The Last Temptation of Bob, AKA Normality

In the chapter I'm currently reading, Science's Claims on Truth, the limitations of McGilchrist's approach become more apparent. You might say that while his neurology is cutting edge, his philosophizing -- thus far anyway -- is going to be pretty familiar to anyone who has thought seriously about the limits of science. In short, he gives us a conventional critique of scientism. 

Again, when you're accustomed to someone like Schuon, anything less is like a declension from a higher to a lower dimension of reality. 

For example, in the chapter before this (What is Truth?) McGilchrist lists the usual paths to truth, including science, reason, intuition, and imagination. But he left out the most important one: intellection, which is the direct perception of truth. The intellect is a "mirror of the supra-sensible and itself a supernatural ray of light" (Schuon). 

Mere reason "perceives the general and proceeds by logical operations, whilst Intellect perceives the principial -- the metaphysical." However, in our yuga of stupidity,

the intellect is atrophied to the point of being reduced to a mere virtuality, although doubtless there is no watertight partition between it and the reason, for a sound process of reasoning indirectly transmits something of the intellect (Schuon).

Also left off McGilchrist's list is revelation, which, according to Schuon, is a "an objective and transcendent Intellection," whereas "Pure Intellection is a subjective and immanent Revelation." 

Although I agree with Schuon, it is a pretty woo woo opinion, so I certainly don't blame McGilchrist for having more conventional views. Nor do I want to criticize him for what he is not trying to say, do, or be. Analogously, I love Thomas Sowell, and it would be stupid to blame him for not being Thomas Aquinas.

McGilchrist criticizes the idea of truth as a settled thing, and prefers to view it as an ongoing process, more of an unending asymptotic approach. It very much reminds me of Voegelin's bottom line, that our Quest has no external "object," but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. That's also pretty woo woo, but it sounds about right to me.

In one of his books, Schuon says something to the effect that the divine manifests as truth or presence, and McGilchrist says something pretty similar vis-a-vis the LH and RH, respectively. 

Again, for the LH, truth will be an abstract map or model, a re-presentation, while the presentation -- the presence itself -- is in the RH:

The single most profound difference between the hemispheres... 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. 

Now, "presence" is an ambiguous word. For example, when the teacher would call my name in the morning I would say "present," even though I was subjectively absent. Somewhere else. We've all had the experience of people being with us but not truly present, and we can even detect the same thing, in, for example, music. 

We can even be absent from ourselves, which is the worst.

Last night I was listening to a singer who was really present, and then there's the matter of "stage presence." What is that?  Whatever it is, it is obvious, and known in some kind of direct manner analogous to how intellection works. 

McGilchrist asks why we don't "have a verb to describe the experience of an encounter with reality that strikes us at once as of fundamental importance?" Instead, we have this equivocal and ambiguous word, "presence." But

To "presence" is not the same as to "be present," which is too finished and inert, leaving little place for whatever is there to play an active part in the encounter; or worse, to "be presented," which is passive, and gets dangerously near to "being re-presented." 

Whatever this Presence turns out to be, it clearly isn't something perceived by the LH. Problem is, the LH only knows what it knows, and, like scientism, will pretty much deny the existence of what it does not and cannot know. What would the LH say about the presence of the sacred? That you're lying or hallucinating, I guess.

Or, it might say what an autistic person says about facial expressions: eh, seen one, seen 'em all. 

Here's a sobering thought: "Presencing is what the world does less of as we grow older." Is this inevitable? Or in-eve-ate-apple? Is there something we can do to arrest or reverse the process? If only we could somehow be born again, or be as children or something.... 

Note also that it cannot be the world that does less presencing, since it doesn't change. Rather, something in us hardens and crystalizes, or freezes or dries up, or loses its sense of flowing engagement, its living dialectic with the real presence of the Real Presence. Something must be able to reach us from outside ourselves, or we're done.

How do we go from dead men walking to dead men waking?!

McGilchrist recalls Wordsworth's famous gag about how those annoying shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy, and boy, I hate it when that happens. It's something I've spent my whole life trying to avoid, even back when I didn't know a thing about poetry and hadn't a punny to my gnome. In other words, it is something from which I instinctively recoiled, as from Grim Death itself. Save me from the LH monster!

If that's what it was.  

Here's another thing: if everyone you know is living in the conventional LH grid, but you're some bohemian living way out in the bewilderness of the RH, how do you avoid feeling like you're the weirdo? 

I still get occasional attacks of this nature -- like The Last Temptation of Bob, or something. Perceptive readers will know it's happening when Bob has one of his periodic tantrums about having few readers and no impact. A perfectly wasted life!

At any rate, in addition to presence, two other important principles or realities to bear in mind are relationship and betweenness, but I guess we'll deal with those tomorrow.

Related: I've only skimmed it, but an article about how the presence of beauty can be a more powerful argument than any mere re-preesentation of reason (https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2023/05/13/how-the-apostles-spoke-of-the-beauty-of-christ/?utm_source=The+Catholic+Thing+Daily&utm_campaign=32e8a8b343-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_12_07_01_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_769a14e16a-32e8a8b343-244304881&mc_cid=32e8a8b343&mc_eid=c604663a22).