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Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Volume 11 Number 2, August 2010
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McGilchrist, Iain; The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western
World; New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2009, 978-0-300-14878-7, 592pp, £25.
Reviewed by
John Downie
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Reading McGilchrist's book, which does come at you with both weight and force, I was reminded of
the sense of evolutionary double-bind that Arthur Koestler latched onto in his 1967 book linking brain
anatomy to cultural predicament, The Ghost in the Machine. The alimentary tube of arthropods, mites
through centipedes, insects, spiders, to ten-foot giant crabs, passes through the middle of the brainmass. The inevitable outcome to any augmentation in size to the latter, and presumably increase in
intelligence, would be starvation. So it was the little vertebrates who got brainy. But Koestler's
prognosis for homo sapiens, was just as glum. The simultaneous presence of archicortex, mesocortex,
and neocortex (reptile, mammal, and cleverclogs) as an explosive over-layering in the human brain
meant that schizophysiology was inbuilt, and the pressurizing of populations and the ingenuity of
human inventiveness was leading, he wrote, towards "an age of climax". This prognosis might not be
so surprising from a writer who somehow survived death row (during the Spanish Civil War), and was
subsequently writing in the era of nuclear anxiety and overkill. To him, the brain was a sort of
tumerous overgrowth, and the journeyman mechanic in him was suggesting it would take nothing less
than a sharp blade and world-wide lobotomisation to save the species from itself; "Nature has let us
down, God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out". Forty years later,
McGilchrist hardly gives such ideas of hot vertical congestion, let alone radical surgery, a passing
glance. His business is with lateral anatomies, the relativism of side by side hemispheres, and the
future of the species as a cool expanding anticlimax of micro-management.
This shift would appear to emanate, of course, from the vigorous growth of neuroscience in those
intervening years, and if much data has been patiently amassing on this score, it hasn't particularly
been to re-inforce the partial understandings already in popular imagination that characterise the left
hemisphere as "somehow gritty, rational, realistic, but dull, and the right hemisphere airy-fairy and
impressionistic, but creative and exciting". A more current neurophysiology, linking organism to
function, might describe the difference as that between a serial processor that works methodically in a
linear fashion (left hemisphere) creating the dimensionalities we experience and describe as past and
future, and a parallel processor (right hemisphere) that allows us to fully engage with the diverse
sensations and perceptions of an eternally present moment. McGilchrist, while totally respecting the
integrated brain/mind as mechanics, chemistry and architectonics, makes it clear from the outset that
he is writing as a philosopher, and his business is to articulate an understanding of the recognisably
human world as it has arisen through two increasingly different "modes of experience", attributable to
the consistent differences being displayed between the hemispheres. These are deeply defined
anatomically, most particularly by what appears to be the profound functional inhibition between the
two that is negotiated by the dividing neural tissue of the corpus callosum; a mutually nay-saying
boundary that seems to propose from the outset a besetting problem of balance when it comes to
comprehending human behaviours.
McGilchrist offers a number of diverse and elegantly described takes on asymmetry in the First Part of
his book, constantly colliding the quick antics of the parts-and-measurement-infatuated left with the
intoxicated-and-immersively-holistic right, tracing as he does so a 'knowledge' of both corporeal and
virtual anatomies. If 'schizophysiology' is Koestler's demon, McGilchrist is discomforted by a
potentially treacherous process at work when science delivers its ever expanding series of revelations:
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"The model of the body, and therefore the brain, as a mechanism, is exempted from the process of
philosophical scepticism: what it tells us becomes the truth. And since the brain is equated with the
mind, the mind too becomes a mechanism…As a result, in a spectacular hijack, instead of a mutually
shaping process, whereby philosophy interrogates science, and science informs philosophy, the naïve
view of science has tended by default to shape and direct what has been called 'neurophilosophy'.
(p.135)
It is 'neurophilosophy' that persuades McGilchrist towards his pervading metaphor - a take on
Nietzsche's parable of the wise spiritual master eventually dispossessed by one of his cleverest and
most ambitious 'emissaries', the usurpation leading to a duped population inhabiting a tyrannized
domain. Us. Beings in a world whose implicit apprehensions of it are continuously replaced by
explicit explanations, in the way that John Dewey previously tried to counter by reasoning thus:
"To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system,
the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy. And when thus seen
they will be seen to be in, not as marbles are in a box but as events are in history, in a moving,
growing, never finished process". (cited on p.142)
It is a sustained analytical discussion of such events in history, at least in 'Western' history and culture,
that McGilchrist turns to in his Second Part, to illustrate the developing symptoms of the 'usurpation',
and how they demonstrate the struggle within both personal and social/cultural consciousness. There
is a grand, richly informed, sweetly argued and synthesized scale to the way he strides from the
originating schisms to be traced in Classical Greek culture, through intermediate stages of struggle (for
example, there is a particularly good exposition on the sixteenth century cultivation of melacholia as a
right-brain protestation against Renaissance left-brained ingenuity, and a vigorous deconstruction of
both American and French Revolutions to offer distinctly different exposure of the conflict in
extremis) up to an eclectic selection of the disintegrations of the Modern Period, succintly summarized
by the touchstone voice of Nietzsche warning of the growth of humanity's excessive selfconsciousness; "We are the Don Juans of cognition" whose "knowledge will take its revenge on
us…"
McGilchrist is nothing if not comprehensive. While remaining more or less within the Western
heritage might in the long run be a limitation to a broader sense of the human predicament, he
nonetheless provides eloquent and extensive access to Consciousness wrestling with the idea of human
thought and actions being able to intervene, interrupt, and elaborate on 'Nature's' relentless cycles of
birth, copulation, and death; the left hemisphere's persistent jockeying of the right hemisphere's
somnolent animal, and how the markers, the signs, the alphabets and the lexicons of this culture
produces the possibilities of life experience beyond that of mere survival. But if Koestler's scenario is
born of an apprehension of the brutality of totalitarian fact and possibility, I'm not sure what exactly is
at stake for McGilchrist. While justifiably wary of extremes, he seems to be intent, in the long run, in
finding his way back again and again to the notions of balance advocated by any self-regarding
conservative humanist, whose comforts and consolations are more found by being ensconced in the
library rather than risked in the streets or in crossing continents, or in encountering the relative and
contradictory evidences of human witness. As he journeys through the near past and enters the
present century you can feel the difficulty of having to engage with things more closely at hand. He
closes his door ever more firmly on the Modern and Postmodern sensibilities, with an increasingly
fuzzy sense of how his hemispheric interpretations can be applied except to suspect expressivity more
and more as a question of personal taste. While it is very disappointing that there is virtually no sense
of his argument being extended by examination of last century's social or political explosiveness, such
as Time and Motion, International Capitalism, the Bomb, or Totalitarianism - all thunderous players in
the march of left-brain triumphalism - it is equally disheartening, on this lesser scale, to see him laying
into Indeterminacy, Abstract Expressionism, Finnegan's Wake, and the wilder whirls of the Abstract
and the Synthetic (and significantly we never get anywhere near the drastic suddenness of digital
acceleration) as symptoms of the sorcerer's apprentice of the left hemisphere getting away with more
and more, revelling "in its own freedom from constraint". A certain smallness of ambition and
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perversity of judgement has overcome him. A good book is, after all, a good book, he seems to be
suggesting, and the music of J S Bach, like an excellent vintage, the sine qua non.
A particular focus might be found, for example (p.411), on the important distinctions to be made
between novelty and newness, where McGilchrist elaborates on George Steiner's observation that
"originality is antithetical to novelty". But here he begins to batter up against something which is
more and more beyond the grasp of his ideological position:
"We confuse novelty with newness. No-one ever decided not to fall in love because it's been done
before, or because its expressions are banal. They are both as old as the hills and completely fresh in
every case of genuine love".
The author has fatally come out into the street, and it is that "genuine" that begins to gum up the
works. 'Love' is about as fluid a flow as the business of the integrated hemispheres might be capable
of entertaining themselves with; individual intellectual presumption and calculation challenging
chemical routines and traditional values both, future advancement discounting past experiences within
the continued intensification of the present moment. 'Love' is nothing if not a profoundly moveable
feast, an experience of the world, personally or socially or politically, that marks with some
vehemence how our genetic selves battle with the exo-genetic; our deeps with our shallows, our whole
souls with our calculating machines, and, if you like, our Right with our Left, and profoundly different
from epoch to epoch. The realisation begins to dawn that McGilchrist might be being too stuffy and
prescriptive by half. His argument gives virtually no room to the diversity of advantages provided by
accelerating reason, even if dangerously speeding beyond perceived bounds as it might appear to be
doing right now (genomes, machine intelligence, medical procedures, new materials). And although
advocating philosophy as his tool, he provides no mention at all of contemporary philosophers or
philosophies that engage with the disturbances of the Modern and PostModern, in profoundly
thoughtful ways, as a poetics of science as well as a science of poetics, bodies and languages in
complex syntheses, as liquidities, differences, assemblages, or rhizomes. Here I might be thinking, as
a single example, of Deleuze's 'becoming' ('becoming-woman', becoming-animal', 'becoming-intense',
'becoming-imperceptible') as a way of encountering life philosophically not by describing it as a standoff between adversaries, but as something mobile, crossing borders rather than encountering
boundaries, and always open to the intensity of life. But it isn't necessary to invoke only French
abstruseness to give ourselves a more positive spin around existential predicaments. The current
writings of Richard Sennett, for example, provide an alternative pragmatism, examining how the idea
of 'craft' (human ingenuity, hand and eye and brain together) might re-invest continuity and
sustainability with a more corporeal sense of being, traditions that are equally imbedded within our
cultural history. Maybe the 'offer' of the brain's asymmetrical arrangements and the tumultuous
rackets of history that it goes on causing in every sphere worth a name, is to challenge us with the
frightening and frightful proposition that evolution, the rich possibilities of our survival, is entirely
dependent upon it being just so, anatomically and culturally; a sublime, as much as a cruel, accident.
At the same time, there is something very urgent riding within McGilchrist's thesis; part of the story, if
far from being the whole of it. Nowhere does he capture this better than in a late section subtitled
'What Would the Left Hemisphere's World Look Like?', where he extrapolates a growing profusion of
symptoms that show how abstraction and reification might be leading humanity to a systematised and
micro-managed removal of itself, in which "repeatability would lead to an over-familiarity through
endless reproduction", and in which "as a culture, we would come to discard tacit forms of knowing
altogether". This is how the world would look like, McGilchrist suggests, as the Emissary goes on
betraying the Master. One can't help feeling (and I speak, like McGilchrist, as a paid up member of
the pampered 'West'), far from being "within sight" as the author suggests, totalised as Singapore or
Dubai, these "disenchanted" topographies are already profoundly both with and within us.
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