Substance dualism — the metaphysical doctrine that mind and body constitute two ontologically distinct kinds of being — occupies a charged and largely critical position within the depth-psychology corpus. The library’s treatment is neither uniform advocacy nor simple rejection; rather, it reveals a sustained tension between inherited Cartesian formulations and the integrative, embodied, or process-oriented alternatives that depth psychology and allied phenomenological traditions consistently press against classical dualism. Descartes himself is the unavoidable reference point: his Meditations elaborate the real distinction between res cogitans and res extensa, working through the concepts of substance, modal existence, and transubstantiation that anchored early modern dualist thought. Aristotle’s De Anima, as interpreted in the corpus, frames the quadripartite scheme — physical/spiritual permutations of body and soul — making plain that Cartesian dualism is one possibility among several. Against this backdrop, thinkers from Plotinus to Simondon to Thompson reconstruct substance and psyche in ways that collapse or bypass the hard dualist split. Thompson explicitly names a ‘dualism of matter versus information’ as an obscuring conceptual error. Simondon situates the body-soul opposition within a broader somatopsychic problem that resists any simple two-substance resolution. Jung’s corpus registers Manichaean and gnostic dualisms as cultural-psychological symptoms rather than metaphysical truths. The overall trajectory of the library is toward monist, enactivist, or emanationist alternatives, making substance dualism function less as an endorsed position than as a contested inheritance.
the third is paradigmatically the position of the modern Cartesian Dualist, and the fourth
This passage maps the logical space of body-soul combinations, identifying Cartesian substance dualism — physical body, spiritual soul — as one of four canonical positions and calling it the paradigmatic modern instantiation.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350thesis
Another problem associated with the notion of information is that it almost invariably goes hand in hand with a dualism of matter versus information. This dualism obscures the nature of cellular dynamics.
Thompson argues that informational language in biology smuggles in a covert substance dualism — matter versus information — that misrepresents the integrated autopoietic dynamics of living systems.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
dualism xxxvi–xxxviii
The index entry for ‘dualism’ in the editorial apparatus of the Meditations marks it as a central, explicitly discussed theme spanning multiple sections of Descartes’s foundational text on mind-body distinction.
, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2008thesis
Here is Dennett’s version of informational dualism: If you think of yourself as a center of narrative gravity an abstraction defined by the brain’s information processing… your existence depends on the persistence of that narrative… which could theoretically survive indefinitely many switches of medium
Thompson exposes Dennett’s program-based conception of personal identity as a form of informational dualism that replicates the substance-dualist aspiration to mind’s independence from any particular physical substrate.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
the substances of bread and wine are said to be changed into the substance of something else in such a way that this new substance is contained altogether within the same boundaries as the other substances were contained in before
Descartes applies his account of substance and modal existence to the theological problem of transubstantiation, illustrating how his dualist ontology of distinct substances grounds both his physics and his philosophy of religion.
, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2008supporting
subsisting by themselves : existing as things in their own right, not as attributes or modifications of some other thing… Spinoza, however, was to suggest that if finite entities cannot exist without an infinite substance, it makes no sense to speak of them as ‘existing by themselves’
This editorial gloss traces the internal pressure on Cartesian substance dualism that Spinoza exploited, showing that the concept of independently subsisting substances generates a monist counterargument from within Descartes’s own framework.
, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2008supporting
the opposition between man and animal, which is erected into a dualistic principle, originates within the somatopsychic opposition itself.
Simondon locates the broader human-animal dualism as derivative of the more fundamental somatopsychic dualism, suggesting that substance dualism is a secondary crystallization of a deeper ontological misreading of individuation.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
Substance is that which belongs essentially to itself, or, in so far as it is a part of the differentiated object, serves only to complete the Composite.
Plotinus offers a definition of substance that diverges from Cartesian dualism by emphasizing the Composite and the relational completion of form and matter, resisting any clean bifurcation of ontological kinds.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
what is the objection to including everything in a single category, all else of which existence is predicated being derived from that one thing, Existence or Substance?
Plotinus interrogates the grounding of plural substances within a single category of Being, probing the metaphysical coherence of any dualist ontology that posits two irreducibly different kinds of substance.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
Spirit itself is pure substance of being presenting itself as an object no longer to physical, vital or mental sense, but to a light of a pure spiritual perceptive knowledge in which the subject becomes its own object
Aurobindo reformulates substance not as one half of a Cartesian binary but as a graduated continuum from matter through mind to spirit, dissolving dualist ontology into a series of increasingly subtle self-aware being.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
the being here must, that is, be life, and the life and the being must be one.
Plotinus insists on the identity of life and substance in Soul, refusing any dualism that would separate the living principle from the substrate in which it is supposedly housed.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
This duality of point of view is an expression of the eternal ineradicable dualism of all living. In Psychological Types, C. G. Jung studies critically many aspects of this basic dualism
Rudhyar treats dualism as an irreducible experiential polarity between spirit and substance rather than a metaphysical thesis about two kinds of thing, and cites Jung’s Psychological Types as a critical engagement with this perennial tension.
, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting
Manichaean dualism, 103
A brief index reference situating Manichaean dualism as a distinct entry within Jung’s comparative mythological and psychological taxonomy, indicating its presence as a thematic coordinate rather than a developed argument.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959aside
The sage has transcended dualism, whereas the newborn has yet to enter it, not having awakened to the fact that he or she has been born into a realm of deeply ingrained dualism
Masters treats dualism not as a philosophical thesis but as a developmental stage or existential condition to be traversed on the way to integrative awareness, subordinating the metaphysical question to a psychological-spiritual narrative.
, Spiritual Bypassing When Spirituality Disconnects Us From, 2012aside