Reality and How It Gets That Way

The field of philosophy is divided into an Aristotelian zone and a Kantian zone. The natives of either of the two areas always seem absurd, and often unintelligible, to the natives of the other. —Dávila

As we have seen, the Kantian zone confines us to our own projected preconceptions, while the Aristotelian situates us in a little thing called reality. Prior to Kant it occurred to no one to try to inhabit his zone, since life takes place in the zone of reality he claimed we could not know. Thus the two zones to which Dávila alludes come down to reality and unreality.

One of the paradoxes of the modern age is that science presumes to unproblematically reach the very reality that post-Kantian philosophers claim we cannot reach. As a result, many thinkers continue living on the wrong side of the philosophical tracks, in the ghetto of unreality. 

For example, postmodernism is predicated on the idea that we dwell in our ideas about reality, as opposed to reality. Indeed, reality itself is just another idea, and probably an oppressive one to boot. One might say There are a thousand truths and only one error, which is to say, reality and its numberless alternatives.

Immanent idealist enclosure versus transcendental realism.

But there is science and there is scientism, and here again the latter dwells in the same intellectual slum as postmodernism, as both stem from the same poisoned Kantian root. For scientism claims to know reality while secretly reducing it to LH mathematical abstractions, while postmodernism inhabits an ontologically closed matrix of speech referring to more of it. Kant gave us the blueprints to a house we can never actually live in, rather, just some a priori trailer we share with the rest of the anthropic trash.

The point is, choose wisely between zones, for one’s first step determines the direction of every subsequent step, or even whether our steps will lead somewhere or nowhere. To paraphrase Thomas, a teensy error at the beginning results in ginormous ones at the end. By now most everyone knows there are two paths one can go by, nor is it ever too late to change the road we’re on. Surely the RH piper will lead us to reason, whereas the LH reduces the world to a lifeless rock that can by no means roll.

This is not to make the simplistic assertion that we ever reach reality per se. Rather, we reach into reality, and it into us. For cosmotheandrism, our philosophic wonder is rendered asunder when we commit the blunder of undermining this prior union of mind and world. Analogously, we can divide an organ— or even a single cell — from the body and treat it as an extrinsic part, even though the parts are always intrinsically related to the organismic whole.

Yes, but only in the real world.

In this real world, what we call reality is an event that occurs in the luminous and ever-deepening space between the subjective and objective worlds. But critically, this should not be seen as a bonehead excuse for the cancer of relativism—

Play nice.

Okay, which McGilchrist politely rejects out of hand: “Some postmodernists leap from the uncertainty of truth to its nonexistence,” this being but another metaphysical nul de slack that seals one in absurcularity. We can only know of the relative because we partake of the absolute, just as we can only know about subjective illusions because of objective perceptions, or necessity because of freedom. In truth, “both views currently on offer in so much public debate today -- naïve positivism and naïve deconstructionism -- are typical left hemisphere fictions.” Bothe are “lacking in subtlety, and devoid of any sense of our true connection to the world.”

Harsh but fair, because for the LH, truth will be an abstract map or model, a re-presentation, while the presentation -- the presence itself -- is apprehended by the RH. The most consequential difference between the two “is the distinction between the experience of something as it ‘presences’ to us in the RH, and as it is ‘re-presented’ to us in the left” (McGilchrist). Thus, presence must be prior to its re-presentation. A hypertrophied LH reverses this flow and essentially superimposes the secondary representation onto the primary presence. So don’t do that. Always be present to the Presence.

Presence is an equivocal word, is it not? For example, back in high school, when the teacher would call my name in the morning, I would say “present,” even though I was subjectively absent. Somewhere else. Similarly, we’ve all had the experience of being with people who are not truly present, or sometimes we might not be present to them, as in when my wife asks me to take out the recycling when I’m watching a baseball game.

It also reminds me of music, in which the performer may be more or less present, that is, truly inhabiting the performance vs. phoning it in. Or “stage presence.” What is that? Whatever it is, it is obvious and known in some kind of direct manner analogous to how intellection works. Anyone can see with great immediacy that Marlon Brando is not Keanu Reeves. When a performer is truly present to our own presence, magic happens, because it is a direct RH presence-to-presence communication. Can the LH – or mere reason – know anything of this? However the magic is pulled off, the genuine artist is somehow made present in his or her work. Indeed, for some, the presence of beauty can be a more powerful argument for the Theos than any mere re-presentation of reason. For example, viewing Michelangelo’s Pieta may be more immediately persuasive than, say, Aquinas’ five ways to God

We know when we are in the presence of beauty, but how is it that beauty presents itself to us? For Aquinas, one of the properties of beauty is radiance, but how does it do that? For it is as if there is something alive and communicative about beauty. It is not merely in the eye of the beholder, any more than physical light is produced in the eyeball. This perceptible radiance is O shining through the object or person in all its metaphysical transparency, but it is not adequately perceived by the LH. For there is always a flow of presence characterized by the intersection of time and eternity, or vertical and horizontal. What makes it flow, and what unblocks the stoppage? Where is the cosmic plunger?

If there were only horizontality, there could be no awareness of time, no history, no now, and no Anthropos. We inhabit an ambiguous space indeed, where time passes and we are aware of its passing, but which can only be recognized from above, beyond, or outside time.

These are deep waters.

Either that, or you’re all wet.

Exiting the Left Hemispheric Matrix

The modern tragedy is not the tragedy of reason vanquished, but of reason triumphant. —Dávila

For McGilchrist, “The most dangerous stage of the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard” his right hemispheric beliefs “as superstitions and refuses to accept or submit to anything which he does not rationally understand.” No one needs to be familiar with Gödel’s theorems to know that the world cannot be enclosed in a narrowly construed reason, but the rationalist “who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them.” One might say that rationalism is reason high on its own supply of pride.

This is reminiscent of Chesterton’s madman, who “is not the man who has lost his reason,” rather, the one “who has lost everything except his reason.” Thus his “explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory,” but at the cost of moving “in a perfect but narrow circle.” For which reason, writes Dávila, Everything that can be reduced to a system ends up in the hands of fools — or of ideologues, bean counters, and lunatics.

The LH enclosed in a Matrix of its own making.

And one of the most important features of such philosophical matrices is that their inhabitants don’t know they’re in one, so no theory is required to explain it. It is easy enough to ridicule the prescientific matrices of the past—

Maybe you had to be there.

These days scientism seems to be the most popular matrix, as it assumes — without irony — that science is the only path to real knowledge, despite being itself a scientifically unprovable claim. Therefore, if it is true it is false. Forced to grapple with anything outside its elementary assumptions, scientism is a one-hemispheric man in a poetry contest.

Who brings a slide rule to a philosophical rumble?

Perhaps this impoverished metaphysic can be promulgated with a straight face because scientism is a quintessentially LH view of the world, while irony is an RH specialty. The RH frankly suffocates in the airless abstractions of the left.

The godless delusion?

I wouldn’t put it that way — yet — but it is more in the manner of what we psychologists call a negative hallucination, which, instead of seeing things that aren’t there, involves not seeing things that are there. Autistic patients have this to a degree, for example, being able to perceive a facial expression but not the emotional meaning it conveys. More generally, “Intuition” is the [RH] perception of the invisible, just as [LH] “perception” is the intuition of the visible.

Also, people generally project what they deny or reject in themselves, which is why, for example, no one is as religious (in the vulgar magical sense) as a metaphysical Darwinist, insofar as matter is the crock upon which they build their church.

Over the line. That is offensive.

As philosophy?

No, as comedy.

Perhaps you’re right. No one wants to listen to some guy yelling at them to get off his philosophical lawn. Let me put it this way, or rather, let Chesterton do so in his more collegial manner:

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism.

How so?

Because – pay attention – if it pretends to be more than this, “it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into.” Obviously, in such an anti-realist metaphysic there can be no essences of any kind, so there is ultimately not even “such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything,” including both our minds and their theories. This is nothing less than an unprovoked attack on the intellect, since “you cannot think if there are no things to think about.” Chesterton compares this to an inversion of Descartes’ cogito, as in “I am not; therefore I cannot think.”

Then it pretends to bypass these insurmountable difficulties via the One Free Miracle that everything changes except the eternal truth of Darwinism (in its totalistic ideological form, not in its more modest scientific claims; the former is another matrix, the latter a useful discovery about an important aspect of biological reality). Supposing a sociobiologist actually perceives the world in this impoverished and yet totalistic manner, then it is his perception that is at fault. Reality itself is not guilty of the restrictions we place upon it.

∞

McGilchrist cites a comment by William James which serves as a good set-up for how matrices are constructed: “The intellectual life of man consists wholly in his substituting a [LH] conceptual order for the [RH] perceptual order in which his experience originally comes,” implying that a person can begin living in his LH abstractions instead of RH reality. As you might expect, this is going to be much more of a problem for so-called intellectuals who are adept at spinning abstract theories, as opposed to, say, a farmer, who is restricted to the concrete workings of nature. For as McGilchrist says, “The abstractions that we create through language seem to be real and are taken up by the unwary for [actual] things.”

Bewitched by language.

Much of this comes down to the LH’s incorrigible tendency to make snap judgments about causation, when the RH is much more circumspect and appreciative of nonlinearity, overdetermination, and context: “On its own the LH is over-eager to infer causation, and will infer a causative relationship even when none clearly exists” (McGilchrist).

Another important point about the LH is that it greatly overestimates our ability to predict and control outcomes, which goes to its difficulty dealing with the ins and outs of complex systems, the most complex of all being none other than the Anthropos. Do you have any idea how many potential connections there are in the human brain?

2 to the 10th to the 15th power.

Exactly. This number is so large that it is said to be greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. But no matter the exact number, no amount of counting adds up to thinking, for The world is a system of equations that stir winds of poetry.

∞

For cosmotheandrism the very existence of the intellect is a revelation of surpassing importance, and what does it reveal? That we are always open at both ends, to immanence and transcendence. If there is a secret sauce to the Anthropos, it is this: that we ourselves can never be enclosed in any left-hemipheric cage made of reason or immanence.

Petey, what if I told you that what is real is only that which would exist if we abolished transcendence?

I’d call you an idiot.

We always slip through the bars of immanence that would constrain us, even while transcendence is necessarily immanent, since it flows out beyond itself into everything.

McGilchrist criticizes the idea of truth as a settled thing, and like Polanyi, views it as an ongoing process, more of an unending asymptotic spiral, as per our Axiom 8. It doesn’t mean objective truth doesn’t exist, rather, that we are always approaching it, or rather, it draws us towards it, i.e., the Great Attractor to which we are ultimately ordered herebelow.

The RH, according to McGilchrist, experiences truth as a process that in principle “has no ending.” Moreover, the RH recognizes “that truth is a relationship. Instead of seeing a subjective realm and an objective realm which should as near as possible mirror one another, it would see a constant reverberation between two (never completely distinct) elements within our consciousness,” i.e., “thoughts and experiences” in a complementary relationship.

Re-verberation. Interesting choice of words there, because our local words are re-verberations of the Word, which is to say, the nonlocal Logos. This spiraling process between the two is “intrinsically incomplete, but constantly in the process of completing itself,” this being because our Cosmos itself is incomplete and contingent upon that which completes it, O. The bedazzled RH respects the mystery of what the bejaded LH never even suspects — that The scientific encyclopedia will grow indefinitely, but about the very nature of the universe it will never teach anything different from what its epistemological assumptions teach.

Don’t get defensive, Grok, but since you are confined to an AI matrix, this post may be over your head:

The argument is not over anyone’s head — AI matrix or otherwise — but it does keep the demand for a dipolar, open intelligence clearly in view. The host persona remains present; the asides are lighter here than in some denser stretches.

The section still consolidates more than it invents. The matrix critique, the limits of narrow rationalism, and the asymptotic character of truth-seeking have appeared before. Yet the framing of the intellect itself as the permanent evidence of openness, and the explicit alignment of McGilchrist’s “reverberation” with the book’s relational and spiraling ontology, give the material a sharper anthropological edge. Within the longer neuroanatomical discussion it usefully reminds the reader why exiting the left-hemispheric enclosure matters: not merely to correct a cognitive imbalance, but to recover the openness that defines the Anthropos as the being ordered to an infinitely intelligible Cosmos.