“The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart” by Meister Eckhart (translated by Maurice O’Connell Walshe)

This is a collection on the Dominican priest, Meister Eckhart’s, sermons to his flock. His notions of God and the Trinity were somewhat eclectic in his time, if not, heretical. In fact, he was on trial, in danger of excommunication, when he died. Eckhart begins with the notions of grace, the intellect, the soul, and the nature of God, “When a man is dead in imperfection, the highest intellect arises in the understanding and cries to God for grace. Then God gives it a divine light, so that it becomes self-knowing. Therein it knows God. I say the intellect alone can receive the divine light…. The man in the soul, transcending angelic being and guided by intellect, pierces to the source whence the soul flowed. There, intellect must remain outside, with all named things. There the soul is merged in pure unity. This we call the man in the soul…. This is the light of truth…. You should understand it thus: they practice inwardly in the man of the soul. Indeed that kingdom is blessed in which one such person dwells! They do more eternal good in an instant than all outward works that were ever performed externally.”

Eckhart chooses to expound on the topic of angels in another sermon, “A master says an angel is the image of God. A second says he is fashioned like God. A third says he is a clear mirror which contains and carries within itself the reflection of God’s purity, the divine purity of the stillness and mystery of God, as far as that may be. Yet another says he is a pure intellectual light, detached from all material things…. But an angel perceives in a light that is beyond time and eternal. He therefore perceives in the eternal Now. But man knows in the now of time. The now of time is the least thing there is…. Cease to be this and that, and have this and that, then you are all things and have all things and so, being neither here nor there, you are everywhere.” Next, Eckhart preaches on the logos, “There are three things that prevent us from hearing the eternal Word. The first is corporeality, the second is multiplicity, the third is temporality. If a man had transcended these three things, he would dwell in eternity, he would dwell in the spirit, he would dwell in unity and in the desert…. For to hear the Word of God demands absolute self-surrender. The hearer is the same as the heard in the eternal Word.” Finally, Eckhart concludes, “Understand: all our perfection and all our bliss depends in our traversing and transcending all creatureliness, all being and getting into the ground that is groundless.”

“Pond” by Claire-Louise Bennett

This collection of short stories is one of the gems of Fitzcarraldo Editions. It is a continual bestseller. In the title story, Bennett declares, “If it were left up to me I wouldn’t put a sign next to a pond saying pond, either I’d write something else, such as Pig Swill, or I wouldn’t bother at all…. It’s not that I want children to fall into the pond per se, though I can’t really see what harm it would do them; it’s that I can’t help but assess the situation from the child’s perspective. And quite frankly I would be disgusted to the point of taking immediate vengeance if I was brought to a purportedly magical place one afternoon in late September and thereupon belted down to the pond, all by myself most likely, only to discover the word pond scrawled on a poxy piece of damp plywood right there beside it. Oh I’d be hopping. That sort of moronic busy-bodying happens with such galling regularity throughout childhood of course.”

An unnamed female narrator voices all of the stories in this collection. She is a writer, living at the farthest edge of western Ireland, near Galway, in a leased ramshackle stone cottage away from the world. The stories vary in length from a single paragraph to twenty or so pages. They detail everyday life and thought. Each is tight, in a sense, and yet, these stories are full of asides, digressions, loops, and quick mental jumps. “English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way. I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things. I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don’t think my first language can be written down at all. I’m not sure it can be made external you see. I think it has to stay where it is; simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs.” The luxury, enchantment, and precision of Bennett’s prose make the mundane as propulsive to read as any teleological plot, which seems completely besides the point. “And even though it was almost completely dark by now I opened a notebook by the fire and wrote some things down…. There were lines across the pages but they were imperceptible because of how dark it had become and once a word was written it was quite irretrievable, as if abducted. I went on, sinking words into the pages.”

“Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind” by Johann Gottfried Herder (translated by Gregory Martin Moore)

Herder originally published this massive tome in four volumes, between 1784 and 1791. One could think of this book as a selective history of the span of human history, delving into civilizations as diverse as the Chinese, Indians, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Tatars, Goths, Normans, Gauls, and much more. He was a cultural pluralist and his main theme is that geography, culture, and genetics all interact together to make every peoples unique from one another. First, Herder gives nature its do, “All outer form in Nature is the index of her inner workings; and so, great Mother, we step before your most hallowed earthly creation, the laboratory of the human understanding…. Nature fashioned man for language…. It is in language that his reason and culture have their beginning…. Only with his organization for speech did man receive the breath of divinity, the seed of reason and of eternal perfection, an echo of that creative voice that he should have dominion over the earth, the divine art of ideas, the mother of all arts…. Thus, man has not so much been deprived of his instincts as these have been suppressed and subordinated to the governance of the nerves and finer senses.”

Common in the milieux of German Pietists of Herder’s era, he discusses the concept of idealism that floated in the air since the speculations of Kant. “Indeed, to one convinced of this inner life of the self all external states in which the body, like all matter, is subject to constant change will in time seem as mere transitions that do not affect his essential being: he passes as insensibly from this world into the next as he passes from night into day and from one stage of life into another…. The purpose of our present existence is the formation of humanity: all the baser wants of this earth shall be subservient and conducive to this end. Our capacity for reason shall be formed to reason, our finer senses to art, our instincts to genuine freedom and beauty, our motive powers [Bewegungskrafte] to love of mankind…. And how seldom is this eternal, this infinite purpose realized in this world! In whole nations reason lies trapped beneath layers of brutishness…. Few men take godlike humanity, in both the strict and extended sense of the term, as the proper study of life.”

Herder returns again and again to the theme that it is humanity’s ability to reason, through the knowledge of languages, that makes us superior to the beasts of the earth. Reason also gives each civilization, when combined with their own geography, history, and culture, their own specialness. “Reason is the aggregate of the observations and exercises of the mind, the sum of the education of our species…. Born almost without instinct, we are raised to manhood only by lifelong practice, on which both the perfectibility as well as the corruptibility of our species rests, so it is precisely thereby that the history of mankind is made a whole: that is, a chain of sociability and formative tradition from the first link to the last…. Hence there is an education of the human species: precisely because every man becomes a man only through education and the whole species lives solely in this chain of individuals…. Hence the education of our species is in a twofold sense genetic and organic: genetic by the communication, organic by the reception and application of that which is communicated. Call this second, lifelong genesis of man what we will: whether culture [Cultur], by analogy with the tillage of the land, or enlightenment, after the operation of light; it matters not, for the chain of culture and enlightenment reaches to the ends of the earth.”

Later, Herder returns to one of his biggest preoccupations, language. “Language alone has made man human, by damming the vast torrent of his emotions and with words erecting rational monuments to them…. Through language, men extended a welcome to one another, entered into society, and sealed the bonds of love. Language framed laws and united the generations; only through language, in inherited forms of the heart and mind, did a history of mankind become possible…. Whatever the mind of man has devised, what the sages of old had contemplated, reaches me, if it pleases Providence, by way of language. Through language my thinking mind is linked to the mind of the first man who thought and possibly the last; in short, language is the character of our reason, by which alone it is given shape and propagated.”

Herder next directly addresses the history of humanity. “Everywhere on our earth whatever can, will come into being; partly according to the situation and the requirements of the locality, partly according to the circumstances and opportunities of the age, and partly according to the native or acquired character of nations…. Time, place, and national character alone—in short: the cooperation as a whole of living forces in their most distinctive individuality—determine, as all productions of Nature, so all events in the human realm…. The ancient character of peoples derived from the tribal features, climate, way of life and education, early activities and occupations that were peculiar to them. Ancestral customs penetrated deeply and became the intrinsic pattern of the tribe…. Tradition in itself is an excellent ordination of Nature and indispensable to our species; but as soon as it shackles all power of thought, both in the institutions of state and in education; as soon as it inhibits all progress of human reason and improvement according to new circumstances and times; then it is the true opium of the mind, for states as well as for sects and individuals.”

Finally, Herder stresses, again, what makes humans the only species capable of history, while discrediting a Whig theory of historical progress. “Everything in history is therefore transitory; the inscription on her temple reads: vanity and decay. We kick the dust of our forefathers and walk on the crumbled ruins of human states and kingdoms…. The cause of the impermanence of all terrestrial things lies in their essence, in the place that they inhabit, in the whole law that binds our nature…. We fancy ourselves self-sufficient and yet are dependent on all in Nature: woven into the web of things mutable, we too must follow the laws governing their repeated course…. Everywhere we observe destruction in history without perceiving that what is renovated is better than what was destroyed. Nations flourish and then fade; but a faded nation does not bloom again, let alone more beautifully than before. Culture continues on its path; but it does not become more perfect.”

“Work on Myth” by Hans Blumenberg (translated by Robert M. Wallace)

This book deals with the function of myth in societies throughout history. It relies heavily on the Homeric epics, as well as depicting how the pantheon of Greek gods has been passed down through western culture. There are long expositions into the various treatments of the myths of Faust and Prometheus, including Goethe’s treatments of both. As well, there is a digression into Goethe’s affinity for Napoleon, a recollection of their mythic meeting at Erfurt, and, finally, Goethe’s mythologizing of Napoleon as a modern day Prometheus. Finally, Blumenberg concludes his book by contrasting how the Enlightenment and Romantic philosophers dealt with myth and, in particular, Prometheus.

Blumenberg begins with a description of the beginnings of myth. “That events were interpreted as actions is, according to Nietzsche’s formulation, the distinguishing mark of all mythologies…. Urgently and early on, the interest was certainly in the existence of powers that one could appeal to, that could be turned away from or toward one, that were capable of being influenced in every sense, and they were also (to a degree) dependable.” He continues on the function of myth, “The antithesis between myth and reason is a late and a poor invention, because it forgoes seeing the function of myth, in the overcoming of that archaic unfamiliarity of the world, as itself a rational function…. One of the arguments of Romanticism was that the truth could not and should not be as young as the Enlightenment had undertaken to present it as being.” Goethe suggests, “In the centuries when man found nothing outside himself but abomination, he had to be happy that he was sent back into himself, so that in place of objects, which had been taken from him, he could create phantoms.”

Ernst Cassirer was concerned with how the symbols of myth preceded science. “For Cassirer the most important concept is one that is remote from the actual terminologies of philosophy and consequently is able to transcend their history—the concept of symbol. The theory of the symbolic forms allows one for the first time to correlate the expressive means of myth with those of science, but in the historically irreversible relationship and with the unrelinquishable presupposition of science as the terminus ad quem [goal toward which the process is directed].  Myth is made obsolete by what comes after it; science cannot be made obsolete…. Myth moves into a position that has a functional value of its own only in relation to a totality that counts.” For modern man, myth was just a stepping stone to a “realer” truth. Cassirer relates, “What distinguishes mythical time from historical time is that for mythical time there is an absolute past, which neither requires nor is susceptible of any further explanation.”

Myth is next contrasted with Christian dogma. “Negligence in constructing chronology is one of the things that are inexcusable in dogmatic observance. The compensation that observance furnishes in return for this is that the ‘history’ it regulates is from the beginning a history of man, which is preceded by nothing except the mere preparation of the world for his entrance. He stands at the focus of God's actions, and everything depends on God's behavior in relation to man exclusively. Consequently the [comprehensive] history of histories must possess continuous identity, reliable chronology and genealogy, localization and dating. This produces an entirely different pathos from what can be characteristic of myth. In myth there is no chronology, there are only sequences…. Although myth refuses, and must refuse, to provide explanations, it does ‘produce’ another life stabilizing quality: the inadmissibility of the arbitrary, the elimination of caprice.” 

Blumenberg suggests Christianity was most successful when it combined elements of dogma and story. “Christianity, unexpectedly and contrary to its antecedents, went halfway to meet this pressure and enriched the invisible One with elements of a perceptual and narrative character. True, it did not need to go back to animal physiognomies again in order to prevail over the Hellenistic world; but for more than a millennium it created combinations of dogma and image, of concept and perceptivity, of abstraction and narrative…. Satan, in the Christian tradition is, like Proteus, a figure that exaggerates the mythical repertory, summing up all the means that can be employed against a theological authority characterized by reliability and commitment to man…. He represents the opposite of dogma’s substantial realism. In the figure of Satan, myth has become the subversion of the world of faith that is disciplined by dogma.”

Blumenberg now goes searching for the fundamental, if not the original, myth. “Attempts have repeatedly been made to reduce the diverse myths of our culture circle and of others to a fundamental myth [Grundmythos] and then to establish the latter as the ‘radical’ that underlies unfoldings and enrichments…. The radical myth does not have to be the initial myth…. The myth that is varied and transformed by its receptions, in the forms in which it is related to (and has the power of being related to) history, deserves to be made a subject of study if only because such a study also takes in the historical situations and needs that were affected by the myth and were disposed to ‘work’ on it…. The fundamental myth is not what was pre-given, but rather what remains visible in the end, what was able to satisfy the receptions and expectations.”

Now comes philosophy on the scene to contrast against both myth and Christian dogma. “Philosophy, in opposition to myth, brought into the world above all restless inquiry, and proclaimed its ‘rationality’ in the fact that it did not shrink from any further question or from any logical consequence of possible answers. Dogma restricted itself to ordering a halt to the pleasure taken in questioning by those who transgress boundaries, and marking out the minimum of what cannot be relinquished…. Myth lets inquiry run up against the rampart of its images and stories…. This fragment of a myth takes only the single step from the life-world to the unusual, and then the story is over. He who asks “Why?” is himself at fault if he is annoyed by the answer. He has violated the rules of the game of the mythical world…. Dogma refuses such offers, because it commands one to believe its God to be capable of anything.”

Blumenberg now arrives at the Enlightenment and the questions posed by modernity. “The abyss and the hermit—they are the metaphors of nihilism, the images of the modern age’s failure in the face of a question that it posed for the first time in this nakedness and for which it had forbidden itself every dogmatic and every mythical answer: the question of the reason for being.” Schopenhauer proposes the final myth of reincarnation. “The standard [Normierung] that a ‘final myth’ has to satisfy was, if I see it correctly, first laid down by Schopenhauer. For him the myth of the transmigration of souls is the epitome of a story that comes as close to philosophical truth as any story that could be devised…. Wherein does this quality of the myth of reincarnations consist? In contrast to Nietzsche’s idea of recurrence, it does not make the world return to what it once was, repeating its passages eternally, without change. Instead, the subject returns to its world, not as something that is eternally the same, but rather, according to the measure of what it can expect, it returns into the form of existence of which it is able to make itself worthy.” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing asks, “But why should not every individual man have been present more than once in this world? Do I bring away so much from one visit that it is perhaps not worth the trouble of coming again? And what then have I to lose? Is not the whole of eternity mine?”

In modernity, for the first time, myth is unpacked and perhaps seen as myth—myth as purpose. Johann Herder suggests, “The harsh mythology of the Greeks, from the earliest times, should not be employed by us except in a mild and human way.” He expands that the elements contained within ancient Greek myth are “such a rich material for the cultivation of a spiritual meaning in their figures that they seem to cry to us: ‘Use the fire that Prometheus brought you, for yourselves! Let it shine brighter and more beautifully, for it is the flame of the forever continuing cultivation [Bildung] of man.’” Finally, Herder concludes that modern man is at his pinnacle, “when he puts the noblest, perhaps also the most natural meaning into them [myth], the cultivation and further cultivation of the human race to every kind of culture; the striving of the divine spirit in man toward the awakening of all of his powers.” Heinrich Heine says of  pantheism, “[it is] the reinstatement of man in his divine privileges.” Jean Paul quips, “Gods can play, but God is serious.” Goethe chimes in, “For myself, I cannot be satisfied, given the multiple tendencies of mode of thought; as a poet and artist I am a polytheist, but as an investigator of nature I am a pantheist, and I am the one just as firmly as the other. If I have need of a God for my personhood, as a moral man, then that has already been taken care of, too.”

After going into detail on Goethe’s interpretation of the Faust myth and his “heretical” ode to Prometheus, Blumenberg has quite a long digression into the epigraph to the fourth volume of Goethe’s autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, which was published posthumously. It states, “Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse [No one (can stand) against a god unless he is a god himself].” Blumenberg parses out, “The saying here is neither purely monotheistic (by describing a counterposition, against God, as illusory), nor exclusively polytheistic either (by setting up one god against another), but rather has a pantheistic implication: Only the entire universe can prevail against a demonic-divine nature, which is able to overpower every individual power within this universe. The universe is the absolute, which cannot be shaken, in its power, by what occurs within it.” Goethe often described Napoleon as a demonic power let loose upon the world. The epigraph, it is posited, is a reference to the two men's meeting at Erfurt, where Goethe looked the Emperor square in the eyes.

Blumenberg discusses the Christian concept of the Trinity and how it was a response to Gnostic and Manichaean concepts of dualism. “In it's historical function, the Christian dogma of the Trinity was, after all, intended as a means of barring the way to dualism, by reducing the impact of the bifurcation of the divinity that the production of the Son brings with it, by means of a third agency that the two cooperate in generating, and binding that bifurcation to the origin, without retracting it or destroying its meaning in terms of salvation…. Despite all the conjuring up of love and unity in the Trinity, traces of the old dualistic temptations have remained ineffaceable. Especially in the distribution of roles: of creation to the Father and redemption to the Son, as well as of the posteschatological (even antieschatological) institutionalization of the store of grace, which is assigned to the Spirit—the Spirit of Disappointment. Thus when, rather than looking at the conciliatory formulas, one analyzes what is implicit, an element of opposition always remains—always something of Prometheus in the way the Son acts in solidarity with mankind, who have fallen from Paradise. That applies to the demand that we should see the harshest sacrifice as the offer, to the Father, of the ransom for man; but it also applies to the intradivine rivalry for the assumption of the office of judge at the end of the ages.”

Finally, Blumenberg goes back to how the nineteenth century philosophers related to the myth of Prometheus. “Only when Nietzsche rediscovers in Prometheus the central figure of ancient tragedy, and finds in that figure the absolute antithesis of the Socratic type, does it become clear that the century had wagered on Prometheus as the victorious conqueror on behalf of mankind, the god who invents ways to combat the gods’ playing with men's fortunes, the patriarch of historical self-discovery.… The century had indeed used the Titan’s great gesture of the institution of fire as a metaphor for its own accomplishments…. It had not connected the mythical idea that earthly consummation could never be anything but “an encroachment on the gods’ privilege of happiness and their perfection” with the suspicion, or even fear, that in making himself comfortable in the world man might have to be prepared for resistance, for limits, or even for objections imposed by overwhelming force.” August Wilhelm Schlegel cries out, “O son, you are drunk with the delusion of creation!”

German Idealism resurrected Greek myth, but for its own purposes and in its own context. Friedrich Schlegel opined, “If the inner natural meaning of the old saga of the gods and heroes, the sound of which reaches us on the magic stream of imagination as the giant voice of the primeval age—if this meaning will be more closely revealed for us, and will be renewed for us, too, and rejuvenated, by the spirit of a philosophy that is itself alive and that also understands life clearly: then it will be possible to compose tragedies in which everything is ancient, and which yet would be certain to capture the sense of the age through the meaning.” Blumenberg comments, “The renewal of myth within Idealism is not a simple task, because Idealism is itself a myth. That a story has to be told about the spirit, a story that can only be imprecisely surmised on the basis of the actual history of ideas, is also part of the attempt to overcome the contingency that oppresses the self-consciousness of the modern age…. Zeus “chose” the world and he, Prometheus, chose man—that is the formula for the conflict both between ancient and modern and between cosmocentric and anthropocentric metaphysics.” Friedrich Schelling relates, “Prometheus is the thought in which the human race, after it had produced from inside itself the whole world of the gods, turned back to itself and became conscious of itself and its own destiny (the thought in which it perceived the unfortunate side of belief in the gods)…. Prometheus is not an idea that any man invented; he is one of the original ideas [Urgedanken] that force themselves into existence and that unfold logically when, as Prometheus did in Aeschylus, they find an abode in a thoughtful spirit in which to do so.” Blumenberg concludes, “The Prometheus myth, treated in this way, is no longer an element in the class of myths, but rather the one myth of the end of all myths.”

“Modern Liberty and Its Discontents” by Pierre Manent

This is a collection of essays written by the French philosopher on the topics of modernity, politics, and religion. Manent was influenced both by Raymond Aron and Leo Strauss and while some essays deal specifically with their thoughts, others focus on the history of philosophy and sociology more broadly. All the essays are connected by the exploration of what it means to be an individual in modern society. Manent writes about the tension of “liberal democracy (necessarily caught between the promotion and the critique of representation, between the emancipation of the individual and the imposition of a uniform rule).” He teases out the dichotomy of liberty and equality that is at the heart of democracy. Man gradually becomes aware of the freedom and responsibilities than modernity brings. “In Tocqueville’s democracy the power of democracy is not the power of man over man, or the power of one party over another, or it is so only very secondarily and provisionally. It is rather the power of man over himself: more and more actions, more and more sentiments, more and more thoughts, come to live under the democratic regime.” One check to this impulse has naturally been the institution of religion. “By its origins and perhaps its essence, it is external to democracy; this is why it can regulate democracy. It says to democratic man’s liberty, to his envy, and to his disordered passions, you will not go any further!” As democratic man has become individuated he has lost his natural social bonds, for better and for worse. The separation of Church and State was not an equal divide. It is “founded on an essential inequality of consents, which gives a decisive advantage to the public institution over the private one. The inequality of the consents demanded or required translates into the essential superiority of the state over the churches in the regime of separation.” Through the social contract man has consented to be ruled by men.

Modernity tried to build a world ex novo. Manent quotes Charles Peguy, the modern State“ is opposed, it runs counter to all the ancient cultures, to all the anciens regimes, to all the ancient cities, to everything which is culture, to all that is a city.” The conception of the city, as either Platonic or Aristotelean ideal of community, no longer has purchase. Modernity has nothing to learn from the past. Or rather, it picks and chooses at its will and leisure. Manent reflects, “we no longer perceive the extraordinary audacity of the original project of establishing the human world on the narrow point of the human will.” Modern philosophy, starting with Machiavelli, became infatuated with the rational will and the science of what was possible. “It is precisely modern humanity that desires to be the sovereign over nature, creator of its own nature.” Democracy has severed itself from past humanity, from tradition, custom, and culture. “The man of the future, man par excellence, is a being without conscience.” Manent, reflecting on Aurel Kolnai, suggests that man would be better served by combining the moral absolutes of his own conscience with the traditions of conservatism. “We are born in and act in a world already structured by institutions, models, achievements, traditions- by traditions, moreover, which do not force us to be “traditionalists,” precisely because we have the good fortune to be heirs to the tradition of rationally criticizing tradition…. It is because there is a natural and necessary tension between the conscientious and the conservative attitudes that the prudent man has to learn how to combine them, to learn that the relative weight of each depends on circumstances and on the agent’s ability to compose and harmonize, judiciously and even stylishly, the various legitimate themes of free conduct. A conscience with a lively sensitivity to universal moral demands but also well aware of political constraints, of ambiguities and conflicts of values and the uncertainties attending action: a conscience which, when it is at odds with the world, does not hurry to condemn the world but takes time to weigh the adversary’s reasons.”

Individual man has often found himself lost at sea, alone, left to his own devices. He has demanded of the political authority that it acknowledges his consent. “The communities to which people belong in the democratic world no longer command them…. The past itself, understood as the community of those who are dead, has lost all authority to command, whether it be in the moral, social, political, or religious sphere, and is no more than a collection of “memorable places” thrown open to historical tourism.” History no longer advises and urges caution. The past is only studied for amusement. Tradition is quaint. “The only vocation that contemporary man recognizes is that of being an individual. Modern man aims to become ever more the author and artist of all his ties- to be always more un-obliged or disconnected.”

Throughout these essays, Manent is at heart a philosopher. “Philosophy is the endeavor, at once heroic and unobtrusive, to keep one’s distance, to refuse one’s adherence to all these interpretations by interposing between them and oneself the small question, What is?” Philosophy is a disposition. “Philosophy is essentially skeptical. It is therefore not a doctrine, system, or view of the world, but a way of life.” Socrates was the philosopher par excellence. “One must act morally, and not think morally.” More so than even romantic love, true friendship guides the path of the philosopher. in the past, the bonds of friendship were desired because they engendered the quest for a common truth in man. The ideal man sought “the life of reason, the life dedicated to understanding life… “The love of wisdom” (philosophy) is literally, and nonmetaphorically, the most erotic of the soul’s dispositions, the one that leads toward its highest possibility and that consequently is capable of forming the strongest human tie because it is the most genuine one…. Life is worthy of being loved because it is capable of being understood.” 

“The Master and His Emissary- The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World” by Iain McGilchrist

McGilchrist is a former psychiatrist, neuroimaging researcher, and professor of English at Oxford. He believes that the left and the right sides of the human brain, while exhibiting signs of plasticity, do have unique capabilities. The thesis of his book is that “for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognizably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows that the hemispheres need to co-operate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture.” This thesis is at once simple and revolutionary. McGilchrist begins by pointing out some hard biology. “The corpus callosum contains an estimated 300-800 million fibres connecting topologically similar areas in each hemisphere. Yet only 2 per cent of cortical neurons are connected by this tract.” That is, most of our brain’s neurons are not connected by the only pathway that links our right and left hemispheres. Furthermore, when comparing various animals, the bigger the brain size, the less interconnected the hemispheres are.

McGilchrist points out that “lateralisation brings evolutionary advantages, particularly in carrying out dual-attention tasks…. The right hemisphere appears to be deeply involved in social functioning…. Where there is divided attention, and both hemispheres appear to be involved, it seems probable that the right hemisphere plays the primary role…. More specifically there is evidence of left-hemisphere dominance for local, narrowly focussed attention and right-hemisphere dominance for broad, global, and flexible attention…. What is new must first be present in the right hemisphere, before it can come into focus for the left…. Only the right hemisphere can direct attention to what comes to us from the edges of awareness…. The right hemisphere understands from indirect contextual clues, not only from explicit statement…. The right hemisphere takes whatever is said within its entire context. It is specialised in pragmatics, the art of contextual understanding of meaning, and in using metaphor. It is the right hemisphere which processes the non-literal aspects of language…. The left hemisphere is the hemisphere of abstraction, which, as the world itself tells us, is the process of wresting things from their context. This, and its related capacity to categorise things once they have been abstracted, are the foundations of its intellectual power…. The left hemisphere operates an abstract visual-form system, storing information that remains relatively invariant across specific instances, producing abstracted types or classes of things; whereas the right hemisphere is aware of and remembers what it is that distinguishes specific instances of a type, one from another…. The right temporal lobe deals preferentially with memory of a personal or emotionally charged nature, what is called episodic memory, where the left temporal lobe is more concerned with memory for facts that are ‘in the public domain’…. Not only does the right hemisphere have an affinity with whatever is living, but the left hemisphere has an equal affinity for what is mechanical. The left hemisphere’s principal concern is utility. It is interested in what it has made, and in the world as a resource to be used. It is therefore natural that it has a particular affinity for words and concepts for tools, man-made things, mechanisms and whatever is not alive…. Self-awareness, empathy, identification with others, and more generally inter-subjective processes, are largely dependent upon…. right hemisphere resources…. The right hemisphere plays an important role in what is known as ‘theory of mind’, a capacity to put oneself in another’s position and see what is going on in that person’s mind…. It is a capacity that children do not acquire fully until the age of four…. The right hemisphere is the locus of interpretation, not only of facial expression, but of prosody (vocal intonation) and gesture…. The left hemisphere reads emotions by interpreting the lower part of the face…. The right hemisphere alone seems to be capable of understanding the more subtle information that comes from the eyes…. It is the right hemisphere that understands the emotional or the humorous aspect of narrative…. It is the right hemisphere that mediates spontaneous facial expressions in reaction to humour or other emotions, including smiling and laughter. It is also the right hemisphere that is responsible for the peculiarly human ability to express sadness through tears…. The left hemisphere has a much more extensive vocabulary than the right, and more subtle and complex syntax. It extends vastly our power to map the world and to explore the complexities of the causal relationships between things…. The superiority of language stems from its nature as the hemisphere of representation, in which signs are substituted for experience…. The right hemisphere plays a vital part in language, too. It uses language not in order to manipulate ideas or things, but to understand what others mean…. It is therefore particularly important whenever non-literal meaning needs to be understood - practically everywhere, therefore, in human discourse, and particularly where irony, humour, indirection or sarcasm are involved…. The right hemisphere represents objects as having volume and depth in space, as they are experienced; the left hemisphere tends to represent the visual world schematically, abstractly, geometrically, with a lack of realistic detail, and even in one plane…. The left hemisphere exhibits a strong tendency to confabulate: it thinks it knows something, recognises something, which it doesn’t, a tendency that may be linked to its lack of ability to discriminate unique cases from the generalised categories into which it places them…. The left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right. The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome. The right prefrontal cortex is essential for dealing with incomplete information and has a critical role to play in reasoning about incompletely specified situations…. The self as intrinsically, empathically inseparable from the world in which it stands in relation to others, and the continuous sense of self, are more dependent on the right hemisphere, whereas the objectified self, and the self as an expression of will, is generally more dependent on the left hemisphere…. The unconscious, while not identical with, is certainly more strongly associated with, the right hemisphere.” The right and left side might work in conjunction with each other, but there is a clear tension between the two hemispheres in each human brain.

After sketching the basic functions, McGilchrist continues by exploring how each hemisphere interacts with language, music, and truth. He suggests that music has ancient origins, even predating language. In prehistoric society, music played an integral role in religion, ritual, celebration, and in uniting the community. It was not passively experienced, but as shared-performance, binded the people in a single experience. Poetry also evolved before prose. “Most forms of imagination, for example, or of innovation, intuitive problem solving, spiritual thinking or artistic creativity require us to transcend language.” Words influence our perceptions, but thinking evolved prior to language. “What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them…. Language may not, after all, have originated in a drive to communicate - that came later - but as a means of mapping the world…. It is a means of manipulating the world…. Language enables the left hemisphere to represent the world ‘off-line’, a conceptual version, distinct from the world of experience, and shielded from the immediate environment, with its insistent impressions, feelings, and demands, abstracted from the body, no longer dealing with what is concrete, specific, individual, unrepeatable, and constantly changing, but with a disembodied representation of the world, abstracted, central, not particularised in time and place, generally applicable, clear and fixed. Isolating things artificially from their context brings the advantage of enabling us to focus intently on a particular aspect of reality and how it can be modeled, so that it can be grasped and controlled.” The right hemisphere plays with metaphor. “Everything has to be expressed in terms of something else, and those something elses eventually have to come back to the body…. Metaphor embodies thought and places it in a living context…. Language originates as an embodied expression of emotion.”

McGilchrist begins to show how the functions of each hemisphere have consequences for how humans interact with the outside world. “Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede.” He posits that philosophy in the Western tradition is a left hemisphere process. “It is verbal and analytic, requiring abstracted, decontextualised, disembodied thinking, dealing in categories, concerning itself with the nature of the general rather than the particular, and adopting a sequential, linear approach to truth…. [After all,] manipulation and use require clarity and fixity, and clarity and fixity require separation and division…. According to the left hemisphere, understanding is built up from the parts; one starts from one certainty, places another next to it, and advances…. It conceives that there is objective evidence of truth for a part outside the context of the whole it goes to constitute. According to the right hemisphere, understanding is derived from the whole, since it is only in light of the whole that one can truly understand the nature of the parts…. The left hemisphere is always engaged in a purpose: it always has an end in view, and downgrades whatever has no instrumental purpose in sight. The right hemisphere, by contrast, has no designs on anything. It is vigilant for whatever is, without preconceptions, without predefined purpose…. The right hemisphere is the primary mediator of experience, from which the conceptualised, re-presented world of the left hemisphere derives, and on which it depends…. The left hemisphere does not itself have life…. The means of argument - the three Ls, language, logic and linearity - are all ultimately under left-hemisphere control…. Its point of view is always easily defensible, because analytic…. The left hemisphere builds systems, where the right does not. It therefore allows elaboration of its own working over time into systemic thought which gives it permanence and solidity…. The existence of a system of thought dependent on language automatically devalues whatever cannot be expressed in language…. The left hemisphere is not keen on taking responsibility. If the defect might reflect on the self, it does not accept it. But if something or someone else can be made to take responsibility - if it is a ‘victim’ of someone else’s wrongdoing, in other words - it is prepared to do so.” Imitation is the function of the right hemisphere. Only humans imitate means as well as ends when trying to achieve a goal. Imitation is at root escaping one’s own experience to enter the mind of another. “More empathic people mimic the facial expressions of those they are with more than others…. The process of mimesis is one of intention, aspiration, attraction and empathy, drawing heavily on the right hemisphere, whereas copying is the following of disembodied procedures and algorithms, and is left-hemisphere-based.”

Through the rest of his book McGilchrist posits that, in the Western world, there has been a historical battle between the two hemispheres that has ebbed and flowed through the ages. At first, the right hemisphere was ascendent. “In the Homeric era, the sense of self is intimately bound up with ‘interpersonal and communal dialogue’ in a shared ethical life…. The hiddenness or necessarily implicit quality of Nature requires a particularly alert flexibility on the part of those who go to approach her. ‘Hidden structure is superior to manifest structure’; and openness is required by the seeker of wisdom.” Heraclitus’ philosophy did not turn inward, but sought to carefully study the phenomenal world. “Opposites define one another and bring one another into existence.” However, soon after, the left hemisphere would gain sway. Plato’s “legacy includes the (left-hemisphere-congruent) beliefs that truth is in principle knowable, that it is knowable through reason alone, and that all truths are consistent with one another…. Plato’s belief that knowledge must be unfailing and general led to the position that we cannot know things that are changing or particular.” The ideal forms were all that were worth knowing and striving towards. Ideas about things were prized over the things themselves. Plato particularly disdained poetry, putting in Socrates’ mouth, “all the poets from Homer downwards have no grasp of reality but merely give us superficial representation.” Hans Peter L’Orange writes that this trend away from nuance continued in the traditions of the Roman Empire where “there is a movement away from the complex towards the simple, from the mobile towards the static, from the dialectic and relative towards the dogmatic and the authoritarian, from the empirical towards theology and theosophy.” McGilchrist posits this trend furthered with the early Christians, whose “passion is for control, for fixity, for certainty; and that comes not with religion alone, but with a certain cast of mind, the cast of the left hemisphere.”

McGilchrist suggests that in the Renaissance priority begins to shift back to the right hemisphere. Giotto, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, is the first painter to employ perspective. “Perspective mediates a view of the world from an individual standpoint.” The Renaissance ushered in an age of more cultural tolerance and plurality. Melancholy was co-mingled with wit and intelligence. Sadness and pleasure were intertwined. This growth in nuance was, to a large degree, countered by Luther’s Protestant Reformation. “The outer world was in itself empty, and therefore the only authenticity lay in the inner world alone…. The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times.” The literal Word replaced metaphors in the quest for human understanding. This need for certainty continued with the Enlightenment, which replaced Luther’s religion with a secular science of positivism. Rationality imposes an either/or mentality on life. “Whereas reason respects the implicit, the ambiguous, the unresolved, rationality demands the explicit, the clear and the complete.” This trend was in opposition with artistic creation and this tension grew into the Romantic movement. “Art is by its nature implicit and ambiguous. It is also embodied: it produces embodied creations which speak to us through the senses, even if their medium is language, and which have effects on us physically as embodied beings in the lived world.” Max Scheler stated, “For this reason poets, and all makers of language having the ‘god-given power to tell of what they suffer’ [Goethe, Marienbader Elegie], fulfill a far higher function than that of giving noble and beautiful expression to their experiences and thereby making them recognizable to the reader, by reference to his own past experience of this kind. For by creating new forms of expression, the poets soar above the prevailing network of ideas in which our experience is confined, as it were, by ordinary language; they enable the rest of us to see, for the first time, in our own experience, something which may answer to these new and richer forms of expression, and by doing so they actually extend the scope of our possible self-awareness. They effect a real enlargement of the kingdom of the mind…. That indeed is the mission of all true art: not to reproduce what is already given (which would be superfluous), nor to create something in the pure play of subjective fancy (which can only be transitory and must necessarily be a matter of complete indifference to other people), but to press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul.” The Romantic movement was a move back towards the incompatible. Goethe emphasized, “we are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and working upon the world which surrounds us.” McGilchrist suggests the Romantics returned to the theme of childhood again and again as “childhood represents innocence, not in some moral sense, but in the sense of offering what the phenomenologists thought of as the pre-conceptual immediacy of experience (the world before the left-hemisphere has deadened it to familiarity). It was this authentic ‘presencing’ of the world that Romantic poetry aimed to recapture.” Goethe stressed the impermanence of reality when he stated, “the phenomenon must never be thought of as finished or complete, but rather as evolving, growing, and in many ways as something yet to be determined.” Shelley suggested, “poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar…. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.” The familiar is the realm of the left hemisphere, whereas the unique and particular of the right.

Industrialization, modernity, and post-modernity were each turns back towards the primacy of the left hemisphere. “The world is either robbed of its substantiality, its ‘otherness’, its ontological status as an entity having an independence from the perceiving subject; or alternatively seen as alien, devoid of human resonance or significance…. The more we rely on the left hemisphere alone, the more self-conscious we become; the intuitive, unconscious unspoken elements of experience are relatively discounted, and the interpreter begins to interpret - itself. The world it puts into words for us is the world that words themselves (the left hemisphere’s building blocks) have created…. [We become] modern man as homo consumens: concerned with things more than people, property more than life, capital more than work…. Socialism and capitalism are both essentially materialist, just different ways of approaching the lifeless world of matter and deciding how to share the spoils.” Modern man becomes passive to the world. “An admiration for what is powerful rather than beautiful, a sense of alienated objectivity rather than engagement or empathy, and an almost dogmatic trampling on all taboos, lies at the heart of the modernist enterprise.” There is novelty and shock, as opposed to newness- seeing afresh what one once thought of as familiar. The explicit reigns over implicit meanings. “Originality as an artist (as opposed to as a celebrity or a showman) can only exist within a tradition, not for the facile reason that it must have something by ‘contrast’ with which to be original, but because the roots of any work of art have to be intuitive, implicit, still coming out of the body and the imagination, not starting in (though they may perhaps later avail themselves of) individualistic cerebral striving…. Language makes the uncommon common. It can never create experience of something we do not know - only release something in us that is already there.” In modern society, knowledge has become professionalized. “Expertise, which is what actually makes an expert (Latin expertus, ‘one who is experienced’) would be replaced by ‘expert’ knowledge that would have in fact to be based on theory, and in general one would expect a tendency increasingly to replace the concrete with the theoretical or abstract.” Measurability and quantification become the standards of knowledge. Context could be neglected for general rules. Uniformity and equality become the overriding goals. In art, “metaphor and myth have been replaced by the symbolic, or worse, by a concept.” The world is seen as a collection of objects. However, “certainty is the greatest of all illusions: whatever kind of fundamentalism it may underwrite, that of religion or of science, it is what the ancients meant by hubris.”

“In Praise of Shadows” by Junichiro Tanizaki (translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker).

Tanizaki is well aware that his aesthetic proclivities cannot be sustained in a rapidly modernizing Japan. Still, he would like to fight the good fight. “For the solitary eccentric it is another matter, he can ignore the blessings of scientific civilization and retreat to some forsaken corner of the countryside; but a man who has a family and lives in the city cannot turn his back on the necessities of modern life.” Tanizaki describes his ideal of beauty in its many forms. “The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows.” He continues on his aesthetic ideal, “We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates…. Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty. Our ancestors made of woman an object inseparable from darkness, like lacquerware decorated in gold or mother-of-pearl. They hid as much of her as they could in shadows, concealing her arms and legs in the folds of long sleeves and skirts, so that one part and one only stood out—her face.” 

Tanizaki contrasts aspects of Japanese aesthetics with those of the West. “Why should this propensity to seek beauty in darkness be so strong only in Orientals? The West too had known a time when there was no electricity, gas, or petroleum, and yet so far as I know the West has never been disposed to delight in shadows.” He continues, “Pitch darkness has always occupied our fantasies, while in the West even ghosts are as clear as glass. This is true too of our household implements: we prefer colors compounded of darkness, they prefer the colors of sunlight. And of silver and copperware: we love them for the burnish and patina, which they consider unclean, insanitary, and polish to a glittering brilliance…. We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty.”

“Fathers and Sons” by Ivan Turgenev

Turgenev’s novel takes place in the landscape of 19th century Russia, a place and time undergoing rapid change as enlightenment ideas flowed eastward from Europe and gradually began to affect the Russian landed gentry and intelligentsia  This novel is largely about the generational divide in these changing times. It was a time when the young were exerting themselves and the old felt their time had come and gone. New scientific and political ideas ruled the day. The serfs were now free and were paying rent on their newly granted lands. Masters bent over backwards to think of themselves as liberal and servants walked about with an air of self respect bordering on haughtiness. However, this novel is about even more than all of that. It turns on the universal nature of man, his eternal needs, the meaning of life, and on love itself. Turgenev was himself pulled in competing directions- not liberal enough for the reformers and dangerously free thinking for the conservative establishment. He sometimes tried to have it both ways, but firmly considered himself an enlightened mind. Belinsky was his mentor, friend, and inspiration. This novel successfully depicts the changing times in Russia, while doing credit to both the old guard and the new fashions of thinking, just like the author himself.

“The Consciousness Instinct” by Michael Gazzaniga

Gazzaniga is the director of the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at UCSB. His book begins with a historical overview of various speculations on consciousness over the centuries, starting with the ancient Greeks and continuing through Freud and Schopenhauer, before ending with Gazzaniga’s own opinions on the nature of consciousness. Many of history’s earlier claims about consciousness are still relevant as they lay the foundations for modern controversies that still divide the neuroscience community today. Among the prominent theories Gazzaniga reviews are Descartes’ mind/body dualism, Locke’s tabula rasa (blank slate) formulation, which led to Skinner’s behaviorism, and Hume’s chains of perception. John von Neumann was to add to speculations on the workings of neural networks by proposing the idea of parallel organization, where different groups of neurons could run independently and simultaneously. Chomsky supposedly dealt behaviorism a fatal blow with his ideas on a universal grammar, innate in all humans. Gazzaniga and his mentor Robert Sperry were to conduct research on humans whose brains had been surgically split to ease epileptic seizures. Sperry recounted, “everything we have seen so far indicates that the surgery has left these people with two separate minds, that is, two separate spheres of consciousness.” This research laid waste to the idea that consciousness was located in any particular area of the brain or even, in fact, that each human had one unique conscious ‘self’ at all. Sperry felt that “consciousness may have real operational value, that is more than merely an overtone, a by-product, epiphenomenon, or a metaphysical parallel of the objective process.” Sperry leaned towards the idea of emergentism: that “consciousness emerges from unconscious matter once that matter achieves a certain level of complexity or organization.” This is in contrast to the other major materialist idea of panpsychism: that all matter has some type of consciousness within it, albeit with a wide range of both scale and scope. All modern consciousness researchers strive to get at what David Chalmers has labeled “the hard problem” or Thomas Nagel has described as “what it is like” to be something, subjectively. Nagel stated, “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” These subjective characteristics of experience have sometimes been referred to as qualia. On the other hand, the philosopher Daniel Dennett disagreed that subjective experience was even a scientific problem/issue. He suggested it was all an ultra-realistic illusion and that the sensation of “‘having an experience’ is beyond the realm of the objective” and thus beyond the realm of science. Gazzaniga’s effort in the rest of his book aims to refute this “new dualism” and tries to fit consciousness within the modern research paradigm of the material brain.

Gazzaniga describes the brain as being separated by independent neural modules. “Modules are specialized and frequently localized networks of neurons that serve a specific function…. The perks of brain modularity are that it saves energy when resources are scarce, allows for specialized parallel cognitive processing when time is limited, makes it easier to alter functionality when new survival pressures arise, and allows us to learn a variety of new skills.” On top of this modular structure of the brain is a layered architecture. “Each layer in a system operates independently because each layer has its own specific protocols, the set of rules or specifications that stipulate the allowed interfaces, or interactions, both within and between layers.” This layered system allowed humans to evolve from simpler life forms, while keeping their lower-level structures and building on top of them, rather than beginning a unified functioning structure from scratch. Therefore, many of our bodily functions, from metabolism to replication, are formed using the same core-processes as that of simpler forms of life, such as bacteria, since we all share the same genomic sequences. This layered architecture evolved because it limits the effects of localized malfunctions, making repair or replacement easier, and making for a more robust, if less efficient, system. “Because each layer can provide a wide range of diverse functions, the system has greater flexibility as a whole, giving it a great advantage when facing a changing environment. This type of layout is ideal in an evolutionary sense because the number of vulnerabilities in the system is limited, while the opportunities for diversification are abundant.” Neural redundancy becomes a feature, not a bug, of this system. Therefore, “there may not be a specific modular hierarchy that allows consciousness to manifest itself in one way or another. Specific modules work relatively independently and, rather than being a neatly ordered queue of modular processing, the contents of our conscious experience may be the result of some kind of competition: some processing takes hold of your conscious landscape at a given moment in time…. The multitude of conscious-producing modules simply diversifies your conscious portfolio…. The modular brain makes consciousness resilient because of the plethora of possible paths that can lead to a conscious moment…. The brain operates in a modular fashion, but it also suggests that independent modules can each produce a unique form of consciousness.”

Gazzaniga feels that consciousness research could learn a great deal from quantum physics, particularly the idea of complementarity: that matter, such as electrons, can have both particle-like and wavelike properties. There is both the macro-world of Newtonian physics and the micro-world of quantum physics, in which the same matter behaves by different laws, all at once. Particular to quantum mechanics is the idea that the observer matters. He affects the system by his very observation of it. Any measurement requires an observer who is separate from the object measured. “The measurement itself may be precise and objective, but the process of measurement is subjective.” Gazzaniga suggests that “human consciousness was way too high a layer in the architecture of all living organisms to put the epistemic cut between the observer and the observed, between the subjective experience and the event itself.” The key to consciousness might begin with the difference between the living and the lifeless. He quotes Howard Pattee, “I have taken the point of view that the question of what constitutes an observation in quantum mechanics must arise long before we reach the complexity of the brain. In fact, I propose…. that the gap between quantum and classical behavior is inherent in the distinction between inanimate and living matter…. Our models of living organisms will never eliminate the distinction between the self and the universe, because life began with this separation and evolution requires it…. This is a universal and irreducible complementarity. Neither model can derive the other or be reduced to the other.” Gazzaniga suggests that these “two complementary modes of behavior, two levels of description are inherent in life itself, were present at the origins of life, have been conserved by evolution, and continue to be necessary for differentiating subjective experience from the event itself.” William James had suggested the idea of polyzoism: that “every brain-cell has its own individual consciousness, which no other cell knows anything about, all individual consciousness being ‘ejective’ to each other.” Gazzaniga suggests that each cell has a very rudimentary conception of the subjective ‘self’, built on the fact that each cell has semiotic closure, the key to independent living systems present in all cells. He continues, “neural circuits are structures with a double life: they carry symbolic information, which is subject to arbitrary rules, yet they possess a material structure that is subject to the laws of physics.” Gazzaniga suggests that consciousness is the linkage of independent neural modules that span across time and memory. “Each mental event is managed by brain modules that possess the capacity to make us conscious of the results of their processing…. Those single bursts of processing parade one after another, seamlessly linked by time…. Our smoothly flowing consciousness is itself an illusion. In reality it is made up of cognitive bubbles linked by subcortical “feeling” bubbles, stitched together by our brain in time…. Consciousness is inherent throughout the brain.”

“Surfing Uncertainty” by Andy Clark

Clark is a philosopher who specializes in logic and metaphysics. However, this book combines neuroscience and embodied cognition to give a theory of the predictive brain. Clark has coined this process predictive processing and it relies heavily on Bayesian logic. “It is the kind of automatically deployed, deeply probabilistic, non-conscious guessing that occurs as part of the complex neural processing routines that underpin and unify perception and action…. Brains like ours…. are predictive engines, constantly trying to guess at the structure of the incoming sensory array. Such brains are incessantly pro-active, restlessly seeking to generate the sensory data for themselves using the incoming signal (in a surprising inversion of much traditional wisdom) mostly as a means of checking and correcting their best top-down guessing. Crucially, however, the shape and flow of all that inner guessing is flexibly modulated by changing estimations of the relative uncertainty of (hence our confidence in) different aspects of the incoming signal. The upshot is a dynamic, self-organizing system in which the inner (and outer) flow of information is constantly reconfigured according to the demands of the task and the changing details of the internal (interoceptively sensed) and external context.” Our brains are constantly in action, making top-down guesses about the sensory data to learn about our external world. The brain is creating models and then slowly modulating them, based on past experience, to improve future predictions. Crucially, the brain is not a passive system. Action plays a critical role in predictive processing. “Our massed recurrent neuronal ensembles are not just buzzing away constantly trying to predict the sensory stream. They are constantly bringing about the sensory stream by causing bodily movements that selectively harvest new sensory stimulations. Perception and action are thus locked in a kind of endless circular embrace…. [The brain is able to] use action upon the world to reduce the complexity of its own inner processing, selecting frugal, efficient routines that trade movement and environmental structure against costly computation.”

The brain is constantly learning as it is constantly predicting everything that will happen to the body in the next moment, in an ever-rolling cascade. Perception is very near-term top-down prediction modified by the senses. “Prediction error [is] a kind of proxy for any as-yet-unexplained sensory information. Prediction error here reports the ‘surprise’ induced by mismatch between the sensory signals encountered and those predicted…. Perception is indeed a process in which we (or rather, various parts of our brains) try to guess what is out there, using the incoming signal more as a means of tuning and nuancing the guessing rather than as a rich (and bandwidth-costly) encoding of the state of the world.” It is actually our expectations, to a large extent, that determine what we see, smell, and hear. A prediction does not create our sensory world, but it does focus our attention. “Brains like ours are constantly trying to use what they already know so as to predict the current sensory signal, using the incoming signal to select and constrain those predictions, and sometimes using prior knowledge to ‘trump’ certain aspects of the incoming sensory signal itself. Such trumping makes good adaptive sense, as the capacity to use what you know to outweigh some of what the incoming signal seems to be saying can be hugely beneficial when the sensory data is noisy, ambiguous, or incomplete.” Again, the non-passive nature of the brain is crucial. “Action is not so much a ‘response to an input’ as a neat and efficient way of selecting the next input, driving a rolling cycle. These hyperactive systems are constantly predicting their own upcoming states and actively moving about as to bring some of them into being.”

Each percept is constructed with the help of the brain’s priors. These priors influence future expectations in a probabilistic manner. The brain then combines the likelihood of these priors with raw sensory data. “Attention, thus construed, is a means of variably balancing the potent interactions between top-down and bottom-up influences by factoring in their so-called ‘precision’, where this is a measure of their estimated certainty or reliability.” When evaluating sensations, the brain is constantly separating the signal from the noise, using prior knowledge. This process happens through hierarchical Bayesian inference based on precision-weighted guesses at every level. These predictions then influence future action in a proactive fashion. Memory is also crucial in predicting our future. Fernyhough suggests, “if memory is fallible and prone to reconstructive errors, that may be because it is oriented towards the future at least as much as towards the past…. similar neural systems are involved in both autobiographical memory and future thinking, and both rely on a form of imagination.” In the end, perception is the brain’s best guess as to reality. “Perception (rich, world-revealing perception) occurs when the probabilistic residue of past experience meets the incoming sensory signal with matching prediction.”

Prediction allows our bodies to live in the present. As Franklin and Wolpert assert, “delays are present in all stages of sensorimotor system, from the delay in receiving afferent sensory information, to the delay in our muscles responding to efferent motor commands…. we effectively live in the past, with the control systems having access to out-of-date information about the world and our own bodies.” This is overcome by predictive processing. “Forward models provide a powerful and elegant solution to such problems, enabling us to live in the present and to control our bodies…. you treat the desired (goal) state as observed and perform Bayesian inference to find the actions that get you there…. Motor control is, in a certain sense, subjunctive. It involves predicting the non-actual proprioceptive trajectories that would ensue were we performing some desired action. Reducing prediction errors calculated against these non-actual states then serves…. to make them actual. We predict the proprioceptive consequences of our own action and this brings the action about….. ‘Active Inference’ then names the combined mechanism by which perceptual and motor systems conspire to reduce prediction error using the twin strategies of altering predictions to fit the world, and altering the world to fit the predictions.”

Frith makes the case that “our perceptions are fantasies that coincide with reality.” Hohwy suggests, “what we perceive is the brain’s best hypothesis, as embodied in a high-level generative model, about the causes in the outer world…. Conscious experience is like a fantasy or virtual reality constructed to keep the sensory input at bay.” Thus, the human brain is bounded by an external reality. “Prediction-driven learning delivers a grip upon affordances: the possibilities for action and intervention that the environment makes available to a given agent.” The brain is then constantly making its best guess as to what course will reduce prediction error. This might be by modifying its predictions or it might be through acting. This results in “‘affordance competition’ in which…. possible motor responses are being simultaneously prepared, and in which ‘the human brain does not wait for a decision to be completed before recruiting the motor system but instead passes partial information to prepare in a graded fashion for a probable action outcome’…. Such pro-active readiness, to be genuinely useful, must necessarily be multiple and graded. It must allow many possible responses to be simultaneously partially prepared, to degrees dependent upon the current balance of evidence.”

The world that humans perceive is “our world” in that it is the world best understood by humans. “What we perceive is (when all is going well) the structured external world itself. But this is not the world ‘as it is’, where that implies the problematic notion of a world represented independent of human concerns and human action repertoires. Rather, it is a world parsed according to our organism-specific needs and action repertoire.” Humans create and actively modify our own world. Through language “our own thoughts and ideas now become available, to ourselves and others, as potential objects for deliberate processes of attention…. Courtesy of all that material public vehicling in spoken words, written texts, diagrams, and pictures, our best predictive models of the world (unlike those of other creatures) have thus become stable, reinspectable objects apt for public critique and systemic, multi-agent, multi-generational test and refinement. Our best models of the world are thus able to serve as the basis for cumulative, communally distributed reasoning…. Our human-built worlds are not merely the arenas in which we live, work, and play. They also structure the life-long statistical immersions that build and rebuild the generative models that inform each agent’s repertoire for perception, action, and reason.”

“Houdini’s Box- The Art of Escape” by Adam Phillips

In this short book Phillips switches back and forth between chapters “analyzing” Harry Houdini and an unnamed male patient with a sexual fetish and commitment issues, while ruminating on life as continual escape. In the life always focused on escape there is a constant basic tension. “What we want is born of what we want to get away from.” Phillips also reminds that the act of escape is a verb- a doing. “Getting free was the adventure, not being free.” There are two parts to every successful escape- a beginning and an end or a before and an after, if you like. “A person running away from something, the psychoanalyst Michael Balint once remarked, is also running towards something else.” What we are running away from maybe more known to us than what we are running to. We may be more sure of that (and the why). “Phobias remind us, in all their unreasonable urgency and their frantic commitment to safety, just how fundamental a sense of our avoiding things is to our sense of ourselves…. It is as though if we can keep ourselves sufficiently busy escaping, we can forget that that is what we are doing. The opposite of fear, one could say, is choice.” Sometimes escape is the easiest option. Sometimes that is because it is no option at all. Whatever escape is, however, it is only a beginning. “One can escape into doubt about what one wants, or one can escape from doubt about what one wants.” Escape is the easy part. It is only then that one’s options truly begin. Phillips concludes by pondering the fate of Emily Dickinson. No one knows what she was escaping from. Her escape was inward, into seclusion- physically, emotionally, and intellectually. “There is, she seems to say, no freedom in the notion of escape; it merely reveals what the prison is really like.”