With Descartes, against dualism

Abstract

At the crossroads between philosophy and ‘somatics’, we interrogate the problem of dualism as something that still more or less explicitly inhabits our discourse, and forms and deforms our practices. By closely following Descartes’ correspondence with the Princess Elisabeth (1643), we see how Descartes’ concern with distinguishing body from soul never ceases to be problematized by reason of the continual evidence of their union. Considering that in the correspondence the two keys elements that appear when thinking about the union of soul and body are weight and extension, we utilize these two pathways to comprehend the problems and concerns they have identified within the evidence of union. Furthermore, we seek to retrieve these problems and concerns through Bergson’s later philosophy of ‘extensivity’ as it appears in Matter and Memory (1896) under a non-classical dualistic model. We do this, not to proclaim either union or extensivity as solutions, nor even to find the right philosophy for somatic pra tices, but to see how these problems historically found can help us look attentively at somatics’ abilities to invent non-dualistic forms and thoughts, particularly in regard to how they think through movement.