How Spinoza Helps Us Do Away with Mind/Body Dualism and Why We Should Endeavor To Do So

I have been enjoying writing these posts that exhibit how I incorporate my philosophical work into my surfing practice. This — surfing and philosophy — is the topic of my PhD dissertation, which I hope to turn into a book or publish as a book soon after I defend it. I was going to defend it this spring, but due to my health insurance coverage through graduate school, I’m going to wait until the fall so that I have health insurance throughout 2020. Seems like a pretty critical year to have health insurance.

As some may know (from reading the ‘About’ page), the name of this thing I have created — Conatus Surf Club — comes from the philosophy of Benedict (or Baruch or Bento) Spinoza. I dedicate a whole chapter to his theory of the ‘conatus’ and how it pertains to surfing. One of the difficulties I am having in finishing that chapter — I have 4 versions of it so far — is getting tangled up in trying to explain everything about Spinoza’s philosophy. I want to fill out all the nuanced ways in which his ideas intersect and interlock with one another. It’s a classic writing mistake! There really is not a way to cover all the bases, but you can come up with some interesting interpretations. If you’re not satisfied with them down the road because you discovered something new, you can update them to your new understanding.

I find Spinoza’s philosophy interesting for so many reasons, but one of the most pivotal is the way that he collapses any hard and fast distinction we may want to make between the mind and the body. One difficulty, evidenced by what I just wrote, is that this dualism is baked into our way of speaking about what it means to be the kinds of beings that we are. It is simply difficult and near impossible to differentiate between mind and body. What is most therapeutic about this dualism is the way that it makes it easier for us to comprehend our existence, even at the cost of not apprehending reality in all of its intricate depth. Mind/body dualistic thinking has roots in ancient Greek thinking starting with Pythagoras and in Judeo-Christian theology. The Pythagorean formula, “The body is a prison from which the soul desires to escape,” has dominated or insinuated itself in Western thought since at least its first utterance. That it was uttered at all is proof that it preexists Pythagoras and his sect. Plato took up this idea with relish, and to some extent so must have Socrates, in his theory of forms which holds that all things that are are only shadow images of ideal forms that exist on a transcendental plane — the realm of pure ideas outside of the cave. We may still want to inquire into the relationship between the cave — the world of the flesh and body — and the realm of pure ideas — the world of the mind. The hard and fast separation and the need of subjugation of the bodily realm by the mental realm is rooted ultimately in misogynistic and racist thought patterns. These thought patterns are especially insidious because they are ontological and metaphysical at their core. This furthermore means that a majority of the time they operate unconsciously. The basic thought is that the flesh needs to come under the subjugation of the mind. Or that whatever is bodily is necessarily in need of suppression and control. This amounts to a correlation between earth and sky or heaven and the idea of a soul that is more connected to this transcendent or upper realm, which is then distinguished from the material world in which bodies are born, live, and die. In Christian theology, the very notion that “the sins of the flesh” hold the soul back from reaching heaven is emblematic of this division. Hence the premium placed on virginity and celibacy — sex makes you less “pure” because it involves bodily pleasure. So too the idea of original sin in the garden where woman — Eve — and food — the apple — lure man — Adam — to deny god’s commandments. This embeds, even if unconsciously, an alignment between body-woman-food-sex-evil-punishment within the culture that holds such a myth to be foundational for its self understanding.

This bad dichotomy is not just bound to realm of religious or spiritual thought — it has also insinuated itself into scientific thinking (which is evident already in Pythagoras’ use of it). Rene Descartes, of “cogito ergo sum” fame, worked to ensure that the scientific community treats the mind and the body separately from one another. In his Meditations he writes things like: “. . . Our soul is of a nature entirely independent of the body . . .” He used such formulations to prove that this means that we can treat animals, which for him are all body, as if they don’t have souls and thus subject them to mutilations and experiments in the name of science. Spinoza took issue with much of Descartes’ method, and we can say with some confidence that he composes his Ethics with an eye towards overturning the problematic notions of both Cartesian rationalism and Judeo-Christian metaphysics.

Spinoza begins the Ethics with a geometrical proof for the nature and existence of “God” (Deus in the Latin). He wants to get this out of the way at the start since it is the largest question that ties all the other questions together. Following Anselm of Canterbury, for Spinoza “God is that which nothing greater can be thought.” There are multiple ways we can conceive of this “eternal substance”, but he wants us to strive not to think that whatever God is that it does anything with a particular eye to or care of human beings (such interpretations are superstitious, foolish, and lack evidence). We are merely one of its manifestations, as everything else is also a manifestation of it — or in Spinoza’s language everything is a mode or an attribute of what he will later call “God or Nature” — Deus sive Natura. We may also view this eternal substance as an activity: God godding or Nature naturing. We and the world around us are products of this activity — in the Latin we and the world around us are natura naturata — real material things constituted by an eternal process. Already here we can see how this basic natural theology starts to undo a strong distinction between ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’. The other upshot, I hope you can already see, is that it undoes hierarchies of being — we are all in this together, inextricably connected through nature to one another and our world. The philosopher Etienne Balibar calls this a concept of transindividuality.

The second chapter of the Ethics is titled “Of the Nature and the Origin of the Mind”. And guess what? It begins with a definition of the body: “D1: By body I understand a mode that in a certain and determinate way expresses God’s essence insofar as he is considered an extended thing.” “Extension” is a scholastic philosophical term that means literally that — a something that is extended in spacetime. If you’re being you have extension. Just look at your hand. There it is. So it is not mind first that “gives” you being, but extension or being bodily extended in spacetime. This is literally the opposite of Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum.” Extension, furthermore, is necessarily an attribute of the ultimate reality, God or Nature, by virtue of its very existence at all. Again, have a look, listen, smell, or feel around — we exist in a world. Our particular bodies also come equipped with these organs called brains and we perceive that we have thoughts or that we think. For Spinoza this capacity to think must preexist us in the natural world from which and into which we emerge. A mind is a physical/extended thing that thinks. It is affected by its environment, history, and the words and actions of other beings.

It has been a convention in philosophy to call Spinoza’s conception of the interrelation of the mind and the body “parallelism”, but I think this is a misnomer. Things that are parallel run alongside one another and what Spinoza is suggesting is far more radical than this. He is suggesting that the body and the mind — extension and thinking — are completely intertwined, interdependent, and enmeshed with one another. The adage “mind over matter” must be thrown in the trash bin. Instead we may want to phrase it, “Mind with matter, working together in the unified existence that they necessarily entail.”

The ‘conatus’, as the basic drive for continued existence, joy, and homeostasis, can be seen as a principle of unification of these modes of existing. In Chapter 3 Of the Affects, Proposition 7, Spinoza defines the ‘conatus’ as the essence of our existences: “The striving (conatus) by which each thing strives (conatur) to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.” And in Proposition 12 he shows how this striving links the body and the mind together: “The mind as far as it can, strives (conatur) to imagine those things that increase or aid the body’s power of acting.” And it is not just us human beings that have this conatus. Everything that nature natures or god gods — all of natura naturata — has a conatus. Waves have conatuses. Sharks too. Trees. Viruses. Everything desires to persist in existing with all of its being. We are particular in our awareness and ability to reflect on this fact. Reflection and imagination, too, are bodily.

Surfing is an exemplary practice that forces us to consider the truth of Spinoza’s claims. It is impossible to separate mental and physical activities from the surfing practice, and in fact one’s surfing improves the more one is able to integrate their reading and judgments of both the ocean waves and their dynamic interrelation with the land vis a vis the bottom topography or bathymetry and the social reality of any given surf spot on any given day. Combine this with an increasing ability to enter and navigate waves successfully and gracefully, and you have the image of a flourishing surfing practice. But there are plenty things that will attempt to thwart the conatus. When a person yells at you for getting in their way that affects your entire system. Fear and anxiety radiate through your limbs, inhibiting physical ability to move more quickly and effectively. Same goes for when you’re looking down the face of a scary wave and every signal in your system communicates a variety of fright/flight responses. This is not a hallucination. Your initial thought that putting yourself into that position with your whole being has the capacity to bring you greater joy — because it will increase your body’s power of acting — is correct. But other parts of your system communicate the idea that if you fail you may die, which goes against every fiber of your being — on the deepest unconscious level you want to continue existing. But overall, you endeavor to exist with ever increasing powers for acting. If you learn to see the wave and enter it, to take time on your entry, and direct your being in different ways down its path, you will increase your powers for acting and for joyful existence. Your example also illumines the path for others to share in this joyful existence.

This concords with Spinoza’s theory of knowledge. He lists three ways that humans come to form knowledge or universal notions: 

1. Opinion or imagination. We get this kind of knowledge from random experience and from simply coming into contact with things (ab experientia vaga). This kind of knowledge forms memories and helps us imagine, but on its own, i.e., w/out reflection, it cannot provide us with certainty. 

2. Reason. Reason comes from common notions and adequate ideas. Does not need to go as far as seeing the common source of all things, but does constitute basic pattern recognition, reflection, and projection of future feeling. 

3. Intuitive scientific knowing. This is the kind of knowing and acting that is able to trace all things back to Deus sive Natura and the interconnectedness of all life. 

We can think about the three kinds of knowledge in the experience of the surfer: 

1. Surfing ab experentia vaga. When you first start surfing there are so many “external objects” affecting your senses for the first time. You see waves breaking but you cannot tell the difference between lefts, rights, and closeouts. You see the ocean and waves but you do not yet recognize patterns in them. You see a surfboard and you have a vague notion of how you’re supposed to paddle it out into the lineup, but you have not yet tried to do it so you’re only relying on your imagination of watching Blue Crush when you were a teenager. You lay down on the board and realize you have no clue what to do with your body. Then you start getting crushed by waves. There is simply too much information bombarding you at once for you to make sense of it. You are going to make bad decisions simply out of ignorance to the common notions that are everywhere around you, but that you cannot yet recognize as such. 

2. Surfing ex notiones communes. You have had more experience, hired a teacher or found a mentor, and learned how to name phenomena that you have been experiencing — waves, peaks, channels, lefts, rights, closeouts. You start recognizing patterns and this makes it easier to navigate the environment. You can accurately guage the possibilities for catching waves in terms of their frequency and the amount of people in the water and their adjacent ability levels. When you make an error of judgment you reflect on the situation and try to see where you went wrong so that the next time something similar should happen you will do the better thing. You can see many other sources of danger and strive to avoid them. You start experiencing more confidence in your practice. You will still have confused ideas, especially as regards your own body and its interactions, and you may still even developed confused notions about your entitlement to the waves and your relationship to others in the water.

3. Surfing as a scientia intuitiva. You have reached the point where all of your actions are informed by a body mind integrity that expresses the understanding that you have of Deus sive Natura. You recognize patterns extremely well through your finely tuned mental-physical memory. Your ability to see waves emerge ahead of time is advanced and for this reason you are not persuaded by waves that will only drain you of energy and thus will not help you add more power and joy to the world. You give waves to others out of your awareness of the eternity of time and your connectedness to all others within this eternity. Even with this kind of knowledge you still err — part of this knowledge is knowing that no matter how hard to try to live virtuously, you will continue to err. You are constituted by striving not by arriving. 

For the fun of it, I wanted to illustrate body/mind integration in surfing with some images. I will start with the image of me about to take off on a wave from this January in CA. I think from the initial image the connectedness of my whole being is evident. I used previous pattern recognition to pick that wave, find the place of entry, and trusted in the capacities I have developed to enter my being into its curving wall. It is of note that I have chose a wave without another human on it — this is a great skill to develop for becoming a surfer with scientia intuitiva. I follow this with images that show potential paths I could take on this wave to show how a surfer with scientia intuitiva uses his past experiences to project real imaginative possibilities into the future. Check it out.

Here I am at the peak, looking down the line, considering possibilities with my whole being. Pic: Richard Mattison.

Here is a potential scenario where I imagine myself doing a top turn, then an end section hit.

Here is a simpler line, which is always an option. Here I would take a mid line and aim for whatever that end section has in store for me.

Here I imagine a roundhouse cutback, where I race to the shoulder, making sure I have plenty of speed and room to do the turn, redirect back to the white water, rebound off it, then aim for the end section.

In this scenario I am considering one big “cut down” maneuver before dealing with the end section. I’d take an angled path, slight bottom turn, then just before I arrive at the lip, I direct the whole board back down the face with just enough force to complete the turn, but not so much force that I skip out.

In the Spinozist spirit this kind of practice isn’t “mind surfing” but instead is conative memory and imagination surfing. Here we simply may want to substitute ‘conatus’ for 'mind/body complex’. Our conatus is our essence, that part of us that endeavors to push ourselves to see and to gain new powers of acting joyfully. We rely of the help and guidance and examples of other conative beings to show us new possibilities. It doesn’t mean that we can all become Italo Ferreira, but it does mean that we can strive to become the best version of ourselves possible. In one of his most famous lines Spinoza writes, “We don’t even know what a body can do.” Ethically speaking, more bodies that realize their integration and connection with other bodies, the better the overall political body is capable of functioning. Surfing, as a human practice, is by nature political, which means that like all political endeavors, it works better the more reflective and imaginative its constituents become. This is what drives the CSC motto “more waves, more joy.”

Obviously there is much I have left unexplained here. I cannot possibly do the entire Ethics justice in one blog post. For this reason I am offering an 8 week seminar on Spinoza on Wednesdays from 7-830 starting April 22nd. To get involved simply email me, order a copy of the Ethics (linked above), and we’ll get started soon. I am also offering private consultations where we can go through similar conative imaginative practices with your own surfing — I will guide you through a “surfing meditation” — so that you can learn to integrate your overall surfing practice into the very fabric of your being. And once we can go back to our usual program of physically distant but socially responsible surfing, you’ll be able to put this into practice. In closing, I want to urge you to keep considering the ways in which your mental and physical state of being is completely intertwined and to resist interpretations that urge you to consider them separately.