ABSTRACT
Within the “grammar” of dualisms in the history of philosophy, the classical Sāṁrhkhya position appears to be something of an anomaly. The Sāṁkhya is a bit like the nitya-samāsa in Sanskrit composition, that is to say, a compound that cannot be analyzed according to the conventional rules. By this I mean that the Sāṁkhya does not fit the usual or conventional notions of dualism. If one looks, for example, at the classic expression of the dualist position in Western thought, namely that of Descartes, one realizes immediately that the Sāṁkhya somehow misses the mark. In his Principles of Philosophy Descartes comments as follows about the dualist problem:
Extension in length, breadth and depth constitutes the nature of corporeal substance; and thought the nature of thinking substance. For every other thing that can be attributed to body presupposes extension and is only some mode of an extended thing; as all the properties we discover in the mind are only diverse modes of thinking (cited in K. Nielsen, Reason and Practice, 1971, p. 332, I: liii).
