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

by Iain McGilchrist

(The core mythos of Christianity, for that matter, is the vulnerability of the divine, God suffering alongside his creation.)

‘Prometheus, founder of the sacrifice, was a cheat and a thief’, he writes, ‘these traits were at the bottom of all the stories that deal with him.’ Under his tutelage, men became stealers of the divinity that lies round about them, ‘whose temerity brings immeasurable and unforeseen misfortune upon them’.

failure to understand the contextual nature of all thought, what Dewey called ‘the dogma of immaculate conception of philosophical systems’.

science is, to quote Gaukroger again, ‘a loose grouping of disciplines with different subject matters and different methods, tied in various ways each of which work for some purposes but not for others’.

Axioms are propositions, onferences upon which their systems stand but can not prove. Each system can be describd as immaculate given one doesn't consider th nccesary inferemces made to settle on the fundamental axioms. Any comprison betwen systems is largely metaphorical, due to their fundamentally different bases upon which each system of thought was developed. I.e. Parallels Can be drawn but they remin parallel, u able to join. Consider the contextual roots of ...'s geometric axioms. They work in 2Ds but begin to fray in 3Ds, so long as thr axioms claim universality and fail to recall theIr contextual origins.

The mechanical production of goods ensured a world in which the members of a class were not just approximate fits, because of their tiresome authenticity as individuals, but truly identical: equal, interchangeable members of their category.

as Leonard Shlain has pointed out, straight lines exist nowhere in the natural world, except perhaps at the horizon, where the natural world ends.)

As noted in the footnote, every line exists in naturae but is limited to the point of observation; with a broad ebough perspective even the horizon becomes a curve.

familiar in the ‘iconic’ sense (preferred by the left hemisphere), not in the sense of ‘special things that have value for me’ (preferred by the right): identical entities, rectilinear in shape, endlessly reproducible, mechanistic in nature, certain, fixed, man-made.

also more subtly, through excessive ‘management’ of one kind or another,

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

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 resultant anomie, or loss of all bearings, the demise of any shared structure of values, leads to a sort of existential angst.

Real things and experiences are replaced by symbolic tokens; ‘expert’ systems replace local know-how and skill with a centralised process dependent on rules.

I.e. The importance of conversation and interaction when teaching in larger schools rather than defering to automated programs of instruction i.e. Visible Learning's suggestion rather than systemic leason planning.

‘Belonging’ comes from the same Old English word langian which forms the root of ‘longing’. It means a sense of powerful emotional attachment to ‘my place’, where I am ‘at home’, and implies a sense of permanence.

Continuities of time are disrupted as the traditions that embody them are disrupted or discarded, ways of thinking and behaving change no longer gradually and at a pace that the culture can absorb, but radically, rapidly and with the implicit, and at times explicit, aim of erasing the past. And,

Consider the actions of the last four years (2020 -24) of the riots and removal of statues through to the destruction of Palestine by Israel. Let alone al the other examples of the past century of cultural devestation by both extremes of the political or religious ideological extremists.

a shift towards the left hemisphere’s values, priorities and modes of being, that led to a hardening of positions on all sides,

‘the world consists of tools, and … everything that we glance at has some utilization’.

the nature of attention alters what it finds; and specifically that when we cease to act, to be involved, spontaneous and intuitive, and instead become passive, disengaged, self-conscious, and stare in an ‘objective’ fashion at the world around us, it becomes bizarre, alien, frightening – and curiously similar to the mental world of the schizophrenic.

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

when we act or interact – even, perhaps, if all we do is to walk about in our surroundings rather than sit still and stare at them – we are obliged to reckon with the ‘otherness’ of things. As Sass puts it, ‘the very weight of the object, the resistance it offers to the hand, testify to its existence as something independent of will or consciousness’; moving an object ‘confirms one’s own experience of activity and efficacy’.

hyperconsciousness. 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.

Consider mindfulness and the possible misinterpretation of instructon. Awareness of awareness leadubg to 'paralysis' vs the same leading to 'liberation'.

hyperconsciousness. 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.

Hyperconsiousness vs awareness? One is biased toward the abstracted experience whilst the other balances the abstract with the concrete/intuitive. The latter balance dissolves the paralysis of selfconsiousness by allowing one's action/ one's self to be.

loss of ‘ipseity’, a loss in other words of the pre-reflective, grounding sense of the self.24 The self has to be constructed ‘after the fact’ from the products of observation, and its very existence comes into doubt.

There is a veering between two apparently opposite positions which are in reality aspects of the same position: omnipotence and impotence.

Part of everything and part of nothing equating to the same thing. I.e. Without the other as a source of comparison what is one?

Whether there is no self, or everything is embraced in the self, the result is the same, since both conditions lack the normal sense we have of ourselves as defined by an awareness that there exists something apart from ourselves.

Sass sees an ‘unworlding’ of the world: a loss of the sense of the overarching context that gives coherence to the world, which becomes fragmented and lacking in meaning.

Context provides coherence. I.e. Th meaning of the inherent relationships one forms with all that is not one's apparent self; all this is 'other. We know ourselves when we know our relation to the world. We are at peace when we accept it. We struggle when we engage with it (the strugle is the source pf growth).

philosophes malgré nous,

Philosophers in spite of ourselves

introspection ‘will suffer no idea to sink tranquilly to rest but must pursue each one into consciousness, only itself to become an idea, in turn to be pursued by renewed introspection’.

We are the ‘Don Juans of cognition’, he said, whose ‘knowledge will take its revenge on us, as ignorance exacted its revenge in the Middle Ages.’

Knowledge without the pleasure of learning. The pleasure that comes from struggle like that of reaching the mountain top, it is greater for those who made the walk than those who drove for they who walked have grasped the scale of the summit's context. i.e. The brain itself relies on the connctions to other points of knowing when incorporating new knowing.

It is not just that it no longer sees through the two-dimensional surface of the canvas to the world behind, through the window to the world beyond the pane, focussing instead on the plane before its eyes: it no longer sees through the representation of the world that is left hemisphere ‘experience’ at all, to a world that is ‘Other’ than itself. Man himself keeps getting into the picture, as Heidegger says of the modern era.

The interpreter’s task is to look for meaning.

as words need their real world referents to have meaning. Constantly searching for meaning, but not finding any, it is oppressed,

meaningfulness without a focus, a sense that ‘something is going on’.

The more one stares at things the more one freights them with import. That man crossing his legs, that woman wearing that blouse

ICompare to the idea in 'What every body is saying' that the codes it shares only hold meaning when interpreted within the context of their production. I.e. One folding one's arms could mean discomfort but even that possibility is belied by the temperature (they are cold?) or the conversation (they are cross?).

It has a particular meaning, is intended to convey something; but I am not let in on the secret, which every one else seems to understand.

Consider the autistic child

When implicit meaning is not understood, as Wittgenstein surmised, paranoia is the result: ‘Mightn’t we imagine a man who, never having had any acquaintance with music, comes to us and hears someone playing a reflective piece of Chopin and is convinced that this is a language and people merely want to keep the meaning secret from him?’

The feeling of boredom originates for me in a sense of the absurdity of a reality which is insufficient, or anyhow unable, to convince me of its own effective existence…

an ‘appetite for the new and the different, for fresh experience and novel excitements’ has lain at the heart of successful bourgeois society,

We grow bored through disconnection thus seeking additional sensual stimulation to avoid a sense of ineu (meaninglessness), recieve it in meaningless spectacle which titilates us as it further dulls our capacity for engaging with the experiential gestalt of being, leading us to fuel our growing anxiety as we seek meaning in the meaningless and bored with the this barren, over cultivated field of experience. What if we just allowed ourselves to lie fallow, unsown an let us replenish the nutrients of the gestalt. I.e. Frued's 'Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.'

vicious cycle between feelings of boredom, emptiness and restlessness, on the one hand, and gross stimulation and sensationalism on the other:

‘it can be observed that speech becomes gross and hyperbolic, music loud and nervous, ideas giddy and fantastic, emotions limitless and shameless, actions bizarre and foolish, whenever boredom reigns.’

a collection of ‘extremely merry things, viewed by extremely sad people who do not know what to do with them.’

Socialism and capitalism are both essentially materialist, just different ways of approaching the lifeless world of matter and deciding how to share the spoils.

They see it only under Scheler’s lowest realm of value: that of utility and sensation.

The process of re-presenting a thing not only distances us from it, and substitutes an abstraction, a token, for the thing itself; it also objectifies, and reifies it, so as to bring it under control.

Codification is the process of designating known from novel or as yet unknown. Once codified, we often come to acknowledge code/coda over and before that which it signifies. This is the abstraction and reification process that distances us from the presence/somatic/gestalt experience of the codified other. Why else would we be so concerned by the ways that others might codify/designate/refer to us. This is the source of our social/interpersonal angst.

In this way, the subject exercises maximum epistemic control. We might say that the emblem of such an attitude – the correlate in the realm of vision – is the stare.

Consider the concept of 'the male gaze' in so far as it invalidates the presence of an individual by superimposing the abstraction 'woman' in some form and thus creates the newly/self/re- validated femine object, which exists to be observed/stared at (The validation of this purpose arising from the subject who observes their own superimposed abstraction.) This seems a reasonable interpretation of any process of alienation or interpersonal distancing. If all problems are interpersonal problems, perhaps they are problems due to losing sight of the interpersonl through this cyclic process of abstraction and reification; through which we create objects or puzzle(pieces) to be fixed or solved, and lose sight of the fundamentally social nature of existing simulatiousy as and in a diadic (at least) relationship of presence. I.e. That which is 'given' by the individual observed is replaced by that which the observer (one who stares) gives themselves. A self-deluding myopia through abstraction, like putting on a pair of glasses with pin hole lenses. By excluding the 'presense' of the other in the diad the view is narrowed, the same way the pinhole excludes visual date. And, the wearer puts these glasses on themselves; gifts/gives themselves this narrowed (abstracted) perception. Consider then what happens if the user recognises their role in creating their perception but still fails to aknowledge/recognise the broader reality they exlude themselves from. They may imagine or create numerous variations of the pin hole, suggesting numerous ways to observe the objection of their attention. Some of this may place the pin holes in sub-optimal relation to the eye (like wearing glasses made for another with a broader/narrower face) and thus be judged insufficient, despite the fact they still enable some sense of the gestalt the is being excluded.

the being of a purely inner subjectivity that is no longer recognised as enjoying any truth,

There is pleasure in learning. To be a recipient of mechanised information dumps is to lose the greater part of knowledge aquisition; the challenge and self-recognition that one has overcome or succesfully managed that challenge and come away with the prize. The alternative is the treasure without the dragon, the princess witout the risk: what meaning is left aside from the cold, literal and computative?

‘we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’

The map and the territory, mistake one for the other and the one can lose its utility for the other. Imagine someone using a technically accurate Google maps as a substitute for traveling to a place. Much of the pleasure and satisfaction of travel s lost yet the tool's utility for suppprting navigtion remains despite the redundancy of the misuse. Note also that using the terrain/territory as its own map is equanimous with taking a somatic/sensual/gestalt approach to life rather than a narrowly abstracted one, despite the map's specific, abstract utility.

Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Familiar

Boredom and anxiety are different manifestations of the same underlying condition.

Fromm describes modern man as lonely, bored, anxious and passive.

That it may be reinforced or promoted by the nature of the environment in the broadest sense – both physical and psycho-social – would appear to be confirmed by research.