I slept late and wasn't going to post, but since my progress in the book is starting to run ahead of the posts, perhaps a short one to catch up with myself.
We're discussing a chapter called What is Truth?, and at the end of yesterday's post alluded to the importance of relation and betweenness.
The RH, according to McGilchrist, would experience truth "as a process, one that... in principle"
has no ending. More importantly, it would see 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 -- thoughts and experiences -- whereby they answered, or co-responded to, one another....
"This ever better accord, or attunement would be the evolving truth. It would be intrinsically incomplete, but constantly in the process of completing itself."
This is sound as far as it goes, but as we've discussed in the past, there is a deeper principle in which all of this is necessarily anchored, this being the principle of creation (as explicated by Thomistic metaphysics).
Because of this principle, our cosmos is infinitely intelligible; we can know endless things about everything, but can never know everything about a single thing.
I suppose I first encountered a shadow of this idea in a seemingly unlikely place, studying psychoanalysis in grad school. There I learned of Winnicott's concept of the "transitional," or "potential" space between mother and infant, which ultimately scales up to the intersubjective T-space between us all, even to the space where culture takes place.
I just did a search for "Winnicott's transitional space," but too many items come up. Here's a helpful image, though -- notice that what we call "reality" occurs in the space between internal and external, or subjective and objective worlds:
Of course, this should not be seen as some excuse for for the cancer of relativism, which McGilchrist rejects entirely: "Some postmodernists leap from the uncertainty of truth to its nonexistence," but of course, they are asses.
For me, the principle of creation resolves this relativistic sophistry-masquerading-as-paradox, because rational creatures bear the same relationship to the creative principle as does relativity to absolute.
(Note also that the T-space is the space of creative engagement with the world, and I'll bet this somehow mirrors the trinitarian creative space of the Creator himself, more on which maybe later. It just popped out of my head, but I don't know if I can back it up.)
Now, we can only know about the relative because we partake of the absolute, just as we can only know about subjective illusions because of objectivity, or necessity because of freedom.
In conclusion (of this chapter),
let me say that both views currently on offer in so much public debate today -- naïve positivism and naïve deconstructionism -- are typical left hemisphere fictions.... Each is an ill-concealed power-grab, completely lacking in subtlety, and devoid of any sense of our true connection to the world.
What is missing from these distortions of tenure is the betweenness "that is only understood properly by the right hemisphere."
But this "is emphatically not an invitation to promulgate your latest theory based on some political ideology," so don't get any ideas. "That brings an end to truth, and hence to civilized discourse: indeed, an end to civilization."
In case you haven't noticed.
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