Abstract
Recent science estimates that visible matter constitutes only about 4 % of the known universe, while 73 % is composed of invisible or “dark” energy, a force that makes possible the existence of the visible universe. This paper posits that in the universe of human relations and literature, attention can be considered a comparable form of invisible but immensely influential creative energy. Scientific sources include Lisa Randall’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World (2011), and Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009). McGilchrist’s concern that modern culture is being ever more dominated by the power and control-seeking left hemisphere of the brain, as opposed to the empathic, holistic and judicious right hemisphere, is applied to two recent works of literature. Alice McDermott’s short story “Someone” is seen as illustrating the hurtful effects of status seeking and uncaring attention in a failed romantic relationship. When the victim of this treatment looks up into the sky, a dramatic opening occurs in her consciousness, switching from what McGilchrist would call a left-hemispheric focus of attention, that she has been rejected as physically imperfect, to a right-hemispheric focus that is nonverbal and integrative. This depicts a human drama of the skies: between the mind’s scientific, goal-oriented, detail-conscious form of reasoning—what McGilchrist’s associates with our world as conceived by the brain’s left hemispheric “emissary,” as it competes and conflicts with the holistic, compassionate, and metaphoric capacity of the brain’s right hemisphere. The discussion then moves to a science fiction piece by Carol Emshwiller, “Desert Creature.” This story presents a more explicit drama between right-hemisphere-motivated humans of contemporary society and questionably more evolved humanoid extraterrestrials as harbingers of the left-hemisphere-driven beings we might well become. The paper argues for a renewed focus on the quality of attention as the ground of moral awareness, in works of the imagination and in life as we help create it.
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Notes
- 1.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, (New York: Yale UP, 2009), electronic version, pp. 45–46. Pagination henceforth is aligned with the print edition.
- 2.
Lisa Randall, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2011), electronic version, p. 115. Henceforth pagination will be from the e-book, which is unfortunately not aligned with the print edition.
- 3.
On July 4, 2012, the director general of CERN, the research consortium responsible for the LHC, announced the discovery of what appears to be evidence of the Higgs boson particle. Since absolute certainty is yet to be established, it is now being called a Higgs-like particle, although physicists are already celebrating an historic milestone. See Dennis Overbye, “Physicists Find Elusive Particle Seen as Key to Universe,” The New York Times, 7/4/2012.
- 4.
McGilchrist mentions that when stroke damages the right hemisphere, the patient cannot carry out an action, even with no impairment of sensory or motor function, because the right hemisphere gives one the sense of the whole, relating visceral and emotional experience to what we know about the world. If damage is to the left hemisphere, however, patients usually have problems with how to use objects (193).
- 5.
Alice McDermott, “Someone”, The New Yorker, 1/30/2012, which was expanded and published as the novel Someone (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2013)
- 6.
Carol Emshwiller, Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories (Brooklyn, NY: Small Beer Press, 2002), 193–210.
- 7.
My emphasis.
- 8.
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
- 9.
McGilchrist’s emphasis; herewith his further emphases will not be noted.
- 10.
Attributed to Susan Coulson, the author’s daughter.
- 11.
McGilchrist writes that modernity has been marked by “a process of social disintegration…clearly derived from the effects of the Industrial Revolution” producing “an aggregation of essentially atomistic individuals. The drift from rural to urban life…led to a breakdown of familiar social orders, and the loss of a sense of belonging, with far-reaching effects on the life of the mind. The advance of scientific materialism…and of bureaucracy…helped to produce what Weber called the disenchanted world. Capitalism and consumerism, ways of conceiving human relationships based on little more than utility, greed, and competition, came to supplant those based on felt connection and cultural continuity. …And there were worrying signs that the combination of an adulation of power and material force with the desire, and power (through technological advance) to subjugate, would lead to the abandonment of any form of democracy, and the rise of totalitarianism” (495).
- 12.
Regarding post-modernism, McGilchrist opines: “With post-modernism, meaning drains away. Art becomes a game in which the emptiness of a wholly insubstantial world, in which there is nothing beyond the set of terms we have in vain used to ‘construct’ meaning, is allowed to speak for its own vacuity [as in deconstructionism]. The set of terms are now seen simply to refer to themselves. They have lost transparency; and all conditions that would yield meaning have been ironised out of existence. …If words have no referent, we are all absolutely impotent to say or do anything that has meaning, raising the question why the [post-modern, deconstructionist] critic wrote in the first place. …The author becomes a sort of puppet, whose strings are pulled by social forces behind the scenes. He is ‘placed’. Meanwhile the work of art gets to be ‘decoded’, as if the value of the work lay in some message of which the author was once more unaware, but which we in our superiority can now reveal” (538–539).
- 13.
McGilchrist refers to the rise of scientific materialism as the Second Reformation, based on “a view that science is the only foundation for knowing and understanding the world” (487). “By driving a wedge between the realms of sensory experience and the realm of ideas [and spiritual beliefs], the whole realm of ideas became suspect. Ideas were what led us to believe that things we could not see with our eyes and touch with our hands – like God – were real, whereas they must, so went the logic, be our own inventions. Worse, endowed with such independent existence, they kept us in a state of indignity and humility. The denial of the divine was as important to them as the elevation of matter.” So the materialists made a super-human authority, a new divinity, out of science. “Both scientific materialism and the dialectical materialism of Engels and Marx emerged from the view that science was the only authority” (488). “At the same time, science preached that it was exempt from the historicisation or contextualization that was being used to undermine Christianity in the nineteenth century, a way of enabling science to criticize all other accounts of the world and of human experience while rendering itself immune to criticism. This doctrine of the infallibility of science is also a result of the Enlightenment failure to understand the contextual nature of all thought….” (490).
Although the above terms are familiar to most readers, I offer these summaries of McGilchrist’s views to indicate the depth of the connections he makes with them as produced by the brain’s left-hemisphere-directed manner of perceiving the world.
- 14.
A brief example: “Luther perceived that the inner and outer realms,…the realm of the mind/soul and that of the body,…needed to be as one, otherwise the outward show had nothing to say about the inward condition. …But his followers took it to mean that the outer world was in itself empty, and that therefore the only authenticity lay in the inner world alone. …The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. As Schleiermacher put it, the Reformation and the Enlightenment have this in common, that ‘everything mysterious and marvelous is proscribed. Imagination is not to be filled with airy images’” (399). “In fact the supposed ‘idolators’ never had believed they were worshipping statues – that self-serving fiction existed only in the minds of the iconoclasts, who could not understand that divinity could find its place between one ‘thing’ (the statue) and another (the beholder), rather than having to reside, fixed, in the ‘thing’ itself. Luther himself said as much: ‘I believe that there is no person, or certainly very few, who does not understand that the crucifix that stands over there is not my God – for my God is in Heaven – but rather only a sign.’” (400)
“These different ways of looking at the world – ‘proclamation’ of the word versus ‘manifestation’ of the divine – are aligned with hemisphere differences. As Ricoeur demonstrated, the ‘emergence of the word from the numinous is…the primordial trait that differentiates proclamation from manifestation.’ For ‘emergence of the word from the numinous’ read the triumph of the left hemisphere over the right” (405).
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Painter, R.M. (2015). Master and Emissary: The Brain’s Drama of Dark Energy. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) From Sky and Earth to Metaphysics. Analecta Husserliana, vol 115. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9063-5_13
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