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The Master and His Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
Chapter 10: The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment or The Age of Reason, generated confusion and contradiction at the outset. Rational and rationality, reason and Reason are hotly contested notions, but in Greek, Latin, German and English, there is a distinction between reason and rationality. Reason is flexible, resists fixed formation, is shaped by experience and involves the whole living being (the right hemisphere); rationality (the left hemisphere type of reason) is more rigid, rarified, mechanical, and governed by laws. Reason was traditionally considered the higher faculty. Rationality was weakened by the idea that a thing and its opposite may well both be true. Rationality cannot constitute itself according to its own principles of proof and argumentation. Its value has to be intuited. It can only provide internal consistency within a closed system that cannot reach outside itself. The primacy of reason is due to the fact that rationality is founded on it.
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 Immanuel Kant
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Kant reversed this thinking, but McGilchrist believes this was not so much a reversal as an extension. The earlier classical picture missed the necessity for rationality to return the fruits of its operations to reason again; the products of rationality must be subject to reason (Kant’s thinking). This mirrors the process suggested by McGilchrist of RH >> LH >> RH, that enables the hemispheres to work cooperatively.
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Reason depends on seeing things in context. Rationality is context-independent. Reason cannot be taught, but grows out of individual experience and holds incompatible elements in balance. Rationality imposes an ‘either/or’ on life which is far from reasonable.
The Enlightenment was a ‘self-contradictory’ phenomenon, both the best and worst of times, widely admired in the 18th century for harmony, balance and tolerance, but also incorporating precepts that would lead to a less flexible and less humane outlook. Before ending this introductory section to the chapter, McGilchrist introduces the idea of metaphor and the close relationship between metaphorical understanding and reason. Lakoff and Johnson wrote ‘metaphor is centrally a matter of thought not just words’. ‘The loss of metaphor is a loss of cognitive content. Thinking cannot be severed from our bodily existence, out of which all metaphors arise’.
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