Christopher Jamison's intriguing review (The Tablet 22 November) of Iain McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary (2009) also reports on the Templeton Foundation's recent symposium of neuroscientists, philosophers, theologians and McGilchrist's himself. It sought to address the question of the post-Enlightenment malaise which (crudely put) privileges 'left-brain' (LH) cognition and rationality over 'right-brain' (RH) creativity, intuition and empathy, tacit knowledge etc.
I have yet to read the book in full which, according to Fr Jamison, aims at "a reaffirmation of the body as a source of knowledge", among other things. However we also have the claim that modern philosophy focuses "on the field of consciousness itself, not on the world beyond", and is thus a contributory source of an LH/RH inbalance.
Simply not true; the Enlightenment certainly witnessed a "subjective turn" in the shape of both Cartesian rationalism and British empiricism; but from the time of the 18th century philosopher Vico we see resistance to this - a challenge taken up in the 19th by Dilthey, and other western philosophers since, notably Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricouer, Marcel, and (on these shores) Wittgenstein and Polanyi, and in our own time and most explicitly in the work of Mary Midgley.
McGilchrist references all of the above among many others (except Midgley; Wittgenstein is cited or mentioned 12 times), but philosophers are not alone in this. Among theologians, for example, Andrew Louth's Discerning the Mystery (1983) similarly addressed the 'dissociation of sensibility' which, for T.S. Eliot, was a part of the enlightenment legacy, whereby scientific method became the paradigm of the search for truth. More recently we have, in an essay in 'radical orthodoxy', Catherine Pickstock's claim (in After Writing, 1998) that doxology, and hence liturgy, and above all the Eucharist, condition human peace and meaning.
So neuroscience is not by any means the sole or the even the main answer to our (post)modern malaise - especially while the LH/RH distinction remains in dispute among neuroscientists. The scope of The Master and his Emissary seems amply to demonstrate this.
Revd Stephen Wilson, Faversham, Kent
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