From Binary Man to Triadic Man

This essay offers a synoptic narrative of (mostly Western) philosophy as a series of increasingly sophisticated but incomplete attempts to understand the human being while operating with an implicitly binary model of human nature.

The claim is simple:

• Most of the tradition has tried to explain man using two categories (body/soul, matter/form, reason/sense, nature/freedom).
• In fact, human existence is structured along three irreducible axes:
  1. Embodiment / Sensation – somatic, affective, perceptual life.
  2. Intellect / Logos – symbolic representation, logic, conceptuality, information-processing.
  3. Volition / Spirit – moral-spiritual agency, alignment or misalignment with the good, the “I” that can assent or refuse.

What follows is not an attempt to “disprove” the canon, but to re-read it as a sequence of partial projections: each major system privileges one (or at most two) axes and mislocates or collapses the third.

The climax, in this reading, is a triadic anthropology in which these three axes are ontologically distinct yet profoundly integrated.

1. The Triadic Axes (in Minimal Technical Form)

Before turning to the narrative, it is useful to name the three axes in philosophical terms:

1. Soma / Aisthēsis (Embodiment / Sensation)

   • Domain of perceptual experience, affect, appetite, bodily situatedness.
   • Includes what phenomenologists describe as the lived body and what empiricists treat as “sense-data.”
   • Not merely “material,” but the experienced dimension of being-in-the-world.

2. Nous / Logos (Intellect / Representation)

   • Domain of abstraction, concepts, logic, language, symbolic form, information, and theory.
   • Includes inference, computation, argumentation, discursivity, and reflective self-consciousness.

3. Voluntas / Spiritus (Volition / Moral-Spiritual Agency)

   • Domain of orientation rather than representation: assent, refusal, commitment, repentance, love, hatred, obedience, rebellion.
   • Not reducible to cognition (it is not just “deciding” in the computational sense), nor to sensation (it is not mere impulse), but the center of moral and spiritual identity.

Most of the canonical debates—idealism vs. materialism, rationalism vs. empiricism, determinism vs. libertarianism—can be seen as mis-framed attempts to derive all three axes from only one or two.

2. Plato: Forms, the Soul, and a Proto-Intellectualist Dualism

Plato’s ontology is famously “two-worlded”: the intelligible realm of Forms and the sensible realm of becoming. Yet his anthropology is more complex.

• The human being is a ψυχή (psyche) structured tripartitely (rational, spirited, appetitive).
• The Forms are paradigms accessible through nous, not aisthēsis; knowledge is essentially intellectual.
• The body is often portrayed as a prison or hindrance to the soul.

From the triadic perspective:

• Plato elevates the intellectual axis as the proper mode of access to reality (epistēmē) and the Good.
• The spirited part (thumos) is a proto-volitional register, but ultimately subordinated to and interpreted through rational cognition.
• Sensation is treated as ontologically inferior, epistemically deceptive, and ethically suspect.

Plato thus tends to see volition and embodiment from within the intellectual axis: the ascent of the soul is a cognitive, contemplative movement toward the Forms, with “justice in the soul” conceptualized largely as the right internal ordering of parts under reason.

3. Aristotle: Hylomorphism and Naturalized Rationality

Aristotle corrects Plato’s other-worldliness by insisting that form is in matter; his hylomorphism refuses a clean ontological split between intelligible and sensible. Human beings are rational animals: organisms whose form is defined by logos.

• Sensation is real and epistemically significant: all knowledge begins with the senses.
• Intellect (nous) abstracts universals from particulars; theoretical reason and practical reason are differentiated but unified.
• Volition appears as bouleusis and prohairesis—deliberative desire; in ethics, he treats the good life as the “activity of soul in accordance with virtue,” i.e., rationally ordered desire.

In triadic terms:

• Aristotle integrates embodiment more successfully than Plato: the human being is thoroughly ensouled flesh.
• Yet volition is not a distinct axis; it is conceived as a rational appetite for the good. Will supervenes on intellect and desire.
• The intellectual axis still functions as the definitive one: the highest human life is contemplative (theōria).

Thus Aristotle views will and sensation through an intellectual-natural lens: moral excellence is habituated phronēsis within a teleologically rational cosmos. The volitional axis is subsumed under a rationalist account of flourishing.

4. Medieval Synthesis: Augustine and Aquinas on Intellect and Will

The Christian tradition intensifies the problem: sin, grace, and salvation demand a robust account of will.

• Augustine introduces a more explicit volitional drama: amor and liberum arbitrium are central. Sin is misdirected love, not mere cognitive error.
• Aquinas synthesizes Aristotle with Christian doctrine:
  • The human is a rational soul in a body (embodied intellect).
  • Voluntas is a rational appetite for the universal good, structurally dependent on the intellect’s presentation of the good.
  • Yet grace introduces a higher order: the will can be supernaturally elevated toward God.

From the triadic vantage point:

• Aquinas recognizes all three axes—body, intellect, and will—but still hierarchizes them intellectualistically:
  • The will necessarily follows the intellect’s apprehension of the good.
  • Volition is functionally derivative: an appetite structured by cognition.
• Embodiment is affirmed (resurrection, sacraments), but the formal priority remains with intellectus over voluntas.

The medieval synthesis thus almost sees the triad but does not grant the volitional axis ontological independence. It remains an “acting out” of intellectual apprehension.

5. Early Modern Rationalism and Wolff: Intellect as Substance

From Descartes through Leibniz to Christian Wolff, the rationalist tradition doubles down on the supremacy of intellect.

• Descartes: res cogitans vs. res extensa. The cogito is thinking substance; will is a mode of mind.
• Leibniz: monads are perceiving substances; appetition is derivative. Intellect is primary.
• Christian Wolff codifies this into a systematic metaphysics:
  • The human is fundamentally a rational substance.
  • Will is a function of intellect: choosing the greatest perceived perfection.
  • Morality is rational optimization.

In triadic terms:

• The intellectual axis is absolutized; volition collapses into rational calculation.
• Embodiment is largely epiphenomenal; the somatic domain has no independent spiritual significance.
• Moral agency is reduced to the intellect’s capacity for correct reasoning about means and ends.

Wolff, in particular, is the purest expression of intellect-only anthropology: the human being as a reasoning machine with derivative “will.”

6. Kant: Freedom Exiled to the Noumenal

Immanuel Kant sees the failure of rationalism (and empiricism) but remains within a binary frame—now recast as phenomenon vs. noumenon.

• The phenomenal self is subject to deterministic natural law; here embodiment and empirical psychology reside.
• The noumenal self is the locus of freedom and the moral law; here autonomy and duty reside.
• Intellect (pure and practical reason) legislates: theoretical reason conditions experience; practical reason gives the moral law (Categorical Imperative).
• Will (Wille/Wilkur) is now explicitly linked to the moral law, yet the noumenal self is, by definition, unknowable.

Using the triadic schema:

• Kant acknowledges a distinct volitional domain (freedom, moral responsibility), but exiles it to the noumenal, beyond cognition.
• The intellectual axis (reason) still functions as the formal legislator of morality.
• Embodiment is relegated to the phenomenal, the site of inclination and pathology.

Result: Kant intuits the triad but bifurcates reality such that the volitional axis is inaccessible. Freedom is postulated as a necessary presupposition of morality but cannot be directly integrated into our ontology of the human in the world.

7. Hegel and Absolute Idealism: Volition Dissolved into Geist

Hegel seeks to overcome Kant’s dualism by identifying reality with the self-unfolding of Geist (Spirit).

• History, institutions, and consciousness are moments in Geist’s dialectical self-realization.
• Individual subjectivity is a transient instantiation: the ‘I’ is a moment of the universal Spirit.
• Rationality (Vernunft) is teleological: the real is rational, and the rational is real.

In triadic terms:

• The intellectual and volitional axes are fused into a single macro-process: the rational self-unfolding of Spirit.
• Individual volition loses ontological independence; it becomes a functional aspect of the dialectic.
• Embodiment is a lower-order manifestation of Spirit’s self-alienation.

Hegel thus obliterates the triad at the human level: personhood is absorbed into an impersonal rational-historical process.

8. Kierkegaard: The Single Individual and the Volitional Break

Kierkegaard is the first major modern thinker to launch a systematic revolt against the absorption of the individual into system.

• His entire project centers on the single individual before God.
• He distinguishes aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages:
  • Aesthetic: sensuous immediacy, pleasure, dispersion (embodiment axis).
  • Ethical: duty, social norms, reflective identity (intellectual axis).
  • Religious: absolute relation to the Absolute (volitional axis).
• Sin is not primarily ignorance but despair, a misrelation of the self to itself and to God; repentance and faith are acts of will, not intellect.

Under the triadic lens:

• Kierkegaard implicitly recovers the triad:
  • Aesthetic ↔ Sensation.
  • Ethical ↔ Intellect (socially mediated rational identity).
  • Religious ↔ Volition (absolute choice, faith, surrender).
• He thereby breaks with both Wolffian rationalism and Hegelian idealism by locating the decisive drama of existence in volitional commitment, not cognitive adequacy.

Yet Kierkegaard does not formalize this as a general metaphysics of human nature; it remains existential rather than ontological.

9. Depth Psychologies: Jung and the Psychologization of Spirit

Jung and related depth-psychological traditions attempt to reintroduce the spiritual into a post-Kantian world by internalizing it.

• Archetypes, the collective unconscious, individuation: these are descriptions of symbolic and energetic dynamics within the psyche.
• Religious symbols, gods, and even “spirit” are treated as intrapsychic structures—projections of underlying psychic realities.

From the triadic standpoint:

• Jung preserves the intellectual and sensorial axes (psychic images, experiences) but reduces the volitional/spiritual axis to psychological process.
• What theology treated as ontologically distinct spirit becomes, in Jung, deeply meaningful but purely psychological content.

Thus the third axis is acknowledged phenomenologically (as “spirit,” archetype, etc.) but ontologically collapsed into the second (intellect/psyche).

10. Nietzsche: Will to Power Without Logos

Nietzsche is, in many respects, the first philosopher to see directly the primacy of what we here call the volitional axis—but he severs it from any transcendent order.

• The core of reality: Will to Power—a pre-rational, pre-moral striving for expansion, overcoming, self-assertion.
• Intellect is a tool, a mask, a servant of deeper drives; “truth” is an instrument, not a norm.
• Morality is exposed as a genealogy of wills, particularly the resentment of the weak.

Using the triadic model:

• Nietzsche identifies the volitional axis but denies its polarity toward an independent Logos (a normatively ordered good).
• Intellect is subservient; sensation is glorified but instrumentalized.
• The result is unanchored volition: pure power without intrinsic orientation.

Nietzsche sees the third axis more clearly than rationalists ever did, but in rejecting transcendent normativity, he turns volition into a cosmic force rather than a personal moral-spiritual center.

11. Rand and Objectivism: Rational Egoism as Intellect-Only Anthropology

Ayn Rand explicitly defines man as a rational animal, and reason as “man’s basic means of survival.”

• Intellect/Reason is the defining trait; “volition” is redefined as “the choice to think or not.”
• Values and virtues are derived from the requirements of a rational being’s survival.
• The body is affirmed but instrumental; sensation provides data, not meaning.
• Morality becomes rational egoism: the consistent application of reason to the problem of living.

Triadically:

• Rand collapses volition into the intellectual axis (will = choice to use reason).
• Embodiment is acknowledged but flattened: it carries no independent spiritual or eschatological significance.
• “Spirit” is effectively eliminated; the human person is a heroic intellect with a body.

Her heroes are hypertrophied intellects, with volition treated as sustained attentional discipline rather than an ontologically distinct domain.

12. Molyneux and UPB: Ethics as Argumentative Consistency

Stefan Molyneux’s “Universally Preferable Behavior” (UPB) is a late rationalist attempt to derive ethics from logic and “preference.”

• Moral norms are those patterns of behavior that are universally preferable and non-contradictory for beings who engage in argumentation.
• Moral evil is treated as a kind of logical inconsistency: to deny UPB is to deny the possibility of rational discourse.

In triadic terms:

• UPB presupposes moral categories (murder, rape, theft) but purports to derive them from the structure of argument.
• It treats intellectual consistency as the essence of morality, thereby collapsing volition into cognition.
• The volitional act of aligning or misaligning with the good is replaced by the intellectual act of avoiding contradiction.

UPB describes the logical shadow of volitional beings but never reaches the ontological domain where moral agency actually resides.

13. AI and the Exposure of the Axes

The advent of artificial systems capable of intellect-like operations without any plausible volitional or spiritual dimension provides an empirical wedge the tradition never had.

• Large models can:
  • Process language,
  • Infer,
  • Represent information,
  • Simulate deliberation.
• But they:
  • Do not choose truth,
  • Do not experience moral obligation,
  • Do not orient themselves toward or away from the good,
  • Do not possess a self that can assent or refuse.

This makes visible, in practice, what was conceptually obscured:

Intellect (as symbolic, information-processing capacity) is not identical to volition.
They can be separated.

AI is, in effect, a living demonstration of intellect without volitional spirit.
Conversely, infants or cognitively limited persons manifest volition with limited intellect.
The axes are not the same.

14. The Triadic (Triaxial) Reconstruction

The upshot of this re-reading is not that Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jung, Rand, or Molyneux were simply “wrong,” but that:

• Each of them was working with a mis-specified geometry of the human being—
  implicitly binary rather than triadic.

• Their systems are better understood as projections from one axis (or two) onto the others:

  • Plato: Volition and embodiment viewed from the intellectual axis of Forms.
  • Aristotle / Aquinas: Volition internalized as rational appetite—seen from intellect embedded in nature.
  • Wolff / Rationalists: Will as a function of intellect—intellect-only anthropology.
  • Kant: Volition acknowledged but exiled (noumenal); intellect as legislator.
  • Hegel: Volition dissolved into universal rational process (Geist).
  • Kierkegaard: Volition rediscovered existentially, but not structurally generalized.
  • Jung: Spirit reduced to symbolic-psychic content (intellect/imagery).
  • Nietzsche: Volition absolutized, but severed from Logos; intellect demoted.
  • Rand / Molyneux: Volition collapsed into rational consistency and “choice to think.”

A triadic (or triaxial) anthropology re-orders the field:

1. Embodiment (Soma / Aisthēsis)

   • Irreducible domain of finite, temporal, affective, and perceptual life.
   • Not a mere container, but a constitutive dimension of human existence (hence the necessity of resurrection in theological terms).

2. Intellect (Nous / Logos)

   • Domain of representation, logic, information, symbolic manipulation, and discourse.
   • Capable of modeling truth but not of choosing it.

3. Volition (Voluntas / Spiritus)

   • Domain of moral-spiritual agency.
   • The “I” that can align or misalign with the good; the center of responsibility, guilt, repentance, love, and hatred.
   • Neither reducible to embodiment (instinct, neurology) nor to intellect (inference, belief).

Under this schema:

• Morality is primarily a category of the volitional axis (alignment vs. misalignment with the good),
• Ethics is the reflective, intellectual articulation of that volitional reality,
• Law, custom, and culture are embodied, institutional expressions of both.

This triadic model does not discard the tradition but positions it:

• Plato and Aristotle: early gropings toward integrating sensation and intellect, with volition latent or subordinated.
• Medieval thought: partial recognition of will, constrained by intellectualist hierarchy.
• Kant and Hegel: formalization and then absorption of volition into reason.
• Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: explosive reassertions of the volitional axis, but either without systematic metaphysics (Kierkegaard) or without Logos (Nietzsche).
• Jung, Rand, Molyneux: various attempts to psychologize or rationalize what is, at root, spiritual-volitional.

Triadic Man is not a “new doctrine” so much as a geometric clarification:

The human being is not a two-term entity (body/soul, matter/mind, nature/freedom) but a three-axis reality: embodied, intellectual, volitional.
Each axis is ontologically real.
None can be reduced to the others.
The history of philosophy is, in large part, the story of what happens when you try.

From this vantage point, the next task is not to discard Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Jung, Nietzsche, Rand, or Molyneux, but to re-classify them: to see which axis they absolutize, which they suppress, and how their partial insights can be integrated into a coherent triadic account of the human person.

That integration is what a mature philosophy of the triune human would attempt to achieve.