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

by Iain McGilchrist

The most striking example [of a theory that cannot be definitively proved or disproved] is the most important of all biological theories: that of organic evolution. Although some quite limited predictions can be deduced from the theory, the theory was not in fact established by prediction and is not sufficiently tested by it. An enormous number of observations enormously varied in kind are all consistent with this theory, and many of them are consistent with no other theory that has been proposed. We therefore can and, if we are rational, must have an extremely high degree of confidence in the theory

the brain is not just a tool for grappling with the world. It’s what brings the world about.

One could call the mind the brain’s experience of itself.12 Such a formulation is immediately problematic, since the brain is involved in constituting the world in which, alone, there can be such a thing as experience – it helps to ground experience, for which mind is already needed. But let’s accept such a phrase at face value. Brain then necessarily gives structure to mind. That would not, however, equate mind and brain. It is sometimes assumed so, because of the tendency when using a phrase such as ‘the brain’s experience of itself’ to focus on the word ‘brain’, which we think we understand, rather than on the troublesome word ‘experience’, which we don’t.

There is nothing else which has the ‘inwardness’ that consciousness has. Phenomenologically, and ontologically, it is unique. As I will try to show, the analytic process cannot deal with uniqueness: there is an irresistible temptation for it to move from the uniqueness of something to its assumed non-existence, since the reality of the unique would have to be captured by idioms that apply to nothing else.

the one thing we do know for certain is that everything we know of the brain is a product of consciousness. That is, scientifically speaking, far more certain than that consciousness itself is a product of the brain.

Mind has the characteristics of a process more than of a thing; a becoming, a way of being, more than an entity. Every individual mind is a process of interaction with whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves according to its own private history.

The defining features of the human condition can all be traced to our ability to stand back from the world, from our selves and from the immediacy of experience. This enables us to plan, to think flexibly and inventively, and, in brief, to take control of the world around us rather than simply respond to it passively. This distance, this ability to rise above the world in which we live, has been made possible by the evolution of the frontal lobes.

As Nietzsche put it: ‘Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.’

We might think of music as an individualistic, even solitary experience, but that is rare in the history of the world. In more traditionally structured societies, performance of music plays both an integral, and an integrative, role not only in celebration, religious festivals, and other rituals, but also in daily work and recreation; and it is above all a shared performance, not just something we listen to passively.46 It has a vital way of binding people together, helping them to be aware of shared humanity, shared feelings and experiences, and actively drawing them together. In our world, competition and specialisation have made music something compartmentalised, somewhere away from life’s core.

We call a group of people ‘a body’, and its constituents are seen as limbs, or ‘members’. Their relationship within the group is not additive merely, as it would be in a mechanical assembly of items, but combinatory, producing a new entity that is more than the sum of its parts.

things only are what they are because they find themselves in the surroundings in which they find themselves, and are connected to whatever it is that they are connected to.

our question as to the nature of philosophy calls not for an answer in the sense of a textbook definition or formulation, be it Platonic, Cartesian, or Lockeian, but for an Ent-sprechung, a response, a vital echo, a ‘re-sponsion’ in the liturgical sense of participatory engagement

I love the prase "participatory engagement". It is so widely applicable. For example, think of watching a movie alone vs. with an audience. Or having a personal conversation vs. a textual exchange. It is the difference between listing to music on earbuds vs. a live concert experience.

For Descartes, truth is determined and validated by certainty. Certainty, in turn, is located in the ego. The self becomes the hub of reality and relates to the world outside itself in an exploratory, necessarily exploitative, way. As knower and user, the ego is predator. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the human person and self-consciousness are not the centre, the assessors of existence. Man is only a privileged listener and respondent to existence.

We arrive at the position (which is so familiar from experience) that we cannot attain an understanding by grasping it for ourselves. It has already to be in us, and the task is to awaken it, or perhaps to unfold it – to bring it into being within us. Similarly we can never make others understand something unless they already, at some level, understand it.

there are always elements that arise from within the system (rationally conceived goals) that cannot be achieved by the system (rational means of pursuit), and that indeed draw our attention to the limits of the system, and point us beyond.

I described evidence for the primacy of the right hemisphere in constituting our experience of reality, with the need for left hemisphere ‘unfolding’ of what the right hemisphere understands, so that the now unfolded vision can subsequently be reintegrated with the reality of the right hemisphere.

The existence of a system of thought dependent on language automatically devalues whatever cannot be expressed in language; the process of reasoning discounts whatever cannot be reached by reasoning. In everyday life we may be willing to accept the existence of a reality beyond language or rationality, but we do so because our mind as a whole can intuit that aspects of our experience lie beyond either of these closed systems. But in its own terms there is no way that language can break out of the world language creates – except by allowing language to go beyond itself in poetry; just as in its own terms rationality cannot break out of rationality, to an awareness of the necessity of something else, something other than itself, to underwrite its existence – except by following Gödel’s logic to its conclusion.

One may or may not be inclined to accept Scheler’s particular schema of values, but what is relevant about them to the division of the hemispheres is that the left hemisphere recognises only this lowest rank of value. Other values, which Scheler ranked higher than utility, such as bravery, beauty, intelligence, holiness, require an approach that is not tied exclusively to that tool of utility, sequential analytic logic (which is not the same necessarily as saying that they involve emotion).

Opposites define one another and bring one another into existence.

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.103 It is interesting that, much as Skoyles had seen the alphabet as the prime mover in a new way of thinking, Seaford sees money as being the prime mover of a new kind of philosophy, and one can certainly understand why, given that this formulation of Seaford’s bears an uncanny resemblance to Plato’s theory of Forms.