3 e 4. Hemisférios cerebrais e tipos de atenção

Iain McGilchrist, The master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the Western world (Yale Univ. Press, 2012).

Introdução

"Minha tese é que para nós, seres humanos, há duas realidades fundamentalmente opostas, dois modos diferentes de experiência; que cada uma é de importância crucial na produção de um mundo humanamente reconhecível; e que sua diferença está enraizada na estrutura bi-hemisférica do cérebro. Segue-se que os hemisférios precisam cooperar, mas creio que estão de fato envolvidos em um tipo de luta por poder e que isso explica muitos aspectos a cultura ocidental contemporânea."

"Ambos hemisférios claramente desempenham papeis crucis na experiência de cada indivíduo humano e acredito que ambos contribuíram de modos importantes para nossa cultura. Um precisa do outro. No entanto, a relação entre os hemisférios não parece ser simétrica, uma vez que o hemisfério esquerdo depende em última análise -- pode-se dizer que é parasitário -- do direito, embora pareça não ter nenhuma ciência desse fato. Na verdade, tem uma alarmante autoconfiança. A luta que disso se segue é tão assimétrica quanto o cérebro no qual ela se origina."

"A Conclusão [do livro] dedica-se ao mundo que agora habitamos. Sugiro que é como se o hemisfério esquerdo, que cria para si uma espécie de mundo autorreflexivo virtual, bloqueia as aberturas disponíveis, as saídas dessa câmara de espelhos, a uma realidade que o hemisfério direito poderia nos permitir entender. No passado, essa tendência foi contrabalançada por forças de fora desse sistema fechado da mente autoconsciente; aparte da história encarnada em nossa cultura e do próprio mundo natural, dos quais estamos cada vez mais alienados, elas erm principalmente encorporadas na natureza de nossa existência, as artes e a religião. Em nossa época, cada uma delas foi subvertida e as rotas de escape do mundo virtual foram fechadas. Um mundo mecanicista, fragmentado, descontextualizado, marcado por um otimismo injustificado misturado a paranoia e sentimento de vazio veio à tona, refletindo, eu creio uma ação não refreada de um hemisfério esquerdo disfuncional."

"Há uma história em Nietzsche que diz mais ou menos o seguinte. Era uma vez um mestre espiritual sábio, que comandava uma região pequena mas próspera e qeu era conhecido por sua devoção altruísta ao seu povo. À medida que seu povo florescia e crescia em número, os limites de seu pequeno domínio espalhavam-se, e com isso a necessidade de confiar implicitamente nos emissários que enviava para garantir a segurança de suas partes cada vez mais distantes. Não apenas era impossível para ele pessoalmente ordenar tudo que era preciso, mas -- como sabiamente percebeu -- precisava manter distância e permanecer ignorante desses assuntos. Assim, nutriu e treinou cuidadosamente seus emissários, para que pudessem ser confiados. Um dia, no entanto, o mais esperto e ambicionso deles, aquele em que mais confiava, começou a ver-se como o mestre e usou sua posição para aumentar avançar sua própria riqueza e influência. Viu a temperança e paciência de seu mestre como uma fraqueza, não uma sabedoria, e em suas missões a serviço do mestre adotou o manto dele como se fosse seu próprio – o emissário tornou-se desdenhoso de seu mestre. A assim aconteceu de o mestre ser usurpado, as pessoas enganadas e o domínio virou uma tirania, até que, por fim, colapsou em ruínas."

Parte I - O cérebro dividido

Cap. 1 - Assimetria e o cérebro

Corpus callosum: conecta os dois hemisférios, mas tem função predominantemente inibitória

Evolução do cérebro: aumento do tamanho e diminuição da conexão dos dois hemisférios"The defining features of the human condition can all be traced to our ability to stand back from the world, from our selves and from the immediacy of experience. This enables us to plan, to think flexibly and inventively, and, in brief, to take control of the world around us rather than simply respond to it passively. This distance, this ability to rise above the world in which we live, has been made possible by the evolution of the frontal lobes."

"There is an optimal degree of separation between our selves and the world we perceive, if we are to understand it, much as there is between the reader's eye and the page: too much and we cannot make out what is written, but, equally, too little and we cannot read the letters at all. This ‘necessary distance’, as we might call it (it turns out to be crucial to the story unfolding in this book), is not the same as detachment. Distance can yield detachment, as when we coldly calculate how to outwit our opponent, by imagining what he believes will be our next move. It enables us to exploit and use. But what is less often remarked is that, in total contrast, it also has the opposite effect. By standing back from the animal immediacy of our experience we are able to be more empathic with others, who we come to see, for the first time, as beings like ourselves."

Aves e mamíferos têm cérebros divididos também. Explicação evolutiva para a sua seleção: "There is a need to focus attention narrowly and with precision, as a bird, for example, needs to focus on a grain of corn that it must eat, in order to pick it out from, say, the pieces of grit on which it lies. At the same time there is a need for open attention, as wide as possible, to guard against a possible predator."

"On the one hand, there is the context, the world, of ‘me’ – just me and my needs, as an individual competing with other individuals, my ability to peck that seed, pursue that rabbit, or grab that fruit. I need to use, or to manipulate, the world for my ends, and for that I need narrow-focus attention. On the other hand, I need to see myself in the broader context of the world at large, and in relation to others, whether they be friend or foe: I have a need to take account of myself as a member of my social group, to see potential allies, and beyond that to see potential mates and potential enemies. Here I may feel myself to be part of something much bigger than myself, and even existing in and through that ‘something’ that is bigger than myself – the flight or flock with which I scavenge, breed and roam, the pack with which I hunt, the mate and offspring that I also feed, and ultimately everything that goes on in my purview. This requires less of a wilfully directed, narrowly focussed attention, and more of an open, receptive, widely diffused alertness to whatever exists, with allegiances outside of the self."

Animais (aves, sapos, gatos) usam mais o olho esquerdo para prestar atenção a predadores e a parceiros sociais, e o olho direito para prestar atenção a presas/comida

Paciente com cérebro dividido (hemisférios independentes) [repare como o neurocientista Gazzaniga interpreta diferentemente de McGilchrist a função e importância de cada hemisfério cerebral].

"In general terms, then, the left hemisphere yields narrow, focussed attention, mainly for the purpose of getting and feeding. The right hemisphere yields a broad, vigilant attention, the purpose of which appears to be awareness of signals from the surroundings, especially of other creatures, who are potential predators or potential mates, foes or friends; and it is involved in bonding in social animals. It might then be that the division of the human brain is also the result of the need to bring to bear two incompatible types of attention on the world at the same time,one narrow, focussed, and directed by our needs, and the other broad, open, and directed towards whatever else is going on in the world apart from ourselves."

Tipos de atenção e tipos de relação

Hemisfério direito: atenção ampla e flexível ao todo e seu contexto, empatia e compreensão emocional

Hemisfério esquerdo: atenção focada a coisas abstraídas de seus contextos, às partes das quais o todo é feito

A natureza da atenção modifica o que encontramos; ela valoriza e discrimita alguns aspectos da natureza em detrimento de outros.

"Experience is forever in motion, ramifying and unpredictable. In order for us to know anything at all, that thing must have enduring properties. If all things flow, and one can never step into the same river twice – Heraclitus's phrase is, I believe, a brilliant evocation of the core reality of the right hemisphere's world – one will always be taken unawares by experience, since nothing being ever repeated, nothing can ever be known. We have to find a way of fixing it as it flies, stepping back from the immediacy of experience, stepping outside the flow. Hence the brain has to attend to the world in two completely different ways, and in so doing to bring two different worlds into being. In the one, we experience – the live, complex, embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected. In the other we ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: a ‘re-presented’ version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based. This kind of attention isolates, fixes and makes each thing explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention. In doing so it renders things inert, mechanical, lifeless. But it also enables us for the first time to know, and consequently to learn and to make things. This gives us power."

Dois modos de estar no mundo: (1) pré-reflexivamente, antes de ter uma concepção dele ou de analisá-lo, antes de distinguir o que é subjetivo e o que é objetivo e (2) reflexivamente, distinguindo um polo objetivo e um polo subjetivo.

Capítulo 2. O que 'fazem' os dois hemisférios?

Tipos de atenção: vigília, atenção constante, alerta, atenção focada e atenção dividida

Intensidade da atenção: vigília/incapacidade de aprender, atenção constante/fragmentação e alerta/sono [hemisfério direito]

Seletividade da atenção: atenção focada [hemisfério esquerdo] e atenção dividida [ambos hemisférios]

Novidades

"From this it follows that in almost every case what is new must first be present in the right hemisphere, before it can come into focus for the left. For one thing, the right hemisphere alone attends to the peripheral field of vision from which new experience tends to come; only the right hemisphere can direct attention to what comes to us from the edges of our awareness, regardless of side. Anything newly entering our experiential world instantly triggers a release of noradrenaline – mainly in the right hemisphere. Novel experience induces changes in the right hippocampus, but not the left."

"The right hemisphere is, in other words, more capable of a frame shift"

"It is similar with problem solving. Here the right hemisphere presents an array of possible solutions, which remain live while alternatives are explored. The left hemisphere, by contrast, takes the single solution that seems best to fit what it already knows and latches onto it."

Integração versus divisão

"In general the left hemisphere is more closely interconnected within itself, and within regions of itself, than the right hemisphere. This is all part of the close focus style, but it is also a reflection at the neural level of the essentially self-referring nature of the world of the left hemisphere: it deals with what it already knows, the world it has made for itself."

Hierarquia de atenção

"Global attention, courtesy of the right hemisphere, comes first, not just in time, but takes precedence in our sense of what it is we are attending to; it therefore guides the left hemisphere's local attention, rather than the other way about."

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Todo versus parte

Contexto versus abstração

"A patient with left-hemisphere damage described by Hécaen and de Ajuriaguerra, therefore relying on his right hemisphere only, on being asked to copy a model using pieces of wood appeared ‘as if compelled by some bizarre force to place the pieces of wood on top of the model that we were intending him to copy, rather than to one side’. This was thought to signify ‘a problem with the ability to produce an abstract representation from a concrete model’. The left hemisphere can only re-present; but the right hemisphere, for its part, can only give again what ‘presences’. This is close to the core of what differentiates the hemispheres."

"The right hemisphere deals preferentially with actually existing things, as they are encountered in the real world. Because its language roots things in the context of the world, it is concerned with the relations between things. Thus the right hemisphere does have a vocabulary: it certainly has a lexicon of concrete nouns and imageable words which it shares with the left hemisphere; but, more than that, perceptual links between words are made primarily by the right hemisphere."

Indivíduos versus categorias

"The right hemisphere presents individual, unique instances of things and individual, familiar, objects, where the left hemisphere re-presents categories of things, and generic, non-specific objects."

"In general, then, the left hemisphere's tendency is to classify, where the right hemisphere's is to identify individuals.157 But of course both hemispheres are involved in recognition according to the grouping of experience – how could it be otherwise? Each hemisphere must be able to make sense of reality by revealing a shape to what otherwise would be an amorphous mass of impressions. But how they do this in practice differs in vital respects which have a direct impact on the nature of the world that each brings into being. The right hemisphere's version is more global and holistic, based on the recognition of similarity with an ideal exemplar, and on where this is positioned in the context of other examples, whereas the left hemisphere identifies single features that would place the object in a certain category in the abstract."

Diferenças na igualdade

"In general, then, the left hemisphere's tendency is to classify, where the right hemisphere's is to identify individuals.157 But of course both hemispheres are involved in recognition according to the grouping of experience – how could it be otherwise? Each hemisphere must be able to make sense of reality by revealing a shape to what otherwise would be an amorphous mass of impressions. But how they do this in practice differs in vital respects which have a direct impact on the nature of the world that each brings into being. The right hemisphere's version is more global and holistic, based on the recognition of similarity with an ideal exemplar, and on where this is positioned in the context of other examples, whereas the left hemisphere identifies single features that would place the object in a certain category in the abstract."

"Fascinatingly, right-hemisphere deficit syndromes can result in something which looks like the opposite: the belief that someone one knows is duplicated in different places at different times." "This curious condition is called Fregoli syndrome, after an Italian quick-change artist of the early 1900s. Here the fine discrimination of individuals supplied by the right hemisphere is lost, and different individuals are lumped together and again ‘re-presented’ in a category. It is not the opposite of the Capgras syndrome, but a natural consequence of the same cause: a loss of the sense of a unique whole. Such ‘delusional misidentification’ applies not only to people, but to objects: another patient of mine began a vendetta against someone who, she believed, had entered her bedroom and subtly changed all her clothes for copies of a slightly inferior quality. It can even apply to places: one individual held that there were eight ‘impostor’ cities, duplicating his own, and said he had spent the last eight years wandering between them, without finding the real one. There were also eight duplicates of his wife and children, each duplicate living in a separate duplicate city with a double of the patient."

Pessoal versus impessoal

Vivo versus não vivo

"The right hemisphere prioritises whatever actually is, and what concerns us. It prefers existing things, real scenes and stimuli that can be made sense of in terms of the lived world, whatever it is that has meaning and value for us as human beings.185 It is more able to assimilate information from the environment,186 without automatically responding to it, and, possibly as a result, the developing right hemisphere is more sensitive to environmental influences. At the same time the left hemisphere is more at home dealing with distorted, non-realistic, fantastic – ultimately artificial – images."

Empatia e 'teoria da mente'

"The right hemisphere plays an important role in what is known as ‘theory of mind’, a capacity to put oneself in another's position and see what is going on in that person's mind."

"The right hemisphere has by far the preponderance of emotional understanding."

Assimetria emocional: na percepção e reglação de emoções, o hemisfério direito é dominante

Receptividade emocional

Expressividade emocional

"The right frontal lobe is of critical importance for emotional expression of virtually every kind through the face and body posture. The one exception to the right hemisphere superiority for the expression of emotion is anger."

Diferenças em afinidade emocional

"It is the right hemisphere which gives emotional value to what is seen"

Razão versus racionalidade

"...reasoning is of different kinds, and though linear, sequential argument is clearly better executed by the left hemisphere, some types of reasoning, including deduction, and some types of mathematical reasoning, are mainly dependent on the right hemisphere. More explicit reasoning is underwritten by the left hemisphere, less explicit reasoning (such as is often involved in problem solving, including scientific and mathematical problem solving) by the right hemisphere."

"Problem solving, making reasonable deductions, and making judgments may become harder if we become conscious of the process. Thus rendering one's thought processes explicit, or analysing a judgment, may actually impair performance, because it encourages the left hemisphere's focus on the explicit, superficial structure of the problem."

Corpos gêmeos

"The right hemisphere, as one can tell from the fascinating changes that occur after unilateral brain damage, is responsible for our sense of the body as something we ‘live’, something that is part of our identity, and which is, if I can put it that way, the phase of intersection between our selves and the world at large. For the left hemisphere, by contrast, the body is something from which we are relative detached, a thing in the world, like other things ( en soi , rather than pour soi , to use Sartre's terms), devitalised, a ‘corpse’. As Gabriel Marcel puts it, it is sometimes as if I am my body, sometimes as if I have a body."

"This is known as asomatognosia [...]. A lack of capacity to recognise parts of the embodied self is always associated with right-hemisphere damage, never with left-hemisphere damage. The phenomenon can be replicated by selectively anaesthetising the right hemisphere."

Significação e o que é implícito

"When we think of meaning we tend to think of language, and the lefthemisphere's great contribution to meaning is language, symbol manipulation."

"But the left hemisphere is attached to language per se : language is where it is at home. It seems to be (in an interesting parallel with the situation regarding numbers mentioned above) actually less concerned about meaning than the right hemisphere, as long as it has control of the form and the system. In conditions of right-hemisphere damage, where the left hemisphere is no longer under constraint from the right, a meaningless hypertrophy of language may result."

"The right hemisphere's particular strength is in understanding meaning as a whole and in context. It is with the right hemisphere that we understand the moral of a story, as well as the point of a joke. It is able to construe intelligently what others mean, determining from intonation, and from pragmatics, not just from summation of meaning units, subject to the combinatorial rules of syntax, as a computer would. It is therefore particularly important wherever non-literal meaning needs to be understood – practically everywhere, therefore, in human discourse, and particularly where irony, humour, indirection or sarcasm are involved. Patients with right-hemisphere damage have difficulty understanding non-literal meaning. They have difficulty with indirect meaning, such as is implied by metaphor and humour. In fact, those with right-hemisphere damage cannot make inferences, an absolutely vital part of understanding the world: they do not understand implicit meanings whatever their kind, but detect explicit meanings only."

Música e tempo

"t is the relations between things, more than entities in isolation, that are of primary importance to the right hemisphere. Music consists entirely of relations, ‘betweenness’. The notes mean nothing in themselves: the tensions between the notes, and between notes and the silence with which they live in reciprocal indebtedness, are everything. Melody, harmony and rhythm each lie in the gaps, and yet the betweenness is only what it is because of the notes themselves. Actually the music is not just in the gaps any more than it is just in the notes: it is inthe whole that the notes and the silence make together."

"Music – like narrative, like the experience of our lives as we live them – unfolds in time. The movement of time is what makes music what it is. Not just that it has ictus and rhythm; its structure extends through and across time, depending on memory to hold it together."

"The ability to compare duration in time is clearly better performedby the right hemisphere, and relies on the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In fact virtually all aspects of the appreciation of time, in the sense of something lived through, with a past, present and future, are dependent on the right hemisphere, principally the right prefrontal and parietal cortex. The sense of past or future is severely impaired in right-hemisphere damage."

Profundidade

"The right hemisphere's organisation of space depends more on depth, whether things are nearer or further ‘from me’. The right hemisphere is even biased towards what lies further ‘from me’, an aspect of its broader, wider and deeper attention. The left hemisphere, by comparison, has difficulty with processing depth: as a result, it may get the size of things wrong, sometimes dramatically."

"The right hemisphere represents objects as having volume and depth in space, as they are experienced; the left hemisphere tends to represent the visual world schematically, abstractly, geometrically, with a lack of realistic detail, and even in one plane."

Certeza

"The left hemisphere likes things that are man-made. Things we make are also more certain: we know them inside out, because we put them together. They are not, like living things, constantly changing and moving, beyond our grasp . Because the right hemisphere sees things as they are, they are constantly new for it, so it has nothing like the databank of information about categories that the left hemisphere has. It cannot have the certainty of knowledge that comes from being able to fix things and isolate them. In order to remain true to what is, it does not form abstractions, and categories that are based on abstraction, which are the strengths of denotative language. By contrast, the right hemisphere's interest in language lies in all the things that help to take it beyond the limiting effects of denotation to connotation: it acknowledges the importance of ambiguity. It therefore is virtually silent, relatively shifting anduncertain, where the left hemisphere, by contrast, may be unreasonably, even stubbornly, convinced of its own correctness."

(Ver experimentos de Gazzaniga com cérebros divididos, confabulações do hemisfério esquerdo etc.)

"So the left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right. The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome. The right prefrontal cortex is essential for dealing with incomplete information and has a critical role to play in reasoning about incompletely specifiedsituations. The right hemisphere is able to maintain ambiguous mental representations in the face of a tendency to premature over-interpretation by the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere's tolerance of uncertainty is implied everywhere in its subtle ability to use metaphor, irony and humour, all of which depend on not prematurely resolving ambiguities. So, of course, does poetry, which relies on right-hemisphere language capacities. During ambiguous stimulation of perceptual rivalry (the phenomenon of an ambiguous figure that can be seen in one way or another, but not both simultaneously, such as the duck–rabbit above or the Necker cube opposite) right frontal cortex is more active."

Consciência de si e timbre emocional

"The right hemisphere is also more realistic about how it stands in relation to the world at large, less grandiose, more self-aware, than the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere is ever optimistic, but unrealistic about its short-comings. When patients who have had a right-hemisphere stroke are offered constructive guidance about their performance it makes little impact. In the words of one researcher into head injury, ‘children with right-brain deficit disorder ignore task obstacles, accept impossiblechallenges, make grossly inadequate efforts, and are stunned by the poor outcomes. These children act fearless because they overlook the dangers inherent in the situation.’"

"Denial is a left-hemisphere speciality: in states of relative right-hemisphere inactivation, in which there is therefore a bias toward the left hemisphere, subjects tend to evaluate themselves optimistically, view pictures more positively, and are more apt to stick to their existing point of view. In the presence of a right-hemisphere stroke, the left hemisphere is ‘crippled by naively optimistic forecasting of outcomes’. It is always a winner: winning is associated with activation of the left amygdala, losing with right amygdala activation."

"There are links here with the right hemisphere's tendency to melancholy. If there is a tendency for the right hemisphere to be more sorrowful and prone to depression, this can, in my view, be seen as related not only to being more in touch with what's going on, but more in touch with, and concerned for, others. ‘No man is an island’: it is the right hemisphere of the human brain that ensures that we feel part of the main. The more we are aware of and empathically connected to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, the more we are likely to suffer. Sadness and empathy are highly correlated: this can be seen in studies of children and adolescents. There is also a direct correlation between sadness and empathy, on the one hand, and feelings of guilt, shame and responsibility, on the other. Psychopaths, who have no sense of guilt, shame or responsibility, have deficits in the right frontal lobe, particularly the right ventromedial and orbitofrontal cortex."

Senso moral

"Another area where analytic retrospection misleads us as to the nature of what we are seeing, since it reconstructs the world according to left-hemisphere principles, is that of morality. Moral values are not something that we work out rationally on the principle of utility, or any other principle, for that matter, but are irreducible aspects of the phenomenal world, like colour. I agree with Max Scheler, and for that matter with Wittgenstein, that moral value is a form of experience irreducible to any other kind, or accountable for on any other terms; and I believe this perception underlies Kant's derivation of God from the existence of moral values, rather than moral values from the existence of a God. Such values are linked to the capacity for empathy, not reasoning; and moral judgments are not deliberative, but unconscious and intuitive, deeply bound up with our emotional sensitivity to others. Empathy is intrinsic to morality."

The self

"Conscious awareness of the self is a surprisingly late development in evolution. The higher apes, such as chimpanzees and orangutans, are capable of self-recognition, but monkeys are not: they fail the mirror test. The right prefrontal region is critically involved in self-recognition, whether by face or by voice. Imaging studies of self-recognition by face or voice confirm the importance of the right frontal region and the right cingulate cortex. An important correlate of self-awareness in humans is the correct use of the personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’, which is lacking in autism, a condition which replicates many right-hemisphere deficits."

"Clearly no one hemisphere can on its own constitute the self. The self is a complex concept, but, in brief, the self as intrinsically, empathically inseparable from the world in which it stands in relation to others, and the continuous sense of self, are more dependent on the right hemisphere, whereas the objectified self, and the self as an expression of will, is generally more dependent on the left hemisphere."

"Philosophers spend a good deal of time inspecting and analysing processes that are usually – and perhaps must remain – implicit, unconscious, intuitive; in other words, examining the life of the right hemisphere from the standpoint of the left. It is perhaps then not surprising that the glue begins to disintegrate, and there is a nasty cracking noise as the otherwise normally robust sense of the self comes apart, possibly revealing more about the merits (or otherwise) of the process, than the self under scrutiny. Schizophrenics, like philosophers, have a problem with the sense of the self which ordinary individuals, involved with living, lack. As Wittgenstein once remarked: ‘it's strange that in ordinary life we are not troubled by the feeling that the phenomenon is slipping away from us, the constant flux of appearance, but only when we philosophise. This indicates that what is in question here is an idea suggested by a misapplication of our language.’ Could this be read as the ‘misapplication of language’ – in other words, the faulty procedure of seeking truth by standing in the world of the left hemisphere while looking at the world of the right?"

CODA: THE ‘FRONT–BACK’ PROBLEM

Conclusion

"Ultimately if the left hemisphere is the hemisphere of ‘what’, the right hemisphere, with its preoccupation with context, the relational aspects of experience, emotion and the nuances of expression, could be said to be the hemisphere of ‘how’. This perhaps explains why conventional neuroscience, being itself largely a manifestation of left-hemisphere activity, has focussed so much on what the brain is doing in which hemisphere, not in what way it does it in each hemisphere, thus, in my view, missing the significance of what it is trying to understand."

"I believe the essential difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere is that the right hemisphere pays attention to the Other, whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation. It is deeply attracted to, and given life by, the relationship, the betweenness, that exists with this Other. By contrast, the left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world that it has created, which is self-consistent, but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it powerful, but ultimately only able to operate on, and to know, itself."

CAPÍTULO 3 -- LINGUAGEM, VERDADE E MÚSICA

"I want to [...] suggest that the hemispheric differences [...] represent two individually coherent, but incompatible, aspects of the world."

O novo e o familiar, e duas maneiras de conhecer

"...new experience of any kind – whether it be of music, or words, or real-life objects, or imaginary constructs – engages the right hemisphere. As soon as it starts to become familiar or routine, the right hemisphere is less engaged and eventually the ‘information’ becomes the concern of the left hemisphere only."

"Understandably this has tended to be viewed as a specialisation in information processing, whereby ‘novel stimuli’ are preferentially ‘processed’ by the right hemisphere and routine or familiar ones by the left hemisphere. But this already, like any model, presupposes the nature of what one is looking at (a machine for information processing). What would we find if we were to use a different model? Would perhaps something else emerge?

I want to suggest a different way of looking at the role played by the brain in forming our experience of the world. This involves concerning oneself with the nature of knowledge itself.

We use the word ‘know’ in at least two importantly different senses. In one sense knowledge is essentially an encounter with something or someone, therefore with something ‘other’ (a truth embodied in the phrase ‘carnal knowledge’). We say we know someone in the sense that we have experience of him or her, so that we have a ‘feel’ for who he or she is, as an individual distinct from others. This kind of knowledge permits a sense of the uniqueness of the other. It is also uniquely ‘my’ knowledge. [...] This is the kind of knowledge we think of first when talking about the living."

"This kind of knowledge derives from a coming together of one being or thing as a whole with another. But there is another kind of knowledge, a knowledge that comes from putting things together from bits. It is the knowledge of what we call facts. This is not usually well applied to knowing people. We could have a go – for example, ‘born on 16 September 1964’, ‘lives in New York’, ‘5ft 4in tall’, ‘red hair’, ‘freckles’, and so on. Immediately you get the sense of somebody – who you don't actually know. [...] It is the only kind of knowledge permitted by science (though some of the very best scientists have used subterfuge to get away with the other kind). It concerns knowledge in the public domain – the local train timetable, the date of the Battle of Trafalgar, and so on. Its virtue is its certainty – it's fixed. It doesn't change from person to person or from moment to moment. Context is therefore irrelevant. But it doesn't give a good idea of the whole, just of a partial reconstruction of aspects of the whole."

"This knowledge has its uses. Its great strength is that its findings are repeatable. Its qualities are the inverse of those previously outlined, and they are associated with the left hemisphere: an affinity with the non-living; with ‘ pieces ’ of information; general, impersonal, fixed, certain and disengaged."

"Both kinds of knowledge can be brought to bear on the same object, of course. My knowledge of you can be informed by knowing your age, height and place of birth, but that is not in itself at all what I mean by knowing you. These ways of knowing are so different that in many languages other than English they are referred to by different words: the first by, for example, Latin cognoscere , French connaître , German kennen ; the second by Latin sapere , French savoir , German wissen – and so on."

"To take one example of an apparently non-living entity that appears to require us to know it in the sense of kennen rather than wissen , think of a piece of music. The approach to music is like entering into relation with another living individual, and research suggests that understanding music is perceived as similar to knowing a person; we freely attribute human qualities to music, including age, sex, personality characteristics and feelings. The empathic nature of the experience means that it has more in common with encountering a person than a concept or an idea that could be expressed in words. It is important to recognise that music does not symbolise emotional meaning, which would require that it be interpreted; it metaphorises it – ‘carries it over’ direct to our unconscious minds. Equally it does not symbolise human qualities: it conveys them direct, so that it acts on us, and we respond to it, as in a human encounter."

"Jung said that ‘all cognition is akin to recognition’. By this he meant that we come to know in the sense of ‘cognise’ ( wissen ) something only by recognising ( erkennen ) something we already knew ( kennen ). In the process it becomes clear, familiar, where before it was latent, intuitive. This is, I believe, an expression of the same process that Goldberg and Costa describe at the neurological level; the new becomes old. In fact Nietzsche goes further and seizes the nub of the matter, when he expresses a similar idea: ‘it is through “knowing” [ erkennen , re-cognition] that we come to have the feeling that we already know [ wissen ] something; thus it means combating a feeling of newness and transforming the apparently new into something old.’"

"However, just as everything changes its nature, however slightly, when it changes its context, what we choose to compare a thing with determines which aspects of it will stand forward and which will recede. Thus comparing a football match with a trip to the betting shop brings out some aspects of the experience; comparing it with going to church brings out others. The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find. If it is the case that ourunderstanding is an effect of the metaphors we choose, it is also true that it is a cause : our understanding itself guides the choice of metaphor by which we understand it. The chosen metaphor is both cause and effect of the relationship. Thus how we think about our selves and our relationship to the world is already revealed in the metaphors we unconsciously choose to talk about it. That choice further entrenches our partial view of the subject. Paradoxically we seem to be obliged to understand something – including ourselves – well enough to choose the appropriate model before we can understand it. Our first leap determines where we land."

O que a linguagem nos diz sobre os hemisférios

"Let's return to the structure of the brain and take another look at that strange asymmetry in the left parietal region, where language is said to reside. Isn't that obviously what it's for? What's the problem with thatexplanation?

While it is true that the left hemisphere expansion is now associated with language functions, there are difficulties with the belief that it is language that necessitated the expansion. For one thing, fossil records of primitive humans from the earliest periods, long before anthropologists believe language developed, already show this typical pattern of brain asymmetry. Even more striking is the fact that some of the great apes, and possibly other large primates such as baboons, which clearly have no language, already show a similar asymmetry to that of the human brain, with enlargement in the same area of the left hemisphere that in humans is associated with language."

"So what is this expansion in the left hemisphere about? Perhaps, it has been suggested, it is a consequence of right handedness. But this begs a further question, namely why we should have developed right handedness. The usual assumption is that, man being the tool-making animal, extra skill was needed in the manufacture of such tools, requiring specialisation. But it is not obvious why skill is best acquired in one hand only. Skilful operators could be even more skilful if they could use both hands equally well, and the brain is not subject to some economic regulation that means that the development of one hand must be at the expense of the skill acquisition of the other."

As origens da linguagem

"Fairly obviously, one might think, language must have developed for communication. But that is not as obvious as it seems. Some 300–400,000 years ago or longer, homo heidelbergensis , the common ancestor of homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis , had a large brain and a vocal apparatus comparable to those of modern humans, and, although we cannot be sure of the earliest date such features arose, it may well have been as long ago as about half a million years. However, the evidence suggests that we did not develop the degree of sophisticated symbol manipulation that language requires until a much later point, possibly as little as 40,000 years ago, but at any rate not earlier than a mere 80,000 years ago, when the first cultural artefacts, along with evidence of visual representation, suddenly and profusely arise, and humans began to adopt ritualised burial of the dead. It would seem, then, that for most of human history, despite a large brain and presumably high intelligence, they managed to communicate satisfactorily without language as we understand it. Admittedly they were not civilised in the true meaning of the word. But they survived and thrived as social animals, living in groups. How did our ancestors communicate adequately, if not by language?"

"The evidence of the fossil record is, as I say, that the control of voice and respiration needed for singing apparently came into being long before they would ever have been required by language. But is there any reason, apart from this, why we should adopt the view that music came first?"

Linguagem ou música: qual veio primeiro?

"There are, if nothing else, some indications on the matter. In the first place, the ‘syntax’ of music is simpler, less highly evolved, than that of language, suggesting an earlier origin. More importantly, observation of the development of language in children confirms that the musical aspects of language do indeed come first. Intonation, phrasing and rhythm develop first; syntax and vocabulary come only later. Newborns are already sensitive to the rhythms of language; they prefer ‘infant-directed speech’ – otherwise known as ‘baby talk’ – which emphasises what is called prosody, the music of speech."

"Ultimately music is the communication of emotion, the most fundamental form of communication, which in phylogeny, as well as ontogeny, came and comes first."

"This conclusion has not been universally welcomed. There are a number of reasons, but one stands out, at least as far as concerns geneticists. Developments must demonstrate evolutionary advantage. Language, it is reasoned, gives a huge advantage in the power it confers to its possessor: but what has music to do with power – what advantage can it yield?"

"That we could use non-verbal means, such as music, to communicate is, in any case, hardly surprising. The shock comes partly from the way we in the West now view music: we have lost the sense of the central position that music once occupied in communal life, and still does in most parts of the world today. Despite the fact that there is no culture anywhere in the world that does not have music, and in which people do not join together to sing or dance, we have relegated music to the sidelines of life. We might think of music as an individualistic, even solitary experience, but that is rare in the history of the world. In more traditionally structured societies, performance of music plays both an integral, and an integrative, role not only in celebration, religious festivals, and other rituals, but also in daily work and recreation; and it is above all a shared performance, not just something we listen to passively. It has a vital way of binding people together, helping them to be aware of shared humanity, shared feelings and experiences, and actively drawing them together."

"But if it should turn out that music leads to language, rather than language to music, it helps us understand for the first time the otherwise baffling historical fact that poetry evolved before prose. Prose was at first known as pezos logos , literally ‘pedestrian, or walking, logos ’, as opposed to the usual dancing logos of poetry. In fact early poetry was sung: so the evolution of literary skill progresses, if that is the correct word, from right-hemisphere music (words that are sung), to right-hemisphere language (the metaphorical language of poetry), to left-hemisphere language (the referential language of prose). Music is likely to be the ancestor of language and it arose largely in the right hemisphere, where one would expect a means of communication with others, promoting social cohesion, to arise."

Comunicação sem linguagem

"Perhaps the most striking evidence, though, is that there are extant tribes in the Amazon basin, such as the Pirahã, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Brazil, whose language is effectively a kind of song, possessing such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum or whistle conversations"

Língua Pirahã: https://youtu.be/SHv3-U9VPAs, https://youtu.be/KYpjFObtV94, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0145289

"For our primate ancestors, who clearly had no speech, body language played a vital role in social cohesion, especially in prolonged sessions of mutual grooming. One theory is that singing, a sort of instinctive musical language of intonation, came into being precisely because, with the advent of humans, social groups became too large for grooming to be practical as a means of bonding. Music, on this account, is a sort of grooming at a distance; no longer necessitating physical touch, but a body language all the same. And, the theory goes, referential language was a late evolution from this. It is estimated that even now over 90 per cent of communication between humans is by non-verbal means, through bodylanguage and perhaps especially through intonation. Communication, after all, does not only mean the kind of language we use to talk about things. Music is communication – but it speaks to us, not about things. It does not refer (to a third party): it has an ‘I–thou’ existence, not an ‘I–it’ existence."

Pensamento sem linguagem

"We carry out most mental processes that would normally constitute what we mean by thinking without doing anything consciously, or in language, at all. We make sense of the world, form categories and concepts, weigh and evaluate evidence, make decisions and solve problems, all without language, and without even being consciously aware of the process."

"Indeed, many of these things can be achieved satisfactorily only if we do not become too explicitly aware of the process, which would otherwise have a limiting and inhibiting effect. Many examples exist of famousscientific problems that were solved without language. After much cogitation, Kekulé seized the shape of the benzene ring, the foundation of organic chemistry, when the image of a snake biting its tail arose from the embers of his fire; Poincaré, having spent 15 days trying to disprove Fuchsian functions, suddenly saw their reality, as, after a cup of black coffee, ‘ideas rose in crowds – I felt them collide until pairs interlocked’; later their relation to non-Euclidean geometry occurred to him at the moment he put his foot on a bus, though he was in the middle of a completely unrelated conversation (‘on my return to Caen, for conscience’ sake I verified the result at my leisure’). The structure of the periodic table of the elements came to Mendeleyev in a dream. Einstein wrote that ‘the words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in the mechanism of my thought ...’ Similar points were made by Gauss and Helmholtz. Mathematical thinking, which is principally right-hemisphere-mediated, takes place in three dimensions. Rudolf Arnheim wrote in his classic work, Visual Thinking , as powerful today as when it was written in 1969: ‘What we need to acknowledge is that perceptual and pictorial shapes are not only translations of thought products but the very flesh and blood of thinking itself."

"What is more, in evolutionary terms, thought, including concept formation, clearly predates language. Quite apart from the already mentioned existence of sophisticated pre-lingual hominids, we know that animals can think and form concepts. Any sentient being living in an environment where it needs to defend itself from predators and find enough to eat must be capable of forming concepts and placing things in categories. Without it, it would be forced to start from scratch with everyencounter with friend or foe, with plant or poison, and wouldn't last long. These assumptions are borne out by the evidence of studies demonstrating that indeed categorical perception is not unique to humans, and cannot therefore depend on language. The ability to categorise is in fact almost universal. Pigeons, for example, can categorise different types of leaves, or fish, or people. They can even distinguish a human face in a crowd, and artificial from natural objects."

"That thought does not depend on language is also demonstrated by those who have developed aphasia – lost the power of speech. Those that recover are able to describe their experience and we are fortunate to have the description left by Jacques Lordat, a professor of physiology at the University of Montpellier, a man who, somewhat ironically, had made a study of aphasia. In 1843 he published a paper in which he gave a detailed description of an aphasic episode, lasting several weeks, that he himself had experienced following a stroke. Lordat noticed that 'when I wanted to speak I could not find the expressions that I needed ... the thought was all ready , but the sounds that had to express it as intermediary were no longer at my disposition ... I was unable to accept ... the theory that verbal signs are necessary, even indispensable for thought.'"

"In fact subjects who have suffered a stroke demonstrate that even complex reasoning and mathematical calculation do not depend on language. Syntactic structure is distinct from logical structure: subjects that have lost their grasp of syntax following a left-hemisphere stroke remain able to use sophisticated thought processes, as complex as the structure of complex syntax, and can calculate and reason perfectly well. Patients with semantic dementia, too, can perform calculations, sometimes exceptionally well."

"That we do not need words in order to hold concepts is alsodemonstrated by some beautiful research carried out amongst tribal peoples with quite differently structured vocabularies from our own. It turns out that, for example, numerical concepts do not depend on the pre-existence of linguistic terms for them. Tribes with limited words for numbers (such as the Amazonian tribe, the Mundurukú, who have no word for a value greater than three) can succeed in arithmetical tasks that involve values as great as 80. Some members of the Mundurukú speak both their own language, with its extremely limited vocabulary for numbers, and Portuguese, in which there are an unlimited range of number words, while others speak only Mundurukú. The two groups of speakers nonetheless perform comparably on calculation tasks (whether or not, in other words, their number vocabulary goes further than ‘3’), and both groups perform as well as French-speaking controls; and this is the same for adults and children."

"The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis has partial truth – if you don't have the word, you are likely to lose the concept; but this research demonstrates that the concept can arise without the word, and is therefore not dependent on it. So thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This has its good side, and its bad. It aids consistency of reference over time and space. But it can also exert a restrictive force on what and how we think. It represents a more fixed version of the world: it shapes, rather than grounds, our thinking."

"Language is not essential, then, to communication or to thinking – and may interrupt or interfere with both. So we return to the question: why did language actually come about, and what is it for? There may be a clue in the fact that the other conventionally defining human characteristic, apart from language, is tool making, and that this is associated with the development of right-hand skill: interestingly enough with the same area of the left hemisphere as semantics and syntax."

Linguagem e a mão

"We know from experience that there are many connections between the hand and language. For example, there clearly is a close relationship between spoken language and the wealth of gesture language that often accompanies it. In normal subjects, restricting hand movement produces an adverse effect on the content and fluency of speech. Ramachandran even reports the case of a young woman, who was born without upper limbs. She experiences phantom arms; and the fact that she has phantom arms at all, replicating a number of such findings in the congenitally limbless, is interesting enough (phantoms are usually thought of as being the residual of a limb that is lost, that in other words must have been there originally). But, even though these phantom arms do not, for example, swing by her side as she walks, she cannot stop them gesticulating when she speaks. Even though she has never been able to use an arm or hand, speech activates these areas of her brain."

"This complicity of language and grasping movements of the hand is not just an interesting neurophysiological and neuroanatomical finding. It is intuitively correct, as evidenced by the terms we use to describe linguistic comprehension and expression. It is not an accident that we talk about ‘grasping’ what someone is saying. The metaphor of grasp has its roots deep in the way we talk about thinking in most languages (e.g. the various Romance derivatives of Latin com-prehendere , and cognates of be-greifen in Germanic languages)."

Linguagem e manipulação

"Where words come into their own is for transmitting information, specifically about something that is not present to us, something that is removed in space or time, when you and I need to co-operate in doing something about something else."

"Words alone make concepts more stable and available to memory. Naming things gives us power over them, so that we can use them; when Adam was given the beasts for his use and to ‘have dominion’ over them, he was also the one who was given the power to name them. And category formation provides clearer boundaries to the landscape of the world, giving a certain view of it greater solidity and permanence. That may not have begun with humans, but it was obviously given a vast push forward by referential language. Language refines the expression of causalrelationships. It hugely expands the range of reference of thought, and expands the capacity for planning and manipulation. It enables the indefinite memorialisation of more than could otherwise be retained by any human memory. These advantages, of memorialisation and fixity, that language brings are, of course, further vastly enhanced when language becomes written, enabling the contents of the mind to be fixed somewhere in external space. And in turn this further expands the possibilities for manipulation and instrumentalisation. The most ancient surviving written texts are bureaucratic records."

"Reverting to the needs of the frontal lobes, it provides the framework for a virtual representation of reality. Language enables the left hemisphere to represent the world ‘off-line’, a conceptual version, distinct from the world of experience, and shielded from the immediate environment, with its insistent impressions, feelings and demands, abstracted from the body, no longer dealing with what is concrete, specific, individual, unrepeatable, and constantly changing, but with a disembodied representation of the world, abstracted, central, not particularised in time and place, generally applicable, clear and fixed. Isolating things artificially from their context brings the advantage of enabling us to focus intently on a particular aspect of reality and how it can be modelled, so that it can be grasped and controlled."

"But its losses are in the picture as a whole. Whatever lies in the realm of the implicit, or depends on flexibility, whatever can't be brought into focus and fixed, ceases to exist as far as the speaking hemisphere is concerned."

Metáfora

"Language functions like money. It is only an intermediary. But like money it takes on some of the life of the things it represents. It begins in the world of experience and returns to the world of experience – and it does so via metaphor, which is a function of the right hemisphere, and is rooted in the body. To use a metaphor, language is the money of thought."

"Only the right hemisphere has the capacity to understand metaphor. That might not sound too important – like it could be a nice thing if one were going to do a bit of lit crit. But that is just a sign of the degree to which our world of discourse is dominated by left-hemisphere habits of mind. Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life."

"A metaphor asserts a common life that is experienced in the body of the one who makes it, and the separation is only present at the linguistic level. Our sense of the commonality of the two ideas, perceptions or entities does not lie in a post hoc derivation of something abstracted from each of them, which is found on subsequent comparison to be similar, or even one and the same thing; but rather on a single concrete, kinaesthetic experience more fundamental than either, and from which they in turn are derived. Thus a clash of arguments and a clash of cymbals are not seen to have something in common only after the disembodied idea of a ‘clash’ is abstracted from the one and from the other, and found – aha! – to be similar; it is rather that these experiences – a clash of arguments and a clash of cymbals, or, for that matter, a clash of swords, or a clash of colours – are felt in our embodied selves as sharing a common nature."

"Metaphor (subserved by the right hemisphere) comes before denotation (subserved by the left). This is a historical truth, in the sense that denotative language, even philosophical and scientific language, are derived from metaphors founded on immediate experience of the tangible world."

"Metaphor is centrally a matter of thought, not just words. Metaphorical language is a reflection of metaphorical thought ... Eliminating metaphor would eliminate philosophy. Without a very large range of conceptual metaphors, philosophy could not get off the ground. The metaphoric character of philosophy is not unique to philosophic thought. It is true of all abstract human thought, especially science. Conceptual metaphor is what makes most abstract thought possible."

"It is also a truth about epistemology, how we understand things. Any onething can be understood only in terms of another thing, and ultimately that must come down to a something that is experienced, outside the system of signs (i.e. by the body). The very words which form the building blocks of explicit thought are themselves all originally metaphors, grounded in the human body and its experience."

"Metaphor embodies thought and places it in a living context . These three areas of difference between the hemispheres – metaphor, context and the body – are all interpenetrated one with another. Once again it is the right hemisphere, in its concern for the immediacy of experience, that is more densely interconnected with and involved in the body, the ground of that experience. Where the right hemisphere can see that metaphor is the only way to preserve the link between language and the world it refers to, the left hemisphere sees it either as a lie (Locke, expressing Enlightenment disdain, called metaphors ‘perfect cheats’) or as a distracting ornament; and connotation as a limitation, since in the interests of certainty the left hemisphere prefers single meanings."

Linguagem enraizada no corpo

"Metaphors, even the simple ones hidden in expressions like feeling ‘down’, derive from our experience of living as embodied creatures in the everyday world. The body is, in other words, also the necessary context for all human experience."

"Yet with the rise of Saussurian linguistics in the twentieth century, it has become fashionable to insist on the arbitrary nature of the sign – a fascinating and counterintuitive move, designed to emphasise the ‘freedom’ of language as far as possible from the trammels of the body and of the physical world it describes. There is, however, plenty of evidence that the sounds of words are not arbitrary, but evocative, in a synaesthetic way, of the experience of the things they refer to. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, those with absolutely no knowledge of a language can nonetheless correctly guess which word – which of thesesupposedly arbitrary signs – goes with which object, in what has become known as the ‘kiki/bouba’ effect (‘kiki’ suggesting a spiky-shaped object, where ‘bouba’ suggests a softly rounded object)."

"So language is a hybrid. It evolved from music and in this part of its history represented the urge to communicate; and to the extent that it retains right-hemisphere empathic elements, it still does. Its foundations lie in the body and the world of experience. But referential language, with its huge vocabulary and sophisticated syntax, did not originate in a drive to communicate, and from this point of view, represents something of a hijack."

"Language has done its best to obscure its parentage. It has increasinglyabstracted itself from its origins in the body and in the experiential world. It developed its current form to enable us to refer to whatever is not present in experience: language helped its re-presentation."

"Metaphor is the crucial aspect of language whereby it retains its connectedness to the world, and by which the ‘parts’ of the world which language appears to identify retain their connectedness one to another. Literal language, by contrast, is the means whereby the mind loosens its contact with reality and becomes a self-consistent system of tokens. But, more than this, there is an important shape here which we will keep encountering: something that arises out of the world of the right hemisphere, is processed at the middle level by the left hemisphere and returns finally to the right hemisphere at the highest level."

A expansão frontal direita

"If asked to name the characteristics that ultimately differentiate humans from animals, the classic answers, reason and language, seem like a poor stab. Plenty of animals show, in their degree, capacity to deduce (deductive reasoning is importantly associated with right-hemisphere function, in any case): crows can reason, even bees have language of a kind. Of course, even the most highly evolved animals are incomparably inferior to ourselves in both respects, but the point is that they do show at least glimmerings of such, utilitarian, functions. But there are many things of which they show no evidence whatsoever: for instance, imagination, creativity, the capacity for religious awe, music, dance, poetry, art, love of nature, a moral sense, a sense of humour and the ability to change their minds. In all of these (though as always both hemispheres undoubtedly play a part), a large part, and in most cases the principal part, is played by the right hemisphere, usually involving the right frontal lobe. Where the left hemisphere's relationship with the world is one of reaching out to grasp, and therefore to use it, the right hemisphere's appears to be one of reaching out – just that. Without purpose."

Conclusão

"I suggest that there are two opposing ways of dealing with the world that are both vital but are fundamentally incompatible..."

"Both of these drives or tendencies can serve us well, and each expresses an aspect of the human condition that goes right to the core. It is not inevitable, ultimately, that they should be in conflict; and in fact it is best that they should not be. In some human brains, it appears that they can more closely co-exist..."

Capítulo 4 - A natureza dos dois mundos

"Our attention is responsive to the world. There are certain modes of attention which are naturally called forth by certain kinds of object. We pay a different sort of attention to a dying man from the sort of attention we'd pay to a sunset, or a carburettor. However, the process is reciprocal. It is not just that what we find determines the nature of the attention we accord to it, but that the attention we pay to anything also determines what it is we find. In special circumstances, the dying man may become for a pathologist a textbook of disease, or for a photojournalist a ‘shot’, both in the sense of a perceived frozen visual moment and a round of ammunition in a campaign. 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."

"One way of putting this is to say that we neither discover an objectivereality nor invent a subjective reality, but that there is a process of responsive evocation, the world ‘calling forth’ something in me that in turn ‘calls forth’ something in the world. That is true of perceptual qualities, not just of values."

"It is not possible to discuss the neuropsychological basis of our awareness of the world without adopting a philosophical position, whether or not one is conscious of doing so. Not to be aware of doing so is implicitly to have adopted the default standpoint of scientific materialism."

"The model of the body, and therefore the brain, as a mechanism is exempted from the process of philosophical scepticism: what it tells us becomes the truth. And, since the brain is equated with the mind, the mind too becomes a mechanism. The philosophical world view is brought into line with that, and reveals – the truth of the mechanical model as applied to brain and mind. As a result, in a spectacular hijack, instead of a mutually shaping process, whereby philosophy interrogates science, and science informs philosophy, the naïve world view of science has tended by default to shape and direct what has been called ‘neurophilosophy’."

"If the world of the left hemisphere and the world of the right hemisphere are both present to the mind, and form coherent aspects of experience, should we expect to find the resultant incompatibilities reflected in the history of philosophy? The hemispheres have different answers to the fundamental question ‘what is knowledge?’, as discussed in the last chapter, and hence different ‘truths’ about the world. So on the face of it, yes. But the default approach of philosophy is that of the left hemisphere, since it is via denotative language and linear, sequential analysis that we pin things down and make them clear and precise, and pinning them down and making them clear and precise equates with seeing the truth, as far as the left hemisphere is concerned. And since the type of attention you bring to bear dictates the world you discover, and the tools you use determine what you find, it would not be surprising if the philosophical vision of reality reflected the tools it uses, those of the left hemisphere, and conceived the world along analytic, and purely rationalistic, lines. It would be unlikely for philosophy to be able to get beyond its own terms of reference and its own epistemology; and so the answer to the question whether the history of philosophy would reflect the incompatibilities of the hemispheres is – probably not."

Paradoxos: processos vs. estados momentâneos

"Take the sorites paradox. This results from believing that the whole is the sum of the parts, and can be reached by a sequential process of incrementation. It tries to relate two things : a grain of sand and a heap, as though their relationship was transparent. It also presupposes that there must either be a heap or not be a heap at any one time: ‘either/or’ are your only alternatives. That is the left-hemisphere view, and sure enough it leads to paradox. According to the right-hemisphere view, it is a matter of a shift in context, and the coming into being of a Gestalt , an entity which has imprecisely defined bounds, and is recognised whole: the heap comes into being gradually, and is a process, an evolving, changing ‘thing’ (this problem is related to the Growing Argument). Failure to take into account context, inability to understand Gestalt forms, an inappropriate demand for precision where none can be found, an ignorance of process, which becomes a never-ending series of static moments: these are signs of left-hemisphere predominance."

Dewey and James: context and the nature of truth

"This account of James's illuminates the difference between two approaches to knowledge or understanding, those of the two hemispheres. According to the left hemisphere, understanding is built up from the parts; one starts from one certainty, places another next to it, and advances as if building a wall, from the bottom up. It conceives that there is objective evidence of truth for a part outside the context of the whole it goes to constitute. According to the right hemisphere, understanding is derived from the whole, since it is only in the light of the whole that one can truly understand the nature of the parts."

Husserl e a ideia de intersubjetividade

Merleau-Ponty: empatia e o corpo

Heidegger e a natureza do ser

"Things are not whatever we care to make them. There is a something that exists apart from our own minds, and our attempt to apprehend whatever it is needs to be true to, faithful to, that whatever-it-is-that-exists and at the same time true to ourselves in making that apprehension. No single truth does not mean no truth."

"This idea of truth-as-unconcealing contrasts with the idea of truth-as-correctness, which is static, unchanging. Truth as unconcealing is a progress towards something – the something is in sight, but never fully seen; whereas truth as correctness is given as a thing in itself, that can in principle be fully known. For Heidegger, truth was such an unconcealing, but it was also a concealing, since opening one horizon inevitably involves the closing of others. There is no single privileged viewpoint from which every aspect can be seen."

"For Heidegger, truth was such an unconcealing, but it was also a concealing, since opening one horizon inevitably involves the closing of others. There is no single privileged viewpoint from which every aspect can be seen. It may be true that, to quote Patricia Churchland, ‘it is reasonable to identify the blueness of an object with its disposition to scatter ... electromagnetic waves preferentially at about 0.46μm’ [emphasis in the original]. That is, I suppose, a sort of truth about the colour blue. That is one way in which blue discloses itself. Most of us would think it left rather a lot out. There are also other very important truths about the colour blue that we experience, for example, when we see a canvas by Ingres, or by Yves Klein, or view the sky, or sea, which are closed off by this. It is, in this sense, like the duck–rabbit: we can have only one ‘take’ on it at a time. We see things by seeing them as something. In this sense too we create the world by attending to it in a particular way."

"But there is a more important reason why truth has to be concealment. Every thing that purports to be the truth is, according to Heidegger, inevitably an approximation and true things, things that really are, rather than as we may apprehend them, are in themselves ineffable, ungraspable. Thus to see them clearly is to see something at best indistinct to vision – except that to see them distinctly would not be truly to see them . To have the impression that one sees things as they truly are, is not to permit them to ‘presence’ to us, but to substitute something else for them, something comfortable, familiar and graspable – what I would call a left-hemisphere re -presentation. The inexperienced mariner sees the ice floe; the experienced mariner sees the berg and is awe-struck."

"For Descartes, truth is determined and validated by certainty. Certainty, in turn, is located in the ego . The self becomes the hub of reality and relates to the world outside itself in an exploratory, necessarily exploitative, way. As knower and user, the ego is predator. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the human person and self-consciousness are not the centre, the assessors of existence. Man is only a privileged listener and respondent to existence. The vital relation to otherness is not, as for Cartesian and positivist rationalism, one of ‘grasping’ and pragmatic use. It is a relation of audition. We are trying ‘to listen to the voice of Being’. It is, or ought to be, a relation of extreme responsibility, custodianship, answerability to and for."

"Since Dasein is ‘to be there’ in the world – the literal, actual, concrete, daily world – to be human at all is to be immersed in the earth, and the quotidian matter-of-factness of the world. The right hemisphere is concerned with the familiar , not in the sense of the inauthentically routine, but in the sense of the things that form part of ‘my’ daily world or familia, the household, those I care for. It is not alien from material things, but, quite the opposite, attends to individual things in all their concrete particularity. This is exactly the ‘personal sensibility to the grain and substance of physical existence, to the “thingness” and obstinate quiddity of things, be they rock or tree or human presence’ that is found in Heidegger. Again this roots existence in the body and in the senses. We do not inhabit the body like some alien Cartesian piece of machine wizardry, but live it – a distinction between the left and right hemisphere understandings of the body. In trying to convey the ‘otherness’ of a particular building, its sheer existence or essent prior to any one act of cognition by which it is partially apprehended, Heidegger speaks of the primal fact of its existence being made present to us in the very smell of it, more immediately communicated in this way than by any description or inspection."

"Time is responsible for Dasein 's individuality, and is the condition under which existing things are. In Sein und Zeit ( Being and Time ) Heidegger insists that we do not live in time, as if it were some independent, abstract flow, alien to our being, but live time – much as being-in-the-world is not the same as being in the world like a marble in a box. We live time rather than just conceive it, and similarly we live the body rather than simply derive sensory information through it. Through the experience of time, Dasein becomes a ‘being towards death’: without death existence would be careless, would lack the power that draws us to one another and to the world. For Heidegger the ‘nadir of inauthentic temporality’ is time as a sequence of instants (the left-hemisphere mode), which is opposed to the lived time of Dasein , and whatever gives it meaning."

"Everydayness was an important concept for Heidegger: again it has two meanings, and Heidegger's distinctions once more illuminate hemisphere differences, as hemisphere differences illuminate Heidegger's meaning. To take a famous example of his, the hammer that I use finds its place naturally in a context of the action for which I use it, and becomes almost an extension of myself, so that there is no awareness or focal (left hemisphere) attention to it. It recedes into its context – the lived world of me, my arm, the action of hammering, and the world around in which this takes place (right hemisphere); in Heidegger's terms it is zuhanden (‘ready-to-hand’). By contrast, it stands out, becomes in Heidegger's terms vorhanden (‘present-at-hand’), only when something goes wrong and interrupts this flow, and draws my attention to it as an object for inspection (left hemisphere). Then it begins to become alien. But the situation is more complex and alive (right hemisphere) than this analytical schema (left hemisphere) makes it appear. Things do not end up ‘filed’ (left hemisphere) or for that matter ‘dwelling’ (right hemisphere) in one or other hemisphere, but are constantly moving back and forth, or, to put it more accurately, aspects of them belong to one hemisphere and aspects to the other, and these aspects are continually coming forward and retreating in a process that is dynamic."

"As things become dulled and inauthentic, they become conceptualised rather than experienced; they are taken out of their living context, a bit like ripping the heart out of a living body. Heidegger called this process that ofGestell , or framing, a term which suggests the detachment of seeing things as if through a window (as in a famous image of Descartes's)..."

Scheller: a importância dos valores na constituição da realidade

Dois mundos

"Take first the idea that we are active choosers of where we look. On its own the left hemisphere is remarkably entrapped by its vision. Once itsees something, it locks onto it, in a way that has little to do with choice. The world that it would be choosing from is, in any case, provided by the broader attention of the right hemisphere, and often what engages the focus of our attention comes to us pre-consciously, and bypasses any willed action. For example, the eye is ‘caught’, as we say, by salient words or names that leap out of the page (words which are probably undiscoverable again once we try to find them, and the narrow attentional beam of the left hemisphere comes into play). In practice so-called ‘pre-attentional’ processing means that before we can have had a chance to read what is there, we notice pre-consciously whatever has a particular affective charge or demand on our attention. So it is clearly not true that we have to attend to something consciously before we can know it: we can only select what to attend to when we know what it is we are dealing with. We know it first, then are drawn to attend, so as to know more – Escher's hands again. The world comes to meet us and acts to attract our gaze. Vitality, life and movement themselves draw the eye."

"Neurocognitivists say that we can re-cognise, and therefore know, something only if we have already got the model of it in our brain. That does perfectly describe left-hemisphere processes: but it would mean that we were forever trapped in the re-presented, no longer alive, world of the left hemisphere's knowledge, forever re-experiencing the familiar, the world forever going stale. We'd be back to the hall of mirrors."

"The left hemisphere will never help us here. As one researcher has put it, the left hemisphere on its own, for example after a right-hemisphere stroke, just ‘sees what it expected to see’"

"It is the task of the right hemisphere to carry the left beyond, to something new, something ‘Other’ than itself. The left hemisphere's graspof the world is essentially theoretical, and is self-referring. In that respect it gives validity to the post-modern claim that language is a self-enclosed system of signs – but if, and only if, it is a product of the left hemisphere alone. By contrast, for the right hemisphere there is, as Johnson said of theories about literature, always an appeal open to nature: it is open to whatever is new that comes from experience, from the world at large. The corollary of this impact of expectation on attention is that the left hemisphere delivers what we know, rather than what we actually experience."

"There is an inevitable relationship between certainty and ‘ re -cognition’, the return to something already familiar. Conscious knowledge, the knowledge that characterises left-hemisphere understanding, depends on its object being fixed – otherwise it cannot be known. Thus it is only its re-presentation in consciousness, after it has already become present to the un conscious mind, that enables us to know something consciously."

"The second part [1st = conscious control of attention] of the camera image is passive receptivity. But we never just ‘see’ something in the sense that a photographic plate receives rays of light. In the real world we bring a lot of our selves to the party. And that means gaze alters what it finds."

Falsos amigos

"‘Knowledge’ and ‘truth’ I have discussed – again there are two versions: one purporting to be impersonal, static, complete, a thing, and the other personal, provisional, a matter of degree, a journey. ‘Belief’ is closely related and has two meanings too."

"I believe that the train leaves at 6:13." vs "I believe in you."

Vontade como controle vs vontade como cuidado.

Conclusão

"The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, always imperfectly known – and to this world it exists in a relationship of care. The knowledge that is mediated by the left hemisphere is knowledge within a closed system. It has the advantage of perfection, but such perfection is bought ultimately at the price of emptiness, of self-reference. It can mediate knowledge only in terms of a mechanical rearrangement of other things already known. It can never really ‘break out’ to know anything new, because its knowledge is of its own re-presentations only. Where the thing itself is ‘present’ to the right hemisphere, it is only ‘re-presented’ by the left hemisphere, now become an idea of a thing. Where the right hemisphere is conscious of the Other, whatever it may be, the left hemisphere's consciousness is of itself."

Capítulo 5 - O primado do hemisfério direito

Awe (thaumazein) vs indiferença estoica

"Philosophy shares the trajectory that I have described as typical of the relationship between the hemispheres. It begins in wonder, intuition, ambiguity, puzzlement and uncertainty; it progresses through being unpacked, inspected from all angles and wrestled into linearity by the left hemisphere; but its endpoint is to see that the very business of language and linearity must themselves be transcended, and once more left behind. The progression is familiar: from right hemisphere, to left hemisphere, to right hemisphere again."

Primacy of broad vigilant attention

Primacy of wholenes

Primacy of experience

O primado do implícito

"All understanding, whether of the world or even of ourselves, depends on choosing the right metaphor. The metaphor we choose governs what we see."

"As Heidegger writes: ‘The world picture does not change from an earlier one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age.’ This changes the nature of existence."

"A painting is not a thing in the world: nor is it just a representation of theworld. In a marvellous phrase of Merleau-Ponty's, we do not see paintings, as much as see according to them. They are, like people, and the forms of the natural world, neither just objective things, nor mere representations of things: they permit us to see through, and according to, themselves."

O primado do afeto

"the affect comes first, the thinking later"

"Emotion and the body are at the irreducible core of experience: they are not there merely to help out with cognition."

"I think part of the difficulty here, which I will return to throughout this book, is that in the context of intellectual discourse we are always obliged to ‘look at’ the relationship of cognition to affect from the cognitive point of view."

O primado da vontade inconsciente

Experimentos de Libet

"...three principal meanings of the term consciousness: (1) consciousness as waking state : ‘after a lucid interval, the injured soldier lapsed into unconsciousness’; (2) consciousness as experience : ‘I became conscious of a feeling of dread, and an overpowering smell of burning rubber’; (3) consciousness as mind : ‘I am conscious that I may be straining your patience’ – in which case, unlike the previous example, one is not reporting on experience as such, but on something one bears in awareness even if not actually thinking about it and experiencing the consequences of such a thought at the time. Consciousness in each of these senses is sustainable by either hemisphere in isolation, though the quality of that consciousness might differ. The major difference between the hemispheres lies in their relationship with the unconscious mind, whether that means the dreamstate (thinking of consciousness in the first sense), or what we experience or bear in mind without being aware of it (the second and third senses)."

Tanto o pensamento quanto a sua expressão originam-se no hemisfério direito

David McNeill: "The anticipation of speech by gesture is important evidence for the argument that gestures reveal utterances in their primitive form: there is a global-synthetic image taking form at the moment the preparation phase begins, but there is not yet a linguistic structure with which it can integrate."

"McNeill reviews evidence for the main hypotheses about the relationship between gesture and speech, and concludes that there is a synthesis of two ‘opposite modes of thought’. One is expressed in gesture, and is ‘global-synthetic all the way down’: it is constructed at the moment of speaking, and is idiosyncratic in nature, rather than forming a systematic code – all features that identify it as right-hemisphere-derived. The other is expressed in words, having ‘a linear-segmented hierarchical linguistic structure,’ features which identify it as derived from the left hemisphere. But he emphasises that it is the right-hemisphere contribution that has both temporal priority and ontological priority, since thought is originally ‘largelyimagistic and minimally analytic’, whereas by the moment of utterance, it has become ‘both imagistic and analytic and is a synthesis of the holistic and analytic functions.’ In terms of the thesis of this book, then, the process begins in the realm of the right hemisphere, gets input from the left hemisphere, and finally reaches a synthesis of right with left."

"Perhaps the most striking finding of all is that, when there is a mismatch between gesture and speech, it is the gesture that carries the day in 100 per cent of cases."

Re-presentation waits on presentation

O funcionamento do sistema nervoso é congruente com o hemisfério direito

O processamento intermediário realizado pelo hemisfério esquerdo

O processo de reintegração

"The right hemisphere needs the left hemisphere in order to be able to ‘unpack’ experience. Without its distance and structure, certainly, there could be, for example, no art, only experience – Wordsworth's description of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is just one famous reflection of this. But, just as importantly, if the process ends with the left hemisphere, one has only concepts – abstractions and conceptions, not art at all. Similarly the immediate pre-conceptual sense of awe can evolve into religion only with the help of the left hemisphere: though, if the process stops there, all one has is theology, or sociology, or empty ritual: something else."

Reintegração como Aufhebung

"As I have suggested above, all apparently ‘complete’ systems, such as the left hemisphere creates, show themselves ultimately, not just by the standards or values of the right hemisphere, but even in their own terms, to be incomplete."

Ignorância necessária

"The left hemisphere seems to play a crucial role in determining what comes into being; it is part of the process of creation. Applying linear, sequential analysis forces the implicit into explicitness, and brings clarity; this is crucial in helping bring about an aspect of what is there. But, in doing so, the whole is lost."

Capítulo 6 - O triunfo do hemisfério esquerdo

"Despite the left hemisphere's conviction of its own self-sufficiency, everything about the relationship of the hemispheres to one another and to reality suggests the primacy of the right hemisphere, both in grounding experience (at the bottom level) and in reconstituting left- hemisphere-processed experience once again as living (at the top level). We have also seen that many important aspects of experience, those that the right hemisphere is particularly well equipped to deal with – our passions, our sense of humour, all metaphoric and symbolic understanding (and with it the metaphoric and symbolic nature of art), all religious sense, all imaginative and intuitive processes – are denatured by becoming the object of focussed attention, which renders them explicit, therefore mechanical, lifeless. The value of the left hemisphere is precisely in making explicit, but this is a staging post, an intermediate level of the ‘processing’ of experience, never the starting point or end point, never the deepest, or the final, level."

"The left hemisphere is competitive, and its concern, its prime motivation, is power . If the working relationship were to become disturbed, so that the left hemisphere appeared to have primacy or became the end point or final staging post on the ‘processing’ of experience, the world would change into something quite different. And we can say fairly clearly what that would be like: it would be relatively mechanical, an assemblage of more or less disconnected ‘parts’; it would be relatively abstract and disembodied; relatively distanced from fellow-feeling; given to explicitness; utilitarian in ethic; over-confident of its own take on reality, and lacking insight into itsproblems – the neuropsychological evidence is that these are all aspects of the left hemisphere world as compared with the right."

"My thesis is that the hemispheres have complementary but conflicting tasks to fulfil, and need to maintain a high degree of mutual ignorance. At the same time they need to co-operate. How is this achieved, and what is their working relationship like?"

"... in the first months following surgery, split-brain patients reported some rather disconcerting experiences. These took the form of an apparent conflict of will, displayed in so-called intermanual conflict. Such was the case of a man who found himself in the unfortunate position of going to embrace his wife with one arm and pushing her away with the other."

A relação entre os hemisférios

Nível um: instantâneo; inibição mútua

Nível dois: ignorância mútua; predominância do hemisfério esquerdo na experiência consciente

What the stories of the split-brain patients in their first few months after operation also reveal is that it is the left hemisphere, Gazzaniga's interpreter, that is in control, at the conscious level, of the consistent nature of ‘our’ experience, even though we may have differing views, desires, and values in either hemisphere. In inter-manual conflict, it is never the right hand that is experienced as the rebel, the ‘naughty’ hand, the one that is ‘out of control’: it is always the left, that pushes the other way, grabs the wheel, chooses the ‘wrong’ clothes."

"Despite the asymmetry in their roles, in favour of the right hemisphere, there is an important opposing asymmetry of power, in favour of the left hemisphere. The Master makes himself vulnerable to the emissary, and the emissary can choose to take advantage of the situation, to ignore the Master. It seems that its nature is such that it is prone to do so, and it may even, mistakenly, see the right hemisphere's world as undoing its work, challenging its ‘supremacy’."

Nível três: conflito de assimetrias

• assimetria ontológica (sobre o que há); predomínio direito

• assimetria funcional (direito -> esquerdo -> direito)

• assimetria de meios (linguagem, lógica, linearidade); predomínio esquero

• assimetria estrutural

• assimetria interacional

"Ramachandran puts the problem with his customary vividness: 'In the most extreme cases, a patient will not only deny that the arm (or leg) is paralysed, but assert that the arm lying in the bed next to him, his own paralysed arm, doesn't belong to him! There's an unbridled willingness to accept absurd ideas.' But when the damage is to the left hemisphere (and the sufferer is therefore depending on the right hemisphere), with paralysis on the body's right side, they almost never experience denial. Why not? They are as disabled and frustrated as people with right hemisphere damage, and presumably there is as much ‘need’ for psychological defence, but in fact 'they are not only aware of the paralysis, but constantly talk about it ...It is the vehemence of the denial – not a mere indifference to paralysis – that cries out for an explanation'."

O hemisfério esquerdo como um sonâmbulo

PARTE II - Como o cérebro tem modelado nosso mundo

Cap. 7. Imitação e a evolução da cultura

"Knowing what we do about the nature of the different worlds each hemisphere brings about, and understanding their relationship, we can, I believe, begin to see a pattern in the course of Western history. I believe there has been a succession of shifts of balance between the hemispheres over the last 2,000 years, and the second part of this book will explore this point of view, with the particular aim of understanding what is happening in the contemporary world."

"Today all the available sources of intuitive life – cultural tradition, the natural world, the body, religion and art – have been so conceptualised, devitalised and ‘deconstructed’ (ironised) by the world of words, mechanistic systems and theories constituted by the left hemisphere that their power to help us see beyond the hermetic world that it has set up has been largely drained from them. I have referred to the fact that a number of influential figures in the history of ideas, among them Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger, have noted a gradual encroachment over time of rationality on the natural territory of intuition or instinct."

Como aconteceram as alterações no equilíbrio

"Imitation is a human characteristic, and is arguably the ultimately most important human skill, a critical development in the evolution of the human brain. It is surely how we came to learn music, and though Chomsky may have distracted our attention from this, it is how we learnt, and learn, language. Only humans, apart from birds, are thought normally to imitate sounds directly, and only humans can truly imitate another's course ofaction. Other species may adopt the same goal as another individual member of their species, and may succeed in finding their own way to achieve it, but only humans directly imitate the means as well as the end. This may sound like a rather backward step, but it isn't. The enormous strength of the human capacity for mimesis is that our brains let us escape from the confines of our own experience and enter directly into the experience of another being: this is the way in which, through human consciousness, we bridge the gap, share in what another feels and does, in what it is like to be that person. This comes about through our ability to transform what we perceive into something we directly experience."

"Imitation is non-instrumental. It is intrinsically pleasurable, and babies and small children indulge in it for its own sake. The process is fundamental and hard-wired, and babies as little as forty-five minutes old can imitate facial gestures. It is how we get to know what we know, but also how we become who we are."

"Imitation gives rise, paradoxically as it may seem, to individuality. That is precisely because the process is not mechanical reproduction, but an imaginative inhabiting of the other, which is always different because of its intersubjective betweenness. The process of mimesis is one of intention, aspiration, attraction and empathy, drawing heavily on the right hemisphere, whereas copying is the following of disembodied procedures and algorithms, and is left-hemisphere-based. The distinction is similar to that sometimes claimed between metaphor on the one hand and simile on the other: simile has no interiority."

"I am reminded here of Bruno Snell, also speaking of the ancient world: ‘The warrior and the lion are activated by one and the same force ... a man who walks “like a lion” betrays an actual kinship with the beast.’ Homeric metaphors are ‘not only symbols, but the particular embodiments of universal vital forces’. They assign ‘a role very similar to that of the beasts also to the natural elements. We have already met with the storm, the wave, the rock ... above all they are regarded as the conductors of fundamental forces such as are alive also in man.’"

"We already know from the discovery of the existence of mirror neurones that when we imitate something that we can see, it is as if we are experiencing it. But it goes further than this. Mental representation, in the absence of direct visual or other stimulus – in other words, imagining – brings into play some of the same neurones that are involved in direct perception."

"Imagination, then, is not a neutral projection of images on a screen. We need to be careful of our imagination, since what we imagine is in a sense what we are and who we become."

"Imitation would itself have a selective advantage: it would enable those who were skilled imitators to strengthen the bonds that tied them to others within the group, and make social groups stable and enduring. Those groups that were most cohesive would survive best, and the whole group's genes would do better, or not, depending on the acquisition of shared skills that promote bonding – such as music, or ultimately language. Those individuals less able to imitate would be less well bound into the group, and would not prosper to the same degree."

"In the left-hemisphere world there is, however, a way of accommodating such values: by simply returning them all to the only value it knows, that of utility. Beauty, for example, is a way of ensuring that we select healthy reproductive partners; bravery acts to defend territory in the interests of the gene pool; intelligence leads to power to manipulate the environment, and one's fellow creatures; holiness is an invention designed to promote cohesion of the group; and so on..."

Cap. 8 - O mundo antigo

"The relatively sudden change that came over the portrayal of the human face in the period beginning in the sixth century BC , and particularly from the fourth century, in Greece, in which the more abstracted, stereotypic and inexpressive gaze of Egyptian and early Greek representations of the face and head gives way to portraiture which is more individualised, varied, emotionally expressive and empathic, is attributed by Brener to a rapid advancement in functioning of the right hemisphere in Greece at around the same period. Other evidence for this, according to Brener, would be evolution of a body of highly expressive poetry rich in metaphor, the evolution of the idea of the individual as having legitimate claims to be balanced with those of the community at large, and a sense of empathy with others in general, as well as an interest in the natural world – to which I would add a sense of humour based on ironic appreciation of the pathos of man's position in the world as a ‘being towards death’."

"The Greeks began this process of standing back; and the beginnings of analytical philosophy, of theorising about the political state, of the development of maps, of the observation of the stars and of the ‘objective’ natural world, all may be mediated by the left hemisphere; though the urge to do so at all comes from the right."

"My thesis is that the separation of the hemispheres brought with it both advantages and disadvantages. It made possible a standing outside of the ‘natural’ frame of reference, the common-sense everyday way in which we see the world. In doing so it enabled us to build on that ‘necessary distance’ from the world and from ourselves, achieved originally by the frontal lobes, and gave us insight into things that otherwise we could not have seen, even making it possible for us to form deeper empathic connections with one another and with the world at large. The best example of this is the fascinating rise of drama in the Greek world, in which the thoughts and feelings of our selves and of others are apparently objectified, and yet returned to us as our own. A special sort of seeing arises, in which both distance and empathy are crucial."

Grécia arcaica

Sobre Homero: "This profound embodiment of thought and emotion, this emphasis on processes that are always in flux, rather than on single, static entities, this refusal of the ‘either/or’ distinction between mind and body, all perhaps again suggest a right-hemisphere-dependent version of the world. But what is equally obvious to the modern mind is the relative closeness of the point of view . And that, I believe, helps to explain why there is little description of the face: to attend to the face requires a degree of detached observation."

"By the late fifth and fourth centuries, separate ‘concepts of body and soul were firmly fixed in Greek culture’. 24 In Plato, and thence for the next two thousand years, the soul is a prisoner in the body, as he describes it in the Phaedo , awaiting the liberation of death."

Grécia clássica

"Heraclitus’ response to the misleading nature of re-presentation, to the way things seem, is not to go further in that direction, away from phenomena, but to look again at what our experience tells us. In other words, he does not advise a turning inwards in order to discover the nature of reality, but a patient and careful attention to the phenomenal world. Most people, he says, make the mistake of prioritising opinion, their ideas, over experience, over ‘things as they encounter them’."

"Let us move on to the early fifth century BC , in Elea, a Greek colony on the southern coast of Italy, where Parmenides founded his own school of philosophy. Parmenides was a priest of Apollo: his main work is a poem that survives in fragmentary form, and is explicitly opposed to Heraclitus (and, on different grounds, to Pythagoras). The important message enshrined in its double structure – The Way of Truth versus The Way of Belief – is that the phenomenal world is a deception. Thought is all that there is: ‘for thought and being are the same thing’. 64 What can be thought must be, and what cannot be thought cannot exist. What follows from logic, however much it flies in the face of experience, must be true. However, contradiction, a conflict within the system of language and reason, is taken as a sure indication of error."

"As Plato in his dialogues Parmenides and Sophist reveals, Parmenides’ position leads to many unpalatable consequences. Effectively the complete sundering of the worlds of experience and of ideas leads to the consequence that ‘we do not participate in knowledge itself’ (the opposite of Heraclitus's claim that the logos is shared). So philosophers do not participate in knowledge (a self-undermining position) and none of us can partake in the reality of being (another). The impossibility of difference as well as sameness brings all discourse to a halt. None of this would matter so much if self-undermining positions were not expressly excluded by Parmenides (and by Socrates), and if rational discourse was not held by both to be the way to truth."

"The very fact of having a philosophy at all was one of the many changes to be brought about by the advent of necessary distance. Drama, at least as conceived by the Greeks, is another, and as Nietzsche saw it, a demonstration of the necessary balance of Apollo and Dionysus. This distance has nothing to do with the ironising distance, or Verfremdungseffekt , espoused by modern dramatists, and indeed works to the opposite end. It enables us to feel powerfully with, and thus to know ourselves in, others, and others in ourselves. ‘Man must listen to an echo of himself before he may hear or know himself,’ as Snell says; and it is in drama that we find that echo. The ‘process of the tragic chorus is the original phenomenon of drama’, wrote Nietzsche, ‘this experience of seeing oneself transformed before one's eyes and acting as if one had really entered another body, another character’. In tragedy, we see for the first time in the history of the West the power of empathy, as we watch not just the painful moulding of the will, and of the soul, of men and women (the constant theme of tragedy is hubris ), but the gods themselves in evolution, moving from their instincts for vengeance and retributory justice towards compassion and reconciliation."

A palavra escrita

Pictogramas (3300 a.C), ideogramas, fonogramas, alfabetos (2000-1500 a.C), direção da escrita

Dinheiro

Período tardio

"...the highpoint was the age of Aeschylus, when Apollo and Dionysus were reconciled, the time of the birth of tragedy. In Nietzsche's view, in the end ‘the ambiguous god of wine and death yielded the stage to Apollo and the triumph of rationality, to theoretical and practical utilitarianism as well as democracy, which was a contemporary phenomenon’, symptoms of the ageing of Greek civilisation, and foreshadowing the depressing spectacle, as he saw it, of the modern Western world."

"In this later Greek world, truth becomes something proved by argument. The importance of another, ultimately more powerful, revealer of truth, metaphor, is forgotten; and metaphor, in another clever inversion, comes even to be a lie, though perhaps a pretty one. So the statements of truth contained in myth become discounted as ‘fictions’, that is to say untruths or lies – since, to the left hemisphere, metaphor is no more than this."

"...there is no doubt that it is ultimately the left-hemisphere version of the world that Plato puts forward, for the first time in history; puts forward so strongly that it has taken two thousand years to shake it off."

"And so it is that perhaps the most profound legacy of the Greeks, their myths, come to be seen as ‘myths’ as we now use the term, false histories. But here is Malinowski on the true nature of myth: 'These stories live not by idle interest [that is, not as a sort of primitive science, merely to answer intellectual curiosity], not as fictitious or even as true narratives; but are to the natives a statement of a primeval, greater, and more relevant reality, by which the present life, fates, and activities of mankind are determined, the knowledge of which supplies man with the motive for ritual and moral actions, as well as with indications as to how to perform them.'"

Os romanos

"Rome's greatness depended more on codification, rigidity and solidity than it did on flexibility, imagination and originality."

Cap. 9 - O renascimento e a reforma

"This is a Renaissance characteristic, a sudden coming into awareness of aspects of experience that had unaccountably been neglected: in science, a return to looking at things carefully ‘as they are’ rather than as they were known to be; in painting, similarly, to what we see rather than what we know. This is bound up with the important rediscovery of perspective..."

"What we are being let into here [tempo e emoções] is something profound about the betweenness of emotional memory. Our feelings are not ours, any more than, as Scheler said, our thoughts are ours. We locate them in our heads, in our selves, but they cross interpersonal boundaries as though such limits had no meaning for them: passing back and forth from one mind to another, across space and time, growing and breeding, but where we do not know. What we feel arises out of what I feel for what you feel for what I feel about your feelings about me – and about many other things besides: it arises from the betweenness, and in this way feeling binds us together, and, more than that, actually unites us, since the feelings are shared. Yet the paradox is that those feelings only arise because of our distinctness, our ability to be separate, distinct individuals, that come, that go, in separation and death."

"One of the most mysterious expressions of the way in which the whole does not depend on the sum of the parts is in the art of caricature. Here gross distortions of every part can be compatible with immediate recognition of the whole. Caricature in the ancient world – and it existed both in Egypt and Greece – was always the exaggeration of a type, not the caricature of an individual. The first artist to deploy caricature of an individual, and the originator of the term ‘caricatura’, was Annibale Carracci (1560–1609). ‘A good caricature’, he said, ‘like every work of art, is more true to life than reality itself.’"

"In keeping with my view that the Renaissance initially involves a standing forth of the right hemisphere, it seems that from the fourteenth century onwards, there begins a tendency for the light source in paintings to be situated in the left visual field. This tendency increased during the Renaissance, and declined from the eighteenth century onwards: during the twentieth century the mediaeval tendency for a non-directional light source returned, a change which was to be correlated with the disappearance of apparent depth (illusionary perspective) and the tendency of the artists to remain in the two-dimensional plane."

"Intriguingly, there appears to have been a marked shift, according to James Hall, in the way the left and right sides of the body were viewed at around this time. The traditional view of the left side as, literally, sinister would appear to have softened at the Renaissance, and given way to an intuitive sense of its positive qualities. According to Hall, ‘the superior beauty of the left hand was an important component of the courtly love tradition’, right at the outset of the Renaissance. 8 As the Renaissance unfolded, the claims of the left side were advanced at the expense of the right: it was seen as the more beautiful side – finer, more gentle, more truthful, more in touch with feeling. The entire left side of the body took on a cast of beauty, truthfulness and fragility."

"William James, the greatest psychologist ever to have studied religion sympathetically, wrote that ‘melancholy ... constitutes an essential moment in every complete religious evolution’, 14 and that the ‘completest religions’ are those in which pessimism has best been developed. There is, at least, a strong connection between religious belief and melancholic temperament in the Renaissance period, as between music and melancholy (the connection between music and religion is a universal in all cultures and at all times: see p. 77 above)."

"The Renaissance is also the time when not just apparently opposed or contradictory ideas could be entertained together, when not just ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning in language are rife (from the obvious love for puns, ‘conceits’, and so on, to the whole array of fruitful ambiguities in which Elizabethan poetry inheres and consists), but when emotions are experienced as characteristically mixed."

Desejar (querer) e sentir falta de: "Wanting is clear, purposive, urgent, driven by the will, always with its goal clearly in view. Longing, by contrast, is something that ‘happens’ between us and another thing. It is not directed by will, and is not an aim, with the ultimate goal of acquisition; but instead is a desire for union – or rather it is experienced as a desire for re -union. This goes with there not necessarily being a simple explicit vision of what it is that is longed for, which remains in the realms of the implicit or intuitive, and is often spiritual in nature. Spiritual longing and melancholy share these more diffuse and reverberative features, of something that ‘happens’ or ‘comes about’ between ourselves and an Other, whatever it may be. In either case it is not necessarily possible to say what the ‘cause’ (or better, the origin) is – what the melancholy, or the longing, is about or for . Wanting is clear in its target, and in its separation from the thing that is wanted. Longing suggests instead a distance, but a never interrupted connection or union over that distance with whatever it is that is longed for, however remote the object of longing may be. It is somehow experienced as an elastic tension that is set up between the one that is longing and the object of that longing – the pull, tautness as in a bow string (in German, die Bogensehne) holding together the two ends of the bow that are never really separate."

Reforma

"Though we have been focussing on a return to the right hemisphere in the flowering of the Renaissance, with an almost magnetic attraction towards the newly discovered history, writings, arts and monuments of the ancient world, which opened eyes to the vibrancy of a living world beyondthe mediaeval ‘world-picture’, the decline of the Middle Ages yields an example of both processes at work. One can see the second process (a rejection of the right hemisphere's world) in the way in which the decline of metaphoric understanding of ceremony and ritual into the inauthentic repetition of empty procedures in the Middle Ages prompted, not a revitalisation of metaphoric understanding, but an outright rejection of it, with the advent of the Reformation. This cataclysmic convulsion is said to have begun with Luther's Ninety-Five Theses , which he nailed to the door of the Schloßkirche in Wittenberg in 1517."

"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 marvellous is proscribed. Imagination is not to be filled with [what are now thought of as] airy images."

"The problem of the Reformation was, according to Koerner, one of ‘either/or’, a ‘hatred based on the absolute distinction between truth and falsehood’. Because of the inability to accept the ambiguous or metaphorical, and because of a fear of the power of the imagination, images were objects of terror."

"Decapitation of statues by the Reformers took place because of the confounding of the animate and the inanimate, and the impossibility of seeing that one can live in the other metaphorically. In a world where metaphoric understanding is lost we are reduced to ‘either/or’, as Koerner says. Either the statue is God or it is a thing: since it is ‘obviously’ not God, it must be a thing, and therefore ‘mere wood’, in which case it has no place in worship. To see that ‘mere’ wood can partake of the divine requires seeing it as a metaphor, and being able to see that, precisely because it is a metaphor rather than a representation, it is itself divine. It is not just something non-divine representing the divine, it is something divine. This is the difference between the belief that the bread and wine represent the body and blood of Christ, and the belief that they are in some important sense the body and blood of Christ, metaphors of it. It was the explicit analytical left hemisphere attempt to untangle this that had led, in mediaeval scholastic theology, to an ‘either/or’, and resulted in the improbable doctrine of transubstantiation: that at the moment of the priest's pronouncing the words of consecration, what had been mere bread and mere wine became suddenly, and literally, the body and blood of Christ. What the right hemisphere had understood intuitively, being comfortable with metaphoric meaning, was forced into the straightjacket of legalistic thinking, and forced to be either literal bread and wine or literal body and blood. At the Reformation this problem re-emerged."

"Some further interesting phenomena begin to appear. Rejection of the body, and of embodied existence in an incarnate world, in favour of an invisible, discarnate realm of the mind, naturally facilitates the application of general rules. In other words, abstraction facilitates generalisation."

"Every existing entity comes into being only through boundaries, because of distinctions: which is perhaps why the Book of Genesis speaks of God creating by dividing – the earth from the heavens, the sea from the dry land, the night from the day, and so on. The drive towards separation and distinction brings individual things into being. By contrast, the drive towards generalisation, with its effective ‘democratisation’ of its object (of the holy, of art, of the beautiful), has the effect of destroying its object as a living force."

"What I wish to emphasise is the transition, within the Reformation, from what are initially the concerns of the right hemisphere to those of the left hemisphere: how a call for authenticity, and a reaction against the undoubtedly empty and corrupt nature of some practices of the mediaeval Roman Catholic Church, an attempt therefore to return from a form of re-presentation to the true presence of religious feeling, turned rapidly into a further entrenchment of inauthenticity."

"In essence the cardinal tenet of Christianity – the Word is made Flesh – becomes reversed, and the Flesh is made Word."

O começo do iluminismo

"In his classic analysis of modernity, Cosmopolis , the philosopher Stephen Toulmin, a disciple of Wittgenstein, saw two distinct phases to the origins of modernity. One was that of Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare and Montaigne, a tolerant, literary and humanistic phase, in which horizons expanded – literally as well as metaphorically, since this was the age of the explorer, and a fascination with other peoples and their customs, a revelling in difference. The second, a scientific and philosophical phase, he believes turned its back on the earlier phase, in terms more rigid and dogmatic: ‘there are good precedents for the suggestion that the 17th century saw a reversal of Renaissance values’"

"There was, according to Toulmin, a narrowing, not an expansion, of concern, as one moves from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth, from the world of Pantagruel to that of Pilgrim's Progress , from Shakespeare to Racine, from Montaigne to Descartes – a ‘narrowing in the focus of preoccupations, and a closing in of intellectual horizons’. Reason itself became narrower in conception, no longer respecting context, as Aristotle had insisted, when he held that what was reasonable in clinical medicine was different from what was logical in geometrical theory. A universal, timeless theory became the only true subject of philosophy: abstract generalisations and rules for perfection superseded acceptance of the contingency of difference."

"It was not long, however, before Descartes, certainly, was saying, in very different spirit, that science will make us ‘the lords and masters of nature’. And gone is Bacon's careful recognition that, while observing Nature attentively is essential, she is many times subtler than our senses or our understanding. If Descartes had observed that caveat, he would never have made the fatal mistake of believing ‘that I could take it as a general rule that the things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true’. That was the fallacy that was to derail the next three centuries of Western thought."

Conclusão

"Renaissance, one sees a fruitful balance in the relation of the hemispheres. This operated to bring about the quintessential Renaissance achievements of perspective, both in spatial depth and in historical and personal time, and of the idea of the individual. For the most part, however, the changes that occurred at around this period do suggest the salience of primarily the right hemisphere's world. One of the defining features of the Renaissance must be its opening of the eyes to experience, initially almost exclusively personal experience, in preference to what is ‘known’ to be the case, the teachings of scholastic theory and received opinion. There is a corresponding respect for the quiddity of individual things and people, rather than their being seen as members of categories. There was a faithful imitation of, and close attention to, the natural world, and to what other people in other times may have thought or known; and in this breadth of concern, and the insistence on the interconnectedness of things and the importance of the fullest possible context, it again speaks of the right hemisphere's world. This also included the body and the soul equally and inseparably as the context of all living things. In its respect for the body as more than a thing, and an integral part of the whole person; in its rehabilitation of the senses; in its emphasis on spatial depth, and on time as lived, with man becoming the ‘being towards death'; in the rekindling of empathy in the arts, including theatre, and a preoccupation with the expressive powers of the human face in particular, in the portraiture that dominates the visual arts of the period; in the sense of the self as an individual, yet integrated by moral and emotional bonds to society; in the newfound expressiveness of all the arts; in the rise of polyphony, with the importance of melody, harmony and the relationship of the parts to the whole; in the rise of wit and pathos, and the predominant emphasis on the links between wisdom and melancholy; in its attraction to exemplars, rather than to categories; in its capacity to accept the coniunctio oppositorum , and to relish mixed emotions and the coming together of widely different ideas; in its emphasis on the importance of what must remain implicit, on inborn and intuited skills (as well as on the artist as a semi-divine being), and on the world as never just what it ‘seems’ to be, but pointing beyond to something Other, a world that is semi-transparent, pregnant with myth and metaphor – in all these respects, it seems to me that the Renaissance started out with a huge expansion of the right hemisphere's way of being in the world, into which, initially, the work of the left hemisphere is integrated."

"As the Renaissance progresses, there becomes evident, however, a gradual shift of emphasis from the right hemisphere way of being towards the vision of the left hemisphere, in which a more atomistic individuality characterised by ambition and competition becomes more salient; and originality comes to mean not creative possibility but the right to ‘free thinking’, the way to throw off the shackles of the past and its traditions, which are no longer seen as an inexhaustible source of wisdom, but as tyrannical, superstitious and irrational – and therefore wrong. This becomes the basis of the hubristic movement which came to be known as the Enlightenment."

Capítulo 10 - O iluminismo

"The value of rationality, as well as whatever premises it may start from, has to be intuited: neither can be derived from rationality itself. All rationality can do is to provide internal consistency once the system is up and running. Deriving deeper premises only further postpones the ultimate question, and leads into an infinite regress; in the end one is back to an act of intuitive faith governed by reason (nous). Logos represents, as indeed the left hemisphere does, a closed system which cannot reach outside itself to whatever it is that exists apart from itself. According to Plato, nous (reason as opposed to rationality) is characterised by intuition, and according to Aristotle it is nous that grasps the first principles through induction. So the primacy of reason (right hemisphere) is due to the fact that rationality (left hemisphere) is founded on it. Once again the right hemisphere is prior to the left."

Descartes e loucura

"Descartes is one of the first and greatest exemplars of the left hemisphere's salience in the philosophy of the Enlightenment."

Desvitalização e a necessidade de certezas

"As the German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann, one of the Enlightenment's earliest critics, saw, this Cartesian world view would lead to devitalisation, and in social terms, to bureaucratisation. The immediacy with which unnatural detachment induces boredom can be seen from the novelist Alberto Moravia's description of boredom, in his novel of that name: 'Boredom to me consists in a kind of insufficiency, or inadequacy or lack of reality ... yet again boredom might be described as a malady affecting external objects and consisting of a withering process; an almost instantaneous loss of vitality ... The feeling of boredom originates for me in a sense of the absurdity of a reality which is insufficient, or anyhow unable, to convince me of its own effective existence ...'

The concept of boredom arose in the eighteenth century."

"In his book The Roots of Romanticism , Isaiah Berlin lays out what it was about the Enlightenment that Romanticism later came to put in question. He refers to ‘the three propositions ... upon which the whole Western tradition rested’: namely, ‘that all genuine questions can be answered, that if a question cannot be answered it is not a question'; ‘that all these answers are knowable, that they can be discovered by means which can be learnt and taught to other persons'; and ‘that all the answers must be compatible with one another’. These tenets could be said to be the foundations of Enlightenment thinking."

"The necessity for the Enlightenment of certainty and ‘transmissibility’ creates a problem for the arts, which are intrinsically ambiguous and uncertain, and where creative genius is not ‘transmissible’. There is a consequent downgrading of imagination in favour of fancy, and a mistrust of metaphor, as we have noted, which is equated with the lie. There are obvious continuities between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. They share the same marks of left-hemisphere domination: the banishment of wonder; the triumph of the explicit, and, with it, mistrust of metaphor; alienation from the embodied world of the flesh, and a consequent cerebralisation of life and experience. The right hemisphere bid for reason, in which opposites can be held in balance, was swiftly transformed into a move toward left-hemisphere rationality, in which one of the two must exclude, even annihilate, the other. The impulse towards harmony was replaced with the impulse towards singleness and purity."

Clareza enganadora

Simetria e stasis

"Symmetry – in poetry, in music, in architecture, in prose and in thought –was perhaps the ultimately guiding aesthetic principle of the Enlightenment. There is a relationship between symmetry and two other important Enlightenment qualities, both of them allied to the preferences of the left hemisphere: stasis and equality."

"So it is with the left hemisphere and stasis. Because the left hemisphere is dealing with things that are known, they have to have a degree of fixity: if their constantly changing nature is respected, they cannot be known. To the left hemisphere, a thing once known does not change, though it may move, or be moved, atomistically, according to the will, and it must indeed be made to move to fit in with the categorisations of the left hemisphere's will. Thus, where the left-hemisphere world obtains, the continual change and the individual differences of actual living things are exchanged for stasis and equality, as the butterfly is skewered, unmoving, a specimen in the collector's cabinet. At the same time, however, the left hemisphere achieves, through this process, power to manipulate, which I would claim has always been its drive."

A busca da igualdade

Revoluções francesa e americana

Terror e destruição

Uncanny [estranho/sinistro/misterioso]

Capítulo 11 -- Romantismo e Revolução Industrial

"though the Enlightenment could be summed up in the cognitive content of a relatively small number of beliefs, Romanticism never could, because its concern is with a whole disposition towards the world, which involves the holder of that disposition, as well as what beliefs might be held. Not in other words, with a what , but with a how."

"Since the foundation of Enlightenment thinking is that all truths cohere, are mutually compatible, non-contradictory, ultimately reconcilable, its weak place is where incompatibilities are found..."

Corpo e alma

"For the Romantic mind, by contrast, theory was not something abstracted from experience and separate from it (based on representation), but present in the act of perception. There was therefore no question of ‘applying’ theory to life, since phenomena themselves were the source of ‘theory’. Fact and theory, like particular and universal, were not opposites. According to Goethe they ‘are not only intimately connected, but ... interpenetrate one another ... the particular represents the universal, “not as a dream and shadow, but as a momentarily living manifestation of the inscrutable”.’ The particular metaphorises the universal. Goethe deplored the tendency for us, like children that go round the back of a mirror to see what's there, to try to find a reality behind the particularity of the archetypal phenomenon."

"Some things have to remain obscure if they are not to be forced to be untrue to their very nature: they are known, and can be expressed, only indirectly. One of these is embodied existence."

"The fusion of body with mind, or more properly with spirit or soul, was never more keenly felt than by the Romantics. ‘O Human Imagination, O Divine Body’, wrote Blake."

"for us truly to experience something it has to enter into and alter us, and there must be something in us which specifically responds to it as unique. A consequence of this, as Thomas Kuhn recognised, will be that those phenomena with which we have no affinity, and which we are not in some sense ready to see, are often not seen at all. Theory, in the conventional sense of the term, can restrict one's capacity to see things, and the only remedy is to be aware of it. Understanding, then, is not a discursive explanatory process, but a moment of connection, in which we see through our experience – an aperçu or insight. All seeing is ‘seeing as'; not that a cognition is added to perception, but that each act of seeing, in the sense of allowing something to ‘presence’ for us, is in itself necessarily an act of understanding."

Profundidade

"The subjects of Claude's paintings are not the tiny figures whose history forms their pretext, but the depth, spatial and temporal, of our relationship with the world, for which colour, light and texture act as visual metaphors. In Claude's paintings there is a deep perspective, enhanced sometimes by the steeply angled buildings which often form part of the foreground, particularly of his harbour scenes, and by an extraordinary ability to use variations in light and colour to suggest not just distance as such, but a succession, or progression, of distances, each giving place to the next, by which the viewer is inexorably drawn into the imagined scene."

"The breakthrough in Romantic thinking to the essential connectedness of things enabled them to see that those who are in awe of any great object – whether it be God, or the vastness, beauty and complexity of nature – do not set themselves apart from it; they feel something that is Other, certainly, but also something of which they partake. Because of the empathic connection or betweenness – of which depth here is a metaphor – they both share in the character of the Other and feel their separateness from it. Reverence is no abasement, they understood, but with as much truth an exaltation: a sense of belonging to something greater than oneself, which for the Romantics was the phenomenal world, and what one could see through it."

Melancolia e saudade

O problema da clareza e do explicitar

"The problem with sight, as Herder notes, is its tendency to meet our approach with the cool rebuff of a planar surface, an image, a representation, rather than with the palpable immediacy of the thing itself as it ‘presences’ to us – the ‘physically present, tangible truth’. Because of this tendency to sap the life from the embodied original and substitute a product of the mind, Wordsworth spoke of what he called ‘the tyranny of the eye’"

"We need to see through the eye, through the image, past the surface: there is a fatal tendency for the eye to replace the depth of reality – a depth which implies the vitality, the corporeality and the empathic resonance of the world – with a planar re -presentation, that is, a picture. In doing so, the sublime becomes merely the picturesque. In art there needs to be a certain balance between the facticity of the medium and the something that is seen through the medium, what I have referred to in shorthand as semi -transparency. A too great emphasis on the sound and feel of words as ‘things’ separate from their meaning, or alternatively on the meaning as something separate from the sound and feel of the words in which it exists, destroys poetry. Similarly with painting: but there the tendency for ‘re-presentation’, being dependent on the eye, is greatest. We rush to the ‘meaning’ too quickly in its subject matter (this is not a reason for rejecting representation in art, a quite different issue – just for being on one's guard for the substitution of representation for the whole, form and matter together). Here again distance results in seeing indistinctly, which allows other aspects of the painting – its ‘music’ – to come forward. ‘There is an impression’, wrote Delacroix, ‘which results from a certain arrangement of colours, light effects, shadows, etc. It is what one might call the music of the painting. Before you even know what the picture represents, you enter a cathedral, and you find yourself at too great a distance to know what it represents, and often you are rapt by this magical harmony ...’"

"Language, a principally left-hemisphere function, tends, as Nietzsche said, to ‘make the uncommon common’: the general currency of vocabulary returns the vibrant multiplicity of experience to the same few, worn coins. Poetry, however, by its exploitation of non-literal language and connotation, makes use of the right hemisphere's faculty for metaphor, nuance and a broad, complex field of association to reverse this tendency. ‘Poetry’, in Shelley's famous formulation, ‘lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar ... It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.'"

Woodsworth e o poder redentor da natureza

A segunda reforma

Positivismo, materialismo, mecanicismo, mito da unidade da ciência

Revolução industrial

"But it is the Industrial Revolution which enabled the left hemisphere to make its most audacious assault yet on the world of the right hemisphere – or perhaps one should say that the left hemisphere's most daring assault was the Industrial Revolution. It goes without saying that this move is of the profoundest consequence for the story of this book, and underwrites the defining characteristics of the modern world, which will form the subject of the next and final chapter."

"If the right hemisphere delivers ‘the Other’ – experience of whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves – this is not the same as the world of concrete entities ‘out there’ (it is certainly more than that), but it does encompass most of what we would think of as actually existing things, at least before we come to think of them at all, as opposed to the concepts of them, the abstractions and constructions we inevitably make from them, in conscious reflection, which forms the contribution of the left hemisphere. But what if the left hemisphere were able to externalise and make concrete its own workings – so that the realm of actually existing things apart from the mind consisted to a large extent of its own projections? Then the ontological primacy of right-hemisphere experience would be outflanked, since it would be delivering – not ‘the Other’, but what was already the world as processed by the left hemisphere . It would make it hard, and perhaps in time impossible, for the right hemisphere to escape from the hall of mirrors, to reach out to something that truly was ‘Other’ than, beyond, the human mind."

Cap. 12 - O mundo moderno e pós-moderno

"Modernity was marked by a process of social disintegration which clearly derived from the effects of the Industrial Revolution, but which could also be seen to have its roots in Comte's vision of society as an aggregation of essentially atomistic individuals. The drift from rural to urban life, again both a consequence of the realities of industrial expansion and of the Enlightenment quest for an ideal society untrammelled by the fetters of the past, 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 advances of scientific materialism, on the one hand, and of bureaucracy on the other, 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. The state, the representative of the organising, categorising and subjugating forces of systematic conformity, was beginning to show itself to be an overweening presence even in democracies. 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."

"If one had to sum up these features of modernism they could probably be reduced to these: an excess of consciousness and an over-explicitness in relation to what needs to remain intuitive and implicit; depersonalisation and alienation from the body and empathic feeling; disruption of context; fragmentation of experience; and the loss of ‘betweenness’. Each of these is in fact to some degree implied in each of the others; and there is a simple reason for that. They are aspects of a single world: not just the world of the schizophrenic, but, as may by now be clear, the world according to the left hemisphere."

Representação: quando coisas são substituídas por conceitos e conceitos se tornam coisas

"The normal relationship of reality to representation has been reversed. At the beginning of this book, I summarised the left hemisphere's role as providing a map of the world. That map now threatens to replace the reality."

Arte contemporânea

Conclusão - O Mestre Traído

"I have tried to convey in this book that we need metaphor or mythos in order to understand the world. Such myths or metaphors are not dispensable luxuries, or ‘optional extras’, still less the means of obfuscation: they are fundamental and essential to the process."

"The divided nature of our reality has been a consistent observation since humanity has been sufficiently self-conscious to reflect on it. 107 That most classical representative of the modern self-conscious spirit, Goethe's Faust, famously declared that ‘two souls, alas! dwell in my breast’ . Schopenhauer described two completely distinct forms of experience; Bergson referred to two different orders of reality. Scheler described the human being as a citizen of two worlds and said that all great European philosophers, like Kant, who used the same formulation, had seen as much. What all these point to is the fundamentally divided nature of mental experience. When one puts that together with the fact that the brain is divided into two relatively independent chunks which just happen broadly to mirror the very dichotomies that are being pointed to – alienation versus engagement, abstraction versus incarnation, the categorical versus the unique, the general versus the particular, the part versus the whole, and so on – it seems like a metaphor that might have some literal truth. But if it turns out to be ‘just’ a metaphor, I will be content. I have a high regard for metaphor. It is how we come to understand the world."