When we think about the things around us, or about people, or about ourselves, we tend to categorize in pairs: man-woman, good-bad, hetero-homo, nature-culture, mind-body, innate-learning, individual-collective, and so on.

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 organized (thought about and manipulated) the world in two hierarchies from the era we know as “modernity”.

Mind and Body: Modern Dualism

Dualistic, dichotomous or binary thinking is a tendency we have in the West 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 thinking 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 thinking. This is based on the famous Cartesian cogito: pienso luego existo , 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 mathematical logical language (for Descartes, mind, god and logical reasoning are closely related).

That is to say that very close to this tendency (and therefore to the way of doing science and to our thoughts and practices), is found the modern western philosophy of rationalist tradition (which is based on the belief that the only or the main valid way to know the world objectively is the one that is done based on logical reasoning).

That’s why 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 like “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 was trying to be resolved in his time: the mind-body relationship, which he resolves, among other things, through his opposition.

Impact on psychology and social organization

The fundamentally rational dualistic thought marked in an important way the development of modern science , which begins to study reality separating 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 is closely related to the knowledge and practice of modern psychology , whose roots are established precisely in the divisions between the physical and non-physical world. That is to say, psychology is based on a physical-psychic model; where it is assumed that there is a mental reality (which corresponds to “objective” reality) and another entity, material, which is the body.

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

The problem of reasoning this way

Basically, the problem of separating things and explaining them in binomial is that simplifies in an important way our knowledge of the world , as well as our possibilities of action and interactions; besides, they are asymmetric binarisms, that is to say, they operate in the base of frequently unequal power relations.

In other words, the problem itself is not to think in pairs (which is also the case in non-Western societies), but that these pairs are almost always unequal in terms of domination and oppression . A clear example is the domination of nature that since modernity has been constituted as a western human imperative and that recently has been faced as a serious problem.

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

The return to the body and the overcoming of dualisms

Recovering the land of the body, matter and experience is one of the great post-modern tasks. In other words, the current question in many contexts, especially in the human and social sciences, is how to leave behind dualistic thinking to generate alternatives of relation and identification .

For example, several theories from the social sciences have critically positioned themselves before realistic epistemology, androcentrism and 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 that we construct is subject to the characteristics of the context where we construct it (a critical realism or a situated knowledge).

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

Thus, the horizons of the same rationality 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 of the other dichotomies) is the relationship, and it is this that must be analyzed and understood.

Some principles of relationality have even been developed, as a new paradigm of understanding and organization of 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

Some proposals have also emerged in the social and political fields. For example, social movements that try to retake the concepts of oriental, ancestral, pre-Hispanic, and generally non-Western traditions; as well as political movements that denounce the pretension of universality of the One World and propose the existence of many worlds. In general terms they are proposals that intend to destabilize dualisms and question supremacy, not only from the discourse but in concrete actions and in daily life.

It is clear that there is not only one alternative, the very development of the alternatives is a historical consequence of an era where the excessive rationality of modernity is questioned, because among other things we realized that it had some negative effects on interpersonal relations and on the hierarchical construction of our identities.

In other words, the programme for overcoming dualism is an unfinished task that is constantly being updated, which also arises as a consequence of historical and ideological projects of a specific context, and which 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. Tabula rasa, 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.
  • Araiza, A. & Gisbert, G. (2007). Transformations of the body in social psychology. Psychology: Teoría e Pesquisa (23)1, 111-118.