I often hear that binary oppositions are typical of\u00a0Western thought. The implication is that “we” should strive\u00a0to avoid being trapped by such oppositions.<\/p>\n
To be sure, certain distinctions (white\/non-white, male\/female, Christian\/non-Christian) are the basis of injustices.\u00a0Those distinctions have been\u00a0important in\u00a0Western Europe and have been used to justify oppression. As a result, some\u00a0people are moved to\u00a0challenge what they call Western dualism. But the problem isn’t dualism–after all, the whole point is to\u00a0promote justice over its opposite, injustice–nor is it helpful to introduce a binary distinction between the West and the rest.\u00a0It seems odd to invent\u00a0a very simple and global binary in order to criticize dualism.<\/p>\n
I’m skeptical of the very notion of the West, because it encompasses so much diversity and has overlapped with so many other parts of the world for so long that I don’t know how to define it. But\u00a0one thing the West has not<\/em> been consistently is dualistic.<\/p>\n Christianity is surely\u00a0a Western phenomenon, and a core Christian idea is that Jesus is both divine and human, both a person and one with the persons of God and the Holy Spirit. Another orthodox Christian assumption is that nature\/the world is good and is solely God’s creation, yet it is not identical with God. Many of the thinkers who have been formally condemned as heretics<\/a> by Christianity have been banned for adopting dualistic views either of Christ or of nature.<\/p>\n Nobody could be more dualist than George Boole, the inventor of Boolean logic (in which all<\/em> values are reduced to TRUE or FALSE). Apparently<\/a>\u00a0Boole\u00a0was deeply influenced by classical Indian logic, which is rife with sharp distinctions. Taoism is also described as fundamentally dualist. All of which is to say that binary oppositions don’t seem to be particularly “Western” to me.<\/p>\n Jacques Derrida is cited<\/a> as the source of the view\u00a0that Western thought is binary, although it would surprise me if\u00a0he really caused it\u00a0to be so\u00a0widespread. Besides, Derrida says things like this: “Doubtless Western metaphysics constitutes a powerful systematization of this illusion, but I believe it would be an imprudent overstatement to assert that Western metaphysics alone does so.”* Three\u00a0points to notice about this sentence: 1) Derrida is talking about a specific tradition of philosophical thought (“metaphysics,” as Heidegger would define it), not about Western culture, more broadly. 2) He is not criticizing binary thinking per se but certain specific binaries, especially text versus\u00a0reference. And 3) He doubts that Western metaphysics alone suffers from this “illusion.”<\/p>\n See also:\u00a0to whom do the ancient Greeks belong?<\/a>;\u00a0Jesus was a person of color<\/a>;\u00a0avoiding the labels of East and West<\/a>;\u00a0when East and West were one<\/a>;\u00a0on modernity and the distinction between East and West<\/a>.<\/p>\n *Derrida, Positions<\/em>, translated by Alan Bass (1982),\u00a0p. 33<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I often hear that binary oppositions are typical of\u00a0Western thought. The implication is that “we” should strive\u00a0to avoid being trapped by such oppositions. To be sure, certain distinctions (white\/non-white, male\/female, Christian\/non-Christian) are the basis of injustices.\u00a0Those distinctions have been\u00a0important in\u00a0Western Europe and have been used to justify oppression. As a result, some\u00a0people are moved to\u00a0challenge […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16918"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16930,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16918\/revisions\/16930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}