization of women brings with judgements about personal incompetence (Fasoli, et al., 2018).

A person is sexually objectified when his or her sexual parts or sexual functions are exclusively focused upon rather than individual personality. This debases the person to the level of an instrument while voiding the person. Women are more often subjected to sexual objectification in their daily lives more so than men. It occurs in two forms: through in-person, social interactions in which a woman is gazed upon in an erotic fashion or through the use of visual media that highlight women’s bodies or their various parts. These forms include being ogled or leered at, hearing sexually degrading jokes, being called sexual names, or receiving unwanted sexual advances. The media has virtually unending ways of degrading the female body and these images are impossible to ignore. Worse, these images lead to the eroticization of violence against women in posing them in contorted or demeaning poses. This is what Wolf (1991) called “beauty masochism.” The sexualization of women is omnipresent and, so much so, it is normalized. This normalization exerts social pressure upon women to respond by internalizing their own objectification.

Human bodies are “commodified” by mass market culture. Both the male and female body are transformed into objects of commerce, but women’s bodies far more so than those of men. The beauty and diet industries have exploited women’s fears and fantasies to sell products. This has led to high body dissatisfaction in children as young as six in the Western industrialized nations (Rice, 2014).

HUMAN vs. NATURE/GOD: Objectification of the World

Descartes was not the first philosopher to distinguish mind and body as separate things, but he did so quite thoroughly and mixed the belief with Newtonian mechanistic science of which he was a leading proponent. He did all this to eliminate medieval philosophy as being the dominant force in knowledge and replace with an evidence-based, natural philosophy. He stretched this metaphysics to its fullest extent, but not far enough to explain consciousness which somehow remained out of bounds. So he left the world a mechanical universe of dead matter, soulless machine-animals, and machine-people with souls which are sort of connected to the body but somehow can affect its operations especially regarding the emotions. It devitalized Nature and transformed the physical world into what Heidegger called “standing reserve;” inanimate material for personal exploitation and consumption. T

My two main bibles for the destructive nature of everyday state of human attitudes toward the physical world can be summarized in the key works of Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980) and On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature by Melanie Challenger (2013). I am sure that few readers will disagree that we have totally destabilized the environment with our relentless terraforming with greenhouse gases since the 1700s which has led to concentrated animal processing operations, mass extinctions, toxic waters, coral reef destruction, sea pollution, smog conditions, and now climate fluctuations from global warming. Some readers may disagree with me, but physical reality does not care about their disagreement.

The Cartesian world is a meaningless world. And this worldview, over the past several centuries, I assert, has had globally catastrophic consequences.

Closing Thoughts

Descartes replaced Aristotle’s body-soul—a model with which people envisioned bodily existence for sixteen centuries—with an entirely different one. Aristotle taught that the soul actualizes itself through the body. Matter and form were two united aspects. Descartes divided the soul or mind from the body and made them absolute opposites. There is no natural affiliation between the two. “Souls are conceived as scattered points of life in a universe of dead matter” (Smith, 1902, p. 2). Descartes’ division was a natural culmination of other philosophies that were influential on human thinking at this time: Stoicism and Christianity. Both of these held antagonistic views of the world and the body. Christianity separates out each human soul from the cosmic whole thereby driving consciousness was turned inward toward subjective experience and morality. The senses and the body could no longer be trusted. All experience, even all reality, is no longer revealed by sensual experience, but by thinking. This also affected physics. Descartes’ vision of the universe is a field of homogenous matter that is absolutely passive except for the effects of motion. Nature is thus not only dehumanized, but despiritualized as well (Smith, 1902).

Cartesian thinking turns humans into perpetual sleepwalkers. And so the world looks the way it does—mostly because of Cartesianism but also aided and abetted by Christianity and unregulated Capitalism–and, I believe, these have all sealed Our Collective Fate. The Big Take away from all of this—and this is definitely a rule to live by although now it is far too late–is:

Belief systems have consequences and ultimately very serious ones.

Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT

Director, Academic Content

References

Calogero, R., Tantleff-Dunn, S., & Thompson, J. (2011). Objectification theory: An introduction. In R. Calogero, S. Tantleff-Dunn, & J. Thompson (Eds.), Self-Objectification in Women: Causes, Consequences, and Counteractions, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, pp. 3-21.

Challenger, M. (2011). On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature. London, England: Granta Books.

De Vries, D. & Peter, J. (2013). Women on display: The effect of portraying the self online on women’s self-objectification. Human Behavior 29, p. 1483-1489.

Fasoli, F., Durante, F., Mari, S., Sogmaister, C., & Volpato, C. (2018). Shades of sexualization: When sexualization becomes sexual objectification. Sex Roles 78, p. 338-351.

Fisher, S. (1970). Body Experience in Fantasy and Behavior. New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Greenberg, P. (2013). Ends of the Earth. The New York Times, Jan. 27, p. 13.

Jourard, S. & Landsman, T. (1980). Healthy personality: An approach from the viewpoint of humanistic psychology, third edition. New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.

López-Munoz, F., Rubio, G., Molina, J., & Alamo, C. (2012). The pineal gland as physical tool of the soul faculties: A persistent historical connection. Neurologia 27(3), p. 161-168.

Merchant, C. (1980). The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Petrucelli, J. (2016). Body-states, body image and dissociation: When not-me is ‘not body.’ Clinical Social Work Journal 44, p. 18–26.

Rice, C. (2014). Becoming Women: The Embodied Self in Image Culture. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

Riva, G., Gaudio, S., & Dakanalis, A. (2015). The neuropsychology of self-objectification. European Psychologist 20(1), p. 34-43.

Schmitz, M., Back, S., Seitz, K., Harbrecht, N., Streckert, L., Schulz, A., Herpertz, S., & Bertsch, K. (2023). The impact of traumatic childhood experiences on interoception: Disregarding one’s own body. Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation 10(5), p. 1-15.

Smith, N. (1902). Studies in Cartesian Philosophy. London, UK: Macmillan and Co.

Snider, A. (2000). Cartesian bodies. Modern Philology 98(2), p. 299-319.

Tiggemann, M. (2011). Mental health risks of self-objectification: A review of the empirical evidence for disordered eating, depressed mood, and sexual dysfunction. In R. Calogero, S. Tantleff-Dunn, & J. Thompson (Eds.), Self-Objectification in Women: Causes, Consequences, and Counteractions, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, pp. 139-159.

Werner, H. & Wapner, S. (1952). Toward a theory of perception. Psychological Review 59, p. 324-338.

Wolf, N. (1991). The Beauty Myth. New York, NY: Morrow.

Revised on 02-01-26.

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