Philosophy II
2009-2012
Photo installation with sound (Photo: Ultrachrome print on Hahnemuhle 265 gs.)
90 x 42 cm.
Polarization, Dualism and Relationship of Opposites
“Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.”
The Kybalion
Although it seems external to us or recent –and aware that many other factors, especially the more contemporary political speech, have exacerbated it– we could sign that, in the historical-conceptual perspective the phenomenon of polarization and polarized thinking are imprinted in the DNA of our culture. The tendency of the Western approach and, by extension, its philosophy is based precisely on the principle of polarization, on the definition of absolute categories, and this finds a dichotomous basis in the rhetoric of cognitive and linguistic dualism. But the “problem” itself does not lie in the principle of opposites, but in the way we relate to them.Where other systems of thought understood interrelationship (as a relation of inclusion) and the implicit complementarity in opposing pairs, for Western rationalism the “opposites” turned out to be hostile, mutually exclusive spheres. Thus we Westerners wallow in irreconcilable antagonism.
Philosophy II: Cognitive Distortions and Dichotomous Thinking
As a result of the above: a deep wound and the cult of the culture of scissions that fractures the human being in his relationship with himself, with the other and with the world. The final resolution of this important issue in the gnoseological field, remains a pending task in the history of thought in our hemisphere.
In such a tessitura, these works propose a reflection on this and other related questions.