Bilingual PDF edition (Romanian-English). Kantinomus Verlag, Tübingen, 2024, ISBN: 978-3-911041-16-4, 72 pages (A4)
Marcel Chelba, Open Letter to Iain McGilchrist/ I. On Iain McGilchrist’s Implicit Physiological Confirmation of Kantian Stereoperspectival Epistemology, Kantinomus Verlag, Tübingen, 2024, ISBN: 978-3-911041-16-4, 72 pages (A4).
“Dear Iain,
you can’t imagine how happy I was when I discovered you on YouTube.
This man — I thought to myself — is looking for the same thing as me, but he started his digging at the other end of the tunnel, on the other side of the mountain, exactly where I would have wanted to end up.
You started from empirical experience and are trying to reach metaphysics, in order to give your empirical certainties an intelligible form (Gestalt), and I started from metaphysics and am trying to reach empirical experience, in order to give my theoretical (metaphysical or transcendental, in Kant’s sense) certainties an empirical content. For, as Kant put it in his own way, ideas without empirical content are pure fictions, and our sensible perceptions without integrating concepts are just groping in the dark.”
“So, you look to metaphysics for an adequate conceptual framework, interpretative models and categories (classification criteria) to make your impressive collection of empirical data intelligible, and I look to the physiology of feeling and thinking for empirical confirmations of the Kantian epistemological apriorism, which I find perfectly coherent and intelligible.”
“Dear Iain, thanks to you, it is clear to me today that the aesthetic (empirical) perspective is the favourite perspective of the left hemisphere (responsible for our relation to the objects of the sensible world) and the transcendental (holistic, purely theoretical) perspective is the favourite perspective of the right hemisphere, responsible for our existential, geographical and moral orientation in the intelligible world, without which the left hemisphere would be lost in the jungle of its empirical data.
The functional asymmetry of the cerebral hemispheres that you have highlighted through the prism of the Master-Emisar parable is, I believe, the greatest physiological confirmation that Kantian stereoperspectival epistemology could receive. The left hemisphere is the one that, as the saying goes: can’t see the forest because of the trees.
For the left hemisphere the concept that does not designate a tangible object is an empty concept, purely speculative and useless, if not dangerous. From the left hemisphere’s perspective, the concept of forest is pure fiction, for the forest itself is never the object of our senses, but only of our intellect. (Has anyone ever seen the universe itself? Still, where do we get this concept from?)
From the perspective of the left hemisphere, the concept of forest is the vanishing point of its empirical knowledge, which it always wants to chase away into the transcendent (out of the empirical forest), precisely in order to save the consistency of its forestry knowledge.
The right hemisphere is the one that sees the forest as a whole and, for this very reason, sees the trees (the collection of empirical data of the left hemisphere) in a more appropriate context. For the right hemisphere, the concept of forest is immanent, given a priori and necessary, precisely in order to ensure the logical completeness of its system of synthetic concepts.
What is consciousness? It is our way of putting ourselves before our own presence as being present, or of making an exteriority out of our own interiority — a kind of topological dedublation, as in the Banach-Tarski-Hausdorff paradox. Are these propositions intelligible in Aristotle’s logic? However, they are true, because…”
“Your interpretative solution to the unilateral epistemological antagonism[1] between the two cerebral hemispheres corresponds perfectly to Kant’s critical solution to the unilateral epistemological antagonism between sensibility and intellect, that is, between the two diametrically opposed uses of reason, the empirical and the transcendental (theoretical).
I/IX. The first analogy between your empirical epistemology and Kantian transcendental (theoretical) epistemology is the dualism, or, more precisely, the stereoperspectivism — as I like to call it. In the epistemological asymmetry between the two cerebral hemispheres, according to your evidence, the left hemisphere is the analytic hemisphere and the right hemisphere is the synthetic hemisphere (in the very sense that Kant gives the analytic-synthetic dichotomy).
II/IX. The second analogy is the epistemological relevance that you give to imagination — properly productive imagination, as Kant said, not mere fantasy (play of the imagination), as you have also pointed out several times.
III/IX. The third analogy is the epistemological relevance that you give to attention (Aufmerksamkeit), i.e. to our natural inclination to perceive only what we can imagine a priori as possible and to seek only what we know a priori as useful or harmful.
IV/IX. Fourth analogy: Your whole work, I might say, is a heroic attempt to do justice to the right hemisphere in the history of culture and science, just as Kant had tried to do justice to metaphysics — for, according to your own observations, it is clear that the right hemisphere is the hemisphere of metaphysics (of holistic, inevitably paradoxical thinking) and the left hemisphere is the hemisphere of empiricism (of linear, analytical thinking, always aiming at the urgent performance of concrete tasks, like a hunter or soldier).”
”Your philosophy, dear Iain, is what Kant called empirical realism, i.e. a complement to transcendental idealism, not a negation of it.
´Der transzendentale Idealist kann hingegen ein empirischer Realist, mithin, wie man ihn nennt, ein Dualist sein, d. i. die Existenz der Materie einräumen, ohne aus dem blossen Selbstbewusstsein hinauszugehen, und etwas mehr, als die Gewissheit der Vorstellungen in mir, mithin das cogito, ergo sum, anzunehmen.´ (KrV, A 370)
Transcendental idealism and empirical realism are the two points of view of Kantian stereoperspectival epistemology — as I call it.
Kant is not an idealist philosopher, as it is still believed today, but a critical philosopher, who tries to place himself in the middle or above the empiricism-idealism antinomy (as we both are trying to do).”
”In any case, I believe that the junction you have made between the pathology of the mind (dysfunctions of the cerebral hemispheres) and the pathology of history (the myth of the Master-Emisar in political and cultural hypostatisation) is the greatest pattern recognition of our times, which will break the deadlock of modern science and philosophy and open the way to new horizons.
Truth, reality, intellect, reason, spirit, consciousness… the whole package of concepts of classical metaphysics will have to be revised and upgraded.
Your and Harald Haarmann’s books (which have turned our view of history upside down) seem to me to be the greatest philosophical and scientific events of the 21st century in European culture so far.
They truly exude the Zeitgeist.”
”Someone should immediately set up an Institute for Stereoperspectival Epistemology and invite us to lend a hand.”
[1] The Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica (1909-1987), in his last book, Letters on the Logic of Hermes (1987), introduced the concept of unilateral contradiction. The most notorious case of unilateral contradiction invoked by Constantin Noica was the relation between the part and the whole, in which the part contradicts the whole in order to ensure its individuality, while the whole does not contradict the part in order to ensure its unity. This is exactly the kind of relationship you point out between the cognitive tasks or virtues of the two cerebral hemispheres..”
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