Materialism lies coiled in the heart of dualism

Fichte draws a distinction between idealism and "dogmatism." The dogmatist holds that we should begin with assumption of mind independent matter and try to account for everything else in terms of that. The idealist starts with consciousness. According to Fichte, these are the two possible starting points. you start with yourself, or you start with material objects. But what of dualism?

Dualism is an unstable position. It constitutes an attempt to fit the real mind in an assumed world of objective material things. Some dualists are content to simply allow the existence of nonphysical mental properties. More robust dualists consider the mind to be a thing, a substance that exists alongside material objects. Whichever variety of dualism you choose, the underlying assumption is that one can think of the mind using the same sort of ontological categories that y ou use when considering material things. To be sure, mental properties are not physical properties. Minds are not physical things. But they are still properties and things and in these innocent sounding words there lies loads of assumptions.

In Being and Time Heidegger recognized these assumptions in his critique of Descartes. Descartes was mislead, Heidegger argues, because he took as his paradigm for existence material things and, realizing that the mind is among these, categorized the mind as another kind of thing, a thing exists alongside run of the mill material objects. But to do this is to miss out on the fact that the mind is not just another kind of thing that is externally related to the physical universe. In Heidegger's terminology the mind is essentially characterized by "Being-in-the-world." We might drop the indiosyncratic language and say instead, the mind is necessarily intentional.

But to say just this and then go on our way is not enough. When we think deeply about intentionality, we come to see that its not just a special mental property. Intentionality is an internal relationship between mind and world, consciousness and its objects. To understand what i am doing now, typing this blog post, I need to bring in things in the world. my fingers, the keyboard, the computer screen. Even if my current typing is in a dream, it is still the case that my dream world is part of my mental state, part of my consciousness. To try to seperate these, to try to replace the esential intentional connection with something causal to pass over the phenmena at hand. To think of intentionality as a property my mind has is to already distort it, since intentionality is an internal relationship to the world. It is Heideggers "Being-In." If we call it a property at all its a property had not by mind alone but by mind and world. It is a way of expressing a primordial essential linkage. If one comes to think of intentionality in this way, as a property not of mind alone but of mind/world, one has already taken the leap and become an idealist!

So a dualist has a choice. She can come to grips with the essential intentionality of consciousness and move away from dualist towards idealism. Or she can view the mind as things like material things with weird properties. The second alternative is what grounds the mind body problem and explains the strong temptation some people feel towards materialism. One needs to find a way of fiting this weird mind thing into an already assumed universe of externally related physical objects. One comes to think of the mind as a sort of appendage to the body, like those thought baloons that cartoon characters sometimes have. So conceived the dialectical preasure to minimize or remove the mind, to make it epiphenomenal or identical to material processes, is enormous.

Even a subtle thinker like Thomas Nagle has this difficulty. Nagle shows an unusual sensitivity to the reality of subjectivity. And yet one feels that for Nagle subjectivity is still just one thing, one added element that has to be somehow meshed in with mind independent objective reality.

What is required is a radical shift of perspective. Instead of asking how the mind fits into the physical world, we should ask how it is that the physical world comes to have any existence for a mind.

Back to Kant!

Epistemological and Ontological Idealism

Arguments for idealism generally come in to forms. There are epistemological arguments that attempt to show that the world as it is known to us is essentially mind dependent. Kantian arguments are the most famous example of this sort of a approach. So too are some of Berkeley's arguments for idealism, such as the arguments presented with such force in the _Dialogues_ showing that the only empirically defensible concept of a material thing is one that identifies matter with a system of ideas. Ontological arguments for idealism, on the other hand, attempt to show that there is something about the nature of reality that requires that it be of a spiritual or mind dependent character. Thus McTaggart argues that the world must consist of substances and that the only candidate for substance that we have available is that which we find when we reflect on our own minds. Berkeley too presented an ontological argument for idealism when he argued that the very conception of a mind independent entity was incoherent. The famous master argument was not intended as a claim about merely knowable reality, it was intended, it seems to be a claim about reality as such whether known by us our not. This last claim of Berkeley's has always struck me as tendentious because it appears to attempt to prove a negative: How can we know that the only thing that is real is minds, unless we presuppose that our knowledge exhausts all that is real? And how can any non-omniscient being make that claim?
An answer to this last question can be made by those who endorse a non-realist theory of truth. To take a cheap and easy example, if verificationism is true, then the claim that there is a reality utterly independent of our mode of cognition is not false but meaningless. On these sorts of views the sentence, "There is a reality that is impossible for us to experience" has no cognitive content at all. And this brings out another feature of the distinction between ontological and epistemological idealism. Ontological idealism is perfectly compatible with a realist theory of truth. Thus Berkeley is perfectly happy claiming that, at least when we are "thinking with the learn'd," the literal truth of statements depends on the existence of some reality "out there" that corresponds to it. The difference between Berkeley and metaphysical realists is not with respect to what makes a statement true, but rather with respect to the sorts of things are truthmakers for propositions, to wit, minds and ideas.
Personally I have never really understood the various sorts of non-realist theories of truth. Coherentist and pragmatic theories of truth seem to me to be either obviously false, or really just disquised theories of justification or knowlege. Yet it does seem to me that any variety of idealism is going to be in one limited sense epistemic. Whatever claims about reality we may make, we can only really justify them with respect to the reality that we have some conception of. Kantian things in themselves can never be disproven. The best one can hope to do with respect to such hypothetical entities is to show that such an hypothesis is superfluous, not that necessarily, such things do not exist.
So my own argument for idealism, grounded as it is in the claim that existence is an essential property of consciousness, is an ontological idealism. My claim is that the epistemic claim of the cogito requires an ontological ground. I can only know I exist if there is a necessary connection between existence itself and consciousness or the self. Otherwise I may know I am thinking, and yet not recognize that this thinking must be existent thinking. So the essential premise, the pivotal claim is (1) Consciousness essentially exists. But this claim only gets us to idealism if we can also claim (2) Nothing else exhibits this characteristic of existence. And it is here that the epistemological caveat appears--I can only speak of what I can think of. I can confirm as a phenomenological datum that no perceived object exhibits the characteristic of consciousness. I can even go further and in Berkleian manner argue that no conceivable material thing has the property of existence. Its not just that in fact I am not perceiving material things. but I cannot even in imagination combine the property of existence (which I am aware of in the cogito) with the material things. This shows that at least of those concrete particulars I am aware of (minds and material objects) it is only the mind that exists. Not only do I affirm with Meinong that there are non-existent objects. I affirm the stronger claim that all material things are non-existent objects. But the epistemological limitation remains. The objects that I claim cannot exist are perceivable objects. I cannot by this method show that there is nothing else that also has this property. In fact I may have to admit that there are some things, universals for example, which actually do exhibit existence even though they are not of the character of consciousness or the mind. The idealist claim,though ontological, is thus limited. It is not reality as such, but only reality insofar as I can conceive of it (that is, the concrete particular reality, ignoring universals for the moment), which necessarily does not exist. This may be an "apparently outrageous view" as one reviewer called it, but it is also limited to reality as conceived. Kantian things in themselves may exist even if they are not conscious, but if there are any such "things" they also must not have the character of the material world that is actually conceived and thought of.

dualism vs. idealism

Those of us who agree that both the qualitative and intentional character of consciousness is irreducible to so-called matter have a choice, we can be either dualists or idealists. Dualism is more popular than idealism (though their numbers are smaller than the hordes of materialists), but is this really the best approach to take if we want to affirm the reality of the mental? Dualists have a problem of reconciling the mind with the assumed pre-existence of dead matter. Dualists therefore feel dialectical pressure to make the mind into some sort of appendage to the body. For dualists, the problem of how mind and matter interact is a real problem--if we take materialist causation as our paradigm, then it *is* hard to see how the non-material mind fits in. This is why so many contemporary dualists feel driven to weird ass epiphenomenalism.but if mind is really essential to reality, then there is no mind/matter gap. We get all the advantages of materialist monism without its obvious drawbacks