When epistemic strategy hardened into metaphysics
Descartes is often remembered as the philosopher who split the world in two.
But this is already a misreading. Descartes did not begin by positing two substances as a speculative ontology. He began with a problem of certainty: how to secure knowledge in a world where appearances deceive, traditions mislead, and authority cannot be trusted.
What followed was not a discovery of dualism, but the hardening of an epistemic strategy into metaphysics.
1. The Quest for What Cannot Be Doubted
Descartes’ project is frequently described as radical scepticism. More precisely, it is a search for an indubitable foothold — something that remains stable under maximal abstraction.
Two domains emerge from this search:
That which can be rendered clear, distinct, and geometrically describable.
That which cannot be eliminated even by doubt itself.
These are not neutral categories. They are products of a methodological filter.
2. Res Extensa: What Submits to Geometrisation
Res extensa is not simply “matter.” It is matter construed under a specific inclination: that which submits to geometrisation.
Extension, shape, motion, and measurable relation become the defining features of what counts as real in the external world. What cannot be expressed in these terms is not denied outright — it is simply excluded from the ontological core.
This move stabilises mathematical physics.
Once the world is defined as extension-in-motion, it becomes fully available to formal description. Nature becomes legible to geometry, and explanation becomes derivation.
But this legibility is achieved by a cut.
3. Res Cogitans: The Remainder Category
What, then, of thought, sensation, intention, imagination?
These do not submit to geometrisation. They resist formal closure. Rather than being re-theorised relationally, they are relocated.
Res cogitans is not honoured as the site of meaning; it is isolated as what remains once everything formal has been extracted.
The mind becomes:
non-spatial,
non-extended,
private,
ontologically sealed.
This is not elevation. It is quarantine.
4. The Cost of Stabilisation
Descartes’ dualism achieves something extraordinary: it secures a domain in which mathematical physics can proceed without interference from ambiguity, perspective, or qualitative experience.
But the cost is relational continuity.
Once mind and world are ontologically segregated:
perception becomes a problem,
action becomes a problem,
causation across the divide becomes mysterious.
Interaction is no longer a relation to be theorised; it is an anomaly to be managed.
5. Why Interaction Becomes Mysterious
The familiar “mind–body problem” is often treated as a technical puzzle within dualism.
Relationally, it is simpler:
Interaction becomes mysterious because relation has already been exiled.
By defining substances as self-sufficient and non-overlapping, Descartes forecloses the very resources needed to explain their coupling. The difficulty is not accidental. It is structural.
6. The Untheorised Cut
Here the key diagnosis becomes clear.
The problem with Cartesian dualism is not that it posits two substances.
It is that it refuses to theorise the cut that produced them.
The separation between res extensa and res cogitans is treated as an ontological fact rather than as the outcome of an epistemic orientation:
prioritising formal clarity,
privileging geometrical description,
suppressing perspectival relation.
Once the cut is forgotten, its consequences appear as metaphysical mysteries.
7. Dualism as Successful Method
Cartesian dualism endured not because it was proven, but because it worked.
It delivered:
unprecedented predictive power,
stable explanatory frameworks,
a clear division of scientific labour.
Its success concealed its cost.
What was excluded — relation, horizon, construal — did not disappear. It returned as a series of intractable problems that continue to haunt science and philosophy.
8. Looking Ahead
Descartes’ dualism sets the stage for a further refinement of the same inclination.
In the next post, we will examine how Galileo’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities completed the ontological purification begun here — transforming a methodological abstraction into a governing picture of reality itself.
The cut will be made cleaner.
And the exile of relation will deepen.
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