Dualism vs. Dualism vs. Dualism vs. Dualism

Ontology, Theology, and Consciousness—oh my!

Has anyone ever extolled the virtues of non-dualism to you? Many westerners who are interested in “Eastern” spirituality and mysticism tend to think that non-dualism is the key to unlock spirituality for us mundane Westerners. Anyone interested in Vedanta philosophy, in particular, will surely spend a lot of time considering non-dualism. Richard Rohr, undoubtedly one of the most popular Christian contemplative writers, speaks constantly about non-dualism. Why, even YouTube anarchists are getting in on the action. Non-dualism is interesting and trendy—but what, exactly, is it?

As we will see, that’s both a great question for anyone interested in phenomenology (I’m hoping that’s you!), but it’s also a complicated question. Indeed, I don’t think we can answer this question without first answering a related but distinct one: before we figure out what non-dualism is, surely we first need to figure out what dualism itself is.

Again, though, things get complicated quickly: there is no one thing called dualism. Today, I want to outline the three four common meanings of dualism, and explore how they are both related but also distinct. Only then will we be able to come back and figure out what non-dualism might be.

Now the very name “dualism” does help us out a lot: dualism asserts that there are basically two things. Generally speaking, dualism is countering the idea that there is just one thing (though in theory someone could propose there are three or more basic things, but that’s rare). On its face, that’s it. But what kind of things are we talking about? That’s where the multitude of dualisms arrive. In short, we have ontological dualism, theological dualism number 1 (ditheism), theological dualism number 2 (which we can clumsily call “Barthism” for the moment), and phenomenological dualism. Let’s investigate each in turn.

Ontological Dualism

Probably the most common meaning of dualism in contemporary English philosophical discourse is ontological dualism (note that this mode of dualism goes by many names, especially “substance dualism”, and could also probably be referred to as “metaphysical dualism”. But I am trying to be as general as possible here, and not get caught in terminological debates). An ontologically dualist system argues that there are basically two kinds of “stuff” that reality is made of: each of these fundamental kinds of things are distinct from each other, and neither can be reduced to the other. Cartesian dualism is surely the most common mode of this thought: Descartes basically believed that reality was composed of both matter and mind, with matter being a set of more-or-less mathematical entities which are extended in space and time and which interact with each other according to deterministic rules, on the one hand, and mind, on the other hand, being the stuff that mental experience is made of. For Descartes, and his disciples through to the modern day, this combination of two basic modes of being is itself the fundamental ground of reality. Now, Cartesian dualism is only one example of ontological dualism—there are many others, such as Samkhya philosophy, and they are in many respects quite different from each other. But I think it’s helpful to still group them all under this one broad category.

The opposite of ontological dualism would be ontological monism, the idea that there is really just one kind of stuff out of which everything is made. Surely the most prevalent mode of monism today is materialism, the idea that only matter is real, and that everything else is made of it. According to a materialist ontology, Descartes was more-or-less right about how matter works (though obviously contemporary physics complicates the picture), but he was wrong to think that mind was something fundamentally distinct from matter. For a staunch materialist, mind ultimately resolves to matter, it must be completely reducible to it. Thus, materialist philosophy of mind gives us epiphenomenalism, eliminativism, functionalism, and other interpretations of mind which try to explain how consciousness is either generated by matter, or that simply assert that mind doesn’t really exist at all, since only matter actually does.

Of course, there are other monistic options beside materialism; indeed, the term “monism” in western thought over the last few centuries has more often been associated with any number of “idealist” systems of thought, such as that of Leibniz, Spinoza, Berkeley, or Hegel. (I don’t want to dive down the idealism rabbit hole for now, but I do want to warn the reader that in this context, “idealism” as used above has nothing to do with being an “idealist” in the everyday English meaning of that word. When we describe someone as idealist in this latter sense, we tend to mean that they are committed to achieving certain lofty goals, believe that material life can be made to reflect moral truths, and are generally optimistic. But the idealism of the thinkers listed above is an ontological idealism, which claims that something like consciousness or mind is the only fundamentally real thing, and that everything else—including matter—reduces to it.)

So that’s a very brief explanation of ontological dualism. But there are three more dualisms to go!

Theological Dualism(s)

If you do much reading in theology, and especially about the history of religious thought, you have likely come across another meaning of the term dualism: theological dualism. Confusingly, though, the term dualism is often used in theology to refer to two separate ideas(!)

Ditheism (note that sometimes ditheism is simply referred to as “dualism”; for reasons that should already be clear, I will not be doing that here!) asserts that there are two distinct divinities, two distinct sources for existence. Manichaeism is probably the most famous theologically dualist philosophical and spiritual system, at least in the West. (Now, it’s important to note that Manichaeism was both ontologically dualist as well as ditheist. Indeed, if one is a ditheist, one will almost certainly be an ontological dualist—but the reverse is not necessarily true, as we will discuss further below).

For the Manicheans, there were two gods: a “good” God of light and consciousness, and a “bad” god of darkness and matter. Their cosmology argued that the bad god was constantly trying to infect the realm of light and consciousness with darkness and matter—and that the result of this invasion was our material world. The goal, then, was for conscious beings to liberate themselves from this mixed-up world, separating their soul, which was composed solely of light (and therefore goodness) from the matter which was corrupting them (very much including their own body).

We can see that in many ways, ditheism is just an intensification and spiritualization of ontological dualism: matter and mind are not only seen as fundamentally separate realities, but as opposed spiritual forces. However, it’s important to note that while a ditheist will basically always have to be an ontological dualist—if there are two fundamentally opposed deities, each generating their own kind of substrate or stuff, it’s hard to see how those two different kinds of “stuff” could somehow actually be made of the same thing—an ontological dualist need not be a ditheist. Indeed, our most famous ontological dualist (at least in the West), René Descartes, was most certainly not a ditheist. Descartes believed that the one God created both mind and matter. So although they were ontologically distinct and could not be converted into one another, they both had the same (divine) source.

Now, the opposite of a ditheist is obviously just either a monotheist, or potentially a polytheist (however, it’s worth noting that many systems of thought that superficially seem polytheistic end up being something like a very complicated monotheism; Hinduism is the great exemplar here. And even those systems which seem more straightforwardly polytheistic never assert that each of the gods and goddesses they recognize actually create distinct kinds of “stuff” or fundamental reality. Such polytheisms will generally still be either ontologically dualist or monist. I may have more to say about this in a later post, but I don’t want to get sidetracked any further just now).

However, ditheism is not the only way that the term “dualism” shows up in theological discourse. Karl Barth, arguably the most famous Christian theologian of the 20th century, is often referred to as a “dualist”, but in neither the ontological or ditheistic sense of that word.

Instead, when Barth talked about a dualist theology, he meant to stress the extreme distinction between God, as the source and creator of all things, and the cosmos, as the creation made by God. Barth famously asserted that there is an “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and the world; that is to say: God is utterly and completely different from us and our world. Human modes of being and knowing, therefore, reveal nothing at all about God, because of this radical distinction between the cosmos’s source and the cosmos itself. In other words, God is truly holy—“set apart”—and we are not able to enter into that holiness whatsoever.

Now, this radical assertion of God’s utter holiness had major implications for Barth’s theology. It meant that he denied what western philosophers and theologians often refer to as “natural theology”—the idea that we can learn things about God by looking at what God has created. For Barth, we could only know about God to the extent that God tells us about Godself (what is referred to as “revealed theology”), which of course for Barth basically meant Scripture, as it recorded the messages of the prophets but especially of Jesus, each of which in their own way provided an avenue for God to speak to humanity directly.

Now, the opposite of a dualist in this specific theological sense would just be someone who thought that both natural and revealed theology are valid sources of knowledge about God. It’s not hard to see how this gets rather confusing, since Barth’s dualist position has only one source of knowledge of God (revealed theology) whereas the person we would not describe as a dualist on these matters actually accepts two major sources of knowledge about God. But in this case, the “dual” in dualism refers not to the sources of knowledge, but to the two “things” in question: God, on the one hand, and the created cosmos on the other. For someone who disagrees with Barth, in other words, the relation between God and the world is strong or significant enough that the cosmos itself reveals truths about God. (Such a position is, for example, central to Roman Catholic theology.)

Now there is much more to say about this meaning of dualism, but today we are only interested in a summary overview, so let’s venture forth into the fourth basic kind of dualism.

Phenomenological Dualism

Ontological dualism tells us there are two kinds of basic “stuff”, theological dualism tells us either there are two gods, or that God and the world are utterly distinct. But our final mode of dualism requires that turn inward. If we turn our attention to consciousness itself, we might think that we find basically two “things” there: we have our general sense of self, the “I”, the ego, which seems to be “viewing” the contents of consciousness—and then we have the contents of consciousness themselves, such as an experience of redness, the feeling of hunger, or the concept of a horse.

Indeed, we humans generally have a hard time not thinking of consciousness in dualist terms; basic to our language is conversation about the “subject” and the “object”, the thing which views and the thing which is viewed. Such a structure of thought seems obvious and unavoidable to most of us. Such a position can be called phenomenological dualism, because in consciousness (in which appearances, “phenomena”, appear), there are those two fundamental poles: the subject on one side and an array of objects on the other.

The opposite of phenomenological dualism would refuse to see these poles as fundamentally distinct, and would instead argue that there is actually only one “thing” in consciousness. A non-dualist phenomenology could either collapse the object(s) into the subject, or could collapse the subject into the object(s), or it could argue that both subject and object(s) actually resolve into something else, presumably something yet more fundamental and ontologically “beneath” consciousness as such.

The first option, in which the objects of consciousness “collapse” into the subject, or are actually just something that the subject does, is basically the standpoint of Advaita Vedanta philosophy, a school of thought within “orthodox” Hindu thought (Advaita is literally Sanskrit for “non-dual”). It’s increasingly common in western discourse, and is a very sophisticated and interesting approach to philosophy that I will definitely be discussing in future posts. (It’s probably worth noting that it is this understanding of “non-dualism” that is generally what people are referring to when they wax poetic about non-dualist spirituality.)

The second option, in which the subject is considered basically unreal, and is collapsed into the object(s) of consciousness, is probably a fair, if rough, description of pure forms of empiricist thought and contemporary “phenomenalism”. (As far as I am aware, to the extent that anyone holds this position in philosophy of mind today, it is a small minority, though empiricism certainly had its heyday in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in English-language philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment, and in many ways analytic philosophy has been in part shaped by this perspective, even though it seems largely to have moved beyond it.)

The third option, in which both the subject and object are basically unreal, would probably be a fair understanding of both most kinds of materialism (since materialism generally wants to argue that consciousness itself is really just a material event) but is also probably the best way to approximate most philosophical schools within Buddhism, in both the Theravada and Mahayana traditions (though a now extinct school within the Mahayana tradition, Yogacara, would likely be much closer to Advaita Vedanta).

You may be noticing a trend here: although I have outlined four different kinds of dualism, and though they definitely are distinct, they are also related, and in many cases, one type of dualism will imply another, even though they are strictly distinct concepts. For example, Advaita Vedanta is phenomenologically non-dualist; it argues that the content of our experience is actually a sort of “illusion” or “play” generated by—and contained within—the conscious subject itself. And staunch modes of Advaita (as that proposed by the extremely influential philosopher Shankara) insist that there is actually just one Subject, one “viewer” of all reality.

But note that this then entails a non-dualist attitude all the way down: if within consciousness there is actually just the Subject, and if all the contents of experience are actually contained within this consciousness Subject, then of course there can be no matter independent of consciousness, since what seems to signify or represent matter is actually an illusion within consciousness (though it’s worth noting that the “illusion” here is not necessarily seen as negative). Likewise, obviously, a phenomenological non-dualist will not be a ditheist, since if everything is contained within and generated by the unity of consciousness, there is no room for any second god to do anything—any such god could only be another content of consciousness, something generated by unified consciousness itself). Such a non-dualist would be a monotheist or perhaps an atheist (depending on how the word “God” is defined…perhaps a rabbit hole for another day!). And of course, such a phenomenological dualist wouldn’t be a dualist in the Barthian sense either, since for someone like Shankara, the fullness of reality is literally always and fully present to consciousness because it just is that consciousness itself.

But, as already discussed above, there are ways to mix and match dualist and non-dualist positions at the different “levels” of analysis discussed above: one could believe that the subject and object within consciousness are distinct from each other and think that neither can be reduced to the other (phenomenologically dualist), but also think that they both ultimately resolve to one thing outside of consciousness (potentially ontologically non-dualist). Likewise, could be a strict monotheist (theologically non-dualist in the 1st sense outlined above) who nonetheless thinks that matter and consciousness are nevertheless utterly distinct (ontologically dualist).

Indeed, even within Vedanta philosophy itself, these various modes of non-dualism are mixed and matched. Shankara is basically a non-dualist all the way down, while Ramanuja seems to be a non-dualist about basically everything except that he basically accepts something like the Barthian position on the relationship between the individual subject and the Absolute Subject (that is, the human person and God), though Ramanuja probably wouldn’t agree with Barth at all on the details. Indeed, Vedanta basically offers at least 6 different permutations of basically non-dualist phenomenological thought (some of which are are actually labeled “dualist”, in the semi-Barthian sense!).

I hope this very cursory, very superficial survey of the different ways “dualism” is used in English language philosophy (and theology) has been helpful in clarifying what is actually at stake in different conversations about dualism and non-dualism. I plan to build on this post in the future by discussing some of the various dualisms in greater detail, as well as exploring what impact either accepting or rejecting dualism in a given area of thought actually has on our thinking and living.

Non-Dualism vs. Non-Dualism vs. Non-Dualism vs. Monism