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The Master and His Emissary CHAPTER 10 THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Author: Iain McgilChrist Publisher: London, UK: Yale University Press. Publish Date: 2010 Review Date: Status:💥

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CHAPTER 10

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

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what I have called right-hemisphere sense, was traditionally considered to be the higher faculty. There are a number of reasons why this was so. For a start, the edifice of rationality (logos), the left-hemisphere type of reason, was weakened by the recognition that (in contravention of the consistency principle) a thing and its opposite may well both be true. But there is one problem that attacks the very root of logos. Although constitutive for science and much of philosophy, because of its being based on argumentation and the provision of proof, it cannot constitute – cannot ground – itself according to its own principles of proof and argumentation. The value of rationality, as well as whatever premises it may start from, has to be intuited: neither can be derived from rationality itself. All rationality can do is to provide internal consistency once the system is up and running. Deriving deeper premises only further postpones the ultimate question, and leads into an infinite regress; in the end one is back to an act of intuitive faith governed by reason (nous). Logos represents, as indeed the left hemisphere does, a closed system which cannot reach outside itself to whatever it is that exists apart from itself. According to Plato, nous (reason as opposed to rationality) is characterised by intuition, and according to Aristotle it is nous that grasps the first principles through induction. So the primacy of reason (right hemisphere) is due to the fact that rationality (left hemisphere) is founded on it. Once again the right hemisphere is prior to the left.

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Kant is commonly held to have reversed these priorities. At first sight this would appear to be the case, since for him Verstand (rationality) plays a constitutive role, and is therefore primary, while Vernunft (reason) plays a regulatory one, once Verstand has done its work. Rationality, according to this formulation, comes first, and reason then operates on what rationality yields, to decide how to use and interpret the products of rationality. However, I do not think that Kant’s formulation embodies a reversal as much as an extension. There was something missing from the earlier classical picture that reason is the ground of rationality, namely the necessity for rationality to return the fruits of its operations to reason again. Reason is indeed required to give the intuitive, inductive foundation to rationality, but rationality needs in turn to submit its workings to the judgment of reason at the end (Kant’s regulatory role). Thus it is not that A (reason) B (rationality), but that A (reason) B (rationality) A (reason) again. This mirrors the process that I have suggested enables the hemispheres to work co-operatively: the right hemisphere delivers something to the left hemisphere, which the left hemisphere then unfolds and gives back to the right hemisphere in an enhanced form. The classical, pre-Kantian, position focussed on the first part of the process: A (reason) B (rationality), thus reason is the ground of rationality. My reading of Kant is that it was his perception of the importance of the second part of this tripartite arrangement, namely that B (rationality) A (reason), the products of rationality must be subject to reason, that led him to what is perceived as a reversal, though it is better seen as an extension of the original formulation.

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Reason depends on seeing things in context, a right-hemisphere faculty, whereas rationality is typically left-hemisphere in that it is context-independent, and exemplifies the interchangeability that results from abstraction and categorisation. Any purely rational sequence could in theory be abstracted from the context of an individual mind and ‘inserted’ in another mind as it stands; because it is rule-based, it could be taught in the narrow sense of that word, whereas reason cannot in this sense be taught, but has to grow out of each individual’s experience, and is incarnated in that person with all their feelings, beliefs, values and judgments. Rationality can be an important part of reason, but only part. Reason is about holding sometimes incompatible elements in balance, a right-hemisphere capacity which had been highly prized among the humanist scholars of the Renaissance. Rationality imposes an ‘either/or’ on life which is far from reasonable.

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The Enlightenment is, for all its love of unity, a most self-contradictory phenomenon: it was, one may fairly say, the best of times, it was the worst of times. The highest achievements of the Enlightenment, those for which eighteenth-century culture is widely admired, express the harmony and balance, often accompanied by an ironic, but tolerant, acceptance of human frailty, which, I believe, mark a high point in the co-operation of the right and left hemispheres, with, in my terms the left hemisphere having delivered itself back to the right hemisphere. But built into the foundations of Enlightenment thought are precepts that are bound to lead eventually to a less flexible and humane outlook, that of the left hemisphere alone.

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Let us think, not of reason, but of metaphor. Metaphorical understanding has a close relationship with reason, which seems paradoxical only because we have inherited an Enlightenment view of metaphor: namely, that it is either indirectly literal, and can be reduced to ‘proper’ literal language, or a purely fanciful ornament, and therefore irrelevant to meaning and rational thought, which it indeed threatens to disrupt. It is seen as a linguistic device, not as a vehicle of thought. What the literalist view and the anti-literalist view share is that, ultimately, metaphor can have nothing directly to do with truth. Either it is simply another way of stating literal truth or else it undermines any claim to truth. But as Lakoff and Johnson have shown, ‘metaphor is centrally a matter of thought, not just words’.2 The loss of metaphor is a loss of cognitive content.3 Thinking cannot be severed from our bodily existence, out of which all metaphors arise.

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1. Black, 1983, p. 20.

2. Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, pp. 123 & 129.

3. Black, 1962, p. 46.

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DESCARTES AND MADNESS

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The most influential Enlightenment philosopher, René Descartes, famously attempted to demonstrate precisely the opposite. He saw the body, the senses and the imagination as likely to lead, not only to error, but into the realm of madness. In the Meditations on First Philosophy he refers to the ‘madmen’ who trust their senses and end up imagining ‘that their heads are made of earthenware, or that they are pumpkins, or made of glass’.4

Note: this must be where the term mental “disorder” comes from

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4. Descartes, 1984–91b, ‘Meditation I’, p.

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There is a deep irony involved here. The symptoms he describes are characteristic of delusions that occur in schizophrenia.5 But schizophrenia is not characterised at all by trusting the senses – rather by an unreasonable mistrust of them. It entails in many cases a wholesale inability to rely on the reality of embodied existence in the ‘common-sense’ world which we share with others, and leads to a dehumanised view of others, who begin to lose their intuitively experienced identity as fellow humans and become seen as devitalised machines. One’s own body becomes no longer the vehicle through which reality is experienced, but instead is seen as just another object, sometimes a disturbingly alien object, in the world that is validated by cognition alone. Sufferers from schizophrenia have been known to see themselves as, for example, copying machines, or to contemplate cutting their wrists to find out whether they contain engine oil.

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‘To lose one’s reason’ is the old expression for madness. But an excess of rationality is the grounds of another kind of madness, that of schizophrenia. As Louis Sass argued in his Madness and Modernism and in The Paradoxes of Delusion,6 and Giovanni Stanghellini has further emphasised in Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies,7 schizophrenia is not characterised by a Romantic disregard for rational thinking and a regression into a more primitive, unself-conscious, emotive realm of the body and the senses, but by an excessively detached, hyper-rational, reflexively self-aware, disembodied and alienated condition.

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5. McGilchrist & Cutting, 1995.

6. Sass, 1992, 1994.

7. Stanghellini, 2004.

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Louis Sass has demonstrated, by his comparisons of Wittgenstein’s critique of philosophy with Daniel Paul Schreber’s detailed accounts of his own psychotic illness (Schreber was the subject of Freud’s only study of schizophrenia), that there are extensive similarities between schizophrenia and the state of mind that is brought about when one makes a conscious effort to distance oneself from one’s surroundings, refrain from normal action and interaction with them, suspend one’s normal assumptions and feelings about them and subject them to a detached scrutiny – an exercise which in the non-mentally ill is normally confined to philosophers. The belief that this will result in a deeper apprehension of reality ignores the fact that the nature of the attention we bring to bear on anything alters what we find there. Adopting a stance that is normally found only in patients suffering from schizophrenia is not obviously a recipe for finding a higher truth.8

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8. ‘Schizophrenics very often hold beliefs which are as rigid, all-pervasive, and unconnected with reality, as are the best dogmatic philosophies. However, such beliefs come to them naturally whereas a “critical” philosopher may sometimes spend his whole life in attempting to find arguments which create a similar state of mind’ (Feyerabend, 1975, p. 45n).

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However, the Cartesian view of the world does just this. Referring to a famous passage from the Meditations on First Philosophy in which Descartes describes looking out of his window and seeing what he knows to be people passing by as seeming to him nonetheless like mere machines, wearing hats and coats, the philosopher David Levin comments:

What could be a greater symptom of madness than to look out of one’s window and see (what might, for all one knows, be) machines, instead of real people? The point I want to make is that this, this kind of vision, is what the rationality he has embraced leads to. Not by mere chance, not by a momentary caprice, but by the inexorable logic of the rationality to which he is committed … Only a philosopher could, or would, talk in this way [with scepticism about the existence of other people]. In ‘real life’, outside the study, such a way of talking – such a way of looking at other people – would be judged mad, a subtle symptom of paranoia.9

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9. Levin, 1999, pp. 37–42 (emphasis in original).

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Descartes held that there was ‘absolutely no connection (at least that I can understand)’ between ‘that curious tugging in the stomach which I call hunger’ and the desire to eat.10 Even pain was a mystery: ‘why’, he asks, ‘should that curious sensation of pain give rise to a particular distress of mind?’11 This seems to me to display a quite extraordinary lack of intuitive understanding. If there is, in fact, one place at which the relationship between the body and subjective experience can be intuitively understood, it is right there, in sensations such as pain and hunger. But then Descartes was not sure that he had a body at all:

I can make a probable conjecture that the body exists. But this is only a probability; and despite a careful and comprehensive investigation, I do not yet see how the distinct idea of corporeal nature which I find in my imagination can provide any basis for a necessary inference that some body exists.12

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10. Descartes, 1984–91b, ‘Meditation VI’, p. 53.

11. ibid., p. 52.

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12. ibid., p. 51.

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Descartes’s rationality led him not only to doubt the existence of others, but to see knowledge of his own body as constituted by the intellect, rather than self-evident through intuition: ‘Even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination, but by the intellect alone, and … this perception derives not from their being touched or seen but from their being understood.’13 Thus, by an astonishing inversion, rationality becomes not merely constitutive of reason, but of intuition and the body. However, reason is not only rooted in the body, in our bodies, but in the physical and instinctual realm that we share with animals. As Lakoff and Johnson write:

Reason is evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and makes use of forms of perceptual and motor inference present in ‘lower’ animals … Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from other animals; rather, it places us on a continuum with them … Reason is not completely conscious, but mostly unconscious. Reason is not purely literal, but largely metaphorical and imaginative. Reason is not dispassionate, but emotionally engaged … Since reason is shaped by the body, it is not radically free, because the possible human conceptual systems and the possible forms of reason are limited. In addition, once we have learned a conceptual system, it is neurally instantiated in our brains and we are not free to think just anything.14

The very basis of abstract thought, both in its concepts and in the manipulation of those concepts, lies in metaphors drawn from the body: ‘Reason is imaginative in that bodily inference forms are mapped onto abstract modes of inference by metaphor.’15

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13. ibid., ‘Meditation II’, p. 22.

14. Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, pp. 4–5.

15. ibid., p. 77.

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Descartes is one of the first and greatest exemplars of the left hemisphere’s salience in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. If one thinks back to the neuropsychological literature on the appreciation of time, which has formed a significant part of my analysis of the differences between right and left hemisphere, and I believe casts light on the process of reason in early Greek paradox, one is struck by the view of time held by Descartes. According to Charles Sherover, Descartes had ‘problems with the very idea of temporal continuity, epitomised in his conviction that each moment is a somehow irreducible real self-enclosed atomic point in the structure of the universe, and is devoid of any sustaining continuity with any other moment’.16

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16. Sherover, 1989, p. 281. See Descartes, 1984–91b: ‘it does not follow from the fact that I existed a little while ago that I must exist now, unless there is some cause which as it were creates me afresh at this moment … it is quite clear to anyone who attentively considers the nature of time that the same power and action are needed to preserve anything at each individual moment of its duration as would be required to create that thing anew if it were not yet in existence’ (‘Meditation III’, p. 33); ‘there is no relation of dependence between the present time and the immediately preceding time’ (‘Objections and Replies’, Second Set, Axiom II, p. 116); and ‘this can be plainly demonstrated from my explanation of the independence of the divisions of time … the individual moments can be separated from those immediately preceding and succeeding them, which implies that the thing which endures may cease to be at any given moment’ (‘Objections and Replies’, Fifth Set, §9, p. 255).

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A number of aspects of Descartes’s philosophical stance can be summarised. Detached from the body, its tiresome emotions and its intimations of mortality, he aspired to be ‘a spectator rather than an actor in all the comedies’ the world displays.17 All-seeing, but no longer bodily or affectively engaged with the world, Descartes experiences the world as a representation. That has its rewards for Descartes, but it also has some profoundly negative consequences, not just for us, but for him. It is true that it enables him to achieve his prized goals of certainty and fixity, but it does so at the expense of content. Then again: objectification is, sure enough, a means to domination and control, but it succeeds by a strategy from which the ego itself cannot escape. Here is Levin:

The ego’s possibility of mastering, dominating and controlling required, in turn, that objectification – reification – must be given priority, for objectification is the way that the world is brought before us in representation, made available for our technological mastering, and subjected to our domination. But the final ironic twist in the logic of this process of objectification is that it escapes our control, and we ourselves become its victims, simultaneously reduced to the being-available of mere objects and reduced to the being of a purely inner subjectivity that is no longer recognised as enjoying any truth, any reality.18

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17. Descartes, 1984–91a, p. 125 (emphasis added). With greater wisdom, Bacon had written of Pythagoras, who made a similar claim: ‘In this theatre of man’s life, it is reserved only for God and Angels to be lookers on’ (1857, p. 421).

18. Levin, 1999, pp. 52–3.

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Each of these facets of Descartes’s predicament recapitulates the phenomenology of schizophrenia. The sense of being a passive observer of life, not an actor in it, is related to the passivity phenomena that are a primary characteristic of the condition. Many of the paintings by sufferers show an all-observing eye, detached from the scene it observes, floating in the picture.

Affective non-engagement could be said to be the hallmark of schizophrenia. The sense that the world is merely a representation (‘play-acting’) is very common, part of the inability to trust one’s senses, enhanced by the feeling of unreality that non-engagement brings in its wake – nothing is what it seems. Such an inability to accept the self-evident nature of sensory experience leads to an emptying out of meaning. There is a characteristic combination of omnipotence and impotence, of being all there is and yet nothing at all, which again follows from the lack of betweenness with what is, with the shared world of common experience.

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My purpose here is not to discount Descartes, but to illuminate the links between his philosophical enterprise and the experience of schizophrenia, which, as John Cutting has shown, appears to be a state in which the sufferer relies excessively on (an abnormally functioning) left hemisphere.19 I would argue that in all its major predilections – divorce from the body, detachment from human feeling, the separation of thought from action in the world, concern with clarity and fixity, the triumph of representation over what is present to sensory experience, in its reduction of time to a succession of atomistic moments, and in its tendency to reduce the living to the devitalised and mechanical – the philosophy of Descartes belongs to the world as construed by the left hemisphere.

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19. Cutting, 1997.

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DEVITALISATION AND THE NEED FOR CERTAINTY

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the view of vitality, as the Romantics would come to see it, as the result of imagination bringing something into being between ourselves and whatever it is that exists ‘out there’, in which we act as fashioners of our own experience (as the right hemisphere experiences whatever it is that lies outside the brain).23

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23. ‘The human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants … one being is elevated above another in proportion as he possesses this capability. For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies’ (Wordsworth, 1973, pp. 24–5).

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In his book The Roots of Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin lays out what it was about the Enlightenment that Romanticism later came to put in question. He refers to ‘the three propositions … upon which the whole Western tradition rested’: namely, ‘that all genuine questions can be answered, that if a question cannot be answered it is not a question’; ‘that all these answers are knowable, that they can be discovered by means which can be learnt and taught to other persons’; and ‘that all the answers must be compatible with one another’.26 These tenets could be said to be the foundations of Enlightenment thinking. When Berlin refers to the ‘Western tradition’, he is speaking of the Western philosophical tradition, that is, that part of Western culture dealing in explicit fashion with the resolution of ‘questions’ and ‘answers’. Although philosophers in the West since the time of Plato had behaved as though these tenets, Berlin’s three propositions, were true, there was, until the time of the Enlightenment, enough implicit expression of cultural wisdom through the media of poetry, drama, painting, and, above all, religious ritual – in all of which it is easily perceived as far from true that all questions can be answered, that all answers can be taught, and that all answers are mutually compatible – that these tenets, though important in philosophy, had not come to shape the culture itself. But with the heightened self-awareness of the Enlightenment, these three, obviously false, propositions came to dominate not just academic philosophy, but the business of life itself; or, to look at it another way, in what became known as the age of les philosophes, we all became philosophers malgré nous.

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26. I. Berlin, 1999, pp. 21–2.

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The right hemisphere bid for reason, in which opposites can be held in balance, was swiftly transformed into a move toward left-hemisphere rationality, in which one of the two must exclude, even annihilate, the other. The impulse towards harmony was replaced with the impulse towards singleness and purity.

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If one looks at Reynolds’ Discourses, for example, a hugely influential book in its day, based on a series of lectures delivered to the Royal Academy between 1769 and 1791, one finds him criticising great figures of Renaissance art, such as Bernini, for portraying mixed emotions, something that had once been, and later would again be, considered a sign of genius. (Fortunately, Reynolds, whose writings were a consistent target for Blake, did not stick to his precepts in his own painting.) Where reason respects the implicit, the ambiguous, the unresolved, rationality demands the explicit, the clear and the complete.

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DECEPTIVE CLARITY

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35. Mill, 2003, p. 66 (emphasis in original).

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The powerful all-surveying, all-capturing eye achieved its apotheosis in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.

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Mill wrote of him that

he had neither internal experience nor external … He never knew prosperity and adversity, passion nor satiety … He knew no dejection, no heaviness of heart. He never felt life a sore and a weary burthen. He was a boy to the last … How much of human nature slumbered in him he knew not, neither can we know. Other ages and other nations were a blank to him for the purposes of instruction. He measured them but by one standard; their knowledge of facts, and their capability to take correct views of utility, and merge all other objects in it … Knowing so little of human feelings, he knew still less of the influences by which those feelings are formed: all the more subtle workings both of the mind upon itself, and of external things upon the mind, escaped him; and no one, probably, who, in a highly instructed age, ever attempted to give a rule to all human conduct, set out with a more limited conception either of the agencies by which human conduct is, or of those by which it should be, influenced.35

Note: Zuckerberg

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As Mill suggests, Bentham wished to ‘give a rule’ to human conduct: he saw himself as a legislator of all that had hitherto gone unlegislated.36 He was a vehement critic of intuitive wisdom. ‘His lifelong distaste for organised religion – which he called “The Jug”, short for juggernaut’, writes Huw Richards, ‘was rapidly supplemented by a contempt for the British common law tradition espoused by Blackstone. He saw both as the product of superstition, deference and ancestor-worship, rather than logic and real human needs.’37 His great projects were those of classification; and indeed it was he who invented the words international, codify and maximise. Despite these tendencies to legislate for ‘Society’, Bentham held, in keeping with his personal temperament and with the world as seen by the left hemisphere, that ‘the community is a fictitious body’.38

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36. On reading Helvétius, who gave the opinion that legislation was the most important of earthly pursuits, he gasped: ‘And have I indeed a genius for legislation? I gave myself the answer, fearfully and tremblingly – Yes’ (Bowring, 1838–43, p. 27).

37. Richards, 2005.

38. Bentham, 2003, p. 18.

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It might be anticipated that Bentham would not look favourably on poetry, and in this he can speak for a number of voices from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. ‘Prose’, he wrote, and I would like to suppose that there was here at least some self-mocking humour, ‘is where all the lines but the last go on to the margin – poetry is where some of them fall short of it.’40 However, elsewhere, I have to admit, he wrote in all apparent seriousness that

prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin: poetry and music are relished only by a few. The game of push-pin is always innocent: it were well could the same be always asserted of poetry. Indeed, between poetry and truth there is a natural opposition: false morals and fictitious nature.41

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40. Bentham, letter to Lord Holland dated 31 October 1808 (1838–43, vol. 10, p. 442).

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41. Bentham, ‘The Rational of Reward’ (1825) (1838–43, vol. 2, p. 253).

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Poetry was more easily subverted in this age of consummate prose. Poetry was a form of flattering lie: Lord Chesterfield recommended his son to tear a couple of sheets from a book of Latin poetry and take them with him to the ‘necessary-house’, where, once he had read them, he could ‘send them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina’ (the goddess of sewers);43 which led Keats to write of him that he ‘would not bathe in the same River with lord C. though I had the upper hand of the stream.’44 The Enlightenment belief was that there was a finite set of possible true ideas or thoughts, and that they existed in the abstract and were subsequently given embodiment in language. In this way they were certain and known, but they could be made to look new by wearing new clothes. Poetry adorned ideas with decorous clothing that would enable us to take pleasure in the familiar, but it did not bring new experiences. This was what lay behind Pope’s famous line in praise of intelligent poetry: ‘What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d’, and he continued: ‘Expression is the dress of thought …’45 This later formed the basis of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s attack on the Augustans in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, since they saw poetry as the work of the imagination, which is genuinely creative, in the sense that it brings new experiences into being – not as the work of fantasy, which merely recombines what we are already familiar with in a new way. This view is in line with Scheler’s perception of the nature of poetry, which I quote at length because I know of no better exposition of this crucial point:

For this reason poets, and all makers of language having the ‘god-given power to tell of what they suffer’ [Goethe, Marienbader Elegie], fulfil a far higher function than that of giving noble and beautiful expression to their experiences and thereby making them recognisable to the reader, by reference to his own past experience of this kind. For by creating new forms of expression, the poets soar above the prevailing network of ideas in which our experience is confined, as it were, by ordinary language; they enable the rest of us to see, for the first time, in our own experience, something which may answer to these new and richer forms of expression, and by so doing they actually extend the scope of our possible self-awareness. They effect a real enlargement of the kingdom of the mind and make new discoveries, as it were, within that kingdom. It is they who open up new branches and channels in our apprehension of the stream and thereby show us for the first time what we are experiencing. That is indeed the mission of all true art: not to reproduce what is already given (which would be superfluous), nor to create something in the pure play of subjective fancy (which can only be transitory and must necessarily be a matter of complete indifference to other people), but to press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul, to see and communicate those objective realities within it which rule and convention have hitherto concealed. The history of art may be seen, therefore, as a series of expeditions against the intuitable world, within and without, to subdue it for our comprehension; and that for a kind of comprehension which no science could ever provide. An emotion, for example, which everyone can now perceive in himself, must once have been wrested by some ‘poet’ from the fearful inarticulacy of our inner life for this clear perception of it to be possible: just as in commerce things (such as tea, coffee, pepper, salt, etc.), which were once luxuries, are nowadays articles of everyday use in general supply.46

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43. Stanhope, letter dated 11 December 1747 (1901, vol. 1, p. 192).

44. Keats, letter to Charles Dilke dated 4 March 1820 (2002, p. 429).

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45. Pope, ‘An Essay on Criticism’, lines 298 & 318.

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46. Scheler, 1954, pp. 252–3 (emphases in original).

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SYMMETRY

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the ever-changing, growing, flowing form of the music of Bach contrasts with the self-contained perfection of classical form in Haydn.

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Symmetry is an intriguing concept. In the abstract it is undoubtedly appealing at a very deep level. The word itself means equal measure, and it is a feature of all the ideal typical shapes of ‘regular solids’ beloved of the Greeks. In mathematics the term refers not just to symmetry about an axis, but to any procedure which one can perform on an object and leave it unchanged. It also signifies independence from contingency – in other words, universality: if a law obeys symmetry, it is universally applicable. Newtonian mechanics obey symmetry. All these meanings ally it with the realm of stasis, of universals, of simple, ideal forms: the left hemisphere. Oddly, though, symmetry does not appear in the phenomenal world, although it is approximated by living things, which on closer inspection are, however, like the brain, not truly symmetrical, and are constantly moving and changing.

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The relationship between the left hemisphere and equality is a consequence of its categorical method. Where one is dealing with individual people or things, when one respects the contingencies of the situation in which they find themselves, and by which they are modified, when one accepts that the things or persons themselves and the context are continually subject to change, no two entities are ever equal in any respect. (Cassirer notes that in Arabic there are between five and six thousand terms for ‘camel’, the category for which we have one.)55 However, once the items are classified and entered into categories, they become equal: at least from the standpoint of the categoriser every member of the category can be substituted by any other member of the category. In that sense there is an equalising drive built into the categorising system. But the categories themselves are nonetheless arranged in a hierarchical taxonomy, which means that, while the individual variations of living things are flattened out, the differences between categories become where the inequality resides.

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So it is with the left hemisphere and stasis. Because the left hemisphere is dealing with things that are known, they have to have a degree of fixity: if their constantly changing nature is respected, they cannot be known. To the left hemisphere, a thing once known does not change, though it may move, or be moved, atomistically, according to the will, and it must indeed be made to move to fit in with the categorisations of the left hemisphere’s will. Thus, where the left-hemisphere world obtains, the continual change and the individual differences of actual living things are exchanged for stasis and equality, as the butterfly is skewered, unmoving, a specimen in the collector’s cabinet. At the same time, however, the left hemisphere achieves, through this process, power to manipulate, which I would claim has always been its drive. Power inevitably leads to inequality: some categories of things are more useful, and therefore more valued, than others. So the differences inherent in actual individual things or beings are lost, but those derived from the system are substituted. Similarly, though the thing itself no longer changes, manipulation inevitably leads to change: the recalcitrance of the particular is subjected to the Procrustean bed of the category it represents. So the changing, evolving nature of individual things or beings is lost, but those changes demanded by the system are substituted. And change and difference, outlawed at the individual level, return by the back door.

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THE PURSUIT OF EQUALITY

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The American Revolution, with its famous claims for the individual right to pursue happiness, expresses the left hemisphere’s belief that any good – happiness, for example – should be susceptible to the pursuit of the will, aided by rationality. In doing so it has illuminated the paradoxical nature of rationality: that while the rational mind must pursue ‘the good’, the most valuable things cannot be pursued (the pursuit of happiness has not generally led to happiness). Such valuable things can come only as side effects of something else.

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The left hemisphere misunderstands the importance of implicitness. There is therefore a problem for it, that certain logically desirable goals simply cannot be directly pursued, because direct pursuit changes their nature and they flee from approach: thus the direct pursuit of liberty, equality and fraternity – despite being fine ideals – is problematic. The French Revolution famously championed liberty, equality and fraternity. The problem with bringing them to the fore as concepts and going for them explicitly, left-hemisphere fashion, rather than allowing them to emerge as the necessary accompaniment of a certain tolerant disposition towards the world, right-hemisphere fashion, is that they can be only negative entities once they become the province of the left hemisphere. This is because the left hemisphere, despite its view of itself as bringing things about, can only say ‘no’ or not say ‘no’ to what it finds given to it by the right hemisphere (just as the right hemisphere in turn can only say no or not say no to ‘the Other’, i.e. whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves: see Chapter 5 above). Thus, since there is no equality in the givenness of things as they actually appear to the right hemisphere, equality becomes, for the left hemisphere, a need and a drive to pull down anything that stands out as not equalling ‘equality’ – the essentially negative sense in which equality was pursued through the mayhem and carnage of the French Revolution.

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Neither is there any liberty in what is given by the right hemisphere, which delivers the world as a living web of interdependencies that require responses, and entail responsibility – not the exhilarating nihilism of ‘liberty’, in the sense of casting off all constraints. The liberty of the left hemisphere is, as is bound to be the case, an abstract concept, not what experience teaches us through living. This is what Edmund Burke was getting at in his 1775 speech on conciliation with America, when he said that ‘abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found’.57 The left hemisphere’s version of liberty is a mere concept, not the freedom which can be experienced only through belonging, within a complex of constraints. Instead, because it has to positively do something (but the only thing it can do is to say ‘no’), it is obliged to proceed by negation: to set about eroding and dismantling the structures of naturally evolved traditional communities in which such experience of liberty could be achieved, seeing them as impediments to its own version of an unconstrainedly free society.

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57. Burke, 1881, p. 178.

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Fraternity too lives in the relationships that are formed in the communities of kinship and society made possible by evolution of the right frontal lobe (not ‘Society’, a conceptual construct of the left hemisphere). The left hemisphere version of this is a sort of association of labour (Gesellschaft, in Tönnies’ terms, as opposed to Gemeinschaft)58 and the bureaucratic provision of what is called ‘care’, at the same time that the network of private and personal bonds and responsibilities in communities, in which fraternal feelings and the actual experience of care are made possible, is eroded.

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58. Tönnies, 1887.

59. de Tocqueville, 2003, pp. 723–4.

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The American Revolution is a rather different matter; for one thing, it was notably lacking in ‘Jacobins’. Its approach was not to do as much as possible to bring into being freedom by an effort of will (the French model), but as little as possible: a laissez-faire approach which approximates to Berlin’s concept of negative liberty – as few restraints as possible. As such it enjoyed, unlike the French Revolution, the support of Burke. Whatever its rhetoric, its aim was the reduction of formal restrictions on society, while maximising communality, largely in the interests of economic well-being. Democracy as Jefferson saw it, with its essentially local, agrarian, communitarian, organic, structure, was in harmony with the ideals of the right hemisphere. But in time it came to be swept away by the large-scale, rootless, mechanical force of capitalism, a left-hemisphere product of the Enlightenment. What de Tocqueville presciently saw was that the lack of what I would see as right-hemisphere values incorporated in the fabric of society would lead in time to a process in which we became, despite ourselves, subject to bureaucracy and servitude to the State: ‘It will be a society which tries to keep its citizens in “perpetual childhood” it will seek to preserve their happiness, but it chooses to be the sole agent and only arbiter of that happiness.’ Society will, he says, develop a new kind of servitude which

covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate … it does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which government is the shepherd.59

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This is, as John Passmore puts it, ‘Benthamite or Fabian perfection made manifest’.60

That this dislocation between the ideal and the reality has tended to obtain wherever societies have most stridently identified themselves with Enlightenment concepts (the ‘people’s democracies’ of the world) is explained at one level perhaps by Elster’s paradox that rationality contains the seeds of its own destruction. At another level, it is an expression of the reality that the left hemisphere cannot bring something to life: it can only say ‘no’ or not say ‘no’ to what it finds given to it by the right hemisphere. Once again this is Blake’s perception that: ‘Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy’ (see p. 200).

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60. Passmore, 1970, p. 267.

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The most obvious expression of the necessarily negative force of the left hemisphere’s project is the way in which the ideals of liberty, justice and fraternity led to the illiberal, unjust, and far from fraternal, guillotine. Anything that is essentially sacramental, anything that is not founded on rationality, but on bonds of reverence or awe (right-hemisphere terrain), becomes the enemy of the left hemisphere, and constitutes a bar to its supremacy; and so the left hemisphere is committed to its destruction. That there were, as at the Reformation, abuses of power, is not in doubt, and in the case of both priests and monarch, these were sometimes justified by reference to divine authority, an intolerable state of affairs. But, as at the Reformation, it is not the abuse, but the thing abused – not idolatry, but images, not corrupt priests but the sacerdotal and the sacred – that become the targets. The sheer vehemence of the attacks on priests and king during the French Revolution suggest not just a misunderstanding of, but a fear of, their status as metaphors, and of the right hemisphere non-utilitarian values for which they metaphorically act.

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The destruction of the sacerdotal power of the Church was a goal of the French Revolution, as it had been of the Reformation. The Reformation, however, had not been nakedly, explicitly, secular: it had purported to replace a corrupt religion with a purified one. All the same its effect had been to transfer power from the sacerdotal base of the Catholic Church to the state, an essential part of the relentless process of secularisation, in the broadest sense – by which I mean the re-presentation of human experience in purely rationalistic terms, necessarily exclusive of the Other, and the insistence that all questions concerning morality and human welfare can and should be settled within those terms – which I would see as the agenda of the left hemisphere. The French Revolution, by contrast, was indeed openly opposed to the Church, but its most daring attack was on the sacramental, necessarily metaphorical, nature of royalty (and by extension the aristocrats, whose authority was reciprocally related to that of the monarchy). At the time of the Reformation, the effigies of saints had sometimes been dragged to the public square and there decapitated by the town’s executioner. This not only in itself prefigures the French Revolution, and emphasises the continuity between regicide and the abolition of the sacramental, but also powerfully enacts two other left-hemisphere tendencies that characterise both the Reformation and the Enlightenment, to which we now might turn.

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While the Enlightenment, then, was apparently all about enlightening our darkness, it had a dark side of its own. It is ‘a mental disorder’ wrote Descartes, ‘which prizes the darkness higher than the light’.67 Descartes was rather keen on branding those who saw things differently from himself as mad. Dominated by the left hemisphere, his world is one of comedy and light – he was, after all, the spectator in all the comedies the world displays. But there is madness here, too, which, as I have suggested, approximates the madness of schizophrenia. The successors to the Enlightenment, the Romantics, who I shall argue belonged to a world more dominated by the right hemisphere, saw, instead of comedy and light, tragedy and darkness, their ‘madness’ approximating that of melancholia and depression. But darkness was not to be banished by a fiat of the Enlightenment, either.

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67. Descartes, 1984–91d, ‘Rule IX’, p. 33 (the translation here preferred is that of Haldane & Ross: see Descartes, 1911, vol. 1, p. 29).

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THE UNCANNY

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The uncanny was seen by Freud as the repression of something that should not be seen, that should not come into the light. My argument in previous chapters has been that the rise of modern Western man is associated with an accentuation of the difference between the hemispheres, in other words the evolution of a more, rather than less, ‘bicameral’ mind. The further accentuation of this difference in the Enlightenment, through the striving for an objective, scientific detachment – independent as far as possible of the ‘confounding’ effects of whatever is personal or intuitive, or whatever cannot be made explicit and rationally defended – led to an entrenchment of this separation. Much as the voices of the gods, from being a naturally integrated part of the world as experienced, came to appear alien to the Ancient Greeks, so at the Enlightenment the promptings of the right hemisphere, excluded from the world of rationalising discourse in the left hemisphere, came to be seen as alien. I believe this is the origin of the rise of the experience of the ‘uncanny’, the darker side of the age of the Enlightenment.

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In her absorbing study of the phenomenon, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, Terry Castle explores the elements of phantasmagoria, grotesquerie, carnivalesque travesty, hallucinatory reveries, paranoia, and nightmarish fantasy which accompanied Enlightenment.68 There is an important common element to the classic loci of the uncanny. Citing Freud’s famous essay of 1919, ‘The “Uncanny”’, Castle refers to

doubles, dancing dolls and automata, waxwork figures, alter egos, and ‘mirror selves’, spectral emanations, detached body parts (‘a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, feet that dance by themselves’), the ghastly fantasy of being buried alive, omens, precognition, déjà vu …69

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69. ibid., pp. 4–5. The passage Castle quotes in brackets is based on Freud, 1960e, p. 244.

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I would argue that these phenomena are related to the experiences of subjects with schizophrenia – living things experienced as mechanisms, or as simulacra of living beings, the living body become an assemblage of apparently independently moving fragments, the self losing its intuitive ipseity, no longer self-evidently unique, but possibly copied, reproduced, or subtly altered; and that, accordingly, the phenomena exemplify the disengaged workings of the left hemisphere, attempting to make sense in its own terms of what comes to it from the right hemisphere, from which it has become alienated. Indeed the experience of the uncanny could be said to be the defining experience of schizophrenia as first described by Kraepelin and Bleuler – what is known in current psychiatric terminology as ‘delusional mood’, in which the experienced world is bizarrely altered in a way that is hard to define, and appears vaguely sinister and threatening.

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Freud was in fact quoting Schelling’s formulation when he held that the uncanny is what should have remained hidden, but has been brought to light; in the uncanny, he saw evidence of past experience that had been repressed, a dark secret that is dragged into the light of consciousness. Freud emphasises that the uncanny effect does not proceed automatically from the idea of the supernatural in itself. Children imagine their dolls to be alive, for example, and there are fantastic occurrences in fairy tales, but neither of these are in any sense uncanny. The ghost appears in Hamlet, but however gloomy and terrible it is made to seem, it does not have the quality of the uncanny. In all these cases there is a context that is acknowledged to be removed from that of everyday reality. It is, as Freud says, when the story-teller rejects the possibility of supernatural happenings and ‘pretends to move in the world of common reality’ that the uncanny occurs. It represents the possibility, terrifying to the rational, left-hemisphere mind, that phenomena beyond what we can understand and control may truly exist. The uncanny takes its force from the context in which it appears. The phenomena of the right hemisphere appear uncanny once they appear in the context of the left-hemisphere world of the rational, the mechanistic, the certain, the humanly controlled.

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Notes