The two hemi-spheres of experience

Finally, I'd like to touch on the question of "so what?" The philosophical and cultural dichotomy that McGilchrist describes has been thoroughly explored by many writers in various contexts. All in their various ways have explored the boundary between the word and Spirit, immediacy, Dasein, authenticity or the many names, inevitably misleading, that we give to that which cannot be named. What, then, is added to the mix by McGilchrist's hypothesis that this dichotomy is fundamental to the way we are, largely because that is the way we, particularly our brains, are built? Is it significant or useful to hold in mind that the structure and function of the organ most strongly associated with our knowing, and indeed of the section of that organ most closely associated with our species' uniqueness, the cortex, is so constituted that it is exactly and inevitably through this dialectic that we make our various senses of the world?

I would say yes. This is a hypothesis, a model, which seeks to describe important aspects of human sense and meaning-making and to ground that description in empirically verifiable accounts of particular behaviours arising from specific structures of our physical bodies. McGilchrist's presentation and argumentation includes all major aspects of the human world: the physical/physiological, the cultural (art, philosophy, language, politics, social structures), science and the subjective. Presenting such an integrated view of these significant aspects of the human, providing a multi-dimensional or multi-phasic view of the aetiology of human sense making, without resorting to an arrogant assertion that, for example, "it's all the hemisphere's, innit?" constitutes a challenge and a measuring stick for all those writing on the relation between our physicality and our subjectivity. How do we talk about that relationship without compromising the humanity of the subject? McGilchrist has, in my opinion, set a fine example.

To my mind, the linking of thought and its permutations to our physicality is culturally potent. As a recent report from the RSA[1] puts it, the natural sciences "enjoy greater epistemic warrant than social sciences" and philosophy. Having these ideas empirically supported changes the terms of the discussion, perhaps not immediately but incrementally. As cultures, all cultures participating in the contemporary expansion of human knowledge, we are still in the early days of understanding ourselves in the light of the knowledge that our brains change as we think. Understanding that we are not, even at the thinking level, machines with parts or programs that are statically arranged or repetitive, but that we are self-transforming at all levels, from the atomic and molecular, through cells, tissues, organs and now even as far as brains. We exist as an unceasing exchange with our environment at atomic and molecular levels and at symbolic, hermeneutic and aetiological levels. We absorb, metabolise and transmit chemical compounds, words, ideas, senses of meaning and value which, again, return to us transformed, through almost infinite variations on that reciprocal relationship to which McGilchrist persistently returns.

Given the early stage of our acquaintance with this emerging picture of ourselves, McGilchrist's hypothesis may be a big cultural leap; possibly too big for immediate digestion. In my opinion, as part of the broad study of embodied consciousness, it begins to ground a constructivist account of our knowing relationship with the world in some physiological specifics. Our ideas about ourselves begin to find reflection, and need to find reflection, in flesh. Not only do we construct our world, but here we may find some guidelines to the regularities and themes we can expect to see in our constructions.

At another level, though, this view also strongly suggests that our philosophies are not arbitrary and purely the conditioned outcome of social forces, economic circumstances, cultural conventions or power relations. We are encouraged to begin to see these relations, again, as reciprocal: these particular organic beings, human beings, ourselves, make sense of and construct their worlds in these particular manners and are, in turn, informed in their construction by the world they, we, eternally re-construct. We can move on from talking about The Right and who knows what it is, to, perhaps, The Good. That being, to some level of approximation, that which is fertile or productive from both left and right hemispheres' points of view: symbolic, useful and formal and immediate, generative and aesthetic. We can be aware of our sometimes dysfunctional reliance on words and their misleading precisions; their siren song that what is spoken about is controlled, complete and known. That illusion whose recurrence and current dominance McGilchrist chronicles: the illusion that ideology, doctrine, intellectual system or liturgy is a complete account of our lives and worlds.