I agree with you. If you haven't already, look up Iain McGilchrist. A prof of English Lit, he wondered why analysis of poetry (or any art) never really captured its subjects. He suspected it had something to do with how the brain worked so he went to med school,becoming a neuroscientist specializing in the differences between the left an…
I agree with you. If you haven't already, look up Iain McGilchrist. A prof of English Lit, he wondered why analysis of poetry (or any art) never really captured its subjects. He suspected it had something to do with how the brain worked so he went to med school,becoming a neuroscientist specializing in the differences between the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. While the R hemisphere is aware of the L, the reverse is not the case.
Seems you pretty much get the right hemisphere stuff; understanding gestalts, metaphors and symbols, both/and, etc. The realm of the humanities. Also what quantum physicists have been telling us about reality for a hundred years now. The left? Linear thinking, rationalism, reductionism, etc. It wants certainty and control. Disliking ambiguity, it insists on either/or. Sounds like what's wrong in the western Euro/Euro descent world, doesn't it?
I also recommend //Voltaire's Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West)// by John Ralston Saul. Written in 1992, a lot of it is prescient.
Thank you for your comments and suggestions, Rafi Simonton.
I will look into Iain McGilchrist’s “The Matter with Things” after I have read Charles’ Taylor’s “Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment” (now sitting in my stack), which approaches the same dichotomy in terms of the opposition between rational discourse and poetry. “Voltaire’s Bastards” sounds even more interesting.
I agree with you. If you haven't already, look up Iain McGilchrist. A prof of English Lit, he wondered why analysis of poetry (or any art) never really captured its subjects. He suspected it had something to do with how the brain worked so he went to med school,becoming a neuroscientist specializing in the differences between the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. While the R hemisphere is aware of the L, the reverse is not the case.
Seems you pretty much get the right hemisphere stuff; understanding gestalts, metaphors and symbols, both/and, etc. The realm of the humanities. Also what quantum physicists have been telling us about reality for a hundred years now. The left? Linear thinking, rationalism, reductionism, etc. It wants certainty and control. Disliking ambiguity, it insists on either/or. Sounds like what's wrong in the western Euro/Euro descent world, doesn't it?
I also recommend //Voltaire's Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West)// by John Ralston Saul. Written in 1992, a lot of it is prescient.
Thank you for your comments and suggestions, Rafi Simonton.
I will look into Iain McGilchrist’s “The Matter with Things” after I have read Charles’ Taylor’s “Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment” (now sitting in my stack), which approaches the same dichotomy in terms of the opposition between rational discourse and poetry. “Voltaire’s Bastards” sounds even more interesting.