What makes a man, Petey? Is it openness? Relationality? Intersubjectivity? Creativity? The achievement of objectivity?
That and a pair of cerebral hemispheres.
That is essentially the case Iain McGilchrist makes in his 1,500 page opus on left (LH) and right hemispheric (RH) brain differences, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World.
A good man, and thorough.
Supposing one is writing about the brain, it is indeed difficult to know when to stop, being that it is by orders of magnitude the most complex object in the universe, what with its 100 trillion synaptic connections, not to mention its potential interior relations with 8 billion other brains.
Get over yourself.
We won’t press the point, partly because one of the principles of cosmotheandrism is that the brain cannot be understood in isolation from the entire web of reality, since the Cosmos and Anthropos are not extrinsic to one another. Rather, there is one reality in two modes, interior and exterior, subject and object, vertical and horizontal.
McGilchrist’s research has vast cosmotheandric implications, even if he would not put it that way. Nor do we need to necessarily express cosmotheandrism in neuropsychiatric terms, because the dipolar structure of reality is prior to the structure of our brains. Thus, the reason why we have differently functioning cerebral hemispheres is because they are ordered to two different modes of reality.
In short, the LH is ordered more to the immanent/horizontal world, the RH to transcendence and verticality; likewise the former specializes in analysis, linearity, and division, the latter in synthesis, complexity, and wholeness. Moreover, the RH is attuned more to the interiority of things, i.e., intersubjectivity, empathy, and “mindsight.” One might even say that our complementary hemispheres facilitate the perception of extrinsically related parts within an intrinsically related field.
This dynamic complementarity is discussed in the extensive works of another neurobiological explorer, Allan Schore, most recently in his The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature. In it he describes how “the conscious mind resides in the ‘top-down’ explicit left hemisphere, while the unconscious mind resides in the ‘bottom-up’ implicit right hemisphere.”
In a properly functioning brain, information flows back and forth between them in a “right, left, right sequence” (Schore) — or in McGilchrist’s terms, the RH “underwrites and ‘delivers’” our primary experience of the world, “which the left brain then ‘unpacks’ and processes, before returning it to the right hemisphere, to be reintegrated into the wider picture.”
This right-left-right sequence thus involves holistic experiencing by the right brain; logical examination and categorization by the left; then a return to the right for a final synthesis with the abstract analysis, in order to generate an integrated and transformed whole (Schore).
Here again, irrespective of how we pull off this feat of cognitive metabolism, it is what we do. However, supposing one hemisphere or the other is damaged or even attenuated, then we either cannot do it or have difficulty doing so, i.e., intuiting the Cosmic Area Rug while continuously refining it with the receipt of new explicit information.
In this discussion of hemispheric differences, our main focus is on those features that are relevant to cosmotheandrism, especially to the 12 Axioms. Obviously, neither McGilchrist nor Schore are aware of this connection, since we are about to connect them, and no one can read a book that hasn’t yet been written.
∞
To cite an obvious example, a major factor in the decline of religion – which for you may or may not be a good thing, de geistibus and all that – has to do with what McGilchrist calls “right brain capture” by the left. In short, a hypertrophied LH approach to the Cosmos can effectively disable and silence the RH’s more holistic and intuitive perception and understanding.
To the extent that the LH actively silences the RH, it could explain, say, the impoverished ontology of scientistic materialism, or what we call the Flat Cosmos Society. Supposing you “discover” that that the Theos doesn’t exist, it is the consequence of a kind of perceptual impairment, in that you can no longer sense verticality and transcendence. Analogously, if deprived of your sense of smell, the scent of the rose doesn’t cease to exist, rather ceases to exist for you. No one could smell anything, much less something as elusive as teen spirit
Oh well, whatever, never mind.
Don’t be so dismissive. The point is, without the RH we are essentially living on a plane, trying to explain a 3D object using only 2D geometry. No wonder it appears “irrational” to the LH. Supposing the existence of Nirvana, you won’t get there via the LH, rather, by getting it to shut-up for five minutes and giving the floor to the RH.
Of course, the two hemispheres are supposed to function in a dynamic and complementary manner, such that we have access to “both worlds” in an integrated manner, since there is only the one Cosmos but with horizontal and vertical features. In a simplistic manner we could say that the LH is vital to the scientific approach, while the RH turns out to be central to perceiving and unpacking the spiritual dimension of the Cosmos.
For which reason we would agree with Dávila that Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper -- which it can only do because the Cosmos has a depth dimension perceived by the RH, or at least something like it. Religion is not linear, or at any rate not supposed to be, but rather, a more or less adequate map of a hyperdimensional vertical/transcendent world with many mansions.
Again, many of the things McGilchrist says can be reframed in purely commonsense metaphysical terms, irrespective of the neurology. For clearly, we can perceive and describe the world in a scientific manner, devoid of any spiritual considerations, and indeed, this is how science is supposed to function. Nevertheless, a complete account of how, say, water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, tells us nothing about its role in purification rituals, nor even why sitting in the bubbling waters of a steaming Jacuzzi with an adult beverage can do wonders to dilate the RH.
In the absence of a lively RH, we can’t even access the realm mapped by religion. For in the words of Dávila, The religious man lives among [RH] realities that the secular [LH] man ignores. Which implies that there are more things in your RH perception than dreamt up in your LH ideology. Thus, for Dávila, Faith is not an irrational assent to a proposition; it is a perception of a special order of realities. Faith, whatever else it is, is a quintessentially RH phenomenon. If Blake could hold Infinity in the palm of his hand and bear witness to Eternity in an hour, you can bet he wasn’t staring at his fingers or watching the clock through the LH, for a watched clock never boils.
But in reality, the most creative scientists do of course deploy the RH to peer more deeply into reality, for example, Einstein, who imagined himself chasing a beam of light and wondering what he might experience if he could somehow travel at the speed of light. This has no immediate spiritual implications, but it does show how RH intuition can help us to perceive what is not manifest or obvious. The Cosmos is still speaking to us, but in a more poetic mode. If, as we believe, the Cosmos has a dipolar substance-in-relation structure, it makes perfect sense that the Anthropos would evolve a dipolar brain to interface with it, the LH going to substance, the RH to relation. Importantly, the brain isn’t creating these worlds, rather, it is a transceiver that can be tuned to different frequencies of O.
For as McGilchrist is at pains to point out, the two hemispheres attend to the world in different ways, not just for us but for everybrain. He traces this to the unedifying biological imperative of eat or be eaten, or predator and prey. In short, the more focused LH search for food is very different from the more open ended RH scanning for possible predators that might be anywhere, for he who hesitates is lunch.
That is obviously a bottom-up explanation, and like Darwinism is valid as far as it goes. But cosmotheandrism looks at the same phenomena in a top-down manner, especially as it pertains to the Anthropos. In our case it is quite evident that we can regard the One Cosmos in very different ways, because the Cosmos itself is structured in this way. Again, the LH is conformed more to its horizontal, linear, abstract, mechanical, and decontextualized features, the RH to more to verticality, wholeness, relationality, openness, etc. One might even say knowledge and wisdom, respectively.
Spotlight and floodlight.
Correct: we need both. But McGilchrist maintains that in our modern over-reliance on the LH spotlight, we have been effectively rendered blind to that half (or more) of the world revealed by intuition, imagination, and other RH modalities. The best philosophy the LH can construct will be radically deficient and truncated, and indeed there have been such anemic attempts as behaviorism, eliminativism, and logical positivism. Which implies that before evaluating a philosophy, we might well ask: is this a product of the LH? Of the RH? Or of both working in tandem? Cosmotheandrism, I am pleased to say, both presumes and requires each modality.
