"The reason that the left brain needs certainty is because it wants to control. The modern disease is our need to control. It's through trying to control that we have destroyed the world. And we are destroying society through this passion for "I know how it should be." And "This is how it must be". The left hemisphere is like a bureaucratic establishment that has procedures that must be followed. It can only see these particular tracks, and if it follows these tracks it will be in control. But if anything else happens it's unsettling. This is one of the things that is promoted nowadays, that you should be in control, you know "Take control of your life! Do this! Make that!" and so on. In some ways this is very worthy, but it induces illusions that we can control, first of all, and anxiety when we find that we can't. A lot of patients who I saw as a psychiatrist would say, "You know, I just don't feel like my life is under control." And I felt like saying, "Well join the club!" For none of us is life under control. The art of life is knowing how to, as it were, 'surf the wave' to 'take the stream where it is leading', and make the most of that experience, not try to resist and insist that the wave should come over there three seconds from now. This will never happen. So it's a matter of responsiveness. Everything exists in a reverberative relationship. It's not a one-way relationship. It's a giving and a receiving. In that business of connecting to the world, not controlling it, but actually having a relationship with it, freedom, peace, imagination, growth happen. Whereas when we try to control everything according to the narrow conception that we have, we waste things. We waste opportunities, we make ourselves unhappy, and we destroy what we could have loved."
"The distinction between what is controlled and rigid, with focus on detail, and what is flexibly responded to, with appreciation of the bigger picture, is significant. The left hemisphere sees its role as to control, and get things clear and fixed. The right hemisphere is open to potential and sees its role as to respond to the realities with which it is presented, with an open attendant disposition that one might call ‘active passivity’. It is able to respond to a changed, or changing, context. It is more capable of a frame shift; and not surprisingly the right frontal lobe is especially important for flexibility of thought, with damage in that area leading to perseveration, a pathological inability to respond flexibly to changing situations. For example, having found an approach that works for one problem, subjects seem to get stuck, and will inappropriately apply it to a second problem that requires a different approach – or even, having answered one question right, will give the same answer to the next and the next. It is the right frontal cortex that is responsible for inhibiting one's immediate response, and hence for flexibility and set-shifting.
"Goals need to be flexible, responding to changing circumstances; and these in turn vary depending on how, and why, we pursue such goals. Since the world is, to all intents and purposes, infinitely complex in its structure, we could not predict it, even if there were no ‘black swan’ events. Some uncertainties are irresoluble, and we do well to recognise our limitations, since it makes for better decision-making. We need to be responsive to each step of the process. If you watch an animal – even an animalcule, such as an amoeba – exploring its environment, you will see it make forays, withdraw and adapt, try again in another direction, withdraw, and then find a direction it is prepared to pursue. Trial and error. Everything depends on an organism’s capacity to be flexible and responsive to its environment, just as the environment, both living and non-living, is responsive to organisms. It is this combination of interlocking responses that ensures stability. Good decision-makers are eclectic and not wedded to ‘consistency’. But when things turn out, for whatever reasons, the way we thought they might, we tend to overestimate our role in their doing so. We overestimate our ability to predict and to control. That way disaster often ensues.
"The right hemisphere-damaged, left hemisphere-reliant, patient is always in the right. They tend to disown problems and pass the responsibility to others. Psychopaths have no sense of guilt, shame, or responsibility. A distinguishing feature of schizophrenia is the inability to accept responsibility (causal repudiation), as in delusions of control of thoughts, feelings and actions by others. When they are presented with evidence that what they are doing is not working, their invariable response is first to deny that there is a problem, but, if pushed, to respond not that we have done too much of something that is ineffective, but that we simply need to do more of it. Denial, a tendency to conformism, a willingness to disregard the evidence, a habit of ducking responsibility, a blindness to mere experience in the face of the overwhelming evidence of theory: these might sound ominously familiar to observers of contemporary Western life. The idea that the ‘material’ world is not just a lump of resource, but reaches into every part of the realm of value, including the spiritual, that through our embodied nature we can commune with it, that there are responses and responsibilities that need to be respected, has largely been lost by the dominant culture.
"Eugène Minkowski saw that this involved a lack of ‘vital contact with reality’, the pre-reflective attunement to, or immersion in, the world that grounds our being. He defined the vital contact as an ability to ‘resonate with the world’, to empathise with others, to intuit how to respond affectively and to act rightly, through our partaking in an intersubjective world: “Without ever being ever able to formulate it, we know what we have to do; and it is this that makes our activity infinitely supple and malleable." Life vastly enhances the degree of responsiveness of, to, and within the world. Our attention is responsive to the world, and the world is responsive to our attention. Jan Zwicky said that "truth is the asymptotic limit of sensitive attempts to be responsible to our actual experience of the world... truth is the result of attention (as opposed to inspection). Of looking informed by love. Of really looking". Values are not invented but discovered and disclosed, and it takes life to discover and disclose them. They declare themselves in and through the responses of living beings to the world and the world’s response to them. Values evoke a response in us and call us to some end. They are what give meaning to life: such things as beauty, goodness, truth, and purpose. Every decision we make is not just a response to a known and certain world, but is part of co-creating that world for what it is. The self as an agent who takes responsibility for his or her actions is central to morality.
"Direct experience ‘speaks’ to us and calls to us to respond with seriousness, reverence and gratitude. And that is what gives meaning to life. There is a process of responsive evocation, the world ‘calling forth’ something in me that in turn ‘calls forth’ something in the world. An Ent-sprechen is not ‘an answer to’ (une réponse à), but a ‘response to’, a ‘correspondence with’, a dynamic reciprocity and matching such as occur when gears, both in quick motion, mesh. Thus, our question as to the nature of philosophy calls not for an answer in the sense of a textbook definition or formulation, be it Platonic, Cartesian, or Lockeian, but for an Ent-sprechung, a response, a vital echo, a ‘re-sponsion’ in the liturgical sense of participatory engagement. We are trying ‘to listen to the voice of Being’. It is, or ought to be, a relation of extreme responsibility, custodianship, answerability to and for.” As George Steiner put it, "For Heidegger, the human person is only a privileged listener and respondent to existence."
In a recent paper, John Ehrenfeld highlighted the importance of a set of practices, of design, and of cultural norms, and that “pragmatic inquiry is driven by the right-hemisphere's ability to capture context and imagine ways to interact". He had a very specific definition for that word in mind. But I’m going to use it in the sense of Aristotle’s final cause, or telos, and I think this is a critical point. Our nihilistic culture, and I don’t think that is too strong of a description, has little to no idea where norms, beliefs, or values come from, or that they are anything more than a fiction that we can reductively explain away. So we have to address this. (One possible problem with pragmatism, I think, is that when taken alone it is vulnerable to the same criticisms that any blind theory rooted in 'selectionism' is vulnerable to. One must note that it is entirely possible to try and fail countless times, without number. So what is needed for success is an account of relationality, one which might also provide an explanation for how 'insight' into relationality is possible.)
An interesting feature of McGilchrist’s thought, which he borrowed from the physicist David Mermin, is that ‘relations precede relata’. This might not seem significant, but it ties into his idea that the telos of the cosmos is toward greater responsiveness, not longevity: "Something is happening in evolution at the cost of survival, because we are fragile, short-lived, vulnerable creatures compared with many far longer lived ancestors. There are examples of Actinobacteria in the depths of the ocean that are themselves around a million years old. There are redwood trees thousands of years old. And by comparison humans have far shorter lives. We're obviously not doing terribly well on surviving. Instead, what life seems to do is enormously increase responsiveness, and that responsiveness is to value. A single cell can value some things, and we can value more. So something is happening in evolution. I think that there's something that's driving this, and I think it is responsiveness. Response has in it this idea of ‘responsibility’, a sort of moral engagement with the world.” As an aside, his observation is noteworthy that organisms become more responsive in the course of evolution from unicellular and multicellular organisms. Michael Levin noted that the cells of multicellular organisms surround themselves with cells that are similar to themselves, or imitations as it were, and John Muckelbauer called imitation “responsiveness itself”.
So now I think we might say that what really drives pragmatism is a telos toward increasing responsiveness, or “respons-ibility”. That which evokes a response in us, and gives our lives meaning, we often call values or virtues. Accordingly, pragmatism could be described as a result of the desire to be more responsive to (and caring for) reality and each other, with imagination (and wonder) being the capacities that allow us to fulfill that desire. None of this is done out of purely utilitarian considerations, though it may appear as such from the perspective of the left hemisphere, but rather this is done because it is the simply that to which we are inexplicably drawn. And it is a prerequisite for flourishing. We might say that, seen from the left hemisphere, 'wholeness' is the description of the telos of the cosmos. But this description of wholeness can easily turn into a sort of flat ontology, a homogenous and static version of telos that is intrinsically objectionable. However from the right hemisphere Gestalt, wholeness is actually 'responsiveness', which is a telic description that suggests a far more dynamic sort engagement of coincidentia oppositorum. And after all, returning to Mermin and "The Matter with Things", we need a right hemisphere description of telos that elevates the "relations", not a left hemisphere description of telos that focuses on the "relata".
To bring us back to his specific pragmatic concern in writing his paper, what’s the lesson here for managers? Victoria Alexander once noted that creative and intelligent behavior (i.e. responsiveness) emerges in complex systems when individuals and organizations have both freedom and constraint (there’s a coincidence of opposites). “Government/culture should provide the enabling constraints (language, tradition, borders, laws, courts, currency, public buildings, hospitals, schools, mass transportation, energy and communication networks) but the people making use of those constraints should have the semiotic freedom (i.e., the ability to interpret rules and even misinterpret rules) to make their own decisions, set their own goals, and enjoy/suffer the consequences.” One should hope this freedom is bound by wisdom. At any rate, she's describing a kind of dance, a dialogue, and managers should be capable choreographers, as it were, to allow these dances to play out.
To review, a LH "insurrection" appeared when power and control become the predominant value of the system, whether this system is a single organism or a collective. Over time, and with greater technological proficiency, the capacity for Western civilization to exercise power and control has increased, and so has our hubris. It's the familiar warning that power tends to corrupt. The implication, once again, is that if we adopt a kind of methodology - a way of life and form of attention - that includes features that are more consistent with the characteristics of humility (instead of hubris), and responsiveness (instead of control), then we could restore a healthier balance. How do we change the direction that humanity and the planet is taking? If we can implement a methodology that is consistent with the actions required for healthy individuals and societies, then have we effectively addressed the existential problem we face? More pragmatically, any methodology which might allow one to be comparatively more responsive and caring (to each other and the planet) than the existing methodology, would likely be preferable for that very reason.
Per McGilchrist, telos and value are not emergent properties of the right hemisphere. If they emerge at all, then their emergence in some way coincides with the cosmos itself, making them what he calls 'ontological primitives'. He describes other processes, such as consciousness, in a similar way. There's a relationship among all these primitives such that ultimately no hard and fast distinctions may be possible to make. Critically, the right hemisphere is somehow able to 'presence' to these aspects of reality in a way that the left hemisphere cannot. Now, if these sound like esoteric pronouncements, that might be because they present a significant challenge to Western cultural assumptions and scientific premises. For some people it is a bridge too far. Can we pick and choose among the ideas McGilchrist advances? Perhaps we would like to retain the basics of the hemisphere hypothesis, but discard or modify the portions he wrote about value, purpose, and the sense of the sacred. I think we could, but it would come at a high cost. It would rob the 'Master' of much of his authority over the 'Emissary' and potentially reduce them to equal partners. If we accept that the RH is more veridical, then I think we must follow where it leads. And it leads to a very numinous sort of world, with transcendent values that can guide us into a flourishing future. Which isn't to say there are no problems with the ideas of value, purpose, and the sacred. After all, how long have we been habitually misconceiving these in a distorted LH fashion?
Keywords: attend/relate/respond vs. neglect/deny/control
Sources:
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things (2021)
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary (2009)
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