‘The Master and His Emissary’: One of the Most Important Books of the Past Century
A review of ‘The Master and His Emissary’, by Iain McGilchrist; Yale Press, 2012.
Seven years ago, more or less on a whim, I went to a talk at St. James’s Church in central London. It had been organised by the Blake Society , the president of which was Philip Pullman — Philip Pullman being the author of the outstanding His Dark Materials trilogy of books, which I loved as a child. The subject of the talk was ‘William Blake and the Divided Brain’, and the man giving it was Dr. Iain McGilchrist. Over about 45 minutes, he painted a radical picture of reality, yet one that struck me as wholly persuasive and intuitively correct.
His central thought is this: for as long as there have been brains, there has been brain asymmetry—that is, differences between the two sides of the brain. The sea-worm nematostella vectensis, the oldest-known creature with a neural circuit, has a divided brain. Why? First we must forget everything we have been told about the two sides of the brain: that one side deals with logic and the other with imagination, that one deals with maths and the other with art. Both sides of the brain are involved in almost everything we do. They differ, however, in the way in which they pay attention.
For as long as there have been brains, there has been brain asymmetry. Why?
Consider a bird. A bird searching for a piece of grain in the grass must focus narrowly on that piece of grain in order to retrieve it. And yet, if our bird-friend does not also remain vigilant to the possibility that a local cat might be creeping up behind it, that bird will no longer be a bird. It will be lunch. Therefore, the bird must at once attend to the world in two different ways. It must balance a narrow form of attention and an open, sustained form of attention. In this way, it can make sure that it eats without being eaten.
McGilchrist argues that this is why our brains are divided. And because how we attend to the world—that is, how we direct our consciousness—informs the world we bring into being for ourselves, the degree to which each side of the brain pays attention matters. The core of his argument is that these two sides are complementary but not equal. The right side of the brain is, if you like, the master; the left is his emissary. The Master and His Emissary is the name of the book in which McGilchrist explains this idea in full.
The core of his argument is that the sides of the brain are complementary but not equal. The right is the master; the left is his emissary.
Why is the right hemisphere the master? Because it is more in touch with reality. The right hemisphere’s distinctive ‘take’ on the world is that all is flowing and changing, provisional, interconnected, embodied, living. It perceives a gestalt—a whole that is different from the sum of its parts. Its left-sided counterpart, in contrast, understands the world as static, isolated, mechanical, disembodied, abstracted, detached. It is well-suited for manipulation, for ‘getting’, for ap-prehending—but not for com-prehending. The popular connection of the right hemisphere with the imagination is not wholly inaccurate: the kind of attention paid by this side of the brain is untroubled by such complex matters as beauty, morality and the experience of the divine—those aspects of experience that lie beyond language. Importantly for McGilchrist’s hypothesis is the idea that the left side of the brain, which closes down to certainty (rather than opens up to possibility), ‘thinks’ it is the master. It is not see the use of its right-sided counterpart. It is like the person who says love is nothing but the product of brain chemistry.
Now, for McGilchrist, our civilisation is in trouble because we have become too left-brained. And in the second half of The Master and His Emissary, he traces the evolution of the Western world, pointing out those periods (pre-Socratic Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the age of Romanticism) when the two sides of the brain have been in harmony, and those (the late Roman Empire, the Reformation, the Enlightenment) when the left brain has had too much say. Though he praises some of the achievements of modernity, such as cinema and jazz, he is concerned that it has mostly involved a mechanisation of the human being—accelerated in the modern day by the explosion of technology and the unprecedented degree of control it gives us.
For McGilchrist, our civilisation is in trouble because we have become too left-brained.
He writes all this in a lucid style that reflects his background as a humanities scholar and literary critic. You will rarely find better company on the page. But he is also a veteran psychiatrist and serious philosopher, which makes him equally authoritative when discussing (for instance) the drivers of cortical expansion, or the history of epistemology. He shows his breathtaking erudition and scholarship in his most recent book, The Matter with Things, the references for which run to more than 300 pages.
The title of The Master and His Emissary comes from a story attributed (I think incorrectly) to Nietzsche. And it goes like this: there was once a wise master whose kingdom flourished under his rule. His kingdom grew so large that soon he had to dispatch an emissary to govern its furthest reaches. It was not simply that he could not do everything himself; but that, being a wise master, he understood that if he focused too much on one part of his kingdom, he would lose sight of the kingdom as a whole and the context to which that part belonged. The emissary, however, grew bitter, believing that if he could run one part of the kingdom then he could run the whole thing. He usurped the master, and the kingdom fell into ruin. For McGilchrist, this is where we are headed. Perhaps it is even happening already. If we do not restore a living, intuitive, open, humble, embodied form of attention, and thus perspective, to its proper place in modern life, then, he suggests, we are done for.
