Dualism many be described as the management process that underlies the subconscious
value
separation that occurs when we choose. Many of our most basic notions of the world and of our
role in it are essentially dualistic, in the sense that the outcomes of thought result from the
interaction of two profoundly different parts of the subconscious. Humanity is composed of males
and females, and in turn forms a unity with an immortal godhead. We perceive good and bad, night
and day, the objective and the subjective and, central to our existance, the mind and the body. This
last pairing, an awareness of dual aspects of ourselves, is deeply engrained in many cultures,
perhaps all. From early childhood, we are aware of ourselves as an unseen and insubstantial mind,
self or spirit controlling a real, physical body. This notion forms the basis of many religions and
is
central to most concepts of folk psychology.
The structure of our language reflects and reproduces the dominant paradigm of dualism,
and
reinforces many of the dualistic assumptions which underlie the Cartesian worldview - the
separation of male and female, nature and culture, mind from body, emotion from reason and
intuition from fact.
Of these examples, the separation of male and female is the most powerful aspect of
dualism that
is up front for most people as they struggle to manage their thoughts on a day to day basis.
Tzeporah Berman, an ecofeminist activist has taken up this issue with regard to the proposition
that within patriarchal culture, male hierarchy is maintained through cultural dichotomies, which
legitimate the logic of domination. Another ecofeminist Val Plumwood defines dualism as "the
process by which contrasting concepts are formed by domination and subordination and
constructed as oppositional and exclusive." Through these conceptual dualisms women have
traditionally been associated with Nature, men with culture and masculinity and femininity have
been constructed as oppositional. Berman says that this cultural polarization leads to a
devaluation of one side of the dualism and the distortion of both.
Catherine Roach notes that, "when women are seen as closer to nature than men,
women are
inevitably seen as less fully human than men." It is therefore through these dichotomies that
the
concept of the `other' is created. Ecofeminist Judith Plant notes that, "the other, the object
of
patriarchal rationality, is considered only insofar as it can benefit the subject." Both women
and
Nature become objects for man's use.
Beman makes the point that:
"As mothers
our identity is constructed through a role of caregiver, as wives we take on our
husband's name (a tradition which stems from a time when women were overtly treated as
objects through the legal system), as prostitutes we become sex-objects and in the natural
world animals are meat, experimental objects or prisoners in a freak show, while plants,
trees and minerals become dollars. This objectification stems from the internalization of
hierarchy and dualistic assumptions prevalent in Western society. Many ecofeminists argue
then, that the creation of hierarchy and the process dualism provides an intellectual basis
for the domination of women and Nature"
