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

by Iain McGilchrist

one’s consciousness of oneself as an embodied individual in the world is founded on empathy – on one’s empathic cognition of others, and others’ empathic cognition of oneself.

We think (of feel) we are by/though what we think (or feel) that others think (or feel) we are.

It is like the attempt to describe a living curve using only straight lines: more and more are added, and the curve is ever more approximated, with infinite complexity, the lines never quite reaching their target

Calculation is unhelpful, and is superseded by a habit of beneficence in most of us for whom the right orbitofrontal cortex, the basis of empathy, is still functioning properly.

the acquisition of nurturant behaviour leaves a seemingly indelible print on a creature’s way of being in the world.32

It is mutuality, not reciprocity, fellow-feeling, not calculation, which is both the motive and the reward for successful co-operation.

In relation to art, Merleau-Ponty’s view, which accords with experience, was that the artist did not merely reflect what was there anyway, albeit in a novel way, but actually ‘brought into being a truth’ about the world that was not there before, perhaps the best example of the universal being manifest through the particular.

Compare to Gaiman's Sandman and the exhibition of AMSND to the actual Oberon and Titania: these things didn't happen but are still true.

It is the rootedness of our thought and language in the body that we share with others which means that despite the fact that all truth is relative, this in no way undermines the possibility of shared truth.

truth is mediated by embodied understanding and imagination.

The statement that ‘there is no such thing as truth’ is itself a truth statement, and implies that it is truer than its opposite, the statement that ‘truth exists’. If we had no concept of truth, we could not state anything at all, and it would even be pointless to act.

None of us actually lives as though there were no truth. Our problem is more with the notion of a single, unchanging truth.

Thus arguments that devolve unhappily because one or both parties feel the other has determined a final or universal, unchangin or unchangable, truth

Such a situation is not an absolute – it tells us not only about the chosen thing, but also about the chooser.

I.e. The acknowledgedment, or otherwise, that the choice of ones truth and being true to it, ultimately is not based on an unchanging or unchangable premise or axiom is what determines the potential depth and breadth of convrsation betwen two parties that disagree with each other. I.e. The neccesary aknowledgment that the iother has some understanding of reality that can be shared constructively - reveal something to some degree further than would have been possible without the discussion

Then it is an entity defined by a negative – by what it is not; and in opposition to something else (unconcealing). It is come at by a process, a coming into being of something; and that process is also, importantly, part of the truth.

Truth as unconcealing is a progress towards something – the something is in sight, but never fully seen; whereas truth as correctness is given as a thing in itself, that can in principle be fully known.

It may be true that, to quote Patricia Churchland, ‘it is reasonable to identify the blueness of an object with its disposition to scatter … electromagnetic waves preferentially at about 0.46 m’ [emphasis in the original].50 That is, I suppose, a sort of truth about the colour blue. That is one way in which blue discloses itself. Most of us would think it left rather a lot out. There are also other very important truths about the colour blue that we experience, for example, when we see a canvas by Ingres, or by Yves Klein, or view the sky, or sea, which are closed off by this. It is, in this sense, like the duck–rabbit: we can have only one ‘take’ on it at a time. We see things by seeing them as something. In this sense too we create the world by attending to it in a particular way.

We create the world by the manner of attendance. If we attend to he world in an embodied of somatic manner we experience it differently than if we do so in an abstract or cognitive manner; although the two are impossible to completely seperate or at the very least to imagine as such.

The inexperienced mariner sees the ice floe; the experienced mariner sees the berg and is awe-struck.

not ‘an answer to’ (une réponse à), but a ‘response to’, a ‘correspondence with’,

Man is only a privileged listener and respondent to existence.

It is, or ought to be, a relation of extreme responsibility, custodianship, answerability to and

Dasein is ‘to be there’ in the world – the literal, actual, concrete, daily world – to be human at all is to be immersed in the earth, and the quotidian matter-of-factness of the world.

We do not inhabit the body like some alien Cartesian piece of machine wizardry, but live it

We live time rather than just conceive it, and similarly we live the body rather than simply derive sensory information through it.

Truth is process, not object.

For us to be able to understand anything we have already to be in possession of enough understanding of it to be able to approach it, and indeed we have, yes, already to understand it in some sense before we can ‘understand’ it.

This is perhaps the target being pointed to in stories of teachers left too soon who tell their students they have all they need to continue their training i.e. The student doesnt yet understand (perhaps in an embodied manner) but has all the neccesary understandings and skills to finally do so. The victory so often comes about due to the insight the student eventually gains by achieving this understanding. Put differently, the understandinv one is in possession of is the point of reference or comparison in the metaphor required to achieve the subsequent understanding.

Similarly we can never make others understand something unless they already, at some level, understand it.

The protagonist cannot come to the end of their jpurney without completing the jpurney itself. The trials and tribulations of the path are the building materials of insight or wisdom. The obstacle is the way. The way can not be named. Tao.

‘it is not we who perceive, it is the thing that perceives itself yonder’.

Compare to buddhist conception of self.

the artificial precision of our language betrays us.

‘Man has to awaken to wonder – and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.’

The middle way; not to be swept away by incoherent wonder whilst also avoiding the cynisism of understanding.

According to Heidegger, what is everywhere apparently now demanded is tough, instant and, where necessary, violent action; ‘the long patient waiting for the gift’ has come to look like mere weakness.92

According to Scheler, values are not themselves feelings, though they reach us through the realm of feeling, much as colours reach us through the realm of sight.

our early experience of the world is intersubjective and does not include an awareness of self as distinct from other.

the same act carried out by two different people may carry an entirely different value, which is why morality can never be a matter of actions or consequences taken out of context, whether that be the broader context or that of the mental world of the individual involved

It’s like making mayonnaise: add too much oil too fast and the suspension breaks down.)

value-ception governs the type of attention that we pay to anything, and by which we learn more about it. Our value-ceptive knowledge of the whole governs our understanding of the parts, rather than the reverse.

Recognising the hands are part of a whole which is the picture; a creation pf another set of hands. The recognition of the whole detirmines both the meaning of the parts and the value we place upon them. Another example perhaps is the 'this is not a pipe' piece.

utility … in reality has no value except as a means to pleasure.’

Fig. 4.2 Pyramid of values according to Scheler.

there are important qualities which happen to be instrumentally useful, and therefore should be pursued on utilitarian grounds, but that doing so makes no sense, since they cannot be grasped by an effort of will, and the attempt to do so merely drives them further away.

The greater the willfull effort to achieve happiness the less utilitarianly beneficial the efforts are.

It is said that the meaning of the Hebrew words translated as ‘good and evil’, in the Genesis myth of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, ‘mean precisely the useful and the useless, in other words, what is useful for survival and what is not’.104

We live, in other words, in two different types of world.

According to this view, we are already in a relationship with the world, which helps to direct our attention; and which also means that we bring something of ourselves to the process of creating a ‘vision’ of the world.

So it is clearly not true that we have to attend to something consciously before we can know it: we can only select what to attend to when we know what it is we are dealing with. We know it first, then are drawn to attend, so as to know more – Escher’s hands again.

the mind can only truly know, in the sense of bring into sharp focus, and ‘see clearly’, what it has itself made.

Interpretation of the gorilla experiments.

one cannot sustain attention to anything unless there is some form of memory of what one’s attention was doing a moment ago and of what the ‘anything’ is.

I.e. The translation of the pali word for mindfulness as 'remembering'

what we know with our conscious left hemisphere is already in the past, no longer ‘alive’ but re-presented.

Jung: ‘all cognition is akin to recognition’.

Eidenai is related to idein (‘to see’), and in fact originally meant ‘to have seen’.

Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred Our eyes, upon one double string.

Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell when he wrote ‘A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.’

The focussed but detached attention of the surgeon, with intent to care, may easily mimic the focussed but detached attention of the torturer, with intent to control; only the knowledge of the intention changes the way in which we understand the act.

the relationship implied by the left-hemisphere attention brought to bear through the scientific method, with its implied materialism, is not no relationship – merely a disengaged relationship, implying, incorrectly, that the observer does not have an impact on the observed

every thing we apprehend is the way it is because we see it in that way rather than another way.