What Am I?
Authors: Almog Joseph 
Published: October 2003

This book articulates and defends Descartes's dual key project: the separation of human mind and body as distinct substances and their integration into a single human being. The central challenge faced by Descartes's dualism is the prove too much/prove too little dilemma: too keen a separation of mind and body gets in the way of reuniting them into a full bloodied real human subject, whereas emphasizing the primality of the full human being is not enough to preserve the distinctness of mind and body as separate complete substances.

The book approaches the Cartesian project in two stages. The first stage concerns the nature of the real distinction between mind and body. The first chapter examines the conceivability arguments that give Descartes's dualism its epistemological bite. The arguments from possibility, conceivability and whatness (or essence) deploy structurally similar considerations to establish the numerical and existential distinction of mind and body. Throughout this book it is assumed that mind and body necessarily coexist. The reconstruction of the real distinction between mind and body respects the assumption of modal inseparability by representing a sense of separate existence weaker than the genuine possibility of disjointed existence. The quest is for conceivable coherent stories depicting the existence of mind without body that, though not really possible, are nevertheless consistent with what the mind is. Conceivability and possibility are mediated by essence, which is responsible for providing the conceptual ‘fix’ on the entity that survives through conceivability scenarios. Essence is understood in conceivability‐free terms: it takes precedence over what is genuinely conceivable of a given item.

At the second stage of the Cartesian conception of man, the challenge posed by the mind/body integration into a single human being is to preserve the four major assumptions that emerge out of the discussion of real distinction: (i) complete subjecthood, (ii) modal inseparability, (iii) conceivable existential separability, (iv) whatness (essence) separability. The question concerns the embedding of the mind and body into the real human being whose mind and body they are. Satisfying the demands of the second stage requires changing the conception of essence in (iv) whatness separability from generic essence (mind as ‘thinking thing’, body as ‘extended thing’) to robust essence (the mind's essence consists of being the mind of a man, similarly for body). This is done by contrasting a classical, separatist dualist reading of Descartes's project with an integrationist dualist interpretation. The merits of integrationist dualism over the eventually rejected separatist dualism concern its ability to deal with the problem of real subjecthood, endurance and change in time. The core of the integrationist approach is the primacy of the human being, in terms of which both the existence/identity conditions and the essence of mind/body are given. A categorical conception of substance is sketched, in contrast to an existential conception of substance as ability to exist on its own.

By the end of the second chapter, the conception of generic essence has been scrapped. The operative conception is one of robust essences, weaved around the specific human being to whom mind and body belong by their nature. This move recommends the revisiting of the ‘real distinction’ presented in the first chapter. According to that conception, whatness‐consistency is the basis for conceivability claims about mind/body distinctness. The robust notion of essence answers to the problem of ‘conceivability illusions’ such as the apparent conceiving of disembodied minds and mind‐man swaps. This perspective allows the appraisal of the ability of integrative dualism to handle the prove too much/prove too little dilemma. It is argued that integrative dualism safeguards the interdependence of mind, body, and man without levelling over the status of mind and body as distinct complete substances. The dilemma is thus rendered innocuous. The book concludes with a final look at Descartes’d primal question (‘what am I?’) and raises the question of the logical form of such what‐am‐I assertions.

Beyond the question of Descartes, this book argues for a particular kind of metaphysics dealing in full bloodied enduring objects rather than ontological abstractions sub species aeternitate. Existence in time and resistance to reduction/definition are the marks of the real subject of metaphysics. Properly conducted metaphysical enquiry should explore the nature, essence, and being though time of unstinted real entities antecedently given in the ordinary world. The order of investigation dictates the blueprints for conceivability: the question of what may be conceived of each real subject is subsequent to the determination of what the real subject is.