The Master & His Emissary: The Divided Brain & the Making of the Modern World by Iain McGilchrist

Growing up in America as a member of the Baby Boom generation, I know that I’ve lived in the best place and the best time in the history of the world—or at least very close to it. Canada, some European countries, Australia, and later Japan can lay some claims to being the best places ever, but suffice it to say that I’ve been lucky. Yet, despite all the material comfort and security that my country and culture have allowed me, there’s still a sense that things aren’t as they should be. The twentieth century is full of contradictions: untold wealth and prosperity interrupted by horrific wars; deep economic depressions despite the existence of all the ingredients of prosperity; the threat of nuclear annihilation; a culture that sometimes seems alien to human concerns; and civilizations that degrade the natural environment with wanton indifference. Thus, despite my good fortune, I’ve been sympathetic to critiques of contemporary culture. My introduction to such a critique came from Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter-Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (1969), which I was assigned to read in my freshman year in college for my course “Introduction to Political Theory.” From that introduction, I went on to read the likes of Hannah Arendt, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Phillip Rieff, the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas, William Irwin Thompson, Wendell Berry, and others. I’ve found resonance with critiques of contemporary Western culture. And much of Asia and other developing regions have adopted Western culture, especially its economics and technology. I hasten to add that I’m well acquainted and sympathetic to the champions of our contemporary world, too, and as this is also “the best of times.” I appreciate the positive perspective as well as the negative.

I mention all this because now I have now encountered a new diagnosis and critique of many of the problems of Western culture that strikes me as uniquely insightful and truly ingenious.

College literature professor turned psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist, has written a two-part book about the anatomical split in our brains and how that split in functions affects how we perceive the world and creates our culture. According to McGilchrist, we can consider our culture from the perspective of the different functions of the two different hemispheres of the brain. (For some further background, see my earlier post about McGilchrist’s RSA Animate presentation and the book he wrote as a follow-up to this masterwork under review here.) In the first part of the book, McGilchrist focuses on anatomical and functional details of the brain, with the well-known but often misunderstood division of the left and right hemispheres. The split is not, as first thought, a neat division of language and logic on the left versus vision, music, and feeling on the right. Functions for each of these skills draw on both sides of the brain. However, the brain is divided and is different on each side. In fact, it doesn’t even sit symmetrically within the cranium: it’s torqued (Yanklovian torque) as if someone had twisted it slightly from the bottom so that the right front is slightly larger than its left counterpart, and the left posterior just a bit larger than its right counterpart. Also, the two sides are joined by a bridge, the corpus callosum, which serves as the gatekeeper that regulates the traffic between the two halves. This (rather narrow) bridge provides a clue about the division of functions within the brain. The gatekeeper often performs its most important work when it inhibits traffic between the two halves. Why? Because each half has its own outlook or way of perceiving the world.

McGilchrist spends much of the book examining the two different ways each side of the brain perceives the world: the right deals with living, dynamic, unique, and context-dependent portions of the environment. The left side deals with (and creates) the static, still, and minutely focused parts of our attention. Each side has evolved to deal with two different needs. The two hemispheres of the brain cooperate, but their perspectives are mostly separate. Thus, language involves both sides of the brain, but the left side, with its emphasis on static, detailed information dominates vocabulary and syntax issues. Thus, while an impulse toward speech may originate in the right brain, those impulses must pass to the left side to obtain full expression. Here is where stroke victims and the subjects of split-brain surgeries (severing the corpus callosum to alleviate epileptic seizures) provide amazing clues about the different functions of the two hemispheres. McGilchrist wades through this research to deepen our understanding and appreciation of these issues.

But if the book were only a catalog of “our amazing divided brain!” it would prove exciting but not profound. The profundity value of the book comes from McGilchrist’s ability to trace the effects of this division of the brain into daily life, especially into a portrait of its influence on the formal culture of the West. (He doesn’t address Eastern culture, begging off for lack of acquaintance.) McGilchrist’s knowledge of Western culture, chiefly literary and philosophical culture, is impressive. McGilchrist argues that Western culture since the Enlightenment, and especially after the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, has been dominated by a left-brain perspective. The left-brain focuses on the static, the manufactured (i.e., the not living, not organic), and that which we can manipulate and control and which therefore pays easily identifiable dividends. The left-side also prefers the literal to the metaphoric and the artificial to the natural. 

McGilchrist finds this especially true in the 20th-century when examining contemporary literature and philosophy, as well as the broader cultural milieu. McGilchrist locates times in Western cultural history when attitudes, beliefs, and practices reflected in the two different perspectives and functions of the brain were balanced, such as in Periclean Athens and the Renaissance. Problems arose early, on the other hand, when the pre-Socratics, such as Heraclitus, with his emphasis on flux and change, were shunted aside by Plato and Aristotle, who preferred the static and established  “reason” as the ideal. Indeed, from Plato through Kant, Western philosophy emphasized the left-hemisphere perspective (with some exception for Spinoza: “Spinoza was one of the few philosophers, apart from Pascal, between Plato and Hegel to have a strong sense of the right-hemisphere world.” McGilchrist, Iain (2010-08-16). The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 3804-3805). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.). In the broader culture, religion offered a good deal of counter-balance to the left-sidedness of philosophy. McGilchrist argues that with Hegel, philosophy begins to take a corrective turn. McGilchrist, following Leon Sass, agrues that modern culture displays many of the traits of schizophrenia. Publisher’s Weekly writes of Sass’s book Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought:

Does the schizophrenic's chaotic inner world resemble modern art and literature? Sass, a clinical psychologist and Rutgers professor, argues that schizophrenia and modernism display striking affinities: fragmentation, defiance of authority, multiple viewpoints, self-referentiality and rejection of the external world for an omnipotent self or, alternately, a total loss of self. While the parallels he draws often seem superficial, there is much to ponder in Sass's notion that schizophrenia's core traits are exaggerations of tendencies fostered by our culture. 

As this quote suggests, McGilchrist, following Sass, finds striking resemblances that McGilchrist identifies as a manifestation of a left-brain perspective run awry. Identifying and counter-acting this trend is a defining part of McGilchrist’s project. He writes:

Hegel, along with Heraclitus and Heidegger, has a particular place in the unfolding story of the relationship between the cerebral hemispheres, in that, it seems to me, his philosophy actually tries to express the mind's intuition of its own structure – if you like, the mind cognising itself. His spirit is like an unseen presence in this book, and it is necessary to devote a few pages to his heroic attempts to articulate, in relation to the structure of the mind or spirit (Geist), what lies almost beyond articulation, even now that we have knowledge of the structure of the brain. 

McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 5477-5481). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

Along with Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, among German-language philosophers, receive extended and sympathetic treatment (demonstrating that McGilchrist willingly suffers through some dense and challenging prose to retrieve nuggets of insight). Also receiving favorable treatment and consideration are lesser-known figures like Husserl, Scheler, and Merleau-Ponty: each gives voice and insight into the function of the right brain. Finally, McGilchrist considers the American pragmatists, John Dewey and William James, for their useful perspectives on philosophy and the organic nature of reality.  

My choice of the Nietzschean fable of the Master and his emissary suggests that right at the heart of the relationship between the hemispheres I see a power struggle between two unequal entities, and moreover one in which the inferior, dependent party (the left hemisphere) starts to see itself as of primary importance.

Id. at 5481-5483.

Is all of this worth the effort? I think so. It’s a very valid and live issue, I believe. How we view our world, what perspectives we take, will change the course of our actions. If we do in fact give predominance to the left-brain perspective, we will reap consequences that will likely backfire on us. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we have loosed its magic on the world, but we have lost control. We need the Master, the living world of the right brain, to come to the rescue.