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relationship between dominance of the left brain hemisphere and a narrow definition of philosophy, and between dominance of the right brain hemisphere and a broad definition of philosophy. The extreme manifestation of left-brain-dominated philosophy is maximum logical precision with minimum relevance to everyday life. The extreme manifestation of right-brain-dominated philosophy is minimum logical precision with maximum relevance to everyday life. At worst, pure left-brain-dominated philosophy tends towards over-specialization and sterile logic-chopping, while pure right-braindominated philosophy tends towards fuzzy and irrational speculation. This suggests that, ideally, philosophy should aim to achieve a delicate balance between the two extremes, with enough left-brain philosophy to clarify the issues under consideration, and enough right-brain philosophy to keep sight of what the important issues are.
earlier Tractatus(1922), his focus was on clarity and certainty, but he adopted an approach more open to ambiguity in his later Philosophical Investigations (1953). William James noted in 1907 that the main argument in philosophy at that time was between tough-minded materialistic atheists and tender-minded believers in God and free will. He attributed the conflict to differences in temperament, and argued that his philosophy of Pragmatism could mediate between the intellectual demands of the two types of personality. Brilliant as James was, few philosophers have been satisfied with his explanation of philosophical differences in terms of personality traits, and even sympathetic followers have not succeeded in explaining why philosophers tend to emphasize one of these two basic types of philosophical temperament over the other. The fault line that Ive identified between those who seek the clear light of certainty and those who seek wisdom within murky ambiguity, seems to be even deeper and more perennial than James tough/tender dichotomy. Plato and Descartes were both tender-minded in James sense, in that they believed in a spiritual dimension of reality; but they were more like the tough-minded logical positivists or even the New Atheists in their certainty that they found the truth. Nietzsche was more tough-minded than James on the God question, but both belong to the tradition of Heraclitus rather than that of Parmenides in their suspicion of certainties and their emphasis on the conflictridden nature of reality.
Divided Opinions
I had no idea how to answer the question why philosophy has always been divided between the lovers of clarity and certainty and the lovers of ambiguity and generality, until I read Iain McGilchrists The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World (2009). McGilchrist reminds us that we have evolved asymmetrical brains, the right and the left hemispheres, separated (as well as connected) by the corpus callosum, such that these two parts of our brains experience the world in very different yet equally necessary ways. Evolution has kept the two apart because they have a tendency to interfere with one another in their operations. Yet this theory offers such an elegant and persuasive answer to my question that it struck me with the force of a revelation: philosophy is two-sided because the brain is two-sided. McGilchrist cites an enormous body of research showing that in birds and animals the left hemisphere provides focused attention, while the right hemisphere provides a broader perspective. For instance, birds use the right eye (left hemisphere) to pick out seed, and the left eye (right hemisphere) to watch out for predators. He argues that although human brains are vastly more complicated than bird brains, the separation of our brain hemispheres for different purposes is analogous: the left hemisphere demands precision and certainty, using literal language to represent, categorize, and manipulate the world; while the right hemisphere is attuned to a broader context which enables it to empathize, to appreciate the uniqueness of individuals, and to understand ambiguity, metaphor, and humor. Comparable in its scope to Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), McGilchrists The Master and his Emissary comes to almost exactly the opposite conclusion. Instead of Jaynes hypothesis of a breakdown of the division in the mind in ancient Greece, McGilchrist
thinks what actually happened in ancient history was a relative separation of the two brain hemispheres, which caused the voices of the gods to seem alien and uncanny instead of part of a unified consciousness. Contemporary higher education tends to produce specialists rather than generalists, but McGilchrist is an exception to the rule. His wide-ranging synthesis of ideas from neuroscience, psychiatry, history, literature, and art, could only have been written by a kind of Renaissance man. A former English don at Oxford, he wrote Against Criticism (1982), which tackled the mind/body problem in the context of literature. Dissatisfied with contemporary philosophys disembodied approach to the issue, he went on to study medicine, neurology, and psychiatry which he regards as neither a science nor an art, but a branch of philosophy.
only certainty, it seems to me, is that those who believe they are certainly right are certainly wrong.