We need to be able to bring the ideas we create through detached thought back into lived experience
Clearly we have to inhabit the world of immediate bodily experience, the actual terrain in which we live, and where our engagement with the world takes place alongside our fellow human beings, and we need to inhabit it fully. Yet at the same time we need to rise above the landscape in which we move, so that we can see what one might call the territory, which the frontal lobes allow us to do. To understand the landscape we need both to go out into the felt, lived world of experience as far as possible, along what one might think of as the horizontal axis, but also to rise above it, on the vertical axis. To live headlong, at ground level, without being able to pause (stand outside the immediate push of time) and rise (in space) is to be like an animal; yet to float off up into the air is not to live at all—just to be a detached observing eye. One needs to bring what they have learned from their ascent back into the world where life is going on, and incorporate it in such a way that it enriches experience and enables more of whatever it is that discloses itself to us to do just that. But it is still only on the ground that it will do so, not up in the air.
References
- Mcgilchrist, Iain. (2010). The Master and His Emissary Chapter 1 Asymmetry and the Brain (p. 49). London, UK: Yale University Press.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Philosophy / Biology / Neuroscience Status:☀️