The Ancient World and the Renaissance

Problem This Solves

We often treat ancient Greek brilliance and the Renaissance as separate phenomena explained by local causes. McGilchrist shows they share the same deep structure: a bilateral advance that enables both hemispheres to flourish, an initial period of extraordinary cultural achievement, and a subsequent slide toward left-hemisphere dominance -- with the Reformation hijacking the Renaissance's right-hemisphere restoration.

Key Principle

The concept of "necessary distance" -- the capacity to stand back from the world and from ourselves -- is the precondition for both deeper empathic engagement and greater abstraction. It enables philosophy, drama, science, and art, but also contains the seed of left-hemisphere isolationism.

When this distance is first achieved, both hemispheres expand their powers simultaneously, producing eras of unmatched cultural richness. Greece achieved this through enhanced frontal lobe function; the Renaissance achieved it through a "second standing back" that rediscovered perspective, individuality, and the semi-transparency of metaphor. But in both cases, the left hemisphere's drive toward categorisation, systematisation, and control gradually took over.

The Reformation then exemplified how a right-hemisphere impulse toward authenticity can be seamlessly captured by the left hemisphere's agenda. Luther's insight that the visible world should be a "presentation" (something becomes present in its actuality) was transformed into the view that the outer world was merely a "show," a re-presentation of something elsewhere.

Good Examples

• Greek drama at the point of necessary distance: Sufficiently detached to observe, but not yet so detached as to be alienated. Tragedy enabled audiences to feel powerfully with others and know themselves through those others.
• Heraclitus and the union of opposites: "They do not understand how a thing agrees, at variance with itself: it is a harmoni like that of the bow or the lyre." The bow and lyre work only because their strings are under tension, pulling in opposite directions. Hidden structure is superior to manifest structure.
• Homer's embodied mind: No word for the body as such in a living person, nor for a separate mind or soul. Thought, emotion, and bodily existence were indistinguishable -- a pre-Platonic condition aligned with right-hemisphere understanding.
• Renaissance semi-transparency: The natural world experienced as "like a myth or metaphor, semi-transparent, containing all its meaning within itself, yet pointing to something lying beyond itself." The metaphysical poets explored "seeing, but seeing through."
• Shakespeare as right-hemisphere exemplar: Disregard for category, celebration of multiplicity, empathy with characters who subvert their own plot-function. Barnardine in Measure for Measure refuses to be an idea rather than an individual -- he will not "arise and be hanged" when the plot requires it.

Bad Examples

• Parmenides' triumph of logic over experience: "Thought and being are the same thing." Motion and change must be illusory because they conflict with logic. The first major philosophical entrenchment of left-hemisphere values: certainty, stasis, the excluded middle.
• Late Roman left-hemisphere overdrive: Architecture cannibalising older structures into standardised forms. Portraiture shifting from "the play of features in the nervous face" to "a peculiarly abstract, distant gaze." Individuals pressed into symmetrical ranks "like the soldier to his rank and file."
• The Reformation as left-hemisphere hijack: Luther's call for authenticity was transformed into the view that the outer world was merely a "show." Iconoclasts destroyed statues because they could not understand betweenness. "In essence the cardinal tenet of Christianity -- the Word is made Flesh -- becomes reversed, and the Flesh is made Word."
• The word replacing the image: Images defaced and replaced by boards with written texts. The verbal acronym VDMIE became a totemic idol. "Sacrament becomes information-transfer." Pictures became self-referential, containing only depictions of what was already going on in the church -- "they do not reach out to the Other, but remain stubbornly trapped within a system of signs."
• Writing and currency as cognitive shifters: Four shifts in writing systems moved power toward the left hemisphere: pictograms to phonograms, syllabic to phonetic alphabet, inclusion of vowels, and the change from right-to-left to left-to-right direction. Currency similarly replaced unique, relationship-building exchange with impersonal, instantaneous transactions based on equivalence.

Key Quotes

"Hidden structure is superior to manifest structure." -- Heraclitus, cited in Chapter 8

"Out of the history of Greece and Rome come confirmatory and converging lines of evidence that it was through the workings of the emissary, the left hemisphere, that the 'empire' of the mind expanded in the first place; and that, as long as it worked in concert with the Master ... the empire thrived." -- Chapter 8

"In essence the cardinal tenet of Christianity -- the Word is made Flesh -- becomes reversed, and the Flesh is made Word." -- Chapter 9

"The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times." -- Chapter 9

Rules of Thumb

1. Necessary distance is a double-edged achievement: it enables both empathy and alienation. Watch for the moment detachment becomes an end in itself.
2. When a culture's art shifts from organic individuality to abstract symmetry, left-hemisphere dominance is advancing.
3. A right-hemisphere call for authenticity can be hijacked by left-hemisphere logic. The test: does the response restore embodied presence, or does it further entrench the explicit and abstract?
4. Semi-transparency -- seeing through and seeing -- is the hallmark of cultural health. When things become either opaque matter or mere sign systems, the balance has tipped.
5. Writing systems, currency, and technology are not neutral: each shift toward abstraction and standardisation moves the cognitive balance leftward.
6. The Reformation linked forward to the Enlightenment through their shared demand for clarity, shared mistrust of imagination, and shared proscription of the mysterious.
7. Track the empirical markers: left-facing portrait tendencies peaked in the Renaissance (indicating right-hemisphere engagement) and reverted in the twentieth century.

Related References

• [[hemispheric-pendulum]] -- The overarching model of Western civilisation's oscillation between hemispheric dominance
• [[aufhebung-and-primacy]] -- The dialectical reintegration that must complete for any cultural renaissance to endure
• [[enlightenment-romanticism]] -- The next swing of the pendulum after the Reformation