By Dr Joseph Steinberg, Forrest Fellow (pictured below).
Dr Iain McGilchrist – psychiatrist, philosopher, literary critic, and former fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, whose other accolades are simply too numerous to list here – has long had little patience for paraphrase. He sees it as part and parcel of a lamentable trend toward abstraction. ‘Literary criticism is bedevilled’, he contends in his first book, Against Criticism (1982), ‘by practices – paraphrase, the treatment of ideas or style in the abstract, the exaltation of a central tradition, or ideal – which are analytic and reductive’. This problem is so deeply ingrained that these simplifications are no longer ‘recognised as such’.
It is a contrarian’s case, teasingly at odds with the scholarly and political consensus of its field and its moment, as well as our own. But it is importantly not a nostalgic one, locating few allies among the literary critics of the early twentieth century whose claims it might at first glance seem to resemble. McGilchrist’s challenge is more fundamental, occurring at the level of method. ‘Understanding’, he writes in Against Criticism, enunciating a philosophical conviction that has underpinned much of his subsequent work, ‘is not achieved by analytic description.’ Not achieved solely, he might now amend. Without contraries – he is, endearingly, a great admirer of the poet William Blake, though he reserves his highest praise for Wordsworth – there can be no progression.
In the forty-plus years since his first book was published, with his thinking now buttressed by decades of neuroscientific research, McGilchrist has come to recognise the prevalence of abstraction, reduction and analytic description more broadly as betokening nothing short of a collective phenomenological error. When we are in thrall to a form of attention that apprehends and summarises, but neither comprehends nor complicates, we elevate the left cerebral hemisphere’s preferred way of attending to the world over the right’s. This, he steadily argues over the course of The Master and His Emissary (2009), as well as his monumental two-volume magnum opus The Matter With Things (2021), constitutes a loss that the left’s hubristic vision of reality cannot even begin to fathom.
The Master and His Emissary’s second half is a periodising history of the West since antiquity, one which repeatedly understands cultural works as allegorising ‘shifts of balance between the hemispheres over the last 2,000 years’. Its remit is ambitious, even a tad audacious, and McGilchrist is unsparing in his judgments of those artworks that in his view betray the left hemisphere’s acute self-consciousness, its spurning of ‘connection, cohesion, context’ in favour of an aesthetics of ‘fragmentation, decontextualisation’. Modernism, on this account, has much to answer for, the pleasures of jazz and free verse notwithstanding. Post-modernism, to which he devotes an entire subsection, is a hubristic enterprise consigned by the end of said section’s very first sentence: ‘With post-modernism, meaning drains away.’
McGilchrist’s prognosis for the present is hardly more optimistic. The Master and His Emissary’s conclusion alights on a dystopian train of thought: what, were the left hemisphere to become ‘so far dominant that, at the phenomenological level, it managed more or less to suppress the right hemisphere’s world altogether’, would our reality come to look like?
After a few sentences, it’s impossible to miss the hint. Things would look an awful lot like they do today. We would live – we are living – in a world increasingly virtualised and excruciatingly bureaucratised: one which disregards ‘tacit forms of knowing altogether’; one which is insensitive or altogether hostile to the notion of beauty; one which is committed to commodification and is materialist in the extreme.
When McGilchrist explains his work, addressing a roomful of guests after dinner at Forrest Hall or a packed lecture hall at the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, he prefers genial persuasion to forthright argument. He is a bespectacled, silvery septuagenarian with a penchant for blazers, even in Perth’s mild winter. His gaze often rests behind or above his interlocutors, especially when he’s listening attentively. He drinks up silence, as he remarked to one dinner attendee, like cool water. But unassuming as McGilchrist is in person, there is something in his discursive manner – conversations with him proceed by a patient, steady accretion – that distinctly echoes his voice on the page.
Beauty, morality, truth: these are his chief values. Reductively materialist accounts of the world in which we live, which would dismiss these values as the ephemera of a meaningless universe, are judged in the second volume of The Matter with Things to evidence ‘a complete refusal to exercise intelligent imagination’. It is this exercise that McGilchrist, on and off the page, seeks to model for us, and it informs his high regard for metaphor. The point, in a way, is not the technical veracity of his neuropsychological account of hemisphere differentiation, well-footnoted though it is. It’s that this account naturalises the practice of playing gracefully with ideas, of allowing opposites to coincide without forcing them to a resolution, a moderating yet exhilarating intellectual temper that Oscar Wilde once attributed to the alma mater he and McGilchrist share. It’s a privilege to hear that temper given voice, to hear both its mastery and its fragility: as persuasive a reminder as any that the imagination depends for its intelligent exercise on communities that recognise its value is innate.
Dr McGilchrist was a guest of the Forrest Research Foundation, the Australasian Association of Philosophy Association and UWA’s Institute for Advanced Studies.
