[Whit Blauvelt]

Per McGilchrist, only the LH has full command of our spoken language. It follows from this that only the LH can employ our spoken language as full command of us. Now, some people fully lack “inner speech,” while others fully lack “inner imagery.” But for those of us with both, “inner speech” will more represent the LH, and “inner imagery” the RH.

The solution then for balancing them cannot be to substitute one inner speech regime for another. It’s not just identifying with a new set of opinions. Any set of opinions, as such, is a LH regime if one strives to live under it. It’s an ideology; all ideologies are LH. Rather we should wish speech and imagery to be brought together, so that each can lend its particular strengths to the combination. And we might also note that the RH is also more capable in terms of present awareness.

For the hemispheres to “speak” together then requires going into the realm of metaphor, where language and imagery blend. The field of cognitive linguistics claims that’s how language achieves meaning, so this is not a betrayal of language. It’s returning it to the strength of its roots. But it is a demotion of ideology — of any and all ideologies. It’s not that some bodies of opinion aren’t superior to others, but that any body of opinion becomes corrupted when used by the LH to suppress RH ways of knowing.

Note the solution is not to just get the LH to “shut up.” Rather, its to bring the hemispheres into a collaboration which is necessarily negotiated beyond the limited scope of our public language, to achieve results which, however much we then may speak of them, still require us to forever go beyond what we can, in words, describe, even in our best prose and poetics.