Last year, my first contact with British brain maven Iain McGilchrist led me to ponder the ways in which systematic schooling undermines a person’s ability to employ metaphor, embrace irony, and enjoy humor. More recently, listening to this literature-loving psychiatrist discuss the marvelous mechanics of the mind caused me to revisit the thought of the most important philosopher with whom I ever dined, the late John R. Boyd.
Colonel Boyd often began his talks by asking people in his audience to refrain from describing him as an analyst. ‘If you call me an analyst’, he would say, ‘you’re telling me that I’m a half-wit, that I have half a brain.1 More recently, in an interview with the president of Hillsdale College, Dr. McGilchrist provided an explanation of this phenomenon. The side of the brain that breaks things apart, he noted, employs ‘self-referential’ circuitry that, left to its own devices, does a poor job of making sense of the world.2
In much the same way, both thinkers stress the importance of a continually updated understanding of the situations in which we find ourselves. Boyd called this ‘orientation’. McGilchrist has described it as ‘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.’3
Iain McGilchrist The Mastery and His Emissary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) page 31 (Thriftbooks) (Internet Archive)