Saturday, August 17, 2019

Immanent Dualism and Transcendent Dualism

A rarely recognized distinction is that between Immanent Dualism and Transcendent Dualism.  In the former, a pair is conceived as essentially compresent, in the latter, a pair is conceived as essentially separated.  One example of the former is Form and Matter, i. e. complements, while one example of the latter is Descartes' Mind and Body.  Now, one reason why the distinction is not generally recognized is that Philosophy has usually been quasi-Dualistic, previously discussed, thus entailing an essential separation of some kind between the two terms.  But another is that advocacy of Immanent Dualism, where putative, has typically been half-hearted.  One example is Aristotle, who after presenting Form and Matter as complementary, seems to argue for a divine isolation of the former from the latter.  Likewise, after presenting Mind and Body as parallel, Spinoza struggles to explain that a Mind might survive the death of its corresponding Body.  Now, it seems difficult to deny that One and Many, or, equivalently, Unity and Multiplicity, constitute an Immanent Duality.  For, all the entities in the world are both One and Many, and even if the Universe itself is infinite, that it does not immediately dissipate indicates the presence of an internal integrity that holds its many parts together.  Hence, the predominance of the concept of One and Many as a Transcendent Duality in the history of Philosophy, begins just as Neoplatonism unwittingly represents it--by a severing of an original Immanent Duality.

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