Dualistic thinking: what it is and how it affects us

When we think about the things that surround us, or about people, or about ourselves, we tend to categorize in twos. two: man-woman, good-bad, hetero-homo, nature-culture, mind-body, innate-learned, individual-collective, and so on. successively.

Far from being a coincidence this dualistic thinking has been the transitory solution to philosophical, social and scientific dilemmas that have resulted from historical and cultural processes. In very broad terms, in the West we have hierarchically organized (thought and manipulated) the world two by two from the time we know as "modernity".

• Related article: "Materialist Eliminativism: a philosophy that discards subjectivity"

Mind and Body: Modern Dualism

Dualistic, dichotomous or binary thinking is a tendency that we have in the West and that has led us to organize the world in a way that until recently had gone unnoticed as "sense common". According to it, what exists can be divided into two fundamental categories, each of which is relatively independent. On one side would be the mind, ideas and rationality, and on the other the material.

This dualistic thought is also known as Cartesian because in the history of ideas it is considered that they were the works of Rene Descartes those that finally inaugurated modern rational thought. This from the famous Cartesian cogito: I think therefore I am, indicating that mind and matter are separate entities, and that matter (and everything that can be known) can be known through rational thought and mathematical logical language (for Descartes, the mind, god and logical reasoning are related tightly).

In other words, very close to this trend (and therefore to the way of doing science and our thoughts and practices), is the modern western philosophy of rationalist tradition (The one that is based on the belief that the only or the main valid way to objectively know the world is the one that is carried out based on logical reasoning).

For this reason, the rationalist tradition is also known as objectivist or abstract, and is linked to other concepts that they have to do with the traditional way of doing science, for example concepts such as “positivism”, “reductionism” “computationalism”.

With his works, Descartes represented a large part of the project of modernity, however, these works are also the product of a debate that in his time he was trying to solve: the mind-body relationship, something that he solves, among other things, through his opposition.

• You may be interested in: "Dualism in Psychology"

Impact on psychology and social organization

Fundamentally Rational Dualistic Thought importantly marked the development of modern science, which begins to study reality by separating the mind from matter (and from there the body from the soul, the life of non-life, the nature of culture, man-woman, western-non-western, modern-non-modern, etc.).

Hence, this tradition is closely related to the knowledge and practice of modern psychology, whose roots are established precisely in the divisions between the physical world and the non-physical world. That is to say that psychology is based on a physical-psychic model; where it is assumed that there is a mental reality (which corresponds to the "objective" reality) and another entity, material, which is the body.

But not only that, but rational knowledge was also androcentric, with which man is positioned as the center of knowledge creation and the highest rung of beings alive. This strengthens, for example, the division between the "natural" and "human" worlds (what is lies at the base of the ecological crisis and also in many of the ineffective alternatives to repair it); the same thing that we could analyze on the divisions between the sexes, or on the bases of the colonization, where certain (western) paradigms are established as the only or best possible worlds.

The problem with reasoning this way

Basically, the problem with separating things and explaining them in pairs is that greatly simplifies our knowledge of the world, as well as our possibilities of action and interactions; In addition, they are asymmetric binarisms, that is, they operate on the basis of frequently unequal power relations.

In other words, the problem itself is not thinking in pairs (something that also happens in non-Western societies), but that those two are almost always unequal in terms of domination and oppression. A clear example is the domain of nature, which since modernity has become a Western human imperative and which has recently faced us as a serious problem.

So, like other philosophical and scientific paradigms, dualistic thought does not remain only on the level of what mental, but rather generates relationships, subjectivities, ways of identifying and interacting with the world and with other people.

The return to the body and the overcoming of dualisms

Recovering the terrain of the body, matter and experience is one of the great postmodern tasks. In other words, the current question in many contexts, especially in the humanities and social sciences, is how to get out of dualistic thinking to generate relationship and identification alternatives.

For example, there are several theories that from the social sciences have positioned themselves critically before realist epistemology, androcentrism and the truth based on modern science. What some of them propose, in very broad terms, is that although there is an external reality (or many realities), we do not have neutral access to it, since the knowledge we build is subject to the characteristics of the context where we build it (critical realism or situated knowledge).

There are other proposals that state that an absolute rejection of rationality and Cartesian thought is not necessary, but rather a reorientation of this tradition, with which they reformulate the very concept of cognition, understanding it as an action embodied.

Thus, the horizons of rationality itself are extended, and the understanding of reality is developed considering the interactions, since it is understood that what is between the mind and the body (and the other dichotomies) is the relationship, and this is what must be analyzed and grasp.

Some principles of relationality have even been developed, such as a new paradigm for understanding and organizing the world, as well as numerous social studies of emotion that go beyond the rationalist framework (in fact, its development has been recognized as an affective turn).

some alternatives

In the social and political field, some proposals have also emerged. For example, social movements that try to recapture the concepts of oriental, ancestral, pre-Hispanic, and in general non-western traditions; as well as political movements that denounce the claim of universality of the One World and propose the existence of many worlds. In general terms, they are proposals that seek to destabilize dualisms and question supremacies, not only through discourse but through concrete actions and daily life.

It is clear that there is not a single alternative, the very development of the alternatives is a historical consequence of a time in which the excessive rationality of the modernity, because among other things we realized that it had some negative effects on interpersonal relationships and on the hierarchical construction of our identities.

That is to say, the program for overcoming dualism is an unfinished task and in constant updating, which also arises as a consequence of historical and ideological projects of a specific context, and that above all puts on the table the need to reformulate our societies.

Bibliographic references:

• Grosfoguel, R. (2016). From "economic extractivism" to "epistemic extractivism" and "ontological extractivism": A destructive way of knowing, being and being in the world. Blank Tabula, 24: 123-143.
• Escobar, a. (2013). In the background of our culture: the rationalist tradition and the problem of ontological dualism. Tabula rasa, 18: 15-42.
• Ariza, A. & Gisbert, G. (2007). Transformations of the body in social psychology. [Electronic Version] Psychology: Theory and Research (23)1, 111-118.