For those who haven’t been following closely, I will repost the table containing the several behaviors associated with the right-hemisphere. I have rearranged the rows in the order in which I discuss them in this series of blog posts. * Russell Ackoff’s ways to deal with messes. Right-hemisphere-dominant behavior types Caring is an especially important category because it has existential implications and is also partly constitutive of flourishing. Caring acts incorporate inputs from the contextual world presented to the right hemisphere. Empathy, sensing what is going on with another person and acting in accordance, guides much caring. But not all… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Myth of The Self (1)
I have just completed a course at the lifelong learning institution I belong to about three novels of displacement. Basically they are about how people respond after suddenly being transported from a world in which they have been acculturated to a completely different one. One was The Hunger Angel, by Herta Müller, a Nobel laureate in literature. It’s about an ethnic-German Romanian man who is removed to a Russian labor camp during WWII, and describes how he survives there during the 4-5 years he is interned. Another is Primo Levi’s, Survival in Auschwitz, an actual recounting of his experience. Other… Read More
Continue ReadingFraternal Twins Part 5
The Real Me The last few posts have been concerned with the routine ways we behave within and without institutions when our actions are controlled by the left brain. In this post, I shift to the other side as the master, which change also affects the basic nature of our behaviors. Again I include the table of behaviors for comparison purposes. I am using the word, real, in the sense of the existential use of authentic, but as the table and this series of posts have indicated our various modes of behavior suggest that we have multiple personas, each related… Read More
Continue ReadingFraternal Twins Part 4
Good and Bad Habits As I have been doing, I will start by adding the table I have been using to show the principal forms of human behaviors. Basic Behavioral Mode Master Hemisphere External World Mode of Being Behavioral Type Left Institutional Undifferentiated Routine Left Familiar Inauthentic Habit Right Familiar Authentic Caring Neither Anywhere Occurent Curiosity–Learning Neither Laboratory Occurent Scientific Study Right Anywhere Pure Occurent Wonder I have discussed the first line, focused on routine behaviors within institutions, in the previous two blogs. Today’s discussion centers on a similar behavioral pattern, habits, that is, repetitious actions in familiar situations, but… Read More
Continue ReadingFraternal Twins (Part 3)
Routines, Institutions, and Unintended Consequences Much of our time is spent acting within institutions without even thinking that our actions are being driven by a lot of rules and resources. From the moment of our birth, we are embedded within the structures of many intersecting institutions, and much of our time awake we act according to the peculiar structures that constitute them. The first of such institutions virtually all of us encounter from birth onward is family. Institutions are human creations. We create them by establishing their structure and keep them in place by re-embedding the structure through the actions… Read More
Continue ReadingFraternal Twins (Part 2)
Different Worlds—Different Human Beings Humans are different from all other species in many ways, but one that has been singled out is that we seek meaning. A corollary to this is Socrates’s warning that, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Heidegger wrote that only human beings make an issue about being, itself. Only we ask questions about what it is to be? This could be interpreted, again, as seeking the meaning of existence. We are also unique in our ability to create and use language in our quest for meaning and generally to express our intentions and feelings, and… Read More
Continue ReadingFraternal Twins (Part 1): Introduction (Reposted May 10)
Fraternal Twins Are you aware that there are two of you? Two different people live inside your skin. One, cool and controlling – rational, too; T’other, empathetic, unlike its twin. The left brain offers a world, abstracted, Defined by dead reductions from the past. Because all meaning has been subtracted, You’re run by rules memory has amassed. The right brain connects you to the present Where the real you acts in the here and now. Unlike the rule-bound left, you can invent; Now, the creative, caring you can show. Our modern culture has suppressed the right. That means there’s little… Read More
Continue ReadingOnly Connect
The title of this post, is the epigraph of E. M. Forster’s novel, Howard’s End. Forster’s novel is all about relationships, internal and external. Margaret Schegel, the older of the two sisters around whom the story unfolds, becomes impassioned about the phrase, “only connect.” The phrase conveys two meanings in the novel. The first relates to two internalized, opposing forces that battle each other in an individual persona. Margaret refers to them as the beast and the monk or to the prose and the passion. The second is an imperative to make and nurture personal relationships. Forster has caught the… Read More
Continue ReadingFinding McGilchrist in Aristotle’s Virtues
“According to Diogenes society was an artificial contrivance set up by human beings which did not accord well with truth or virtue and could not in any way make someone a good and decent human being; and so follows the famous story of Diogenes holding the light up to the faces of passers-by in the market place looking for an honest man or a true human being. Everyone, he claimed, was trapped in this make-believe world which they believed was reality and, because of this, people were living in a kind of dream state.” (From the Encyclopedia of Ancient… Read More
Continue ReadingOur Better Angels
A friend put me onto an article by Win McCormack in the New Republic discussing possible connections between group or societal behaviors and human nature. The article is built around a book, titled A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation, by the philosophy, Peter Singer. The gist is about the age-old conflict between two poles of human nature: self-interest and altruism or communitarianism. The article pivots around the idea that both are a part of human nature, based on E. O. Wilson’s theory of (Darwinian) group selection as the inherent on social species. Further, how is this “new” idea going… Read More
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