Poetic Dualism

July 6th, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Bloom, Paul, Brain, Dualism, Johnson, Mark, Lakoff, George, Metaphor, Mind, Poetics |

Despite the best attempts by philosophy and science to deny the dualism which is such a part of folk science, a tendency unfairly attributed to Descartes, but actually deeply entrenched in the human psyche, such dualism still dominates much debate. As Paul Bloom suggests, we may be ‘natural born dualists’. Efforts to collapse this duality, whether it be termed as a duality of mind and body, or brain and mind, or matter and spirit, have tended not to provide an integrated model, but simply to deny the existence of one or other of the terms.

Part of the distinction between these terms, and which is used in the suppression of supporters of the one by supporters of the other, is the language which is used to talk about the concepts which form each part of the dualism. There is a perceived difference in the type of discourse which represents the brain, for example, and that which represents the mind. The former is objective, noumenal, scientific, whereas the latter is subjective, phenomenal, poetic.

Recent developments in the study of cognition, however, suggests that this distinction is largely unsupportable.Work carried out by Lakoff, Johnson, etc indicates that the only epistemological distinction to be made is between concepts which are concrete and those which are abstract, not between those concepts which are objective and those which are subjective. Concrete concepts are those which are directly available to the senses, which have tangible and physical attributes. Abstract concepts, which make up most of our thoughts and language, are not available to the senses and can therefore only be represented in cognition through a process of metaphorical mapping.Given that most conceptualisation about both the brain and the mind is necessarily abstract, the mind not being directly available to the senses, then all discourses on the subject of the mind are necessarily structured through metaphor.

Any integration between discourses, if such integration is desirable, must start with a recognition that both objective and subjective discourses around abstract concepts are ultimately poetic.