Retrospective 2024-34

This is a retrospective of week 34, 2024 (2024-08-19–2024-08-25).

I finished reading Karin Bojs’ book last week and have continued reflecting on its content. The question I’m struggling with is: Why is the left hemispere of the brain taking over again and again? We are so easily are caught up in the left hemisphere’s re-presentation of the world.

Iain McGilchrist explains:

…there is a continual tendency for the authenticity of right hemisphere ‘presencing’ to be transformed into an inauthentic ‘re-presenting’ in the left… [This]…may then, logically, lead in one of two directions.

In the first, we remain within the realm of homeostasis, of negative feedback… There is a natural reaction, resulting in a return to the authenticity of the right-hemisphere world itself. This, however, in turn is doomed soon to be co-opted by the left hemisphere and become inauthentic again.

In the second, however, there is not a return to the right-hemisphere world, but on the contrary a rejection of it… Instead…, there is a loss of homeostasis, and the result is positive feedback, whereby the left hemisphere’s values simply become further entrenched. This also helps to explain why the left hemisphere necessarily gains ground over time.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

What happened in Skåne some 8,000 years ago reminds me about what’s happening in our world today. It’s just that the Tågerup settlement in Skåne now is the entire Earth. It’s really an assault on life. Will we ever recover from the disease of value inversion?¹

Iain McGilchrist suggests:

A value can be calibrated cognitively, but it itself is first perceived pre-cognitively…, not as a cognitive elaboration.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

I believe that Iain McGilchrist’s pre-cognitively perceived values are what Robert S. Hartman calls intrinsic values, and that Hartman’s Formal Axiology can help us calibrate our values cognitively. We both need “see” the values and get the valuation right.² If you cannot “see” it, you cannot value it. And, if you don’t value it, you often cannot “see” it. It’s a double bind.

Notes:
1. Value inversion is an inversion of the hierarchy of value in Formal Axiology.
2. Systemic, extrinsic, and intrinsic are three value dimensions. They constitute a hierarchy of value where intrinsic value is more valuable than extrinsic value, and extrinsic value is more valuable than systemic value. The hierarchy of value is a valuation of value. See Robert S. Hartman, The Structure of Value: Foundations of Scientific Axiology , p. 114.

Related posts:
Retrospective 2024-33
Book Review: The Structure of Value