Thus the need to sustain two incompatible ‘takes’ on the world simultaneously explains, I believe (and there is no significant competing theory), the extraordinary fact that the brain is so deeply divided, an otherwise inexplicable waste of potential in an organ that exists only to make connexions, and whose power lies, precisely, in the number of connexions it can make.
Attention is not just another ‘cognitive function’: it is, as I say, the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.
In English the differences between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished, but a great number of Chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs–so that one who thinks in Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities.
Consider in light of McGilchrist's take, which I find very similar.
The GOP’s base of electoral support was heavily recruited from the white working class. If we take education as a proxy for class, the single best predictor other than race for voting for Trump was the lack of a college degree. The result was a party unified around themes of cultural identity and affect and riven with contradictions when it came to policy.
Collingwood distinguishes sharply between human life considered as natural process and human life considered as action. Thus, an individual life is in one aspect a structure of biological events containing ‘all the accidents of animal existence’ (IH 304), and in another, action, self-consciousness or thought. Within each single life, as Collingwood puts it, ‘the tides of thought, his own and others’, flow crosswise, regardless of its structure, like sea-water through a stranded wreck’ (IH 304). Individuals can be both biographical and historical subjects, but the limits set by biography are not those set by history.
The political men of letters in Burke’s picture had griped and exaggerated, without presenting a viable alternative. They had delegitimized one institution after another by sapping public faith in social artifice and ignoring the need for a “veil” of unreflecting custom to cloak destructive natural passions. The financiers in their turn had abetted a perilous financial scheme that brought France a ruinous inflation and wrecked public confidence in the state’s fiscal responsibility.
Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.
God is an obvious psychic and non-physical fact, i.e., a fact that can be established psychically but not physically. (AJ: 133, emphasis added) To assert the “obvious psychic and non-physical fact” of God’s existence is a bold step for the metaphysically reticent Jung. The assertion is particularly significant because it happens in a passage wherein Jung also distances himself from psychologism: given the context, it is impossible to argue that Jung is merely psychologizing the notion of God.
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