Some Reflections on
the Relationship between
Left Brain / Right Brain Tinking in Metaphor and Logic
By Patrick Malcolmson & Roger Moore
We have often taught in each other’s classes and we have spent 10 years exchanging thoughts and reading each other’s reviews and papers. The following is a typical e-mail conversation that exemplifies our style of intellectual interaction which emphasizes the relationship between thought and research, learning and teaching.
Patrick
Malcolmson working in his office on campus
Patrick: At the bottom of page 3 of your review of Polack’s translation of Góngora’s Solitudes, you use the phrase “linear fashion.” What precisely does this mean?
Roger: I was using the terms “linear” and “metaphoric” to distinguish between the thought of the left brain and the right brain, a concept which I have since abandoned after intense pressure from several of my readers.
Patrick: Does this mean reasoned or logical or rational? As opposed to imaginative, intuitive, divinely inspired, or faith?
Roger: I would rather maintain the left brain right brain distinction that I was trying to establish, then I can justify my use of “linear.” However, if “reasoned,” “logical,” and “analytical” are equal in your use of “or”, rather than choices, then my answer would be “Yes! That is precisely what I am saying.” Clearly, then, if all three terms are accepted as equal, any would substitute for “linear” and give greater accuracy. If they are not equal (and I don’t think they are) then I would choose “reasoned,” because of the thinking process suggested. The act of translation is probably eighty or ninety per cent solid reasoning and transposing, hence linear, and with few metaphoric jumps, the art of translation not being conducive to the production of new metaphor unless the original is changed beyond recognition. In my opinion change, other than change of language, is not the translator’s task.
Roger
Moore using his computer.
As for the terms “imaginative,” “intuitive,” “divinely inspired,” or “faith”… I do not see these terms as synonymous. “Faith” has to be eliminated from the start. “Divinely inspired” (Deus est in nobis) is also somewhat suspect nowadays, though if you agree with my theory on the creation of inner space which we talked about earlier, this is probably the closest term. “Imaginative” does not quite capture the process. “Intuitive” has to be the best word of a bad choice. Therefore, I would opt for reasoned versus “intuitive” but with many hesitations, as expressed above.
Patrick: Is this not what Montaigne spoke of in terms of “esprit de finesse” vs. “esprit de géométrie”?
Roger: I would not like to say “yes” or “no” to this question. If he did, then, like me, Montaigne has reduced the concept to an either/or choice. Clearly the either/or choice is an inadequate oversimplification, whether it be reduced to left brain or right brain, “esprit de géométrie” or “esprit de finesse”; “reasoned” or “intuitive.” Equally clearly, the language I am using does not have the words I need to express myself accurately.
Let me try to explain further. When I write creatively, I live suspended in a strange place that I cannot always account for. This happens too when I write academically, so it is not always a creative vs. academic split. Personally, I work probably 95% from analogy: monkey see, monkey do. Unlike you, I find it most difficult to talk in terms of inductive reasoning, metaphor, analogical reasoning, etc. In many cases, I do not think in any rational process that I can reconstruct later. Things seem to be right the way they turn out. But I cannot explain them. My thought process is not one that I can myself see. I therefore have tremendous problems understanding other thought processes. That is why the simplicity of “left” vs. “right” and the suspended space in the middle “feels” so right to me.
When creating, I live in that middle space. It is somewhat of a dream world. I can enter it at will. It has its own logic and rules. I need to be relaxed and happy to enter it and work in it. I am not always conscious when I come out of it of what I have done in it. I am certainly not conscious of the creative logic that operates within it. If I were a world famous author, these pearls would be acceptable. As a mediocre non-entity struggling in a distant province on the outer fringes of an abandoned empire, I feel very deeply the inadequacy of the above statements. Hence the borrowing of left brain / right brain.
Patrick: And is metaphor not an aspect of inductive logic?
Roger: To equate metaphor with any form of logic is, I think, a dangerous thing. The creative process is, for me at least, a hidden one. It just happens. The resulting metaphor may then be decoded into its component parts, but when that has been done, the poetry is usually lost, as happens in translation, when the end elements are more important than the inner space. I think intuitive logic, which is itself a metaphor, would be better applied to poetry; if intuitive logic is not a metaphor, then it is a paradox, much as “freezing fire,” and “burning cold” are metaphors based on paradox. The “truth” (if it in fact exists at all) lies neither in the “ice” nor in the “fire,” but in the inner space between the two opposing elements of “icy fire.” This space (I like to think of it as hyperspace) then becomes the new poetic reality.
Patrick: How else does one generate wholes from parts, a type or genre from a number of specific instances?
Roger: Now I am being bound by the terms of your argument, and I do not like the terms. I would rather reply “Deus est in nobis”! I would rather affirm the overall importance of poetic intuition. I would rather answer by using metaphor than by using logic. I am not certain, at this stage, that my mind is capable of following the logical process which your mind demands. Let me turn the question back to you: how does one generate wholes from parts, a type or genre from a number of specific instances? If you reply by using reasoned, logical thought, I will answer that you are probably not using metaphors, certainly not in any poetic sense. So, at this point, I think the argument becomes self-defeating.
Patrick: My point is that the distinction between logical analysis and metaphorical / intuitive thinking is based on the notion that logic equals deductive logic or analysis. Problem: Inductive logic and analogical reasoning are synthetic! That violates the nice materialistic basis of l-brain vs. r-brain. That distinction presupposes a set of concepts that are then “operationalized” in empirical experiments. Those concepts themselves are derived from philosophy not from science.
Roger: I am not sure that I agree. Montaigne, without the benefit of brain damaged patients from the Los Angeles Emergency Car Crash wards, seems to have been grasping intuitively at this left brain / right brain difference. And this is the crux I think. If the stroke and car crash victims establish the hemispheric differences, then there are medical grounds for arguing the left brain / right brain distinction. If these grounds are not sound, then we are into a more speculative debate the like of which I do not care to enter.
Patrick: Here’s a quote for you, from the Globe and Mail of January 31,1998: “Ornstein addresses split-brain research which was also a mainstay of his previous book. He says he began researching The Right Mind thinking he would find little support for the view of the brain he had promulgated back in 1972 (The Psychology of Consciousness), which basically equated the right hemisphere with creativity and left with rationality. After all, subsequent studies have suggested that many of the original claims made about the different capabilities of the right and left hemispheres were grossly simplistic. Ornstein deplores how split-brain theories have devolved into cultural cliches.”
My main point in all of this is that the creativity / rationality distinction is a fuzzy one at best. It requires metaphysical assumptions: if there is an order to nature, a cosmos, then imagination works to reflect back the “image” of nature — art imitates nature. But if there is no cosmos, then creativity is a species of creation ex nihilo. No?
Roger: Cultural cliche or not, left brain / right brain works for me and the idea of hyperspace metaphorically (not logically) suits my idea of what happens (a) when I produce metaphors and (b) when I read metaphors. However suspect this is scientifically, there is ample support for this theory within the writing community, perhaps because it does attempt to explain, however simplistically, something we do not understand.
As for art imitating nature, this is to return to a much older and a slightly different argument. Some art does imitate nature; but, by extension, some art tries to go beyond nature and create something in one form which does not necessarily exist in another. The breaking of the single viewpoint in modern art already starts a movement away from nature, for in both nature and traditional art we stand in one place and view from one place. The attempt to turn emotion into metaphor (a feeling into words), is not in my opinion a logical act. I think logic breaks down when we try to account for metaphor. That is why translation, which is an eminently logical act 95% of the time, also breaks down when faced with metaphor.
Patrick: I am wanting answers from you, my friend, about the questions I raised — especially about inductive reasoning, metaphor, analogical reasoning, etc. I need to know how reason works, in the hope of becoming more reasonable.
Roger: You want to know how reason works so that you may become more reasonable but I am talking of how metaphor works and how we try to express emotion and feeling without using any reasoned logic which I can reproduce for you in analytical terms. Alas, my friend, perhaps we are comparing “apples” with “oranges”!