Luca McCorry
https://lucamccorry.substack.com/
“On the left hemisphere of the brain: 'Because it knows less, it thinks it knows everything.”
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
“As soon as you feel yourself against me you have ceased to understand my position and consequently my arguments! You have to be the victim of the same passion!
I want to awaken the greatest mistrust of myself: I speak only of things I have experienced and do not offer only events in the head.
One must want to experience the great problems with one’s body and one’s soul.
I have at all times written my writings with my whole heart and soul: I do not know what purely intellectual problems are.
You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.”
―
I want to awaken the greatest mistrust of myself: I speak only of things I have experienced and do not offer only events in the head.
One must want to experience the great problems with one’s body and one’s soul.
I have at all times written my writings with my whole heart and soul: I do not know what purely intellectual problems are.
You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.”
―
“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
“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
“Hölderlin’s lines: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch (‘Where there is danger, that which will save us also grows’).”
― 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
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