Dualism

Dualism (from the Latin word duo meaning "two") denotes a state of two parts. The term 'dualism' was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in other usages to indicate a system which contains two essential parts

Quotes

• Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
  History jeers at the attempts of physiologists to bind great original laws by the forms which flow from them. They make a rule; they say from observation what can and cannot be. In vain! Nature provides exceptions to every rule. She sends women to battle, and sets Hercules spinning; she enables women to bear immense burdens, cold, and frost; she enables the man, who feels maternal love, to nourish his infant like a mother.
  • Margaret Fuller in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

• All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a wanderer or sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person-no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other.
  • Hermann Hesse (1930) Narcissus and Goldmund

• Perhaps the most concise summary of enlightenment would be: transcending dualism. … Dualism is the conceptual division of the world into categories … human perception is by nature a dualistic phenomenon—which makes the quest for enlightenment an uphill struggle, to say the least.
  • Douglas Hofstadter (1979) Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid Chapter 9: "Mumon and Gödel"

• As regards knowledge of truths, there is a dualism. We may believe what is false as well as what is true. ...Since erroneous beliefs are often held just as strongly as true beliefs, it becomes a difficult question how they are to be distinguished from true beliefs. How are we to know, in a given case, that our belief is not erroneous? This is a question of the very greatest difficulty, to which no completely satisfactory answer is possible. There is, however, a preliminary question which is rather less difficult, and that is: What do we mean by truth and falsehood?
  • Bertrand Russell (1912) The Problems of Philosophy

• Death, says Socrates, is the separation of the soul from the body. Here we come upon Plato's dualism: between reality and appearance, ideas and sensible objects, reason and sense perception, soul and body. These pairs are connected: the first in each pair is superior to the second both in reality and in goodness. An ascetic morality was the natural consequence of this dualism. Christianity adopted this doctrine in part, but never wholly. There were two obstacles. The first was that the creation of the visible world, if Plato was right, must have been an evil deed, and therefore the Creator could not be good. The second was that orthodox Christianity could never bring itself to condemn marriage, though it held celibacy to be nobler. The Manichaeans were more consistent in both respects.
  • Bertrand Russell A History of Western Philosophy Book One, Part II, Chapter XVI, Plato's Theory of Immortality, p. 134

• Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.
  • John R. Searle (2002) Consciousness and Language, p. 47