I did not address several important points in part I, so I will do so here. I want to strengthen McGilchrist’s discussed relationship between needs, values, attention, and things, as well as highlight the distinction between Distance and Detachment.
Needs, values, attention, and things
McGilchrist states that the competing needs of life, both for animals and humans, demand that we value our environment in different ways in order to meet distinct kinds of needs. For example, some needs are physiological, such as being hungry or cold, and some are social in nature, such as cooperating with members of our own family/tribe/society or fighting against members of other tribes or societies. Whichever the case, each need demands in a different valuation of the potentialities in our environment. Each need can only be satisfied by certain elements in our environment, but not by just any element. Therefore, in order to meet our needs, we must attend to our specific situation in order to identify and exploit those valuable elements which satisfy the present demand. Again, particular needs are met by specific, valuable elements in our world, revealed by distinct ways of attending to our conditions.
These divergent ways of attending bring different objects into focus for use and exploitation depending on the context. Importantly, they also allow us to regard the same object in different ways depending on the context of the situation. A navigator may use the stars to right his path, though these same stars are regarded entirely differently in a college astronomy course. The nature of our attention determines not only which objects come into focus, but how those objects come into focus.
For McGilchrist, these shifting modes of attention are deeply buried in our neurological structure. For Bernard Lonergan, the shifting modes of attention, with their corresponding and divergent treatment of the same objects, yield distinct realms of meaning, or discourse. Precisely what this means will be discussed soon, but I note here that Lonergan’s formulation reflects McGilchrist’s almost exactly:
Different exigencies give rise to different modes of conscious and intentional operations, and different modes of such operation give rise to different realms of meaning. (1)
Distance vs. detachment
I’ve already mentioned McGilchrist’s distinction between terrain and territory, but I want to highlight its importance, especially in light of what Lonergan calls “the pure, detached, disinterested desire to know.” Reconciling various terminologies is important.
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. (2)
Distance is the term McGilchrist uses for our ability to rise above our immediate experience. Detachment, for McGilchrist, is a specific kind of distance, which is characterized by cleverness (in the Aristotelian sense), or calculation.
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…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. (3)
Distance is our ability to attend to the world in uniquely human ways; detachment is distance honed to exclude irrelevant elements of experience and environment for the purpose at hand. More pointedly, detachment is to take something out of (it’s) context. This can have moral implications, to which McGilchrist alludes above, or it can be a mere function of analysis, such as in scientific analysis.
Later, I will argue that the detachment of scientific investigation is a uniquely powerful human ability that creates knowledge and yields immense benefits to mankind; however, scientific investigation also necessitates taking part of the world, or our experience, out of context. This is a necessary part of any analytic process. That is, analysis necessarily prescinds from the irrelevant, but is naturally incomplete without a corresponding return to the context out of which it arose.
Notes
(1) Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, p. 81.
(2) McGilchrist, p. 21.
(3) McGilchrist, p. 22.
Dissertating Outloud 