The Political Self
‘Ultimately, what exists are relationships', I suggest, 'not ratios. Ratios "are" relationships - seen through the map-like, quantitative lens of the left hemisphere, and converted into its language.' My latest piece on Substack, exploring William Blake's notion of the 'Human Form Divine', in relation to sacred geometry and its relationship to our psychology and physiology - our relationship with patterns, deep orders of being, and archetypes.
'In many ways,' I suggest, 'what we are seeing now in the work of Rupert Sheldrake, Mark Johnson ('The Meaning of the Body'), Merleau-Ponty, and McGilchrist is a "return" to the pre-Socratic understanding of numbers as qualities rather than simply quantities, and of ratios as expressions of even deeper underlying relationships, which are as felt and affective as they are statistical.
As McGilchrist notes, ‘numbers can either signify absolutes – a quantifiable amount, as in statistics – which would suggest an affinity with the left hemisphere, or signify relations, which would suggest an affinity with the right hemisphere. For Pythagoras, it was this regularity of proportion or relationship, rather than number in any absolute sense, that underpinned music and beauty – the music of the spheres, the natural harmony of the universe’ (The Master and his Emissary).
Even the brain itself, as neuropsychologist Mark Solms has compellingly shown, has evolved and is structured as "the feeling brain" (the title of his seminal book on this), and this feelingness operates on both a neurological and a psychological level. This seems to be a return not only to the insights and values of the "right hemisphere" – the hemisphere which, as McGilchrist has demonstrated, is the one that is actually more in touch with reality, however useful the left brain’s abstractions are – but also to the early roots of geometry itself.
"Meaning is relational", notes Johnson in his compelling study of the fundamental importance of embodiment, 'The Meaning of the Body', which has perhaps done more than any other book to help return us to the source of that meaning: "From the day we are brought kicking and screaming into the world, what and how anything is meaningful to us is shaped by our specific form of incarnation." It is the body’s own tendency toward self-concealment that prevents us so often from seeing this – the ultimate ratio, perhaps, which lies in our own relationship to the world we see as beautiful.'
[Golgonooza :: Rod Tweedy]
