Betweenness

Music consists entirely of relations, ‘betweenness’. The notes mean nothing in themselves: the tensions between the notes, and between notes and the silence with which they live in reciprocal indebtedness, are everything.

McGilchrist establishes betweenness as the primary ontological category of the right hemisphere’s world, using music as the paradigm case in which meaning resides not in discrete elements but in the relational field they jointly constitute.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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No, the ‘I’ is ‘betweenness’; the ‘I’ appears and is shaped in the context of some relationship. Thus the ‘I’ is profoundly influenced by the relationship with the ‘Thou.’

Yalom, rendering Buber, argues that betweenness is not a space between pre-existing selves but the very matrix in which selfhood is generated and continuously recreated through encounter.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis

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Both subjectivism and solipsism, on the one hand, and morbid objectification on the other — are equally found in schizophrenia: each is a breakdown of betweenness.

McGilchrist identifies the clinical dissolution of betweenness in schizophrenia as the shared root of otherwise opposed pathologies — solipsism and objectification — revealing betweenness as the structural precondition for any coherent self-world relation.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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Both subjectivism and solipsism, on the one hand, and morbid objectification on the other — are equally found in schizophrenia: each is a breakdown of betweenness.

McGilchrist identifies the clinical dissolution of betweenness in schizophrenia as the shared root of otherwise opposed pathologies — solipsism and objectification — revealing betweenness as the structural precondition for any coherent self-world relation.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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This ‘betweenness’ is a time of the double lack and the double not: the time of ‘the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming.’

Miller transposes betweenness from a relational-perceptual register into a mythological-historical one, characterizing the contemporary cultural moment as an interregnum of divine absence that generates relativism and the transvaluation of values.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis

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In reality there can be neither absolutely, only a choice between a betweenness which acknowledges itself, and one which denies its own nature.

McGilchrist argues that the objective/subjective polarity is itself a left-hemisphere artifact, and that all perception is inescapably relational — the only real choice is whether betweenness is owned or disavowed.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting

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No relationship can eliminate isolation. Each of us is alone in existence. Yet aloneness can be shared in such a way that love compensates fo

Yalom frames existential isolation as the necessary condition against which betweenness — achieved through I-Thou relation — operates as a partial but genuine mitigation, rather than a dissolution, of aloneness.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting

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Isaac Stern described music as ‘that little bit between each note – silences which give the form’… The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term.

McGilchrist invokes the Japanese concept of ma as a cross-cultural confirmation of betweenness as the generative interval that gives form to the whole, lamenting the absence of an equivalent Western term.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Isaac Stern described music as ‘that little bit between each note – silences which give the form’… The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term.

McGilchrist invokes the Japanese concept of ma as a cross-cultural confirmation of betweenness as the generative interval that gives form to the whole, lamenting the absence of an equivalent Western term.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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individual entities are distinguished, but only within a union which supervenes, and qualifies that distinction.

McGilchrist articulates the right hemisphere’s view that individuation always occurs within an encompassing relational whole, a structural claim that undergirds the ontology of betweenness without naming it directly.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside

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