Ultimately the principle of division (that of the left hemisphere) and the principle of union (that of the right hemisphere) need to be unified: in Hegel’s terms, the thesis and antithesis must be enabled to achieve a synthesis on a higher level. Split-brain patients can tell us a little about this level from their experiences outside the lab, in their encounters with life; for they appear to have problems with dreaming and imagination. In the case of dreaming, it may be that it takes place but that the difficulty lies in the left hemisphere having access to it, and therefore being able to report it. But one can see that the generation of the greatest feats of the human spirit require integration of both hemispheric worlds, and split-brain patients do appear to have an impoverished level of imagination and creativity, suggesting, as I believe to be clearly the case, that integrated functioning of both hemispheres is needed for such activity. The form that that integration takes may be far from straightforward, of course. It may be that, in the absence of the intact corpus callosum, it is impossible for either hemisphere to inhibit the other adequately and stop it from interfering for critical periods. Or it may be a failure of reintegration once the separate business is done.
If the left hemisphere vision predominates, its world becomes denatured (in Heidegger’s terms, there is ‘unworlding’ of the world). Then the left hemisphere senses that something is wrong, something lacking--nothing less than life, in fact. It tries to make its productions live again by appealing to what it sees as the attributes of a living thing: novelty, excitement, stimulation. It is the faculty of imagination, however, which comes into being between the two hemispheres, which enables us to take things back from the world of the left hemisphere and make them live again in the right. It is in this way, not by meretricious novelty, that things are made truly new once again.
The right hemisphere needs the left hemisphere in order to be able to ‘unpack’ experience. Without its distance and structure, certainly, there could be, for example, no art, only experience--Wordsworth’s description of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is just one famous reflection of this. But, just as importantly, if the process ends with the left hemisphere, one has only concepts--abstractions and conceptions, not art at all. Similarly the immediate pre-conceptual sense of awe can evolve into religion only with the help of the left hemisphere: though, if the process stops there, all one has is theology, or sociology, or empty ritual: something else. It seems that, the work of division having been done by the left hemisphere, a new union must be sought, and for this to happen the process needs to be returned to the right hemisphere, so that it can live. This is why Nietzsche held that ‘in contrast to all those who are determined to derive the arts from a single principle, as the necessary source of life for every work of art, I have kept my gaze fixed on these two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysos.’
According to Nietzsche, these two gods represented the two fundamentally opposed artistic drives (Kunsttriebe): one towards order, rationality, clarity, the sort of beauty that comes with perfection, human control of nature, and the celebration of masks, representations or appearances; the other towards intuition, the over-riding of all humanly contrived boundaries, a sense of oneness or wholeness, physical pleasure and pain, and the celebration of nature beyond human control, as she really is.
It will be appreciated that this contrast does not correspond neatly to the left hemisphere versus the right hemisphere--more, in neuropsychological terms, to the frontal lobes versus the more ancient, subcortical regions of the limbic system; but since, as I have emphasised, such distinctions carry with them implications for the division of the hemispheres (in that the right hemisphere is more in touch with these ancient and ‘primitive’ forces, though modulating them importantly in many respects), they have a relevance to the subject of this book.
The left hemisphere knows things the right hemisphere does not know, just as the right knows things of which the left hemisphere is ignorant. But it is only, as I have tried to suggest in earlier chapters, the right hemisphere that is in direct contact with the embodied lived world: the left hemisphere world is, by comparison, a virtual, bloodless affair. In this sense, the left hemisphere is ‘parasitic’ on the right. It does not itself have life: its life comes from the right hemisphere, to which it can only say ‘no’ or not say ‘no’.
...the relationship between the hemispheres entails more than an equal and symmetrical participation of the two: there is an asymmetry between the principles of division (left hemisphere) and unification (right hemisphere), ultimately in favour of union. Heidegger was not alone in seeing that beauty lies in the coming to rest of opposites, that have been sharply distinguished, in the connectedness of a harmonious unity. The need for ultimate unification of division with union is an important principle in all areas of life; it reflects the need not just for two opposing principles, but for their opposition ultimately to be harmonised. The relation between union and division is not in this sense, once again, equal or symmetrical.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 5568-5611). Yale University Press.
I know--that's a long excerpt. But read it again after reading what I've written below.
So this is meant to be a companion piece to "Dolly Parton and the Coincidentia Oppositorum". I should mention here that in the same way that Apollo and Dionysos do not neatly correlate with left and right hemispheres as McG stipulates above, neither do Serpent and Dove. My interest here is not primarily neuroscience, but if you are interested in how this larger theme of the coincidentia oppositorum is grounded in neuroscience, read the rest of McG's book.
This book is itself an act of imaginative synthesis, an enacting of the coincidentia oppositorum in its own right, using philosophy, primarily drawing from German philosophy from Fichte through Heidegger, with an occasional tip of the hat to Wittgenstein and Merleu-Ponty--to effect a synthesis between science and art by helping us understand how both hemispheres play an essential role in producing both.
The excerpt above is from Chapter 5, "The Primacy of the Right Hemisphere", and in subsequent pages in that chapter he explains Hegel's concept of aufhebung with a clarity that you won't find in Hegel. The German word is usually translated as sublation in English, which of course means nothing that any normal human could find helpful, so I'll stick with the German, 'aufhebung'.
I will probably have more to say about this in future posts in a more nuanced way, but McG tries to show that Hegel understood essentially what is described in the excerpt above, which is a three-phase movement starting from a state of slumbering, undifferentiated unity, to a moment of negation that says "no" to aspects of the undifferentiated unity. This No is required so that parts of that unity recede, become grayed out so to say, into the background so that something might disembed (in the Charles Taylor sense) and stand out vividly and distinctly in the foreground. This saying No is like the sculptor who cuts away the stone so that an imagined figure might come forth. Or as in The Karate Kid when Mr. Miyagi instructs Daniel in how to prune--negate--the the bonsai tree.
Think only tree. Make perfect picture down to last pine needle. Nothing exist whole world. Only tree. You got it?”
Daniel nods.
“Remember picture?”, says Miyagi.
“Yeah.”
“Make like picture. Just trust picture.”, Miyagi instructs.
Still hesitant, Daniel asks, “How do I know if my picture is the right one?”
Miyagi confirms, “If come from inside you, always the right one.”
Is Mr. Miyagi talking about the same thing here that Goethe was in his assertion that he was able to see the urpflanze? I think they're barking up the same tree, because otherwise how do we know whether what we think is inside us is the real thing, or is just the bric-brac that have infected our minds from other sources? In other words, what is the difference between Coleridge's distinction between primary imagination and fantasy? Knowing the difference is fundamental.
Miyagi, of course, is pointing to the existence of archetypes, archetypes--in this case the urpflanze--within our mind that must be awakened in order to see the way it manifests in the particularity of this tree. I don't think the pruning--the act of negation--if done correctly, is the artist's projecting his own view of what the tree should look like so much as it is an awakening within his mind to the best possibility for this tree to realize its own inherent beauty. If he were given another tree to work on, a completely different possibility is there to be realized.
So there must be a conversation between the tree and the pruner, and when that conversation is genuine, there is no possibility of a mistake. Or perhaps more accurately, the difference between a great artist and a mediocre one has to do with the quality, i.e., the depth of genuineness, of that conversation, of his or her ability to work from the energy in the archetype in time and space. And so the process of saying Yes--the preconceptual state of awe in which I see a slumbering possibility that wants to be realized--is followed by a saying No, which is to cut away the parts that don't belong or fit.
This negation is what Nietzsche describes as the Apollonian, and it is in McG's terms the task primarily assigned to the left hemisphere. But the act of negation is 'right' only if it is informed by what the right hemisphere delivers to it, which is the slumbering, i.e., preconceptual, archetype. [See Note 1](
But then there must be a third moment, which is the negation of the negation, the aufhebung, which is the reintegration of the individual thing standing out from the blurred background back into the original life context from which it disembedded. But it just doesn't sink back into the embedded, undifferentiated unity; it returns to the right hemisphere and to its living connection to the whole, but now it lives there with its own differentiated identity and in doing so brings a dimension of heightened awareness to the whole. This is how humans will renew the face of the earth. The left hemisphere in having come to know something in disembedding it from the whole, still knows it, but now experiences it as reintegrated with--in communion with--the life world.
McG says later--
In each [step] there is a progress from an intuitive apprehension of whatever it may be, via a more formal process of enrichment through conscious, detailed analytic understanding, to a new, enhanced intuitive understanding of this whole, now transformed by the process that it has undergone.
So the first mistake is either to remain in a state of slumber; the second, to remain in a state defined by the first negation. The second mistake leads to another kind of slumber that Hegel calls the "unhappy consciousness", when consciousness lives in a world of lifeless objects alienated from their origins in the lifeworld of Being, what I call the Living Real. This was Heidegger's big insight--that in privileging what lies in the foreground, we become captured in a world that in negating the lifeworld in the background becomes forgetful of it, i.e., forgets Being.
The first negation--the disembedding--is essential but to stay in it is a kind of living death. It is consciousness, but the unhappiest kind of it. One of the primary symptoms of the unhappy consciousness from Hume through to many of the postmoderns is to assert that the Self is a fiction. This has always struck me as parodic of the older apophatic tradition in Christianity that knows that everything it says about God is untrue, but that doesn't mean that there is no God. The same can be said of the human Self--almost everything we can say about it is untrue, but that does not mean it doesn't exist. If the human self is created in the image and likeness of God, then it follows that if you can't say anything meaningful about one, you can't say it about the other. But that doesn't mean that we ought not to make the attempt to articulate what we can know even if it is dwarfed by what we don't. We can say true things, but always with a humility that is open to what is still unknown disclosing itself.
And so McGilchrist does a very interesting thing at the end of the chapter in illustrating the aufhebung as "negation of negation" in explaining what he understand the annihilation of Self to mean in Christian and Buddhist terms:
This idea explains the apparently paradoxical attempt according to the spiritual practices of all traditions to ‘annihilate’ the self. Why would one want to do such a thing, if the point of creation was to produce the infinite variety embodied in the myriad selves of all the unique existing beings in the created world? Would this not be just to strive to reverse the creative process, and return from Being to Nothing? Instead what I understand by this miscalled ‘annihilation’ of the self is a sacrifice of the boundaries which once defined the self, not in vitiation of the self, but in its kenosis, a transformation whereby it is emptied out into a whole which is larger than itself. So it is that neither the bud nor the blossom is repudiated by, but rather aufgehoben in, the fruit.
As I have suggested above, all apparently ‘complete’ systems, such as the left hemisphere creates, show themselves ultimately, not just by the standards or values of the right hemisphere, but even in their own terms, to be incomplete. In addition, whether or not the superstructure holds up, their foundations lie in, and are ‘bootstrapped’ on, intuition: the premises from which the rational system building begins, and even the rational mode of operation itself, that of the value of reason, cannot be confirmed by the process of rationalistic systematisation, but need ultimately to be intuited.
That does not invalidate our intuition in favour of reason, of course, any more than it invalidates other of our intuitions, such as the value of goodness, or of beauty, or of truthfulness, or the existence of God. (Wittgenstein in the Tractatus describes each of logic, ethics and aesthetics as transcendental.) But it does mean that they take their origin from the right hemisphere, and cannot transcend their origins except by reverting to the right hemisphere in a process of sublation or Aufhebung. However much rationalistic systems give the illusion of completeness--and they can be very hard to escape for those who cannot see their weaknesses--they do in fact conceal within themselves the clue of thread that leads out of the maze.
McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 5782-5798). Yale University Press.
I don't know about you, but it seems to me that there is no more important task than to find that thread and to pull on it until it leads us out of this maze. This is not just a task for us as individuals, but it must start with individuals.
I spent so much time with Dolly Parton earlier in the week because I think she points to how aufhebung works in a particular life. This is not a task just for philosophers--it's for everyone. It's the eudaemonic, integrating process by which the human being achieves integrity. People from all walks of life accomplish this. It's not an intellectual project but a moral one. Perhaps in fact philosophers are at a disadvantage because of their tendency to get trapped in the unhappy consciousness and the lifeless abstractions of the first negation. And the two dominant moral philosophies--consequentialism and deontology are more impediments than help. In the end, good people do good things, and so the fundamental moral question is not what is the right thing to do, but how do we become good? Dolly Parton is a better model for us than someone, say, like Immanuel Kant.
But philosophers like McG help us to understand the nature of the problem and where effective solutions might lie. And a big part of that is pointing to the everyday places where solutions are already being lived so that we might learn from them and adapt what we learn in whatever way is appropriate in our own lives.
None of this matters if it doesn't help us in a deeply existential way to effect a deeper personal sense of integration however imagined--as Serpent and Dove, as Apollo and Dionysos, as Division and Union, or as left and right hemispheres. But the experience of the aufhebung, the coincidentia oppositorum, whether in modest, day-to-day ways or in some ultimate eschatological sense is the only antidote for the alienation and estrangement that we late moderns have come to accept as normative.
We know an aufhebung moment when we experience it as true Communion--the merging of two or more while retaining their individuality--and as true Beauty, which is the response of the soul when it cognizes the how the archetypes, i.e., the transcendent elements in the mind of God, manifest in a dynamic relationship with the particularity of individual beings in time and space. Sometimes these moments come spontaneously as gifts in little or big ways. At other times they are achieved, as, for instance, the becoming of an integrated self is achieved through a life lived faithfully in response to the myriad ways grace works in our lives. A satori moment is in this sense an expansive aufhebung moment.
'Unhappy consciousness' is the basic graceless condition for most of us, especially the educated late-moderns in North Atlantic societies who don't believe in such things. Our grace detector, in McG's terms, is very much a right-brain thing. Our only collective way out is 'renaissance', which would be to effect on a social-cultural level this aufhebung. This would in part require the re-integration of what most philosophy and science have abstracted from the original life world back into that life world. [See Note 2] This would provide a path toward far richer possibilities for genuine human flourishing than science by itself and its mechanomorphic imagination of the human can ever provide.
There has to be some catalytic moment that effects this. I'm not sure how this happens, but it would be similar to what Jaspers describes as what happened during the Axial Age, but in reverse. If the original Axial impulse was to dis-embed, the Axial impulse to come would require us to re-embed, without losing what was gained in the disembedding.
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Note 1: This idea of archetype and how it operates epistemologically needs more unpacking, but that's for another day. It's enough for our purposes here to say that there is something in the mind that correlates to something in the world, and one's coming into awareness of the extramental reality (percept) requires the stimulation or awakening of an intramental reality (concept). Both participate in an archetypal dimension that provides the transcendental foundation for the possibility of the world's intelligibility. We make progress in knowing more about the world by gradually awakening to it by activating slumbering, unconscious dimensions of our own minds. We call the awakening experience 'having an insight'. But there are insights, and there are INSIGHTS. As the mind awakens, it awakes to what was before unknown in the world in a reverberative dynamic that McGilchrist talks about elsewhere. Also, Coleridge's idea of primary imagination is helpful for how I think about this kind of 'neo-realism'.
Note 2: My problem with Nietzsche, Heidegger and even with McGilchrist [see "McGilchrist's Reading of Nietzsche's Misreading of Socrates"] is that they think of the post-Socratic philosophical traditions as a mistake, something that permanently damaged us as human beings because of the way that it created an alienation from Being. I see it as a necessary disembedding step in the evolution of consciousness. It's the first negation that enables to individual human being to step out from the collective. The task before us now is to find a way as individuals and as a collective cultural project to negate the negation, i.e., to reintegrate with the Living Real what we have come to know as disembedded, buffered selves. Science can't do this. It's an artistic, spiritual/moral project. This is the formula for Renaissance.