Revolt against Cartesianism
Markendeya Yeddanapudi
Instead, it emerges as intellectual movements that challenge reductionism, mechanistic thinking, and strict subject–object separation.
What you are calling “Cartesianism” — the split between mind and matter, observer and observed, human and nature — is being questioned in multiple universities worldwide. The shift is gradual, plural, and often embedded within existing institutions rather than openly revolutionary.
Here are some significant currents:
1. Systems Thinking & Complexity Science
Universities influenced by systems theory reject reductionism as sufficient for understanding life.
The Santa Fe Institute Santa Fe Institute works on complexity science, studying wholes, emergence, and interconnected systems rather than isolated parts.
Programs in systems ecology, network science, and earth systems science emphasize interdependence.
These approaches argue that the whole cannot be understood merely by dissecting parts — a direct challenge to Cartesian fragmentation.
2. Ecological Economics
Some institutions are challenging growth-based economic orthodoxy.
The Stockholm Resilience Centre Stockholm Resilience Centre integrates planetary boundaries with economics.
Scholars influenced by thinkers like Herman Daly Herman Daly promote steady-state economics rather than perpetual growth.
This reframes economics as embedded within ecology, not above it.
3. Deep Ecology & Environmental Humanities
Certain universities host programs in environmental philosophy and humanities that question anthropocentrism and mechanistic worldviews.
Inspired by Arne Næss Arne Naess and deep ecology.
The Schumacher College Schumacher College (though not a traditional university) explicitly promotes holistic, non-dual ecological education.
Environmental humanities departments increasingly critique the nature–culture divide.
4. Process Philosophy & Post-Cartesian Thought
Philosophy departments influenced by Alfred North Whitehead Alfred North Whitehead emphasize process, relation, and becoming rather than static substance.
Process philosophy rejects strict subject–object dualism and views reality as relational events.
5. Indigenous Knowledge Integration
Many universities in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are incorporating Indigenous epistemologies, which tend to be relational and non-dual.
For example:
The University of British Columbia University of British Columbia integrates Indigenous land-based learning programs.
These approaches emphasize reciprocity with land rather than detached observation.
6. Contemplative Education Movements
Some institutions integrate mindfulness and contemplative pedagogy into curricula.
The Naropa University Naropa University explicitly blends contemplative practice with academic study.
This challenges the purely analytic model of knowing.
Important Clarification
There is no coordinated “anti-Cartesian revolution” sweeping universities.
Instead, what exists is:
Fragmented reform
Parallel movements
Interdisciplinary experimentation
Growing dissatisfaction with hyper-reductionism
Ironically, the critique of Cartesianism often happens within the very institutions shaped by it.
Why There Is No Full Revolt
Universities are financially embedded in economic systems.
Research funding favors technological and market-oriented outcomes.
Ranking systems reward measurable output, not holistic transformation.
Students seek economic security, reinforcing the cycle.
So change tends to be evolutionary, not revolutionary.
The Present Moment
However, there is increasing unrest:
Climate activism among students
Degrowth scholarship
Critique of neoliberal university models
Rising ecological anxiety among youth
The dissatisfaction you express is not isolated.
A Realistic Assessment
Cartesian dualism is no longer intellectually dominant in cutting-edge philosophy or ecological science.
But institutionally and economically, its structures remain powerful.
The revolt is philosophical and pedagogical — not yet structural.
If you would like, I can next:
Map out where a genuine structural transformation might realistically begin
Identify universities most aligned with holistic ecological education
Or analyze whether a complete break from Cartesianism is even possible in modern scientific civilization
Rajaram Krishnamurthy
Cartesian dualism is no longer intellectually dominant in cutting-edge philosophy or ecological science.
But institutionally and economically, its structures remain powerful.
The revolt is philosophical and pedagogical — not yet structural.
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KR VALIDITY OF THE THEORY OF CARTESIAN AND ITS DUALISM
The validity of Cartesian dualism—the 17th-century theory proposed by René Descartes that the mind and body are two distinct, interacting substances—is widely considered to be outdated in contemporary science and mainstream philosophy. While it historically served as a critical foundation for modern science by allowing for the mechanistic study of the body, it is now largely replaced by materialist and monist views that see the mind as an emergent property of brain activity.
Descartes proposed that existence consists of two fundamentally different types of things:
[Res Extensa (Material Substance)]: The physical body, which takes up space, is divisible, and governed by mechanical, physical laws. [Res Cogitans (Thinking Substance)]: The immaterial mind/soul, which does not take up space, is indivisible, and holds the capacity for consciousness, thought, and free will. [Interactionism]: Descartes argued that despite being separate, the mind and body interact, famously proposing the pineal gland as the site of this interaction.
Arguments Against Validity (Modern Critique)
The Interaction Problem: The most significant objection, raised first by Elisabeth of Bohemia in Descartes' own time, is that immaterial substances cannot physically move material ones. If the mind has no physical properties, it cannot cause a physical change (e.g., lifting a hand).
Neuroscience and Brain Damage: Modern neuroscience shows that mental processes are heavily dependent on physical brain structures. Damage to the brain results in direct, predictable changes to personality, memory, and consciousness, suggesting that the "mind" cannot exist independently of the body.
Violation of Physical Laws: The interaction of a non-physical mind on the physical brain would break the law of conservation of energy/mass.
Scientific Advancement: Darwinian evolution and subsequent advances in biology have connected humans to all other living organisms, undermining the view that the human mind is fundamentally different from animal behavior (which Descartes deemed purely mechanistic).
Contemporary Relevance and Alternative Views
Still Intuitive: Despite its rejection in academia, Cartesian dualism remains a popular intuitive view, often supporting religious, spiritual, or near-death experience beliefs.
Philosophy of Mind: It is replaced in academia by Physicalism (material monism), which states that everything is physical, or Property Dualism, which asserts that while there is only one substance, mental properties are distinct from physical ones.
"Ghost in the Machine": Philosopher Gilbert Ryle notoriously referred to Cartesian dualism as the "ghost in the machine," arguing it is a category mistake—treating the mind as an independent "thing" rather than a description of behavior.
Psychoneuroimmunology: Modern health science has moved towards a "biopsychosocial" model, which acknowledges the intense interconnection of mind and body, reversing the rigid separation Descartes instituted.
Cartesian dualism is no longer considered a scientifically valid explanation of human nature, but it remains historically significant as a driver of the scientific method and a catalyst for the ongoing, complex debate regarding the "hard problem" of consciousness.
1 Cartesian Dualism and Gassendi's Objection
The seventeenth century philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes famously held that, while the nature and behavior of nonhuman animals could be explained completely by the physical science of his day, various features of human beings—including in particular the fact that human thought and action are not under direct environmental control—seemed to place them beyond the reach of physical science. Descartes therefore endorsed dualism, the idea that every human being is a complex of a physical body located in space and subject to physical laws and an immaterial mind not located in space and not subject to physical laws. Descartes' contemporary Gassendi famously objected that dualism made a mystery of how bodily actions and movements could be caused by immaterial psychological events: ‘How can there be effort directed against anything, or motion set up in it, unless there is mutual contact between what moves and is moved? And how can there be contact without a body?’ (Descartes and Cottingham et al. 1984). Gassendi's objection is an example of a problem of causation in multiple domains. It turns on the fact that there is causal contact between the mental and physical domains, something which is difficult to understand if Cartesian dualism is true. However, problems of this sort are by no means unique to the relationship between the mental and the physical, nor to Descartes'specific account of that relationship, and nor do they arise only from older ideas in science and philosophy. On the contrary, they arise from a general picture of the world which is very common in contemporary intellectual culture: the causal hierarchy picture.
The cognitive science of the 20th century, reflecting the focus of the individual cognitive sciences, was predominantly interested in perception, memory, problem solving, planning, and other “cognitive” activities. For the most part, researchers interested in cognition ignored those aspects that, as a hangover from Cartesian dualism, were considered “subjective”, such as consciousness and affect. This was due to a variety of factors, including the inheritance of behaviourist and cognitivist psychology. Although cognitivism was a reaction to the behaviourism of the early to mid 20th century and thus directly opposed to many of its claims, they both shared the assumption that the emotional domain was separate from the cognitive domain, and furthermore, that emotion was potentially dissociable from cognition. As a result, cognitive scientists have tended to consider it unnecessary to understand affect in order to understand the other aspects of cognition, and for the most part have left research in this area to a handful of “affective” neuroscientists and psychologists.
So we acquire information about mathematical objects by means of a faculty of mathematical intuition. Now, other philosophers have endorsed the idea that we possess a faculty of mathematical intuition, but Gödel's version of this view involves the idea that the mind is non-physical in some sense and that we are capable of forging contact with, and acquiring information from, non-physical mathematical objects. (Others who endorse the idea that we possess a faculty of mathematical intuition have a no-contact theory of intuition that is consistent with a materialist philosophy of mind. Now, some people might argue that Gödel had such a view as well. I have argued elsewhere [1998, chapter 2, section 4.2] that Gödel is better interpreted as endorsing an immaterialist, contact-based theory of mathematical intuition. But the question of what view Gödel actually held is irrelevant here.) This reject-(1) strategy of responding to the epistemological argument can be quickly dispensed with. One problem is that rejecting (1) doesn't seem to help solve the lack-of-access problem. For even if minds are immaterial, it is not as if that puts them into informational contact with mathematical objects. Indeed, the idea that an immaterial mind could have some sort of information-transferring contact with abstract objects seems just as incoherent as the idea that a physical brain could. Abstract objects, after all, are causally inert; they cannot generate information-carrying signals at all; in short, information can't pass from an abstract object to anything, material or immaterial. A second problem with the reject-(1) strategy is that (1) is, in fact, true. Now, of course, I cannot argue for this here, because it would be entirely inappropriate to break out into an argument against Cartesian dualism in the middle of an essay on the philosophy of mathematics, but it is worth noting that what is required here is a very strong and implausible version of dualism. One cannot motivate a rejection of (1) by merely arguing that there are real mental states, like beliefs and pains, or by arguing that our mentalistic idioms cannot be reduced to physicalistic idioms. One has to argue for the thesis that there actually exists immaterial human mind-stuff.
The term “biomental” (Ninivaggi, 2013, p. 5) was coined to transcend the Cartesian dualism of body-mind separateness. Biomental efforts capture the authentic integrity of the person as a biopsychosocial organism in flux yet in ongoing integration:
I have coined the innovative phrase biomental child development, in which the word “biomental” indicates a specific child development perspective. This term refers to the integrity—nonduality and emergent integration—of the whole individual at all ages in processes that are both psychological and physical. It connotes simultaneity, a responsiveness of the total organism, and the dynamic relatedness among its aspects. In states of health, this relatedness reflects a synergy that promotes emerging dynamic integration. The construct and phenomenon of integration—apparently split-off parts understood to be aspects of a primary whole—is axiomatic in the biomental perspective, and remains a golden thread running throughout this text. p.5. Eastern perspectives have always recognized the intimate links between body and mind and the energies pervading them. A health span that linked wellness to a coupling of body and mind runs through that literature. The term “biomental” also illustrates this. Formalizing these forces by the terms qi and prana makes tangible the intangible. Such paradoxical thought is a quintessential part of Eastern worldviews. Thus, in discussing mindfulness, Eastern conceptions center attention on subtle psychological processes, often using concepts scientifically foreign to Western thought. This contribution aims at helping to bridge this gap in understanding, at least as it adds to explaining the roots of modern mindfulness.
Radical empiricism, in contrast, proposed an ontology that continued his attack on Hegelian absolute idealism but broke sharply with the commonsense mind–body dualism of his scientific psychology. To transcend this Cartesian dualism, and the cognitive dualism of thought and its object or consciousness and its contents, he now proposed pure experience as the fundamental reality. Pure experience prior to analysis or conceptualization does not distinguish between thing and thought. The commonsense categories, he believed, could be recovered from the contexts in which ingredients of pure experience are embedded and their various relationships. His apparent move toward philosophical idealism was qualified by his continuing commitment to pluralism: ‘… there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. If you ask what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same: “It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not”’ (1912/1976, p. 14–15).
Nature was thereby drained of her inner life, rendered a deaf and blind apparatus of indifferent and value-free law, and humankind was faced with a world of inanimate, meaningless matter, upon which it projected its psyche – its aliveness, meaning and purpose – only in fantasy. It was this disenchanted vision of the world, at the dawn of the industrial revolution that followed, that the Romantics found so revolting, and feverishly revolted against. Although Descartes’s dualism did not win the philosophical day, we in the West are still very much the children of the disenchanted bifurcation it ushered in. Our experience remains characterised by the separation of ‘mind’ and ‘nature’ instantiated by Descartes. Its present incarnation – what we might call the empiricist-materialist position – not only predominates in academia, but in our everyday assumptions about ourselves and the world. This is particularly clear in the case of mental disorder.
In order to avoid these difficulties with substance dualism, many have argued for “property dualism,” a view that holds there is only one real substance, one kind of “stuff” as it were, but it has two distinct properties, one material and one mental. Our experience of color, for example, can be understood in these two ways. The wavelengths involved are physical properties detectable by objective measurement and fully implicated in material causal mechanisms. Color, on the other hand, is a qualia, an experiential property accessible only to the experiencing subject (which is why color blindness can easily go undetected); it is only indirectly amenable to qualitative analysis. In other words, physical properties are susceptible to objective, public, third-person analyses, while experiential properties—qualia—are only accessible through subjective, private, first person accounts. It is how we know them that differs, not what they are. Notice the underlying structure of this. We have shifted from substance dualism, which is ontological, to property dualism, which is, in effect, epistemological: “experience” is the private, subjectively accessible dimension while neurons, etc., are the public, objectively accessible dimension. We have replaced a mind-body dualism with a subject-object dualism. But in contrast to Yogācāra Buddhist analyses of the interdependence of subject and object, which operate only in interaction, these two are typically seen as independent—or even incommensurate—epistemologies. Moreover, one or the other of them is typically considered paramount. Eliminative or reductive materialism, for example, claims that the subjective realm of experience only appears to be independent, but even this can be effectively eliminated: once we know enough about the brain we will be able to exhaustively explain experience in material terms, the only real terms there are. This is a modern version of the old appearance reality problem. Qualia, what we appear to experience, have no truly independent reality and hence require no nonmaterial explanation—they are purely epiphenomenal, mere by-products of the material processes which alone are real. In effect, all first-person accounts are valid only insofar as they directly reflect, or may be wholly reduced to, third-person accounts. In this view, we can never truly explain our behavior by appeal illiam waldron | 75 ing to direct experience—to our desires, feelings, or intentions—since these are merely epiphenomenal. Explanations of experience must —in principle—be couched in terms of their material substrate. Indeed, not only is our desire to understand our minds itself a mere by-product of these exclusively real material processes, but so is any desire we might entertain to the contrary! We are in effect automatons only imagining we are agents—such is the logic of reductive materialism. In part as a response to this unappealing (and ultimately incoherent) vision, many posit an intrinsic subjectivity, the counterpart to the objective side of the subject-object dichotomy. If mind is intrinsically intentional, if it is intrinsically “about something,” then it possesses its own nature and properties independently of its material substrate. As Feser (2006, 172) succinctly explains: brain processes, composed as they are of meaningless chemical components, seem as inherently devoid of intentionality as sound-waves or ink marks. Any intentionality they do have would have to be derived from something else. But if everything that is physical is devoid of intentionality, then whatever has intentionality would have to be nonphysical. It follows then that since mind does have intrinsic intentionality it must be nonphysical. But this too has its problems. If our intentional objects, our qualia, were truly independent of any material basis, they would not be involved in causal interactions with the body. We could neither explain why we seem to experience red when we drive up to a stop sign, since the qualia of this seeing should occur independent of our retinas and visual faculties; nor could we explain how this seeming experience of red is connected to our actually stopping, since, again, the seeing is intrinsically nonphysical and hence—by definition—unconnected to our nervous system or muscles. The notion of qualia thus resembles a Cartesian immaterial essence, which rendered causal interaction between body and mind so inexplicable. And insofar as the notion of qualia assumes an underlying ontological dualism between body and mind or an epistemological dualism between first and third person modes of knowing, it has not yet resolved the mind-body problem. Indeed, insofar as subjectivity is exclusively defined as first person and private, and science depends on what is third person and public, subjectivity in principle remains outside the purview 76 | Buddhist Critique of materialist science (Feser 2006, 105).
Thus, to the extent that these three considerations are pertinent— that neuroscience is a theory-laden human enterprise, that meditators are not innocent informants but acculturated individuals, and that all adult brains are radically socialized and linguistified—we cannot assume a truly autonomous third-person knowledge set up against an equally autonomous first-person knowledge, the correlation of which will give us indubitably accurate knowledge about the relation between brain and experience. All of these are inescapably intersubjective; that is, they are related in their very origins. It is not enough for us to perceive them coming together after the fact, as it were; we need to conceive of them as together from the beginning.
Cartesian is far away from all of us; Life is running around the property dualism; getting rid of dualism and Vishishtadvaita, while living with the Karma unattached alone can make all do exist. WITHOUT WINGS NOTHING CAN FLY; BUT TO GET THE WINGS WE HVE TO RIGGLE WITH DUALISM. K Rajaram IRS 27226
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