The Master And His Emissary: The Divided Brain And The Making Of The Western World (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
This is a phenomenal book, perhaps one of the best I've ever read. It is neither short nor an easy one. There are more than 500 pages of very dense text that could easily span above 800 in a bit more conventional typesetting... But the true challenge comes from the author; a true erudite, a modern day polymath, who effortlessly combines neuroscience, with philosophy, with literature, with arts, with social sciences and humanism, and even things that are completely in between, to create a coherent argument on the duality of our brain and how it is reflected trough the history and our doings.The first part of the book examines neurological evidence (patients with brain strokes, split brain patients, schizophrenics, etc), then moves to philosophy, further on to the history of the Western civilization and at the end he tries to synthesize a conclusion that merges all of this together. The language is rich and amazing to read (McGilchrist was an Oxford professor of English before turning into neuroscience), but that makes things only slightly easier on the conceptual level. The first part demands at least basic preexisting knowledge on neural anatomy and neural development, the second part is much more rewarding to be read by prior reading of philosophers (all the big names; Aristotle, Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger,...), and the last part requires knowledge of basic history and history of Arts (pictorial, music, literature, drama...). Needless to say, I had some difficulties getting trough to the middle part (since philosophers have never been exactly my coup of tea), but I enjoyed the neurological and the art-historical parts so much more. They felt like a balsam for my soul: the last quarter of the book is a powerful assault on modernism and the nonsense of art of 20th century. In that he says everything I wanted to say, but couldn't find the right voice for it.This is one of those books (along with Antifragile by Taleb) that completely (re?)shaped the way I see the world and myself (in it). Not just that it gave me a deeper understanding, it also gave shape and meaning to my own ideas, by which I feel flattered. Of course, I am being openly biased in that, for it is easy to like a book which agrees with you, but what the hell... Every page was better than the previous one! In this seminal work, Iain McGilchrist provides a very comprehensive overview of hemisphere differences in the brain and makes a passionate plea for why it is important to account for the two fundamentally opposed realities and modes of experience that they provide when interacting with the world around us. Drawing on his background as a psychiatrist and neuroimager, the author integrates recent fMRI findings, experiments on split-brain patients, as well as research on patients with brain compromise/insult (post-stroke, schizophrenics, etc.) with evidence from philosophy, history, myth, and art history. The book is constructed in two parts - the first, explores the anatomy of the brain itself, specifically its divided and asymmetrical nature and what this means for the development of music and language. The second part develops a hypothesis about how hemispheric co-dependence has slanted towards increased left hemisphere reliance based on evidence from noteworthy cultural epochs in Western civilization (notably the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the Renaissance, Modernism, and post-Modernism).This book is scholarly in its handling of the subject and is singularly masterful in its invocation of different knowledge domains to paint a picture of inter-hemispheric evolution of the brain. Debunking extant theories that have elevated the left hemisphere (the "Emissary") in what makes us human on the basis of language principally residing there, McGilchrist provides overwhelming evidence that the right hemisphere ("the Master") is crucial in paying more attention to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves. As a result, it is the right hemisphere that provides "the betweenness" between the Self and the Other. Consequently, McGilchrist argues, the left hemisphere is the hemisphere of 'what' with "its dependence on denotative language and abstraction, focusing primarily on yielding clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, decontextualized, but ultimately lifeless". In contrast, the right hemisphere yields a world that emphasizes change, evolution, and interconnectedness within the context of the lived world, that remains imperfectly known and never graspable. Happiness and fulfillment being by-products of other things, a focus elsewhere, makes this interconnectedness and the right hemisphere vital to our sense of being, he argues.In the second part of this book, the author provides ample evidence of how we have increasingly migrated to a left hemisphere dominance in many spheres of Western culture. He makes the case of language, and how it has evolved from pictograms and syllabic phonograms in the Ancient World to increased reliance on phonograms, a phonetic alphabet, vowel use, and left to right writing in the modern world, all of which suggest left hemisphere dominance. He points to a decline in the use of metaphors and the deployment of perspective in art since the Romantic period, when the poet or artist yearned to provide depth, so that the experience is one of engagement with the world, and the human spirit is drawn out into the expanses of space and time. The author argues that evocation of such depth is "the means by which we are drawn into a felt relationship with something remote", which he differentiates from the flat effect of merely observing it. With the advent of scientific functionalism followed by the Industrial Revolution, McGilchrist argues that the sense of belonging and ultimately of individual identity was destroyed. The web of relations which give life all meaning were disrupted, and connectedness radically weakened. This, he argues, set the stage for a world increasingly dominated by the left hemisphere, and increasingly antagonistic to the right. He points to increased trends in brain disease such as schizophrenia, anorexia nervosa, Asperger's, autism, borderline personality, etc in our present times, mostly characterized by right hemisphere dysfunction. He provides evidence of how arts and music have also contributed to the betrayal of the Master by overemphasizing the Emissary. He argues, and modern art purists will vehemently disagree, that beauty today is merely defined by shifts in art theory, and not on the basis of beauty as a transcendental ideal. In a powerful critique of the modern art movement, McGilchrist says that art is no longer an indication of what humanity can achieve; instead, it has degraded to become an expression of what another being, a potential competitor, has achieved - "It is as if every organ in the body wanted to be the head", he writes, adding: "We have lost the ability to see through the eye, through the image, past the surface", to embrace the depth of reality. Instead we remain content with a planar re-presentation. He quotes the poet Blake:"This Life's dim Windows of the Soul Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole And leads you to Believe a Lie When you see with, not thro', the Eye."This is a superb accomplishment, powerfully rendered by a writer who is not afraid to take on the establishment's sacred cows and to serve up earth-shattering conclusions about our ongoing journey as human beings. Are we on the road to lose our very essence of connecting to each other in the pursuit of a conceptual, lifeless existence in our lives? Will we allow alienation to trump engagement, abstraction to strangle incarnation, rely only on categories instead of searching out what is unique? Don't pass up this book - it will provide a much needed jolt and leave you awed with its brilliance...
What do You think about The Master And His Emissary: The Divided Brain And The Making Of The Western World (2009)?
One of the most challenging and thought provoking books I've ever read. Worth the effort.
—ezrahlim
Extraordinary bible of how our left and right brain interoperate
—vats
This book radically changed the way I think about the world.
—phoebe
