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A review by allisonjpmiller
The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist
5.0
You don't need to be convinced by McGilchrist's thesis to benefit immensely from reading this magnum opus (though I'd love to read a counter argument that manages to approach the same level of erudition and nuance ... I'm serious, point me to one! Is it possible?!). The back of the book contains over 150 pages of citations written in such tiny print that even my PRK-perfect eyes strained to read them, indicating not only how thoroughly researched and well-supported his arguments are, but also just how much wisdom he has to share with you from every discipline imaginable. He's the best kind of polymath: someone equally well-versed in the intuitive, implicit realm of art (he taught literature at Oxford before entering medicine) as in the more explicit realm of science.
In true right-hemisphere fashion, McGilchrist doesn't rely on his own ideas or even his current field (neuroscience) alone to arrive at a coherent picture of the Western world and its descent into unreality, but draws on thousands of voices from the annals of history, literature, philosophy, religion, ethics, physics, psychology, anthropology, etc—acknowledging the movements within each, and helping the reader discern patterns of perception encompassing them that would be difficult to even begin to notice without the depth and richness of an integrated view. Which is precisely the function the right hemisphere performs for a healthy brain: contextualization. That's what we lose, McG says, when we begin perceiving things primarily in parts rather than wholes (as is the case in our present, left-hemisphere-dominant society)—when we reduce the world and ourselves to mechanisms, rather than seeing them as living, evolving, interdependent entities that are ultimately unknowable except through an active I-thou relationship.
Among the many insights this book has gifted me, the fact that the brain reacts to a work of art the same way it reacts to seeing/hearing a living thing makes so much intuitive sense of the way in which books, music, the visual arts, etc seem to have their own ongoing life independent of their creators ... and why our experience of each work is so dependent on the unique relationship we develop with it, rather than any "objective" statement that can be made about the elements that constitute it. (This is also why lit/art theory, for all it's contributed to the academic study of these fields, is fundamentally maddening: It's an intrusion of the left hemisphere's obsession with systematic thinking on something that categorically resists it.)
Another thing I can't stop thinking about and seeing everywhere I look, now: cynicism and gullibility are close bedfellows, neurologically speaking.
I could go on. But I have 1,300 more pages of McGilchrist ([b:The Matter With Things|58955313|The Matter With Things Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World|Iain McGilchrist|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1641262000l/58955313._SX50_.jpg|92917408]) to read. What can I say? In an insane world, sanity is addictive.
In true right-hemisphere fashion, McGilchrist doesn't rely on his own ideas or even his current field (neuroscience) alone to arrive at a coherent picture of the Western world and its descent into unreality, but draws on thousands of voices from the annals of history, literature, philosophy, religion, ethics, physics, psychology, anthropology, etc—acknowledging the movements within each, and helping the reader discern patterns of perception encompassing them that would be difficult to even begin to notice without the depth and richness of an integrated view. Which is precisely the function the right hemisphere performs for a healthy brain: contextualization. That's what we lose, McG says, when we begin perceiving things primarily in parts rather than wholes (as is the case in our present, left-hemisphere-dominant society)—when we reduce the world and ourselves to mechanisms, rather than seeing them as living, evolving, interdependent entities that are ultimately unknowable except through an active I-thou relationship.
Among the many insights this book has gifted me, the fact that the brain reacts to a work of art the same way it reacts to seeing/hearing a living thing makes so much intuitive sense of the way in which books, music, the visual arts, etc seem to have their own ongoing life independent of their creators ... and why our experience of each work is so dependent on the unique relationship we develop with it, rather than any "objective" statement that can be made about the elements that constitute it. (This is also why lit/art theory, for all it's contributed to the academic study of these fields, is fundamentally maddening: It's an intrusion of the left hemisphere's obsession with systematic thinking on something that categorically resists it.)
Another thing I can't stop thinking about and seeing everywhere I look, now: cynicism and gullibility are close bedfellows, neurologically speaking.
I could go on. But I have 1,300 more pages of McGilchrist ([b:The Matter With Things|58955313|The Matter With Things Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World|Iain McGilchrist|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1641262000l/58955313._SX50_.jpg|92917408]) to read. What can I say? In an insane world, sanity is addictive.