Metaphysical Dualism

Metaphysical dualism, as articulated in Boothby's reading of the pre-Socratic philosophical revolution, names the worldview born from the Greek thinkers' systematic drive to replace the sacred, unknowable void behind appearances with rationally graspable first principles. The move from mythopoetic culture — in which the Real excess behind the visible world retained its character as irreducibly alien and awe-inspiring — to philosophical explanation constitutes a "desecration": the chasm between appearance and essence, image and idea, body and mind, is rendered explicit and conceptually manageable rather than preserved as a site of reverence. In this sense, metaphysical dualism is not simply a theoretical position about the composition of reality but the structural consequence of a violence done to the sacred unknown; by naming and fixating the split between sensory and intelligible realms, philosophy simultaneously forecloses the possibility of dwelling before the unnameable.

Heidegger's "oblivion of Being" provides one theoretical frame for this move, but the passage in Boothby's argument positions it additionally within a proto-Lacanian trajectory: what is lost in this birth of dualism is precisely something like das Ding — the unknowable, excluded Thing that the mythopoetic world honored through ritual and myth. The philosophical drive toward knowable first principles is thus a disenchantment that abstracts away the void, reducing what was an extimate kernel of the sacred to a merely negative term in a conceptual opposition. Socrates's famous profession of ignorance is read as a residual gesture back toward that foreclosed reverence, even as his trial signals the punishment the archaic culture levied against those who dared make the abyss conceptually explicit.

This concept appears once, in diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred (p.105), where it anchors Boothby's genealogy of disenchantment. It functions as a historical hinge between two cultural orientations toward the unknown: the mythopoetic (which honors the void) and the philosophical (which seeks to eliminate it by naming it). In relation to the cross-referenced canonical concepts, metaphysical dualism is best understood as the cultural-historical event that forecloses das Ding. Where das Ding names the irreducibly alien, pre-symbolic kernel that the subject can never possess but must keep at a respectful distance, metaphysical dualism names the intellectual gesture that attempts to dissolve that irreducibility by converting it into a cognizable opposite term — the "intelligible" set against the "sensory." In this sense it is less an extension of das Ding than its historical erasure.

The concept also resonates with the cross-referenced Abstract: the very operation Hegel celebrates as the "absolute power of the Understanding" — tearing apart organic unity and isolating moments as self-subsistent — is precisely the move Boothby identifies as constitutive of metaphysical dualism. Where Hegel treats this abstraction dialectically, as a necessary step toward the concrete, Boothby's frame (via Heidegger and implicitly via Lacan's maeontology, the thinking of non-being) reads it as a civilizational loss. Disenchantment of the World, another cross-referenced concept, is the long-run cultural consequence of this same birth of dualism, making metaphysical dualism the inaugural moment of a trajectory that leads from Greek rationalism to the modern "oblivion of Being." Foreclosure enters obliquely: the primordial sacred void is not repressed but structurally expunged from the space of legitimate discourse — it returns, if at all, only as irrationalism or mysticism, never as a recognized dimension of the Real.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.105)

The worldview of metaphysical dualism was born.

The phrase "worldview" signals that the dualism in question is not merely a philosophical thesis but a total structural orientation toward reality, while "was born" frames it as an event — a rupture — rather than a timeless logical possibility, reinforcing Boothby's argument that the split between senses and intellect, body and mind, is a historical desecration rather than a neutral analytic achievement.