Straight Line

The straight line occupies a charged and largely negative valence within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning less as a neutral geometric form than as a diagnostic marker of a particular mode of cognition. Iain McGilchrist’s work supplies the most sustained treatment: the straight line is paradigmatically the product of left-hemisphere processing — sequential, analytic, rectilinear — and is contrasted with the curvature characteristic of right-hemisphere engagement with living reality. McGilchrist’s case study of Jason Padgett, whose post-traumatic left-hemisphere disinhibition caused him to perceive smooth curves as assemblages of tangential straight lines, renders this contrast clinically vivid: the left hemisphere does not access organic wholeness but approximates it through mechanical, non-living segments. The broader implication — that the left hemisphere conceives of progress itself as a straight line, driving culture ‘ambling towards the abyss’ — gives the term genuine psycho-cultural weight. Against this, the corpus counterposes circular, rhythmic, and spiral movements as more truthful to biological and psychological reality. Ancillary sources — the I Ching commentary tradition, Platonic geometry, and somatic psychology — treat the straight line instrumentally: as one component of larger formal structures, or as a practical standard of bodily alignment. The tension between the straight line as cognitive impoverishment and as formal utility is the entry’s animating problem.

In the library 13 passages

however much the left hemisphere sees progress as a straight line, it is rarely so in the real world. The very circularity of things as they really are, rather than as the left hemisphere conceives them, might be a reason for hope.

McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere’s reduction of progress to a straight line is a cognitive distortion contradicted by the circular, self-correcting nature of actual reality.

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

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We have often had reason to return to the difference between a curving motion and a rectilinear motion. Curvature, as I have suggested, is more characteristic of the intellectual world of the right hemisphere, in which opposites can be reconciled, in which the direct approach may for many purposes be inferior to the indirec

McGilchrist establishes rectilinear motion as the signature of left-hemisphere thinking, contrasting it unfavorably with curvature as the hallmark of right-hemisphere reconciliation and life.

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

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We have often had reason to return to the difference between a curving motion and a rectilinear motion. Curvature, as I have suggested, is more characteristic of the intellectual world of the right hemisphere, in which opposites can be reconciled, in which the direct approach may for many purposes be inferior to the indirec

Parallel passage confirming McGilchrist’s hemispheric topology in which straight-line rectilinearity is aligned with analytic, mechanistic left-hemisphere cognition.

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

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developed an unusually perfectionistic attraction to creating diagrams that are self-referring – and entirely composed of straight lines. That this has little to do with maths is not surprising since the visuo-spatial imagery accompanying mathematical problem-solving is usually associated with the right hemisphere, not the left.

McGilchrist uses Jason Padgett’s compulsive straight-line diagrams to argue that the left hemisphere’s preference for rectilinear abstraction is separable from genuine mathematical understanding, which belongs to the right hemisphere.

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

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developed an unusually perfectionistic attraction to creating diagrams that are self-referring – and entirely composed of straight lines. That this has little to do with maths is not surprising since the visuo-spatial imagery accompanying mathematical problem-solving is usually associated with the right hemisphere, not the left.

Parallel passage reinforcing the dissociation between left-hemisphere straight-line abstraction and the right-hemisphere’s visuo-spatial grasp of mathematical meaning.

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

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Hold your body, head, and neck firmly in a straight line, and keep your eyes from wandering. To sit in meditation with the back, neck, and head in a straight line is not as easy as it sounds.

The Bhagavad Gita prescribes a straight line of head, neck, and spine as a contemplative discipline, treating rectilinear alignment as a prerequisite for meditative steadiness.

Easwaran, Eknath, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975supporting

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Just as in geometry straight lines can be joined to form rectangles, and rectangular planes can be joined to form cubes, so it is that in each situation there exists the raw ingredients which can be used to give shape to the creative idea

The I Ching commentary uses straight lines as an analogy for the elemental, morally neutral raw materials that the superior person combines into righteous and creative action.

Carol K. Anthony, A Guide to the I Ching, 1988supporting

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the triangle, as the surface contained by the minimum number of straight lines, is ‘assumed’ as the irreducible ‘element’ of all such figures

Plato’s Timaeus treats the straight line as the foundational geometric primitive from which all planar and solid forms are constructed, establishing a cosmological context for its later psychological valuation.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside

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the advance of Time is not like a single straight line of unlimited extent in both directions, but limited and circumscribed

Proclus, commenting on the Timaeus, explicitly rejects the straight-line model of time in favor of circular revolution, an ancient precursor to McGilchrist’s critique of linear progress.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside

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A pilgrimage involves not a settled and determined lockstep march to a fixed point, but a winding, turning, looping, crisscrossing, occasionally backtracking peregrination

Kurtz implicitly contrasts the straight-line march of certainty with the winding path of genuine spiritual pilgrimage, aligning rectilinear movement with misguided rigidity.

Kurtz, Ernest, Ketcham, Katherine, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994aside

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