Merry Christmas

A very Merry Christmas to all the readers of The Chrysalis. I do wish you all a very enjoyable, pleasant, and relaxing holiday season — the eye of the storm, as it were.

Thank you for being with The Chrysalis.

Fractured Paradigms

My mind turned this morning to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This is a book I have read more often than any other in my library. It is pretty essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand science or the history and philosophy of science and perhaps even how the “mind” functions itself. The book is the source for the contemporary popular usage of the term “paradigm”, which is already implicated in the title of Kuhn’s book as a kind of “structure”. This, of course, makes it of some interest in gaining further insight into what Jean Gebser means by a “structure of consciousness”. Such is the theme of today’s posting.

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McGilchrist and Late Modern Madness

I am slowly working my way through Iain McGilchrist’s marvelous new book The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. It is certainly makes for rewarding reading, and has led me back to some earlier postings in The Chrysalis for which McGilchrist provides an even fuller account. Those postings explored the limitations and functional deficiencies of the Late Modern Mind, or what Jean Gebser called “the mental-rational” (or “perspectival”) structure of consciousness now functioning in “deficient mode”. McGilchrist’s thesis about the “two modes of attention” of the divided brain, and the problem of the hypertrophy of the left-hemisphere mode helps deepen our appreciation for Gebser’s diagnosis of our present condition. So, let’s review once more those earlier postings in light of McGilchrist’s insights.