Dualistic Thinking Essay

334 Words2 Pages
aTricia McCullers Dualistic Thinking Dualistic Thinking is an Excuse it arbitrarily imposes limits on what I will consider doing, or not doing. I rule out options based on this kind of stark, exclusionary, yes-no thinking. Often, I hide behind this type of dualistic thinking as a way to avoid doing what I need to do, and it can cause me to block. I slant my thinking as a way to avoid taking what I probably know is the next right step for my work. I can just hear you I’m just starting to see how I have learned to segment my thinking, only using my creative skills in arenas where they have been deemed acceptable. Just realizing I have not only segmented my spaces, but also my approaches, and my systems (or lack of since artists has to break rules- at least in our stereotypical moments. The artist rebel in me is being held down and held back by these businessperson stereotypes and imagined rules. It is only acceptable to be an artist in certain contained spaces. Intellectually I don’t believe any of this, what you are saying is so true! Yet, if I am honest and look at my behavior over the last decade, I am guilty as charged. I think we are wired for dualistic thinking. How can we give meaning to “up” without simultaneously thinking “down?” And, to push it further, it is necessary to be able to smell a sewer in order to appreciate a rose. Your “holistic” example itself remains fundamentally “dualistic“; which is why, no doubt, you say, “When we think in a ‘more holistic’ way, we satisfy or honor ‘both sides’ of each dualistic pair for the benefit of our creative work (my inverted commas.) “More” holistic, and “both sides” imply a continuation of the dualism, and a suggestion that we should work towards the reconciliation of both parts–which acknowledges that, like any ideal, such reconciliation is, by definition, impossible of

More about Dualistic Thinking Essay

Open Document