Since the RH is implicated in creativity, one might suspect that LH damage would result in an unhinged imagination. However, it doesn’t work that way at all. Schizophrenia, for example, correlates with a hyperactive LH and hypoactive RH, the latter again anchoring us in the real world. Rather, it is the LH that is more prone to spinning abstractions and dwelling in them instead of reality.
Living in the comfort and safety of one’s own delusions.
Except to say that people often prefer to live in painful and persecutory delusions — or even neuroses — that are easily disprovable, at least to those of us living outside the delusion. Speaking as a clinical psychologist, a neurosis is often less painful than the reality it is designed to avoid: it is a defense mechanism against a painful or unpleasant reality. For example, it is much easier to blame a conspiracy for one’s failings than to acknowledge responsibility for one’s own failure. Frankly, this is Psychology 101.
Here again, this suggests that the RH must specialize in transcendence, since it is able to view LH antics from “above” and apply the brakes to them. But at the same time, it is more immanent than the LH, in the sense that the latter specializes in abstractions and maps of the world which may obscure the world itself. Once the mind is entrapped in its own ideology, it becomes difficult to recognize anything outside it, and it will use resources from within the erroneous system to attempt to plug holes and prop it up.
Like doubling down on a hard 12 in blackjack.
Or splitting 10s. Truly, in philosophy you need to know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. A wise but unknown fella’ by the name of Jules Lequier – we’ll hear more from him in Book III – said that “We are all children of error. Most of the time we only escape our errors by means of other errors.” In other words, supposing we begin our philosophy with a Big Error, it will require a multitude of subsequent small errors in order to continue propping it up.
For example, McGilchrist touches on the aggressive misosophy (my characterization) of deconstruction, whereby language is reduced to a closed system in which words are only about other words rather than reality. But as discussed in Book I, language is analogous to money, since both are symbols for an underlying reality. Both language and money must ultimately be fungible to the First Bank of Reality.
The LH gives us a representation of reality, not reality itself. It is reality once removed, which is not unimportant: just because a map isn’t the territory, it hardly means maps are worthless. Rather, as they say, all models are wrong, but some are useful. But just as you can’t live in a map, nor can you eat money or substitute a college diploma for a brain. In the Wizard of Oz, the Scarecrow actually possessed the thing itself which the conferral of a diploma only signified, whereas nowadays we confer the symbol as if it signifies the thing itself, i.e., intelligence.
Credentialed ignorati?
Yes, the left-hemispheric Dunning-Krugery discussed previously. Back in graduate school one of the requirements — not that I didn’t need it — was to undergo a course of psychoanalytic therapy, partly in order to discover just how neurotic we actually are beneath our clueless self-confidence. On one occasion while on the couch freely associating about this and that, my analyst surprised me with a question: “Do you know what you’re doing right now? “I don’t know. Complaining about my mother?” “No,” he responded. “You’re relaxing the left brain and allowing the right brain to speak.”
These days, in order to keep the mind limber, I meditate every day for half an hour. What am I actually doing during this verticalisthenic exercise? Among other things, it seems I am lulling the LH into the background so the RH can come to the fore. McGilchrist describes how activation of RH indeed results in heightened awareness and a deepened sense of reality. One hopes, at any rate.
Height and depth. The measures of transcendence.
The theologian Hans Balthasar writes of “the annihilation of the depth dimension of being” resulting from “The formula ‘A is nothing other than,’” because if something is only what it is, it is thereby less than what it is. Rather, reality has a surprising depth dimension, which is precisely how we know it is – and we are – real, as per Polanyi above. The real Cosmos is full of surprises, whereas a superimposed ideology preemptively tames them. If being weren’t always already beyond being, life would frankly be a snooze, for When things appear to us to be just what they seem, they soon seem to be even less. We can never actually get to the bottom of reality, because it is bottomless.
And topless.
Moreover, bottomless because topless, or in other words, open at both ends. Back in the 1980s there was a famous newspaper headline: Headless Body in Topless Bar. We too become headless if the Cosmos isn’t topless, because we are thereby enclosed in an LH immanence we can never escape. In reality science is interminable. Supposing it terminates in matter, this is just another attempt to enclose being in ideology. Being is intelligible, but inexhaustibly so, unless one prematurely encloses it in an anti-Gödelian system.
McGilchrist highlights the centrality of intersubjectivity, which goes to the relational interiority of our Axiom 4. This too is very much an RH specialty, for it doesn’t matter how big our brains are if we aren’t intersubjective, which is to say, members of one another, so to speak. Or so to communicate. Absent this there is no way for culture to exist, or anything beyond the atomistic individual. Intersubjectivity is the interior-to-interior linking or mutual indwelling of subjects. Without it we’d all be more like billiard balls or even Kardashians.
As discussed previously, the neurological foundation of intersubjectivity develops in infancy, forged in the mother-infant dyad. Schore explains how the right brain develops prior to the left, such that this intersubjectivity results from a right-to-right brain attunement between mother and infant. But this same attunement is precisely what allows us to tune into other subjects throughout the lifespan. Likewise, an effective psychotherapist specializes in this kind of attunement, which the psychoanalyst Theodore Reik called “listening with the third ear,” when in reality one is listening for right brain clues embedded in the patient’s left-brain speech.
Pickin’ up bad vibrations?
It often comes down to that.
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