What is the traditional Western dichotomy mindset

There are many kinds of dualities.　　The best known in the Western tradition are probably these: the duality of form and substance (soul and body) (from the Platonic tradition); the duality of good and evil (Manichaean influence, discussed by Augustine, who was himself a monist); the duality of reason and the senses (Descartes, skepticism); and so on.　　Dualism Dualism is not so much a school of thought as it is a mode of human thought based on observation of phenomena, and is found in various philosophical schools in both the East and the West, especially in the West; therefore, modern scholars often regard dualism as a characteristic of Western thinking, with Greek philosophy as the representative. Although Eastern philosophies always have some kind of "Great Oneness", "Tao", or "Nothing" concept, to say that Eastern philosophies (Indian and Chinese) are monistic is a bit of a simplification and generalization.　　Dualism holds that there are two substances, forces, or forms in the world, and that they are ***existing*** and glorious, and that none of them has ever been, or will ever be, subsumed, or simplified by the other. Monism, on the other hand, holds that only one substance, force, or form is eternal. Purely from the standpoint of philosophical debate, dualism has its attractions because it is natural and easily observable from actual experience, as in the case of light and darkness, good and evil, or the dualism of the material and the spiritual. But this apparent merit must be confronted with a serious question: How did these two so-called substances, forces, or forms come to be? What is the relationship between the two? How can an external mind affect a material body? Or how can the material affect the non-material?　　From the history of philosophy, the first Western theory to explain the world as two forms or boundaries was developed in Greece. The Greeks believed that the universe was divided into two levels, the cosmos noe{tos, which is the realm of ideas and can only be understood by the mind, and the cosmos aisthe{tos, which is the material world in which we live and which can be recognized by the human senses and nerves. The true world is eternal and therefore immovable; the sensory world is impermanent and constant; there is no necessary relationship between the two, and although the true world can become the object of the pursuit of knowledge by those in the sensory world through something like the "World Idea," which is similar to Christianity's word, the World Idea does not have the necessary relationship with man.　　This Greek dualism has dominated Western thought. Through the philosophers of Gnosticism*, who polarized the dualistic elements of the Platonic and Stoic cosmogonies, especially the Ptolemaic Gnostics. They severed the realm of truth from the realm of the senses, arguing that there is no way through these two realms, that man can never really know God, and that all effort is just an effort without knowing where it ends. On the other hand, they believe that all that changes is incomplete, and that all changes are only a step toward an unchanging completeness; that this world of changes is incomplete and corrupt, and that the unchanging God cannot have anything to do with it. This extreme view of transcendence, in fact, is to cancel out even the existence of God; since he does not wish to have any kind of relationship with man, and since he is himself an absolute unknowable, he does not actually exist for man.　　The Greeks certainly did not say that the gods did not exist; they had many gods, each representing man's projection of the idea of eternity (or life's desires). But on the basis of their dualistic worldview, a convenient model was prepared for later generations to deny the gods (atheism, Atheism*) or to confuse the world with the gods (pantheism, Pantheism*). The strict separation of the spiritual from the temporal in the Middle Ages, the Newtonian belief that God does not intervene in anything of the world, and the complete denial of the spiritual realm in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries actually find their precedents in the dualistic philosophy of Greece. Toward the end of the twentieth century, there was a strong upheaval in this situation. On the one hand, the school of physics represented by Albert Einstein pointed out that the physical world was not as fixed and predictable as it had been thought to be in the previous centuries; on the other hand, the materialism and rationalism that had been developed over the centuries had shown itself to be deficient in various ways, and that man could not be wholly satisfied with material desires, nor was his rationality so omnipotent. In the twenty-first century man is demanding the affirmation of his spiritual needs and his need for meaning in life, there is a general revival of the world's historic religions (cf. Charismatic Theology*), and the dualistic view of the world is being questioned as never before.　　

References:

Dictionary of Contemporary Theology