In October, 2009 The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist was published. Mary Midgley, one of my favorite philosophers, reviewed the book a few months later. As I now take a deeper dive into this subject, this was my starting point.
This is a very remarkable book.
McGilchrist's suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience… has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought. Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision – towards elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience – in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path.
Of course, I had a look at what Wikipedia had to say.
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World is a 2009 book written by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist that deals with the specialist hemispheric functioning of the brain. The differing world views of the right and left brain (the "Master" and "Emissary" in the title, respectively) have, according to the author, shaped Western culture since the time of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, and the growing conflict between these views has implications for the way the modern world is changing. In part, McGilchrist's book, which is the product of twenty years of research, reviews the evidence of previous related research and theories, and based on this and cultural evidence, the author arrives at his own conclusions.
The Master and His Emissary received mixed reviews upon its publication. Some critics praised the book as being a landmark publication that could alter readers' perspective of how they viewed the world. Other critics claimed neurological understanding of hemispheric differences falls short of supporting the sweeping conclusions the book draws about Western culture.
Next I looked at DIVIDED BRAIN, DIVIDED WORLD WHY THE BEST PART OF US STRUGGLES TO BE HEARD, published by RSA in February, 2013, and written by Jonathan Rowson and Iain McGilchrist. At the time Rowson was s Director of The Social Brain Centre at the RSA. Currently Rowson is co-founder and Director of Perspectiva.
In the Introduction Rowson writes,
If you have ever had the feeling that the world is deeply out of kilter in a way that you can’t quite articulate, suspect that the growing neglect of arts and humanities is even more tragic than most people believe, or are hoping for some insight into why we might be blinkered enough to destroy our own planet, the following discussion will hopefully offer some valuable intellectual resources. The Master and his Emissary, the book that informs the following discussion, is about the profound significance of the fact that the left and right hemispheres of our brains have radically different ‘world views’. The hidden story of Western culture, as told by the author, is about how the abstract, instrumental, articulate and assured left hemisphere has gradually usurped the more contextual, humane, systemic, holistic but relatively tentative and inarticulate right hemisphere.
I only skimmed this lengthy document but I did read the Afterword in which Rowson writes,
Iain’s work has struck a deep chord in a huge number of people from a wide variety of backgrounds all over the world. The nature of that appreciation has not simply been: ‘that’s a particularly good book, but one of many’. No, in most cases the reaction has been that this perspective is a singularly profound contribution that reveals, in a way that is both compelling and credible, the form of the pattern underlying the most challenging issues of our time.
I read a book review by George Allen Hagman published in the August 2013 Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Although a correction of the long-standing tendency to privilege left-brain functions (the rational/verbal brain over the relational/emotional brain) is understandable,McGilchrist argues that we reduce our view of the creative potential of brain function by ignoring the important role of hemisphere differences and interactions in psychological life and clinical processes.In fact, he argues in the first few chapters that the attitudes held by each hemisphere are so fundamentally different, even contrary, that they result in entirely different experiences of reality and self. Somehow consciousness must manage both attitudes simultaneously to create a unified experience.
McGilchrist explains that the right brain is responsible for maintaining a coherent, continuous, and unified sense of self.
The left brain is aware, practical, useful, and (most important) rational. However, these capacities also alienate the person from the world, drain vitality from lived experience, impose order on an inherently ambiguous and rich reality, reduce flexibility, and constrain the person’s openness to life.
Increasingly, McGilchrist claims, Western society and individual attitudes have lost their grounding in emotion and relationships. Power, rationality, and abstraction have created a world no longer possessing the essential elements that make us human. It also puts all of us at risk.
In August, 2020 Tom Morgan wrote The Most Interesting Thing I’ve Ever Read.
I’ve just read a book that has potentially changed everything I understood about the world and snapped together all the existential questions I’ve been wrestling with over the last few years. So settle in; this is going to take a little while to explain.
The Master and his Emissary is the product of twenty years of research by polymath psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist.
The question McGilchrist asks and answers is why the ineffably complex human brain is split in two. Why would there be obvious redundancy in a system that has been so uniquely refined by evolution, and why are split-brains ubiquitous in nature?
The left is rational, certain and persuasive, but inevitably atheistic; it cannot connect with the “Other”. It’s the Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens of brains. It can only see individual parts, not the flow of life that binds it together.
This is where I’d like to speculatively suggest a connection between McGilchrist and Campbell. Campbell found a central narrative arc that had a remarkable commonality across times and cultures. He called this the ‘monomyth’ or the ‘Hero’s Journey’. In its simplest form: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
The danger here is that the left hemisphere is fundamentally competitive, it refuses to relinquish its power. This is again referred to in Campbell’s metaphor of the dragon the hero encounters.
…the other huge concern I have is that making this hemispherical relationship and process explicit somehow moves it into the left hemisphere.
McGilchrist believes Pandora can only be put back in her box by society collectively achieving higher consciousness. I prefer the less hierarchical epithet ‘broader awareness’. The hemispherical distinction shows that awareness is not the same as intelligence. Campbell himself agrees on a personal level- and that the individual purpose is to truly find yourself.
The broader implication from all of this, that I have no idea how to assess, is that there’s a superior, or at least different, form of wisdom connected to the right hemisphere.
At the end of the day, I have to accept that McGilchrist’s entire theory may be total nonsense. My ideas on all these topics are evolving and changing the more I learn and experience… And in the concluding passages of the book McGilchrist acknowledges that possibility…
In November, 2021 McGilchrist published The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World.
The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World is a 2021 book of neuroscience, epistemology and metaphysics written by psychiatrist, thinker and former literary scholar Iain McGilchrist.
Following on from McGilchrist's 2009 work, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, The Matter with Things explores the radically different worldviews presented by the two hemispheres of the brain, and the many cognitive and worldly implications of this.
The book "is an attempt to convey a way of looking at the world quite different from the one that has largely dominated the West for at least three hundred and fifty years [ie. since the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment] – some would say as long as two thousand years."
The first review of this book that I read was a harsh criticism and scathing rebuke of it. Better said, this was a review I tried to read as it was a difficult task. The Matter with ‘The Matter with Things’ was written by Robert M Ellis, founder of The Middle Way Society.
Years ago, I read his book, Migglism: A Beginner’s Guide to Middle Way Philosophy by Ellis, which I very much appreciated, although I did not like the made up word in the title. I lost interest in The Middle Way after I discovered metamodernism. Nothing that Ellis said in his review drew me back to him and his ideas.
My overall impression is that Ellis seemed to be putting down the work of McGilchrist in an effort to elevate his own approach. I suspect some of his criticisms are valid, but both the book and the criticisms are at too high a level for me to appreciate. And I do not want to be a True Believer in either McGilchrist or Ellis.
My approach is that "It is all stories all the way down." All stories are incomplete. The whole is beyond the ability of any single person to grasp. Better than McGilchrist or Ellis is BOTH McGilchrist AND Ellis AND many others. But some stories are more useful than other stories and its seems to me that the story told by McGilchrist is more useful than the story told by Ellis.
In March, 2023 Jonathan Rowson wrote Introducing The McGilchrist Manoeuvre.
‘The McGilchrist Manoeuvre’ (I mean manoeuvre in the simple rather than strategic sense, as a movement or series of moves requiring skill and care).
Iain tells me that audiences who encounter his work often seem to want two things, neither of which they can have. The first common desire is to know that when there are two things, one is right and the other is wrong, or in this case that the right hemisphere is good and the left hemisphere is bad. That is not true because they both matter hugely, just asymmetrically, for instance, the right hemisphere understands the value of the left but the left does not understand the value of the right. The second common desire is that when there are two things that matter they should be equally important, and that is not true either, for very often two things both matter, but disproportionately, in this case, the right hemisphere and left hemisphere both provide an invaluable perspective on reality, but the right hemisphere’s take has been consistently and decisively proven to be more fully accurate than the left hemisphere’s take.
When we encounter what is real and what is true as viewed by both hemispheres, it very rarely takes a binary either/or form, but nor is it simply both/and. The second expression of the McGilchrist manoeuvre is therefore the perspectival shift from the contention that something has to be either/or (LH) or both/and (RH) to the recognition that reality is invariably either/or and both/and. Iain is not the first or only thinker to disclose this pattern, but it falls out his insights very elegantly. To be clearer on the ‘and’ here, the claim is that when we are considering reality in its fullness it invariably has the quality of both/and (RH) to either/or (LH) and back to both/and(now including either/or) (RH).
The McGilchrist manoeuvre entails the combined perceptual and conceptual capacity that transcends contradictions, disclosing the coincidence of opposites as generative of reality, thereby re-enchanting aspects of life long considered problematic, including tension and paradox.
In June, 2023 Tom Morgan wrote about his Seven Summer Gems…
5. Article. The Matter With Things- Interview with Dr. Iain McGilchrist in Beshara Magazine (66 minute read).
- Topic: How a stunning theory of the brain has shaped the modern world.
- Why Read? Even though it’s comfortably the best book I’ve ever read, I appreciate that only a small fraction of you are likely to tackle Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s 1,600 page masterpiece The Matter with Things. This superb interview is the best one I’ve read on his work, and hopefully explains why his thesis is potentially life-changing (as it was for me).
…the fact that the corpus callosum – the band of fibres that connects the two hemispheres – is largely inhibitory in its function. That alone sat in my mind for a while, germinating as something interesting; later I realised that the two hemispheres must be – in fact fairly obviously are – asymmetrical. I thought, well, why is the brain divided at all? After all, if its purpose is to make connections and that’s where its power originates, why on earth would it have evolved to be divided? What I didn’t know then was that it had not only evolved to be divided, but that the corpus callosum is getting smaller in relation to the size of the brain, not larger, with evolution, and also is becoming more inhibitory.
…I learnt is that the right hemisphere also understands implicit meaning – metaphors, jokes, irony, sarcasm, humour – all the stuff that isn’t explicitly said. But it hasn’t got a voice.
… over the course of evolution, the first kind, the very narrow attention to a fragment or a detail very precisely targeted, has been taken over by the left hemisphere, and the right hemisphere has been left holding the baby of the whole of the rest of experiential reality. The drive for manipulation is expressed in the right hand, which the left hemisphere controls, and in language, which is a way in which we can manipulate what we are doing in the company of others, getting together in order to achieve a certain goal and so forth… The first way of seeing is like a map; the second is like the territory, which is an infinitely more complex, beautiful reality. The embodied right hemisphere sees the world as animated and perceives it as full of unique beings.
…in Part Three I try to show that these different pathways of knowledge are not in conflict with one another. In fact when followed properly, reason, science, intuition and imagination lead to positions that are complementary to one another. But usually this is because the important part of each of them – including science and reason – is offered to us by what the right hemisphere gives, not the left. So when we take all these together, that’s what we find in the world.
In Understanding Iain McGilchrist's Worldview Jonathan Rowson writes,
I’ve been an interpreter and promoter of Iain McGilchrist’s work for over a decade now, and my most recent attempts to distill it include The McGilchrist Manoeuvre, and at Perspectiva’s book launch, and before that in an inquiry at the RSA that led to Divided Brain, Divided World, a dialogue with Iain that became a book chapter in a book called The Political Self.
So I have some form when I say that the following distillation of Iain’s worldview by David McIlroy is the best I have read.
If you think 6000+ words (below) is a lot, it’s actually a huge achievement of distillation given that the two-volume book is over 600,000 words (before you get to any notes or appendices or bibliography), and the claims made are carefully referenced. What follows then is the 1% through which, hopefully, you can glean and appreciate the 100%, before or after buying the book to read at leisure.
The author, David McIlroy is a Barrister and Head of Chambers at Forum Chambers, Global Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame (USA) in England, and a Visiting Professor in Banking Law at Queen Mary University of London.
The following attempt to distill the main elements of Iain’s worldview is the first of two scholarly essays. We will publish the second part, which is about the theological implications of Iain’s worldview in the not-too-distant future. We also hope to publish both in some other form in due course but are keen to get them out into the world now. Do leave any reflections elicited by David’s distillation in the comments.
After reading the article twice, I will now try to distill the distillation.
Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and literary scholar. He is a polymath, best described as a natural philosopher.
A former fellow of All Souls’ College, he has a glittering academic and professional career. His 2009 book The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (“TMHE”) is a masterpiece. In it, McGilchrist shows how there are two ways of attending to the world: one which seeks to take it apart and to manipulate it and the other which embraces it in its wholeness and connectedness. These two ways of attending to the world are typical of the left and right hemispheres respectively. He has expanded on this thesis in a monumental follow-up work, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (“TMWT”).
McGilchrist’s basic contention is that the two hemispheres of the brain have two different ways of perceiving the world (TMWT Introduction pp.17-32, ch.3 p.104). The right hemisphere looks at the world holistically, responding to its flow.[2] The left hemisphere looks at the world analytically, seeking to break it down into things that can be manipulated (TMWT Introduction p.21). The optimum way to use our brain’s potential to connect with reality is for the right hemisphere (the Master) to attend some part of the world, for the left hemisphere (the Emissary) to seek to apprehend that part, and for the results of the left hemisphere’s analysis to be re-integrated into the right hemisphere’s vision. After the parts have been examined, “There is … a need for effortful recomposition to make the whole comprehensible”. (TMWT ch.9 p.331).
McGilchrist’s First Feature of Reality: The primacy of relationships
…his preferred view is that “relationships must be primary, since entities become what they are only through their situation in the context of multiple relations.”
McGilchrist’s Third Feature of Reality: the Particular and the General
“Everything is part of one whole, connected to every other part by a matter of degree. But everything is also absolutely unique”
“The claim that All is One is well-intentioned, but it seems to me disastrous, because it is just half a truth. … the other equal truth is All is Many.”
McGilchrist’s Fourth Feature of Reality: the Reconciliation of Apparent Contradictions
The dialectic between the One and the Many is an illustration of McGilchrist’s fourth feature of reality, that two superficially contradictory perspectives can be held in tension with one another, but ultimately reconciled by integrating one into the other.
McGilchrist’s Fifth Feature of Reality: Change and Motion are what Give Things their Identity
The left hemisphere worldview gets stuck in superficial paradoxes: for it, something either has to remain static or it becomes a different thing…“many, if not all, logical paradoxes can be seen as arising from the left hemisphere’s attempt to analyse something that is better grasped as a whole by the right hemisphere.” …The right hemisphere worldview can embrace paradox, seeing how different perspectives can be integrated into a deeper vision.
McGilchrist’s Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Features of Reality: This is a Participatory Universe
The world for us is the world as we experience it. This world cannot be manipulated howsoever we wish (as the left hemisphere is apt to think) but neither it is unresponsive to our attention.
The insights of quantum physics reveal that in nature, nothing is wholly determined, though there are constraints, and nothing is wholly random, though chance plays an important creative role.
McGilchrist’s participatory view of the universe reinforces his claim that relationships are primary.
McGilchrist argues: “things are better thought of as being attracted towards certain goals, rather than pushed blindly forwards by a mechanism from behind.”
McGilchrist’s Ninth Feature of Reality: Understanding the World requires more than the use of Science and Reason
Because of the left hemisphere’s blindspots, “the right hemisphere is a more reliable guide to reality than the left hemisphere. … it has a greater range of attention; greater acuity of perception; makes more reliable judgments; and contributes more to both emotional and cognitive intelligence than the left.”
“All understanding whatsoever is, at bottom, metaphorical.”
McGilchrist’s Tenth Feature of Reality: Reality is Bigger Than We Can Grasp
Therefore, in order to find our home in the world, we need to approach the world as something to be embraced rather than manipulated. We need to assume the connexion with the world that we are going to find. McGilchrist insists that “belief is dispositional, not propositional”
There are things, (like love, sunsets, and even the joy of being in a good bookshop) which we cannot reduce to writing not because they have no meaning but because they are overflowing with meaning.
McGilchrist’s Second Feature of Reality: Consciousness is Prior to Matter
A major theme in TMWT is that no things can be fully understood apart from their relationships to everything else in the universe, with the consequence that our understanding of matter is necessarily partial and incomplete.
Given the total failure of the materialistic worldview to explain consciousness and, McGilchrist would argue, its fundamentally mistaken account of matter, McGilchrist argues that it is more consistent with experience, more powerful as an explanation of the nature of the world, and therefore more reasonable, to regard consciousness as equally fundamental as, or even as prior to, matter (TWMT ch.10 p.394).
McGilchrist’s Eleventh Feature of Reality: God is becoming with Nature
McGilchrist poses his own wager, with an express nod to Pascal: “if God is an eternal Becoming, fulfilled as God through the response of his creation, and we, for our part, constantly more fulfilled through our response to God; then we are literally partners in the creation of the universe, perhaps even in the becoming of God (who is himself Becoming as much as Being): in which case it is imperative that we try to reach and know and love that God. Not just for our own sakes, because we bear some responsibility, however small, for the part we play in creation …”
Conclusion
McGilchrist offers a philosophical vision with many strengths. It is relational, it is anti-reductionist, and it integrates perspectives from a variety of disciplines into a more than plausible whole. Any society in which such a vision has arisen will be greatly enriched if only we will take the time to attend to it.
McGilchrist has also dared to think about what a wholehearted and fully engaged attention to reality suggests about “God”. This has implications for other ways of thinking about God…
My closing thoughts… for now.
Theory is great but I want to make this personal. Looking back, in the first two decades of my adult life, I was probably largely driven by left brain thinking. Much began to shift for me at midlife. In hindsight, slowly, I began gaining an appreciation for right brain thinking as currently framed by McGilchrist. I now want to accelerate that shift as best I can, and add another dimension to it.
Simplistically, it seems to me that the left brain thinking that built our unsustainable civilization was mostly embodied in men. It seems to me that right brain thinking may be more naturally embodied in women. It seems to me that this may be pointing us in a direction, a need for a stronger feminine spirit in the search for solutions to the metacrisis. To focus on fixing particular problems is important, as we see impressive galaxy brained men trying to do. To focus on fixing all the problems at the same time, a holistic approach, may be easier for women. And perhaps Jonathan Rowson is pointing at something important with ‘The McGilchrist Manoeuvre’ - the quality of both/and (RH) to either/or (LH) and back to both/and(now including either/or) (RH).