Luca McCorry
https://lucamccorry.substack.com/
“Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole. These gifts of the left hemisphere have helped us achieve nothing less than civilisation itself, with all that that means. Even if we could abandon them, which of course we can't, we would be fools to do so, and would come off infinitely the poorer. There are siren voices that call us to do exactly that, certainly to abandon clarity and precision (which, in any case, importantly depend on both hemispheres), and I want to emphasise that I am passionately opposed to them. We need the ability to make fine discriminations, and to use reason appropriately. But these contributions need to be made in the service of something else, that only the right hemisphere can bring. Alone they are destructive. And right now they may be bringing us close to forfeiting the civilisation they helped to create.”
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
“Goethe wisely wrote, however, that ‘we are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and working upon the world which surrounds us.’13 We see ourselves, and therefore come to know ourselves, only indirectly, through our engagement with the world at large.”
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
“David Levin, ‘prefers the distance of vision … even when it means dehumanisation’.149 But in this he was pursuing the belief that acknowledging our relationship with the world will make it obtrude. In reality it obtrudes more when not acknowledged. The baggage gets on board, as Dennett puts it, without being inspected. In a scientific paper, one may not say ‘I saw it happen’, but ‘the phenomenon was observed’. In Japan, however, science students, who ‘observe’ phenomena, do so with quite a different meaning, and in quite a different spirit, from their Western counterparts. The word kansatsu, which is translated as ‘observe’, is closer to the meaning of the word ‘gaze’, which we use only when we are in a state of rapt attention in which we lose ourselves, and feel connected to the other. The syllable kan in kansatsu contains the nuance that the one who gazes comes to feel a ‘one-body-ness’ with the object of gaze.150”
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
“The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.”
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
“According to Max Planck, ‘Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.’ And he continued: ‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
― The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
Philosophy
— 5858 members
— last activity 13 hours, 57 min ago
What is Philosophy? Why is it important? How do you use it? This group looks at these questions and others: ethics, government, economics, skepticism, ...more
Luca’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Luca’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Luca
Lists liked by Luca




























