The Individual Human System

As a System, the human Individual entails a Formal Principle and a Material Principle. The main traditional dualisms are unsatisfactory to serve in those capacities. To begin with, in Aristotle's Soul-Body pair, Body repeats the problem with Aristotelian 'Matter' in general, that it is no more than inert stuff that requires a separate principle to activate. As such, it only encourages an interpretation which Aristotle insists he does not subscribe to--a separation that is not merely analytical, but is ontological, of Body from Soul, such as some Medieval theologians attempted to foist on him. Plus, the legacy of inert corporeality persisted even into the Modern era, for example, in Descartes' Mind-Body duality, in which the latter's property of 'Extension' appears as an accomplished fact, not a dynamic process. Furthermore, as I have once informally discussed, the Mind-Body pair is an abstraction from a more fundamental duality that cuts across both of those parts. The organism's efferential and afferential processes are both part 'mental' and part 'physical'. The efferential begins with a 'mental' moment of willing that activates the 'physical' limbs, while the afferential begins with the 'physical' sense organs, terminating in 'mental' consciousness. Also, there been other pairs of concepts that have traditionally been associated with the Individual, but which have rarely been developed as systematically binary. One is Freedom and Responsibility, the relation between which actually roughly corresponds to the Efferential-Afferential. And, their systematization famously posited, but never developed with respect to the Individual, is the Practical-Theoretical, in the Kantian sense, combination. The Material-Formal pair that I will present will crystallize what is common to all these tandems.