The right hemisphere sees metaphor as the means of keeping language linked to the experienced world, while language seems separate from the world for the left hemisphere
Every word is metaphorically linked to the something in the lived world, andAll denotation and abstraction has its metaphorical roots in the lived world. Metaphor embodies thought and places it in a living context. These three areas of difference between the cerebral hemispheres—metaphor, context (the right hemisphere sees things in their context, and The left hemisphere sees things abstracted, isolated, and stripped of context) and the body—are all interpenetrated one with another. Once again it is the right hemisphere, in its concern for the immediacy of experience (novelty is handled by the right hemisphere, and is transferred to the left hemisphere as it becomes familiar), that is more densely interconnected with and involved in the body (The right hemisphere is much more involved in emotions and bodily experience than the left hemisphere), the ground of that experience. Where the right hemisphere can see that metaphor is the only way to preserve the link between language and the world it refers to, the left hemisphere sees it either as a lie (As Locke, expressing Enlightenment disdain, called metaphors ‘perfect cheats’) or as a distracting ornament; and connotation as a limitation, since in the interests of certainty the left hemisphere (the narrowness of certainty appeals to the left hemisphere) prefers single meanings.
The left hemisphere sees language as separate from experience, and identical with reality
For the left hemisphere, consequently, language can come to seem cut off from the world, to be itself the reality; and reality as a result seem made up of bits strung together, as the words are strung together by syntax. The left hemisphere is bound to see language like this because it understands things by starting from the observation of ‘pieces’ and builds them up to make something (the right hemisphere sees the whole first, and then the left hemisphere separates it into parts), and this is the only route it has to understanding both the world and language itself, the medium with which it does its understanding, including its understanding of language.
References
- McgilChrist, Iain. (2010). The Master and His Emissary CHAPTER 3 LANGUAGE TRUTH AND MUSIC (Epub p. 241). London, UK: Yale University Press.
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Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Neuroscience / Psychology / Neuropsychology Status:☀️