None of this appealed to the party’s old base. Culture usually beats class in American politics, and a tolerant, inclusive Democratic Party would have needed better policies and politicians to hold on to culturally conservative voters.
N.B. Italics added.
[M]y thesis [that the two hemispheres of the brain attend to the world in different ways], though it depends on neuroscience, has no reductionist agenda. I do not claim for an instant that our experience merely is some function in the brain. Quite the contrary, in fact, since my thesis implies that only one part of our brains – the part that understands less – would pursue such an agenda in the first place. Some philosophers deny that scientific research can tell us anything at all about human experience, on the grounds that experience is an ‘inward’ matter (which is undeniably the case).
[T]he hemisphere hypothesis is deceptively simple: the bi-hemispheric structure of the brain makes possible attending to the world simultaneously in two otherwise incompatible ways. It is the implications of this that are manifold.
Every animal, in order to survive, has to solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten. It has to pay precisely focussed, narrow-beam attention that is already committed to whatever is of interest to it, so as to exploit the world for food and shelter. Put at its simplest, a bird must be able to distinguish a seed from the background of gravel on which it lies, and pick it up swiftly and accurately; similarly, with a twig to build a nest. Yet, if the bird is to survive, it must also, at one and the same time, pay another kind of attention to the world, which is the precise opposite of the first: broad, open, sustained, vigilant attention, on the lookout for predators or for conspecifics, for friend or foe, but also, crucially, open to the appearance of the utterly unfamiliar – whatever may exist in the world of which it had no previous knowledge.
I’ve come to recognize how value or “the good” is really more of a verb than a noun.
Paracelsus’s “direct knowledge” sounds very much like the kind of “direct perceiving” Stan Gooch suggests our Neanderthal ancestors enjoyed and which allowed them “a real knowledge of aspects of human life and human biology, of some of the functions of the planet’s geology and perhaps some knowledge even of atomic and molecular structure.” It is also reminiscent of Schwaller de Lubicz’s “intelligence of the heart,” Bergson’s “intuition,” and the other variants of these we have come across in this book.
The problem with all this is that, in reality, nation-states are not that much like individual people. It would be much more accurate to say that, like any large-scale polity, they are complex systems. As such, they are not governed by the same broadly Gaussian rules as individual members of our species.
But at the beginning of the modern period Da Vinci and Bacon stand together as illustrating the various strains which have combined to form the modern world, namely, legal mentality and the patient observational habits of the naturalistic artists.
The logical statements entered into the notebook are broken down into six categories: (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments.
