A Distance Between

	Book review on The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist (2009) Reviewed by David Lorimer, 2009 published in Network Review No 101
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Twenty years in the making, this seminal book has been well worth the wait and could scarcely have been researched and written in less time. It has to be one of the most significant books published in 2009, since it addresses so directly the ways in which we understand the world and the systemic predicament of Western culture. I first met Iain in the early 1980s when his brother, like myself, was teaching at Winchester College. Iain was coming to the end of his seven-year prize Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. In 1982, he published his first book, Against Criticism, in which he argued against what he saw as the destructive analytical tendency in literary criticism, which failed to recognise that the initial apprehension of a work of art or literature was intuitive, on which subsequent analysis was built. This theme reappears in his new book, as will become clear below. The present book is arguably the most important contribution to come out of the interdisciplinary brilliance of All Souls in a generation, and is a tribute to the possibility of wide reading that the fellowship enables. Ironically, the dreaming spires are mainly focused on what Iain characterises as left hemisphere thinking, and yet this book is a triumph of the integration of both hemispheres, which is as education should be.

Readers will have read the articles based on the book, published in April and in this issue, and will be familiar with the outline of the argument. To recap, the book falls into two parts, the first of which deals with the neuroscience of the two hemispheres, and the second with the cultural implications of the relative dominance of one particular hemisphere in a historical period. The divided brain of the title indicates that human beings have two distinctive takes on the world, mediated by the left and right hemispheres respectively. There are evolutionary reasons, explained in the book, for why this should be the case, right the way through the animal kingdom.

Iain explains that the right hemisphere gives the overall context, apprehends things as a whole and is able to take in the new. The proper cooperation of the hemispheres involves the grounding and integrating role of the right hemisphere, with detail added by the left hemisphere and returned to the right for a further integration, or, as the Germans put it, Aufhebung. This means that philosophy should begin and end in the right hemisphere rather than being a purely left hemisphere activity as it tends to be, especially in Oxford. A particularly striking chapter argues for the primacy of the right hemisphere, an idea which may initially come as a surprise to the reader, who is used to hearing the left brain referred to as the dominant hemisphere. The primacy of the right hemisphere implies the primacy of the whole over the part, of the implicit over the explicit and of experience over abstraction.

Philosophy (and indeed science) as practised, however, is a largely left hemisphere activity. As Iain points out, philosophers spend a good deal of time inspecting processes that are normally implicit, unconscious and intuitive, which means that they examine life of the right hemisphere from the standpoint of the left. This leads to a startling observation that philosophers, like schizophrenics, have a problem with the sense of self, a theme which is elaborated at length later in the book on the relation between madness and modernism. The left hemisphere, although it uses mechanistic metaphors, does not really understand the nature of metaphor, which can carry us across (as is its real meaning) a gap that language itself creates: 'metaphor is language's cure for the ills entailed on us by language.' Philosophers like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Scheler and Wittgenstein were aware of the limitations of linear, sequential analysis and sought to go beyond it, with descriptive philosophy, in a sense, giving way to evocative poetry.

Science, too, as ordinarily practised, is largely a left hemisphere activity. The very metaphor of the body and brain as a machine is quintessentially left hemisphere, as it makes the organism into a non-living thing, abstracting it from the immediate world of experience. Moreover, the left hemisphere is self-referential, only comfortable dealing with familiar ideas and intensely suspicious of the new. This has far reaching implications for paradigm shifts, with which most readers will be familiar: a rigid dogmatism that refuses to countenance a new way of understanding, and is inordinately sure of itself. As Iain remarks on a couple of occasions, 'the only certainty is that those believe they are certainly right are certainly wrong.' All this means that the basis of the mechanistic metaphor is not questioned by the left hemisphere. The absurdity of this is revealed in some split brain experiments where it becomes apparent that the structure of a syllogism is more important as a criterion of truth than the components of the argument. It is the right hemisphere that understands jokes, irony and context.

None of this should give the impression that the book is simply an apologia for the right hemisphere, and that Iain does not believe in the crucial importance of rigorous analysis. If his points come across strongly, it is because we are in a severely unbalanced cultural situation. A further critical theme is that of empathy, another quality intrinsic to the right hemisphere. As Iain indicates, empathy is intrinsic to morality, linking us to others so that we may 'imaginatively inhabit' their experience, which is the lived basis of imitation. Anglo-American philosophers and scientists do not understand empathy, untouched as they are by European phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty, who understand mutuality, reciprocity and fellow-feeling as expressed through the body and the emotions. All this helps the reader realise that the category of Being is critically absent from British philosophy, which has confined itself to (a rather disembodied) mind. Culturally, if we had an empathic connection with Nature, then we would be incapable of devastating our habitat in the way we have. Here, the left hemisphere science of manipulation meets the economics of exploitation and the politics of short-term expediency.

It is hard in a short review to convey the staggering erudition and scintillating intelligence of this book. There are 135 pages - in small print - of notes and bibliography.  In the first half, the reader not only learns about functions of left and right hemisphere thinking, but also considers the origins of language in relation to music, the nature of time, and the way in which Greek logical paradoxes are resolved by a right hemisphere perspective which does not divide time up into discrete points. The arguments for the primacy of the right hemisphere are I believe persuasive, as are his explanations for the triumph of the left hemisphere. We realise that a sense of depth is incompatible with cold detachment, as illustrated in a commentary on the 18th century paintings of Claude Lorrain. Lorrain is one of a great many artists referred to and indeed illustrated.

In the second half, which is a book in itself, the reader is taken on a journey through the evolution of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greeks, moving through the Renaissance and the Reformation, then to the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution, before arriving at the modern and post-modern worlds. One understands how the primacy of the hemispheres as understood in particular cultures has alternated, usually between a more or less balanced situation and over-predominance of left hemisphere thinking, which reflects our current cultural situation. There are etymological digressions on the meaning of Greek terms referring to knowledge, reflections on pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Heraclitus, the implications of Plato's separation of the eternal from the phenomenological, the association of Cartesian philosophy with schizophrenic attitudes, the scientific work of Goethe and the parallels between the Reformation in which the 'Flesh became Word' - the triumph of the literal - and the rise of scientific materialism and the infallible Word of Science, which has inherited a corresponding dogmatism unless allied to the subtle reconciling properties of the right hemisphere.

One remedy lies in the notion of betweenness or transparency; for mediaeval Catholics, the symbol was transparent to the transcendent, but Protestants swept this all away as idolatry, rejecting metaphorical understanding. Wordsworth and Hopkins understood this relation of betweenness, as did Goethe, whose poetry and scientific writings are quoted. Also Hegel, whose articulation of individuation within union is extraordinarily acute. Music provides an exemplar of betweenness in its interplay between silence and sound. The right hemisphere pays attention to the other, generating this relationship of betweenness, which turns out to be crucial to our happiness, depending as it does on the breadth and depth of our social connections. Interestingly, betweenness implie what he calls 'necessary distance',  the foundation of empathy. So, for instance, in the development of Greek culture, both these processes proceeded together, with a remarkable development of empathy and philosophical acumen.

Reflecting on our somewhat bleak contemporary cultural landscape, Iain shows how the predominance of left hemisphere thinking has pervaded the visual arts, music, philosophy and science. Modernist concepts and mechanistic metaphors are rife, as is reductionism, alienation, fragmentation and decontextualisation. The parallels between madness and modernism, featured in the work of Louis Sass, are particularly striking, especially given the increase in  mental illness over the last 50 years. Our bureaucratic systems are impersonal, aiming at control and manipulation, dehumanising the individual and imposing a drab uniformity. Body, spirit and art are all under attack, as is beauty; however, the sense of beauty is not culturally bound, but is rather intrinsic to human perception.

It is no exaggeration to say that this quite remarkable book will radically change the way you understand the world and yourself. Ironically, some left hemisphere dominated reviewers of this book have already unwittingly proved its thesis by reacting to it in exactly the way in which the book predicts, taking exception to the legitimate criticisms of exclusively left hemisphere thinking. It must be obvious to most readers that our culture is seriously out of balance, not only in itself, but also in relation to Nature. More of the same kind of thinking will not move us forward. We need less detachment and more empathy, recovering our connection to ourselves, each other and the world around us. As Iain observes, both science and art need to become more human and humane. Reading this book, to which you will want to return on a regular basis (one reading cannot possibly exhaust its multifaceted insights) will help you better understand reality and the way we experience and represent it. It is a genuine tour de force, a monumental achievement - I can think of no one else who could have conceived, let alone written a book of such penetrating brilliance.

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