The Master and His Emissary - A Review
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist
David T. expressed interest when I first mentioned this book and I thought I'd give a preliminary appraisal. The book is available from Amazon (here). Dr. McGilchrist can be heard on YouTube (here).
I just got the book and I've read the sizeable introduction and the first chapter which lay out the plan for the book and introduce the concepts that the book will tackle. As such this isn't a proper review as I'm only thirty pages into a nearly five hundred page book. My appreciation will be a bit limited.
The author is an interesting dude. He trained initially in Literature at Oxford and taught for a while. He then re-trained in Medicine and spent several years doing neurological research. He is currently a psychiatrist and lives in London and on the Isle of Skye. The extensive background shows in the text. References to many leading thinkers of the western tradition (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, many others) liberally occur. It's an impressive display of knowledge.
When I bought the book I thought I was getting a book on (neuro-) biology. It's rather more than that. Biology (especially neuro-imaging and related studies), but just as importantly philosophy (chiefly Epistemology and Phenomenology), and cultural history.
The main thesis of the book is a look at brain function and how that helps us understand how we view the world. What McGilchrist does not really address is how consciousness arises from the brain. He mentions it in passing. Mostly to dismiss the mind\brain duality (the idea that mind and brain are two different things) and to also dismiss mind\body unity (that mind and brain are identical). His thought on this sounded to me like mind was an emergent property of brain. An intriguing idea.
Rather, the point of the book is to examine the two hemispheres of the brain. McGilchrist asserts that they are distinctly different. Indeed, that that they look at and process the world distinctly differently. They are not just redundant capacity. He sees that one side is essentially reductionist. It's view of the world is of individual pieces to be examined separately. The other is more globalist and systemic. It looks at connections between things, provides context, and looks at how events flow. The central aspect of this is that these halves cooperate and, most especially, compete.
McGilchrist uses these insights to explore the philosophical concepts of Epistemology (the study of the nature of knowledge) and Phenomenology (the study of the structures of experience and consciousness). His thesis is that the two halves of the brain develop these ideas in distinctly different ways. And, most importantly, these conceptions compete with each other in determining how a human thinks about the world around them.
The first half of the book looks at these biologic and philosophical considerations. The second half takes views and applies them to a broad range of western cultural history.
As I've noted, I've only read up through the first chapter. Some things do seem clear. This isn't light reading. I'm finding that I'm re-reading passages with some frequency. And I'm certainly not as familiar with Heidegger as would be useful (or at all). This is not a drag on understanding though, as McGilchrist explains concepts fairly crisply. Not only am I not dismayed, I am quite fascinated. I find myself hauling my own ideas on how this stuff works out and looking at them with a new light.
The book has extensive notes and a full bibliography online (a partial one is in the (paper back) book).
So far I'm really enjoying this. It may take a while to get through it. One thing struck me. One of the features of academic training is that the higher you go the more you learn about an increasingly narrower range of topics. This typically means that reading academically oriented work is similarly narrow. Not so with this work. No, not at all.
You should read this.
David T. expressed interest when I first mentioned this book and I thought I'd give a preliminary appraisal. The book is available from Amazon (here). Dr. McGilchrist can be heard on YouTube (here).
I just got the book and I've read the sizeable introduction and the first chapter which lay out the plan for the book and introduce the concepts that the book will tackle. As such this isn't a proper review as I'm only thirty pages into a nearly five hundred page book. My appreciation will be a bit limited.
The author is an interesting dude. He trained initially in Literature at Oxford and taught for a while. He then re-trained in Medicine and spent several years doing neurological research. He is currently a psychiatrist and lives in London and on the Isle of Skye. The extensive background shows in the text. References to many leading thinkers of the western tradition (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, many others) liberally occur. It's an impressive display of knowledge.
When I bought the book I thought I was getting a book on (neuro-) biology. It's rather more than that. Biology (especially neuro-imaging and related studies), but just as importantly philosophy (chiefly Epistemology and Phenomenology), and cultural history.
The main thesis of the book is a look at brain function and how that helps us understand how we view the world. What McGilchrist does not really address is how consciousness arises from the brain. He mentions it in passing. Mostly to dismiss the mind\brain duality (the idea that mind and brain are two different things) and to also dismiss mind\body unity (that mind and brain are identical). His thought on this sounded to me like mind was an emergent property of brain. An intriguing idea.
Rather, the point of the book is to examine the two hemispheres of the brain. McGilchrist asserts that they are distinctly different. Indeed, that that they look at and process the world distinctly differently. They are not just redundant capacity. He sees that one side is essentially reductionist. It's view of the world is of individual pieces to be examined separately. The other is more globalist and systemic. It looks at connections between things, provides context, and looks at how events flow. The central aspect of this is that these halves cooperate and, most especially, compete.
McGilchrist uses these insights to explore the philosophical concepts of Epistemology (the study of the nature of knowledge) and Phenomenology (the study of the structures of experience and consciousness). His thesis is that the two halves of the brain develop these ideas in distinctly different ways. And, most importantly, these conceptions compete with each other in determining how a human thinks about the world around them.
The first half of the book looks at these biologic and philosophical considerations. The second half takes views and applies them to a broad range of western cultural history.
As I've noted, I've only read up through the first chapter. Some things do seem clear. This isn't light reading. I'm finding that I'm re-reading passages with some frequency. And I'm certainly not as familiar with Heidegger as would be useful (or at all). This is not a drag on understanding though, as McGilchrist explains concepts fairly crisply. Not only am I not dismayed, I am quite fascinated. I find myself hauling my own ideas on how this stuff works out and looking at them with a new light.
The book has extensive notes and a full bibliography online (a partial one is in the (paper back) book).
So far I'm really enjoying this. It may take a while to get through it. One thing struck me. One of the features of academic training is that the higher you go the more you learn about an increasingly narrower range of topics. This typically means that reading academically oriented work is similarly narrow. Not so with this work. No, not at all.
You should read this.
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