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

by Iain McGilchrist

Water is distinct from ice, but in the ice cube it is present: not as a fly might be trapped there, but in the very ice. It is the ice. And yet when the ice cube is gone, the water remains. Although we see water in the ice, we do so not because it is there separately, to be seen behind or apart from the cube.

we experience the universal in, or through, the particular, the timeless in, or through, the temporal.

regards the phenomenal world itself as Absolute and rejects the recognition of anything existing over [and above] the phenomenal world.

The phenomenon is that pointed to by te absteaction. The abstractipn replaces the phenomenon in ojr perception and this 'bein placed before' equates to 'being placed above' like children lining up to enter or leave the classroom.

rejection of a reality that must, or ever could, be arrived at purely by reason.

‘a word is a finger that points at the moon. The goal of Zen pupils is the moon itself, not the pointing finger.

knowing as many individual things as possible: ‘Learning consists in widening one’s information, absorbing extensively anything and everything one comes upon.’

The trap apparent is the categorisation of this knowledge and subsequent abstraction of the individual or phenomenal within, as or by these categories. The category of knowledge comes to replce the knowledge itself, leading to a seperation where there is interconnection, like the students who learn one thing in a language lesson and fail to transfer this to a science or arts lesson.

Everything surrounding human life, including mountains, hills, rivers, plants, trees, animals, fish and insects, has its own spirit (kami), and these spirits communicate with one another as well as with those who live there.

The power of metaphor to describe the complexity of inter-relational realities.

with our recording apparatus of every kind, we value what we can grasp and hold. But life and everything living refuses this approach. It changes as we hold it.

Absteaction, words etc, record items and thus grasps them, holding the in the verbal stasis of definition. The irony is in the, adnittedly glacial, change still felt by some when event the denorative grasp loosens by shifting or creeping (changing) definition.

Spenser’s great masterpiece, The Faerie Queene,

Oriental art emphasises the field, and tends correspondingly to de-emphasize individual objects, including people, by comparison with Western art.

Self-improvement in such cultures has far less to do with getting what one wants, and far more to do with confronting one’s own shortcomings, in the interests of harmony, at home, at work, and amongst friends.

phenomenon, and is far from being an unmixed good. Having low self-esteem, certainly in the West, is an obvious cause of anxiety and depression; but high self-esteem is positively correlated with a tendency to be unrealistic, to take offence too easily, and to become violent and demanding if one’s needs are not met.

In the West, failure tends to lead to discouragement; in the East, to a determination to do better.

thought, to which the Chinese were ‘perennially averse’.95 What this does not, of course, demonstrate is that East Asian culture relies on the right hemisphere, and Western culture on the left. We both rely on each. What the evidence suggests, if reviewed in greater detail than I have here, is that the East Asian cultures use strategies of both hemispheres more evenly, while Western strategies are steeply skewed towards the left hemisphere.

With a rising interest in neuroscience, we have an opportunity, which we must not squander, to sophisticate our understanding of ourselves, but we can only do so if we first sophisticate the language we use, since many current users of that language adopt it so naturally that they are not even aware of how it blinds them to the very possibility that they might be dealing with anything other than a machine.

the comic and tragic muses.

brains not only dictate the shape of the experience we have of the world, but are likely themselves to reflect, in their structure and functioning, the nature of the universe in which they have come about.

Certainty is the greatest of all illusions: whatever kind of fundamentalism it may underwrite, that of religion or of science, it is what the ancients meant by hubris.

The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to what lies behind the Truth. It is not possession of the Truth, but rather the pursuit of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectibility is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent, vain – If God held enclosed in his right hand all truth, and in his left hand the ever-living striving for truth, although with the qualification that I must for ever err, and said to me ‘choose’, I should humbly choose the left hand and say ‘Father, give! pure truth is for thee alone.’

things as they exist in practice in the real world, rather than as they exist in theory in our re presentations, are likely to be intrinsically resistant to precision and clarification.

zwei völlig heterogene Weisen gegebene Erkenntniß’);

mirror the very dichotomies that are being pointed to – alienation versus engagement, abstraction versus incarnation, the categorical versus the unique, the general versus the particular, the part versus the whole,

metaphor. It is how we come to understand the world.

Chris McManus (in McManus, 2002,

But, as with eyes, the two hemispheres must be identical. He does not therefore distinguish between the two hemispheres,

Mind and brain are aspects of the same entity, but completely distinct types of phenomena. The difference is similar to what I take Sartre to mean by his distinction between our inward experience of the body (pour soi), and the fact of the body as a ‘thing’ (en soi).

helpful analogy for the relationship I believe I see between mind and brain might be the relationship of a wave to water.

‘When we’re too young, our judgment isn’t sound, and it’s the same when we’re too old. If we don’t think enough about something – or if we think too much – we’re inflexible and get stuck. If we take a look at our work as soon as we’ve done it, we’re not able to be objective; but if we wait too long, we can’t get into it any more. It’s like looking at pictures from too near or too far away. There is only one place that’s exactly right: the others are either too far, too near, too high or too low. In the art of painting it’s perspective that determines where that point should be. But who’s to say where it is when it comes to truth and morality?’:

‘metaphor … was the first word in spoken language, and only after losing its original colour could it become a literal sign’.

It is not merely a question of applying rules, of making the most combinations possible according to certain fixed laws. The combinations so obtained would be exceedingly numerous, useless and cumbersome.

Erkennen” ist der Weg, um es uns zum Gefühl zu bringen, daß wir bereits etwas wissen: also die Bekämpfung eines Gefühls von etwas Neuem und Verwandlung des anscheinend Neuen in etwas Altes.’

When one describes man as a wolf any ‘human traits that can without undue strain be talked about in “wolf-language” will be rendered prominent, and any that cannot will be pushed into the background. The wolf-metaphor suppresses some details, emphasises others – in short, organises our view of man. Suppose I look at the night sky through a piece of heavily smoked glass on which certain lines have been left clear. Then I shall see only the stars that can be made to lie on the lines previously prepared upon the screen, and the stars I do see will be seen as organised by the screen’s structure. We can think of a metaphor as such a screen and the system of “associated commonplaces” of the focal word as the network of lines upon the screen …’ If I describe a battle as a game of chess, ‘the chess vocabulary filters and transforms: it not only selects, it brings forward aspects of the battle that might not be seen at all through another medium’ (Black, 1962, pp. 41–2).

‘the fundamental principle of brain organisation’ between the two hemispheres is that the right hemisphere deals with novel information, and the left with familiar information.

Consider the processing of trauma - the as yet improperly or unprocessed trauma will 'remain in' the knowing aspect of the right hemisphere

‘language is always poetry, and … prose (science) is a distinction, not of aesthetic form, but of content, that is, of logical form’

Examples are (optimism) being upbeat, lifting one’s spirits; (control) having control over, ranking above; (consciousness) waking up, but falling asleep; (rationality) rising above one’s feelings, but breaking down in tears.

‘There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination’

‘Contradiction is a bad indicator of truth. Plenty of things that are certain are mutually contradictory; plenty of things that are false contain no inconsistency. Contradiction is not a sign of falsehood, nor the lack of contradiction

Pascal warned: ‘Individual things break down and are transformed at every moment: he [man] only sees them in passing

Mittelstrass, 1988.

One can only see from a certain standpoint, but this fact does not make all standpoints of equal value.

key element in schizophrenia is not irrationality, but an excessive and misplaced rationalism.

An idea wonderfully imaged in the Japanese Zen garden, Ryoan-ji, in which, from any one viewpoint, there is always at least one of the 15 stones that cannot be seen.

Some things are such that if you do not understand them immediately, you never will’),

‘If you have not already got it in you, you cannot receive it’,

So things are not entirely subjective: there is truth after all. And yet! When we want to put our finger on it, it will not stand up; when we look more closely at it, it looks different again. It is an interpretation and yet something more than an interpretation, knowledge and yet not quite knowledge: what are we dealing with?’

Sensations which were pleasurable to our ancestors have become indifferent or even intolerable to ourselves;

civilisation is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non–satisfaction … of instincts’

Civilisation] displaces instinctual aims and brings it about that people become antagonistic to what they had previously tolerated’

‘People should not worry so much about what they do as about who they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are, for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctify our works’

happiness … cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself’