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

by Iain McGilchrist

‘The thickness of flesh’, Merleau-Ponty wrote, ‘between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication’

Belief, like faith and truth, etymologically implies a relation of loyalty, and has the same root as love

‘the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me … one vision or seeing, and one knowing and loving’

‘those who have been shaken, especially by the experience of great historic trauma, out of life “within a lie” – or, in general, out of the unquestioned prejudices of their culture – into a genuinely open-minded thoughtfulness. This is not the thoughtfulness of scholarly expertise; but, rather, that other sort of thoughtfulness (to be found at all different levels of scholarly sophistication or articulacy) which may also be described as a fundamental openness to transcendence’

man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason

everything, then, is both a cause of, and is caused by, something else, supporting and being supported, mediate and immediate, and all is held together by a natural though imperceptible bond which draws together the most distant and different entities,

manner in which the spirit is united with the body cannot be understood by man; and yet this is what man

‘The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle’

‘Car il ne faut pas se méconnaître: nous sommes automates autant qu’esprit’

the best of our knowledge, the affective essence of emotion is subcortically and precognitively organised’ (1998, p. 26) and ‘the normal flow of motivational events in the brain’ is one in which ‘emotions and regulatory feelings have stronger effects on cognitions than the other way round’

The cognitive distortions that are undoubtedly present in depression must be, in my view, a consequence, not a cause, of the primary disturbance, which is a disturbance of affect. In short, we believe the world is a crock of shit because we are depressed; we are not depressed because we believe the world is a crock of shit.

‘Behind every thought there is an affective-volitional tendency, which holds the answer to the last “why” in the analysis of thinking’:

‘Les passions ont appris aux hommes la raison’:

According to Scheler, the cosmos, and beyond that the human world, is formed by the relationship between Sein and forces which he refers to as Drang and Geist, which stand in a permissive relationship – either saying ‘no’ or not saying ‘no’ – to one another. The interested reader is referred to Scheler’s metaphysics (2008); particularly Chapter 7, pp.

‘The work of the painter, the poet and the composer and the myths and symbols of primitive man [should] seem to us if not as a superior form of knowledge, at any rate as the most fundamental form of knowledge, and the only one that we all have in common; knowledge in the scientific sense is merely the sharpened edge of this other knowledge. More penetrating it may be, because its edge has been sharpened on the hard stone of fact, but this penetration has been acquired at the price of a great loss of substance’ (p. 303: emphasis added).

For a discussion of kenosis in neuropsychological terms, see Teske, 1996.

inhibition may be of three main kinds: isolation, interference and suppression.

Another advantage of the idea that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing entity but a graduated process is that it accommodates the possibility of degrees of consciousness in other sentient beings.

he analogical form of the English expression “what is it like?” is misleading. It does not mean “what (in our experience) it resembles”, but rather “how it is for the subject himself”’ (Nagel, 1979b, p. 170, n. 6).

Since this applies to the structure of reason itself, it applies a fortiori to the practical business of science, which is why reductionism could succeed only within a self-enclosed system. Thus Einstein: ‘the supreme task of the physicist is the discovery of the most general elementary laws from which the world-picture can be deduced logically. But there is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance, and this Einfühlung [literally, empathy or ‘feeling one’s way in’] is developed by experience’ (‘Preface’, Planck, 1933, p. 12); and Planck himself: ‘… empiricism is unassailable on the fundamental ground of pure logic; and its conclusions are equally impregnable. But if we look at it purely from the viewpoint of knowledge it leads into a blind alley, which is called solipsism. In order to escape from this impasse there is no other way open but to jump the wall at some part of it, and preferably at the beginning. This can be done only by introducing, once and for all, a metaphysical hypothesis which has nothing to do with the immediate experience of sense-perceptions or the conclusions logically drawn from them’

The inability of a system of thought to explain its own core axioms/assumptions upon which it is constructed.

it is just this striving forward that brings us to the fruits which are always falling into our hands and which are the unfailing sign that we are on the right road and that we are ever and ever drawing nearer to our journey’s end. But that journey’s end will never be reached, because it is always the still far thing that glimmers in the distance and is unattainable. It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.

David Wight's star on the horizon

Gaukroger, 2006, p. 11.

563: ‘Ich kann tun, was ich will: ich kann, wenn ich will, alles, was ich habe, den Armen geben und dadurch selbst einer werden – wenn ich will! – Aber ich vermag nicht, es zu wollen; weil die entgegenstehenden Motive viel zuviel Gewalt über mich haben, als daß ich es könnte’ (‘I can do as I will: I can, if I will, give everything that I have to the poor, and thereby become one of them myself – if I will! – but I cannot will it, since countervailing motives have much too much power over me, for me to be able to do so’:

comparing the productions of an autistic child painter and early cave paintings gives some incidental support to Brener’s thesis that primitive art shows a paucity of right-hemisphere function

the reason for favouring the left-facing profile is almost certainly the more emotionally engaging nature of the image: for example, family portraits are more likely to evince the leftward-facing, right hemisphere bias than professional portraits (Nicholls, Clode, Wood et al., 1999). Remarkably enough, portraits of scientists actually evince a rightwards-facing, left hemisphere bias

Braudel, 2001, p. 264.

The earliest coins date from the late seventh century or early sixth century, according to Seaford, 2004,

opening of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’.

‘In much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow’

Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer’

consenting to any thought that comes along’

individual moments can be separated from those immediately preceding and succeeding them,

A complete error/fallacy given the interdependence of atoms. I.e. Just as we have height and width and depth so to do we age. One's dimensionality isnt lost when a single particle making this up is lost. Rather the is a relation experience between this part and the others that permits a continuance of the whole despite even the translation of a part from one state to another. This interelational process of continuence occurs despite the void within the whole. I.e. That we are made up as much of space, perhaps more, as we are of stuff.

‘In this theatre of man’s life, it is reserved only for God and Angels to be lookers on’

the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies’

‘In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,/ Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben’:

‘There are those who, from an uncouth insensibility, hold (as Aristotle says) bodily pleasures in disgust. I know some who do it from ambition. Why do they not also give up breathing, so as to live on what is theirs alone, rejecting the light of day because it is free and costs them neither ingenuity nor effort? … I suppose they think about squaring the circle while lying with their wives!’

‘Underlying our most sublime sentiments and our purest tenderness there is a little of the testicle’:

one must come to the sight with a seeing power made akin and like to what is seen. No eye ever saw the sun without becoming sun-like

‘Bei allem diesen lassen wir niemals aus dem Sinne, daß diese Erscheinung nie als eine fertige, vollendete, sondern immer als eine werdende, zunehmende, und in manchem Sinn bestimmbare Erscheinung anzusehen sei’ (trans.

yearning that young people occasionally experience for that which seems to have passed away from them for ever”.

‘The Don Juan of knowledge – no philosopher or poet has yet discovered him. He does not love the things he knows, but has spirit and appetite for and enjoyment of the chase and intrigues of knowledge – up to the highest and remotest stars of knowledge! – until at last there remains to him nothing of knowledge left to hunt down except the absolutely detrimental; he is like the drunkard who ends by drinking absinthe and aqua fortis. Thus in the end he lusts after Hell – it is the last knowledge that seduces him. Perhaps it too proves a disillusionment, like all knowledge! And then he would have to stand to all eternity transfixed to disillusionment and himself become a stone guest, with a longing for a supper of knowledge which he will never get! – for the whole universe has not a single morsel left to give this hungry man’

For Wittgenstein, see p. 157 above. Montaigne’s most famous saying was, after a lifetime of learning, que sçais-je? The saying that ‘the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know’ is attributed both to the Buddha and to Socrates. St. Paul wrote: ‘And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know’ (1 Corinthians 8: 2).

A. N. Whitehead (1926, 1934).

‘uneigennützige und nicht nach Lohn haschende Liebe’

‘l’amour désintéressé ou non mercenaire’

‘Man kann sagen: daß, unter allen diesen drei Arten des Wohlgefallens, das des Geschmacks am Schönen einzig und allein ein uninteressiertes und freies Wohlgefallen sei; denn kein Interesse, weder das der Sinne, noch das der Vernunft, zwingt den Beifall ab’

shall have a strong desire for a woman of no remarkable beauty; while the greatest beauty in men, or in other animals, though it causes love, yet excites nothing at all of desire…’

Andrew Shanks, to whose work Trans-Metaphysical Theology

the worse it gets, the better it gets, as the widely shared experience of alienation opens up the possibility of a truly fresh start’:

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness’: