Extract
[...] This is because, in the author's own words, psychiatrist and man of letters, our brain is divided into two hemispheres that have prerogatives often considered to be opposed in terms of the cognition process. Specifically, the object of the left hemisphere is to make us grasp the world with this hand that seizes the object to better master it: "The left hemisphere controls the right hand with which we say that we 'grasp' the meaning, [by which we] make it certain and definitive." How pass to understand human cognition, therefore, in order to give meaning back to a world mastered, but emptied of meaning. [...]
[...] Our world seems absurd to us, because we cannot integrate the chains of evidence into a whole that makes sense and is our global understanding of the world - in relation to our environment. It then appears that the more we manipulate the world, the less we are able to find a sense in what we undertake. We should therefore not oppose one hemisphere to the other; it is not a matter of convincing and defeating the left hemisphere, but of considering that, alone, it does not make man a more 'wise' or rational being. [...]
[...] To do this, he deconstructs the idea that the left hemisphere - the supposedly rational, reasonable part of our brain, is the one that we should develop in order to be in the world in a more authentic way. On the contrary, he defends the idea that the right hemisphere 'emotional, creative, fuzzy' - is underdeveloped, even though it is this part of our brain that allows us to perceive the world in its entirety, to have perceptions that are not solely stored for the transformation of matter: 'The right hemisphere, on the other hand, manifests a form of vigilant attention to everything that is, everything that exists, without preconceived ideas. [...]
[...] The right hemisphere is that of presence in the world in its most total stripping. It is the hemisphere of reality not as we want to transform it, but as it is. The author therefore reverses the solid, unchallenged balance between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere by estimating that our intuitions that come from an unworked experience are from the right hemisphere, where the left hemisphere is responsible for articulating them in a reasoning. Our sentences begin and end in the right hemisphere, and it is in the in-between, to explain his thought, that the individual needs the left hemisphere. [...]
[...] Because the whole object of this chapter is to question us on this paradox. How does it happen that in the manipulation of the world to his own benefit, man loses what is for him quite fundamental - meaning? The author answers this question by deconstructing several of the reader's expectations: first, as a psychiatrist, he should defend a certain reductionism that aims to reduce the mind to matter, or make the mind an epiphenomenon of matter. It is precisely this first expected cliché that the author calls into question to establish his demonstration. [...]
