Wellness | Inspiration
Inspiration - The 21st century - our society’s return to - spirituality
| 2025-09-25 |     |
The concept of the human beings was radically challenged in the 19th century. Breaking with previous religious traditions, a monistic theory[1] emerged, notably under the impetus of Ludwig Büchner (1824-1899); this theory asserted that human nature is purely material. It reduced human beings to machines (stimulus-response) that would be the product of their genes and environment. From this perspective, an individual’s personality was nothing more than the combination of their physical structure and experiences.
In fact, monism (and its ideological extension in today’s neuroscience) made life a by-product of matter. One of the main ideas of this philosophical system was that thought, consciousness, and emotions are exclusively products of the brain; they can therefore be explained entirely by neural activity, synaptic connections, neurotransmitters, etc. “Without phosphorus, there is no thought”, Büchner had supported in his work Force and Matter[2].
In practice, monism was a metaphysical view that explained the visible world, a way of interpreting the results of one’s experiences. It was a philosophical bias rather than an empirical necessity (a principle that would have been made indispensable by the experience).
However, the question that needs to be asked is this: was the solution to the problem that monists had sought to resolve really relevant? Why complicate things by trying to lump everything together?
Would it not have been wiser to follow the example of philosophers, lawyers, and ordinary people who outright accept dualism, in other words, who acknowledge the duality of the human condition (mind and body) and who assert that the life that inhabits a human being (as well as any living organism) is immaterial, autonomous, and therefore not necessarily reducible to a material phenomenon in the physical sense?
Although dualism is entirely compatible with most traditional religions’ conceptions of the spirit (or soul), it differs from them in that it arises from a requirement of the contemporary society: to reconcile the knowledge and findings of the experimental sciences with the need to revalue human beings as autonomous living beings endowed with self-awareness, as well as awareness of the world around them.
But how can we establish a rational and modern dualism that contains no dogma and is also fully consistent with advances in the physical sciences?
The American philosopher L. Ron Hubbard wrote the following: “… the individual, himself, is a spirit controlling a body via a mind.”[3]
He developed the concept of an immaterial mind by formulating a coherent system of thought in the early 1950s, the first axiom of which is as follows:
“Axiom 1 Life is basically a Static.
Definition: A Life Static has no mass, no motion, no wavelength, no location in space or in time. It has the ability to postulate and perceive.
Definition: In Scientology, the word ‚postulate‘ means to cause a thinkingness or consideration. It is a specially applied word and is defined as ‚causative thinkingness‘.”[4]
As this first axiom suggests, dualism implies the principle that human beings possess a degree of free will and freedom of choice, even if only to a very small extent.
With this element of free will, dualism may seem like a familiar, even obvious concept to many people. But for others, it may be confusing at first glance, particularly because it leads to a strong notion of responsibility that is not necessarily easy to accept. Indeed, free will implies that human beings, far from being mere victims of their environment, always have a responsibility towards the world around them.
Accepting the existence of free will therefore implies that individuals must constantly make the right choices and accept the consequences; they can no longer invoke “external constraints” to justify their past transgressions or inaction to themselves.
And on a societal level, isn’t dualism a fundamental principle implicit in human rights? Indeed, the three concepts of conscience, freedom of choice, and responsibility are clearly present in the first article of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”[5]
Beyond initial resistance to its acceptance, modern dualism opens extraordinary perspectives for our society, as it allows us to reevaluate concepts such as creativity, art, ethics, democratic rights, concern for the environment and for all living beings, as well as freedom. It promotes a higher idea of human beings.
[1] Monism: a theory or doctrine that denies the existence of a distinction or duality in a particular sphere, such as that between matter and mind, or God and the world. (Oxford Languages)
[2] Kraft und Stoff, Ludwig Büchner, Francfort-sur-le-Main, 1855 (translated by DeepL).
[3] L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology, The Fundamentals of Thought, p. 76.
[4] Ibid., p. 85.
[5] Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 (https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf).
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