"Ultimately, though, I believe that the great achievement of humankind is not to have perfected utility through banding together to form groups, but to have learnt through our faculty for intersubjective experience, and our related ability to imitate, to transcend utility altogether. ... Instead of looking, according to the manner of the left hemisphere, for utility, we should consider, according to the manner of the right hemisphere, that finally, through intersubjective imitation and experience, humankind has escaped from something even worse than Kant's 'cheerless gloom of chance': the cheerless gloom of necessity. " (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 124).
"According to the left hemisphere, understanding is built up from the parts; one starts from one certainty, places another next to it, and advances as if building a wall, from the bottom up. It conceives there is objective evidence of truth for a part outside the context of the whole it goes to constitute. According to the right hemisphere, understanding is derived from the whole, since it is only in the light of the whole that one can truly understand the nature of the parts. " (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 142).
"It is mutuality, not reciprocity, fellow-feeling, not calculation, which is both the motive and the reward for successful co-operation. And the outcome, in utilitarian terms, is not the important point: it is the process, the relationship, that matters. " (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 147).
"For Merleau-Ponty truth is arrived at through engagement with the world, not through greater abstraction from it; the general is encountered through, rather than in spite of, the particular; and the infinite through, rather than in spite of, the finite. " (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 149).
"The grounding role in experience played by empathy, the primacy for Merleau-Ponty of experience over conceptual thought ..., his insistence on context and on the fundamental role played by the physically instantiated self in the 'lived body' as the prerequisite for being-in-the-world, the lived body as the medium of intersubjective experience, the consequent importance of depth, which is the necessary condition for embodied existence, his emphasis on the work of art as bringing into being something entirely new, not just a redeployment of what already exists, are all, in my view, expressions of the stance or disposition towards the world of the right hemisphere. " (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 149).
"Man is only a privileged listener and respondent to existence. The vital relation to otherness is not, as for Cartesian and positivist rationalism, one of 'grasping' and pragmatic use. It is a relation of audition. We are trying 'to listen to the voice of Being'. It is, or ought to be, a relation of extreme responsibility, custodianship, answerability to and for. " (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 152, quoting George Steiner).
"a patient, respectful nurturing of something into disclosure, in which we need already to have some idea of what it is that will be. George Steiner compares it to 'that "bending toward" of spirit and intellect and ear' to be seen in Fra Angelico's Annuncation in San Marco. A highly active passivity, in other words." (Ibid).
"governs the type of attention we pay to anything and by which we learn more about it. Our value-ceptive knowledge of the whole governs our understanding of the parts, rather than the reverse." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 160).
"The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, always imperfectly known – and to this world it exists in a relationship of care. The knowledge that is mediated by the left hemisphere is knowledge within a closed system. It has the advantage of perfection, but such perfection is bought ultimately at the price of emptiness, of self-reference. It can mediate knowledge only in terms of a mechanical rearrangement of other things already known. It can never really 'break out' to know anything new, because its knowledge is of its own representations only. Where the thing itself is 'present' to the right hemisphere, it is only 're-presented' by the left hemisphere, now become an idea of a thing. Where the right hemisphere is conscious of the Other, whatever it may be, the left hemisphere's consciousness is of itself." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 174).
"... nil admirari' – to be astonished at nothing. The mark of the true philosopher becomes not the capacity to see things as they are, and therefore to be awestruck by the fact of Being, but precisely the opposite, to keep cool in the face of existence, to systematise and clarify the world, so that it is re-presented as an object of knowledge. The role of the philosopher, as of the scientist, becomes to demystify." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 178).
"Many things that are important to us simply cannot withstand being too closely attended to, since their nature is to be indirect or implicit. Forcing them into explicitness changes their nature completely, so that in such cases what we come to think we know 'certainly' is in fact not truly known at all. Too much self-awareness destroys not just spontaneity, but the quality that makes things live; the performance of music or dance, of courtship, love and sexual behavior, humour, artistic creation and religious devotion become mechanical, lifeless, and may grind to a halt if we are too self-aware" (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 180).
"a way of attending to the world (or not attending to it), a way of relating to the world (or not relating to it), a stance, a disposition, towards the world – ultimately a 'way of being' in the world." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 184).
"... the disconnected left hemisphere could not engage with narrative, for two main reasons: it lacked concreteness and specificity in its relation of the story, and became abstract and generic; and it got time sequences wrong and conflated episodes that were separate in the story because they looked similar (in other words, it categorised them, and therefore put them together, even though in the lived world their meaning was destroyed by being taken out of narrative sequence). In place of a narrative, it produced a highly abstract and disjointed meta-narrative." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 191).
"the system, regardless of experience: it stays within the system of signs. Truth, for it, is coherence, because for it there is no world beyond, no Other, nothing outside the mind, to correspond with." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 193).
"The right hemisphere needs the left hemisphere in order to be able to 'unpack' experience. Without its distance and structure, certainly, there could be, for example, no art, only experience ... But, just as importantly, if the process ends with the left hemisphere, one has only concepts – abstractions and conceptions, not art at all. Similarly the immediate pre-conceptual sense of awe can evolve into religion only with the help of the left hemisphere: though, if the process stops there, all one has is theology, or sociology, or empty ritual: something else." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 199).
"Rather than separate entities in a vacuum, we might think of individual entities as dense nodes within some infinitely stretchable or distensible viscous substance, some existential goo – neither ultimately separable nor ultimately confounded, though neither without identity nor without the sense of ultimate union." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 207). I.e., God.
"In the space within the heart lies the controller of all. ... He is the bridge that serves as the boundary to keep the different worlds apart." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 213, quoting The Upanishads).
"Despite the asymmetry in their roles, in favor of the right hemisphere, there is an important opposing asymmetry of power, in favor of the left hemisphere. The Master makes himself vulnerable to the emissary, and the emissary can choose to take advantage of the situation, to ignore the Master. It seems that its nature is such that it is prone to do so, and it may even, mistakenly, see the right hemisphere's world as undoing its work, challenging its 'supremacy'." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 219).
"Panksepp sees consciousness as something that begins very deep indeed, in the so-called peri-acqueductal grey matter in the midbrain, and 'migrates' through higher regions of the brain, especially the cingulate, temporal and frontal regions of the cortex. So he sees it as something that is not all or nothing, but has a continuous existence, transforming itself as it travels upwards, through the branches, to what he calls, by analogy with the forest canopy, the 'cerebral canopy', until in the frontal cortices it becomes high-level cognitive awareness. I like this image of the cerebral 'canopy' because it reminds us that consciousness is not a bird, as it often seems to be in the literature – hovering, detached, coming in at the top level and alighting on the brain somewhere in the frontal lobes – but a tree, its roots deep inside us. It reinforces the nature of consciousness not as an entity, but as a process." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 221).
"Conscious experience is at the focus of our attention, usually therefore dominated by the left hemisphere. It benefits from an asymmetry of means. The means of argument – the three Ls, language, logic and linearity – are all ultimately under left-hemisphere control, ... [whose] point of view is always easily defensible, because analytic, ... [and] most easily expressible, because of language's lying in the left hemisphere: it has a voice. But the laws of non-contradiction, and of the excluded middle, which have to rule in the left hemisphere because of the way it construes the nature of the world, do not hold sway in the right hemisphere, which construes the world as inherently giving rise to what the left hemisphere calls paradox and ambiguity. This is much like the problem of the analytic versus holistic understanding of what a metaphor is: to one hemisphere a perhaps beautiful, but ultimately irrelevant, lie; to the other the only path to truth." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 228).
"Language in itself (to this extent the post-modern position is correct) can only refer to itself, and reason can only elaborate, 'unpack' the premises from which reason must begin, or that validates the process of reasoning itself – those premises, and the leap of faith in favor of reason, have to come from behind and beyond, from intuition or experience." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 229).
"We are caught up, [according to Heidegger] in a frenzy of 'forming projects, enclosures, frameworks, division and structuring', destroying ourselves and our environment and turning all into 'resource', something to be merely exploited, Nature turned into 'one gigantic filling station'." (The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, 2009; page 232).
