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📙 The Master and His Emissary

Author: Iain McGilchrist

Full Title: The Master and His Emissary

Highlights from September 7th, 2020.

The attempt by some post-modern theoreticians to annex the careful anti-Cartesian scepticism of Heidegger to an anarchic disregard for language and meaning is an inversion of everything that he held important.
it has been estimated that there are more connections within the human brain than there are particles in the known universe
…I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but … am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I form with it a single entity.
The defining features of the human condition can all be traced to our ability to stand back from the world, from our selves and from the immediacy of experience. This enables us to plan, to think flexibly and inventively, and, in brief, to take control
axis. To live headlong, at ground level, without being able to pause (stand outside the immediate push of time) and rise (in space) is to be like an animal; yet to float off up into the air is not to live at all – just to be a detached observing eye.
Attention is not just another ‘function’ alongside other cognitive functions. Its ontological status is of something prior to functions and even to things. The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to, the very nature of the world in which those ‘functions’ would be carried out, and in which those ‘things’ would exist.
At its simplest, a world where there is ‘betweenness’, and one where there is not. These are not different ways of thinking about the world: they are different ways of being in the world. And their difference is not symmetrical, but fundamentally asymmetrical.
It may seem that I am suggesting that there is some cosmic struggle going on behind the scenes here, with the left and right hemispheres slugging it out on a grand scale. Metaphorically speaking that is true.
The level of integration between brain areas may be changing as a function of cerebral evolution. One reasonable way for corticocognitive evolution to proceed is via the active inhibition of more instinctual subcortical impulses. It is possible that evolution might actually promote the disconnection of certain brain functions from others. For instance, along certain paths of cerebral evolution, perhaps in emerging branches of the human species, there may be an increasing disconnection of cognitive from emotional processes. This may be the path of Autism, in its various forms.
Rationality is, naturally, reluctant to accept the very possibility of a thing lying beyond rationalistic argument, since the left hemisphere cannot accept the existence of anything that lies outside itself. As always, it is the right hemisphere that is drawn to whatever is Other, what lies beyond.
CHAPTER 8 THE ANCIENT WORLD

Highlights from September 25th, 2020.

Because our use of a term such as ‘being’ makes us feel that we understand what being is, it hides the sense of radical astonishment we would have if we could truly understand it, and subverts our attempts to do so. I am reminded of Cantor’s perception that treating infinity as just another kind of number stopped us understanding its nature and hence the nature of the world.
Heidegger’s insight does not mean that we should abandon language. It just means that we have to be constantly vigilant to undermine language’s attempt to undermine our understanding.* {{r/moved}}
For Heidegger, Being (Sein) is hidden, and things as they truly are (das Seiende) can be ‘unconcealed’ only by a certain disposition of patient attention towards the world – emphatically not by annexing it, exploiting it or ransacking it for congenial meanings, in a spirit of ‘anything goes’.
This idea of truth-as-unconcealing contrasts with the idea of truth-as-correctness, which is static, unchanging.
For Heidegger, truth was such an unconcealing, but it was also a concealing, since opening one horizon inevitably involves the closing of others.
Heidegger’s concept of hiddenness does not imply a sort of throwing up of one’s hands in the air before the incomprehensible. Just the opposite, as his life’s work implies. Hiddenness does not mean, in the arts, being beyond approach, nor does it invite a free-for-all; instead it suggests that what is understood by the right hemisphere is likely to be uncomprehended by the left.
The stance, or disposition, that we need to adopt, according to Heidegger, is one of ‘waiting on’ (nachdenken) something, rather than just ‘waiting for’ it; a patient, respectful nurturing of something into disclosure, in which we need already to have some idea of what it is that will be.
Since Dasein is ‘to be there’ in the world – the literal, actual, concrete, daily world – to be human at all is to be immersed in the earth, and the quotidian matter-of-factness of the world. The right hemisphere is concerned with the familiar, not in the sense of the inauthentically routine, but in the sense of the things that form part of ‘my’ daily world or familia, the Household, those I care for.
Everydayness was an important concept for Heidegger: again it has two meanings, and Heidegger’s distinctions once more illuminate hemisphere differences, as hemisphere differences illuminate Heidegger’s meaning.
To take a famous example of his, the hammer that I use finds its place naturally in a context of the action for which I use it, and becomes almost an extension of myself, so that there is no awareness or focal (left hemisphere) attention to it. It recedes into its context – the lived world of me, my arm, the action of hammering, and the world around in which this takes place (right hemisphere); in Heidegger’s terms it is zuhanden (‘ready-to-hand’). By contrast, it stands out, becomes in Heidegger’s terms vorhanden (‘present-at-hand’), only when something goes wrong and interrupts this flow, and draws my attention to it as an object for inspection (left hemisphere).

Heidegger’s insight does not mean that we should abandon language. It just means that we have to be constantly vigilant to undermine language’s attempt to undermine our understanding. {{∆:1+2}}

However, the very alienation inherent in the experience of its sudden Vorhandenheit, when the hammer becomes the focus of my attention, allows the possibility of rediscovering the authenticity that had been lost, because the detachment enables us to see it anew as an existing thing, something remarkable, almost with a sense of wonder (in which, for Heidegger, as for many other philosophers, all philosophy begins).
As things become dulled and inauthentic, they become conceptualised rather than experienced; they are taken out of their living context, a bit like ripping the heart out of a living body. Heidegger called this process that of Gestell, or framing, a term which suggests the detachment of seeing things as if through a window (as in a famous image of Descartes’s),61 or as re-presented in a picture, or, nowadays, framed by the TV or computer screen.
Because reality is infinitely ramified and interconnected, because its nature is to hide, and to recede from the approach of logical analysis, language is a constantly limiting, potentially misdirecting and distorting medium. Yet it is necessary to Heidegger as a philosopher.
Heidegger ultimately found himself, in his last works, resorting to poetry to convey the complexity and depth of his meaning. He saw language as integral to whatever it brings forward, just as the body is to Dasein, not as a mere container for thought: ‘Words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak.’
We need to allow the ‘silent’ right hemisphere to speak, with its understanding that is hard to put into the ordinary language of every day, since everyday language already takes us straight back to the particular way of being in the world – that of the left hemisphere – that it is trying to circumvent.
Our role in understanding is that of an open, in one sense active, passivity: ‘in insight (Einblick), men are the ones that are caught sight of’.
Most people who instinctively see the world in Heideggerian terms don’t become philosophers – philosophers are self-selected as those who feel they can account for, or at any rate sensibly question, reality in the very terms that would need to be transcended if we are to do justice to the right hemisphere’s reality.
It is still true that Heidegger, while doing all he can to use language to undermine language, persists in according a primal role to language in Being. It is often asked, why not music? Perhaps the answer is personal: if he had not thought language of primal importance, and himself instinctively seized on language rather than music or the visual arts, as his medium, he would not have been a philosopher. All the same, starting from the modes of operation of the left hemisphere – language, abstraction, analysis – Heidegger remained true to what he perceived was constantly hidden by the left hemisphere’s view; he did not, for once, let it be swept away, but with extraordinary patience, persistence and subtlety, allowed it to speak for itself, despite the commitment to language, abstraction and analysis, and thus succeeded in transcending them. It is this extraordinary achievement which makes him, in my view, a heroic figure as a philosopher, despite all that might be, and has been, said against the ambivalence of his public role in the Germany of the 1930s.
The importance of Heidegger for the theme of this book lies not only in his perception that ultimately the world is given by (what we can now see to be) the right hemisphere. He went even further, and appears intuitively to have understood the evolving relationship between the hemispheres, which forms the subject of the second part of this book: namely that, with at times tumultuous upheavals, retrenchments and lurches forward, there has been a nonetheless relentless move towards the erosion of the power of the right hemisphere over recent centuries in the West.