Problem This Solves
We tend to assume attention is passive -- that we simply register a pre-existing objective reality. This creates a false dichotomy: either the world is entirely "out there" (naive realism) or entirely "in here" (subjectivism). McGilchrist argues both positions end in the same isolation and that the truth lies in the participatory relationship between attention and reality.
Key Principle
Attention is not merely a cognitive function but a moral act that creates reality. It brings aspects of things into being while making others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way. There is a "responsive evocation" between the mind and the world -- each calls forth something in the other, like Escher's Drawing Hands, where neither comes first in a linear sense.
Good Examples
- Responsive evocation: Music arises from neither the piano nor the pianist's hands but from their coming together. Qualities like a mountain's greenness lie neither "in" the mountain nor "in" the mind, but come from between them.
- Phenomenological validation: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Scheler -- a naturally left-hemisphere enterprise (philosophy) -- have been compelled to validate the right hemisphere's world of embodiment, intersubjectivity, context, and implicit understanding.
- Heidegger's zuhanden vs. vorhanden: An entity experienced as part of a context of use (ready-to-hand, right hemisphere) versus an entity that stands out as an object of inspection (present-at-hand, left hemisphere). Both modes are dynamic -- aspects of things are "continually coming forward and retreating" between hemispheres.
- Scheler's Wertnehmung (value-ception): A pre-cognitive capacity for apprehending value, analogous to perceiving colour through sight. Value reaches us through feeling but is not itself merely a feeling. Value-ceptive knowledge of the whole governs understanding of the parts, not the reverse.
Bad Examples
- Paradox as left-hemisphere artifact: Classical paradoxes (sorites, Ship of Theseus, Zeno's) arise from applying left-hemisphere logic to reality better apprehended by the right hemisphere. The sorites paradox presupposes there must either be a heap or not -- an "either/or" framing the right hemisphere does not require.
- Instrumentalising values: Wisdom, humility, courage, and love vanish when pursued for their utility. The left hemisphere reduces higher values (justice, beauty, truth, the holy) to the lowest level of Scheler's hierarchy -- utility and pleasure.
- The "view from nowhere": Assuming a neutral, detached observer position is an empty pretence. The "view from somewhere" is the only view genuinely available.
- Gestell (framing): Heidegger's term for the process by which things become conceptualised rather than experienced -- "taken out of their living context, a bit like ripping the heart out of a living body."
Key Quotes
"Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way."
"We are transmitters, not originators."
"The left hemisphere is not impressed by empathy: its concern is with maximising gain for itself, and its driving value is utility."
"It is mutuality, not reciprocity, fellow-feeling, not calculation, which is both the motive and the reward for successful co-operation."
"The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture." (Heidegger)
"Paradox means, literally, a finding that is contrary to received opinion or expectation. That immediately alerts us, since the purveyor of received opinion and expectation is the left hemisphere."
Rules of Thumb
- Treat attention as consequential: what you attend to, and how, changes both the world and yourself.
- Approach knowledge as a participatory relationship rather than an extraction of data from an inert world.
- When encountering paradox, treat it as a signal that a different mode of attention may be needed -- more holistic, context-sensitive, process-oriented.
- Accept that truth is process and journey, never a final static object to be possessed. Truth as aletheia (unconcealing) always involves concealment as well as disclosure.
- The most important values cannot be instrumentalised; they arrive as by-products of a certain disposition toward the world, not as targets of wilful pursuit.
- Practise "negative capability" -- being "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" (Keats).
- Priming studies show that the stereotypes and images we attend to literally reshape our cognition and behaviour. Attend carefully to what you spend time looking at.
Related References
- [[core-framework]] -- The right-left-right cycle and why it matters
- [[two-hemispheres]] -- The specific characteristics that differentiate each hemisphere's attention
- [[language-metaphor-music]] -- How language and metaphor mediate the relationship between attention and reality