[James McMullen]

Hi Laurence,

Very interesting, about the Desana and their desire to shift to LH-style thinking. Can you give us some examples? Iain’s work has got me thinking a lot about the “reasons” for the shift to the LH style over the course of human history, and (if it’s not unreasonable to ask) what we are headed toward. The push in the direction of civilization seems to me to have everything to do with building ourselves a larger and larger, more and more complex house. And according my take on McG, if we want to keep our house from
falling apart, we have to make it a proper home–we have to be in
heartfelt relationship with it. So the LH strikes me as the systems-oriented “house-builder” while the RH is the relationship-centered “home-maker.”

(Aside: I have to think McG has noticed the relation between the two “personalities” of the hemispheres and stereotyped gender psychologies–especially given autism’s being referred to as an “excess of maleness”–and he has just chosen to sidestep a minefield)

Basically, what I find most interesting to wonder about is if we can see a “reason” for the dominance of the LH, beyond its own domineering tendencies? Could we frame the history of civilization, with the “power struggle between the hemispheres” as something like the sorting of roles in a new marriage, with a child on its way, and arguments over where to channel resources? And just to speculate a bit further, could we see it as parallell to multicellular life emerging out of the organization of single-celled life? Might our own organic organization be setting the stage for the emergence of something truly new? Is AI, which “supervenes” on humanity, a new true whole?–a genuinely new phase of life, broadly construed?

Also, I know I’m betraying my own LH-orientation here: future-focused, biased towards optimism, and most obviously in thinking about what “kind of thing” could possibly be “put together out of the parts” of humanity. I’m currently reading Irrational Man, by William Barrett, in order to get a better handle on Heidegger, so as to better handle McGilchrist. In it he talks about the duality of St. Augustine, whose Confessions is a clinic in RH-style embodied relationality, (he had “an almost voluptuous sensitivity to the Self in its inner inquietude, its trembling and frailty, its longing to reach beyond itself in love“) —but in his Enchiridion, he LH-style concocts a cosmology designed to make sense of all the evil which can besiege an embodied soul. Basically, I can see that my wonderings are much more Enchiridion than Confessions, meaning I may need get out of my own head, and balance the speculation with some phenomenology. So I’m grateful for the Merleau-Ponty recommendation. Thanks, Laurence.