That’s because they involve not just hypothetical logical problems, but inferring complex and ambivalent or implicit meaning, inferring what is going on in another person’s mind and knowing how to understand the situation as a whole. “Several studies report impairment in reasoning accuracy as a consequence of lesions in the left hemisphere,237 but others report impairments in reasoning following right hemisphere damage that are in reality more of a handicap. What is more this tree is a true organism, each ‘part’ reflected in, and qualified by co-presence with, each of the others.” Chochmah gives rise to a force for loving fusion with the other, while binah gives rise to judgment, which is responsible for setting boundaries and limits.40 Their integration is another faculty called da’at, which is a bit like Aristotle’s phronesis, or even sophia – an embodied, overarching, intuitive capacity to know what the situation calls for and to do it. Chochmah and binah are considered ‘two friends who never part’, because you cannot have one without the other. “In the Kabbalah, the structure of human faculties takes the form of a tree with a right-hand side and a left-hand side humanity’s task is to integrate them, both laterally and vertically.39 Specifically it is held that the mind is made up of two faculties: wisdom (chochmah) on the right, which receives the Gestalt of situations in a single flash, and understanding (binah), opposite it on the left, which builds them up in a replicable, step-by-step way. The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

But it is the left hemisphere’s process of apprehending the world that gives rise to the very idea of the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ – a false dichotomy.” The one that is thought (on unclear grounds) to do it best is said to be objective, and that in turn is taken to be the truth. This presupposes that there is an ‘us and them’ about the world: something ‘in here’, trying to copy as well as it can something ‘out there’, and usually not doing it well.

As with science, the vice is that of trying to avoid (what we call) the subjective by asserting (what we call) the objective. Thus there is such a thing as reasoned truth, just as there is such a thing as scientific truth but both are inseparable from the humanity that gives rise to them, both are provisional and uncertain. “And it is one of the messages of this book that imagination is not an impediment, but, on the contrary, a necessity for true knowledge of the world, for true understanding, and for that neglected goal of human life, wisdom.

The matter of things iain mcgilchrist