Page - 18 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

18 | Stefan Lorenz Sorgner www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 15–22 chorus. Thirdly, a dualistic theatre architecture was created, which was responsible for enforcing these dualistic structures. All of these dualities were absent from the festivities that had taken place before the invention and institutionalisation of the theatre, which began with the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens in the sixth century BCE.6 I am not suggesting that the establishment of this theatre was the sole event that established dualistic media. It seems plausible to claim, however, that this event was a vital stepping stone for the emergence of dualistic media. Jaime del Val has success- fully demonstrated in some of his writings and presentations how this kind of duality was transforming over the further history of the media, but at the same time he has also shown how visual art kept its dualistic directedness or foundational structure.7 The same can be noted in the realm of philosophy. Dualistic thinking in the Western tradition was strongly influenced by Plato’s thinking of the fifth century BCE. Before Plato, dualistic conceptions could be found in Zoroaster’s thought, of the first half of the second millenium BCE, but Plato was key to the introduction of dualistic catego- ries into Western cultural tradition. In Plato’s view, there is a dualism involving the realm of forms and the material world. Even though he introduced a dualism with the distinction between human be- ings who possess rational souls and animals who do not have such souls, the separa- tion was not yet as rigid as it became later on, for Plato also stressed that there are several types of souls – vegetative, sensitive, and rational. The soul or psyche is re- sponsible for self-movement and hence for life. Consequently, Plato had good reason to attribute souls to plants and animals, as both are capable of directed self-move- ment. Still, only human beings have a rational soul, and a rational soul is necessary for having the option of entering the realm of forms and grasping the forms, and also for using language and for communicating via language with one another. The second significant step for the development of dualistic ways of thinking oc- curred with the Stoics. Stoic philosophy holds that a unified logos encloses immaterial human souls, and for the Stoics animals did not have such souls. The main difference from Plato on the issue of duality is that in Plato’s case the fact that human beings possess a rational soul is not connected to the evaluation that all human beings ought to be treated equally well. According to Plato social rank depends on the type of met- al one has in one’s soul, which might be gold, silver, or iron. Stoic philosophers intro- duced the notion of humanitas, which was linked to the equal evaluation of all human beings. This notion was transformed by Cicero into the concept of dignity, which all human beings were supposed to have equally because they possess a rational soul and belong to the human species. Although clearly human beings differ with respect to their talents and capacities, it came to be acknowledged that all human beings ought to be treated well solely because they are members of the human species. Stoic 6 MacDonald/Walton 2011. 7 Jaime del Val’s talk “Relational & Multi-Dimensional Perception” demonstrates in a descriptive manner central stepping stones in the history of perception: https://vimeo.com/88375539, 14.4.2016.