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| Independence is "the limit case of interdependence" |
“[One] of Jay Forrester’s famous systems sayings goes: it doesn’t matter how the tax law of a country is written. There is a shared idea in the minds of the society about what a “fair” distribution of the tax load is. Whatever the rules say, by fair means or foul, by complications, cheating, exemptions or deductions, by constant sniping at the rules, actual tax payments will push right up against the accepted idea of ‘fairness.’ The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions — unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them — constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works.
Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows and everything else about systems. No one has ever said that better than Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to … their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day … see how timber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons … It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas … would cause the most striking changes of external things.”
There’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter — they resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else. So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm… You change paradigms by modeling a system, which takes you outside the system and forces you to see it whole.”
This is where McGilchirst’s hemisphere hypothesis comes in very useful. It provides a phenomenological perspective on the paradigmatic ways in which the left hemisphere (LH) and right hemisphere (RH) attend to the world, along with the systems, frameworks, and other lower level structures that are often used to organize and structure that relationship. It provides a position from which to make informed choices about which path is likely to prove in the long run more veridical and lead to a flourishing society. This is the ultimate and most effective level to intervene in a system according to Meadows, it is “the power to transcend paradigms”.
At this level we are “attending to attention”. We are no longer just attending to the objects of attention. This explains why McGilchrist is reluctant to give a list of “things to do”, because that takes us back down to the more instrumental levels below it, to the objects of attention, when what we want to do is respond to problems in terms of how they arise from the way in which we attend to the objects of our attention. We want to respond in terms of “ways to attend to (things to do)”.
How we attend to the world corresponds to how the world presences to us. Our attention is responsive to the world, and the world is responsive to our attention. With a better understanding of “how to attend” our current blind spots can be revealed so that we can cultivate a way of attending that allows us to inhabit our lives, the world, and the cosmos, and enables us to resonate in that encounter. If we can attend in this way, then in some very real sense we have solved the problem of “things to do” because we will be able to see whatever it is that we need to see, and thereby we will be able to naturally do whatever it is that we need to do.
Integrated Gestalts transcend paradigms
I think it's good to take a step back and see how Meadows' ideas are supported by the way in which attention is instantiated. Following the evidence of neurobiology and phenomenology concerning brain lateralization, a single Gestalt is not sufficient to establish agent-environment alignment; it is always going to be limited in certain ways. To compensate for those limitations, an opposing process, a second Gestalt, is necessary. And these two systems must be integrated into a larger dynamic system which is capable of transcending either Gestalt (or either paradigm, to bring this back to Meadows' point above).
As McGilchrist has repeatedly said, the asymmetry between the Gestalt of the LH and that of the RH is due to their different ways of attending to the same underlying reality. This is for very practical reasons. As he wrote in The Master and His Emissary, "In general terms, the left hemisphere yields narrow, focused attention, mainly for the purpose of getting and feeding. The right hemisphere yields a broad, vigilant attention, the purpose of which appears to be awareness of signals from the surroundings, especially of other creatures, who are potential predators or potential mates, foes, or friends." Put another way, every animal must solve the basic problem of how to eat without being eaten (how to 'get' without being 'got').
A shift between the Gestalts produces a 'figure-ground shift'. What is affirmed (cataphasis) by the RH is often denied (apophasis) by the LH, and vice versa. For example, the LH affirms the parts, but the RH affirms the wholes. Though ‘parts’ and ‘wholes’ appear to be opposite things, they refer to the same reality; they are different ways of attending to the exact same things. Reality doesn't change, but our way of attending to it does. So an alternative way to understand the unity of opposites, or coincidentia oppositorum, might be as the ability to see one world (unity) with two different ways of attending (opposites).
It's the synergy between these Gestalts - the synergy of the paradoxical union of division with union - that enables us to reach the goal of flourishing. As an aside: The limit case of flourishing is simply bare survival, where "what is essential to the phenomenon has reached its minimum, without being actually extinguished". The LH is a 'faithful servant' when in proper relation to the RH. Even though one way of attending is more veridical, each is necessary. Every animal must focus on the parts in order to eat, the wholes in order to avoid unanticipated sources of risk, and yet ultimately be able to synthesize and transcend both of these attentional modes, paradigms, or Gestalts, to reveal a single unified world of experience that guides their long term development.
Conscientiousness
Owing to different interpretations, the taxonomy of personality traits within the "Big Five" model may not reflect the same structure of the twenty contrasting features of the brain hemispheres that McGilchrist gave in outline form (TMWT, pp.28-30). But interestingly, each trait can be characterized as existing along a continuum such that, for example, neuroticism can be described as emotional stability or instability, and conscientiousness can be described as the presence or absence of self regulation. These traits inform how we engage with the world and are in turn influenced and shaped by the world thus revealed. McGilchrist makes a passing reference to the Big Five in the last section of the last appendix, subtitled “Religious belief and the health of individuals and societies”. He wrote:
“The religious or spiritual are markedly better at dealing with adversity [and] enjoy much greater well-being... being religious or spiritual has a protective effect against depression, anxiety, substance abuse and suicide. It is correlated strongly with personality traits of conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion and openness to experience, and is inversely correlated with psychoticism and neuroticism. ...In their examination of the role of religion and spirituality in the lives of American teenagers, Smith and Denton write: ‘the differences between more religious and less religious teenagers in the United States are actually significant and consistent across every outcome measure examined: risk behaviours, quality of family and adult relationships, moral reasoning and behaviour, community participation, media consumption, sexual activity, and emotional well-being’.”
One of the key words here is 'correlation', which is likely due to the difficulty of deducing a cause-and-effect relationship between these variables. A causal role is not assigned to religion, personality traits, or some unknown third feature which may explain the observations. Candidates for such a third feature might include the dynamics described by the hemisphere hypothesis, variables associated with the social determinants of health, or perhaps some combination of the above. It is interesting to note that regulatory control does appear to correlate with a form of LH attention that is able to sustain a narrow focus on the 'parts'. Wikipedia helpfully defines conscientiousness as:
"A tendency to display self-discipline, act dutifully, and strive for achievement against measures or outside expectations. It is related to the way in which people control, regulate, and direct their impulses. High conscientiousness is often perceived as being stubborn and focused. Low conscientiousness is associated with flexibility and spontaneity, but can also appear as sloppiness and lack of reliability. High scores on conscientiousness indicate a preference for planned rather than spontaneous behavior."
It's not uncommon for people to fail to regulate well when feeling persistently unmoored and adrift in life. As a result they may eat or sleep too much (or too little) and their health consequently declines. The RH and LH are existentially tethered together. The latter's ability to locate and eat healthy food, to select when and where to sleep, and in general to conscientiously attend to the particulars of a situation supports the ability of the former to access reality. The synergetic processes of the hemispheres are critical to sustaining the entire body. If the LH, whose raison d'etre is handling the finer details of regulation, fails to effectively regulate, how does such a situation arise? Of many possible explanations, one could be a simple imbalance in feedback processes with cascading effects: an overweighed attention to the world of the LH and underweighed attention to the world of the RH that results in increasingly distorted messages being passed back and forth.
McGilchrist once said "If you wanted to destroy the happiness of a people what would you do? Alienate them from nature, alienate them from the idea that there's any kind of spiritual or divine or sacred realm, and divide them one from another and destroy their traditions and history." Having severed access to the world of the RH, an individual may no longer have any context in which regulation makes sense to begin with. Perhaps into this vacuum some ideological product of the LH itself may be inserted and take hold (see "responsiveness" subsection below). To be sure, many dogmatic individuals holding regressive perspectives can exhibit high levels of conscientiousness. But this is conscientiousness in the service of self cannibalization. What to do? Phoebe Tickell recently suggested one way to provide the LH with appropriate "marching orders" from the RH:
“A really important part of my work is the connection to what matters, the ‘moral imagination’. Religion can be wonderful, but it can also be very harmful when you're looking to a kind of ‘top-down morality’. The way I see it is that, rather than following moral laws and rules that can be massively manipulated, what we need instead is to build a kind of muscle of moral imagination and metaphor, and the ability to really connect with what matters and is beautiful, good, and true, and not wait to be told to follow rules, or to try and work out what the right law, rule, or principle is, but to get this kind of ‘coming alive’ through the right hemispheric, intuitive, imaginative capacities. We need to develop that compass of what is right and wrong, and what we are not going to let happen.”
The intersection between attention and conscientiousness is relevant to appropriate action and flourishing. These are skills that respond to the cultivation of habits for healthy minds and healthy behaviors. Or stated negatively, they are skills that respond to the elimination of bad habits (Linji famously advised the "cultivation of non-cultivation"). Returning to Donella Meadows, once we arrive at that uppermost lever with the greatest scope, that of "transcending paradigms", we must return back to the levers with the narrowest scope if we are to have any hope whatsoever of sustaining a nascent paradigm shift. Zen Master Linji put it well, “Seekers of the Way. In Buddhism no effort is necessary. All one has to do is to do nothing, except to move his bowels, urinate, put on his clothing, eat his meals, and lie down if he is tired.” Elsewhere we read “In carrying water and chopping wood: therein lies the wonderful Tao.” Notice the paradox: even an enlightened being must conduct themselves conscientiously at all times and cannot renege on the most mundane responsibilities. Put the other way around, they are conscientious (responsive to the world) simply because that is what one does once they transcend paradigms. That is the Way.
Responsiveness
There is a dialogue between the hemispheres, in which the virtues of one to some degree inform the Gestalt of the other. The right presences => the left re-presents => and the right then integrates. McGilchrist used the ascending spiral depicted in Blake's "Jacob's Dream" to illustrate this dialectic process. The "imaginative inhabiting" of imitation (inspiration/absorption) unfolds in a similar way. There is a Zen parable described by Feng Youlan, the famous saying of Ch'ing-yüan Wei-hsin (Seigen Ishin): 老僧三十年前未參 禪時、見山是山、見水是水、及至後 夾 親見知識、有箇入處、見山不是山、見水不是水、而今得箇體歇處、依然見山 秪 是 山、見水 秪 是水 In "The Way of Zen", Alan Watts translated this: "Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters." Or as Laozi wrote in TTC 52: “There was a beginning of the universe which may be called the mother of the universe. He who has found the mother (Tao) and thereby understands her sons (things), and having understood the sons, still keeps to its mother, will be free from danger throughout his lifetime." We navigate across polarities to achieve a deeper integration, "rising yet another step over the top of the hundred-foot bamboo," then reiterate the process.
At any point the two-way feedback is vulnerable to disruption. The first form of disruption may involve severing ourselves from presencing to reality, the result of this might be a feeling of alienation. A second form is mistaking a re-presentation for presencing. The result of that is delusion, the 'insurrection', 'capture', or as I put it, 'self cannibalization' of contemporary culture by the left hemisphere. In Sanlun xuanyi, Jizang quoted the lines "The Great Sage preached the law of emptiness in order to free men from all personal views. If one still holds the view that emptiness exists, such a person the Buddhas will not transform." As if to emphasize this point, Jizang added dryly "If one is still attached to emptiness, there is no medicine that can eliminate the disease". He provides us with both an ontological insight into reality, as well as the difficulty of addressing the contemporary disease of mistaking a re-presentation for presencing due to our collective blindness to this significant qualitative difference.
The third form of disruption is the failure to integrate presencing and re-presentating to provide a truly skillful and appropriately embodied response. The coincidence of opposing Gestalts in simultaneous immanence and transcendence has been illustrated with paradoxical sounding phrases such as "samsara is nirvana", the "attainment of non-attainment" and, as the Heart Sutra says, “form is emptiness,
emptiness is form." Within Taoism there is the "knowledge of
no-knowledge" (A Short History of
Chinese Philosophy, p113-117). Joshu said: "There are only two diseases: one is riding an ass to search for the ass; the other is riding an ass and being unwilling to dismount. If, having found the ass, one is unwilling to dismount, this disease is most difficult to cure." My interpretation is that this is a paradoxical statement. Having found the ass (corresponding to the integration and transcendence of paradigms) we must dismount the ass (corresponding to responsiveness to implicit value, to immanence). Consistent with the advice from Meadows, it advocates for an enlightened perspective on mundane engagement. More directly stated by Nansen: "After coming to understand the other side, you come back to live on this side." And perhaps for the first time you truly see this side, in a way that you never saw it before.
This pattern of three steps, "here, there, and back again" or "right, left, right" has less to do with black and white dualisms than with processes of developmental integration. We see the same pattern in the monomyth, the "Hero's Journey". As the Tao Te Ching put it: "Reversion is the action of Tao." At several places McGilchrist references Tolkien, who wrote The Hobbit, a famous work of imagination subtitled "There and Back Again”. Bilbo, who was literally embedded within the countryside living in an earth sheltered home leaves his idyllic existence to become a burglar, an emissary by another name. He then finds the ultimate tool of power and manipulation: the ring of Gyges, very symbolic of the value of the LH. (Is AI the modern mythic equivalent of this "ring of power"?) At the conclusion of his journey he returns to his home (the world of the RH), but sets the ring on his mantle where it remains a constant temptation, just as Flint is a constant source of risk in the Iroquois legend that McGilchrist also referenced. The novels to follow this first book, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, then reiterate and further elaborate on this pattern with new protagonists.
Being responsive requires attention, but attention is eroded by pervasive temptations for immediate gratification and the 'supernormal stimuli' that we are surrounded with in our contemporary environments. These both reinforce the LH Gestalt. Donella Meadows pointed out that we have the ability to restructure the material constraints of the environment. Wendy Wood noted we can reduce our proximity to distractions in particular, and thereby take willpower out of the equation as much as possible. We could make responsiveness to value much less effortful, such that the very structure of the world is once again keenly sensitive and capable of resonating with a RH Gestalt. This isn't about efficiency for its own sake. It's about shaping the contours of life to help realize the value that lies within the adjacent possible, it's about enhancing our capacity for conscientiousness and respons-ibility. It's about enabling the hero of the monomyth, who having transcended paradigms is now ready to "dismount the ass" with appropriate humbleness and return home. The monomyth is of course figurative, but there are actual skills that we can cultivate to strengthen conscientiousness and practice a RH form of attention.
Detour: Nietzsche and McGilchrist
Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his criticism of The Imitation of Christ, noted that it “disregards the world, in all its richness”, or as René Girard wrote: "Jesus [does not] propose an ascetic rule of life in the sense of Thomas à Kempis and his celebrated Imitation of Christ, as admirable as that work may be". How penetrating is this criticism? Does it extend to all works on the subject of humility, including those of McGilchrist? If De Imitatione Christi is not so faithful to the actual person of Christ, does that book perhaps more reflect the “master-slave morality” proposed by Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals? Nietzsche always described his 'superman' in a positive sense and defined "good" as synonymous with everything that is powerful and life-affirming. He suggested that the ressentiment of "slave morality" led to the inversion of values and thereafter what was "good" was re-labelled "evil". In The Matter with Things McGilchrist also talks about the inversion of values. But whereas Nietzsche criticized the deposition of 'power', McGilchrist criticizes the deposition of 'the sacred' from the top of the value hierarchy. Both have quite a bit to say on the topic of nihilism.
According to Nietzsche, ancient Greek and Roman societies were grounded in the "master morality" of the Homeric hero, the strong-willed man. But this may not be completely accurate. McGilchrist writes that “Greek tragedy concerns the effects of hubris, the vain delusion whereby man sees himself as being god-like. The result is inevitably catastrophic. Indeed our term ‘catastrophe’ (from Greek katastrephein, to overturn) refers specifically to the dramatic downfall of the victim of hubris in Greek tragedy.” He goes on to caution that we should not “misunderstand humility as abasement… This has nothing whatever to do with a supposed master-slave relationship. Instead it is, like awe and wonder, not an abasement but an ecstasis (from Greek ek, out, + stasis, standing), a standing outside oneself while still being oneself. We are both united with something greater than ourselves, in which we share, and simultaneously aware of the separation, in which one feels one’s smallness: the union of division and union.”
Though his characterization of Greek morality was perhaps incomplete, presumably Nietzsche's 'superman' is no less capable of experiencing this form of humility. But then, McGilchrist draws the implications: “Pride and arrogance, believing we know it all, are the opposite of the religious disposition of humility, reverence and compassion. And without them, neither we, nor the whole far greater, astonishing, living world, over which for better or worse we now have the power we so much craved, can thrive.” Identifying the root of compassion in the sense of humility alludes to that awareness of unity with some greater whole, a union we all share, and that binds us together. With this comes no small measure of awe in beholding that greater whole, and perhaps gratitude to those without whom we would not experience it as we do. There may even be moments of pride no less, in recognizing our small role as "partners in creation", properly contextualized within that larger whole. These capacities: attention, humility, imagination, and responsiveness are not far from each other. To imagine, to respond, one must first be able to attend. And humility is a precondition for attention and imagination, as we must first get out of the way and make space to "receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it,” as Simone Weil put it. To return to where we began, what now of Kempis? One might say that where he writes on the virtues of humility he can be eloquent, but where he veers into ascetic denial of the fecund universe he is right to be criticized by the likes of Nietzsche, Balthasar, Girard, and presumably McGilchrist as well.
Gare highlighted that McGilchrist clearly agrees with Nietzsche concerning the diagnosis and destabilizing effects of nihilism, but they differ on the likely solution space given that diagnosis, owing to how exactly each characterizes the etiology of nihilism. Recall that Heraclitus is not only McGilchrist's favorite philosopher, but was also a personal favorite for Nietzsche. Eva Cybulska noted that Nietzsche understood the essential role of opposites. Humility and attention plays a relatively more prominent role in that solution space for McGilchrist, given that the dominant value of the LH is that of power, and this has resulted in blindness and destruction. And no one would ever call Nietzsche a humble person, when seen through what he wrote: “I am dynamite!" So given this apparent disagreement, it’s fair to ask: Is preaching humility really up to the task of addressing the encroachment of nihilism? We can answer that humility performed for its own sake is not nearly enough. But McGilchrist’s prescription is not a naive humility. It’s a humility that is informed by Huìnéng’s metacognitive awareness that "Truth is like the moon in the sky and language is like the finger that points to the moon. A finger can point out where the moon is, but the finger is not the truth." Here the finger is the left hemisphere, and only the right hemisphere can presence to the moon. No number of fingers will ever equal a single moon. As an orientation we can adopt, humility may only ever apply to the emissary. In any event, it’s not clear that it could bear any relevance to the embodied intuitive wisdom of the master, given its ability to directly presence to the world. But all considered, in this regard I think it’s likely Nietzsche would’ve broadly agreed with McGilchrist, despite their differences in presentation and emphasis. As for the death of god, that’s more complicated.
Gare describes McGilchrist as “clearly aligned with a particular tradition of philosophy (which includes Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Dewey, Whitehead and Bergson and can be traced back through Nietzsche, Schelling and Bruno to Heraclitus and Anaximander)”. So rather than contrasting their differing approaches, it may ultimately be most illuminating to see them along the same sort of developmental trajectory of thought. McGilchrist is a fellow ‘physician of culture’. He's in agreement with the rest that rationality “could not secure its own foundations”, as Gare pointed out. And he observed that this can lead to a nihilism from which we haven’t yet emerged. Both he and Nietzsche are vocal defenders of the arts. But whereas Nietzsche invoked the “will to power” as the condition for knowledge, McGilchrist took a decidedly different route.
In the conversation between Ameer Shaheed and McGilchrist, they looked at a lot of contextual considerations that determine if control, rules, and organizational hierarchies are needed, and if so, when and in what manner these are best instituted. Generally, the broader the context by which we evaluate control, the better. They found that additional layers of control, even when exercised with the best of intentions, as when attempting to address public health issues, can still very often result in poor outcomes. Which isn't to say that the absence of all control would necessarily be better. The challenge is fitting the right amount of control to the right context. And as Schmachtenberger noted, that requires the kind of wisdom that is capable of seeing the difference between model and reality.
Control only makes sense in the context of the hemisphere hypothesis, because McGilchrist describes that paradoxical relationship between 'presencing and re-presenting', where, according to his namesake manoeuvre, "the right hemisphere’s initial perception of context is enriched and enhanced by the left hemisphere". The emissary relies on the master to presence with 'active passivity' to the flood of experience, and the master relies on the emissary to then parse this flood of experience into more manageable bits. Per Schmachtenberger, the master (wisdom) must always moderate the emissary's blind quest for the acquisition and utilization of those bits. In contemporary culture, these insights generally do not prevail, and with predictably destructive results. But if they did, then it's possible that the quality of our engagement with the world would increase in terms of responsive action. But also in terms of predictive depth. Not only would we be able to enter into either Gestalt, and see which of two paths is more veridical, but we would also have a good understanding of where each would take us if adopted, and thereby avoid that cliff edge we are currently blindly ambling (rushing?) toward. Insofar as attention enables consciousness and cognition (what some call 'active inference'), we can also ask in what specific way our predictive and inferential capacities depend on this 'presencing and re-presenting' paradox of phenomenology.
The evident truth of the paradox is expressed in the Sandokai. This is the distinction between non-doing (wuwei) and doing (youwei), or similarly, nonduality (wuji) and duality (taiji), referred to as the ways of "superior virtue" (shangde) and "inferior virtue" (xiade) that are described in chapter 38 of the Tao Te Ching, "Superior virtue has no doing: there is nothing whereby it does. Inferior virtue does: there is something whereby it does." It may be said that Chan (Zen) Buddhists, influenced by Daoism, recognize the same asymmetry as McGilchrist, as evidenced by the superior/inferior distinction, and that by chanting the Sandokai they attempt to internalize this realization and maintain a flow state.Humility and a Sense of Awe
"The practical problems won't be solved by simply practical solutions. They also need to be coupled to a renewal of the spiritual dimension to our lives." - Iain McGilchrist
The primal form of opposition is between the tendencies for division (strife) and union (love). "Somewhere I think Joseph Campbell says "Stay with the contradiction, hold both elements of the contradiction, because there is always a third element that will arise from them." Love necessitates making oneself vulnerable. Both receiving it and giving it are bound up with vulnerability. If you try to make yourself invulnerable you cannot either give or receive love. And so when people try not to be wounded, they see they succeed in not living." McGilchrist is here noting that the presence of love in some sense implies the presence of strife. McGilchrist more recently said "If we adopt a different, less arrogant, less hubristic attitude to the world, if we incorporate some sense of the limitations as to what we know and can do, if we have some humility, then we might rekindle in ourselves a sense of awe and wonder before what is still there in this beautiful world, and with it bring some compassion to our relations with other people." While love requires allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, strife is unavoidable regardless of whether we want it or not. We know from both personal experience and physics (Rovelli) that we are limited by nature - incomplete, impermanent, and imperfect (wabi-sabi). We are fallible (CS Peirce). There is a loose connection to shoshin, "beginner's mind" and senshin "enlightened mind". We need both. But without a deep appreciation of our fallibility and acceptance of our imperfection (immanence), we could not presence to moments of awe (transcendence), we could not truly experience love, and therefore we could not respond.
Is the dualism of ‘hubris and humility’ equivalent to that of the left and right hemispheres? What does McGilchrist say about all this? He writes that Goethe was obsessed with the legend of Faustus, a warning against hubris. Goethe also wrote The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and according to Scott Preston, “It’s a safe bet that Nietzsche got the idea for his parable of the Master and Emissary from Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Nietzsche having apparently considered Goethe an exemplar of his anticipated ‘overman’). So Nietzsche would appear to be the link between Goethe’s ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ and McGilchrist’s ‘Emissary’.” If McGilchrist’s book was inspired by Nietzsche, who in turn was inspired by Goethe, who in turn was inspired by a parable about hubris, then understanding the opposing tendencies of hubris and humility may be central to understanding much of what McGilchrist is writing about. Earlier I suggested that the ‘Hero’s Journey’ describes another central theme, that of integration. The legend of Faustus combines the two: it is a hero’s journey from a state of humility, to hubris, to their integration (the Master and his emissary working in concert). Goethe’s Faust explores the metastable coincidence of the opposites of hubris and humility, a paradox whose resolution is revealed only through an understanding of their relation to one another and the surrounding context. It undergirds the paradox of love/strife, it is the neurological instantiation, the phenomenological fundament that enables both presence and response. And we need to be humble about the very application of humility itself, in the sense that we must know when to stop being humble and just act. In contrast, if we are hubristic about the exercise of hubris itself, it only serves to reinforce the same dynamic. In this way, humility and hubris can have asymmetric influences on behavior: one tends toward homeostasis and the other towards disequilibrium. As McGilchrist recently said during a conversation with Isabela Granic:
“The key things that would avert a crisis, in terms of our disposition towards one another and towards the world, would be the cultivation of three things that are very obviously absent from it right now. One is a degree of humility about how much we can know and how little we do know. Another is simply rekindling a sense of awe. In a way that goes with humility, in that if you are humble enough you see the enormous complexity and beauty of something that you couldn't possibly begin to understand. That is a gift. And the other is compassion. Effectively that is the core, and that's what we need to find again. These are missing from our discourse these days.”
There cannot be love without strife. And together these create life. But the poles are not symmetrical. "Good can embrace and neutralize evil, but evil cannot embrace and neutralize good. Hate can never embrace love, but love can embrace hate." Good and evil are opposite but that doesn't make them equal. The spiritual community, both East and West, when properly constituted may help to serve as a bulwark against excessive fragmentation and strife, a counterbalance on the side of continuity and love, and an advocate for responding to value. Meditative activities allow us to access a relational "field" of care, a primordial source of love, which is the foundation of value. Lin Yutang translated TTC 52 using an economy of words: "From the Mother [love], we may know her sons [strife]. After knowing the sons [strife], keep to the Mother [love]." One who has recognized their humility and "dismounted the ass" understands this is the way to go. This is the "mind of awakening" (bodhicitta), a perennial philosophy that influenced both Gautama and Jesus. The latter said "Just as the Father has loved me, I have also loved you; abide in my love." (John 15:9) This love and compassion doesn't rely on empathy alone, but is given unconditionally and with a broader appreciation of the role of contingency and blind luck. Held in this field of care, thoughts and feelings are permitted to unwind and release. Feelings of gratitude, and satisfaction with oneself in the world, may increase and thereby reduce our perceived need or desire to acquire new things, be greedy, selfish, or feel unsatisfied and restless. As noted, this can be an effective guard against the fragmentation that consciously explicit ratiocentrism produces when left unchecked. This deeper understanding and felt presence of the union of both love and strife might also enable us to become more attentive and responsive to the world as "partners in creation," per Whitehead.
Taoist literature repeats the significance of a field of care and especially a humble disposition toward it (note also that the right hemisphere has been called the 'silent hemisphere'). There is the story of the farmer and his horse, and many parables from Zhuangzi and Laozi that provide exemplars worthy of imitation or moral lessons, here are a few:
“There was a beginning of the universe which may be called the mother of the universe. He who has found the mother (Tao) and thereby understands her sons (things), and having understood the sons, still keeps to its mother, will be free from danger throughout his lifetime. ...He who knows does not speak [RH]. He who speaks does not know [LH]. Close the mouth. Shut the doors. Blunt the sharpness. Untie the tangles. Soften the light. Become one with the dusty world. This is called the profound identification.” [Laozi]
“After this, Lieh Tzu concluded that he had never really begun to learn anything. He went home and for three years did not go out. He replaced his wife at the stove, fed the pigs as though he were feeding people, and showed no preferences in the things he did. He got rid of the carving and polishing and returned to plainness, letting his body stand alone like a clod. In the midst of entanglement he remained sealed, and in this oneness he ended his life.” [Zhuangzi]
”The emperor of the South Sea was called Shu [Brief], the emperor of the North Sea was called Hu [Sudden], and the emperor of the central region was called Hun-tun [Chaos]. Shu and Hu from time to time came together for a meeting in the territory of Hun-tun, and Hun-tun treated them very generously. Shu and Hu discussed how they could repay his kindness. "All men," they said, "have seven openings so they can see, hear, eat, and breathe. But Hun-tun alone doesn't have any. Let's trying boring him some!" Every day they bored another hole, and on the seventh day Hun-tun died.” [Zhuangzi]
“Tao produced the One. The One produced the two. The two produced the three. And the three produced the ten thousand things.” [Laozi] “The one and what I said about it make two, and two and the original one make three. If we go on this way, then even the cleverest mathematician can't tell where we'll end, much less an ordinary man. If by moving from nonbeing to being we get to three, how far will we get if we move from being to being? Better not to move, but to let things be! ...Your life has a limit but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger.” [Zhuangzi]
How we attend influences what we fail to attend to - what we neglect. Today we find ourselves in a cultural moment, the Anthropocene, that is defined by neglect. Not just neglect in the ordinary sense of the word, as in “I neglected to buy food on my way home today, and therefore will go to bed without my supper”. Instead, this is a more thoroughgoing form of neglect, sometimes called inattentional blindness, in which it never even occurs to us that we should buy food in the first place. In other words, we don’t know what it is that we are neglecting. The combination of neglect, denial, and indifference that characterizes our relationship with much of the world today represents a significant challenge to overcome. Though we can perceive the world with our senses, our ability to actually imagine and attend to it has been diminished. Locating the source of the problem at this level helps to explain why we face many of the crises we do today.
So is a methodology, one that is able to overcome our inattentional blindness, what we need? Pragmatic inquiry is one very good candidate for this. In his book Four Ages of Understanding John Deely wrote "Peirce had another name for pragmaticism. He also called this way of thinking fallibilism... the possibility of being mistaken." And in his glossary at the end of Peirce: A Life, Joseph Brent includes this definition: "Fallibilism. The doctrine, a consequence of pragmatism, that no matter how completely we may believe that some claim we make about reality is true, it remains radically subject to error. Even though certainty is impossible, because of the continuity of mind and matter, we can be secure in our everyday knowledge of the world and are justified in believing that we can correct errors." Understood in this way, pragmatism should be able to help counteract the hubris of the left hemisphere and its preference for the “map” over the “terrain”.
Once we address our delusional thinking, the contrast between the map and the terrain can be shocking. What is foregrounded within one hemisphere is often backgrounded in the other, and vice versa. McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis allows us to see, first of all, that there is a productive tension between the opposing views on any question, and secondly, that one of these is a consistently more reliable guide than the other. The practical effect of understanding the hemisphere hypothesis, for people who live within a culture captured by the left hemisphere, is that they will find that certain aspects of reality that were previously doubted or dismissed may become much more salient. It might feel as if the “scales have fallen from their eyes” and they are able to finally hear what the RH has been trying to tell them with its “still small voice”. For example, an inanimate cosmos might suddenly appear fully animate. This can have profound implications. Whereas formerly the left hemisphere would have restricted Maturana and Varela's 'autopoiesis theory' (or Maynard Smith and Szathmáry's 'evolutionary transitions theory') to biological organisms, the right hemisphere might try to extend it to the entire animate cosmos. So what had been a limited conception of telos potentially expands to encompass the deep structure of reality preceding the origin of terrestrial life.
It might sound nice to be able to shift our attention toward the right hemisphere, and presence to an animate cosmos imbued with intrinsic value, but really, how does this help us to address the crises of the Anthropocene? Only acts have an effect on the real world, and so it is action we are after. But action proceeds from many sources. The implementation of an extrinsic methodology is one of these. But the ability to presence to salient aspects of reality, and both intellectually understand and intuitively resonate with the implications for action of that presencing, can be equally if not more motivating due to its intrinsic nature. This is also necessary to provide the motivation to implement the methodology in the first place. Like the hemispheres themselves, both are needed for a 'virtuous circle'. We might also recall what Daniel Schmachtenberger said concerning the asymmetry of these processes: “Wisdom is the capacity to identify the difference between the set of metrics you've identified as important and reality itself. It’s the difference between what the optimization function on the set of all the weighted metrics says you should do, and what you should actually do. In other words, wisdom is the capacity to recognize the limits of our models, our methodologies, and the logic process operating on those. It requires being able to attune to reality itself.”
What this means is that ultimately no methodology will be sufficient. Even a methodology founded on fallibilism is itself fallible. It always comes back to our RH "master wisdom function" (Schmachtenberger's term). Or otherwise stated, the LH and its methods of analysis are limited in a way that the RH and its ability to presence to reality is not. What we seek to operationalize through methodologies, and other means by which we try to get a better control of things, can never be made explicit and disembodied without distorting its connection to reality. It must be implicit and embodied. So the best we can do is acknowledge this, and explain why these efforts at explicitness, which are unavoidably necessary given our complex social systems, will always be imperfect at best. Perhaps most important of all, we must encourage that form of attention, that ability within us to "presence to" and "enter into what is there", which allows us to “connect with the world”, because it is more veridical than any explicit method we might conceive for that purpose.
Imitation
But how exactly do we "enter into what is there" and become more responsive? Become, as John Muckelbauer put it, "responsiveness itself"? Through imitation, by "imaginatively inhabiting", for example one might say, the enlightened mind or the beginner's mind (and the two are the same in the sense that "nirvana is samsara"). By permeating from the inside. As McGilchrist wrote, "One enters into the life. Equally that life enters into the imitator." One does not "think" or rationalize oneself into imitation, it must be an active, lived process. Imitation is not any of the explicit re-presentations that we confuse it with, as when we call something "just an imitation of the original". Imitation is instead perhaps better thought of as the identification with an original, a sort of unification. This implicit aspect of the process of imitation is not widely appreciated. And perhaps that may explain why, as a method, it is not recommended as often as it otherwise might be. We've largely forgotten how to imitate as presencing, not re-presenting. But after attending, after experiencing humility, awe, wonder, and love (all of which one cannot rationalize oneself into either), it is imitation, a relational skill, that may be the most proximal process enabling responsiveness and transformation. There is no substitute. In John 13, Jesus is recorded to have said "I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you... As I have loved you, so you must love one another". And in I Cor. 11:1, Paul writes "lmitatores estote, sicut et ego Christi." (Be you imitators of me, just as I am of Christ.)
This is a recognition that Pauline Delahaye repeated in her paper "Ritual Mimicry" (2019): "Behavioural mimicry should be studied as a preferred way of acquiring complex concepts, advanced technical skills, and healthy emotional management, all necessary to a long life in intelligent social species." A preferred way, one might equally add, of affecting something of a paradigm shift. Schelling, in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), wrote "If philosophy’s first construction is the imitation of an original, all its constructions will likewise be merely such imitations... Philosophy generally is thus nothing other than the free imitation, the free repetition of the original series of acts, into which the one act of self-consciousness unfolds... the one absolute act we start from contains - united and condensed - an infinity of actions whose total enumeration forms the content of an infinite task." While not strictly necessary, imitation can sometimes be aided by a capacity for visualization, as when used to help induce a relaxed state before sleep.
McGilchrist has said that both hemispheres are involved in everything, so the difference is not "what" they do, but "how" they do it, and this is important because how they do it determines what they see. Stephen Asma, in his article "Imaginology", wrote that the imagination plays an important role in adaptation, and necessarily recruits from many brain-processing areas. But he also describes an interesting contrast between an indicative/denotative 'information processor' and an imperative/enactive imagination. This appears to correspond to the sort of lateralization described by the hemisphere hypothesis. The LH denatures all vitality, while the RH is able to imaginatively inhabit or 'enter into' the mind of another. If there is a spectrum with lifeless copying on one end and imaginative inhabiting on the other, then perhaps closer to the former lies "script and schemas" and to the latter is Confucian role ethics, as described by Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont Jr. Role ethics prioritize the relational nature of telos and process, where we are all members of a "team" working together to achieve common goals. This is in stark contrast to the hyper-individualism of the West, where autonomy and independence are prized highly. Empathic identification, while a useful skill in both contexts, is perhaps all the more so within role ethics.
In their book The Dawn of Everything, the Davids (Graeber and Wengrow) write that humans are “fundamentally imaginative creatures”. They write “for most of European history intellectuals seem to have been the only class of people who weren’t capable of imagining that other worlds might be brought into being". And they conclude at various points that “something has gone terribly wrong with the world" and "a conceptual shift is required [to open] new doors of the imagination”. This book is really all about imagination, making it an excellent adjunct for anyone who is also reading The Matter with Things. The subtitles to these books suggest that an argument could be made that
The Dawn of Everything may be seen as a sort of prequel to
McGilchrist's works, part of a chronological trilogy (though, yes,
substantially different in many ways). Will we see a fourth book, "The Dawn of a New Day"? As Asma wrote, "Imagination does not just redescribe a world, but regularly makes a new world. This world-making ability of imagination – its ability to generate Umwelten (perceptual worlds) – is why it should stand as the interdisciplinary foundation underlying both art and science."
The Master and His Emissary is divided into two parts. The second part begins with chapter seven, titled “Imitation and the Evolution of Culture”. Here he referred to imitation as “the meta-skill that enables all other skills”, including Donella Meadows' transcendence of paradigms. It’s an excellent overview that includes a helpful distinction between ‘imitation’ and rote ‘copying’. He doesn’t return to the topic of imitation again in The Matter with Things, as it is largely subsumed within the discussion on imagination, but the conclusion of “The untimely demise of intuition” does read: "In a culture in which computation was not grossly over-prized, an experienced individual would function in almost every aspect of life according to embodied skills, unconscious reasoning, and intuition, with, of course, incursions of analytic thinking, but only when an obstacle was encountered. And the passing on of these skills, through shared experience, attention and imitation, would be the whole purpose of a culture and its traditions."
Terms synonymous with imitation include “imaginatively inhabiting”, “empathic identification”, and “imitative learning”, among other more general terms (synchronize, align, entrain). Daniel Hutto hyphenates an “imaginative-imitative” ability, and Kim Shaw-Williams’ Social Trackways Theory describes “imaginative self-projection”. Imagination is clearly a prerequisite for imitation, and these other terms have the advantage of reducing cognitive dissonance for readers who have strong prior associations with the term. (The last thing one wants when discussing a challenging topic is to be a pedant on terminology.) McGilchrist makes very frequent use of such synonyms, particularly "inhabiting" or "entering into" other people's imaginative worlds. So how does one do that? Through the right hemisphere's "global mode of apprehension" that sees the big picture, integrates context, and considers nuance. If imitation is about the how - the process, manner, and circumstances - then this is dependent upon our ability to appropriately attend to these things. In this way we are encouraged to focus less on the "what" of life, and more on the "how" of life, that is to say "the manner or way in which, or the circumstances, context, or situational considerations" surrounding a process. Responding to our cultural moment requires the imaginative capacity, “the creative power that enables us to enter into what is there”. Imitation can be described as the recognition of similarity in dissimilars, so it is yet another coincidentia oppositorum.
It is important to note the role of psychogenic effects. In his book, Suggestible You, Erik Vance talked to scientists around the world who investigate placebos, internal pharmacies, hypnosis, and the power of belief on the body and mind. One of his favorite quotes came from Alia Crum, a psychologist at Stanford. “I don’t think the power of mind is limitless,” she said. “But I do think we don’t yet know where those limits are.” And action is the key to psychologist Timothy Pychyl's most offered strategy for addressing procrastination, the mantra "just get started", which echoes Wang Yangming's "unity of knowledge and action". So to address self-regulation failure, one could imaginatively inhabit the role of a key player (and we are all key "partners in creation"), who uses their sense of telos, a sort of foreknowledge of the future, to midwife it into existence, who understands how the parts incrementally compose the whole, and who is able to relax and enter the flow of life. "How can the mind understand the Way? Because it is empty, unified, and still." This advice from Xunzi helps reduce stress, a prerequisite for allowing the psychogenic component to be set into motion. Then to sustain and reinforce this one must engage with the world and act in a way that corresponds with the values one holds. It may be helpful to describe what imitation is not. It is not Ronda Byrne's "law of attraction". Byrne discourages doubt, resulting in a form of delusional positivity, which is very characteristic of the left hemisphere. Imitation has more to do with value than emotional valence; pursing the good, true, or beautiful may not always be a pleasant experience.
The transformation that is tentatively begun with the imagination can proceed to bear fruit once enacted. As McGilchrist wrote, "This was understood by Pascal, who realized that the path to virtue was imitation of the virtuous, engagement in virtuous habits – the foundation of all monastic traditions." We seek to imitate the person we would like to become, who we aspire to be, who we are drawn toward. We all need a strong sense of who we are, and who we are becoming. The epigraph to TMWT is a quote by Plotinus, "But we – who are we?" And as was written in TMAHE, "The process of mimesis is one of intention, aspiration, attraction and empathy." The person we are becoming may not actually exist now, but they exist in a future yet to be realized as the person we have yet to develop into. We are a continuously unfolding process. What do we imitate and how do we imitate? Usually we think of imitating a role model, and this can be a useful visualization to begin with. Later, perhaps the embodiment or image of value or virtue, responsiveness itself and the process of 'entering into the life' becomes how this is conceived. Importantly, imitation is not a 'control process', but a 'response process' in which we are 'taken up' (aufgehoben) into some greater dynamic. McGilchrist describes this "reverberative process, in which something comes into being – as all life does – through the union of separated forces, retaining their separation but within that union, one entity acting with another." To quote Paul again, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (1 Corinthians 13:12) Now and then, knowing and known, may be thought of as co-occurring (pratītyasamutpāda).
Near the conclusion of Arran Gare’s review of The Master and His Emissary, he wrote: “People with healthy brains need to appreciate not only the threat of people with malfunctioning brains, but their own potential. As McGilchrist suggests, the most important ability of humans is their capacity for imitation. Through imitation ‘we can choose who we become, in a process that can move surprisingly quickly.’ ... We can ‘escape the “cheerless gloom of necessity”’ (p.253). A series of renaissances of civilization in Europe were built on this capacity. People picked themselves up from the ruins of the Dark Ages by looking back to the achievements of people in the Ancient World of Greece and Rome at their best, and imitating them, developed new education systems, new cultural and institutional forms and created a new civilization.”
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