Coincidentia Oppositorum

μεταβάλλον ἀναπαύεται (By changing, it remains the same.) - Heraclitus

"The more things change, the more they stay the same" (plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose), is the more contemporary version of this epigram. It's subject to a variety of interpretations. On the one hand, one may object to Heraclitus, "but if all things change, then nothing is the same." However that relies on a superficial interpretation that understands a sentence solely by means of the definition of words. Alternatively, one may rationalize the statement: if everything changes, then ipso facto it stays the same; the only constant is change. Or, despite apparent changes certain fundamental aspects or patterns remain unchanged. And indeed these are apparent facts of life, as Lewis Carroll wrote, "My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place." But instead of defining, and instead of rationalizing, one might consider the overall gestalt of Heraclitus' philosophy. The antinomic logic here is the key. It is a sieve through which only the knowledge that knows its own limits by means of the contrary, in a relational manner, may pass. As we'll see following a bit of elaboration, Heraclitus' gnomic utterance, which was recorded by Plotinus in his Enneads, describes the quality of the human condition, and through an understanding of this we might break out of the hall of mirrors imposed by the left hemisphere. (Particularly good news for anyone suffering from analysis paralysis and perseveration.)

The unity of opposites, as a concept, was first suggested to the western view by Heraclitus (535 – 475 BC) though the idea was nascent within the thought of Anaximander (610 - 546 BC). Because there are few records before this time, it might've been in circulation even earlier. Much later, Nicholas of Cusa (1401 – 1464) used the Latin phrase coincidentia oppositorum, meaning coincidence of opposites. CS Peirce wrote “A thing without oppositions ipso facto does not exist... existence lies in opposition.” And Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) also used the term, inspired as he was by the writings of Gerhard Dorn (1530 – 1584). But of course it is not merely a western idea. It occurs in the traditions of Tantric Hinduism and Buddhism, in Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Zen and Sufism, among others. So when Hegel (1770 – 1831) and Schelling (1775 – 1854) arrived on the scene near the inception of what would later be called process philosophy, these ideas had already been in the air for a very long time, gestating a future axiological renaissance.

I was long ago introduced to what has been called the “law of non-contradiction” and the various arguments against it by Walter Benesch, professor emeritus of philosophy, but it was Carl Jung’s intense excursions into the thought of Gerhard Dorn, which I read about in the university’s copy of his twenty volume collected works, that really seized my imagination. And so when I learned that Iain McGilchrist, who was well acquainted with many of these same thinkers, was able to naturalize their insights by placing them on a neurobiological foundation, I already had all the necessary context I needed to incorporate this most recent development in a line of thought extending back into prehistory. In a sense, Carl Jung was my gateway drug to McGilchrist. The centrality of this notion is such that it comes up quite frequently, with diverse and sometimes surprising implications, as during a recent conversation with Curt Jaimungal:

“As you know, part three of The Matter with Things, which is the whole of the second volume, is about ontology. And I begin with a chapter on the coincidence of opposites. There's a certain kind of thinking that will insist that “it's got to be one or the other”.  But actually, if you can suspend that, you can get hold of a sense which is deeper. …Think back again to love. Love is both something that recognizes an ‘other’, but comes together fully with that other, so that there is no antagonism. Without that element of something that offers a degree of resistance, nothing can be created, nothing can come into being ... opposites not only coexist, but give rise to and fulfill one another." [From the field of love (the greatest of values) we recognize the coincidence of opposites, instantiated in the fabric of our very being, and from which pours forth poetry, art, ornament, ritual, music, drama, dance… (aka "an entirely superfluous, superabundant, and exuberant outpouring of riches") The One produced the two. The two produced the three. And the three produced the ten thousand things.]

According to the Heraclitean line of thought, conflict is never overcome nor would we want it to be overcome. Instead it is to be sustained as a generative dynamic. This is challenging, as it does invert the popular perspective. The text in the image (from The Matter with Things) metaphorically points out that if we “overcome” the conflict between “the warring ends of the bow” the arrow simply falls flat. Tension is necessary. Jung found this insight valuable in psychology, and McGilchrist in neurobiology, though neither were the first in either case. (Robert Ellis has sought to eliminate conflict by supposing that it has an origination in absolutization, and while this may be true in some cases, it misses the full import of the concept.) We should be able to speak using any language capable of supplying that tension, including metaphysics or any other, so long as it is understood that these are all inadequate tools in the final analysis. And this is possible by either "thinking against thinking" (paradox) or an understanding that words are a transluscent re-presentation (poetry). As we can see, it's not the 'what' but the 'how' that matters.

If we understand Heraclitus and those following in the same tradition, they didn't want to completely integrate or resolve conflict, be that of systemic or conceptual origin, but provide a vantage from which it may be viewed. The terms complementarity, correspondence, or "coincidence" of opposites can be slightly more helpful for understanding this, as it's not a simple "unity" of opposites they describe. Consider the fundamentally opposed pair of division/union. To unify these is to beg the question: Can something really be united and yet divided? On the one hand we can clearly say no, “it's got to be one or the other”. On the other hand we can say yes. The Heraclitean view is that either response entails the other, and this is a feature or pattern that we should be able to anticipate. Equivocation is going to be unavoidable. 

These may be little more than abstractions for some, but consider how our embodiment grounds these ideas, offering an undeniable source of resistance and opposition that is provided through our contact with reality itself. Embodiment has always played a central role in this line of thought, with modern proponents, like McGilchrist above, having noted that "without that element of something that offers a degree of resistance, nothing can be created, nothing can come into being." Embodiment is no minor consideration. There is a sort of negative feedback contained within the structure of a paradox. It's as though it were a thought capable of thinking against itself. Recall "the Heraclitean view that either response entails the other," so if you turn the coincidence of opposites into a metaphysical abstraction (which no doubt many have tried to do) and yet fail to realize that this entails it is no such abstraction at all, then you never really understood it to begin with.

On the one hand, I don't think we should be perfect skeptics and hold all knowledge in doubt. But on the other hand, I don't think we should be absolutists about anything. So what remains? We could hold to a sort of milquetoast attitude of flaccid provisionality that seeks to reduce conceptual tension (Robert Ellis holds some version of this). Or we could adopt the antinomic ontology of the Heraclitean perspective, which holds that any response we give entails its own opposite. Heraclitus provided a vantage point from which we might view the conceptual tension between doubt and certainty, and adjudged this to be good. McGilchrist merely naturalized that insight in his hypothesis, expanded it to a deeper phenomenal tension, and drew out some of the broad implications. There's a sort of enantiodromia (a term favored by Jung) in culture itself, such that we don't know what good may arise out of apparent misfortune, and vice versa. Perhaps some heterodox interpretation of the hemisphere hypothesis will be that which launches it into greater public awareness, we just don't know which one that will be and how it may yet transform. 

The myths of consciousness

Decades of research suggests that consciousness is not monolithic, that it embodies qualitative differences, and that these factors in turn likely constrain its specific instantiation. But not all of these findings have filtered into the conception of consciousness that is broadly held within contemporary society. In part this may be because it represents a challenge to several popular myths. The hemisphere hypothesis in particular, which draws upon this body of research, takes direct target at each of these:

Myth 1: Consciousness is monolithic and entire of itself. This is the idea that our experience of unitary awareness cannot be described as a synthesis of several identifiable neurological processes. The hemisphere hypothesis challenges this myth by suggesting that there are in fact at least two primary holarchic processes, that these are instantiated in the hemispheres, and that their combined interactions influence conscious (and unconscious) mental processes.

Myth 2: Consciousness has no polar attributes. This is the idea that our experience has no relation to qualitative differences in attention, specifically axiological differences with corresponding normative/ ethical implications. The hemisphere hypothesis challenges this myth by suggesting that there are at least two primary forms of attention that are coincident and yet not completely reconcilable to each other, and which reveal polarized differences in the quality of awareness. [2] (Polarity may be negatively defined as asymmetry or inequality.)

Myth 3: Consciousness is substrate independent. This is the idea that the particular embodied substrate (and perhaps structure and form) of mental experience is fundamentally irrelevant. And accordingly we could abstract and reproduce consciousness in silicon, digital, or any other suitable Turing-complete format. The hemisphere hypothesis does not completely refute this "myth," but it does impose strict constraints on any suitable substrate in the sense that, as far as we know, it would need to recapitulate those embodied processes that permit neurological opponent processing.

As popular myths, these are the main principled objections I've encountered preventing a wider application of the hemisphere hypothesis (prejudices relating to presentation and confusion regarding derivative implications may be addressed elsewhere). As long as these continue to have their hold, the hemisphere hypothesis will be outright dismissed. And many of the primary implications that follow from it, such as asymmetry and paradox, will remain substantially incomprehensible, at least when applied to phenomenal experience. Some prior familiarity with any of the currently extant antinomic ontologies (many Eastern traditions, Heraclitean, Jungian, process philosophies, indigenous traditions, etc.) can be of benefit when addressing these contemporary myths; if one is already familiar with paradox in philosophy, then one may be less surprised when they find it turns up in biology as well. The remaining obstacles to a more comprehensive understanding are for the most part comparatively minor technical details, and can be sorted out using the conceptual tools available to us.

I put those three main myths down as I have because I had just finished having an extended conversation with several people who were antagonistic to McGilchrist and his work. Unsatisfied, I wondered why no substantial movement by anyone resulted upon its conclusion. As is often the case, most of the objections they raised, and rejoinders I provided, failed to get down to, as Jonathan Rowson puts it, “what’s at stake here,” or in other words, what cherished ideas are really being threatened. I think these contemporary myths are precisely what McGilchrist is threatening, and what he simply cannot be allowed to overturn.

What I am seeking to do is identify and remove whatever is occluding our vision or preventing us from recognizing and presencing to the reality of our situation. I think these myths could be seen to lie near the heart of it. And I’m using the term "myth" in the pejorative sense that it has today, because this is the most common way in which it is used by most people. I'm aware that there is a more accurate sense of the word that McGilchrist usually intends when uses it. Such myths (or I should say, cognitive biases) often lie below our everyday awareness, keeping us blind until confronted and dealt with.

There’s been growing recognition from various quarters about several trends converging in the same direction that McGilchrist is pointing. There's a revival of panpsychism in philosophy, a revival in a biological basis for teleology, via the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, and a revival of appreciation for the sacred and corresponding decline in “new atheism” (which some have speculated may have been fueled by the cultural response to 9/11). And now with McGilchrist, there’s a growing awareness of the unity of the sciences and humanities, and more besides. None of this is coming a moment too soon!

Mind and Matter

Panpsychism has become a familiar view, both within philosophy and popular culture. And it's less associated with McGilchrist than it is with its more vocal proponents, like Philip Goff or (to a much lesser extent) Michael Levin. In my experience, panpsychism is not often raised as a cause for objecting to the hemisphere hypothesis (as compared to the myths described above). I've not heard, for example, "I agree with everything McGilchrist says about the hemispheres, the two modes of attention and all that, but panpsychism is simply a bridge too far." A simple inversion between matter and consciousness, as to which is more ontologically primitive, is a conceptually easy enough flip for most people to do. After all, the core notions of idealism were proposed long before Berkeley's 1710 A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. And variations have been a plot device in many popular films. In his book Descartes' Baby, psychologist Paul Bloom describes children as natural dualists. The subsequent reduction of mind to matter (or vice versa) is the sort of simple operation that the left hemisphere excels in.

But on the other hand, panpsychism could be so outrageous of an idea that, like McGilchirst's notions of the sacred and other metaphysical concepts, it needn't even be raised at first. At least, that is, without either first addressing the less esoteric seeming ideas that are specific to the hemisphere hypothesis (the rational/ scientific approach), or without first directly contacting such a reality and thereby breathing life into the idea (the intuitive/ imaginative approach). When approached rationally, asking a materialist to jump straight into panpsychism is probably putting the cart before the horse. Such a conclusion may be better thought of as lying at or near the end point of a long line of argumentation, along with the other implications of the hypothesis that only become rationally plausible once assent is first granted to the basic premise: that the brain's form and structure reflects complementary, though divergent, modes of attention.

For those who are antagonistic toward any version of panpsychism, beginning there would likely shut down further engagement with the hemisphere hypothesis that might've otherwise been possible. Can we begin with panpsychism as an initial premise, then from there arrive at the hemisphere hypothesis? I'm not aware of anyone doing so. And the reason may be that this is because we live in a culture whose dominant premise is materialism, not panpsychism. But the rational/ scientific approach could likely follow either direction, to convince the materialist of panpsychism, or the panpsychist of materialism. In other words, without addressing the neurological argument for opponent processing first, the possibility of such alternative arrangements remain for the most part conceptually incoherent.

But ultimately, McGilchrist's hemisphere hypothesis may be best understood as a post hoc explanation (as are all discursive approaches). In other words, the real work of convincing us of the reality of any metaphysical considerations takes place through direct experience. This is the previously mentioned intuitive/ imaginative approach. Accordingly, one might say "These arguments will not do the work of convincing you, or anyone else, for that you must experience the divine yourself. But they will enable you to understand how it is that you were able to presence to the sacred to begin with." That being said, the virtue of the post hoc rational approach is that by opening a door into RH translucency we are able to subvert our own LH opacity. And using both approaches in tandem we come that much nearer to the possibility of addressing the neglect, denial, and indifference that characterizes our relationship with much of the world today.

Scott Barry Kaufman's opposition: DMN & TPN

The topic of the Default Mode Network (DMN) has been raised in some discussions we've had, regarding how it might correlate with the function of the right hemisphere. So it was interesting to hear that the DMN was recently also discussed on the Many Minds podcast during an interview with Ev Fedorenko about a review paper she wrote:

Fedorenko: "This default network is a network that has been implicated in building up these long contextual representations. It can be happening when you’re watching, say, a silent film where there’s no language whatsoever, but you’re still constructing this long narrative structure, but also when you’re listening to a story, which, of course, is linguistic but engages this system which is not specific to language. It’s an interesting system but I think needs more work to understand."

Has this subject been discussed by McGilchrist? Tangentially. Paraphrasing an earlier interview with Scott Barry Kaufman:

Kaufman: “Our work is actually really consistent. We should coauthor an article together.”

McGilchrist: “That would be great.”

Kaufman: “I’m obsessed with the default mode brain network because I think that network offers us the core of human experience of what it means to be really human. And I think you’re obsessed with the right hemisphere for the same reason. So I looked deeper into our Nature paper and I noticed that there were preferential right hemisphere activations in the default mode network. Now, we didn’t originally set out to test that specifically, so don’t quote me on that as a statistically significant effect, because we didn’t have the methodology, but I noticed a trend…

It’s mapping the ‘network approach’ to the ‘hemisphere approach’. You’ve got me thinking about this in a deeper way than I ever have before, how these are probably both saying the same thing. They’re just different levels of analysis. You know, I’ve been arguing against the tyranny of the executive attention network, where you’ve been arguing against the tyranny of the left hemisphere. But conceptually, I feel like we’re both bothered by the same thing.”

McGilchrist: “I think that that’s right. There’s a lot of overlap.”

I would love to see such a paper, if it were to be written. 

Any discussion of the DMN and the anti-correlated Task Positive Network (aka "executive attention network") might cause one to wonder if McGilchirst is like that proverbial "man who was found searching for his keys, not where he had dropped them, but under the lamplight, because that was where he had enough light to search." The location of damaged brain regions, whether on the left or right, has long been noted in lesion-deficit studies, so it would obviously be easier to articulate a hypothesis about the hemispheric lateralization of our modes of attention. Those same studies do not necessarily "shine a light" on whether portions of the DMN or TPN are damaged or not. Consequently this lack of information prevents the likelihood of a possible "Network Hypothesis" from being put forward as a competing theory to the "Hemisphere Hypothesis". After all, the DMN was only described in 2001, with the majority of papers published after 2007, so there wasn't a whole lot of research at the time of the publication of The Master and His Emissary in 2009.

Now, if information about these brain networks should prove to be more explanatory than the hemisphere hypothesis, would this invalidate the sort of arguments that McGilchrist is putting forward in his work? Not necessarily. It's conceivable that it would merely switch the attribution of his observations to a different neurological mapping, that is, from hemispheres to networks.

Kaufman and McGilchrist are engaged in complimentary research. And as he indicated, the most likely possibility is that one level of analysis is at a higher integrative level [1] than the other, one of these can only be fully developed by seeing it in light of the other, located at a higher integrative level. If they were to write a paper comparing the network and hemisphere approaches, I suspect they might find just this sort of hierarchical relationship, such that one is "necessary but not sufficient," one of these underwrites critical aspects of the other, but does not explain the full observations. But which is it? 

Is it more accurate to say that each hemisphere has access to bilaterally distributed networks with anti-correlated roles? Or is it more accurate to say that these networks cut across hemispheric divisions to access lateralized hemispheres with anti-correlated modes of attention? Whichever it is, this is the "what."

Following that, "how" these neurological networks are engaged by either hemisphere in the deployment of asymmetric modes of attention is the purview of the hemisphere hypothesis. Or conversely, "how" these hemispheres are engaged by either network in the deployment of asymmetric roles is the purview of the network approach. So is the lateralization aspect overlain upon the network approach, or vice versa?

In the conclusion of The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist writes that the "divided nature of mental experience... might have some literal truth." If we assent this much, then does it really matter which "chunks" of the brain "mirror the dichotomies that are being pointed to"? In principle, I don't think it should. Both analyses involve opponent process theory (anti-correlated networks or hemispheres) with asymmetric roles. The 'coincidence of complementary opposites' is the primary insight. In order to be 'antifragile' and adaptable the brain operates near a critical threshold at the edge of chaos, between order and disorder (or so it's been speculated), which is the most resilient place to be. Exactly where these coinciding oppositions are instantiated is arguably of secondary importance.

A point in favor of the network approach is that it does more easily satisfy the "bridge law objection" as articulated by Spezio (and referenced by Thompson) because it appears to better identify a reductive "locus" for various features. It also better comports with a postmodern cultural context, in part because it is more conceptually abstract, and because an eliminativist perspective (which is where the network approach tends to lead) means one can avoid addressing the question of how science and the humanities intersect, a preferable outcome since it is feared that any proposed answer to that question might support discriminatory practices and revisit the experience of historical traumas. 

McGilchrist noted that Marcel Kinsbourne identified three main oppositional pairings within the brain. The network approach described by Kaufman here articulates still others in addition to these, or perhaps merely recombines and reinterprets them in different formulations, subdivided at different scales of resolution. And this is to be expected. We should not be surprised to find a multitude of opponent pairings across many scales and within a wide variety of biological systems. 

A point in favor of the hemisphere hypothesis is that, and here McGilchrist cites Joseph Bogen, "hemispheres can sustain the activity of two separate spheres of consciousness." The network approach cannot claim this as easily. In part this is due to the inherent complexity of the networked neurological structures being described and their morphological dissimilarity to each other. I think we are now able to postulate a few general rules: 

• Once structural complexity has reached an apex or point of diminishing returns, mutually entailed opponent processing must take over to do what elaborate complexity cannot achieve alone, for example, in order to be able to address problems such as those raised by the "no free lunch" theorem. McGilchrist shares the Heraclitean view: "We need resistance. We need opposition."
• The highest integrative level or scale of opponent processes will provide the greatest explanatory power, as these are the "highest leverage points" (Donella Meadows) in the system. These large scale dynamics exert downward constraint that entrains and thereby overrides lower scale differences (Stanley Salthe). This also suggests an apparent telos or convergent drive acting behind the system to sustain opponent dynamics. 
• In general, the higher the level of opposition, the more evenly matched 'the agonist and the antagonist' may appear to be. This is needed in order to sustain the tension between them. Lower level analyses however tend to focus on similarities among the parts instead of the higher level opposed gestalten. (Thus to a trained eye, the apparent redundancies in the bisected brain should suggest that a higher level of integrated opponent processing may be occurring, with corresponding phenomenological specialization.)

And indeed, these implications appear to follow from the underlying argument in The Matter with Things, which leads from neurology to "naturalized metaphysics" in a single vision, re-uniting the sciences and the humanities. 

Bernardo Kastrup's opposition: Intuition & Reason

A recent conversation between McGilchrist and Bernardo Kastrup illustrates important places of convergence and divergence. Kastrup's framing of cognition is more orthodox than McGilchrist's, and I suspect Evan Thompson is more sympathetic to Kastrup's description here as well. A few excerpts:


McGilchrist: “I believe that what we experience is the real deal. It doesn't mean that it's the whole truth about whatever it is. It's just that that is a real experience. It is the experience that I had of that particular thing, as it were, five o'clock in the afternoon.”

Kastrup: “Evolution would never optimize for us to perceive the world as it is. It would optimize for us to see the world in whatever way it would be more conducive to fitness. So “fitness oriented perception” stands to be very different from perception that mirrors the states of the world... The qualities of perception represent what it is like to observe the world, and what it is like to observe the world is different from what it is like to be the world. And that's why representations and the world “as it is in itself” may deviate.”

McGilchrist: “For a lot of things you feel your way into them. And people may say, well, you do that through your senses. Okay, but in fact you do it by an act of imagination. And having spent many years practicing as a psychiatrist, I spent a lot of time sitting with people and understanding what it must be like to be them. What is it like to be that person? And indeed, in all our lives, we're doing this all the time, and it's how love originates. You feel your way into, way beyond anything that you can write down as a perception about somebody. And you really do feel as if you're making contact with them. The reality of those experiences have shaped who I am. There is this reciprocal encounter in which I contribute to what there is other than me, and this other than me also contributes to making me who I am... it can be argued that imagination is the only way to understand in depth what it is that one is attending to.”

Kastrup: “Human reasoning is the latest cognitive capacity we've evolved. From very early on life had the capacity to express spontaneous intelligence, intuition, and imagination. Those are the early ones. If you think of a human being as a tree, intuition and imagination are at the root. It's what makes contact between us and reality. And thinking is all the way in the canopy. It’s in the clouds. It's all conceptual. It may be the most advanced, but it's also the youngest and the most removed from the ground of reality. And typically it's people like me, who have the other mental faculties stunted, that put reason above everything else because then they can then self-validate. It’s a kind of self-deceptive game. …The universe is computationally irreducible. The only way to know is to get there. And I think that's the whole point of existence is to set it in motion.”

McGilchrist: “Metacognition is a very late arrival on the scene, as you say, and I'm not sure that it is necessarily a help. And one of the reasons I say that is that the very interesting question which you raised of the savant. A savant may be born with special skills of this kind, or may suddenly have access to these skills, never before having had access, after brain injury. And what interests me is it's almost always an injury to the left hemisphere. Now, the left hemisphere is mainly interested in self-reflective forms. The right hemisphere is more open to the breadth, but the left hemisphere is very much inwardly focused. That Gorgon stare of the left hemisphere... (Kastrup: It casts a field of obfuscation around it. It's like staring at the sun at noon and missing all the stars, because the glare of metacognition is just too strong.) It's definitely a trade off. As long as it doesn't rule the show, we can reel it in at a certain part of the process of coming to understand something, and it will illuminate things. But at the end, we must lose the focus of that again in order to discover the reality of the whole. So we go from a whole that gets broken down and over focused by the left hemisphere to an understanding of the whole again in the right hemisphere.” 

Recall that for McGilchrist the defining opposition in the brain was present long ago. As he wrote, “the earliest known instance of a nervous system, that of Nematostella vectensis, a sea anemone over 700 million years old, already exhibits lateral asymmetry.” This asymmetry corresponds to the two complementary modes of attention that we see in ourselves today. Why is it so important for McGilchrist to trace this back millions of years? He suggested it is because all life must know how to “eat without being eaten.” Though perhaps true, this always felt like a bit of an ad hoc explanation to me intended to satisfy a certain type of reader. Which is why I think Zak Stein gets closer to a deeper metaphysical point when he referenced Whitehead, remarking that "life emerged to respond to value, which pre-existed it. That the evolutionary process responds to value makes it teleological.” Or in other words, Stein recognizes that McGilchrist really wants to tie the structure of the brain to the very structure of reality itself. Neurological asymmetry is an evolutionarily conserved feature because neurology recapitulates ontology. Whitehead's "appetition of the cosmos" is a positive definition of life. We aren’t here just to avoid being eaten while we search for the next meal.

As for Kastrup, in this conversation he points to a different opposition within the brain, between intuition/imagination on the one hand and reason/metacognition on the other. And he lays emphasis on the relatively recent arrival of reason/metacognition to the evolutionary scene. While it is undeniably true that other species do not display these capacities in the same ways that humans have, I think Kastrup’s view here may be a bit too focused on one side of the equation. We could recall the intelligence of slime molds and plants, which has caused scientists to wonder how widespread such problem solving capacities are in the natural world. But more to the point, we may equally wonder if it might be that our capacity for intuition and imagination never really stopped developing, and has continued to expand in lockstep with those vaunted capacities for reason and metacognition, displaying an equal increase in range and depth over evolutionary time. It is this latter possibility which McGilchrist seems to be hinting at above. 

References: 

[1] Joe Scott described 'top down' causation in a recent video: "There's not just one consciousness going on inside our minds. There's two. But it actually gets crazier. Turns out there's actually multiple modules inside each of the hemispheres that can display a kind of consciousness, and they have their own things to say. In a lot of ways, our brains work pretty much like a hierarchical brain system. Consciousness is a result of both 'bottom up' and 'top down' causation. We are simultaneously making decisions on a subconscious level but also shaping those decisions at a conscious level. In Gazzaniga's words, "Action is made up of complementary components arising from within and without... What is going on is the match between our ever present multiple mental states and the impinging contextual forces within which it functions."

Tania Lombrozo: "One way to think about how 'learning by thinking' occurs is to basically say that your mind has multiple components, and like, one part of your mind knew something, but the other part of your mind didn't know that, so the way that 'learning by thinking' works is that part one tells part two, and now part two learns something that it didn't know before. ...If you think about the mind itself as possessing kind of multiple sub-minds, sub-mechanisms, sub-components, and so on that can communicate with each other, and share information with each other more or less effectively, then a lot of the same ways that we think about information transmission working within groups of people apply to what what we think about what happens within the human mind. ...To what extent is it that we see those kinds of "many minds" within a single mind?"
Kensy Cooperrider: "That is a new gloss on the title of our podcast Many Minds. I never thought of that as referring to the many minds within a single mind."

Iain McGilchrist. The Coincidence of Opposites (2021) "I've argued that at the origin of everything there lies a coincidence or conjunction of opposites that is profoundly generative, indeed necessary for creation, gives rise to all that we know. And this coincidence of opposites is by no means contrary to reason. I've stressed that we must not be tempted, in a left hemisphere fashion, to resolve the necessary tension by pretending one of the pairs of opposites can safely be dispensed with, or is not real. Denying the concealed opposite is dangerous. The coincidence of opposites does not compromise their nature as opposites, rather they fulfill themselves through one another. The foundation of everything, recognized from Empedocles to Goethe, is this opposition between love and strife. We need the union of division and union, the union of multiplicity and unity... [and] just as there's an asymmetry in the relationship of the hemispheres, there's an asymmetry in the coincidencia oppositorum." 

Iain McGilchrist. ‘Selving’ and Union (2016) "It is no contradiction that, while the idea of the self as distinct from others does have meaning, the dichotomy between self and others is fundamentally misleading. From the outset they are intertwined, proceed from and return to one another. They could be said to ‘co-create’ each other: ‘The sense of self emerges from the activity of the brain in interaction with other selves.’ ...it may come to life in a Hegelian sense: for the emerging product may be neither just both, nor neither, of two contraries we cannot singly embrace, but something new altogether, as the lyric tone of the lyre emerges from the tension of the wire that holds its warring ends together."

Iain McGilchrist. The Matter with Things (2021) “...opposites not only co-exist, but give rise to and fulfil one another (‘sunt complementa’), and are conjoined (like the poles of a magnet) without any intervening boundary, while nonetheless remaining distinct as opposites. And indeed the more intimately they are united, the more, not the less, they are differentiated. [...] Blake famously wrote: "He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer, for art and science cannot exist but in minutely organised particulars and not in generalising demonstrations of the rational power. The infinite alone resides in definite and determinate identity." The point Blake is making is that we do not come to understand or experience the infinite, or, for that matter, the eternal, by attempting somehow to transcend the finite or the temporal, but by immersing ourselves in them, in such a way as to pass into the infinite, manifest there where they are. The path to the infinite and eternal lies in, not away from – not even to one side of – the finite and the temporal.”

[2] Àlex Gómez-Marín: "For Whitehead, nature is made of "events" not of substances. And those events are polar. Imagine something that happens in the world, that gets "actualized." It has a future and a past pole, a mental and a physical pole. You might say that's substance dualism, but it's more sophisticated than that."

In the Andean worldview, life is made possible through a generative encounter (tinkuy) between opposite complementary forces (yanantin). Female and male bodies are an expression of this duality. 

Alan Watts. The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity (1963)

Poetry: the music of language

"Poetry is the way in which language can subvert language. It disconcerts the reader in certain ways, makes connections the reader is not used to in order to liberate hidden levels of meaning in words. But when those words are stuck together in the way that, for example, a user manual for some technological device sticks them together, there is no hidden anything. In the business of living, as we use language, it develops layers of meaning, and those can only be accessed through things like poetry, myth, metaphor, humor (which is particularly important), and narrative." - Iain McGilchrist 

One inevitably acts, designs, and speaks in such a way that is figurative, that points beyond any explicitly instrumental or utilitarian ends. The only question is whether we realize this or not. That's the ethos of ritual, ornament, and poetry. This is why Xunzi said all is ritual, why Alexander said all is ornament, and why still others have said all is poetry. Furthermore, poetic verse is under no obligation to comply with any preconceptions for how language should work. There's a reason why McGilchrist created a playlist of 365 poems (and not 365 pieces of music, however lovely that might've been.) As he noted above, poetry flaunts its subversive approach to the conventions of language, for as Heidegger counseled, thinking "must think against itself." This notion of poetry as both subversive and transparent gets to the essence of what language is and always will be. McGilchrist describes poetry at length in The Master and His Emissary

“Poetry cannot be just any arrangement of words, but one in which each word is taken up into the new whole and made to live again in a new way, carrying us back to the world of experience, to life... words are used so as to activate a broad net of connotations, which though present to us, remains implicit, so that the meanings are appreciated as a whole, at once, to the whole of our being, conscious and unconscious, rather than being subject to the isolating effects of sequential, narrow-beam attention. ...Language, a principally left-hemisphere function, tends, as Nietzsche said, to ‘make the uncommon common’: the general currency of vocabulary returns the vibrant multiplicity of experience to the same few, worn coins. Poetry, however, by its exploitation of non-literal language and connotation, makes use of the right hemisphere’s faculty for metaphor, nuance and a broad, complex field of association to reverse this tendency. ‘Poetry’, in Shelley’s famous formulation, ‘lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar … It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.”

It has been said that music, like poetry, is intrinsically sad, and a survey of music from many parts of the world would bear that out – not, of course, that there is no joyful music, but that even such music often appears to be joy torn from the teeth of sadness, a sort of holiday of the minor key. It is what we would expect in view of the emotional timbre of the right hemisphere... The pre-Socratic philosopher Gorgias wrote that ‘awe [phrike] and tearful pity and mournful desire enter those who listen to poetry’, and at this time poetry and song were one... In fact early poetry was sung: so the evolution of literary skill progresses, if that is the correct word, from right-hemisphere music (words that are sung), to right-hemisphere language (the metaphorical language of poetry), to left-hemisphere language (the referential language of prose). ...I know of no better exposition than Scheler’s perception of the nature of poetry:

"For this reason poets, and all makers of language having the ‘god-given power to tell of what they suffer’ [Goethe, Marienbader Elegie], fulfil a far higher function than that of giving noble and beautiful expression to their experiences and thereby making them recognisable to the reader, by reference to his own past experience of this kind. For by creating new forms of expression, the poets soar above the prevailing network of ideas in which our experience is confined, as it were, by ordinary language; they enable the rest of us to see, for the first time, in our own experience, something which may answer to these new and richer forms of expression, and by so doing they actually extend the scope of our possible self-awareness. They effect a real enlargement of the kingdom of the mind and make new discoveries, as it were, within that kingdom. It is they who open up new branches and channels in our apprehension of the stream and thereby show us for the first time what we are experiencing. That is indeed the mission of all true art: not to reproduce what is already given (which would be superfluous), nor to create something in the pure play of subjective fancy (which can only be transitory and must necessarily be a matter of complete indifference to other people), but to press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul, to see and communicate those objective realities within it which rule and convention have hitherto concealed."

In The Matter with Things, McGilchrist described his “lifelong celebration of art, and poetry, but of music above all.” Here he echoes the sentiment of Josef Pieper, who wrote that music is "one of the most amazing and mysterious phenomena of all the world’s miranda, the things that make us wonder." McGilchrist again: "There is a continuity in form and function [between human music and] early poetry in preliterate societies, which was usually accompanied by music, was socially performative, and helped establish and expand common mythologies and narratives, confirming meaning in the deep structures of life, and consolidating the common purpose of the group: mythos at work.” There's a translucent boundary located somewhere between a melody without words and words without a melody. From music came poetry, and from there, language. “The most expressive aspects of language still are its ‘musical’ qualities (the movement of the verse, its ictus, metre and rhyme), pitch variations, intonation, rhythm, speed, volume and flow; and that it approximated the rather more abstract and symbolic nature of language as we now know it by degrees, beginning in the right hemisphere, as language still does in children, and gradually crossing to the left hemisphere, leaving music behind in the regions of the right hemisphere that are homologous to the ‘language areas’ of the left.”

Or rather than one being the ancestor of the other, perhaps they share a common ancestor. From The Master and His Emissary: "There are those who hold that music and language developed independently but alongside one another, out of a common ancestor, which has been dubbed 'musilanguage' ...there is no culture anywhere in the world that does not have music, and in which people do not join together to sing or dance." Neither is there any culture without an oral tradition. Creating a beautiful new song is a real talent, and a skill not equally shared by all. But only after listening to a song briefly most people are able to easily recall it. Perhaps this asymmetric facility for remembering music, though not composing it, extends to and mingles with poetry as well. And instead of endeavoring to create new poems, we would do better to try to understand the context of oral traditions, which musilanguage evolved to support. We are bearers of poetic traditions. If this is true then we would benefit from practicing that tradition and devoting time to study and recitation. 

Poetry is now more self-reflective than it perhaps once was, but it does retain the aspects of connoting a deeper meaning, and connection between the polarities of a linguistic map and a melodic terrain. This is akin to a three part progression of the mountains and waters verses. Now however the transition is from original musilanguage, to music and language, to neo-musilanguage (aka poetry), no longer simply an early developmental stage, but as a higher level re-integration following development of the capacities latent within it. Many youth seek solace in song lyrics, and some in poetry as well. The poetry of children can be profound because they are by nature nearer to an unfiltered experience of reality. McGilchrist again: 

"Children up to the age of about 11 or 12 will often write rather wonderful poetry, but once they get into their teens the poetry tends to deteriorate because, in a way, it becomes more self-conscious and they think "I'm writing poetry now". One way of looking at it is that children are pragmatists, so they're encountering reality in a very empirical way and responding to it without too much overthinking. Gradually the more theoretically minded part of the brain, which is the left hemisphere, starts to dominate and restrict one's spontaneous, open receptivity to the nature of reality, which the right hemisphere is good at, by interfering with its own theoretical mapping or diagramming of the world." 

Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language

“The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities’, wrote Ortega y Gasset: ‘its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.” Charles Darwin wrote in an autobiography for his family, later published after his death, “If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week." I hope to take his lesson to heart. There is a clip of unseen footage from "The Divided Brain" documentary titled "On epiphanies and the patterns of Western culture." Here McGilchrist recounts an experience, one that is also referenced in The Matter With Things. It's one that resonates strongly with me, as I felt the same when I heard Patti Smith recite The Tyger. (In fact, listening to her is the reason I wrote this article, and why I now believe poetry is so important.) McGilchrist again:

"One eureka moment for me was in my relationship with Wordsworth... Wordsworth became for me a complete genius, and to this day I consider he is the, absolutely the greatest poet in the English language. It does depend on getting away from many of the anthologized pieces actually, but there we go. It happened one day while I was in Oxford and I was talking to a critic called Rachel Trickett, who was supposed to be supervising some work I was doing on the Augustans (i.e. the 18th century writers who came before) and we got on the topic of the caesura in Goldsmith (the caesura is the break in the line of the verse). And this session together, which was supposed to last only an hour, had already gone on for two hours because we were so much enjoying talking about these things. And I realized it was almost time for me to go and have dinner. And she said "I just want to read you the first 110 lines of Tintern Abbey" which is one of the very famous poems of Wordsworth. And I thought, and I almost said, "Rachel please don't do that because I know this poem very well, some of it I know by heart. It's getting late." Anyway I didn't. And thank God I didn't, cause she read it, and there was a way in which she read it in which I thought "I have never heard this poem before. I haven't ever got near knowing this poem, until this moment." (She began to talk about it and pointed to his use of comparatives, his use of negatives to evoke something beyond, to evoke what we cannot actually pin down, and the movement of the verse, how it moved through certain phases, how it accelerated and then slowed down, very much sort of rallentando, and you felt as the words themselves implied that you were going into a sort of deeper almost trance-like, sleep-like state. It was astonishing. I mean people say they've had drug trips and so on. I don't need drug trips. I had Rachel Trickett reading the Tintern Abbey.) And I can remember going, after that, going back to college, walking down the Woodstock Road in Oxford, and my feet scarcely touched the ground. And, you know, there was a sort of 'golden glow'. It was, if you like, an epiphany for me."

At such times, it seems that ritual, ornament, and poetry come together, suffusing one another in one seamless experience. McGilchrist again: 

"There is a video clip of Judy Collins and Pete Seeger singing "Turn, Turn, Turn", which was Seeger's version of Ecclesiastes. It's the idea that there is a cycle to things, which sounds as though it might be a rather simple thing, but listen to it. Not only is the song very good, but watch Judy Collins' face while she's singing. It's absolutely a spiritual experience. You can see the soul of the woman singing."

But the power of poetry isn't restricted to evoking emotions. McGilchrist again, from The Matter with Things: 

“In the attempt to describe quantum reality, ordinary language simply breaks down. As Niels Bohr put it: ‘We must be clear that, when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.’ ...If reality is such that our knowledge is intrinsically, not accidentally, incomplete; if it is intrinsically, not accidentally, uncertain; if it is intrinsically inexpressible in everyday language, requiring exceptional, non-denotative, highly metaphoric, ‘poetic’ use of language to get beyond the limits of language [then] …talking about the constitution of the physical world must be poetic in some way. ...As Sam Matlack puts it: ‘And if poetry is necessary for talking about the foundations of physical reality, this should both elevate the importance of poetry and help to disabuse us of the idea that we can exclude the more personal, parochial, poetic forms of language and still truly apprehend reality.”

McGilchrist: "One of the wonderful things in reading literature is to see, time and again, how these great minds, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, Bohr, Bohm, you name it. They all speak in the same sort of way that mystics do, which is to speak in terms of riddles, and paradoxes, and poetry. And they in turn were able to see that that wasn't a problem with religion, it was just that it was dealing with something that couldn't be put into everyday language, and neither could what they knew of the physics." 

McGilchrist: “What [Anglo-American-Analytic “Triple A”] philosophy is trying to do is get as far away from poetry as possible, because it sees ambiguity, connotation, multiple layers of meaning, things that refer to things obliquely and implicitly, as all confusion. [But] Wittgenstein says one should write philosophy as one writes poetry, Heidegger said that philosophy was like poetry (it went further into a certain kind of truth, but it used the methods of poetry), and A.N. Whitehead said that good philosophy is akin to poetry.”  

Describing the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, McGilchrist writes: 

“It makes us feel, as nothing else could do, the dangers of explicitness, and therefore the value of obliqueness: of myth, intuition, poetry, music, and all the other arts, true philosophy, true spiritual understanding, and every imaginative act whose aim is to offer a glimpse of the elusive nature of reality.” Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that: “the work of the painter, the poet or the musician, the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental, and the only kind really common to us all – knowledge of which scientific thought is merely the sharpened point: more penetrating because it has been honed on the stone of fact, but at the price of a loss of substance."

What is the substance thus lost? I think this is depth, the implicit, and the transcendent. And so we can best pass through the words to the hidden layers of meaning beneath and behind them when they are not so narrowly explicit and opaque that they prevent us from doing so. Today our world is awash in a sea of explicit representation. Digital media is everywhere. The hall of mirrors constricts us tighter, in both private and public life, and it's easy to lose sight of the fact that work isn't just about what "it's about" (what is written on the paper). If it's not about what it's about, then what is it about? Implicit qualities can only be gestured toward, suggested, and felt or experienced. There's a difference between reading a book about how to swim, and actually jumping in the water. The literal words are never the full meaning. As Bruce Lee once said, they are like "a finger pointing away to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger, or you will miss all that heavenly glory." This may also be what Nansen was trying to get at when he said "If one of you can say a word, I will spare the cat." But today the implicit, the spirit behind the words that animates the voice, has been sacrificed on the altar of the explicit. And no longer do we sit by candlelight listening to a single story told or read by a single voice. 

The thing isn't the thing. Which means, whatever it is you are ostensibly doing or talking about isn't the actual point. So what is the point? It is what is actually being accomplished when it is all said and done, perhaps the realization of some good, some value. Which means, oddly enough, that whatever it is that is ostensibly being done could, in the final analysis, appear to have been an utter failure and yet we might say it was a success if whatever it was that we were actually trying to do was realized despite that. The second order goal. This may all sound rather confusing, but this is how art, poetry, and life tends to work. If the thing ever does become the thing, then disaster cannot be far off. Because there is no one-to-one identity between the thing and the thing. There is a gulf separating them across which we can only catch indirect glimpses and pass information like messages in a bottle, never knowing if they will reach their destination.

Look at the screenshot from Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language. Here is an unintentional "poem." And for me it also illustrates that language learning can, and maybe should be, poetic. We can write about resistance, but in a suggestive, oblique manner, and explore the paradox of how that which is incomplete may yet gesture toward wholeness. Some websites that teach foreign languages provide the weekly news using basic vocabulary, these could be lineated to yeild a more dramatic feel. There have also been dramatic readings of microblog entires (from Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky) for humorous effect. Generally, no one actually speaks like this, but liberation from rules can be very helpful at early stages in the process of language acquisition.

References: 

• Paul Keegan. The Penguin Book of English Verse (2005) "I've always kept poetry by my bed all my life. And when I've traveled I've got a very massive copy of The Penguin Book of English Verse, which has gone everywhere with me," McGilchrist said in a June 2021 interview.
• Philip Larkin. Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse (1973) "Surely one of the most rewarding anthologies ever compiled," (TMHE)
• Donald Keene. The Pleasures of Japanese Literature (1988) "Keene draws attention to the place of mist, haze, fog and moonlight in Japanese poetry" (TMHE)
• Robert Wicks. The idealization of contingency in traditional Japanese aesthetics (2005) "We read that traditional Japanese aesthetics is an aesthetics of imperfection, insufficiency, incompleteness, asymmetry, and irregularity, not to mention perishability, suggestiveness, and simplicity." (TMWT) These qualities imbue much of Japanese poetry as well. See also wabi-sabi.
• Henri Bergson. The Creative Mind (1946) "...this very modest share of intuition has become enlarged, that it has given birth to poetry, then to prose, and converted into instruments of art [...] All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original."
• Iain McGilchrist. Daily Poetry Readings (2020) A full year of McGilchrist's favorite poems, as read by himself.
• Iain McGilchrist. Epistemology and Metaphysics (2023) “If you explain a joke it's no longer funny. If you explain a poem you're left with a handful of banalities.”  
• Iain McGilchrist. Dogma and the Brain (2014) “When I was a practicing psychiatrist, many of my most valued colleagues were therapists who worked with drama, art, sculpture, and music. They produced phenomenal results that weren't possible by using more verbal and rational techniques." 

Metamodernism

Iain McGilchrist doesn’t address Metamodernism anywhere in his books. This is the proposed name of a paradigm that has emerged after Postmodernism. Perhaps it was still too much of a novel idea while he was writing. However it’s been steadily gaining greater attention. Recent Akomolafe mused "Perhaps the posthumanist needs the humanist to think well about the world." And while there are differing descriptions of exactly what this paradigm might be, some do comport very well with the hemisphere hypothesis, and thus provide us with an entry point into a wider discussion. Etymologically, the term metataxis translates as “between, beyond”. Plato's metaxy denotes a movement between (meta) opposite poles as well as beyond (meta) them. In their essay Notes on Metamodernism, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker write:

"Ontologically, metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern."

Basically, the modern and the postmodern are both incomplete, both subject to error. And by navigating between them we are in a better position to avoid the pitfalls of either. In a sense, it is an answer to the "no free lunch" theorem. Those familiar with what Jonathan Rowson described as the McGilchrist Manoeuvre will note the similarity here. During a conversation with Michael Garfield, Zak Stein described Metamodernism succinctly:

“The Modern view of science is that science is truth. Period. It's very definite. The Postmodern view of science is that science is one view, and that there's actually many sciences. The Metamodern view essentially tries to say that both of those are true, within a specific context. Science works and actually discovers things. But the problem is that it's overstepped its context, and so it takes for example an experiment that was done under very closed conditions, in a laboratory, and pretends that what's discovered there applies to radically open systems outside the laboratory. The Metamodernist says "We have to pay attention to the 'moment of truth' in the Modern, and then contextualize it with the Postmodern alternative." The combination of the Modern and the Postmodern in a Metamodern reconvergence provides the very distinct possibility of a new historical epoch, a nonreductionistic, complex systems science. Many people on the fringes know this. Building institutions, building medical practice, and building educational practice around that "new paradigm" is what the Metamodern attempts to do." And again: “One of the things that characterizes the move beyond Postmodernism is a reemergence of objectivity, but not the simplistic Modern objectivity. It's an objectivity that has to do with the refraction of different perspectives, a new synthesis, a global Renaissance, that's more than a Modern view.”

Why would we need to advocate for a reconvergence in the first place? Consider some of the obstacles that are preventing this. One of these may be what's been called the “cynical genius illusion,” concerning which several research articles have been written. The Postmodern critique, particularly those forms that tend to view social interactions solely in terms of power and control, is sympathetic to a “negativity bias.” And according to Jamil Zaki, this can easily take us along the slippery slope from skepticism, to mistrust, to cynicism. Stein noted that philosophers like Roy Bhaskar have observed a sort of "crypto-normativism" that Postmodernism gives rise to. As Stein puts it, "the Postmodern critique is always implying that there is a better way, but is unwilling to state what the better way might be, because if you state the better way you now open yourself up to critique. Bhaskar wanted to actively counteract the overtly pessimistic and nihilist kind of critiques of the Postmodernist." We have seen a similar dynamic playing out in politics, where some individuals might advance specific policy platforms, while others seem only eager to criticize and deconstruct these, without articulating any substantial alternative of their own.

Stein suggests the possibility of a new "historical epoch," so one could certainly interpret Metamodernism within a sort of "grand cosmological Hegelian theory of history." I have little interest in the actual terminology. But what does interest me is the use of the  "Metamodern" term to help 1) reveal the limitations of any "-modernism" through opposition, and 2) suggest that complementarity, rather than elimination or a simple synthesis, may be a more preferable response. The Metamodern reconvergence has attracted diverse writers. In his book More Deaths than One (2014), the New Zealand writer and singer-songwriter Gary Jeshel Forrester wrote that "It's okay to search for values and meaning, even as we continue to be skeptical." And in Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World (2019) Lene Rachel Anderson claims "Metamodernity provides us with a framework for understanding ourselves and our societies in a much more complex way. It contains both indigenous, premodern, modern, and postmodern cultural elements and thus provides social norms and a moral fabric for intimacy, spirituality, religion, science, and self-exploration, all at the same time." Jonathan Rowson wrote: 

"The point of invoking metamodernity is not to insist on this name for a chronological phase of time, but to resolve to characterise a cultural epoch with a Kairological quality of time... to feel into what it means to be in a time between worlds, where meta-crises relating to meaning and perception abound and we struggle to perceive clearly who we are and what we might do... To be metamodern is to be caught up in the co-arising of hope and despair..."

Metamodern education

Zak Stein: “The modern innovation of schooling is a result of the separation of church and state. (Note: There was progress in that move. The 30 Years War, for example, was bad. That was religion.) But today there's an incoherence of how we make meaning, of our identity in life, death, and tragedy. They're basically not telling you “what it all means.” You just go in, up, and out, and don't really question “Why am I doing this?” But the smartest ones will want an answer to that question.

If no one actually answers that, or if all the answers are obviously not enough, then there's built-up tension. So sometimes I think we misunderstand as attention-deficit what is really the tension produced by the absence of an answer. There's a pent-up desire for this. When there's a sense of why, and when my motivation and the motivation of what I'm doing aligns, it all feels right and I can do it.

There's a basic problem when we can't say good, true, and beautiful things about the nature of the situation we're putting the youth in. And they know it. So of course they’re not paying attention. Oh, they're paying a lot of attention to other things, just not to you, and not to school. This is part of the dynamic of the educational crisis. It is part of the larger “legitimacy crisis,” the absence or inability to secure political legitimacy or investment in the project of cooperation, which is society. That's one of those things education has to do, or the center falls apart.”

On the Metamodernism and the post-tragic: "How do we have conversations about topics of 'existential risk' and 'catastrophic risk'? We had to experience fearing having those conversations with the youth as Covid began. The fear of having to have the conversation about 'when billions watch millions die' and there's nothing they can do about it. I talk about the need for the future of education to be ‘post-tragic’ in terms of its orientation in psychology. Basically it means there are different ways to relate to tragedy. Tragedy is inevitable. If you believe tragedy is not inevitable then you're in the 'pre-tragic' state of consciousness. How do you move from the denial of tragedy, to stepping into tragedy (without getting stuck in it), and then to the post-tragic? It's not a new denial of tragedy. It's being in the tragedy still, but having also found a way to manage and transcend the tragedy, phenomenologically, psychologically, emotionally.

During the tragedy it's very hard to laugh and love. In the post-tragic there's laughter and love again, but it's different from the pre-tragic laughter and love. That's a simple characterization. But as educators thinking about this dynamic of intergenerational transmission, do we lie to our kids and give them a pre-tragic view? Do we traumatize them by getting them stuck in the tragic, and telling them there's no way out? Or do we have some way to actually become post-tragic? How do we tell stories about our own history that are not just simply tragedies?" 

Metamodern politics

Trump is an oligarch who openly admires other greedy, power hungry people. In a sense, he really walks the talk. And if we happen to agree with his ethos, that can seem very compelling. But greed sees no use for higher values like social equity. And what many Americans want, though they cannot easily find, is a politician who holds higher values, and has a record of putting those above their self interest.

Politicians across the political spectrum have forgotten values for the most part and are still dealing with the cultural legacy of postmodern cynicism. So, on one side we have self-aggrandizing greed, and the other side is a confused vacuum. What we need is a strong sense of values to confront greed, but all we can muster is, as Jonathan Rowson put it, “an avalanche of cliches and platitudes, cheered on by an unthinking crowd desperate to believe in something.” That isn't enough. So we get the greedy monster instead.

Apathy, false equivalence, the “bothsidesism” that tries to justify cynical disengagement from politics, all played a role. Sure, Trump is bad, they say, but the other side is more of the same “business as usual,” the same corporate criminals and war hawks, that got us to this point to begin with. To a significant extent that is true. When you are empty and stand for nothing behind the words, anti-value is what you get. It seizes the opportunity. Rowson again, “Those who lament Trump’s victory should also lament the absence of a powerful story of the present and vision of the future - that is an even bigger problem than Trump’s victory, and part of its basis.” George Lakoff and Gil Duran wrote: 

“All politics are moral politics. Trump won because he has tapped into something deep in the American psyche: Strict Father morality. This is a hierarchical view of the world, rooted in the metaphor of a family with a dictator-like patriarch whose word is law. Millions of American brains are wired to accept this moral system, and this is why none of the facts about Trump (his impeachments, his convictions, his lies) mattered. Moving forward, Democrats must stop ignoring the metaphorical and moral frameworks underlying our politics… Unfortunately, Trump reflects the values of many Americans – even those whose “self-interest” is clearly threatened by his policies… They identify with his projection of dominance and strength, and it matters more than their own gender or racial identity.” 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a hierarchical view of the world (often associated with Modernism), indeed hierarchies are everywhere and very few things would function or make sense without them. But, and this is a very big “but”, we need to understand them correctly and not have a delusional view on them. Trump’s authoritarianism is a delusional, completely inverted moral hierarchy. Not only is this ethically illegitimate, it’s built on a foundation of lies. And the only reason it has attracted as much support as it has is that Democrats have apparently given up that game (under the influence of Postmodernism). They aren’t advancing much of a moral hierarchy of their own to confront the inverted one Trump presents us with, and connect it to the evidence needed to back it up. Where there are no convictions there is no courage to act. As David Brin wryly noted, "there are reasons why the all out assault on all fact-professions is the core agenda" underlying Trump's rise to power. Despite some significant disagreements I have with Robert Ellis' review of TMWT (we've looked at these before), one of his observations is astute: 

"McGilchrist is, I believe, something like a theoretical Burkean conservative – a position that, in theory, I have much sympathy for, because it prioritises a recognition of complexity in socio-political relationships, and discourages quick and simplistic solutions to problems. However, one of the major problems in current political discourse is the appropriation of such conservative ideas by corrupt political Conservatives – who have very little understanding of complex systems, and are mainly interested in defending the interests of a privileged class through any manipulative means that are available. ...the heirs to Burkean conservatism in modern UK politics (parallel to many other countries) are much more the Green Party, which prioritize the conservation of the complex relationships both between humans and the environment and within human society, rather than the asset-stripping ‘Conservative’ Party. Without making this explicit, the immensely destructive corrupt right will simply appropriate books like this for their own rhetorical purposes."

Those with an overly simplistic understanding of McGilchrist, whether on the Far Right or Far Left, are just as lost in identity politics. What makes the difference has more to do with their hidden ontological commitments. The Right is more sympathetic to the ideals of modernism, while the Left is much more aligned with post-modernism. The problems with post-modernism are many, including relativism and general hostility to hierarchy and asymmetry (very similar concepts). Clearly, the transcendent, sacred, or divine is closely associated with hierarchy as traditionally understood. And asymmetry is associated with inequality. These are lightning rods for the Far Left. But on the whole, the challenges on both sides of the aisle are extensive. How might we sum this up? The Far Right sees in McGilchrist a very superficial sort of agreement with their beliefs, and has used it to justify their form of identity politics (for example, "left hemisphere = political left"). Meanwhile, the Far Left sees in McGilchrist a very superficial disagreement with their beliefs, and this has been used to justify a dismissal of his work (for example, "inequality in the brain = inequality in society"). If both sides understood the deeper nuance of the hemisphere hypothesis, all this could be avoided. The takeaway from all this is that a superficial understanding of inequality can and does favor the ideology of the Far Right, and so we might say that they have a slight rhetorical advantage. There are ways one might mitigate this however, Bradbrook shines here. 

A scholar such as McGilchrist, who can marshal the full force of science to validate religious belief, can be very appealing. It is those features of religion that are consequences of built in asymmetries and inequalities that the post-modern political left is (understandably) very skeptical of, and tends to take exception to, and which therefore explain the differential reception to McGilchrist that we observe. For example, to the extent that religion is stripped of traditional hierarchical concepts it tends to become more palatable to the post-modern aesthetic. We can point to "Buddhist modernism" as an example of this, which has sanitized "ethnic Buddhism" of many (if not most) of its offensive inequalities, but in the process of doing so rendered it almost unrecognizable. By necessity we all begin with a shallow understanding of any topic, and the hemisphere hypothesis is no exception, but if we are going to reduce our vulnerability to manipulation, and check if our conclusions are sound, then we will eventually need to arrive at a deeper understanding of "the asymmetry of the coincidentia oppositorum." Maybe this won't be possible (or even desirable) for each of us individually, but as a culture it is critical. 

A language of conviction and value

From a recent conversation:

Henry Soinnunmaa: “Some people are like “Whoa, what are you talking about when you refer to values such as truth and beauty and good as being something that's not invented by humans?” There's so much cynicism nowadays about them that to imply they would exist as anything besides a social construct is seen as very provocative. And many of the people who might be triggered by you referring to those being something besides social constructs probably don't view themselves as postmodernists. 

Zak Stein: That’s because social constructivism is the cultural given. Which is why I bring it up. Many of the people who are social constructivists and relativists have simply not been educated otherwise. If you move through college and graduate school in the United States or Europe you will get postmodernism. You won't get anything else. You'll get postmodernism, and you'll be brought into the belief that truth and ethics are basically a function of power, and therefore the things that we valorize as beautiful, good, and true are the result of systematic power over many generations and all kinds of performative contradictions and other things built into that worldview. What's interesting to me about it is that this is anomalous. The majority of human belief systems throughout history held that we participate in something bigger than us. They did not believe that the universe is meaningless. That’s the anomalous view. From the perspective of all other humans that have lived we are quite unusual in that view. 

Soinnunmaa: Yet we do need postmodern criticism. That makes us pay attention to how power affects things in the world. So the question then is how to integrate that, without throwing away the understanding that there are values that are important and there are things to aspire towards. John Vervaeke uses the term transjective, meaning not entirely objective or entirely subjective but something else. David Chapman also writes in his Meaningness blog about how meaning is not created entirely subjectively or objectively, but it's something that we come into contact with when we are together with the world, and together with other people.

Stein: That's exactly it. Value evolves. That's what’s so remarkable about it. It evolves in these relationships between different centers within the flux of of evolution. The postmodern critique is not incorrect, it just kind of ends up pulling the punch. It doesn't complete its own circle. You know, my view of education is very much a postmodern critical theory argument. But I come from a stance of critical theory, the Frankfurt School, which basically says you can only do criticism if you can articulate something you stand for.

So there's this term, crypto-normativism, which is what most of postmodernism is. They’re critiquing this, and they're critiquing that, and they're critiquing the other. And all of those critiques are correct. But what remains unsaid is the thing that they are standing on to do the critiquing. If you are critical of something then you must stand for something. Can you move from the language of complaint and criticism to the language of conviction and value?  That would be what the postmodernist needs to do, that turn, which is the turn that Habermas did, which is to turn postmodernism from a deconstructive into a reconstructive project. You totally deconstruct and then you rebuild, because you wouldn't have taken it apart if you didn't stand for something that was valuable. Why is power over other people bad? If everything's a social construction then who cares? So there's this sense in which the postmodernist has to go that turn towards the reconstruction.

Postmodernists are not really taking themselves seriously enough. They're critiquing all of this stuff, and they're doing it from this really heartfelt position, often of anger and indignation, and that means that there's something inside of them that really stands for something. So to move out of the crypto-normative into the explicitly normative, to move from the deconstructive to the reconstructive, that's the postmodernism that we need. Postmodernism reveals the Shadow, but then says there's only Shadow. But if you're going to call out the Shadows you need to be able to claim your own position as light. It takes a kind of self referential humility to do that because now you're on the hook for something. Now you have to go build something better than this thing that you’re critiquing. Let's go do that. But who’s doing that? They're just critiquing. But at some point we have to go build something better than the thing we critiqued. 

It's quite easy to get a large group against something. But it’s very hard to get a large group standing for something, and then building, reconstructing. How do we move from deconstructing the old power structures to building structures that could be responsibly used, or is there no vision of what a better world could be? So yes, postmodernism was a critical moment, but it hasn't completed its work. It needs to turn reconstructive, and then we get into a different phase of philosophy.

Soinnunmaa: Like metamodernism, which is trying to integrate postmodernism with modernism and premodernism? 

Stein: Totally. We need to become people who have rich languages of intrinsic value, a shared sense of what is actually at stake, and what types of futures would be valuable. It’s not a homogenizing value set, but it is a planetary scale macro ethics that agrees upon the value of certain things, the most minimal of which would be the biosphere as we know it, for example. Without this even the most capacitated and intelligent technologists, politicians, and others will be in a difficult position. So we need to become a very different type of human and re-infuse our most important endeavors with a language that refers to intrinsic and real value. 

Metamodern movements

The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon and political movement that rebelled against dogma everywhere, experimenting with new relationships to religious ideas, the material economy, and social institutions. But it wasn't long before rigid thinking and greed returned, and as we've since seen, with renewed vengeance. Would the movement have achieved more lasting results had it a better understanding of the world around us, and how our brains function to reveal that world?

Alan Watts opens his book The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity, with three quotes. One of which from the Zhuangzi is particularly challenging:

"Those who would have right without its correlative, wrong; or good government without its correlative, misrule,—they do not apprehend the great principles of the universe nor the conditions to which all creation is subject. One might as well talk of the existence of heaven without that of earth, or of the negative principle (yin) without the positive (yang), which is clearly absurd. Such people, if they do not yield to argument, must be either fools or knaves." Zhuangzi, xvii

Does this have anything to do with the Pareto principle (also known as the "80–20 law") which states that roughly 20% of all people receive 80% of all income (and 20% of the most affluent 20% receive 80% of that 80%, and so on). ...Could it be that the asymmetries of right and wrong, of good government and misrule, and of power and wealth, are in some sense immutable qualities of the world?

In the course of time, some of the goals of the 1960s have been realized, while others still remain out of reach. Perhaps the goals that were realized were those that did not traduce these asymmetries, and those that are still out of reach are precisely those that would've required their violation. And so, if we are to achieve these remaining goals sooner rather than later, perhaps we will have to find ways to reconcile them accordingly, or continue that work if it has already begun. 

Extinction Rebellion: A Metamodern Movement?

Gail Bradbrook is following an interesting path. She earned a doctorate in molecular biophysics, and in 2016 went on a "psychedelic retreat" to Costa Rica after which she and Hallam came up with Extinction Rebellion. She was engaged in many different movements prior to this. In a 2019 video she describes her approach to social movements in general, and the Extinction Rebellion in particular. It's wide ranging, and there's more than I've included here, so watch the video. I'm only paraphrasing some of it from the transcript (she talks fast):

"I want to talk about Extinction Rebellion's strategy and how we can see it in a really wide ecology of different theories of change, because it's important that we understand how strategy can be thought about from different perspectives. There are lots of perspectives in our movement. One of these perspectives is that of Gene Sharp, the father of civil resistance, who thought about how you look at a system and try to make a significant change to it, how you take out dictatorship and so on. We can also look at our movement through the lens of purpose, vision, and culture, through the lens of patriarchy and white supremacy, and underneath that, even through the lens of consciousness.

Underneath all of this is what we might call the sacred. I'm essentially talking about love and the consciousness we're running in our brains. There's lots of scientific evidence that there is a "oneness," a connection of energy between us, an actual purpose to life itself. Your life has an inherent purpose within a flow of life. A capitalist-consumerist society very much wants to disconnect us from that. What brain science suggests is that when we're more in our right hemisphere than our left hemisphere we have a deeper connection to the oneness there is. Look up Iain McGilchrist's work for example, and his book The Master and His Emissary. Also a beautiful video by Jill Bolte Taylor, and another by Wai Tsang. This is not something you have to sort of "believe in and be a hippie about." I'm suggesting be open to the idea that love is underneath what really matters to us.

I think the only way we're going to make the shift that's necessary is if it's a paradigm shift, a shift in consciousness. And I think this is all possible, but what we need to do is recognize that we're working on different strategic levels. I personally believe that science and spirituality are on their way to unification. And I'm interested in teleology, the idea that there may be inherent purpose in the universe. It shows up through things like morphic resonance, which is actually known about in the science I did, looking at crystallizing protein structures and so on.

Tim Gee's book Counter Power talks about the need to raise awareness of an issue, or consciousness about an issue, and coordinate across movements. That's the confrontation stage. The consolidation stage is the citizen's assembly. We want a people-powered decision-making process about what the change actually looks like. We know from Erica Chenoweth's work that we need around 3.4 percent of the population in active participation in the movement, and we need about 50% of the public to support the issue that we're dealing with. That's Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's work. The grand strategy then focuses on the three pillars of the system, and that comes from Gene Sharp.

I'm also really in love Valerie Kaur's TED talk, "Three lessons of revolutionary love." She talks about the radical self-love that other movements didn't do. I think that is something that we really have to bring forward, and that will show up as self-care. I think it's part of the rising feminine; that's how she talks about it. It's the work that we do on decolonization, on anti-oppression and liberation. So these are things that are coming through from the regenerative culture team XR Together, and also there's the XR Internationalist solidarity network in the UK doing great work as well.

It's now the time for humanity to stop harming and start repairing, and do that together with more democracy. That's a vision that is universally known about. For the Jewish faith it is tikkun olam. In Africa it's talked about as ubuntu. We can bring that through in multiple languages and culturally relevant ways. Frederick Laloux's book Reinventing Organizations is about how businesses might make more of a profit when they get behind purpose, and he gives some great examples. Wouldn't it be amazing if the business world continues to move in that direction and actually holds this purpose that our culture needs to speak to, that we want to stop harm and start repairing, and help us get that done together?

I want to just speak very briefly to something controversial. I've been speaking about psychedelic medicines; they're not for everybody. They've been part of my path, and they very much speak to me in terms of access to these processes. But they need to be used in really safe and healthy ways. If anybody is using them there's lots of information out there. They are part of deep indigenous traditions and spiritual practices.

As things get worse, what are we doing in XR that is going to support us? Frankly, the work we're doing is prefigurative. It's anti-fascist, it's holding a vision, it's the people's assemblies work, it's working together, it's holding conflict, it's how we work on diversity, it's how we're bringing forward our vulnerability, it's how we address patriarchy and white supremacy. And goodness, I know we're not getting that right, but in tension let's keep doing our best and moving on that stuff. It's how we really notice that there's an evolutionary purpose here. So this is what you might call prefigurative. It's the piece that will help us to be together as things go pear-shaped. That's why it's so important. It's a very imperfect journey that we're on. I really love Adrienne Maree Brown's book Emergent Strategy. It shaped some of the thinking at Extinction Rebellion. She says: "Trust the people."

Bradbrook has clearly fully internalized the hemisphere hypothesis and perhaps even expanded upon the implications, it appears to be very substantially embedded into the DNA of XR, which explains why McGilchrist has spoken at several XR events. How could he not? Bradbrook is really getting his ideas out there, she invariably cites him in almost every recorded presentation she's given, including a more recent 2023 talk she gave (note that this is after TMWT is published, whereas the other was before it was published):

"How did we get here? As psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist articulated based on reviews of thousands of scientific papers, human beings like other animals have two very distinct hemispheres in our brain with very distinct roles. To cultivate the collective "good mind" we have to have practices baked into our culture. In our diseased culture these get baked out. So given that we live within a pathologized system of systems, we need to understand more about how systems work. We need social movements that are very mindful of the "wetiko pathology." Ones that see the anti-life systems of destruction and both forcefully and mindfully separate from them. I see it in me, but I'm choosing something else. Each one of us has that choice in the moment, and as groups. It's time to unite within a collaborative framework for change that leaves space for doing things that is location and culture specific.

We are part of a more enduring system than that of capitalist-colonialist modernity. It is our birthright to root ourselves into aliveness, reclaiming our role as keystone species and serving life's purpose, which includes composting and adding to the complexity and beauty of life. We can intend to create the conditions for life to thrive by learning from life. Life thrives because it collaborates and learns. Through purpose, collaboration, and learning unexpected things emerge. Let's work across different organizations and networks, seeing our shared concerns and these root causes, and then develop some kind of framework together around how we see the change." 

So given this additional context, it may be that Roger Hallam's recent article is a reaction to what Bradbrook has been saying, perhaps since the inception of the Extinction Rebellion, than to anything McGilchrist is saying. And given her good work here, I'm a bit dismayed that he hasn't been listening to her more closely! It would be interesting to compare Hallam's writing in The Ecologist to Bradbrook. 

The UK activist scene is quite the network. I'm trying to sort it all out. So Bradbrook and Hallam (with others) began XR in 2018. Bradbrook cites McGilchrist in 2019 as a core influence in their movement strategy. She's almost certainly familiar with him before that time. McGilchrist appears at several XR events. Shaun Chamberlain joins Extinction Rebellion early, then moves to Local Futures with Helena Norberg-Hodge, which was founded in 1978. McGilchrist appears in many recorded conversations with Norber-Hodge and speaks at the "Planet Local Summit" in 2023 in several presentations (alongside Bayo Akomolafe). Chamberlain later interviews McGilchrist as part of his "Surviving the Future" program in 2024. The Local Futures' directors also form the editorial board of The Ecologist magazine, where Hallam (among others) regularly contributes articles. McGilchrist also widely collaborates with many other activists in the UK, not least of which being Rupert Read, Dougald Hine, and many others. One could go on.

All that being said, McGilchrist also gets equal air time from conservative media platforms, even though some of these are critical of the goals and strategies of the above activists and organizations (many of these appearances have been highlighted here before). His ability to engage with people on both sides of the aisle is somewhat uncommon today. How does he do that? I think there are many reasons for this, including what I'd characterize as a metamodern approach. Jonathan Rowson's series of conversations at Perspectiva were in this same line of thinking. But McGilchrist's recent success courting conservative platforms may have come at the cost of curtailing enthusiasm among the activist community, who still need to hear the sort of message he's putting out there. It's a challenging balance. So hearing people like Dougald Hine, but especially Gail Bradbrook, deeply integrate the hemisphere hypothesis into their work is really inspiring. Like Elizabeth Oldfield, Bradbrook has a praxis, a way of engaging her audience, that is aware of, responsive to, and fluent with the conceptual world of contemporary alternative subculture(s) that are looking for a connection with the sacred and a path to meaningful engagement.