[Dialogue] What the heck did we mean with "Contentless"??

[Ken Fisher]

And now for something completely different ...


Iain McGilchrist:

Metaphor is not just a reflection of what has been, but the means whereby the truly new, rather that just the novel, may come about … All understanding, whether of the world or ourselves, depends on choosing the right metaphor.  The metaphor we choose governs what we see.  Even in talking about understanding, we cannot escape metaphors.



Which metaphor would you choose for ‘Being’ as the educational context for the process of becoming who we are?

 

Iain McGilchrist:

That’s quite a question!  Of course there can’t be a metaphor for being as such, since it is the core mystery, along with time, as Heidegger saw, and we can’t compare it – or time, for that matter – with anything else at all.  But I would try to answer you by saying that we are all in the process of becoming what we are, and that everything that is, is also only becoming.  And so there never is an ‘is’ in the static sense.  We are always, all our lives, work in progress – and so, actually, is everything that ‘is’.  I suppose one of my cardinal points is that everything, for us as human beings, exists under two aspects: one is static, fixed, isolated and certain, and that corresponds with ‘being as representation’ (what the left hemisphere delivers); and the other is flowing, changing, connected and uncertain, and that corresponds with ‘being in itself’, which is also a ‘being as becoming’ (what the right hemisphere delivers).  But ultimately the first is only a special way of conceiving the second, once time has been removed from the picture.  The reality, as Heraclitus saw, and others in the East have seen before and since, is that ‘everything flows’.



http://towardsmagz.org/?page_id=320
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