By Jim Coughenour on February 21, 2010
Format: Hardcover
Ian McGilchrist's thick book on the "divided brain" is the most interesting book I've read this year. I'd come to regard the fabled right brain/left brain antithesis as so much entertaining pop psychology (e.g., Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future) -- handy for provoking corporate robots, but hardly more than a convenient fiction. McGilchrist has convinced me that it's a metaphor worth taking seriously, that in fact it may be the fundamental metaphor for a scientistic age.
McGilchrist's thesis is simple: the right hemisphere of the brain (the "Master" of his title) provides our primary connection to the world - to whatever is outside ourselves; the left hemisphere is its Emissary, breaking wholes into parts, analyzing and abstracting, devising categories, names and theories, then returning the results of its investigations to the right brain to be integrated into lived experience. The health of both individuals and civilizations depends upon the reciprocal connection. The problem is that the left brain, which imagines it "knows" things it can't possibly know, usurps its role and projects its own partial, definite vision of the world onto the world's essentially ambiguous reality.
Stated simply (and the above is my own wording for McGilchrist's argument) I risk making the book sound as if it was written by a crank with an overweening metaphor. Nothing could be further from the truth. The book, which begins by examining a huge range of neurological research on the brain, then examines how the structure of the brain has affected (nothing less than!) the history of Western civilization, is continuously fascinating, rich in detail and bold in observation. Bothits science and practice of philosophy are exemplary. McGilchrist takes almost 500 pages to build his case. Fortunately, he's an engaging and unpretentious writer.
His argument reminded me of some of the most stimulating books I've ever read. A short list of ideational echoes: James Hillman's discussion of "seeing through" in Re-Visioning Psychology; Owen Barfield's examination of polarity in the evolution of consciousness in What Coleridge Thought; F S C Northrup's study of the Aesthetic and Theoretic components in The Meeting of East and West; Paul Ricoeur's theory of "second naivete" in The Symbolism of Evil; and Colin Falck's post-structuralist approach to literary language in Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-modernism . Each of these books is a touchstone to me, and each is illuminated by McGilchrist's speculations.
At the same time, McGilchrist's discussion and bibliography pointed me to books I'd never heard of and now can't wait to read: Louis Sass's Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought; Stephen Gaukroger's The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685; and Joseph Leo Koerner's The Reformation of the Image. I realize this review doesn't do much more than emphasize my own enthusiasm - but for the curious reader, maybe that will suffice.
McGilchrist's thesis is simple: the right hemisphere of the brain (the "Master" of his title) provides our primary connection to the world - to whatever is outside ourselves; the left hemisphere is its Emissary, breaking wholes into parts, analyzing and abstracting, devising categories, names and theories, then returning the results of its investigations to the right brain to be integrated into lived experience. The health of both individuals and civilizations depends upon the reciprocal connection. The problem is that the left brain, which imagines it "knows" things it can't possibly know, usurps its role and projects its own partial, definite vision of the world onto the world's essentially ambiguous reality.
Stated simply (and the above is my own wording for McGilchrist's argument) I risk making the book sound as if it was written by a crank with an overweening metaphor. Nothing could be further from the truth. The book, which begins by examining a huge range of neurological research on the brain, then examines how the structure of the brain has affected (nothing less than!) the history of Western civilization, is continuously fascinating, rich in detail and bold in observation. Bothits science and practice of philosophy are exemplary. McGilchrist takes almost 500 pages to build his case. Fortunately, he's an engaging and unpretentious writer.
His argument reminded me of some of the most stimulating books I've ever read. A short list of ideational echoes: James Hillman's discussion of "seeing through" in Re-Visioning Psychology; Owen Barfield's examination of polarity in the evolution of consciousness in What Coleridge Thought; F S C Northrup's study of the Aesthetic and Theoretic components in The Meeting of East and West; Paul Ricoeur's theory of "second naivete" in The Symbolism of Evil; and Colin Falck's post-structuralist approach to literary language in Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-modernism . Each of these books is a touchstone to me, and each is illuminated by McGilchrist's speculations.
At the same time, McGilchrist's discussion and bibliography pointed me to books I'd never heard of and now can't wait to read: Louis Sass's Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought; Stephen Gaukroger's The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685; and Joseph Leo Koerner's The Reformation of the Image. I realize this review doesn't do much more than emphasize my own enthusiasm - but for the curious reader, maybe that will suffice.
No comments:
Post a Comment