The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

by Iain McGilchrist

The casualties in self-consciousness are all right-hemisphere-based, social or empathic skills.

in this chapter I have put forward evidence suggesting that a conflict of wills may be exactly what we find.

I showed that on a range of both philosophical and neuropsychological grounds the right hemisphere has primacy, and that, though the left hemisphere has a valuable role, its products need to be returned to the realm of the right hemisphere and once more integrated into a new whole, greater than the sum of its parts.

the most obvious fact about the relationship between the hemispheres is that it depends on separation and mutual inhibition, which is coherent with the view of the relationship between the phenomenological worlds of the two hemispheres, according to wh...

their more global interaction over longer time periods that form the basis of conscious experience, the evidence is that the relationship is not symmetrical or reciprocal, with ...

The right hemisphere is the primary mediator of experience, from which the conceptualised, re-presented world of the left hemisphere derives, and on which it depends.

the left hemisphere does not itself have life, such life as it appears to have coming from reconnecting with the body, emotion and experience through the right hemisphere.

And Giovanni Stanghellini has explored with subtlety, in his book Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies, the way in which the ‘zombie’ state is mimicked by schizophrenia, a largely right-hemisphere-deficit condition.

And in keeping with the left-hemisphere hypothesis, more hypnotisable subjects display higher levels of dopaminergic activity

(dopamine transmission is more extensive in the left hemisphere).

delusion. This is a perfect example, incidentally, of the left hemisphere’s way of construing its own history, not least in its way of breaking a culture into atomistic fragments devoid of context, as though snippets of behaviour, feeling or thinking – of experience, in other words – stuck together in large enough numbers, constitute the world in which we live.

It could lead to a turning away from the conceptualisation of experience, an attempt to rid perceptual phenomena of their customary accretions of thought, which render the world inauthentically familiar: a return from the re-presentation of reality towards an active openness to the ‘presencing’ of what is.

In other words, a return to the authenticity of the right-hemisphere world.

Or it could lead in the opposite direction, to a discrediting of the testi...

seen as the root of deception, and a turning further inwards to the contemplation of the ...

At first we see an equitable balance, governed by an awareness of the primacy of the right hemisphere, but with time the balance shifts

ever further towards the triumph of the left.

Thought is all that there is: ‘for thought and being are the same

What can be thought must be, and what cannot be thought cannot exist.

What

In its prioritising of a logical system

over truth to phenomena, in its refusal of ambiguity or contradiction, in its achievement of certainty and stasis, this philosophy shows its allegiance to the world of the left hemisphere.

It entails in many cases a wholesale inability to rely on the reality of embodied existence in the ‘common-sense’ world which we share with others, and leads to a dehumanised view of others, who begin to lose their intuitively experienced identity as fellow humans and become seen as devitalised machines.

Poetry, however, by its exploitation of non-literal language and connotation, makes use of the right hemisphere’s faculty for metaphor, nuance and a broad, complex field of association to reverse this tendency.

the innate structures of the left hemisphere are, through technology, being incarnated in the world it has come to dominate.

‘All human relations have shifted’, she continued, ‘those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and

The specificity of the date she gives for the beginning of the modern era, of the era of Modern-ism – for it is to that self-proclaiming consciousness of radical change that she refers – is designed to suggest not so much the swiftness of the transition, as the abruptness of the disjunction, between what had gone before and what was to come after.

It was less an avalanche after unexpected snow than a landslide following years of erosion.

Modernity was marked by a process of social disintegration which clearly derived from the effects of the Industrial Revolution, but which could also be seen to have its roots in Comte’s vision of society as an aggregation of essentially atomistic individuals.

Capitalism and consumerism, ways of conceiving human relationships based on little more than utility, greed, and competition, came to supplant those based on felt connection and cultural continuity.

The effects of abstraction, bureaucratisation and social dislocation on personal identity have been themes of sociology since Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, and their effects on consciousness in modernity have been explored in works such as The Homeless Mind, by Peter Berger and colleagues.

Pervasive rationalistic, technical and bureaucratic ways of thinking have emptied life of meaning by destroying what Berger calls the ‘sacred canopy’ of meanings reflecting collective beliefs about life, death and the world in which we live.

Anthony Giddens describes the characteristic disruption of space and time required by globalisation, itself the necessary consequence of industrial capitalism, which destroys the sense of belonging, and ultimately of

‘disembedding mechanisms’,

Real things and experiences are replaced by symbolic tokens; ‘expert’ systems replace local know-how and skill with a centralised process dependent on rules. The result is an abstraction and virtualisation of life.

In neurological terms, the evolutionary roots of the integrated emotional system involved in the formation of social attachments may lie in more ancient and primitive animal attachments to place.5 Some animals bond as much with their nest sites as with their

I believe, a world increasingly dominated by the left hemisphere, and increasingly antagonistic to what the right hemisphere might afford.

It was the hunger for certainty in the later period, representing in my view a shift towards the left hemisphere’s values, priorities and modes of being, that led to a hardening of positions on all sides, to the relative intransigencies of both scientism and the Counter-Reformation, and to conflict.

In cases where the right hemisphere is damaged, we see a range of clinically similar problems to those found in schizophrenia.

Perhaps most significantly they have a similar lack of what might be called common sense.

Both rely on piecemeal decontextualised analysis, rather than on an intuitive, spontaneous or global mode of apprehension.

The right hemisphere is not functioning normally, and the left hemisphere takes its place.

The philosopher’s ‘predilection for abstraction and alienation – for detachment from body, world and community’,18 can produce a type of seeing and experiencing which is, in a literal sense, pathological.

Over-awareness itself alienates us from the world and leads to a belief that only we, or our thought processes, are real.

The detached, unmoving, unmoved observer feels that the world loses reality, becomes merely ‘things seen’.

Wittgenstein’s own ‘anti-philosophy’ is seen as an attempt to restore sanity to the philosophical mind caught up in the hyperconsciousness of metaphysical thought.

What Sass picks up in modern culture and identifies with schizophrenia may in fact be the over-reliance on the left hemisphere in the West, which I believe has accelerated in the last hundred years.

Elements of the self and of experience which normally remain, and need to remain, intuitive, unconscious, become the objects of a detached, alienating attention; and levels of consciousness multiply, so that there is an awareness of one’s own awareness, and so on.

The self has to be constructed ‘after the fact’ from the products of observation, and its very existence comes into doubt.

There is a loss of the pre-reflective sense of the body as something living and lived, a loss of the immediate physical and emotional experience which grounds us in the world, since bodily states and feelings fall under the spotlight of awareness, and are deprived of their normal compelling immediacy and intimacy.