Posts Tagged ‘ Master and his Emissary ’

Industrial Insanity

I am back reading The Master and his Emissary again, and trying to reconcile his approach with my own, as I outlined in What Went Wrong - a major breakthrough for me. One thing we agree on: it started with the Industrial Revolution.

He concentrates on how it changed the relationships between the two hemispheres of the brain – a very fruitful approach it seems to me, but no one else seems impressed with. This is something else we share: no one else is interested in our ideas.

My approach is to take Ortega y Gasset’s concept of mass man and run with it. He is not impressed by Ortega at all. I made mass production the center of my approach, and noted that this was the basic technique and mental attitude of Industrialization. I took it even further, and said man has become self-destructive – something I do not believe he says at all, but I have not read all of the book.

He has the advantage of being a well-educated man who is very well informed. I have the advantage of a brute-force approach based on personal paranoia. He is an academic having lived in that protective environment, but I spent time in the trenches of high-tech, dodging the incoming fire – but unlike most, I learned from that. If I think I am only being paranoid (as I often do), I only have to look at my battle-scars – and the scars of many other people down here, who are also on the run without being aware of it – and thank my lucky stars I am still alive.

Ortega’s approach was simple and direct – he simply noted he was surrounded by a strange breed of people that were taking over the world. In other words, he was aware of what was going on in the world – an astonishing achievement that almost no one has taken seriously. And which he didn’t understand too well either, in my opinion. But he did point his finger and say “There they are!” – when at the same time everybody was saying “I don’t see anybody there.” – because he was pointing at them (and all the other people like them).

In the same way, a fish is not aware of water, because it is surrounded by it. Post-modern man is not just surrounded by it – he is it. It not only effects his hemispheres, it affects all of him and defines him.

To be fair to McGilchrist, he does go into this, rather well, in the section Modernism and the Left Hemisphere, beginning on page 392. He pointed me to Eric Fromm, who I had almost forgotten about, and have ordered two of his books. He is extremely useful in pointing to other valuable sources – and as a result reading him takes a very long time.

2011
11/07
CATEGORY
Economy
Philosophy
Technology
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Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution

I continue to read The Master and his Emissary, and I found this part so good I had to copy it from page 382:

In the first part of this book, I referred to the German so-called ‘idealist’ philosophers of the late and early nineteenth centuries, and therefore of the Romantic age, and their view that one had to combine reason with imagination, system-building with the perception of individuality, consistency with contradiction, analysis with a sense of the whole.

What is striking is the degree of enthusiasm for, and active participation in, science that they exhibited. Goethe is another conspicuous example: in fact he believed his scientific world to be more important than his poetry. With his discovery of the intermaxillary bone in the human foetal skull, a vestigial remnent of a bone to be found in the skull of apes, and thought to be missing in humans, he demonstrated to his own statisfaction, long before Darwin, that all living things were related and their forms evolved from the same stem.

Though they were primarily philosophers and poets, the saw the world as a living unity, in which the metaphysical and the material were not to be separated, but where, nonetheless different contexts demanded different approaches. In an exploration of the spirit of Goethe’s age, one historian writes, in words that echo Nietzsche on Apollo and Dionysus:

For even rationality cannot get by without imagination, but neither can imagination with rationality. The marriage of the two is, however of such a peculiar kind, that they carry on a life and death struggle, and yet it is only together that they are able to accomplish their greatest feats, such as the higher form of conceptualizing we are accustomed to call reason.

But he goes on to say that this marriage was not to last. A second Reformation was on the way.

Buy the book and read it yourself.

2011
10/30
CATEGORY
Philosophy
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Left Brain, Right Brain

TED - Iain McGilchrist: The divided brain

I have been reading McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary for months, and still haven’t finished it. It keeps pointing me towards things I want to explore further. To me, it is the most important book out there.

Imagine my surprise to see him summarize the whole thing in 12 minutes!

Highly recommended.

2011
10/26
CATEGORY
Psychology
Science
Sociology
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Wanting and Longing

Today I read more of Iain McGilchrist in his The Master and his Emissary. I sometimes wonder if I am too far-out, but he is so far-out reading him I feel normal by comparison. From page 367:

The difference between wanting and longing.

The first is an impulsion, the second an attraction. Wanting is a drive, such as the left hemisphere experiences, or possibly embodies, in which one is impelled, as it were ‘from behind,’ towards something which is inert, and from which one is isolated, something not participating in the process except through the fact of its existence.

In longing, one is drawn ‘from in front,’ towards something from which one is not wholly separate, and which exerts an influence through that ‘division within union.’

The first is like a hydraulic force (like Freud’s model of drives), a mechanical pressure; the second is more like a magnetic field, an electric attraction (as Jung’s model of archetypes would suggest). The first is unidirectional; the second bidirectional – there is a ‘betweenness.’

The first is linear; the second, as the concept of a ‘field’ suggests, holistic, round in shape. The first has a clear view of its target; the second intuits its ‘Other.’ The first is simple, in the sense of unmixed force – one either wants or does not want. Longing, by contrast, is full of mixed emotions.

I have been writing of a technological explosion and its accompanying  human implosion. But my prose is pedantic; I admire his poetry.

I ask myself how we are relating to things like the iPhone and iPad. This is clearly a matter of wanting – something we want, something we can buy. In love, by contrast, we long for the beloved, and our relationship with him or her is complicated.

But we are fast becoming unable to tell the difference. We have merged with our things and cannot imagine what life would be like without them. They have even become part of our love lives.

2011
10/06
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Poetry
Psychology
Science
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Mass Production Produced Mass Man

The things we create, create us. What we do, and how we do things, end up being part of us. Man is always something in the making, making himself.

I know this is obvious, but I also know this is being ignored by everyone. Being something of a thinker (a defective, but stubborn one) I ask myself “Why? Why is everyone so eager to overlook this?” The answer comes immediately: “Because honest acceptance of this would make us less divine.” I use the world divine here with considerable reluctance, but I cannot think of a better word.

America has been described, very nicely, as a nation with the soul of a church, as a Google search shows. But this valuable insight has not been taken seriously enough by enough people. I intend to remedy that – or at least try to, by putting it into the larger context provided by Ortega y Gasset (who writes about mass man) – expanded still larger by including technology. And making the whole thing into a massive complex. The key concepts here are religion, mass man, mass production – and, very importantly, mixing all this into a complex.

Our ability to think of complexes has been one of breakthroughs of modern science, but we have been reluctant to expand this breakthrough to include the social sciences – for reasons I hope to make clear.

To return to the beginning of this essay: We become whatever we become obsessed with. We have always been obsessed with religion, in one form or another (including the development of heroic science) – and we have now become obsessed with our things (and the process of making and consuming them), so much so that we have become thing-like ourselves. Religious thing-like creatures – something hard to comprehend, but easy to observe in contemporary America.

One side-effect of this was the importance of manufacturing in the industrial economy. Our whole way of life revolved around this; this was where everyone was employed. Now China has become the manufacturer for the world, we are baffled: what are we going to do with all the unemployed in the rest of the world (including America)?

Perhaps my own life provides an answer. I have never worked in manufacturing, this was not what high-tech was about. What was high-tech about, or more appropriately – what IS it about? This is not an idle question, it is the question of our time: what will the post-industrial economy be?

The answer seems to be “Duh?” But I think a better answer would be to examine the technology involved. Starting about the middle of the 19th Century, oil and electricity became more and more important. Oil produced the automobile and electricity produced a whole host of things that changed us into watchers of images instead of readers of text. It made us couch-potatoes.

Ultimately, it produced the computer/software/internet complex that has changed everything. The world will never be the same – but more importantly, the people in it will never be the same either. They have been damaged permanently – and have become unable to comprehend most higher-order effects.

This is a sobering fact, and I need to say more about it. My only help here is Iain McGilchrist in his book The Master and his Emissary. I heard of him from an article in Poetry Magazine, of all things. Among other things he has taught English at Oxford University, but he has also been a brain researcher – and this is what he talks about here: the way the brain hemispheres affect our operation as an unique species. A species that has become endangered, not from outside forces, but from inside forces – from ourselves.

2011
09/28
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
Philosophy
Psychology
Religion
Science
Sociology
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Reason and Rationality

These two words refer to two different ways of life. This important difference, however, is one that few are aware of.

There are many ways of approaching this subject, but Iain McGilchrist in his book The Master and his Emissary has the simplest and most direct approach. From page 360:

Reality was not, as Goethe and the Romantics came to see, the fixed and unchanging state of affairs that the left hemisphere assumes. ‘The phenomenon must never be thought of as finished or complete’, Goethe wrote, ‘but rather as evolving, growing, and in many ways something yet to be determined’… He notes that ‘Vernunft [reason] is concerned with what is becoming, Verstand [rationality] with what has already become…Reason rejoices in whatever evolves; rationality wants to hold everything still so that it can utilize it.’

That  we take place in a changing world, and that the world evokes faculties, dimensions, and characteristics in us, just as we bring aspects of the world into existence, is perhaps the most profound perception of Romaniticism.

Put this way, it does not seem so dangerous, it even sounds like fun.

But for conservatives, it rejects the authority they adore – and that that they profit from.

2011
09/24
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Political comment
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Calculative Thinking and Meditative Thinking

This is from Martin Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking, in the book Existentialism, pages 151-152.

This so easy to understand that anyone could benefit from reading it. Why isn’t everyone doing so? There are lots of reasons, but the one Heidegger gives is the flight from thinking - something I have noticed myself. One of the commandments of our time seems to be: thou shalt not think. He says:

This flight-from-thought is the ground of thoughtlessness. But part of the flight is that man will neither see nor admit it. Man today will even flatly deny this flight from reasoning. He will assert he opposite. He will say – and quite rightly – that there were at no time such far-reaching plans, so many inquiries in so many areas, research carried on as passionately as today. Of course. And this display of ingenuity and deliberation has its own great usefulness. Such thought remains indispensable. But – it also reamains true that it is thinking of a special kind.

Its peculiarity consists in the fact that whenever we plan, research, and organize, we always reckon with conditions that are given. We take them into account with the calculated intention of their serving specific purposes. This we can count on definite results. This calculation is the mark of all thinking that plans and investigates. Such thinking remains calculation even if it neither works with numbers nor uses an adding machine or computer. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is.

There are, then, two kinds of thinking, each justified and needed in its own way: calculative thinking and meditative thinking.

Meditative thinking is what we have in mind when we say that contemporary man is in flight from thinking.

I agree wholeheartedly. When I try to explain the difference between the two, I say ordinary thinking cannot arrive at the basics of experience (which makes no sense if you do not meditate yourself). Which is precisely why people don’t want to do it – they don’t want to know what is really going on.

This fits in with McGilchrist’s left-hemisphere mode of thinking and right-hemisphere mode of thinking – my basic text.

Understanding this difference, in my opinion, is the most important task of our time. We have no end of solutions for everything under the sun, but unless we understand how we are thinking about our problems, we are wasting our time – and our precious lives.

2011
09/23
CATEGORY
Meditation
Philosophy
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Whatever Makes Them Feel Good

This is what Americans want – which is usually what everybody else wants too. For them, this makes sense – how can you go wrong by being like everyone else? Actually, you can go completely wrong – like everyone else.

This morning, I am reading my favorite book The Master and his Emissary. On page 355 he is talking about fact and theory, and how they interrelate:

For the Romantic mind, by contrast [to the Enlightenment mind], theory was not something abstracted from experience and separate from it (based on representation), but present in the act of perception. There was therefore no question of ‘applying’ theory to life, since phenomena are themselves were the source of ‘theory’.

Fact and theory, like particular and universal, were not opposites. According to Goethe they ‘are not only intimately connected, but…interpenetrate one another…the particular represents the universal, “not as a dream and a shadow, but as the momentarily living manifestation of the inscrutable”. The particular metaphorizes the universal.

Enlightenment thinking had the weakness of trying to make everything explicit. Things necessarily fled from it, as for their lives. Self-knowledge has been the goal of human wisdom since ancient times. Goethe wisely wrote, however, that ‘we are, and we ought to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and therefore come to know ourselves only indirectly, through our engagement with the world at large.

I am also studying Kant, and he makes much the same point about Idealism and Pragmatism – with, unfortunately, no insight into self-knowledge.

On page 357 McGilchrist quotes the poet Wordsworth:

I know of no book or system of moral philosophy written with sufficient power to melt our affections, to incorporate itself with the blood and vital juices of our minds. These bald and naked reasonings are impotent over our habits, they cannot form them; from the same cause they are equally powerless in regulating our judgment concerning the value of men & things.

Contemporary poetry, unfortunately, has much less impact than Romantic poetry – and I subscribe to Poetry Magazine, and work at relating to it.

2011
09/15
CATEGORY
Philosophy
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The Great Dying

Mankind has experienced many epidemics, such as the Black Death. They had the advantage of being obvious: we could not possibly overlook millions of dead bodies.

The Dying I have in mind was something everyone overlooked because it was so gradual, subtle, and internal: it happened in the unconscious, which was discovered as this was happening – from about the late 19th Century to the late 20 Century. It effected nearly everyone; and was a mass dying far greater than anything that had ever happened before.

As a result: people, or what was left of them, took great care not to be seen – and not to see anything either. They were scared to be seen alive – which meant having some awareness of what was going on. If they were caught alive, they were destroyed.

There are all kinds of theories about how this happened and what happened. But for me, it all boils down to a matter of will-power: the determination of an individual to be its own unique self.

This is the kind of subject you cannot think about (although many philosophers have tried), but something you can feel easily. Or as McGilchrist has pointed out, this is the purview of the Right Hemisphere – the Master part of the brain, that was usurped by the Left Hemisphere (the Emissary). The end result has been our technological, totalitarian culture – where everyone is the same.

Or, to put it another way, it is like a illness that has destroyed our ability to be - leaving people only interested in money, or equally strange obsessions (such as religion).

I am reading Oliver Sacks Awakenings, about how he used the drug L-DOPA on people suffering from Sleeping-Sickness and Parkinson’s disease. These people had a similar problem: they no longer existed as normal people, but only as disembodied ghosts.

In their case, the symptoms were obvious. The disease affecting all of us has been diagnosed by nearly everyone – to no avail. The most common strategy is to simply ignore it, and declare it does not exist – exactly what it wants.

How do you know I am not just another crazy seeing things? Look for yourself, and see if you cannot detect fear everywhere.

2011
09/07
CATEGORY
History
Medical
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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The Roots of Our Problem

Our problem can be compared to an infected tooth with many roots – all of which contribute to the overall problem.

Dealing with it requires some expertise – and I speak from experience here. I had a dentist down here who spoke excellent English – but whose dentistry was not so excellent. I had a painful molar, but instead of taking my complaint seriously (X-raying it, perhaps) he just prescribed some pain-killer medicine. I lost the tooth – and second one I have lost to incompetent dentists. My present dentist has saved another molar – partly do to my own stubbornness. I have learned the hard way to distrust experts.

Now I must give some credits: The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, and a book he referenced: Cosmopolis by Stephen Toulmin. The later describes the origins of the modern world – something that has long puzzled me – and something most seem content to overlook.

I have a steady flow of books coming from Amazon, from Miami, via my commercial mailing service. Most of the end up in the trash, as two did this week. Usually, it doesn’t take me too long to get what I am interested in out of them.  No problem, the trash man doesn’t complain.

After that introduction, I can get down to work. What are the roots of our problem – the one that is killing us?

I am tempted to tell you: just read the books – but I know few have the leisure, and even the inclination to do so. Can I give you a summary you can read in the 6.5 seconds of attention span you have available? No, no. I am like a beggar standing on the side of the road, holding up a small sign: “Learn about it here,” while the cars go zooming by.

From the preface to Toulmin (page x):

In choosing as the goals of Modernity an intellectual and practical agenda that set aside the tolerant, skeptical attitude of the 16th Century humanists, and focused on the 17th Century pursuit of mathematical exactitude and logical rigor, intellectual certainty and moral purity, Europe set itself on a cultural and political road that has led to both its most striking technical successes and to its deepest human failures.

If we have any lesson to learn from the experience of the 1960s and ’70s, this (I have come to believe) is our need to re-appropriate the wisdom of the 16th Century Humanists, and develop a point of view that combines the abstract rigor and exactitude of the 17th Century “new philosophy” with a practical concern for human life in all its concrete detail. Only so can we counter the current widespread disillusion with the agenda of Modernity, and salvage what is still humanly possible in its projects.

Does that mean anything to my readers, who have scant interest in anything human? I doubt it, but that hardly matters. I continue my studies for their own sake. And continue to see my dentist.

2011
09/06
CATEGORY
History
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