Roger, I have been grappling with this issue for over forty years, ever since our company was taken over in wildly over-leveraged buyout. We went through a transformational experience that I have been trying to make sense of ever since. The result was my first (and only) article in HBR (in May 1984) and a few years later, career change from manager to management educator (I have a piece on Medium to mark the 40th anniversary).

Forty years on my conclusion is that it’s time to recognize that concepts like yours of an “opposable mind” are more than metaphors. Our fundamentally divided nature is the essence of our humanity and that it is the practical weaving together of apparently irreconcilable opposites (e.g. the existential and the instrumental) that is the very warp and woof of our existence. It's both...and, not either/or.

P.S. Like Eisner, I went to the University of Chicago!