Iain McGilchrist on Wholeness

The purpose of this post is to highlight some of what Iain McGilchrist writes about wholeness in his two books The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things together with my questions.

Ian McGilchrist writes (my emphasis in italics):

…there is the primacy of wholeness: the right hemisphere deals with the world before separation, division, analysis has transformed it into something else, before the left hemisphere has re-presented it. It is not that the right hemisphere connects – because what it reveals was never separated; it does not synthesise – what was never broken down into parts; it does not integrate – what was never less than whole.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

The values of clarity and fixity are added by the processing of the left hemisphere, which is what makes it possible for us to control, manipulate or use the world. For this, attention is directed and focussed; the wholeness is broken into parts; the implicit is unpacked; language becomes the instrument of serial analysis; things are categorised and become familiar.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Experience is already coherent in its wholeness at very low levels in the brain, and what higher levels [of the brain] do is not to put together bits (left-hemisphere fashion) but to permit the growth of a unified whole (right hemisphere fashion).

—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

If we subject a work of art, say,…to detached, analytic attention, we lose the sense of the thing itself, and its being in all its wholeness and otherness recedes. But the result of such [analytic] attention, provided it is then relinquished,…may be a deeper and richer ‘presencing’. …it is the analogy of the necessary analysis carried out by the pianist in learning a piece, an analysis that must be forgotten during performance.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Cognition in the right hemisphere is not a process of something coming into being through adding piece to piece in a sequence, but of something that is out of focus coming into focus, as a whole. Everything is understood…in its context – all that encircles it. There are strong affinities between the idea of wholeness and roundedness.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

I would suggest that there are broadly six features that stand out in the language inevitably used by biologists … which stands in blatant contradiction to the metaphor of the machine. What are they? References to (1) actively co-ordinated processes, expressing a sense of (2) wholeness, inextricably linked with (3) values, (4) meaning and (5) purpose – each leading separately and together, to the phenomenon of (6) self-realisation.

—Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

The idea of complementarity is foundational in Nature. So, for example, to turn one’s back on the parts (the workings of the left hemisphere) and accept only the whole (the work of the right hemisphere) is not to ‘get back to wholeness’, because the whole is never an annihilation, but rather a subsumption, of the parts. The true whole exists precisely in this relationship, the tension between parts and an apparent whole.

Questions: 1) Is wholeness a subsumption of parts? 2) Is the tension maybe an artifact of a particular way of seeing?

The conjunction of the One and the Many is so important that it merits consideration in greater detail… It parallels that very necessary synthesis which is performed by the right hemisphere (if it is given freedom to do so) of its own awareness of wholeness together with the work of division which is provided by the left hemisphere.

Question: Is wholeness a synthesis of the parts? Didn’t it come into focus as a whole according to a previous quote?

…we [can] fall under the spell of language and abstract concepts to such an extent that we are no longer able to experience the intuitive wholeness from which, as secondary products, those concepts, and the things they denote, derive. That is a very substantial caveat in the world in which we now live.

Every part of the cosmos would be necessarily connected in some form to every other part. … Oddly enough, and beautifully enough, the quest to reduce reality – at last! – to its elementary particles merely returns the searcher to wholeness.

…synthesis engenders a new, richer, wholeness… I have compared this with the process whereby we learn a piece of music: initial receptivity; fragmentation and analysis…; followed by a new synthesis…

Question: Again, does synthesis bring wholeness into existence?

The world, I suggest, is far different from the way it has been generally understood… It is one in which there is a natural process of individuation, but one the aim of which, far from disrupting wholeness, is to enrich it.

Question: What if we are expressions of an unimaginably complex wholeness?