Establishing the New Science of the Concept. [1] Bhakti Madhava Puri, Ph.D.
July 13, 2018

The Physical and the Mental

The physical as contrasted with the mental, is one side of a whole of two antithetical yet intimately related parts. There are three terms here, like two antithetical peas in a pod (the whole). Some may call the antithetical relation that is involved here an object-subject duality (which is originally not a duality because of the integral relation between thesis and antithesis) due to the presumption of the subject as a separately existing agent [ego] of thinking activity opposed to the otherwise reified being of an object. However, because this thinking activity is directed toward comprehending the inner essence or true self (or concept) of the object, the object-subject cannot be considered a mere duality of aspects that are separate, opposed to, and outside of one another. Rather such thinking activity is the conceptual self-development of the object itself (the object’s own self).

What Matter is

Modern science with its focus on the physical sciences has adopted the Cartesian duality that opposed the mental (cognition) to the physical (spatially extended bodies), completely ignoring their implicit relation. By differentiating what is originally an integral relation, and then by excluding the mental from the exclusive study of the physical nature, they placed all thinking in a separated subject (the scientist) opposed to, and apart from the object, physical nature. Science, which is a product of thinking reason – the foundation of all science, merely became a study of objects that were presumed to be devoid of any contribution from thinking consciousness, which thus became known as material objects, material entities, or particles.

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