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"
