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The Master and His Emissary CHAPTER 12 THE MODERN AND POST-MODERN WORLDS

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

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Modernity was marked by a process of social disintegration which clearly derived from the effects of the Industrial Revolution, but which could also be seen to have its roots in Comte’s vision of society as an aggregation of essentially atomistic individuals. The drift from rural to urban life, again both a consequence of the realities of industrial expansion and of the Enlightenment quest for an ideal society untrammelled by the fetters of the past, led to a breakdown of familiar social orders, and the loss of a sense of belonging, with far-reaching effects on the life of the mind. The advances of scientific materialism, on the one hand, and of bureaucracy on the other, helped to produce what Weber called the disenchanted world. Capitalism and consumerism, ways of conceiving human relationships based on little more than utility, greed, and competition, came to supplant those based on felt connection and cultural continuity. The state, the representative of the organising, categorising and subjugating forces of systematic conformity, was beginning to show itself to be an overweening presence even in democracies. And there were worrying signs that the combination of an adulation of power and material force with the desire, and power (through technological advance) to subjugate, would lead to the abandonment of any form of democracy, and the rise of totalitarianism.

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The effects of abstraction, bureaucratisation and social dislocation on personal identity have been themes of sociology since Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, and their effects on consciousness in modernity have been explored in works such as The Homeless Mind, by Peter Berger and colleagues.2 Pervasive rationalistic, technical and bureaucratic ways of thinking have emptied life of meaning by destroying what Berger calls the ‘sacred canopy’ of meanings reflecting collective beliefs about life, death and the world in which we live. The resultant anomie, or loss of all bearings, the demise of any shared structure of values, leads to a sort of existential angst.

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In his book on the subject, Modernity and Self-identity,3 Anthony Giddens describes the characteristic disruption of space and time required by globalisation, itself the necessary consequence of industrial capitalism, which destroys the sense of belonging, and ultimately of individual identity. He refers to what he calls ‘disembedding mechanisms’, the effect of which is to separate things from their context, and ourselves from the uniqueness of place, what he calls ‘locale’. Real things and experiences are replaced by symbolic tokens; ‘expert’ systems replace local know-how and skill with a centralised process dependent on rules. The result is an abstraction and virtualisation of life. He sees a dangerous form of positive feedback, whereby theoretical positions, once promulgated, dictate the reality that comes about, since they are then fed back to us through the media, which form, as much as reflect, reality. The media also promote fragmentation by a random juxtaposition of items of information, as well as permitting the ‘intrusion of distant events into everyday consciousness’, another aspect of decontextualisation in modern life adding to loss of meaning in the experienced world.4

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Giddens, 1991.

4. ibid., p. 27.

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5. Panksepp, 1998, p. 262.

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6. ibid., pp. 248 & 402, n. 7. See also Panksepp & DeEskinazi, 1980.

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7. Putnam, 2000.

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The ‘homeless’ mind: attachment to place runs deep in us. In neurological terms, the evolutionary roots of the integrated emotional system involved in the formation of social attachments may lie in more ancient and primitive animal attachments to place.5 Some animals bond as much with their nest sites as with their mothers.6 ‘Belonging’ comes from the same Old English word langian which forms the root of ‘longing’. It means a sense of powerful emotional attachment to ‘my place’, where I am ‘at home’, and implies a sense of permanence. In the last hundred years this has come increasingly under attack from at least three of the defining features of modernity: mobility, which ensures a permanently changing population, who do not necessarily have any prior attachment to the place where they now find themselves; an extreme pace of change in the physical environment, fuelled by consumption, the need for convenience of transport, exploitation of the natural world, the transformation of agriculture from an ancient culture into a business, and increasing urbanisation, all of which results in the familiar scene quickly becoming alien; and the fragmentation of social bonds within communities, for a host of reasons, devastatingly and meticulously captured in a work such as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, leaving us feeling less and less as if we belong anywhere.7

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Thus our attachments, the web of relations which give life meaning, all come to be disrupted. Continuities of space and time are related: the loss of sense of place threatens identity, whether personal, or cultural, over time – the sense of a place not just where we were born and will die, but where our forefathers did, and our children’s children will. Continuities of time are disrupted as the traditions that embody them are disrupted or discarded, ways of thinking and behaving change no longer gradually and at a pace that the culture can absorb, but radically, rapidly and with the implicit, and at times explicit, aim of erasing the past. And, as Putnam demonstrates, the sense of community – the ultimate attachment, connectedness with one another – also weakens radically.

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The changes that characterise modernism, the culture of modernity, then, are far deeper and wider than their manifestation in art. They represent, I believe, a world increasingly dominated by the left hemisphere, and increasingly antagonistic to what the right hemisphere might afford.

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In his account of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, Toulmin sees a relationship between social, religious and political conflict, on the one hand, and the hungering for certainty that was exhibited in the science and philosophy of the age. Though he makes the perhaps understandable assumption that the first was the cause of the second, he himself cannot avoid noticing evidence that the second was, to a greater extent, the cause of the first. For the previous age of the humanists had been just as wracked by uncertainties in the social sphere, as in religion and politics, but a different attitude towards certainty had prevailed amongst its thinkers and writers. It was the hunger for certainty in the later period, representing in my view a shift towards the left hemisphere’s values, priorities and modes of being, that led to a hardening of positions on all sides, to the relative intransigencies of both scientism and the Counter-Reformation, and to conflict.

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When we come to the twentieth century, Toulmin identifies, I believe rightly, a still greater demand for certainty:

The ideas of ‘strict rationality’ modelled on formal logic, and of a universal ‘method’ for developing new ideas in any field of natural science, were adopted in the 1920s and 1930s with even greater enthusiasm, and in an even more extreme form, than had been the case in the mid-17th century … The Vienna Circle program was … even more formal, exact, and rigorous than those of Descartes or Leibniz. Freed from all irrelevant representation, content, and emotion, the mid-20th-century avant garde trumped the 17th-century rationalists in spades.8

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8. Toulmin, 1990, p. 159 (emphasis in original).

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And here again he makes, mutatis mutandis, the same assumption: that the demand for certainty was a response to the unrest in Europe occasioned by Fascism and Stalinism. I rather doubt that. For one thing the intellectual changes can be seen well before the rise of totalitarianism. What if Fascism and Stalinism were facets of the same mental world as modernism, both of them expressions of the deep structure of the left hemisphere’s world?

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MODERNISM AND THE LEFT HEMISPHERE

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I will return to that question in due course. First let’s see if there is any more direct evidence of a growing domination of the culture by left-hemisphere ways of conceiving the world. What would we expect to see?

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Let me briefly recap. In cases where the right hemisphere is damaged, we see a range of clinically similar problems to those found in schizophrenia. In either group, subjects find it difficult to understand context, and therefore have problems with pragmatics, and with appreciating the ‘discourse elements’ of communication. They have similar problems in understanding tone, interpreting facial expressions, expressing and interpreting emotion, and understanding the presuppositions that lie behind another’s point of view. They have similar problems with Gestalt perception and the understanding and grasping of wholes. They have similar problems with intuitive processing, and similar deficits in understanding metaphor. Both exhibit problems with appreciating narrative, and both tend to lose a sense of the natural flow of time, which becomes substituted by a succession of moments of stasis.9 Both report experiencing the related Zeitraffer phenomenon in visual perception (something that can sometimes be seen represented in the art works of schizophrenic subjects). Both appear to have a deficient sense of the reality or substantiality of experience (‘it’s all play-acting’), as well as of the uniqueness of an event, object or person. Perhaps most significantly they have a similar lack of what might be called common sense. In both there is a loss of the stabilising, coherence-giving, framework-building role that the right hemisphere fulfils in normal individuals. Both exhibit a reduction in pre-attentive processing and an increase in narrowly focussed attention, which is particularistic, over-intellectualising and inappropriately deliberate in approach. Both rely on piecemeal decontextualised analysis, rather than on an intuitive, spontaneous or global mode of apprehension. Both tend to schematise – for example, to scrutinise the behaviour of others, rather as a visitor from another culture might, to discover the ‘rules’ which explain their behaviour. The living become machine-like: as if to confirm the primacy of the left hemisphere’s view of the world, one schizophrenic patient described by Sass reported that ‘the world consists of tools, and … everything that we glance at has some utilization’.10 From neuroimaging, too, there is evidence that schizophrenics show abnormal patterns of brain activation, often showing excessive left-hemisphere activation in situations where one would expect more activation of the right hemisphere. This goes across a whole range of activities: for example, even the sense of smell appears to be abnormally lateralised. There is a decrease in expected right-hemisphere activation in limbic connections to the rhinencephalon (smell brain) and right orbitofrontal cortex, and an increase in left hemisphere activity during olfaction.11 When one considers how critical the sense of smell is for infant–mother bonding, and social bonding of all kinds, and the part it plays in grounding our world in intuition and the body, one appreciates that, tiny as this piece of the jigsaw may be, it is not insignificant.12 The right hemisphere is not functioning normally, and the left hemisphere takes its place. And, as it happens, drugs that help stabilise schizophrenia act to reduce dopaminergic activity, a form of neurotransmission on which the left hemisphere is dependent to a greater extent than the right.13

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9. Sass, 1992, pp. 159–60.

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10. ibid., p. 168.

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11. Moberg & Turetsky, 2006; Clark, Kopala, Hurwitz et al., 1991; Bertollo, Cowen & Levy, 1996; Moberg, Agrin, Gur et al., 1999.

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12. Indeed for the relation between the sense of smell and empathy, see Spinella, 2002.

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13. It is particularly relevant that the current version of the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia, the most widely espoused theory of the genesis of schizophrenia, proposes an interaction between a posterior dopamine hyperactivity and a frontal dopamine hypoactivity, which, on the basis that the frontal lobe inhibits posterior activity in the same hemisphere, compounds the effect of a preponderant, though aberrant, left hemisphere in schizophrenia: Laruelle, Kegeles & Abi-Dargham, 2003; Abi-Dargham, 2004.

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There are, then, remarkable similarities between individuals with schizophrenia and those whose right hemisphere is not functioning normally. This is hardly surprising since there is a range of evidence suggesting that just such an imbalance in favour of the left hemisphere occurs in schizophrenia.14 If that is what happens in individuals, could a culture dominated by left-hemisphere modes of apprehension begin to exhibit such features?

Odd as it may sound, there is striking and substantial evidence of precisely that.

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MODERNISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA: THE CORE PHENOMENOLOGY

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The importance of Sass’s work is that it demonstrates how the nature of attention alters what it finds; and specifically that when we cease to act, to be involved, spontaneous and intuitive, and instead become passive, disengaged, self-conscious, and stare in an ‘objective’ fashion at the world around us, it becomes bizarre, alien, frightening – and curiously similar to the mental world of the schizophrenic. Sass explores the idea that ‘madness … is the end-point of the trajectory [that] consciousness follows when it separates from the body and the passions, and from the social and practical world, and turns in upon itself’.17 For Sass, as for Wittgenstein, there is a close relation between philosophy and madness. The philosopher’s ‘predilection for abstraction and alienation – for detachment from body, world and community’,18 can produce a type of seeing and experiencing which is, in a literal sense, pathological.

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17. Sass, 1994, p. 12.

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18. ibid., p. x.

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In Wittgenstein’s own words, ‘staring is closely bound up with the whole puzzle of solipsism’.19 Over-awareness itself alienates us from the world and leads to a belief that only we, or our thought processes, are real. If this seems curiously reminiscent of Descartes’s finding that the only reliable truth was that his own thought processes guaranteed that he, at least, existed, that is not accidental. The detached, unmoving, unmoved observer feels that the world loses reality, becomes merely ‘things seen’. Attention is focussed on the field of consciousness itself, not on the world beyond, and we seem to experience experience. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein actually notes that when this kind of staring attention takes over, others appear to lack consciousness, to be automata rather than minds (as Descartes had also found). This is a common experience in schizophrenia and a core experience of Schreber’s. There is a lack of seeing through, to whatever there is beyond.

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19. Rees, 1968, quoted in Sass, op. cit., p. 35.

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Engagement reverses this process. Wittgenstein’s own ‘anti-philosophy’ is seen as an attempt to restore sanity to the philosophical mind caught up in the hyperconsciousness of metaphysical thought. He noted that when we act or interact – even, perhaps, if all we do is to walk about in our surroundings rather than sit still and stare at them – we are obliged to reckon with the ‘otherness’ of things. As Sass puts it, ‘the very weight of the object, the resistance it offers to the hand, testify to its existence as something independent of will or consciousness’; moving an object ‘confirms one’s own experience of activity and efficacy’.20 One is reminded of Johnson’s response to Berkeley’s idealism by kicking a stone, and saying: ‘I refute it thus.’

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20. Sass, 1994, p. 35.

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Although the phenomenology of schizophrenia comprises an array of symptoms and experiences, these relate to a group of core disturbances in the relationship between the self and the world. Perhaps the single most important one is what Sass calls hyperconsciousness. Elements of the self and of experience which normally remain, and need to remain, intuitive, unconscious, become the objects of a detached, alienating attention; and levels of consciousness multiply, so that there is an awareness of one’s own awareness, and so on. The result of this is a sort of paralysis, in which even everyday ‘automatic’ actions such as moving one leg in front of another in order to walk, can become problematic. ‘I am not sure of my own movements any more’, says one patient. ‘It’s very hard to describe this but at times I’m not sure about even simple actions like sitting down. It’s not so much thinking out what to do, it’s the doing of it that sticks me …’ Another says: ‘People just do things, but I have to watch first to see how you do things …’ And another: ‘I have to do everything step by step, nothing is automatic now. Everything has to be considered …’22 This goes with an inability to trust one’s own body or one’s intuitions. Everything gets dragged into the full glare of consciousness. Ulrich, the antihero of Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities, describes being so aware of ‘the leaps that the attention takes, the exertion of the eye-muscles, the pendulum movements of the psyche’ occurring at every moment, that just keeping one’s body vertical in the street is a tremendous effort. This puts one in mind of the psychologist Chris Frith’s identification of the core abnormality in schizophrenia as ‘an awareness of automatic processes which are normally carried out below the level of consciousness’.23

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21. Sass, 1992.

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22. All quotations from patients with schizophrenia in this chapter are taken from Sass, 1992, unless otherwise stated.

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23. Frith, 1979, p. 233.

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Associated with this is what Sass calls a loss of ‘ipseity’, a loss in other words of the pre-reflective, grounding sense of the self.24 The self has to be constructed ‘after the fact’ from the products of observation, and its very existence comes into doubt. This gives rise to a reflexivity, whereby attention is focussed on the self and its body, so that parts of the self come to appear alien. There is a loss of the pre-reflective sense of the body as something living and lived, a loss of the immediate physical and emotional experience which grounds us in the world, since bodily states and feelings fall under the spotlight of awareness, and are deprived of their normal compelling immediacy and intimacy. Emotions lose their normal directedness towards action, towards other beings, arising from a personal past and directed towards a personal future, in a coherent world of other beings.

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24. See Sass & Parnas, 2003, 2007.

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There is a veering between two apparently opposite positions which are in reality aspects of the same position: omnipotence and impotence. Either there is no self; or all that the observing eye sees is in fact part of the self, with the corollary that there is no world apart from the self. Whether there is no self, or everything is embraced in the self, the result is the same, since both conditions lack the normal sense we have of ourselves as defined by an awareness that there exists something apart from ourselves. This position is associated, in schizophrenia, with a subjectivisation of experience: a withdrawal from the external world and a turning of attention inward towards a realm of fantasy. The world comes to lack those characteristics – the ultimate unknowability of aspects of the world that exceed our grasp, and the recalcitrance of a realm separate from our fantasy – that suggest a reality that exists apart from our will. At the same time, the world and other people in it are objectified, become objects. In a term borrowed from Heidegger, Sass sees an ‘unworlding’ of the world: a loss of the sense of the overarching context that gives coherence to the world, which becomes fragmented and lacking in meaning.

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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SCHIZOPHRENIA AND MODERNIST ART

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I mentioned the relationship between such experiences and the condition of the introspective philosopher: but, as in the Enlightenment, where increased self-consciousness brought what needed to remain intuitive into the glare of reason, with the result that we all became philosophes malgré nous, the relationship between schizophrenia and modern thought goes further than philosophy proper, into the culture at large. Sass identifies the same phenomena that characterise schizophrenia in the culture at large. ‘I used to cope with all this internally, but my intellectual parts became the whole of me’, says one patient. Compare Kafka, who speaks for the alienated modern consciousness, noting in his diary how introspection ‘will suffer no idea to sink tranquilly to rest but must pursue each one into consciousness, only itself to become an idea, in turn to be pursued by renewed introspection’.26 The process results in a hall of mirrors effect in which the effort at introspection becomes itself objectified. All spontaneity is lost. Disorganisation and fragmentation follow as excessive self-awareness disrupts the coherence of experience. The self-conscious and self-reflexive ponderings of modern intellectual life induce a widely recognisable state of alienated inertia. What is called reality becomes alien and frightening.

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25. See Stanghellini, 2004; Parnas, 2000; Parnas & Sass, 2001; Sass & Parnas, 2003; Sass & Parnas, 2001; Zahavi & Parnas, 1999.

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26. Kafka, 1949, p. 202.

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The disintegrating stare that Wittgenstein noticed is a characteristic of schizophrenia. ‘Persons in the schizophrenia spectrum’, writes Sass elsewhere, ‘often seem to move in on the stimulus field in the sense of engaging in a kind of fixed, penetrating, over-focused stare that dissolves the more commonly recognised Gestalts in favour of their component parts.’27 But it is also a feature of modernism, and, for all of us, it has the effect of bringing about wilfully the fragmented world of the left hemisphere. According to Susan Sontag, it is the mode positively invited in the viewer by modernist art. ‘Traditional art invites a look’, she wrote. ‘[Modernist art] engenders a stare’.28 The stare is not known for building bridges with others, or the world at large: instead it suggests alienation, either a need to control, or a feeling of terrified helplessness.

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27. Sass, 2004, p. 71, citing Goodarzi, Wykes & Hemsley, 2000 (see p. 213 above).

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28. Sontag, 1978, pp. 15–16.

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The effect of hyperconsciousness is to produce a flight from the body and from its attendant emotions. Schizophrenics describe an emptying out of meaning – each word ‘an envelope emptied of content’, as one patient puts it, with thought become so abstract as to attain a sort of ineffable vacuity. They may feel themselves entirely emptied of emotion, except for a pervasive feeling of anxiety or nausea in the face of the sheer existence of things. Bizarre, shocking and painful ideas or actions may be welcomed as a way of trying to relieve this state of numbed isolation. So it is, too, in modernism: Sass compares Antonin Artaud (who himself suffered from schizophrenia): ‘I can’t even find anything that would correspond to feelings’, and suggests that the ‘theatre of cruelty’, which Artaud originated, was a response to this devitalised condition. ‘I wanted a theatre’, he told Anaïs Nin, ‘that would be like a shock treatment, galvanise, shock people into feeling.’29 These sentiments are reminiscent of the explanations given by patients who harm themselves, so as to relieve the numbness of no-feeling. The patient etherised upon a table in the opening of ‘Prufrock’ seems prophetic of the anaesthetised state of modernism, in which everything physical and emotional is cut off.

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29. See Sass, 1992, p. 238 (and p. 187). The quotation from Artaud is from Nin, 1966, p. 229.

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Sass points to a dehumanisation, a disappearance of the active self, in modernism. There is, in its place, a certain fragmentation and passivisation, a loss of the self’s unity and capacity for effective action: either an impersonal subjectivism, such as one finds in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves – ‘subjectivity without a subject’, as he puts it; or alternatively the most extreme kind of objectivism, refusing all empathy, stripping the world of value, as in Robbe-Grillet’s ‘The Secret Room’. This ‘story’ consists of a series of static descriptions of a woman’s corpse. Its cold, clinical detachment expresses better than any purely abstract art the triumph of alienation over natural human feeling, over in fact the body and all that it implies. One could say that the stabbed corpse stands in here for the body in general, and its fate at the hands of modernism. His description of the woman’s flesh and bloody wounds in terms of geometry, the fragmented manner and the disruption of time sequence, all contribute to a sense of unreality, despite Robbe-Grillet’s manifesto of describing what ‘simply is’. Being is not so simple.

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Robbe-Grillet’s story and a number of others are carefully compared by Sass with characteristic schizophrenic discourse. The parallels include lack of a cohesive narrative line, dissolution of character, neglect of conventional space–time structure, loss of comprehensible causal relations, and disruption of the symbol–referent relationship – or, as I would say, the all-important sense of metaphor. Most interestingly schizophrenics emphasise the static, and downplay emotional and dynamic, aspects of the world, evoking a universe more dominated by objects than by processes and actions. This parallels the preferences of the left hemisphere for inanimate things, for stasis, over what is living and evolving.

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In modernism the disruption of narrative, with formal devices drawing attention away from the inherent temporality of language, empties human action and intention of the meaning they have in a world to which we respond, and which responds to us. According to Heidegger, ‘care’ is only possible within temporality, in which we are directed towards our own future, and that of others who share our mortality, a care which is grounded in a coherent past. All of this, coupled with the forcible alienation caused by the bringing into awareness of what is required to remain latent, results in a detachment and irony that are inimical to pathos, a subversive disengagement and spirit of mockery towards life and art. Here is Walter Benjamin:

The art of storytelling is coming to an end … It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences. One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.30

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30. Benjamin, 1969, p. 84.

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If one had to sum up these features of modernism they could probably be reduced to these: an excess of consciousness and an over-explicitness in relation to what needs to remain intuitive and implicit; depersonalisation and alienation from the body and empathic feeling; disruption of context; fragmentation of experience; and the loss of ‘betweenness’. Each of these is in fact to some degree implied in each of the others; and there is a simple reason for that. They are aspects of a single world: not just the world of the schizophrenic, but, as may by now be clear, the world according to the left hemisphere.

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The problem of an unstable alternation between subjectivism and objectivism that Sass identifies in modernism (either polarity being at odds with a world in which there is still what I call betweenness) is associated with a derealisation and ‘unworlding of the world’, just as it is in schizophrenia. The world is either robbed of its substantiality, its ‘otherness’, its ontological status as an entity having any independence from the perceiving subject; or alternatively seen as alien, devoid of human resonance or significance. In either case the ego is passivised. In the one case it is little more than an impotent observer of inner experiences, sensations, images, and so on (derealisation); in the other it is transformed into a machine-like entity in a world of static neutral objects (unworlding). Instead of one consistent inhabited viewpoint, there arises an obvious perspectivism, or relativism, an uncertainty and multiplicity of points of view. This has the effect of either, on the one hand, drawing attention to the presence of a particular perspective, thereby displaying a recognition of its limitedness, or alternatively attempting to transcend such limits by inhabiting a variety of perspectives. This goes with the belief that there is no true world, because everything is, as Nietzsche famously said, but ‘a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us’.31 Though this is something Nietzsche recognised in the modern mind, he did not welcome it: in fact he dreaded its consequences, speaking of that ‘great blood-sucker, the spider scepticism’ and warning that our excessive self-consciousness will destroy us.32 We are the ‘Don Juans of cognition’, he said, whose ‘knowledge will take its revenge on us, as ignorance exacted its revenge in the Middle Ages.’33

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31. Nietzsche, 1968, §15, pp. 14–15.

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32. Nietzsche, 1973 [1886], §209, p. 120.

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There is what Sass calls an aesthetic self-referentiality in modernism, the work of art become ‘a form of drama in which consciousness watches itself in action’ (Valéry);34 either emptying itself of external attachments or representational content, so that the formal elements become themselves the content; or exploiting representational or narrative conventions self-consciously and without context, so that they themselves become the focus of the work. In other words there is a shift of the plane of attention to the surface, whether of the canvas – Greenberg’s famous ‘flatness’ of modernist painting – or of the written medium, to the mechanics of the process of creation, as in the Verfremdungseffekt, in which we no longer suspend our disbelief, but have disbelief thrust upon us. (Schizophrenics experience, precisely, a loss of visual depth. One patient describes the external world as ‘like a two-dimensional transparency, something like an architect’s drawing or plan’.) Attention is focussed on the medium, not on the world beyond that medium, which is effectively denied. The self-reflexive tropes of postmodernist literature and criticism concentrate attention on language, and undercut the possibility of existence beyond language. As Erich Heller says of Nietzsche’s portrait of the ‘last philosopher’: ‘Nothing speaks to him any more – except his own speech; and, deprived of any authority from a divinely ordered universe, it is only about speech that his speech can speak with a measure of philosophical assurance.’35

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33. ‘Der Don Juan der Erkenntniß’: Nietzsche, 1970, Bk. IV, §327, p. 234. In Hollingdale’s translation: ‘The Don Juan of knowledge – no philosopher or poet has yet discovered him. He does not love the things he knows, but has spirit and appetite for and enjoyment of the chase and intrigues of knowledge – up to the highest and remotest stars of knowledge! – until at last there remains to him nothing of knowledge left to hunt down except the absolutely detrimental; he is like the drunkard who ends by drinking absinthe and aqua fortis. Thus in the end he lusts after Hell – it is the last knowledge that seduces him. Perhaps it too proves a disillusionment, like all knowledge! And then he would have to stand to all eternity transfixed to disillusionment and himself become a stone guest, with a longing for a supper of knowledge which he will never get! – for the whole universe has not a single morsel left to give this hungry man’ (1997, p. 161).

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34. Sypher, 1962, p. 123.

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SELF-REFERENTIALITY AND THE LOSS OF MEANING

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Ultimately there is nothing less than an emptying out of meaning. The influential contemporary neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has referred to the left hemisphere as ‘the interpreter’, the locus of self-consciousness, of conscious volition, and of rationality, which since the Enlightenment we have seen as being our defining qualities as human beings.36 An interpreter is not an originator, however, but a facilitator, and should be involved in mediating between parties. The more we rely on the left hemisphere alone, the more self-conscious we become; the intuitive, unconscious unspoken elements of experience are relatively discounted, and the interpreter begins to interpret – itself. The world it puts into words for us is the world that words themselves (the left hemisphere’s building blocks) have created. Hence there is Nietzsche’s ‘speech about speech’. The condition is a lonely, self-enwrapped one: ‘nothing speaks to him any more’. The left hemisphere, isolating itself from the ways of the right hemisphere, has lost access to the world beyond words, the world ‘beyond’ our selves. It is not just that it no longer sees through the two-dimensional surface of the canvas to the world behind, through the window to the world beyond the pane, focussing instead on the plane before its eyes: it no longer sees through the representation of the world that is left hemisphere ‘experience’ at all, to a world that is ‘Other’ than itself. Man himself keeps getting into the picture, as Heidegger says of the modern era.

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36. Gazzaniga, 1998.

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The interpreter’s task is to look for meaning. But that meaning can only come to the representational world by allowing a betweenness with the world it re-presents – as words need their real world referents to have meaning. Constantly searching for meaning, but not finding any, it is oppressed, as the schizophrenic is oppressed, by an unresolved and irresoluble sense of meaningfulness without a focus, a sense that ‘something is going on’. Everything, just as it is, seems to have meaning, but what it is is never clear. The more one stares at things the more one freights them with import. That man crossing his legs, that woman wearing that blouse – it can’t just be accidental. It has a particular meaning, is intended to convey something; but I am not let in on the secret, which every one else seems to understand. Notice that the focus of paranoia is a loss of the normal betweenness – something that should be being conveyed from others to myself, is being kept from me. The world comes to appear threatening, disturbing, sinister. When implicit meaning is not understood, as Wittgenstein surmised, paranoia is the result: ‘Mightn’t we imagine a man who, never having had any acquaintance with music, comes to us and hears someone playing a reflective piece of Chopin and is convinced that this is a language and people merely want to keep the meaning secret from him?’37

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37. Wittgenstein, 1967c, §161, p. 29e.

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Devitalisation leads to boredom, and boredom, in turn, to sensationalism. The high stimulus society in which we live is represented through advertising as full of vibrancy and vitality, but, as advertisers know only too well, its condition is one of boredom, and the response to boredom. Since the rise of capitalism in the eighteenth century, when according to Patricia Spacks boredom as such began, an ‘appetite for the new and the different, for fresh experience and novel excitements’ has lain at the heart of successful bourgeois society, with its need above all to be getting and spending money.39 Use of the word ‘boredom’ and reports of the experience have escalated dramatically during the twentieth century.40 It has infested the places of desire and further saps vitality: by 1990, 23 per cent of French men and 31 per cent of French women already reported being bored while making love – ‘l’atrophie du désir.’41 There is a vicious cycle between feelings of boredom, emptiness and restlessness, on the one hand, and gross stimulation and sensationalism on the other: in fact Wordsworth makes the point in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. So Anton van Zijderveld, in his excellent study of cliché, notes that ‘it can be observed that speech becomes gross and hyperbolic, music loud and nervous, ideas giddy and fantastic, emotions limitless and shameless, actions bizarre and foolish, whenever boredom reigns.’42

1096

39. Plumb, 1982, p. 316.

1096

40. Klapp, 1986, p. 32. See also Healy, 1984.

1096

41. Spacks, 1995, p. 3.

1096

42. Zijderveld, 1979, p. 84.

819

I would relate both the boredom and sense of devitalisation, and the associated demand for stimulation, to the needs of an ‘unplugged’ left hemisphere.44 Disconnected from the grounding effects of the right hemisphere, which could lead it out of itself and back to what I have called ‘the Other’, it can find nothing except what it already knows. Newness would come from the imagination, which reconnects us with whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves: all that is open to the left hemisphere acting alone is novelty (The Shock of the New should really have been entitled, were it not ambiguous, The Shock of the Novel). Crude sensationalism is its stock in trade. The left hemisphere, with its orientation towards what is lifeless and mechanical, appears desperate to shock us back to life, as if animating Frankenstein’s corpse. When the Austrian experimental artist Hermann Nitsch crucifies a dead lamb, he reminds us that he is flogging a dead horse.

1096

44. Psychopaths, who have right frontal deficits, show little alteration in heart rate, blood pressure, respirations, or galvanic skin responses when they are subjected to fear, stress, or unpleasant pictures (Intrator, Hare, Stritzke et al., 1997; Raine, Buchsbaum & LaCasse, 1997; Levenston, Patrick, Bradley et al., 2000); and, consequently, seek constant stimulation.

819

In Eric Fromm’s study On Disobedience, he describes modern man as homo consumens: concerned with things more than people, property more than life, capital more than work. He sees this man as obsessed with the structures of things, and calls him ‘organisation man’, flourishing, if that is the right word, as much under the bureaucracy of communism as under capitalism. There is a close relationship between the mentality that results in bureaucratic organisation and the mentality of capitalism. Socialism and capitalism are both essentially materialist, just different ways of approaching the lifeless world of matter and deciding how to share the spoils. To that extent one might say that their antipathy represents little more than a farmyard scrap between two dogs over a bone. These preferences – for things more than people, status or property more than life, and so on – align with those of the left hemisphere, and what I want to explore here is the close relation between a concern for materiality and a simultaneous impulse towards abstraction.

820

REPRESENTATION: WHEN THINGS ARE REPLACED BY CONCEPTS, AND CONCEPTS BECOME THINGS

820

That the left hemisphere is concerned with abstraction has been a theme of the first part of the book, but it also has a preference for inanimate things, particularly as they have use for us. There is no paradox involved: materialists, as I suggested earlier, are not people who overvalue, but who undervalue, matter. They see it only under Scheler’s lowest realm of value: that of utility and sensation. The abstraction is reified, the concept becomes a thing ‘out there’. The world in our time has become a ‘world picture’, according to Heidegger: not a new world picture, but rather ‘the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age’.46

❗️

1096

46. Heidegger, 1977, pp. 129–30.

821

In his book The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of the Enlightenment the philosopher D. M. Levin writes that re-presentation, the left hemisphere’s role, is the characteristic state of modernity. The process of re-presenting a thing not only distances us from it, and substitutes an abstraction, a token, for the thing itself; it also objectifies, and reifies it, so as to bring it under control. What ‘presences’ is not accepted as it presences, but, he writes,

subjected to a certain delay, a certain postponement, a certain deferral, so that the ego-logical subject can give what is presencing to itself, can, in other words, make itself the giver of what it receives. In this way, the subject exercises maximum epistemic control. We might say that the emblem of such an attitude – the correlate in the realm of vision – is the stare.47

1096

47. Levin, 1999, p. 54.

821

As he points out, even worse is that

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.48

1096

48. ibid., pp. 52–3.

822

Levin’s point that this enables the mind actually to believe that it creates the world and then gives the world to itself, is a perfect formulation of the process whereby the left hemisphere, interposes a simulacrum between reality and our consciousness – like trompe l’oeil shutters in front of a window, bearing an exact replica of the view – and then interprets its own creation as the reality.

822

The normal relationship of reality to representation has been reversed. At the beginning of this book, I summarised the left hemisphere’s role as providing a map of the world. That map now threatens to replace the reality.

823

My contention is that the modern world is the attempt by the left hemisphere to take control of everything it knows so that it is the giver to itself of what it sees. If it is Gazzaniga’s interpreter, it is, finally and self-referentially, its own interpreter (a role hitherto, according to William Cowper, reserved for God).

824

Boredom and anxiety are different manifestations of the same underlying condition.51 Kafka said that his deepest feelings towards other people were indifference and fear. According to Elias Canetti, that makes him a representative modern man.52 One might think that this had much to do with Kafka’s particular character, and there is no doubt that Kafka had a somewhat schizoid personality – such personalities lack warmth, find it difficult to engage with the world or other people, and tend to combine indifference with a state of chronic anxiety.

824

Canetti’s point, however, is that Kafka’s indifference and fear are part of the modern condition. Fromm describes modern man as lonely, bored, anxious and passive.54 This combination of anxiety or fear with boredom and indifference is also remarkably like the emotional range of the schizophrenic subject, where apathy and indifference are varied mainly by paranoia. Both schizophrenia and the modern condition, I suggest, deal with the same problem: a freewheeling left hemisphere.

1097

51. Healy, 1984, p. 69.

1097

52. Canetti, 1974, p. 48.

1097

54. Fromm, 1984.

827

That it may be reinforced or promoted by the nature of the environment in the broadest sense – both physical and psycho-social – would appear to be confirmed by research. After controlling for all confounding factors, mental health is better in rural than non-rural populations and deteriorates in tandem with population density.60 City dwelling is associated with higher rates of depression, certainly, but even more with schizophrenia, in the genesis, or expression, of which it is the most potent environmental factor.61 The relative risk of developing schizophrenia in an urban rather than a rural setting is nearly double, and the evidence suggests that it is more likely that the urban environment causes psychosis than that high-risk individuals migrate to urban areas.62 The concept of ‘social defeat’ has been developed as an explanation of the high levels of schizophrenia in immigrant populations, particularly those from the West Indies into Britain.63 It is acknowledged that urban environments are more competitive. This is in part a reflection of capitalist culture, which is always most strongly expressed in cities for a host of obvious reasons. It is also because the kind of social order that would have valued an individual for anything other than their earning power has been lost. It’s a culture, if that is still the right word for it, of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’.

1097

60. Weich, Twigg & Lewis, 2006.

61. van Os, 2004; Pedersen & Mortensen, 2001.

62. Krabbendam & van Os, 2005.

63. See, e.g., Selten & Cantor-Graae, 2005; Selten & Cantor-Graae, 2007.

828

Anorexia nervosa is by its nature an attack on the flesh, on embodied being – and it increased in prevalence during the twentieth century. Looking for explanations in terms of the social environment, it has been attributed in the popular press to the emphasis on the glamour of thinness. While this may have played a part in triggering episodes of illness in some cases (more typically in bulimia nervosa), this misconstrues the nature of the illness. Cases of what is called ‘holy anorexia’ can be traced for centuries, although not with the frequency we see now, a classic example being that of St Catherine of Siena; and the drive in such cases appears to be a desire for purification, and mortification of the flesh. Although anorexia is increasing rapidly in South Africa, it is still rare in contemporary West Africa, though even there cases exist. When subjects in such a context are asked to explain their motivation, they attribute their anorexia to a spiritual desire for purification and atonement, meaning abjuration of the flesh.64 Contemporary sufferers in the West often speak in similar terms, though not usually using overtly religious language: they speak of purification, a hatred of the body, a desire ultimately to ‘disappear’. The body image, dependent on the right parietal lobe is grossly distorted, to a psychotic degree, so that patients on the point of death through starvation may still see themselves as fat. Often the sense of the self – who one is at all – is lost. Anorexia is also in many cases associated with other forms of deliberate self-harm, such as cutting or burning, a condition which is also on the increase in the West, and is the most blatant form of attack on the body. Both anorexia and episodes of self-harm are used to numb feelings, although sometimes self-harm can be used to recall the sense of being alive at all, the experience of something in the body, in a state of otherwise total dissociation from feelings and from physical existence.

829

We would expect, on the basis of the psychopathology, with its distortions of body image, deliberate attacks on the body through starvation and other methods, loss of self-identity, numbing of feelings, desire for perfection, and need to be delivered from the contradictions and ambiguities of embodied existence, that this condition should be associated with over-reliance on the left hemisphere at the expense of the right. And this is exactly what research suggests – not just imaging and EEG studies, but lesion studies, and tests of cognitive function.65

1098

65. See Uher, Murphy, Friederich et al., 2005, which shows that the right parietal cortex is underactive in anorexic patients compared with either bulimic patients or normals. An underactive right parietal cortex was also found by Grunwald and colleagues (Grunwald, Weiss, Assmann et al., 2004). A systematic review of 54 case reports revealed that eating disorders are associated with right frontal and temporal lobe damage (Uher & Treasure, 2005). Anorexics display an atypical left hemisphere preponderance in cognitive function (Maxwell, Tucker & Townes, 1984). The same bias towards the left hemisphere may obtain in bulimia nervosa (Wu, Hagman, Buchsbaum et al., 1990).

1097

64. See, e.g., Bennett, Sharpe, Freeman et al., 2004; Morgan, Marsden & Lacey, 2000; Bhadrinath, 1990; Rampling, 1985.

831

Anorexia nervosa, multiple personality disorder and deliberate self-harm are linked by ‘dissociation’: there is a sense of being cut off – and often a craving to be cut off – from one’s feelings, and from embodied existence, a loss of depth of emotion and capacity for empathy, a fragmentation of the sense of self; and these features also characterise what is known as ‘borderline’ personality disorder. Once again, this may be a condition whose prevalence is increasing. Though it is possible in retrospect to see elements of the clinical picture in descriptions of behaviour going back to ancient Greece, the condition was first described only in 1938.72 Yet it has grown in the space of 70 years to become ‘certainly one of the commonest psychiatric diagnoses’.73 Here too there is evidence of right-hemisphere dysfunction, with many regions of the right hemisphere appearing underactive.74 There is even evidence of alterations in structural brain asymmetry in borderline personality disorder, with strong leftward deviations in the parietal region, especially marked in those who demonstrate clear dissociative states.75

1098

72. Stern, 1938.

73. American Psychiatric Press Review of Psychiatry, 1989, p. 8.

74. de la Fuente, Goldman, Stanus et al., 1997.

75. Irle, Lange & Sachsse, 2005; Irle, Lange, Weniger et al., 2007.

832

Then there is autism, a condition which has hugely advanced in prevalence during the last fifty years. While it may be that some of the rise is due to greater awareness of the condition, it is unlikely that this explains the very large increase. Autism, and Asperger’s syndrome, which is often thought of as a type of high-functioning autism, were first described in 1943 and 1944 respectively. The research was quite independent, despite the temporal proximity: Asperger was not aware of Kanner’s paper, describing the first case histories of classic autism, when he wrote his own. Since that time rates have steadily climbed, and continue to climb. Again, both these conditions are marked by clinical features strongly suggestive of right-hemisphere hypofunction, and the resulting picture is one of left-hemisphere dominance. There is in autism an inability to tell what another is thinking (lack of ‘theory of mind’); a lack of social intelligence – difficulty in judging nonverbal features of communication, such as tone, humour, irony; an inability to detect deceit, and difficulty understanding implicit meaning; a lack of empathy; a lack of imagination; an attraction to the mechanical; a tendency to treat people and body parts as inanimate objects; an alienation from the self (autistic children often fail to develop the first-person perspective and speak of themselves as ‘he’ or ‘she’); an inability to engage in eye contact or mutually directed gaze; and an obsession with detail.76 All these features will be recognisable as signs of left hemisphere predominance.

1099

76. See Chapter 2 above for discussion of these deficits in relation to the right hemisphere. Apart from these deficits, autistic subjects exhibit other typical right hemisphere neuropsychological deficits: individuals with autism cannot differentiate meanings by context (Frith & Snowling, 1983; Happé, 1997; Jolliffe & Baron-Cohen, 1999); they attend to local, not global, ‘information’ (Jolliffe & Baron-Cohen, 1997; Shah & Frith, 1993); and they tend to have difficulty using personal pronouns appropriately, especially ‘I’ and ‘me’, a faculty which is associated with self-recognition, and is right-hemisphere-mediated (Imbens-Bailey & Pan, 1998). Subjects with autism or Asperger’s syndrome show deficits in theory of mind, which are associated with right-hemisphere dysfunction (Gunter, Ghaziuddin & Ellis, 2002; Ellis & Gunter, 1999). Subjects with autistic spectrum disorders show white matter deficits in the corpus callosum and the right hemisphere (Waiter, Williams, Murray et al., 2005). Because of the likelihood of anomalous dominance, however, scanning data need to be interpreted with caution. 793

VIRGINIA WOOLF’S OFTEN QUOTED REMARK THAT ‘ON OR ABOUT DECEMBER 1910 human character changed’ is memorable for its playful specificity. It is usual to refer that specificity to Roger Fry’s controversial exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, which had opened in November 1910 at the Grafton Galleries in London. However, the change she meant was very far from specific: it was indeed all-encompassing. ‘All human relations have shifted’, she continued, ‘those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.’1 Pretty comprehensive, then: even Roger Fry could not be expected to have taken the credit for that.

1092

1. Woolf, 1924, pp. 4–5, first read to the Heretics in Cambridge in May 1924, under the title ‘Character in Fiction’.

793

The specificity of the date she gives for the beginning of the modern era, of the era of Modern-ism – for it is to that self-proclaiming consciousness of radical change that she refers – is designed to suggest not so much the swiftness of the transition, as the abruptness of the disjunction, between what had gone before and what was to come after. As I hope to show later, that disjunction was not as great as it might appear. The change had already been long in process: what was sudden was the revelation of the consequences. It was less an avalanche after unexpected snow than a landslide following years of erosion.

794

The changes were, right enough, though, changes that affected all aspects of life: as she says, not just art, but the ways in which we conceived the world in which we lived, related to one another, and even saw ourselves in relation to the cosmos at large.

804

In his ground-breaking work Madness and Modernism, Sass goes on to draw a multitude of closely argued parallels between the reported experiences of schizophrenics and the world picture of modernism and post-modernism.21 His purpose is not to pass a value judgment, simply to point out the parallels, in the literature, the visual arts and the critical discourse about art of this era, with every aspect of the core phenomenology of schizophrenia. His argument is compelling and illuminating, but it has a fascinating broader significance. What Sass picks up in modern culture and identifies with schizophrenia may in fact be the over-reliance on the left hemisphere in the West, which I believe has accelerated in the last hundred years. In fact Sass himself discusses this possibility (along with several others) in an appendix called ‘Neurobiological Considerations’.

807

Although there may be some variations in the terms used, there is little dispute, following the work of Louis Sass, Giovanni Stanghellini, Josef Parnas, Dan Zahavi and others, that these clearly interrelated phenomena – hyperconsciousness, loss of ipseity and ‘unworlding’ – are fundamental to the experience of subjects with schizophrenia.25

818

Modernist art from Dadaism to the present day has its share of artworks that illustrate Zijderveld’s point. Scheler speaks of our ‘ “culture” of entertainment’ as a collection of ‘extremely merry things, viewed by extremely sad people who do not know what to do with them.’43 Zijderveld connects the phenomenon with advertising and the exigencies of a mass market. Of course he is right. But like Scheler I would prefer to see a little beyond such formulations in socioeconomic terms, valid as they clearly are in their own way.

1096

43. Scheler, 1998, p. 126.

824

RISE IN ILLNESSES CHARACTERISED BY RIGHT-HEMISPHERE DEFICITS

825

One line of thought suggests that, if there is a shift in the way we, as a culture, look at the world – a change in the mental world that we all share, reinforced by constant cues from the environment, whether intellectual, social or material – that might make the expression of psychopathological syndromes that also involve such shifts more common. Put simply, if a culture starts to mimic aspects of right-hemisphere deficit, those individuals who have an underlying propensity to over-reliance on the left hemisphere will be less prompted to redress it, and moreover will find it harder to do so. The tendency will therefore be enhanced. Though we need to be cautious in how we interpret the evidence, it is nonetheless a matter of interest that schizophrenia has in fact increased in tandem with industrialisation and modernity.

826

In England schizophrenia was rare indeed, if it existed at all, before the eighteenth century, but increased dramatically in prevalence with industrialisation.55 Similar trends can be observed in Ireland, Italy, the United States, and elsewhere.56 However, even at the end of the nineteenth century schizophrenia appears to have been relatively rare compared with the first half of the twentieth century, when it steeply increased.57 There are, however, very considerable problems involved in studies of the prevalence of schizophrenia,58 and for methodological reasons, it is not clear whether the rates of schizophrenia are at present continuing to rise, or have reached a plateau, or are maybe even falling – on that point, studies can be found to support almost any conclusion. What is beyond reasonable doubt, however, since it has been established by repeated research over at least half a century, is that schizophrenia increased pari passu with industrialisation; that the form in which schizophrenia exists is more severe and has a clearly worse outcome in Western countries; and that, as recent research confirms, prevalence by country increases in proportion to the degree that the country is ‘developed’, which in practice means Westernised.59 Descriptions of melancholia, or of manic-depressive (now called bipolar) disorder, are immediately recognisable in accounts from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, yet there are no descriptions of schizophrenia.

1097

55. Ellard, 1987; Scull, 1979; Hare, 1983, 1988.

56. Tuke, 1894; Tagliavini, 1985; Grob, 1973.

57. Jablensky, 1986.

58. See, e.g., Suvisaari, Haukka, Tanskanen et al., 1999.

59. Saha, Chant, Welham et al., 2005.

829

I no longer count calories. I am relaxed about eating/around food. I can eat out in restaurants now.’66

Note: not necessarily something to brag about lol

1098

66. Dusoir, Owens, Forbes et al., 2005.

830

Multiple personality disorder is another dissociative disorder, which has features of hypnotic suggestibility. It is also a characteristically modern condition, hitting popular consciousness in the 1950s, and first incorporated into DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 1980, although a small number of case reports of so-called ‘double personality’ aroused a good deal of interest in the late nineteenth century.67 It also clearly involves, albeit unconsciously, the most blatant abdication of responsibility (‘it wasn’t me – it was my other half!’). This too is likely to be a right-hemisphere-deficit syndrome. Ramachandran describes a patient with a right-hemisphere stroke who was ‘halfway between anosognosia [denial of disability, which we have seen is a left-hemisphere speciality] and multiple personality disorder syndrome’ as a result of two lesions, one affecting the right frontal lobe and the other the right cingulate.69 EEG studies support the idea of right-hemisphere dysfunction coupled with relative left hemisphere overactivation in multiple personality disorder.69 Left-hemisphere hyperactivation fits with the fact that multiple personality disordered patients exhibit first-rank symptoms of schizophrenia, and describe being the passive victims of a controlling force, since schizophrenia is another condition in which there is a failure to integrate left-hemisphere and right-hemisphere processes, with a dysfunctional right hemisphere and an overactive left hemisphere, giving rise to the sense of alien control.70 Although examination of epileptic patients with two distinct personalities has led to the suggestion that multiple personalities might represent the differing personalities of the two hemispheres, this model clearly cannot account for the majority of patients who have not just dual, but literally ‘multiple’ personalities, in some cases over a hundred.71 They must be able to dissociate a multitude of different parts within the fragmented ‘whole’ of their selfhood – a process which by its nature suggests a key role for the left hemisphere.

1098

67. Harrington, 1987, p. 108.

68. Ramachandran, 2005, p. 282, n. 12.

69. Flor-Henry, Tomer, Kumpula et al., 1990.

70. Kluft, 1987; Mesulam, 1981.

71. Ahern, Herring, Tackenberg et al., 1993.

833

THE SELF-PERPETUATING NATURE OF THE LEFT HEMISPHERE WORLD

834

The development of mass technological culture, urbanisation, mechanisation and alienation from the natural world, coupled with the erosion of smaller social units and an unprecedented increase in mobility, have increased mental illness, at the same time that they have made the ‘loner’ or outsider the representative of the modernist era. His apprehension of life has become fragmentary, and the welter of disparate information and surrogate experiences, taken out of context, with which we are deluged intensifies the sense of fragmentation. Increasing virtuality and distance from other human lives tends to induce a feeling of an alien, perhaps hostile environment. Social isolation leads to exaggerated fear responses, violence and aggression,77 and violence and aggression often lead, in turn, to isolation. Structures which used to provide the context from which life derived its meaning have been powerfully eroded, and ‘seepage’ from one context into another produces bizarre, sometimes surreal, juxtapositions which alter the nature of our attention to them, facilitating irony, distance and cynicism at the expense of empathy. In this way the experience of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reproduces many of the experiences until now confined to schizophrenics. At the same time people with schizoid or schizotypal traits will be attracted to, and be deemed especially suitable for, employment in the areas of science, technology and administration which have, during the last hundred years, been immensely influential in shaping the world we live in, and are, if anything, even more important today.

835

THE PROBLEM OF ART IN THE MODERN WORLD

863

POST-MODERNISM

863

With post-modernism, meaning drains away. Art becomes a game in which the emptiness of a wholly insubstantial world, in which there is nothing beyond the set of terms we have in vain used to ‘construct’ meaning, is allowed to speak for its own vacuity. The set of terms are now seen simply to refer to themselves. They have lost transparency; and all conditions that would yield meaning have been ironised out of existence.

864

Subjects with schizophrenia display what Sass describes as ‘a distinctive combination of superiority and impotence’.112 This, too, he sees as a characteristic of the modernist stance, but it is perhaps most evident in post-modernism. In post-modern literary criticism, the impotence is obvious: if reality is a construct without any objective existence, and if words have no referent, we are all absolutely impotent to say or do anything that has meaning, raising the question why the critic wrote in the first place. Why would any solipsist write? The attempt to convince another of one’s point of view explodes the solipsist’s position. Nonetheless an intrinsically superior attitude of the critic towards the authors that form his or her subject is evident. Where the author thought he was doing something important, even profound – was, in Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘a man speaking to men’ – the critic can reveal that he was really playing a word game, the rules of which reflected socially constructed norms of which the author was unaware. The author becomes a sort of puppet, whose strings are pulled by social forces behind the scenes. He is ‘placed’. Meanwhile the work of art gets to be ‘decoded’, as if the value of the work lay in some message of which the author was once more unaware, but which we in our superiority can now reveal.

1101

112. Sass, 1985, p. 76.

867

The trend in criticism towards a superiority born of the ability to read the code is perhaps first seen in the culture of psychoanalysis, which, writes Sass, claims to reveal ‘the all-too-worldly sources of our mystical, religious, or aesthetic leanings, and to give its initiates a sense of knowing superiority’.115 It is closely allied to all forms of reductionism. Reductionism, like disengagement, makes people feel powerful. When the eighteenth-century purveyors of phantasmagoria revealed the apparatus that had given rise to those spectacular effects, they were also revealed as the clever ones who know, and the audience were asked temporarily to enjoy the feeling of being in the presence of a greater intelligence. Their readiness to believe had made dupes of them. They had allowed themselves to be moved, where they should, if they had known, been serenely unmoved, permitting perhaps a knowing smile to play about their lips. It’s hard not to feel that there is a degree of Schadenfreude about it, as in the older brother who tells his younger sister she is adopted; or the psychopath who manipulates people’s feelings of compassion to rob them. Of course good psychoanalysis carefully eschews the superior position, but the point that it is built into the structure, and that one needs to be constantly vigilant not to succumb to it, remains valid.

1101

115. Sass, 2001, p. 284.

867

The knowing superiority of reductionism is also clear in modern scientific discourse. Reductionism is an inescapable consequence of a purely left-hemisphere vision of the world, since the left hemisphere sees everything as made up from fundamental building blocks, the nature of which is assumed to be obvious, or at least knowable in principle in isolation from whatever it is they go to make up. Its model is simple, and it has ramified into popular culture, where it has been adopted unreflectively as the ‘philosophy’ of our age. Within that culture it has had a corrosive effect on higher values, inducing a sort of easy cynicism, and encouraging a mechanistic view of the human.

868

At the intellectual level it is brought into focus by the debate about the nature of consciousness. In a bold inversion, Nick Humphrey claims, in his book Seeing Red, that it is those who are sceptical of the idea that we can explain consciousness reductively who are really feeling smug and superior. Such scepticism ‘taps straight into people’s sense of their own metaphysical importance’, he writes, and ‘allows people the satisfaction of being insiders with secret knowledge’.116 Those are hard claims to refute, and he might have a point. Equally some people might feel that the same charges could be levelled at those neuroscientists who believe in the power of their intellect to reveal the ‘true’ nature of consciousness, of which the rest of us remain ignorant.

1101

116. Humphrey, 2006, p. 3.

869

When one comes to Humphrey’s own explanation of consciousness, one is naturally curious to know what paraphernalia he is going to reveal behind the phantasmagoria. He claims two things. The first is in line with many other accounts of consciousness: that it is the consequence of re-entrant circuits in the brain, creating a ‘self-resonance’. Sensory responses, he writes, ‘get privatised’ and ‘eventually the whole process becomes closed off from the outside world in an internal loop within the brain … a feedback loop’.117 The perfect image of the hermetic world of the left hemisphere: consciousness is the projection of a representation of the world ‘outside’ onto the walls of that closed-off room. His particular contribution in this book, though, is to go further and imagine that a genetic development occurred whose ‘effect is to give the conscious Self just the extra twist that leads the human mind to form an exaggeratedly grandiose view of its own nature’. The self and its experience ‘becomes reorganized precisely so as to impress the subject with its out-of-this-world qualities’. If ‘those who fall for the illusion, tend to have longer and more productive lives’, then evolution has done its work. The sense we have of consciousness, then, as hard to get to the bottom of is just a ‘deliberate trick’ played by the ‘illusionist’ in our genes, to make us better at surviving.118

1101

117. ibid., pp. 121–2.

118. ibid., pp. 127–8.

870

One could point out that, while this certainly might offer a sort of explanation of why consciousness, with its sense of something beyond our grasp (what Humphrey describes as its ‘out-of-this-world’ qualities), exists as it does, it gets no nearer to what, or what sort of a thing, it is, or how it comes about – thus tending to confirm the sceptic’s view. But that is to set the bar rather high, since nobody has ever got near to explaining what consciousness is, despite references to re-entrant circuits, positive feedback, mental representations that are illusions, and gene wizardry. His attempt to discount our intuition that there might be something here that lies beyond what materialism alone can account for is definitely ingenious. As a strategy for accommodating a mind-boggling difficulty into the existing paradigm without having actually to alter the paradigm, it is in fact spectacular. In that respect, it reminds one of the explanation given by Philip Gosse, the Victorian father of marine biology and a biblical Fundamentalist, for the existence of fossils in rock dating back millions of years, long before, according to the Bible, living things had been created. They were, he said, suggestions of life that never really existed, put there by God to test our faith. As with Gosse’s explanation, it’s hard to know what sort of evidence might be allowed to count against Humphrey’s belief, though similarly his account might give rise to some incredulity in more sceptical minds.

871

Some of those who are sceptical, but are cited by Humphrey as examples of the self-deluding conviction that consciousness takes quite some explaining, are the philosophers Stuart Sutherland (‘Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it’); Thomas Nagel (‘Certain forms of perplexity – for example, about freedom, knowledge, and the meaning of life – seem to me to embody more insight than any of the supposed solutions to these problems’); Nakita Newton (‘Phenomenal consciousness itself is sui generis. Nothing else is like it in any way at all’); Jerry Fodor (‘Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious’); and Colin McGinn (‘Isn’t it perfectly evident to you that … [the brain] is just the wrong kind of thing to give birth to [phenomenal consciousness]? You might as well assert that numbers emerge from biscuits or ethics from rhubarb.’)119 Although I do not completely agree with the last, I believe the fundamental point is valid. To these one could continue to add: I have cited Wittgenstein above, whose view is similar to Nagel’s, but their position is really in a long line of what has conventionally been considered wise scepticism about the absolute power of human understanding, including Montaigne, the Buddha, Socrates and St Paul.120

1101

119. Quoted by Humphrey, ibid., pp. 2, 4, 80 & 132: Sutherland, 1989; Nagel, 1986, p. 4; Newton, 2001, p. 48 (emphasis in Newton); Fodor, 1992, p. 5; McGinn, 1993.

120. For Wittgenstein, see p. 157 above. Montaigne’s most famous saying was, after a lifetime of learning, que sçais-je? The saying that ‘the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know’ is attributed both to the Buddha and to Socrates. St. Paul wrote: ‘And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know’ (1 Corinthians 8: 2).

872

The point here is that scientific materialism, despite its apparent opposition to the post-modernist stance, shows similar left-hemisphere origins. They share a sense of superiority, born of the conviction that others are taken in by illusions, to which those in the know have the explanation. It is there, beautifully revealed in that impotent, self-enclosed, boot-strapping circuitry, ‘the whole process … closed off from the outside world in an internal loop within the brain’. It is an example of positive feedback, and it is just this that the left hemisphere, being cut off from reality, its self-reflections reverberating endlessly round its mirrored walls, exemplifies. The structure of scientific realism, like post-modernism, reflects its left-hemisphere origins.

872

Some aspects of the post-modern condition, it may be objected, surely have an affinity with the workings of the right hemisphere. In stark contrast to the Enlightenment, it could be said that our own age lacks conviction and embraces whatever is unclear, indeterminate, fluid and unresolved. If the Enlightenment demonstrated its reliance on left-hemisphere modes of being by its optimism and certainty, its drive towards clarity, fixity and finality, why do I claim that post-modernism is also an expression of left-hemisphere functioning?

872

The difference depends on the level of consciousness. In the Enlightenment, although the process of alienation of the observing subject was well under way, there was as yet little doubt that there existed a world for it to observe. Its construction of the world as clear, orderly, fixed, certain and knowable, was inevitably a simulacrum substituted for the ever-changing and evolving, never graspable actuality of experience, but it was nonetheless taken for a reality – as though the frescoes on the wall of an eighteenth-century dining room were taken for the world outside.

873

A couple of hundred years and another level of self-consciousness later, the observing subject is not just aware, but aware of its own awareness. It is no longer an option to ignore the fact that all cannot be made to agree, that all is not fixed, certain and knowable, and that all is not necessarily going to end up being redeemed by human control. The post-modern revolt against the silent, static, contrived, lifeless world displayed in the fresco on the wall is not because of its artificiality – the fact that it is untrue to the living world outside – but because of its ‘pretence’ that there exists a world outside to be true to. The contrast is not between the fixity of the artificial and the fluidity of the real, but between the fixity and the chaos of two kinds of artificiality.

874

Post-modern indeterminacy affirms not that there is a reality, towards which we must carefully, tentatively, patiently struggle; it does not posit a truth which is nonetheless real because it defies the determinacy imposed on it by the self-conscious left-hemisphere interpreter (and the only structures available to it). On the contrary, it affirms that there is no reality, no truth to interpret or determine. The contrast here is like the difference between the ‘unknowing’ of a believer and the ‘unknowing’ of an atheist. Both believer and atheist may quite coherently hold the position that any assertion about God will be untrue; but their reasons are diametrically opposed. The difference is not in what is said, but in the disposition each holds toward the world. The right hemisphere’s disposition is tentative, always reaching painfully (with ‘care’) towards something which it knows is beyond itself. It tries to open itself (not to say ‘no’) to something that language can allow only by subterfuge, to something that reason can reach only in transcending itself; not, be it noted, by the abandonment of language and reason, but rather through and beyond them. This is why the left hemisphere is not its enemy, but its valued emissary. Once, however, the left hemisphere is convinced of its own importance, it no longer ‘cares’; instead it revels in its own freedom from constraint, in what might be called, in a phrase of Robert Graves’s, the ‘ecstasy of chaos’.121 One says ‘I do not know,’ the other ‘I know – that there is nothing to know.’ One believes that one cannot know: the other ‘knows’ that one cannot believe.

875

CONCLUSION

THE MASTER BETRAYED

897

THE BODY

898

That mechanistic view derives from the nineteenth-century scientific world picture, which has lingered with us longer in biology and the life sciences than in physics. The body has become an object in the world like other objects, as Merleau-Ponty feared. The left hemisphere’s world is ultimately narcissistic, in the sense that it sees the world ‘out there’ as no more than a reflection of itself: the body becomes just the first thing we see out there, and we feel impelled to shape it to our sense of how it ‘should’ be.

898

In his too little known book Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience, Martin Foss writes:

The body is not so much an obstacle to life, but an instrument to life, or, as Aristotle rightly put it, a potential for the soul … but indeed life and soul are more than the body and its functions. Soul transcends body and makes one even forget the body. It is the meaning of the body to be transcended and forgotten in the life for which it serves. It is the most essential characteristic of the body that it disappears as an independent thing the more it fulfils its service, and that we get aware of the body as such only if something is wrong, if some part does not serve, that is in sickness or tiredness.24

1102

24. Foss, 1949, p. 83.

899

In this the body performs like a work of art. Just as Merleau-Ponty says that we do not see works of art, but see according to them, so that although they are vital for what we see, it is equally vital that they become transparent in the process, we live in the world according to the body, which needs its transparency, too, if it is to allow us to be fully alive. Merleau-Ponty called this the necessary transparency of the flesh. The current tendency for flesh to remain opaque, in the explicitness of pornography, for example, bids to rob sex of much of its power, and it is interesting that pornography in the modern sense began in the Enlightenment, part of its unhappy pursuit of happiness, and its too ready equation of happiness with pleasure. Like most answers to boredom, pornography is itself characterised by the boredom it aims to dispel: both are a result of a certain way of looking at the world.

900

Undoubtedly greater openness has brought its benefits, and mechanistic science very clearly has too, and these should not be under-estimated. But they have eroded, along with much else, the power of the body in our lives, by reducing it to a machine. Such a tendency to see the body as an assemblage of parts, or an illness as a series of discrete issues, without reference to the whole (including often vitally important emotional, psychological and spiritual issues), limits the effectiveness of much Western medicine, and drives people to seek alternative treatments which might in other ways be less powerful to help. It is significant that the ‘normal’ scientific materialist view of the body is similar to that found in schizophrenia. Schizophrenic subjects routinely see themselves as machines – often robots, computers, or cameras – and sometimes declare that parts of them have been replaced by metal or electronic components. This goes with a lack of transparency of the flesh. No spirit is seen there: ‘body and soul don’t belong together – there’s no unity’, as one patient eloquently puts it. This results in the body becoming ‘mere’ matter. As a result, other human beings, too, appear no more than things, because they are walking bodies. Another patient described by R. D. Laing ‘perceived the actions of his wife – a vivacious and lively woman – as those of a kind of robot, an “it” devoid of inner life. If he told his wife a joke and she (“it”) laughed, this showed no real feeling, but only her “conditioned” or mechanical nature.’25 It’s hard not to think of Descartes, looking from his window on the world, and seeing not people, but walking

1102

25. Laing, 1965, p. 49, as cited by Sass, 1992, p. 102.

901

There has, in my view, been a tendency to discount and marginalise the importance of our embodied nature, as though it were something incidental about us, rather than essential to us: our very thinking, never mind our feeling, is bound up with our embodied nature, and must be, and this needs to be acknowledged.26 So does the converse: that the material world is not wholly distinct from consciousness in some way that remains elusive.

1102

26. See e.g. pp. 120, 149 & 332–4 above.

901

Everything about the body, which in neuropsychological terms is more closely related to and mediated by the right hemisphere than the left, makes it a natural enemy of the left hemisphere, the hemisphere of ideal re-presentation rather than embodied fact, of rationalism rather than intuition, of explicitness rather than the implicit, of what is static rather than what is moving, of what is fixed rather than what is changing. The left hemisphere prefers what it has itself made, and the ultimate rebuff to that is the body. It is the ultimate demonstration of the recalcitrance of reality, of its not being subject to our control. The left hemisphere’s optimism is at odds with recognising the inevitable transience of the body, and its message that we are mortal. The body is messy, imprecise, limited – an object of scorn, therefore, to the fastidiously abstracted left hemisphere, with its fantasies of human omnipotence. As Alain Corbin has argued, we have become more cerebral, and retreated more and more from the senses – especially from smell, touch and taste – as if repelled by the body; and sight, the coolest of the senses, and the one most capable of detachment, has come to dominate all.27

1102

27. Corbin, 1988.

902

The left hemisphere’s assault on our embodied nature is not just an assault on our bodies, but on the embodied nature of the world around us. Matter is what is recalcitrant to the will. The idea that the ‘material’ world is not just a lump of resource, but reaches into every part of the realm of value, including the spiritual, that through our embodied nature we can commune with it, that there are responses and responsibilities that need to be respected, has largely been lost by the dominant culture. Fortunately, plenty of people still care about the natural world, and there would undoubtedly be an outcry if national parks were targeted for industrialisation; but even here I am afraid that too much of the discussion would be in terms that are reductionist – those of ‘the environment’ – and the arguments, if they are to carry any weight, would have to be made in terms of jobs saved or ‘recreational’ benefit (the benefit being to the economy, principally), and appeals made to ‘biodiversity’, or the ‘viability of the biomass’. The natural world has been commodified, as has art.

902

THE SPIRIT

903

The left hemisphere’s attack on religion was already well under way by the time of the Reformation, and was taken further by the Enlightenment. With the rise of Romanticism, there was, it is true, as might be expected with a shift of equilibrium towards the right hemisphere, a growth in religious feeling and a sense of the transcendental. Romanticism was in itself a reaffirmation of the importance of the transcendental; affirming, not so much religion, as a sense of the holy, in what is best thought of as a form of panentheism (by contrast with pantheism, which equates God with the sum of things, panentheism sees God as in all things).28 But in the West religion has declined in force in the twentieth century,

903

When we decide not to worship divinity, we do not stop worshipping: we merely find something else less worthy to worship. As Nietzsche put it:

Did one not finally have to sacrifice everything comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all faith concealed in harmony, in a future bliss and justice? Did one not have to sacrifice God himself and out of cruelty against oneself worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness – this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate act of cruelty was reserved for the generation which is even now arising: we all know something of it already.30

1103

30. Nietzsche, 1973, §55, p. 63.

904

The Western Church has, in my view, been active in undermining itself. It no longer has the confidence to stick to its values, but instead joins the chorus of voices attributing material answers to spiritual problems. At the same time the liturgical reform movement, as always convinced that religious truths can be literally stated, has largely eroded and in some cases completely destroyed the power of metaphoric language and ritual to convey the numinous. Meanwhile there has been, as expected, a parallel movement towards the possible rehabilitation of religious practices as utility. Thus 15 minutes Zen meditation a day may make you a more effective money broker, or improve your blood pressure, or lower your cholesterol.

928

It is striking, for example, that the Japanese language does not have an established method for composing abstract nouns, and has no definite or indefinite articles, considered to be a crucial step in the emergence of abstract nouns in Greek.54 The Japanese have nothing that corresponds to the Platonic Idea, and in fact no abstractions in general: they have never developed the dichotomy between the phenomenological world and the world of ideas.55 Nakamura writes:

The Japanese are willing to accept the phenomenal world as Absolute because of their disposition to lay a greater emphasis upon intuitive sensible concrete events, rather than upon universals. This way of thinking with emphasis upon the fluid, arresting character of observed events regards the phenomenal world itself as Absolute and rejects the recognition of anything existing over [and above] the phenomenal world.56

1109

54. In not having definite or indefinite articles, of course, it is hardly alone: cf., among Indo-European languages, Russian.

1109

55. Kawasaki, 2002. I am indebted to Kawasaki at various points in what follows.

1109

56. Nakamura, 1993, pp. 533 & 350.

928

The sharp dichotomy in our culture between the ways of being of the two hemispheres, which began in Ancient Greece, does not appear to exist, or, at any rate, to exist in the same way, in Oriental culture: their experience of the world is still effectively grounded in that of the right hemisphere.

929

The Japanese also preserve a healthy scepticism about language, and this goes hand in hand with the rejection of a reality that must, or ever could, be arrived at purely by reason. In Zen Buddhism, according to Soiku Shigematsu, the abbot of Shogenji temple, ‘a word is a finger that points at the moon. The goal of Zen pupils is the moon itself, not the pointing finger. Zen masters, therefore, will never stop cursing words and letters.’57 In general the Japanese place far more emphasis on individual existing things than on generalities, are more intuitive, and less cognitive, when compared with Westerners, and are not so easily swayed by logic or system-building.58 Understanding comes, according to Ogyu Sorai, a Japanese Confucian of the early eighteenth century, through knowing as many individual things as possible: ‘Learning consists in widening one’s information, absorbing extensively anything and everything one comes upon.’59 This attitude would have been immediately comprehensible in the Renaissance in the West, but was lost as the systematising and specialisation of knowledge, through which observation of nature becomes more markedly subjugated to theory-building, became increasingly important with the Enlightenment.

1109

57. Shigematsu, 1981, p. 3.

58. Nakamura, 1993, pp. 530–36.

59. ibid., p. 537.

930

The recognition of absolute significance within the phenomenal world relates to the traditional Japanese love of nature.60 Shizen, the Japanese word for nature, also links it clearly to the right-hemisphere way of being. Its derivation means ‘of itself’, ‘spontaneously’(it is in fact an adverb, not a noun), as opposed to whatever is brought about through calculation or by will.61 It is all that is ‘just as it is’. Everything about the Japanese attitude to nature, expressed both in mythology and in everyday life, suggests an attitude of mutual trust, dependence and interrelationship between man and nature. While shizen does, of course, refer to the natural world of grass, trees and forest, it also means the land and the landscape, as well as the ‘natural self’ considered as a physical, spiritual and moral being, something perhaps akin to Dasein: thus, though there is a distinction between man, with his will, and nature, the opposition between man and nature implied in the West is absent in Japanese.

1109

60. ibid., p. 355.

61. Kawasaki, 2002.

931

A reverent attitude toward shizen, now absent in the West, is characteristic even of the Japanese scientific education system. The term shizen implies that nature is the root of life in a spiritual or religious sense.62 A famous Japanese anthropologist Iwata argues that among the Japanese as well as most southeast Asian people, whether the people are formally Buddhists or Christians, there exists an intuition of animism. Everything surrounding human life, including mountains, hills, rivers, plants, trees, animals, fish and insects, has its own spirit (kami), and these spirits communicate with one another as well as with those who live there. Apparently most Japanese are familiar with such spirits, and experience them: natural things cannot, therefore, be seen by them merely as objects, as in Western science.63 We should be careful before we patronise or dismiss any element of this sophisticated culture, in which there have been high standards of education and literacy for centuries during which half our populations could barely sign their name.

1109

62. Ogawa, 1998.

63. Iwata, 1989: see Ogawa, 1998, p. 158.

931

What Oriental cultures also emphasise is the value of what is fleeting, something that has been appreciated in the West only rarely, that is to say during the Renaissance and in the Romantic period. The impermanence of nature (shizen) is seen as the Buddhahood, or essence of the divine.64 In the West, with our recording apparatus of every kind, we value what we can grasp and hold. But life and everything living refuses this approach. It changes as we hold it. Japanese temples are seen as still the same temple though they are rebuilt every 20 years: presumably the Japanese would have had no problem answering the paradox of the Ship of Theseus (see p. 138 above), because they naturally see the world as a process rather than a collection of things – like Heraclitus’ river, always changing, but always itself.

1110

64. ‘The impermanence of grass, trees and forests is verily the Buddhahood. The impermanence of the person’s body and mind is verily the Buddhahood. The impermanence of the (land) country and scenery is verily the Buddhahood.’ Nakamura, 1993, p. 352.

932

Why do we in the West think that ultimate value lies only in the immutable, in what is eternally the same? The idea emerges with Parmenides, and Plato gave wider currency to this view of the world derived from the left hemisphere, where all is static, known, unchanging. But once again at the Renaissance and in Romanticism one does see intuitions in the West that life, and everything of value, lies not in a static state of being, as understood by the left hemisphere, but in becoming, as understood by the right hemisphere. To take just one example, at the end of Spenser’s great masterpiece, The Faerie Queene, in the so-called ‘Cantos of Mutabilitie’, we see Spenser divided between his loyalty to the abstract principle that what is fixed and eternally unchanging must be ‘right’, and his imaginative intuition in favour of mutability, the individuality of created beings, the variety of the created world, the liberation that comes from unpredictability, which his work everywhere attests. He reconciles the two when he puts into the mouth of Nature, after the suspense of a long silence in which she appears to be deep in thought, deliberating her verdict, these words:

… all things stedfastnes doe hate

And changed be: yet being rightly wayd

They are not changed from their first estate;

But by their change their being doe dilate:

And turning to themselues at length againe,

Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate …

933

In this formulation Spenser suggests, through the persona of Nature herself, that, though things change, they thereby ‘dilate’ their being, becoming in some sense more themselves, and return eventually into themselves, so working ‘their own perfection’. This is the expression of the mysterious circular motion that the right hemisphere descries in things, whereby there is movement within stasis, and stasis within movement. It also suggests the process whereby things ‘dilate’ their being by their contact with the left hemisphere, provided they are then returned to the right. Nietzsche was vehement in setting ‘against the value of what remains eternally the same (see the naivety of Spinoza, also of Descartes), the value of the shortest and most fleeting, the seductive flash of gold on the belly of the snake vita’.65

1110

65. Nietzsche, 2003, §9 [26], p. 145 (emphasis in original).

934

Hardly surprisingly there is in fact much evidence that East Asians and Westerners perceive the world and think about it in very different ways. In general, East Asians have a more holistic approach. For example, if asked to group objects, East Asians make comparatively little use of categories.66 They are more likely to attend to the broad perceptual and conceptual field, noticing relationships and changes, and grouping objects according to family resemblances, based on an appreciation of the whole, rather than on membership of a category. Westerners are significantly more likely to give one-dimensional, rule-based responses, based on individual components of the stimuli.67 East Asians also rely less on formal logic, instead focussing on relations among objects and the context in which they interact. They use more intuitive modes compared with Americans of European origin.68 They see events as arising from an entire context, and tend to think in a much less linear, and more global way, about causation. By contrast Westerners tend to focus exclusively on the object as cause, and are therefore often mistaken. Westerners are more analytic, and pay attention primarily to isolated objects, and the categories to which they belong. They tend to use rules, including formal logic, to understand their behaviour.69 These effects remain when language is controlled for.70

1110

68. Norenzayan, Smith, Kim et al., 2002.

69. Nisbett, Peng, Choi et al., 2001.

70. Ji, Zhang & Nisbett, 2004.

935

East Asians use a more ‘dialectical’ mode of reasoning: they are more willing to accept, to entertain, or even seek out contradictory perspectives on the same issue. They see the world in which they live as complex, containing inherently conflicting elements. Where Chinese students try to retain elements of opposing perspectives by seeking to synthesise them, American students try to determine which is correct so that they can reject the other. Presented with evidence for two opposing positions, Easterners are more likely to reach a compromise, whereas the fact of opposition tends to make Westerners adhere to one position more strongly. Westerners adopt a more ‘either/or’ approach. In one experiment, Chinese volunteers particularly liked proverbs, whether Chinese or American, that presented an apparent contradiction, such as the Chinese saying ‘too humble is half proud’. US participants preferred proverbs without contradictions, such as ‘half a loaf is better than no bread’.71

1110

71. Peng & Nisbett, 1999.

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Notes