Orthoparadox?
Were you listening to the story, Petey? If you’ve dabbled or even flirted with modern physics, then you are familiar with the principle of complementarity. In the words of Neils Bohr — not exactly a lightweight — one “can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood.” However, “The opposite of a great truth is another truth.”
This is not just “in a manner of speaking,” rather, the manner in which we speak of the irreducible complementarity of two equal and opposite Great Truths. Expressed aphorisically, truth is in tension between certain contrary propositions, and for cosmotheandrism this tension is present from the top to bottom, or center to periphery, of reality: from physics below to O above, the former because of the latter. Not to bohr you with details, but it is worth repeating that physics is the way it is because ultimate reality is the way it is, not vice versa.
Here we don’t want to encroach on Book III, but suffice it to say that Theology has no function in resolving the conflict, but in showing its necessity — specifically, the necessity of our Axiom 2, the primordial complementarity of being itself. This is decidedly not a paradox, so what are we supposed to call it?
Understood. But c’mon: bohr you with details? You can do better than that.
We’ve been discussing how this principle seeps into neurology, in that our left and right brains are ordered to these complementary aspects of being, from particle and field in physics to being and beyond-being in metaphysics. Supposing you are confined to an overactive LH, it will redound to any number of nasty and insoluble paradoxes and even absurdities. But the RH has no trouble at all recognizing orthoparadoxical complementarities. These are not to be endured, rather, savored. Truly truly, complements will get you everywhere, although we won’t get to the bottom of the top of this matter until Book III.
God is an ironist?
No spoilers!
It should come as no surprise that the LH doesn’t cope well with paradox, for it “is seen by the analytic mind as a sign of error somewhere,” instead of the threshold of a deeper truth. For as McGilchrist explains, “in the deep (though clearly not the superficial) structure of reality opposite truths do actually coincide, and we must therefore accept both.” Indeed, echoing what Bohr says above, “It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.” Moreover, it is often the tension between these complementary pairs that “is at the heart of all creativity.”
Like John and Paul?
Yes, one is no good without the other, whether we are talking about Ebony and Ivory or Imagine.
Hey, a lot of people adore that song.
Seriously? There is a name for someone who imagines no possessions: crook. It might apply in heaven, but he has already imagined that away.
Suffice it to say that orthoparadox mainly applies to Deep Truths, not to mundane, everyday ones. The latter is the world of asymmetrical logic, Newtonian physics, linear time, and good old leftsplaining. There is also the symmetrical logic of the RH, which we needn’t dwell on here, but was explained in detail by a psychoanalytic brainiac named Ignacio Matte-Blanco, in his The Unconscious as Infinite Sets. An Essay in Bi-logic, and simplified in a more accessible book called The Symmetry of God, by Rodney Bomford. Don’t worry, we’ll deal with them in the appropriate tome.
∞
Meanwhile, McGilchrist touches on an Extremely Important Point, the idea of “degrees of truth,” which goes directly to Axiom 5, verticality. The LH has a preference for dichotomous, black-and-white thinking, and will therefore have difficulty appreciating that something can be true on one level but false on another.
Now, a key to metaphysics is understanding the hierarchical structure of reality, from the Absolute on down. The only alternative is some version of flatland reductionism that can literally never get off (or spiral out of) its own endless goround. Regarding this open spiral, “there is always another level to which one can go to ask a question that transcends the frame of reference.” If we only allow the RH to interrogate the LH under a hot light, we can extract a confession from the left that it is totally ignorant of this transcendent hierarchical structure (which is the doorway out of the LH matrix).
Here one might say that mediated perception is to the LH what direct intuition is to the RH. For example, McGilchrist notes that even “experts can rarely articulate how they are able to do what they do.” It is as if the true expert can bypass his own LH knowledge and see directly into a problem and its solution.
In practical terms, this is how it was for me as a clinician: I could easily intuit things about a patient right away, that were only later confirmed by a detailed history. It’s not that I’m a mind reader, except I am. However, this professional ability — back off, man, I’m a psychologist — is merely the honing of a capacity we all possess, which is anchored in our everyday intersubjective mindsight. Supposing you are married, it is how you can tell there is a glitch in the matrix before your wife even says Can we talk?
One particularly consequential orthoparadox is the relationship between the one and the many, for clearly, the RH is the advocate of the oneness of being, whereas the LH comes down on the side of the many. This has especially important implications for the Anthropos, which is a general category to which all human beings belong. And yet, we are orthoparadoxically a species of unique instances, when a truly unique instance is defined as something that belongs to no general category. Yes, we are Homo sapiens sapiens, but that’s just an abstract LH category. No one knows what it is really like to be me, starting with me. Which implies this LH category of the Anthropos is crosscut by RH mystery. At the very least,
To see each thing as it really is requires a balancing act. On the one hand, we need to see it as unique: nothing that exists is ever the same as anything else….. Yet one aspect of what really is requires us to see where it fits into the context of everything else; and to see that we need generalities. And to appreciate the relationship between uniqueness and generality means always to balance sameness and generality (McGilchrist).
Even this book is a unique instance of the 12 axiomatic truths that cannot not be. I could write it again but it would never come out the same.
The same old same old in a new package?
As they say, each new generation of barbarians must rediscover the same old perennial truths:
Everything has already been said, and well said; but one must always recall it anew, and in recalling it one must do what has already been done: to actualize in thought certitudes contained, not in the thinking ego, but in the transpersonal substance of human intelligence (Schuon).
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