One of These Things Is Not Like the Other: From The Master and his Emissary

So interesting to follow the intellectual ferment of the day some! Peterson promoting this book, this book excoriating Pinker and Chomsky, the latter of them holding court on Democracy Now... Here are some of my favorite parts of McGilchrist's magnum opus.

In the section Music and Time, having observed that "It has been said that music, like poetry, is intrinsically sad": "The relationship between music and emotion is fascinating, and to some degree baffling. Suzanne Langer said that music not only has the power to recall emotions we are familiar with, but to evoke 'emotions and moods we have not felt, passions we did not know before.' Music seems, in other words, to expand the range of possible emotions limitlessly because the emotion experienced is so bound up with the peculiarity of the work that mediates it, yet the lexicon with which we are obliged to describe the feelings remains frustratingly limited. Thus the 'sadness' of a piece of Bach will be quite different from the 'sadness' of a piece of Mozart, and 'sadness' in the Matthew Passion will be different from the sort of 'sadness' we might discern in The Musical Offering..."

And he goes on to discuss individual movements in the St Matthew Passion! This passage gives a sense of the breadth of culture and research which have gone into this book, distilling out the compelling case for the relationship between the hemispheres, and between the structure of the brain and the development of culture. The arguments about music and language make me think about Tolkien, his evocations of music, pity, and etymology, and the status of his mythology for beginning to accomplish just the sort of realignment between the Master right hemisphere, associated with imaginative empathy, as well as spatial depth and musical wholes, and the Emissary left, the wordy, categorizing, atomizing and unfolding usurper whose messages are meant to be reconnected and given meaning within that larger whole from which they receive their material without knowing it--Socrates' daemon, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, Pullman's night fishing in the half-light of Keats' negative capability, etc.

More, in the section on the direction of writing: "Although both oriental and Western languages are generally read from the top down, so that at the global level they still conform to the right-hemisphere preference, at the local, sequential level they have drifted in the West towards the left hemisphere's point of view. This process started with the move to phonetics. While 'almost all pictographic writing systems favour a vertical layout....practically all systems of writing that depend exclusively on the visual rendition of phonological features of language are horizontally laid out.' ...[Greek] continued to be written right to left until the seventh century BC. However, at around this time a fascinating change occurred. Between the eighth and sixth centuries, Greek began to be written in what is known as boustrephedon, literally 'as the ox ploughs,' which is to say going to the end of the line, turning round, and coming back - alternating direction line by line. By the fifth century BC, however, left to right was becoming the norm, and by the fourth century the transition was complete, and all forms of Greek were being written left to right."

He connects this with Athenian democracy, Platonic philosophy, and the rise of currency. It reminds me of Barzun's fascination with the shape of the book vs the scroll--how scrolling makes sense for organizing horizontally units which are vertical, whereas a book organizes in vertical layouts units which are horizontal. I've often imagined a book in which each line could be stacked vertically with branching possibilities like harmonies, whether through hyperlinks or by some mystical suspension of the reader's boundedness to spacetime.

Finally, McGilchrist arrives at a similar concern as Mukherjee: metaphor and its relation to the truths recognized by science. Throughout, he has referred to a tale by Nietzsche, he claims to be unable to say just where he read it, but it sounds a great deal like the parable of the vineyard owner in the Gospels, which he does not refer to, to my recollection, and like Hegel's dialectic, which he does, particularly the master-slave sections. In likening the hemispheres to a servant and his master, considering "alienation versus engagement, abstraction versus incarnation, the categorical versus the unique, the general versus the particular, the part versus the whole, and so on - it seems like a metaphor that might have some literal truth. But if it turns out to be 'just' a metaphor, I will be content. I have a high regard for metaphor. It is how we come to understand the world."

Embodied there in the language and style is the crux of the argument, I think: that science must, even if it doesn't realize it, bow the knee to poetry, which underlies it and orients itself in turn humbly towards the unknown; that in this stance in awe of the world meaning can arise which is individual, true, and yet admits of being shared. It's an invigorating, astonishingly convincing, treasure trove of a book. Read it!

See episode 16 of Bookwarm Games for some thoughts on the implications for postmodern art and theory.