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

by Iain McGilchrist

according to Hagège, ‘the origin of Chinese writing appears to have been magicoreligious and divinatory rather than economic and mercantile.’

Money has an important function which it shares with writing: it replaces things with signs or tokens, with representations, the very essence of the activity of the left hemisphere.

Richard Seaford asserts that monetary currency necessitates an antithesis of sign and substance, whereby the sign becomes decisive, and implies an ideal substance underlying the tangible reality.

The meaning of coinage is value (coins stpred value throufg agreed upon represenratipn) but it came to be value itself. The cashless society further abstracts this representation to the poins that no physical markers exist and replaced by:£, $, €, ¥, etc

I would not favour seeing either the alphabet or currency as the prime movers, but as epiphenomena, signs of a deeper change in hemisphere balance evidenced in both.

In Homer, artefacts of gold and silver may be aristocratic gifts, and are associated with deity and immortality, but are not money: in fact, significantly, unformed gold and silver, as such, had negative associations.

Value as concrete and detirmined through rarity and production (effort and skill ),

gifts are not themselves substitutable, but unique;

Primacy of relationship in barter systems due to/neccesited the non-standardised value of the concrete compared to the abstract. recall Abstraction as explained in I Am A Strange Loop; increased transmissability but lower fidelity of information.

money is homogeneous, and hence homogenises its objects and its users, eroding uniqueness: it is impersonal, unlike talismanic objects, and weakens the need for bonds, or for trust based on a knowledge of those with whom one is exchanging.

the explicit at the expense of the implicit – the direction of the left hemisphere.

The path of abstraction.

the most positive aspects of the left hemisphere, in its guise as Lucifer, the bringer of light?

Necessary distance is what makes empathy possible.

‘the ambiguous god of wine and death yielded the stage to Apollo and the triumph of rationality, to theoretical and practical utilitarianism

It is only with the continuing evolution of greater distance from one another that we start to focus on the uniqueness of ourselves and others as individuals, which is largely what is expressed in the face. If we describe our own feelings, we are more immediately aware of the sensations and emotional reactions throughout our physical frame than of our own changing facial expressions:

‘men are good in but one way, but bad in many’.

sculpture, around AD 130, there was a move from the merely painted pupil to an incised and engraved pupil, enlarging the powers of expressive sculpture in stone.124

The derivation of the name of Apollo means ‘the luminous one’ (in German, der Scheinende); as such also the god of fantasy, of that which only seems to be the case (das Scheinende), rather than of what is.125

In themselves all of these represent enormous advances, and in terms of the thesis of this book demonstrate the power for good that the left hemisphere wields when it acts as the emissary of the right hemisphere, and has not yet come to believe itself the Master.

the Greek language, by inventing the definite article, could take an attribute of an existing thing, expressed through an adjective – that it was ‘beautiful’, say – and turn it into an abstract noun by adding the definite article: so from beautiful (kalos) to ‘the beautiful’ (to kalon).126 In a clever and audacious, one might say hubristic, inversion, the left hemisphere now seems to imply that what is purely conceptual is what is real, and what is experienced, at least by the senses, is downgraded, and amazingly enough actually becomes the ‘representation’!

Although language is the only way we can scientifically bridge the chasm between mind and brain, we should always remember that we humans are creatures that can be deceived as easily by logical rigour as by blind faith

truth becomes something proved by argument. The importance of another, ultimately more powerful, revealer of truth, metaphor, is forgotten; and metaphor, in another clever inversion, comes even to be a lie, though perhaps a pretty one. So the statements of truth contained in myth become discounted as ‘fictions’, that is to say untruths or lies – since, to the left hemisphere, metaphor is no more than this.

The processs of lost faith in the meaning of narrative. I.e. The metaphorical replaced by the analytical. note also its limits and the confusion that arises from the greater fidelity of form yet abstraction of meaning copare to comics and the great triangle

All those involved in creative arts deal in deceit: the metaphor is a lie. Calculation (logic) is to be preferred to imagination: denotation to connotation.

one needs to inquire into many things, not just one, if one is not to be led astray.

perhaps, he must have told himself, things which I do not understand are not automatically unreasonable. Perhaps there is a kingdom of wisdom from which the logician is banished? Perhaps art may even be a necessary correlative and supplement of science?

These stories live not by idle interest [that is, not as a sort of primitive science, merely to answer intellectual curiosity], not as fictitious or even as true narratives; but are to the natives a statement of a primeval, greater, and more relevant reality, by which the present life, fates, and activities of mankind are determined, the knowledge of which supplies man with the motive for ritual and moral actions, as well as with indications as to how to perform them.

both those of amor and those of pietas, coupled with his sense of pity for the passing of human lives and achievements – sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt

…Full sail, I voyage Over the boundless ocean, and I tell you Nothing is permanent in all the world. All things are fluid; every image forms, Wandering through change. Time is itself a river In constant movement, and the hours flow by Like water, wave on wave, pursued, pursuing, Forever fugitive, forever new. That which has been, is not; that which was not, Begins to be; motion and moment always In process of renewal…

they provided a means of transplanting to far-flung places a series of cultural goods, always identifiably the same. Set down in the midst of often primitive local peoples, they marked the staging-posts of a civilisation of self-promotion and assimilation. That is one reason why these towns were all so alike, faithfully corresponding to a model which hardly changed over time and place.

Uniformity of of the deadened, the abstraction of the ideal to that of a cookie cutter

‘The free and natural forms of the early Empire, the multiplicity and variation of life under a decentralised administration, was replaced by homogeneity and uniformity under an ever-present and increasingly more centralised hierarchy of civil officials.’

The imbalance (triumph) of order over chaos This is the social biom in which chritianity took root, considitioning its growth from a possible cult, that drew/draws comparison with Dionesian cults, into the modern monolith the controlled the existance of its adherants for a 1000 years. I.e. Even its choice of structures reflect the political rather than the religions controls of latter Rome

A higher meaning is implanted in the object, which more and more is reduced to a shell enclosing this meaningful core, more and more becomes a sign referring to a thought – and, as a sign, always identical, formula-like, stereotype.

The trade-off of fidelity for transfer/communicability

Plotinus’ belief that the tangible reality of nature was a beautiful reflection of the Platonic Ideas cedes to a view of the natural world as ‘only a jungle of confusion where humans lose their way.’

Myth and metaphor are no longer semi-transparent, but an opaque shell of lies which encloses the real truth, an abstraction at its core. Depictions on triumphal arches are no longer of the actual victor and the actual events, but of the generalised, symbolic attributes of the absolute victor: nothing is what it is, but only what it represents.

‘there is a movement away from the complex towards the simple, from the mobile towards the static, from the dialectic and relative towards the dogmatic and the authoritarian, from the empirical towards theology and theosophy.’162

by the Edict of Milan in 313, he began the process of integrating the Church into the state. In doing so, he also promoted its identification with military success, with secular power, and with wealth.

With the Nicene decree of Theodosius in 381, not only was paganism outlawed, but a certain specific understanding of the nature of the Trinity became orthodoxy: there was no room for disagreement and debate was stifled.

For the Greeks spirituality and rationality, muthos (mythos) and logos, could coexist without conflict.166 That muthoi could be ‘frozen in written form and interpreted to make statements of “truth” (logoi)’ was alien to the Greeks.

The abstraction of thought in writing can kill thought if allowed to. i.e. Rock vs water, the good as adaptive processes and evil as an excess of order or chaos.

It’s just that they deployed it on a legalistic framework for divinity, rather than on the movement of the planets.

Thought unmoored from context and tied instead to legalistic dogma. Could link perhaps to Nietzche's identification of the death of god and how we killed it. I.e. If the spiritual is defined and contained in the abstraction of legalism it loses the adaptive capacity expressed in yarning. If the nicene creed is an exclusionary definition of faith, then all other faiths/variation thereof are invalidated by its prescription. Thus the pope continued resistance to the freemasons.

What was lacking was any concern with the world in which we live; their gaze was fixed firmly on theory, abstractions, conceptions, and what we could find only in books.

The passion is for control, for fixity, for certainty; and that comes not with religion alone, but with a certain cast of mind, the cast of the left hemisphere.

the provisional nature of knowledge’

Christianity, which is in one sense the most powerful mythos in advocacy of the incarnate world, and of the value of the individual, that the world has ever known, also ended up a force for conformity, abstraction, and the suppression of independent thought.

Tools and those who use them. The same tool, a blade, can be used to help or to harm: compare the sugeon and the soldier.

it is striking that what he reports is, not the utility of the experience, but its beauty.

abstraction and generalisation,

This is bound up with the important rediscovery of perspective

perspective mediates a view of the world from an individual standpoint – one particular place, at one particular time, rather than a God’s-eye ‘view from nowhere’.

mais où sont les neiges d’antan?*

Nostre Seigneur se taist tout quoi, Car au tancer il le perdroit†

Frères humains qui après nous vivez N’ayez les cuers contre nous endurciz Car, se pitié de nous pauvres avez, Dieu en aura plus tost de vous merciz.*

What we feel arises out of what I feel for what you feel for what I feel about your feelings about me – and about many other things besides:

the paradox is that those feelings only arise because of our distinctness, our ability to be separate, distinct individuals, that come, that go, in separation and death.

A coward, braggart and buffoon when taken to pieces and the evidence judged in the abstract, he nonetheless has qualities of bravery and generosity of heart which redeem what would have been just a catalogue of imperfections, not by ‘outweighing’ them, but by transforming them into something else within the quiddity of his being.

The limitation of abstraction belied by experience. We conote bravery in the face denotative foolishness. To say the former is solely the latter exposes an analytic myopia. Knowing-learning /wisdom relies on the synthesis (a dialogue between) both.

‘A good caricature’, he said, ‘like every work of art, is more true to life than reality itself.’