Abstract
This paper considers and analyses the idea propounded by Iain McGilchrist that the foundation of Western rationalism is the dominance of the left side of the brain and that this occurred first in ancient Greece. It argues that the transformation that occurred in Greece, as part of a more widespread transformation that is sometimes termed the Axial Age, was, at least in part, connected to the emergence of literacy which transformed the workings of the human brain. This transformation was not uniform and took different forms in different civilisations, including China and India. The emergence of what Donald terms a “theoretic” culture or what can also be called “rationalism” is best understood in terms of transformations in language, including the transition from poetry to prose and the separation of word and thing. Hence, the development of theoretic culture in Greece is best understood in terms of the particularity of Greek cultural development. This transition both created aporias, as exemplified by the opposition between the ontologies of “being” and “becoming”, and led to the eventual victory of theoretic culture that established the hegemony of the left side of the brain.
Highlights
The Western world is the product of a fundamental dialectic or tension, that between reason and imagination, logos and epos
Brain and the Making of the Western World”, Iain McGilchrist claims that such a dialectic is inherently the reflection of the functional asymmetry of the human brain with the left hemisphere of the cerebrum characterised by an analytical capacity, and oriented towards the particular and the factual, and the right hemisphere characterised by greater flexibility and fluidity, and as a result oriented towards the universal and of what lies beyond the factual (McGilchrist 2012)
It can be argued that the practical advantages derived from the development of critical thought and ethics, during the so-called Axial Age, prompted the gradual marginalisation or subordination of the imagination and, to a certain extent, of the aesthetic dimension
Summary
The Western world is the product of a fundamental dialectic or tension, that between reason and imagination, logos and epos (or mythos). McGilchrist’s thesis may seem true, it fails to explain how one hemisphere of the human brain, namely the left hemisphere, characterised by an analytical capacity and an orientation towards the factual, came gradually to dominate His theory or paradigm appears to rest on a premise, which has all the characteristics of an abstract axiom assumed as self-evident and cannot be confuted. It is, insufficient to argue that “the achievement of a degree of distancing from the world” is the cause of the dominance of one of the hemispheres of the human brain. This essay is an attempt to explore the historical or experiential causes which may have contributed to the dominance of the left hemisphere of the human brain and, as McGilchrist argues, characterised the historical development of the Western world
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