Transcript
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Sometimes you'll be chatting with friends about marriage and they'll be considering whether they're going to marry someone. And when you ask why, they're always looking for these reasons that justify their position, but ultimately at the final moment, it is a leap of faith because you can never absolutely know that it's a wise or an unwise decision. And for me, this also relates to a belief in God and also to how the two hemispheres believe in things. And that Kikagad has a good saying about good faith and bad faith, which for me, when I read it, seemed to be precisely that the left hemisphere's faith versus the right hemisphere's faith. And what he seems to be saying is that if we take, say, the idea of believing that one will die if one is a human, then bad faith would be, okay, I am a human, humans die, therefore I will die.
[01:05]
Whereas good faith would be to experience death, not as an individual because then you would then be dead, but to have seen death and to have it realize that everything decays and from that have an appreciation that one will die. Well,
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There's an awful lot there to think about. What I'd quite like to start from is your idea of the friend who talks about whether to marry, because the word truth is related to trust and indeed it's also behind the idea of the very old fashioned expression of plighting your troph, being betrothed to somebody. It has the same meaning as truth. In other words, you are trusting that person. Truth and trust are from the same root. So you can't be certain of something. You have to make ... The only expression we have is this leap of faith. I think the word leap is perhaps a little extreme and could be off putting to people, but there is no safe path to a decision. You can't say, well, because of this, I know that that and therefore in life, the more you look at things, the more they ramify, the less certain they are.
[02:20]
And so you can't actually have this. Never have this certainty. So in a way, we are always placing our trust in a certain point of view. We come back there to Escher's hands that in this circle, there isn't a place in which you can reliably start. There is a circle and at some point you have to jump into it. You have to decide what it is that you're going to trust. So that I like.
[02:49]
To think about the differences between the way that the hemisphere is believe in belief. I would say the left hemisphere sees it as a kind of approach to certainty and believing is just a weaker form of knowing. In other words, we say, I believe the train leaves at 12 minutes past six, meaning I think I know, but I'm not entirely certain. Whereas we were certain we'd just say I know. But the right hemisphere sees that like everything, it's a matter of a relationship between the person who's doing the knowing and the other element. So when you say that you believe in something, it's not that you could know this, but at the moment you haven't got enough information. What it means is that you're trusting in this, not blindly, but through the accumulation of thought and experience, that on the whole, you think this is worth aligning your goals, your values with.
[03:53]
It's a dispositional thing, not a propositional thing.
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And we have to take those dispositions because otherwise it would be- Well,
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We have to take a disposition.
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And being extremely stressful
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Or
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Deal.
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Well, I mean, not taking a disposition is also a disposition. It's saying a disposition in which I don't take any particular disposition. First of all, you will be deceiving yourself because that is a disposition, and in any case you probably have others. But if you didn't have any disposition towards the world, again, you'd be back in the situation where there was no truth. I'd just like to point out about the idea of there being no truth is that that is itself a truth statement. It means that there is no truth is to the speaker truer than the statement that there is truth. So it's still a truth statement. We can't get away from truth.
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Yeah. And then that for me springs to mind the idea of religion, of science as a religion. Those some who say, "I don't believe in God. I believe in science." But in fact, to believe in science is no different and believing in God from the sense of it's still a belief.
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Well, it's still a belief. And I suppose the person saying, "I believe in science, not in God is that they believe that there is very good evidence, which there is, that science reveals truths about the world. It certainly does. What they don't understand is that it can also, as all truths do, rule out the possibility of seeing other truths. This is a rather important point that because there is no one way of looking at the world, but we have to choose a way, unless we're very careful, that espousal of that truth can rule out the possibility of other truths. And there are many people who can see that it is perfectly possible to believe in the truth of there being a divine realm. And nonetheless, to be committed to the idea that science is a very important part of how we come to understand the world.
[05:55]
We don't have to follow one simple way of thinking. In fact, if you do, you will end up in delusions. One of the interesting things is that reason ... We think of a mad person as somebody who's lost their reason. That's what people used to say anyway. But as has been pointed out, when a person is, as we say, mad, it's not that they've lost their reason. It's often that they have a hypertrophy of reason. They've become overrational. And the perfect example of this is schizophrenia is a case of people who rationalize in areas where in order to understand the world, you would have to stop adopting that particular entirely rationalizing point of view.
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And I can imagine that's a very stressful position to be in. This is all very interesting. I'm wondering where to go next.
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Well, let me just think. Yeah, perhaps we shouldn't go into talking about God too much.
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I thought we could chat a bit about Plato's forms.
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So ... Gosh, it's so difficult because it could go so many different
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Ways. Yeah. I'm trying to ... Yeah. The only thing is, are you comfortable sitting in this one of these chats?
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I'm very happy like this. Are you
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Happy? Well, it's just that this chair is very creaky, but if you're very comfortable in that chair, I don't want to take you away from your chair. I could sit on this one, I suppose. I don't know. It's just ... Yes. Because the ...
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Yes.
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But perhaps we could just try and ... It's difficult. I do think the Plato's forms is a really important idea to force.
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Well, the thing is I've changed my mind about that.
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Right. Okay.
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I don't mind changing my mind.
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Yes, yes. Well, perhaps you could begin by just elaborating on broadly what position you feel Plato held with respect to what he meant by the forms.
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The difficulty is I don't know what Plato meant by forms. I'm inclined to believe that Plato is much less consistent than people make him out to be. He's known for being consistent in the way in which he sort of builds up to a truth, but in fact, he's full of contradictions. One is, for example, that he believed, and there are a number of places in his dialogues where he believes that myths are sometimes helpful, but usually rather treacherous, and yet he himself uses myths all the time, the ring of Gaiji's, the cave, Plato's image of the cave, and so forth. So equally the forms I think were probably to him something intuitive, difficult to convey, seemed to come to him as very moving experiences, and yet the way in which they are absorbed into his philosophy is almost as something which is beyond our experience and is worryingly like a realm of reality that is entirely separate from the one that we live in and experience.
[09:57]
Here we come back to the idea that there is somewhere a reality which is disembodied and eternal, whereas we live in a world which is embodied and bounded by time. And it's very attractive, this idea that there is this realm where things are abstract and eternal, but I don't believe it's true. And I believe it started us on the path. And of course, here I'm mouthing a platitude really that has been voiced by many, many people that Plato derailed the history of Western thought by overemphasis on the idea that reason that one's intuitions and passions were mistaken and that reason alone would be the guide to truth.
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There's a nice story of him talking about the stars and saying how they are indisputably beautiful, but they're nothing in comparison to the idea of beautiful stars which exists above and beyond.
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And he actually said at a certain stage that astronomy should not be done by looking at the stars that we can see, but was something in a realm that was entirely virtual, if you like. I don't like to general ... I mean, Plato was obviously a hugely great mind and well, Socrates certainly was, and what we know is only transferred to us via Plato. And it's very hard to be sure that one is grasping what he said, and I think he contradicts himself quite a lot, but the impact of Plato has been to elevate a world where things are not objects of experience or not even subjects of experience, but are something existing in an eternal realm that is outside and that all that we see is some kind of simulacrum. And that is precisely the way the left hemisphere sees the world, because it sees only a representation.
[12:05]
In fact, it's constructing a representation all the time. And I think the idea of the subject object divide comes from the elaboration of the left hemisphere's self-consciousness, whereby it sees a representation and then wonders, how does this relate to something else out there? Whereas the right hemisphere is always in touch, as it were, is what it is out there. It's not in a hermetically sealed box trying to make sense of data that are fed in from somewhere out there. It's actually immediately encountering what is out there. So what I'm saying is that because we are so used to the left hemisphere's tape, we think the subject object divide must be there and we therefore construe that it's our job to somehow reach this something out there. And if we can't, then anything goes because it's all just whatever we can make up inside this sealed cabinet, whereas the right hemisphere, constructing reality, co-constructing it with the experience of whatever it is that is other than ourselves, is constantly in the business of encountering reality.
[13:16]
And for it, there isn't a subject object divide because the whole thing is experienced.
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And of course then the boundaries of self blur because then for the right hemisphere, because it feels this connection to what is the entire world. Whereas if there's this subject, object, then the self is something that can be removed, put under a microscope and understood in that way.
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Well, you've just touched on a very important area, but it's more complicated.
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I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm just trying to ...
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Yes.
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Because with Plato is ... I do find it really attractive trying to think, right, maybe there is this color red that exists beyond this world, and therefore it's an eternal red. What's wrong with the red that exists in this world? I'd love the red in this world, and I think that's another point to be made, is that if there's this eternal thing, then suddenly you start focusing on reason to understand what that eternal thing is. Whereas if it's something that's lived, then you're looking more to your senses because the color red can't be understood by reason.
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No, it can't. But why can what we experience not be part of something that is greater, bigger, and beyond my experiencing of it, but there's nothing unreal about my experiencing of it. Do you see what I'm saying? So lots of people can have a real ... I mean, it comes back to the mountain. We can all have real experiences of the mountain, and there's a core to that. We all see something that we could recognize in one another's descriptions, but the mountain ... I'm not saying the mountain's inside my mind and I made it up and it's something that I have co-constructed with whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves. I mean, you're a solopsist, you believe nothing exists apart from yourself, in which case, as far as what I'm saying now, you don't exist, this room doesn't exist, and I'm just happily fantasizing until somebody pulls the plaque and the fantasy stops.
[15:40]
I don't believe in that at all. I believe that our encounters with reality are perfectly truthful. They are real. They're just not the whole story. So there's a difference between the idea that there is a whole story somewhere, and we are wholly ignorant of it, and we have to ... Falling short is not that there's something out there that we can't get to from in here. The falling short is that we always can find our own point of view. It's just that there will be many, many, many possible takes on it and many, many possible experiences of red. So when you say about the self, interestingly, I would take the opposite point of view that it's the right hemisphere that underlies the coherence of the self, because it's the right hemisphere that experiences the continuity of experience, sees that this is not just little time slices or little fragments of data, but is actually something living which is continuous and can't be divided up into segments, and which actually does have a coherence.
[16:50]
It is like a narrative that unfolds. And when I say a narrative, of course, I don't mean that it's untrue. The trouble is that our language is peppered with words that import left hemisphere meanings that they're untrue, like the word fable, which just used to mean something spoken. The word myth was no suggestion that it was false. That's a very new idea.
[17:16]
I've derailed myself here. What I'm suggesting is that it is the right hemisphere that gives us our sense of the self as distinct from others. And remember that it's very important that there are these two aspects. For something to be fully created and fulfilled, it has to become fully itself, as well as not separate from everything else. So there needs to be this, if you like, semi-permeable relationship between the individual entity and the rest of the cosmos.
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For me, the point it's bringing to mind is either or versus both and.
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Exactly. And what you're implying there is that it's the left hemisphere says it's got to be either or the right hemorrhage says, but it might be both hand. Yeah.
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In the sense that there is this something outside of us that helps create who we are.
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And we help create what it is. We are co-creating.
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So there's this relationship and there is certainly an either or in that sense, but there's also a unity because we are both part of the same process.
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Exactly. And what interesting happens when people have damage to the right hemisphere or in schizophrenia, which I consider to be a right hemisphere deficit condition in which the left hemisphere has gone into a sort of unbridled overdrive, is that you lose the sense of the self. So in this left hemisphere where people confuse parts of themselves with parts of other people, and that is not a sort of wisdom. It's a kind of terrible disability. And in order for things to become richly one, the individuals, and we are all and everything is an individual, the tree is an individual as well as you being an individual, the stream that flows past this house is an individual. All these things are individuals and they're individually themselves, but they are also seamlessly interconnected. And that is the difficult idea to get across. The right hemisphere preserves both the uniqueness of the individual, a very important point, the fulfilling of that enriches the whole to which it belongs.
[19:45]
We're sort of left with a couple of ... Let's think about it in terms of a society, because I think it's rather illustrative. The left hemisphere would have two possible alternatives. One is a Soviet oppressive state in which everybody, as much as possible, it has no identity, but is simply merged in the overall mass of the state. On the other hand, you might have rampant capitalism in which everybody is pursuing their own individual need, and we're atimistic. Now these two look like alternatives. They're the two prophet by a left hemisphere take on the world, but they're not actually alternatives at all. They're both disrespecting the idea of the whole and disrespecting the idea of the individual. The individual is only fulfilled through emerging from a whole and returning what it produces to that whole. We're all produced by the history of the culture, the civilization, the community, out of which we arise and to which we belong, and we give back the fulfillment of our personal individuality to that hole.
[20:55]
And these things shouldn't be in competition. The fulfillment of the individual is the same as the fulfillment of a whole society. It's a matter of harmony and balance as it is with everything in life, as I constantly say, there is nothing that in itself is so good that just having more and more of it makes it better. And that's true about togetherness and individuation, that they both need to be maximally fulfilled, and that's not a contradiction. There are societies, one could say Renaissance Italy might be one in which there were a lot of individual egos, but there was a collective movement and a cohesion to the thought of that society that was very rich. You could say the same about ancient Athens or the ancient Greek world, that there were a lot of very distinct individuals, but what they contributed was different facets of a coherent whole.
[21:59]
The difficulty now is that we seem to veer between societies which brutalize individuals by submitting them to the tyrannical will of a state, or we have a completely senseless, rampant struggle between individuals in which they are exhausted and nothing good comes out of it, except the dispoliation of the environment and the destruction of social cohesion. So the point that I'm making is absolutely crucial to the health of the society.
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It's not that you then have the individual versus the whole and choose a midpoint, but instead you're striving for individualism at the same time as striving for a whole.
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Exactly. It's not that you're saying to people who are highly individual and eccentric and creative, you must be a little bit more like everyone else. And then we have a midpoint here. No, you want them to be maximally that, but you want whatever it is they're doing to be maximally incorporated by everyone else into what your community or group are becoming.