When we think about the things around us, or about people, or about ourselves, we tend to categorize two by two: man-woman, good-bad, hetero-homo, nature-culture, mind-body, innate -learned, individual-collective, and so on.
Far from being a coincidence, This dualistic thinking has been the temporary solution to philosophical, social and scientific dilemmas that have resulted from historical and cultural processes. Broadly speaking, in the West we have hierarchically organized (thought and manipulated) the world in pairs starting with the era we know as “modernity.”
The mind and the 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 because it was considered “common sense.” According to this, what exists can be divided into two fundamental categories, each of which is relatively independent. On the one hand there 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 it was the works of René Descartes that finally inaugurated modern rational thought. This from the famous Cartesian cogito: I think therefore I am, which indicates that mind and matter are separate entities and that matter (and everything that can be known) can be known through rational thought and logical mathematical language (for Descartes, the mind, god and logical reasoning are closely related).
That is to say, very close to this trend (and therefore to the way of doing science and our thoughts and practices), modern Western philosophy of the rationalist tradition is found (which is based on the belief that the only or the main valid way of objectively knowing the world is the one based on logical reasoning).
For this reason, the rationalist tradition is also known as objectivist or abstract, and is linked to other concepts that 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 was trying to be resolved: the mind-body relationship, something that he resolves, among other things, through their opposition.
Impact on psychology and social organization
Fundamentally rational dualistic thinking significantly 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, life from non-life, the nature of culture, man-woman, Western-non-Western, modern-non-modern , etc.).
Hence this tradition has a close relationship with 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, psychology is based on a physical-psychological model; where it is assumed that there is a mental reality (which corresponds to the “objective” reality) and another, material entity, which is the body.
But not only that, but rational knowledge was also androcentric, thus positioning man as the center of the creation of knowledge and the highest step of living beings. This strengthens, for example, the division between the “natural” and “human” worlds (which is at the basis of the ecological crisis and also in many of the ineffective alternatives to repair it); the same thing that we could analyze about the divisions between the sexes, or at the bases of colonization, where certain (Western) paradigms are established as the only or the best possible worlds.
The problem with reasoning this way
Deep down, the problem with separating things and explaining them in binomials is that significantly simplifies our knowledge of the world, as well as our possibilities of action and interactions; In addition, they are asymmetrical binarisms, that is, they operate on the basis of frequently unequal power relations.
In other words, the problem itself is not thinking in twos (which 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 mastery of nature, which since modernity has been established as a Western human imperative and which has recently confronted us as a serious problem.
So, just like other philosophical and scientific paradigms, dualistic thinking does not remain only at the mental level, but rather generates relationships, subjectivities, ways of identifying and interacting with the world and with other people.
The return to the body and overcoming 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 human and social sciences, is how to get out of dualistic thinking to generate alternatives for relationships and identification.
For example, there are several theories that from the social sciences have positioned themselves critically towards 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 propose that an absolute rejection of rationality and Cartesian thought is not necessary, but rather a reorientation of this tradition, thereby reformulating the very concept of cognition, understanding it as an embodied action.
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 it is This is what needs to be analyzed and understood.
Some principles of relationality have even been developed, 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, their 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 return to the concepts of oriental, ancestral, pre-Hispanic, and generally 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 aim to destabilize dualisms and question supremacy, not only in speech but in concrete actions and in daily life.
It is clear that there is not a single alternative, the very development of alternatives is a historical consequence of an era in which the excessive rationality of modernity is questioned, because among other things we realized that it had some negative effects on interpersonal relationships and in the hierarchical construction of our identities.
That is to say, the program to overcome dualism is an unfinished and constantly updating task, which It 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.
