McGilchrist himself has said that it doesn’t matter if the neuroscience is all wrong, it makes a good metaphor. See this review, where McGilchrist’s “The Master and His Emissary” is quoted:
“If it could eventually be shown…that the two major ways, not just of thinking, but of being in the world, are not related to the two cerebral hemispheres, I would be surprised, but not unhappy. Ultimately what I have tried to point to is that the apparently separate ‘functions’ in each hemisphere fit together intelligently to form in each case a single coherent entity; that there are, not just currents here and there in the history of ideas, but consistent ways of being that persist across the history of the Western world, that are fundamentally opposed, though complementary, in what they reveal to us; and that the hemispheres of the brain can be seen as, at the very least, a metaphor for these…
What [Goethe’s Faust, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Scheler and Kant] all point to is the fundamentally divided nature of mental experience. When one puts that together with the fact that the brain is divided into two relatively independent chunks which just happen broadly to mirror the very dichotomies that are being pointed to – alienation versus engagement, abstraction versus incarnation, the categorical versus the unique, the general versus the particular, the part versus the whole, and so on – it seems like a metaphor that might have some literal truth. But if it turns out to be ‘just’ a metaphor, I will be content. I have a high regard for metaphor. It is how we come to understand the world.”
In which case, why is he peddling it? He is asserting the neuroscience as true. It matters whether it is true, because without it, he’s just another purveyor of intellectual artistic ramblings, like the ones he admires. And isn’t that dichotomising, in his terms, a left-brain thing to do?
I think that pretty much cuts the ground from under his whole system. It reduces the neuroscience story to a noble lie.
McGilchrist himself has said that it doesn’t matter if the neuroscience is all wrong, it makes a good metaphor. See this review, where McGilchrist’s “The Master and His Emissary” is quoted:
In which case, why is he peddling it? He is asserting the neuroscience as true. It matters whether it is true, because without it, he’s just another purveyor of intellectual artistic ramblings, like the ones he admires. And isn’t that dichotomising, in his terms, a left-brain thing to do?
I think that pretty much cuts the ground from under his whole system. It reduces the neuroscience story to a noble lie.