I discovered Iain McGilchrist while listening to an interview he did with Jordan Peterson on The Jordan Peterson podcast, which can be heard here. Upon hearing about his book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, I knew it would figure heavily into my dissertation, the basic thesis of which is (informally put) that an epistemic mess is made when we misunderstand the relationship and confuse the boundaries between our commonsense understanding of the world and our technical/analytic/scientific understanding of the world. Scientism is the term given to those who advocate that science is the only means of understanding the objective nature of reality and that, in case where they come into conflict, our commonsense descriptions of the world should yield to our scientific ones. I disagree, for reasons that I will spell out in due course. Here, though, I have set myself the modest task of taking notes on the Introduction to McGilchrist’s book.
McGilchrist’s title is taken from a story he has (apparently) misattributed to Nietzsche:
“There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to this people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted. Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he most trusted to do his work, began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not wisdom, and on his missions on the master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed.”(1)
The thesis of the book is that the bihemispheric structure of the brain creates two different “realities,” or experiences of reality, as a result of the different manner in which the left and right hemispheres pay attention to the world. The critical, analytic left hemisphere “creates a sort of self-reflective virtual world”(2) where aspects of the intellect can play endlessly with objects of its own creation, as though they existed independently of the “real world.” The ability to hone in and select minute aspects of experience for further analysis has served as a powerful tool for humanity, but it is still, McGilchrist argues, merely a tool. And, much like the master and the emissary in the tale above, the appropriate power dynamic between the hemispheres is asymmetrical. “[T]he left hemisphere is ultimately dependent on, one might almost say parasitic on, the right, though it seems to have no awareness of this fact. Indeed it is filled with an alarming self-confidence.”(3)
Part I of the book is concerned to understand to structure of bihemispheric brain in neurological, philosophical, and psychological terms. Part II maps this fundamental division onto the history of Western cultural, identifying places in our history that shine forth as examples of left- vs. right-brain tension. Part II certainly falls outside the scope of my dissertation and is likely to fall outside the scope of this blog.
Key and relevant takeaways
- There are two different realities for us because there are two different modes of experience, and each mode is grounded in and caused by the bihemispheric structure of the brain.
- The operative difference between the two hemispheres is not a question of what, but a question of how.
- The most fundamental difference between the two hemispheres lies in the kind of attention each enables us to pay to the world.
- The types of metaphors, or images, we use to represent the relationship of the two hemispheres, types of attention, and realms of meaning, will prescribe how we understand them.
- The relationship between the two hemispheres is asymmetrical. McGilchrist’s chosen language is that of master and emissary.
There are other, relevant ways of describing what I take to be similar phenomena. As noted, McGilchrist employs the language of Master and Emissary to describe the two different sorts of human attention which arise from the bihemispheric structure of the brain. Similarly, Jonathan Haidt uses the terminology of Elephant and Rider to describe the relationship between the Intuitive and Rational aspects of the mind. Also similarly, Daniel Kahneman uses the designations System 1 and System 2 to differentiate between fast, intuitive reactions to complex problems and slow, thoughtful reactions. Additionally, Jordan Peterson describes our experience of the world in terms of Order and Chaos, the former of which captures what we know and routinely do while the latter represents disruptive threats to the former.
These do not exhaust the subject, but they are empirically-based approaches to a related set of distinctions in philosophy. John Dewey’s distinction between primary and secondary experience is importantly related to those above. Additionally, and something about which I will comment at length, is Bernard Lonergan’s notion of the polymorphic nature of human consciousness and separate, but related, realms of meaning.
Ultimately, I will attempt to argue that commonsense and science only truly conflict in rare cases of profound confusion and misunderstand. Rather than representing different places on some epistemic spectrum of accuracy, they represent fundamentally different manners of engaging the world around us. Hence, McGilchrist’s work figures important into such a project.
Notes:
(1) McGilchrist, p. 14.
(2) ibid, p. 6.
(3) ibid, p. 6.
Dissertating Outloud 