The Master and His Emissary

A while back I heard interesting things about Ian McGilchrist's massive tome, so I picked up a copy at the cat bookstore just in case I someday managed to get around to it.  Gradually, as my readings in the philosophy of technology began to coalesce around the idea that technical objects nicely illustrate a fundamental dualism in approaching the world, I began to wonder if the book could shed some light on the problem.  On one side we find teleology.  Machines execute fixed goals.  It doesn't matter how complex the goal is, or how sophisticated or flexible the machines' approach to achieving it.  Even the perfect automata still does a particular thing 'automatically'; even self-driving cars still just drive, and the most sophisticated AI chat bot ... chats.  On the other side, we find exploration.  Life establishes new goals.  Which is in a sense to say that it has no true purpose, unless this would be to avoid getting permanently trapped by some impermanent goal.  When we talk about freedom and self-determination we are inherently talking about the living.  The automatic machine is the furthest thing from the self-determining organism.  But the conflation of these two ideas seems to be at the core of many perennial philosophical debates -- there's constantly confusion between determining a self and a self which determines.

Now, when I first heard it, I was intrigued but skeptical of McGilchrist's claim that there is a clear consistent difference between the workings of the right and the left hemispheres of the brain.  Wasn't this sort of facile opposition debunked years ago?  After glancing at his "Preface to the New Expanded Edition" however, in which he speaks convincingly of his more nuanced and updated take on hemispheric difference, I decided to take the plunge.  My thought was to add a different take on the same dualism between means and end, technology and life, matter and spirit.  And McGilchrist definitely develops a dualism related to what we've been talking about, and in this sense the book was relevant to my purposes.  In short, he identifies the Left side of the brain as the part that grasps and manipulates through analysis and abstraction (technology), while the Right side lives the particularity of our emotions and body in the context of a broader world (life). 

Unfortunately, while it certainly reiterates it, McGilchrist doesn't do much to help us further explore this dualism.  This is largely because his book sucks.  I rarely quit reading something halfway through, but there are exceptions, and this is one of them.  This has nothing to do with thinking that McGilchrist is wrong in any factual or philosophical sense.  The problem is that he's ultimately a pretty simplistic thinker who imagines himself as a profound philosopher.  As a result, he wastes an enormous amount of ink cramming his superficial understanding of anything and everything into the same repetitive left-brain-bad-right-brain-good box.  His wild welter of disorganized ideas only acquires a profound gloss though sheer force of reductive repetition; the divided brain is only 'profound' because McGilchrist sees it everywhere.  In this way he succeeds only in reproducing the same long list of antonyms he ridicules in his preface (xii).  Of course, lining up various dualisms in two columns is a temptingly way of making sense of the world because it feels so complete and satisfying.  However, no matter which terms figure in your lists, this style of thinking never even reaches the non-dual depths of understanding why the Force is like duct tape. 

Reading the blurbs and hearing the interviews, one imagines that The Master and His Emissary will be focused mainly on brain science.  After all, the supposed point of the book is the profound importance of the different ways the left and right hemispheres of the brain see the world.  Unfortunately, McGilchrist is no scientist.  And if you read the bio carefully, you discover it carefully skirts the question of whether he's even a medical doctor (look like a BM is the equivalent).  In fact, this is a just a philosophy book with a chapter devoted to summarizing some of the science related to hemispheric differences.  And what a poor summary indeed!  To begin with, despite studying literature, McGilchrist is a terrible writer.  Many many sentences are so bad that I can only imagine the (lack of) grammar results from dictating them.  The editing is atrocious both at the level of the text, and the level of the coherence of the ideas.  The whole thing reads like someone's first draft or working blog, with almost no thought spared for how it (doesn't) carry the reader along.  

Take, for example, this early chapter on the science behind the divided brain.  Now, I've studied some science, in fact even some neuroscience.  I'm also receptive to his overall idea.  And yet McGilchrist doesn't even come close to convincing me that there is coherent pattern to the differences between the left and right hemispheres.  We are told again and again that the difference lies in how they operate, not in what they do.  It's all meticulously footnoted.  But almost none of the studies that demonstrate this difference are explained. McGilchrist simply asserts that this is what the mountain of research tells us.  Trust him, he's cutting through all the inevitable controversy and subtlety that attends interpreting experiments like this and just giving us the overall picture.  For anyone even a little familiar with this area, it beggars belief that his level of generalization is justified by the specific research he summarizes.  But who knows?  Since we don't hear much about the research itself and about how it convinced McGilchrist, how would we ever judge how far he jumped to reach his sweeping conclusions?  We'd have to go read the whole bibliography ourselves and form our own opinions.  This is just terrible writing pure and simple.  It's no way to even talk about science, much less do it.  No, without and argument, there is no science.  That's what science is.  Those are the fucking rules.  So while I can't pass any judgement on whether McGilchrist is right about how the left and right brain work, I can certainly claim that in a hundred pages he said almost nothing to make me believe he was right.

However, as I mentioned, The Master and His Emissary is really a philosophy book masquerading as a book about the brain.  Less than a fifth of the text is devoted to neuroscience.  So perhaps it's not terribly important whether his story about the science is convincing or not.  Could we simply ignore the marketing and read it as philosophy, exactly as I proposed to approach it at the outset?  We were already exploring a dualism that has so many names we're not even sure it's a single dualism.  Maybe another name for the same split is Left and Right, even if these terms have no relation at all to the human brain.  Perhaps the brain is not the issue here dude.  If we read McGilchrist as a philosopher (which is how I imagine he sees himself) does his philosophy of left-right duality help to illuminate some of the deep issues that we've encountered in thinking about technology?

Nope.  McGilchrist is interested in some interesting stuff.  He has a long chapter on the origins of music and language.  He writes about the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and his hero Heidegger.  He tells us about the inadequacy of the materialist conception of the world and even outlines a theory of how our dualistic divide can be healed -- Right reabsorbs what it has given to Left in a moment of transcendent aufheben.  But none of his thoughts on these topics is of any more use than his approach to the science.  Everything is treated so breezily, from such a great altitude that it turns into an indistinct mish-mash.  He alludes to all these profound philosophical ideas, but then slurs together many that are so profoundly different.  I mean, do you really think those philosophers I named all shared the same core dualistic system?  Despite the density and range of his text, McGilchrist is incapable of leaving us with anything more than the impression that everything can somehow be reduced to the distinction between Left and Right, Part and Whole.  And of course, the holistic Right turns out to be primary and better in every sense -- ontologically, practically, ethically -- which begs the question of how on earth the Left triumphed in this Manichean struggle.  In the end, his entire thesis is encapsulated in the breathless praise of Hegel's Right-Left-Right pattern (pg 203).  We move from good unity to bad duality back to good unity.  Everything must be mapped onto a schema that doesn't even have four chords. Thus the whole book suffers from something similar to Hegel's encyclopedic obscurantism -- it tries to makes the same simple idea sound profound by endlessly repeating it in fancy language.  But we know there's nothing more boring and more faux profound than the dialectic; it presupposes everything that it pretends to explain and makes a mere illusion of real change.

So I'm going to quit halfway through.  The second half of the book promises to explain how the Left slyly triumphed over its better half.  It's certainly a glaring question given McGilchrist's account.  But at this point I can't imagine his answer would be at all interesting.  And I just can't abide another ramblingly dense yet intellectually insipid 250 pages.