hey camille, i remember a few weeks ago you made a post about mind-body dualism being bad, and i agree!! but i’ve been trying to stop saying things that kinda, endorse that separation for me personally? and i’m struggling. do you have any tips on that?
yeah so… i think it’s really easy to conceptualize dualist systems as primarily (or exclusively) modes of thought. and to some extent that’s not misleading—there is no real distinction between mind and body; they don’t confront each other as inherently or necessarily estranged. so then it seems like we can reconcile with ourselves by just thinking differently (and this is the same type of injunction that drives, for instance, cognitive-behavioral therapy: think better, feel better).
but looking at the situation this way risks viewing an ideal abstraction that arises of its own accord, independently of the material situation. we should be able to provide a better account for why dualist conceptions of self have become so overwhelmingly embraced than “we just happen to live at a time in history when people like them”—that is, we should be able to explain, historically and materially, why it is that we see such a fractured sense of self dominating so much thought.
to paraphrase marx: we can locate the origin of these systems of thought within the social relations of estranged and divided labor. if you’ll allow me to rush through a zillion pages of theory that i would definitely encourage you to read in more detail, the abstraction of an objective world arises when producer confronts product as alien and inessential, and the division between mind and matter culminates in the type of rigid mind-body dualism espoused maybe most famously by descartes.
you can think about this through some examples: a serf labors at the behest of someone else (estranged labor) but might retain knowledge of how to perform this labor (so there’s some division of labor, but not a ton). on the other hand, a fordist factory worker both works for someone else and performs one small task over and over again (much more divided labor), encouraging a “splitting” of mental and material labor. you could keep going in different social situations at different historical moments if you wanted to.
the bottom line to me is that the issue of mind-body dualism is not solved by thinking better or discoursing rationally or studying, although i would still encourage all of these things. the reason we see such an overwhelming tendency to view our minds and bodies as radically distinct is because of the material social and historical conditions we exist in, not because we haven’t discovered how to think about ourselves the right way.
so it’s a tricky line here. i don’t think that just changing my language will reconcile me to my body, and frankly those kinds of individualist, atomized “solutions” to affective distress render us completely politically impotent. i think we have a moral imperative to do more than fix ourselves and let everybody else suffer. that said, i also don’t seek to make myself more unhappy, and i do find it very affirming to remind myself that my state of estrangement is contingently produced and thus subject to change.
idk if any of this really answers your question. i don’t really have, like, a list of ways to make your language more monistic—i mostly just have thoughts about dualism and i think understanding capitalism’s dominant ideology is necessary to changing it (via, to be clear, a material act rather than an ideological pivot). not sure whether that’s actually helpful or not though
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