heisst es in „Die Möglichkeit des Andersseins“, Watzlawicks Buch, das sich mit der psychotherapeutischen Kommunikation, dem Wesen der (heute würde man sagen) hypno-kommunikativen Sprache befasst.
Er unterscheidet zweierlei Sprachen – sie Sprache der Vernunft und der analytischen Zerlegung; und die Sprache des Bildes, der Metapher, der Ganzheit.
Und er unterscheidet zwei Gehirne (nach Anatom Wigan): die linke Hemisphäre neigt zur Spezialisierung, dazu – den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht zu sehen; die rechte Hemisphäre dagegen ist hochentwickelt für die Erfassung der Ganzheit – komplexer Zusammenhänge, Muster, Konfigurationen und Strukturen.
Die Sprache der rechten Hemisphäre ist archaisch und unentwickelt, es fehlen Elemente der Grammatik, Syntax und Semantik; die Begriffe sind zweideutig: in der rechten Hemisphäre dominiert das Bild, die Analogie, die Evokation von Erinnerungsbildern und damit zusammenhängenden Empfindungen schreibt Watzlawick 1977.
Ein Update aus der Neurowissenschaft sei hier dargelegt – 2009 schreibt der Psychiater Ian McGilchrist in seinem Buch The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World an diversen Stellen sinngemäß: The division of the brain is something neuroscientists don´t like to talk about anymore. It enjoyed a sort of popularity in the 60eis and 70ies after the first split-brain operations. Its not true, that one part of the brain does reason and the other does emotion – both hemispheres are profoundly involved in both. For imagination you need both hemispheres, for reason you need both hemispheres.
The world of the left hemisphere, denotative language and abstraction, yield clarity and to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, general in nature but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere by contrast yield a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within contact of the lived world within a nature of things never fully graspable, never perfectly known.
There is a problem here about the nature of the two worlds – it offers two versions of the world and obviously we combine them in different ways all the time. We rely on certain things to manipulate the world, for broad understanding of it we need knowledge that comes from the right hemisphere.
Nowadays we live in a world that is paradox. We pursue happiness and it leads to resentment and unhappiness and an explosion of mental illness. We have knowledge of the parts but no wisdom of the whole. There is a machine model that is supposed to answer everything – even rationality is grounded in a leap of intuition. There is nowhere you can rationally prove that rationality is a good way we can look at the world, we intuit, that it is very helpful. That is not new… we know from the Gödel theorem, we know from Pascal, that the endpoints of rationality is to demonstrate the limits of rationality… In our modern world we prioritise the virtual over the real, the technical becomes important.
Why this shift? I think there are three reasons:
One is – the left hemispheres talk is very convincing because it shaved everything that is does not fit for this model off and cut it out. So this particular model is entirely self-consistent because largely it has made itself so. I also call the left hemisphere the Berlusconi of the brain, because it controls the media. Its very vocal on its own behalf. The right hemisphere does not have a voice and it can’t construct these same arguments.
And I also think, rather more importantly – that is a sort of hall of mirrors effect – …we just get reflected back into more of what we know about what we know about …
Einstein said „THE INTUITIVE MIND IS A SACRED GIFT AND THE RATIONAL MIND IS A FAITHFUL SERVANT.“ McGilchrist: We have created a society that honors the servant but has forgotten the gift.