The Hemispheres: The Paths to Truth

PART TWO The Hemispheres the Paths to Truth

WHAT IS TRUTH?

Truth is a noun only to God; to men, truth is really best known as an adverb, 'truly'.

IN PART TWO, I WANT TO MOVE BEYOND CONSIDERATION OF THE DIFFERENT means made available by each hemisphere, to a consideration of the different paths human beings have adopted, in their approach to a truer understanding of the world we inhabit. I take it that these can be encompassed under the very broad, and to some extent overlapping, headings of science, reason, intuition and imagination. In the case of each path I will examine its claims to lead us towards truth, particularly in the light of what we know about the hemispheres.

In these times especially, truth is a pressing question for all of us; it is not enough to leave it to academic philosophers only. That's in part because our beliefs about it not only help make the world what it is, but make us who we are.

No single overarching theory of truth can encompass everything we would wish from such a theory, and indeed truth is never finally known; but that does not in any way invalidate the attempt. We can at least point to what is unlikely to be the case, and indicate a more reasonable path to pursue. And if our aim is to take a new look at what we mean by reality through the lens of the hemispheres, we must begin with the nature of truth;

for each hemisphere is likely to have a different approach to truth itself, as to everything else.

That does not, however, entail that each idea of truth is equally valid. Indeed, one of the conclusions of this chapter, and ultimately of this book, is that one hemisphere's idea of truth is likely to be more fruitful than the other's. As we have seen in Part ONE, the aspect of reality revealed by the left hemisphere must be contextualised by being taken up into the broader, and deeper, overarching vision available to the right hemisphere; alas, when the left hemisphere takes the lead, it leads us astray. As always, it is a good servant but a poor master.

But if reality is always mediated by the two hemispheres, how can one decide which is more veridical? It has even been put to me that one would need a third hemisphere, so to speak, to decide. This is a lovely idea, but of course why stop there? How would one decide that the third had got there, unless there were a fourth, and a fifth, and so on? But this is to make a basic mistake.

I believe that, despite our always contributing to the reality we experience, there is something apart from ourselves to which we can be true - that reality, in other words, is not purely made up by the brain. There is a relationship there - something to be true to. Assuming there is something there to know implies that some understandings will inevitably be better than others. And since each hemisphere provides a different understanding of it, it is perfectly coherent - and indeed necessary - to ask which is superior. The validity of the question is not affected by the observation that we can, and may be best to, use both. If a pilot is flying blind and has two navigation systems to rely on, each of which, though they differ, provides significant information, the criterion for having to prefer one over the other is clear: following which one is less likely to lead to a crash. Or again, as a piece of music cannot be experienced without a player, who inflects what it is that we hear, there is nonetheless such a thing as a better or worse performance, one that is more or less faithful to the potential enshrined in the piece - a potential that is, essentially, the piece of music, and becomes realised in every true performance. The arbiter, then, in either case, is the experience of the whole embodied person as he or she responds to a more, or less, accurate - a richer, or poorer - account of the world.

Furthermore, if one such account, rendering or assessment was better able, at the same time, to incorporate the best of what was seen by its counterpart, we should clearly prefer the one that saw the bigger, and better integrated, picture.

What would clearly be crazy would be to use the poorer system only: to admit only the poorer performance. That's the point at issue here. Because our current condition in the modern world, I suggest, is the consequence of doing just that.

EXPERIENCE: PRESENCING VS RE-PRESENTATION

The single most profound difference between the hemispheres, which I will have cause to return to repeatedly, is the distinction between the experience of something as it 'presences' to us in the right hemisphere, and as it is 're-presented' to us in the left. Just because we so rarely deal with the world nowadays except as it is represented, and because we are used to mistaking the representation for the thing itself, the full significance of this may not be apparent. Yet as our awareness moves from one to the other, an extraordinary transformation takes place, like moving from a photo album into the living space that was photographed. The two are not necessarily in conflict, but neither are they at all the same kind of experience.

The word 'presences' is important, but sounds unnatural. Unfortunately we don't have an available everyday term, or I'd use it. This in turn is fascinating: why don't we have a verb to describe the experience of an encounter with reality that strikes us at once as of fundamental importance? The experience not being part of the left hemisphere's repertoire, language has side-lined it. To 'presence' is not the same as to 'be present', which is too finished and inert, leaving little place for whatever is there to play an active part in the encounter; or, worse, to 'be presented', which is passive, and gets dangerously near to 'being re-presented'. The shift from the noun ('presence') to the verb form ('to presence') signals a shift from a passive state to an active process, from a thing to a dynamic, two-way relationship. Historically English-speaking philosophers have adopted the verb 'to presence' as a way of translating Heidegger's use of anwesen - though he, too, had to re-invent the verb from what, by his time, existed only as a noun. What I believe he meant by this word is something like to 'reveal or disclose itself to us', to 'come into being for us', with all the vital, pre-conceptual, active freshness that that suggests.

The whole of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of embodied understanding depends, in one way or another, on a fundamental distinction: that between two modes of encountering the world, which he calls 'je pense' and 'je peux'. The first deals with a mental representation in which we are quite separate from the world, and the question is, then, how our thoughts can be said to relate to that world; the second is an intuitive embodied awareness of the world in which we are already fully situated, a field of potential for interaction, something that comes prior to any conscious re-presentation. I believe he was articulating the intuited difference - as have many philosophers, including Bergson, Peirce, James, Heidegger, Scheler, Sartre and Wittgenstein - between the world as understood by the left and right hemisphere, respectively.

Presencing is what the world does less of as we grow older. Wordsworth, the power of whose poetry is, precisely, that it causes the world to presence to us once more, famously lamented that 'shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy'. The effect is accentuated in an era where so much of our experience comes already conceptualised in such a way that we are shielded from its awe-inspiring reality. So often now it comes in virtual form, second-hand, and pre-digested. Though she was writing more than a hundred years ago, Evelyn Underhill already saw the troubling modern submission to the world of representation, and expressed it, I think, brilliantly:

It is notorious that the operations of the average human consciousness unite the self, not with things as they really are, but with images, notions, and aspects of things. The verb 'to be', which he uses so lightly, does not truly apply to any of the objects amongst which the practical man supposes himself to dwell. For him, the hare of Reality is always ready-jugged: he conceives not the living, lovely, wild, swift-moving creature which has been sacrificed in order that he may be fed on the deplorable dish which he calls 'things as they really are'. So complete, indeed, is the separation of his consciousness from the facts of being, that he feels no sense of loss. He is happy enough 'understanding', garnishing, assimilating the carcass from which the principle of life and growth has been ejected.

One example of this process in action, and one which has already been, and will continue to be, important for the argument of this book, concerns our relation to space and time. The process of re-presentation, of (literally) striving to make something present again as it were 'after the event', ignores the significance of time. This is already a considerable step away from reality. When we think about time, only a massive effort of will can prevent us substituting a one-dimensional representation - time as a line in space - for the full experience that is understood only through our embodied intercourse with the world as it presences. Space, too, is reduced to the world's two-dimensional representation - as if projected on a screen. We are so used to giving in to this virtualising and distorting process that we don't even notice that we are doing it. Since space and time are where we live, that is a pretty important fact: I will have much more to say about that in Part three of the book.

If the hemispheres generate different worlds, one that broadly presences and one that is effectively represented, this has consequences for the attempt to make sense of the world, otherwise known as philosophy.