At the beginning of this chapter, McGilchrist says he will look in greater detail at the kinds of world the two hemispheres bring into being. This he does. He also says he will raise the question whether they really are symmetrical, or whether one takes precedence. He doesn’t explicitly answer this question, but leaves it to us.
Important in this chapter is the idea of the circularity of attention – we attend to the world, and the world attends to us. Hence the Drawing of Escher’s Hands. This would suggest that one hemisphere should not take precedence, but that both are required for meaningful attention to the world. It also brings into question the paradox of linear analysis. So a thread running through the book is a constant questioning of dichotomies, and in particular the dichotomies that have been the focus of Western philosophy – real vs ideal, subject vs object.
What keeps cropping up for me is the question of whether the choices that McGilchrist makes to illustrate and substantiate his work might have been different, and if so, how might that have influenced the outcome of the book. Does it matter? So, for example, in this chapter, McGilchrist draws on the work of some selected philosophers to make the point that, at least in their work, they did not neglect the possibility of attending to the world and to philosophy in a different way (the right hemisphere’s way). Are there any other philosophers who should have been included, or at least mentioned? I don’t know enough about philosophy and philosophers to answer this question, but I did wonder about Emmanuel Levinas, who is not mentioned anywhere in the book.
I can imagine that anyone unfamiliar with philosophy (as a subject) and the work of philosophers would find this a difficult chapter. It’s not difficult to grasp the idea that there are two ways of attending to the world, the right hemisphere’s way and the left hemisphere’s way, and that each brings a different world into being, but some of the discussion about philosophers’ work and ideas is more difficult, particularly the long section on Heidegger. I sometimes wonder whether McGilchrist needed to include the amount of detail that is in the book.
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