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The conflicts that exist are the result of differences between the two hemispheres in high-level cognitive processing, and in most cases they become apparent only when, under special circumstances, care is taken to introduce material to one hemisphere only, and in such a way that it will have no opportunity to descend to a level of the self which can communicate via pathways below the corpus callosum.
like this image of the cerebral ‘canopy’ because it reminds us that consciousness is not a bird, as it often seems to be in the literature – hovering, detached, coming in at the top level and alighting on the brain somewhere in the frontal lobes – but a tree, its roots deep inside us.
Consider the world's mythologic depndence on the symobology of the tree of life and world tree and their association an awareness or wisdom; Adam and Eve eat the fruit from the branches , Odin loses an eye for a sip from a well at its base.
The polarity between the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ points of view is a creation of the left hemisphere’s analytic disposition. In reality there can be neither absolutely, only a choice between a betweenness which acknowledges itself, and one which denies its own nature.
A coin exists by having two sides; reality LITERALY is a unity of apparent opposites
One of the difficulties in practising philosophy is that we are obliged to bring into the focus of our attention, and therefore make explicit, processes which by their nature are not focussed on, and cannot be made explicit.
we resort to explicit analysis of the process only when we introspect on what happened – either because something has gone wrong, or because we are complete beginners.
we only become aware of our skills when things are not going smoothly or when someone performing an experiment has given us a task in which we have no prior experience or skill. Then we are indeed dependent on analysis.’
The purpose of failure in learning: to make explicit the oportunity to introduce the analytical mind to the process
One can however distinguish between times when one is aware of oneself as the object of attention and times when one is simply aware of being.
apophatic process
Michelangelo Carving David frm the stone by negating or denying certain parts of the stone.
is only when there is some kind of resistance that one becomes aware of the self, ‘not as an object but as that which is obtruded upon by some kind of recalcitrant reality’.
I come into being as a self through the experience of resistance, as a lake is bounded by the shore which makes it a lake.
Ying requires yang; by definition, for definition. The wave is not just the dip but also the crest. Without both, there is no wave. This limits and points of ultimate contrast are the source of conceptual or identity based meaning.
It is this primacy of the (right-hemisphere-mediated) interaction with the lived world beyond ourselves over our (left-hemisphere-mediated) re-presentation of it that lies behind Goethe’s inversion of the Johannine pronouncement: ‘In the beginning was the word [logos].’ In the mouth of Faust it becomes: ‘Im Anfang war die Tat!’ (‘In the beginning was the deed’).
While experience is enriched by the opposite process, whereby the products of the right hemisphere are sent to the left hemisphere for ‘unpacking’, there is no necessity for that process. One process is literally vital: the other is not.
Reflects the underlying falacy of my rejection of Shakespeare's statement 'a rose by any other name smells as sweet'.
The abstract understanding does enhance one's appreciation of the rose but that wouldn't be either neccesary or possible without the capacity to detect it's scent in the first place nor does it change the scent itself, merely the complexity of it's being smelt;
The divide between perception and conception. The first can be informed by the other but the latter cant exists without the first. All understanding is built on understandings.
Its point of view is always easily defensible, because analytic; the difficulty lies with those who are aware that this does not exhaust the possibilities, and have nonetheless to use analytic methods to transcend analysis.
Plato's paradox of the cave: inability to properly describe the reality one percieves beyond that percieved by others
This is much like the problem of the analytic versus holistic understanding of what a metaphor is: to one hemisphere a perhaps beautiful, but ultimately irrelevant, lie; to the other the only path to truth.
This is what I have expressed as the left hemisphere’s way of building up a picture slowly but surely, piece by piece, brick on brick. One thing is established as (apparently) certain; that forms a platform for adding the next little bit of (apparent) certainty. And so on. The right hemisphere meanwhile tries to take in all the various aspects of what it approaches at once. No part in itself precedes any other: it is more like the way a picture comes into focus – there is an ‘aha!’ moment when the whole suddenly breaks free and comes to life before us. For it, though, knowledge comes through a
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A mechanical vs ecological understanding of processes and relationships.
It is knowledge (Wissenschaft), not knowledge (Erkenntnis).
Knowledge and insigh; the same as a square and a rectangle in their relationship to each other as one can be considered a form of the other but both can be regnosed by their differences from each other.
the difficulty of escape from a self-enclosed system. The system itself closes off any possible escape mechanisms. The existence of a system of thought dependent on language automatically devalues whatever cannot be expressed in language; the process of reasoning discounts whatever cannot be reached by reasoning.
is no way that language can break out of the world language creates – except by allowing language to go beyond itself in poetry;
there can be no evidence within reason that yields the premises from which reason must begin, or that validates the process of reasoning itself
The inability of a system to defend its own axioms The reliance on interdependent systems to support one another.
In this it is like a cat pushing a dead mouse about the floor in order to see it move. But we do not have the power to make things live: like the cat, we can only either permit life, or not permit it.
was Spinoza who first made the point that omnis determinatio est negatio – ‘all determination [in the sense of the bringing into sharper focus of anything] is negation’.
The Popperian criteria
Theories can't be proven but they can be falsified. As such, the cloest to proven we can hope for is to disprove competing theories.
Again, consider Michelangelo discovering/creating David by discounting the stone that isn't David.
One can see the landscape as blocking the path of the water so that it has to turn another way, but again the water just falls in the way that water has to, and the landscape resists its path, in the way it has to. The result of the amorphous water and the form of the landscape is a river.
The conflict between the two nagating powers creates the river. One wthout the other does not a river make. The river runs due to the nagation of the water by the bank. The river moves, or changes courses, by the negation of the bank by the water.
The river does not exist before the encounter. Only water exists before the encounter, and the river actually comes into being in the process of encountering the landscape, with its power to say ‘no’ or not say ‘no’.
All language is inevitably like this: it substitutes for the experienced ambiguity and uncertainty of the original encounter with something in the process of coming into being, a sequence of apparently fixed, certain pieces of information.
the Apollonian has triumphed at the expense of the Dionysian. We are caught up, he believed, in a frenzy of ‘forming projects, enclosures, frameworks, division and structuring’, destroying ourselves and our environment and turning all into ‘resource’, something to be merely exploited, Nature turned into ‘one gigantic filling station’, as he once graphically put it.
Hölderlin’s lines: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch (‘Where there is danger, that which will save us also grows’).
It is only out of the unity of division and unity that a new unity comes: so unity melds with its opposite and yet becomes more itself.
Thesis + antithesis & synthesis
The synthesis has always been or has always been a potential at least but is only grasped when divided into the opposing forms of understanding (when viewed looking backward) then reformed. It is the same except for the added depth of conception and percepion granted by contrasting.
Verfallen, is according to him an inevitable part of existence. But there is a sense in which, as Heidegger believed, this has its positive too, since the very existence of Verfallen prompts Dasein to awareness of the loss of its authentic self, and to strive harder towards what is authentic.
The spiral cycle of synthesis.
the left hemisphere would rather believe authority, ‘what it says on this piece of paper’, than the evidence of its own senses.
… It is the vehemence of the denial – not a mere indifference to paralysis – that cries out for an explanation.
‘“I have done that”, says my [veridical episodic right-hemisphere] memory. “I cannot have done that”—says my pride [theory-driven, denial-prone left-hemisphere], and remains adamant. At last—memory yields.’
Once her left hemisphere had someone else to blame for it, it was prepared to accept the existence of the paralysis.
‘The left hemisphere is a conformist, largely indifferent to discrepancies, whereas the right hemisphere is the opposite: highly sensitive to perturbation.’
Denial, a tendency to conformism, a willingness to disregard the evidence, a habit of ducking responsibility, a blindness to mere experience in the face of the overwhelming evidence of theory: these might sound ominously familiar to observers of contemporary Western life.
Not a political statement: a reality for both groups who sit on the outer fringes furthest from the centre on many debates and those who are in the centre. I.e. A fundamental human failing to be constantly aware of and on guard against but with balanced recognition of the earlier statment: the duality working in balanced unity is key to success: a wave requires the crests and the troughs otherwise there is no wave.
It is as though, blindly, the left hemisphere pushes on, always along the same track. Evidence of failure does not mean that we are going in the wrong direction, only that we have not gone far enough in the direction we are already headed.
Consider the idealist, fanatic, extremist and conformist. Each may deny the others spec without recognising their own beam in their eye.
So if I am right, that the story of the Western world is one of increasing left-hemisphere domination, we would not expect insight to be the key note. Instead we would expect a sort of insouciant optimism, the sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as he ambles towards the abyss.
‘these two very different drives [the Apollonian and Dionysian] exist side by side, mostly in open conflict, stimulating and provoking one another to give birth to ever-new, more vigorous offspring, in whom they perpetuate the conflict inherent in the opposition between them’.
Ying & Yang, light and dark, synthesis via the meeting of thesis and antithesis.
Fine-grained analysis is the expert’s prerogative. However, the more fine-grained the expert analysis, the more difficult it may be to see an overall pattern: it cannot be other than the view from close up.
To see the man without his surroundings do you actually see the man?
However, such social and economic factors inevitably exist in an inextricably involved dynamic relationship with changes in the way we look at the world, and are indeed simply part of another way of describing the process.
The fact is that nothing can in reality be ‘held steady’ in this way: all is in a constant state of dynamic interaction. And one of the factors in this interaction, I suggest, has been the need to resolve the inherently unstable relationship between the worlds delivered by the two hemispheres.
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.
Our experience of the world helps to mould our brains, and our brains help to mould our experience of the world.
Cultural developments can be transmitted through genetic mechanisms. Just as the structure and functioning of the brain has influenced the evolution of culture, the evolution of culture has had its influence on the brain:
Such changes throughout the nervous system of an individual could then be epigenetically transmitted to the next generation, culture and the brain shaping one another over relatively short time spans.
Sounds like it should be called tbe 'shoulders of giants theory'. Just as we can make giant leaps in or discoveries of understanding by building or ellaborating on what has come before, we are simultaniously guided or moulded even by those prior perspectives, unless we can be critical of them in a constructive or adaptive manner.
The equivalent for a meme would be my misremembering a tune, or mishearing it in the first place. But ‘memes’ if they existed would be replicating, unlike genes, within a mind: a mind whose constant interaction with what ever comes to it leaves nothing unchanged or unconnected with something else. We are imitators, not copying machines.
Imitating nature may be like imitating another person’s style; one enters into the life. Equally that life enters into the imitator. In imitation one takes up something of another person, but not in an inert, lifeless, mechanical sense; rather in the sense of its being aufgehoben, whereby it is taken into ourselves and transformed.
but only humans directly imitate the means as well as the end.
Developmentaly ypu see the development of this through the child imitating the means without the effect or purpose (end) and eventually achieving an imitation of both.
we bridge the gap, share in what another feels and does, in what it is like to be that person. This comes about through our ability to transform what we perceive into something we directly experience.
The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else.
