The Death of Duality – Radical Subjectivity

Our world is riven with binaries, strict boundaries drawn between two entities with dualism as their foundation, and objectivity as the lens through which people gaze across the borders to the “other” side, the other concept, the other “thing.” Most everything functions based on these dualisms and how they undergird our most basic understanding of the world, as well as how we navigate the complexities of our societal, political, and personal lives. Our specific type of dualism has a long history, having been handed down from culture to culture for thousands of years, but it is not necessarily specific to the colonially founded globalized world we live in today. It has, however, maneuvered us into an alley, a dead-end, the failure and strain of which we are currently feeling intensely, and which has led to far-right groups and perspectives dominating political discourse as we fail to find a way out of this dichotomy. As the world and our civilizational place in it reveal themselves to be ever more complex, as we face the twin challenges of the climate crisis and technological advancement through digitalization and AI, our dualism, and the objective view of the other and outside world falter. Perspectivism offers a different approach, in the place of an objectizing view of everything that lies beyond the boundaries of the “I” and “us,” it puts forward a radical subjectivity. This subjectivity approaches the border to the other with curiosity and an understanding that whatever lies beyond is some other form of oneself, another, and sometimes the ultimate subject. Illustrating just why this could be the key to dissolving many of the current points of conflict and disarming the most nihilistic and destructive tendencies in our politics means first highlighting just why we are where we are.

This duality, and the objectivized other that lies outside and around us, is age-old. The dualism we live with, and which dictates so much of our perspective on the world, is a product of Cartesian philosophy. Among many other things, René Descartes (“I think, therefore I am”) differentiated between the “mind” and the “body.” Descartes was trying to delineate the soul and distinguish it from the corporeal world, but it creates the binary on which so much of our thinking and interactions are built – there are two elements of differing substance and composition, that may interact and influence one another but are objectively different and distinct things. Descartes, of course, did not invent this concept; it stretches back through Christianity to ancient Achaemenid Persia and Zoroastrianism. Ideas of “good/evil,” “truth/lie,” and “darkness/light” as opposite and opposing forces are borne out of this tradition. Beyond this heritage, we see dualities all around the world, “yin/yang,” and schools of Hinduism also preach versions of dualism. It’s not exclusive to the “West” or “Global North,” but the specific history of its form of dualism, its traditions and its effects, are so pertinent to where we stand today and so far-reaching in terms of how we encounter the issues of our time and the powerlessness we feel, that understanding it, and seeing it and its limitations for what they are, is essential.

Having strict delineations between one entity and another, with an understanding that these entities are essentially and substantially different, carries with it massive repercussions. One foundational element to this approach is the fact that any substances and entities that lie beyond the border and therefore differ from the subjective self are a different and distinct, objective “other.” This lends itself to thinking in binaries. As the French monarchy dissolved and the Revolutionary France moved into newer forms of governance, this dualism led to the now ubiquitous “Left” and “Right” political schism. At that time, this simply meant that the conservative right (supporters of the monarchy who wanted to “conserve” the monarchy) sat to the right of the president, while the supports of the revolution who wanted to abolish the monarchy and establish a democratic state “of the people” sat to his left. Later, as theories of race gained traction, this objectification and dualistic separation gave rise to distinctions made between races who carried certain essential traits within them, and which were distinctive, the most far-reaching being the difference between “white” and “black” used as justification for the transatlantic slave trade or Apartheid. The idea of otherness, of measurable difference and human quantifiability that results from this kind of thinking, was the root of most of the worst crimes perpetrated in the 20th century.

But it is not, and was not, restricted to simply how humans view one another. Perhaps more impactful, in the long term, is that this objectification of the other that dualism creates establishes a view of humanity and humans as being something that exists outside of nature. Our planet and the environment became considered as something primordial, alive but without intelligence or modes of nuanced communication. With the acceleration of the industrial revolution, nature became something to be measured and calculated, plugged into models as the fuel or a backdrop to human innovation. This was true on both the left and right sides of the progressive trajectory of “enlightened” civilization. Whether capitalist or communist, nature was seen as a resource to be measured, planned, and redirected to meet the productive needs of the nation, its people, or corporations. To this day, we see the mark of a strong nation to be massive construction projects that reroute rivers or dam huge valleys to ensure energy for metropolises further downstream. The consequences of such projects for the objectified nature and all the associated ecologies don’t register to any greater degree. The line we have drawn between humanity and the rest of the planet has allowed for dissociation and, over time, the calculated organization and exploitation of nature through the use of modeling, formulas, systems, and planning. As we now fully move into the age of digitalization, binaries reach their pinnacle of importance in the 0s and 1s that shape our world, and the increased push to leave behind the analog, biological world full of uncertainties and imperfections for the presumed clear-cut and decisive answers that are sold in the package of the digital, technological future we are being pushed into. This lack of alternatives, of vision, of imagination is a strangely modern occurrence. Past times and places seemed much more capable of integrating different perspectives than we are today.

Perspectivism and radical subjectivity are particularly valuable and well-suited as tools for dissolving this dualism and reintegrating creativity, flexibility, and dynamism into our approach to the world. Today, we mostly encounter this mode of thinking in Indigenous societies. Often relegated to the realm of esoteric, new world cultural spheres in the Global North, it has slowly gained prominence because of the climate crisis and the seeming lack of answers offered by our current frameworks. Having broken out of its anthropological discourse, it is proving itself to be a plausible alternative to the stagnating and increasingly violent dead-end of dualistic progress. One main proponent of perspectivism is Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who has developed this approach over the last 40 years and has spent much of the last decades applying it to our current crises. Working from Claude Levi-Strauss’ argumentation that all Western anthropology had, to date, been a practice in a Narcissus-like examination of the self through a mirrored reflection in the objectified “other”, Viveiros de Castro puts forward the idea of the Anti-Narcissus that assumes the perspective of the other through the implementation of radical subjectivity. Somewhat strange for Eurocentric ears to hear, he bases this approach on the epistemological implications derived from Amazonian cannibalistic rituals. What does that mean for anyone who doesn’t have to endure academically assaulted language regularly and what implications could it have in practice?

To break it down into more digestible chunks, the idea of a narcissistic anthropology, which I would argue one can extend to most of the way we approach the world, is that when we go out into the world to study it or otherwise, we are actually just looking at how that object, person, or culture relates to us and reflects our being. Grounded in objectifying dualism, we approach this other thing not with any true interest in it, but simply as an object that exists outside of us, and we wonder how it fits into our world and how to catalog it as such. It isn’t just the basis of “othering” or a range of prejudice that people like to bandy about, but also why we can feel such detachment when confronted with the destruction of nature, cultures, and our own institutions and societies. We can justify it to ourselves in the sense that “It isn’t me or my values, directly, so I can essentially let it burn.” What radical subjectivity offers is the chance to inhabit the “other” as a subject, something we usually only reserve for ourselves. Viveiros de Castro breaks this down in detail through various rituals, cannibalistic and other, to illustrate that Amazonian peoples (and many other Indigenous cultures around the world and down through time, by the way) sometimes reserve the most extreme form of subjectivity for their enemies. Cannibalism in these cases is not utter destruction, but a very detailed ritual (and sometimes only a ritual, the actual cannibalism having long since been dropped) where the enemy is brought into the tribe and their death is a burden to carry after which the person who has killed becomes the carrier of the dead person’s being. To be able to achieve this, you must wholly believe that your enemy – the ultimate “other” – is a fully-formed, complex subject, filled with life. This is rooted in a perspective of the outside world, outside the individual and society, as being the same as the internal world of the person, society, or tribe. In this way, people approach their boundaries not with caution or an objectifying gaze, but with curiosity and an understanding that the entities they encounter are another version of themselves. This extends not just to enemies and other humans they meet, no matter how strange and foreign they may seem, but also to nature and everything in it.

This has far-reaching epistemological implications and seems to offer a key to navigating our way through, if not out of, the many crises and dead ends we face. If it is possible, as it seems to be in the case of many indigenous and historical cultures, to inhabit a perspective of radical subjectivity and the understanding of alterity (meaning “otherness”) for those we consider to be the most antagonistic towards us, i.e. our enemies, then that opens the door to softening if not dissolving many distinctions and borders and the definitive differences we see them as having. Approaching alterity with curiosity, seeing characteristics that can be defined as attractive or interesting and sometimes even adopting them, no matter their origin – without denying one’s selfhood because it is not loaded with such existential meaning in terms of set identity and cultural identification – stands in contrast to the objective analysis of a distinctive alienness and discomfort when confronted with the other, the new, the different, that leads to the need to contain, expel, or even antagonize or destroy to preserve one’s own identity. Being able to inhabit a subjective other also means having a better view of oneself, less investment in a permanent, historical identity, meaning a better ability to adapt to meet the challenges of changing circumstances.

This feels like an ideal tool for navigating the chaos we currently face, including the many challenges presented by climate change, increased digitalization, AI, and the ongoing, if not escalating, threat of nuclear war in an unstable multipolar world. While the rigidity of a dualistic, objective framework can be valuable in many areas, it and the models built around it fall short when trying to apply them as a one-size-fits-all solution globally and under shifting paradigms. Caught in these frameworks and left-right dichotomies, societies seem stuck in a pointless death grip, allowing authoritarian impulses and far-right figures to gain astonishing ground. Breaking free from this progressive conservatism and adopting a better, more flexible understanding and framework would not only help us build stronger, broader alliances but also enable us to engage our opponents more effectively, primarily because we are dealing with reality as it exists rather than how we wish it to be. Beyond political and societal issues, this shift also offers a more realistic and effective way to address the climate crisis. Moving beyond viewing the environment as an object to understanding it as a subject shapes a new perspective—one that not only prepares us for the true scale of loss and grief we should be feeling now but also expands our sense of agency. Developing this sense of agency to include other species and ecosystems better informs our ability to move away from the current paralysis and willful ignorance. We are an addict, realizing that we must change our way of life or bury our heads in the sand and perish, and the next decades will decide precisely which way that will shake out. Anyone who has dealt with addiction in any capacity knows that it can just as well end fatally.

The ability to look at another and not see an other, but see a version of oneself, means the ability to act in a way that is both more determined as well as refined. It allows for the inclusion of many ways of thinking and does not resort to exclusion based on otherness. As a tool, it is liberating as it includes formulas and models but can move outside of these to incorporate examples based on varying cultural or natural heritage. This becomes extremely valuable when confronting the many problems triggered by the climate crisis, for which our present-day models offer little in terms of on-the-ground solutions to pertinent problems. This type of thinking can look around the world and down through history and see other peoples or even species who have adapted to changing environments and elaborate ways of integrating these approaches into our own cultures and thinking. Perspectivism and radical subjectivity offer the chance to beget an agency and empower people to make change in the world that is freed from ideology and thereby bring people together. Something that dualism cannot do due to the objectification of the other, the implied strict adherence and need for loyalty to one’s own epistemological framework and culture.