This is a retrospective of week 38, 2024 (2024-09-16–2024-09-22).
This week I’ve read Rupert Read’s review of The Matter with Things by Iain McGilchrist. Rupert Read writes (italics in the original):
For me, the great value of McGilchrist’s work consists in (i) critiquing the existing picture; especially, by way simply of showing that it is a picture; thus freeing us up from its unconscious ideological grip, and (ii) providing a kind of corrective to it. There is a correction of perspective – a movement to a less unhappy place – going on; not (necessarily) a new statement of absolute metaphysics.1
I think it is possible to see McGilchrist’s philosophy as a corrective to the metaphysic and epistemology by which we are possessed, more than as a metaphysic of its own which runs the risk then of setting up a new dogma.2
What’s missing in Rupert Read’s review is the risk he sees if we allow ourselves to separate and split off the hemispheres from each other. The following is from a conversation between Iain McGilchrist and Rupert Read on June 13, 2024 (my emphasis in italics).3
McGilchrist: I can see the hallmark of the left hemisphere at work and I can see the hallmark of the right hemispheres broader vision, and if we have to make decisions about which way we’re going to to lean, I think it’s wise to lean towards the one that tends to be more veridical, and I mean that in a very literal sense…
Read: Yes, although that only follows if we allow ourselves to separate and split off the hemispheres from each other.McGilchrist: My argument is the left hemisphere is a good servant, but not a good master. In our society it’s become the master.
Read: Yeah, but shouldn’t we always seek to remain clear on the point that the hemispheres are parts of a whole. If we don’t remain clear on that, then we always risk a sort of fallacy of decomposition or a homuncular fallacy.
The fallacy of decomposition (or division) is the assumption that the parts possess the characteristics of the whole. And the homunculus fallacy is the error of claiming to explain some phenomenon but failing to appreciate that one’s explanation merely re-introduces the same phenomenon that originally required an explanation.
Update 2024-09-30:
Related posts added.
Update 2024-09-26:
Last paragraph changed. Text removed and descriptions of the decomposition fallacy and the homunuculus fallacy added.
Notes:
1. Rupert Read, Critical Notice: Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, p. 7.
2. Ibid., p. 11.
3. Perspectiva, “Iain McGilchrist & Rupert Read in Conversation: Are We in a War Against Life?”, 20230613, YouTube Video, 1:44:30, https://youtu.be/WvZ9-Y8MR0o?t=1186
Related posts:
Retrospective 2024-39
Iain McGilchrist on Wholeness
Is the whole thing grounded?
Iain McGilchrist on Sledgehammering at Western Civilization
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