Substance Dualism

 

Sterling's Core Stoicism: The Six Philosophical Commitments

One: Substance Dualism

Classical Stoicism placed its ethics in logical dependence on Stoic physics — the providential Logos, the rational fire permeating all things, the deterministic cosmos. Sterling's Core Stoicism replaces that physics with six philosophical commitments that do the same structural work without requiring the ancient cosmology. Each commitment is a load-bearing element of the practical system. Remove any one and the system fails at the point that commitment supports.

The first commitment is substance dualism.

The Commitment

The rational faculty — the self that receives impressions, withholds assent, examines claims, and makes decisions — is not identical with the body or any physical process. It is a genuinely distinct substance. There is a real self that stands over against its representations and owns its acts of assent or refusal.

Why Sterling Needs It

Without a genuine self distinct from physical events, the pause has nowhere to occur. Recognition — the act by which the impression is reclassified as a representation rather than reality — requires a subject standing over against the object. If the self is simply one more physical event among physical events, there is no one to whom the impression appears, only the appearing. The entire five-step method presupposes a real agent capable of withholding assent. Substance dualism is what makes that agent real rather than apparent.

The source texts make this explicit. Recognition "presupposes that the mind is not identical with its representations, and that representations are not identical with the world. Prohairesis is not a function of the impression and not a product of the event. It is a distinct locus of judgment." And at the pause: "The pause does not occur in the body. The body reacts according to physical law... The pause occurs in the rational faculty of judgment. It is not a physical event but a rational one."

The Competing Positions

Physicalism holds that the self is identical with the brain or its processes. Mental states are physical states. There is no immaterial substance — only matter configured in complex ways. On this view the pause is a neural event, assent is a brain state, and the self is an emergent property of physical processes rather than a distinct substance.

Property dualism holds that mental properties are genuinely distinct from physical properties but are not properties of a distinct substance — they are properties of the physical brain. The self has both physical and mental properties but is not itself an immaterial thing.

The Answers

Against physicalism: if assent is simply a brain state governed by physical law, it is determined by prior physical causes. The pause disappears — there is only a longer causal pathway to a fixed result. Moral responsibility dissolves with it. The Stoic practical program becomes an elaborate description of a mechanism rather than a genuine practice.

Against property dualism: mental properties without a mental substance leave the agent without genuine causal power of its own. If the properties belong to the physical brain, they are ultimately governed by physical causation. The self has no genuine standpoint from which to evaluate impressions — it is still inside the causal chain rather than capable of interrupting it.

The positive case rests on what the practice requires. A real pause, a genuine withholding of assent, a self that owns its acts and is answerable for them — these require a real agent. The phenomenology of moral experience — the felt reality of genuine choice, of standing over against an impression and deciding — points to a self that is not reducible to physical events. As the source texts state: "Without this separation, there is no observer of experience, only experience. There is no one to whom the impression appears, only the appearance itself. There is no standpoint from which a claim could be evaluated, because there is nothing that stands over against the claim."