Why dualism feels like clarity
There is a reason dualism has returned, in one form or another, across centuries of philosophy, science, and common sense. It feels right. It feels clarifying. It promises order where there is confusion, structure where there is entanglement.
This post does not begin with Descartes, nor with any historical doctrine. It begins with a more basic question:
Why does separating mind and world, subject and object, observer and observed feel epistemically stabilising?
The answer is not metaphysical. It is relational.
1. Separation as Cognitive Relief
Separation reduces ambiguity.
When phenomena are entangled — when experience, interpretation, action, and world blur into one another — responsibility is diffuse. Causation is unclear. Agency is difficult to locate. Explanation becomes precarious.
Partitioning resolves this discomfort.
By drawing a clean line:
the world can be treated as independent,
the mind can be treated as internal,
observation can be treated as passive reception,
error can be located on one side or the other.
This is not yet ontology. It is cognitive relief.
2. Separation as a Cognitive Technology
Dualism functions as a technology of thought.
It allocates responsibility:
If something goes wrong, it is either in the world or in the mind.
If a description fails, the failure belongs either to representation or to reality.
If disagreement arises, it is attributed to subjective distortion rather than relational divergence.
This allocation makes reasoning tractable. Domains become governable. Each side can be stabilised with its own rules.
In this sense, separation operates exactly like other powerful abstractions: it simplifies by cutting.
3. The Seductive Promise of Clean Domains
Once domains are separated, they become optimisable.
This is the seductive promise of dualism:
If we divide cleanly enough, we can explain exhaustively.
At this stage, the loss is not yet felt. The gains are immediate and compelling.
4. The Key Relational Move: Separation Is a Cut
The decisive error occurs when separation is mistaken for discovery.
In relational ontology, this matters profoundly.
A cut is a perspectival act that stabilises some relations while suppressing others. Cuts are necessary. Without them, no phenomenon can appear. But cuts do not exhaust the field from which they arise.
Dualism forgets this.
It treats the cut as if it disclosed what really exists, rather than acknowledging itself as an oriented act of stabilisation.
5. Dualism as Inclination Toward Closure
Seen relationally, dualism is not primarily a theory about substances. It is an inclination toward closure through partition.
By dividing reality into non-overlapping domains, it achieves:
epistemic security,
explanatory tidiness,
resistance to ambiguity.
But this security comes at a cost:
relation is displaced,
horizon is suppressed,
interaction becomes mysterious by construction.
The very clarity that makes dualism attractive also makes it brittle.
6. Method Masquerading as Ontology
The final step — and the most consequential — is when method hardens into metaphysics.
What began as a useful way of thinking becomes a claim about what exists.
Dualism thus becomes ontology by default.
Not because it was proven, but because it worked.
7. Looking Ahead
This post has not argued that separation is wrong. Cuts are indispensable. Without them, meaning itself would dissolve.
The problem arises only when cuts are forgotten as cuts.
In the next post, we will examine the most influential instance of this forgetting: Descartes’ transformation of an epistemic strategy into a metaphysical architecture, and the consequences that still shape science today.
For now, the task is simply this:
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