Art, God and Beauty -a conversation with Iain McGilchrist

[Music] thank you [Music] well I just like to start really by by thanking you Ian for allowing me to come up and have this conversation with you it's a great sort of privilege and a great thrill for me it's absolutely wonderful that you've made it up here and I gather by rather interesting route I buy air indeed uh well I thought it might be helpful just to to begin just by explaining why I I really wanted to um to have this conversation does um during the last 40 years or so when I've been working as a as an artist I've often found myself described by journalists and others as a religious artist um and as though that we were kind of um small sort of subspecies of the of the sort of great genus and you know in in the Contemporary Art world that's absolutely the case um so it's not unfair but it always seemed to me there's something sort of slightly odd about that because um when you think about it all in all the sort of great civilizations uh ancient civilizations in um in every traditional society that we has been studied in as far as we can tell throughout pre-history there's um there's always been an incredibly close connection between image making and and religion or spirituality or however you describe it and it's only really in the last 300 years that the two things have sort of begun to pull apart but of course that's when our notion of art as we have it today it was formulated and that's when art history as a sort of discipline it really began and and one of the effects of that is has been that we've kind of tended to project our sort of current sort of notion of our back onto all that uh all that sort of past um time and so it just seemed to me it's interesting though it's so difficult but but worth trying to to look at it the other way around and sort of telling that looking at the last 300 years in the light of that longer story that that sort of goes before it and so that's what I've been trying to do in um in this book that I've been writing um but as I've been doing that what's been really suppressing on me has been the question was well if that there is Zach letters connection and that just seems to be overwhelming evidence that there is what's why is it there what's what's the the basis of it um and what the way I've been structuring this book is to look at a single picture is actually um the for Angelica's enunciation in San Marco I'm just looking at different aspects of that picture of pattern making color and representation and so on um but it's when I got to what I think I was visual metaphor that that the question really came into Focus um and that's when for me your writings became very sort of germane to to the way I was beginning to uh to think about that um and so what what I'd like to do in this conversation is though I'd like to get in the end to get to that question of of why the two things are so um are so connected I thought it could perhaps start by talking about metaphor um because one of the things I really want to in in your writings is that the way you talk about it metaphor is not is not simply a kind of literary device um but it's in fact fundamental to the way the human mind works would that be so true to to to what you're you you're saying yes I think that all meaning is ultimately metaphorical especially actually as has been pointed out in the realm of philosophy and science we have to go back to embodied daily experience in order to express anything that seems to us rather verified so metaphor is how we understand something in terms of something else that we think we understand and of course there may not be serial process as that sounds that you know one and then you know another by analogy with it but it's more like a picture coming into Focus that various connections between things come to be meaningful um and I think your point about the relationship between the images and religion um requires one to think about how one can express something that is intrinsically ineffable I mean it's in every religion there is this prohibition on the name of God and trying to name things that are that can be named is not the real down and so on so what we're dealing with is something that is intrinsically very hard to express if not impossible to express in ordinary everyday language and so what we need is something that does so um complexly enough and implicitly enough to be able to hint at this very complex and implicit phenomenon and that means music which is effectively one very large metaphor and metaphor in language and metaphor in painting So parachute painting and music are the ways in which we can approach the sacred or the divine that I mean when you in your books when you talk about metaphor um I mean we normally associate medical with language and I I imagine saying that you know when people first began to sort of see the the the hemispheres had different um it was sort of language was was located on the left-hand side with the rocker and vertica and those people but the way you talk about it that actually it's it's more complicated than that because though the leftover May perhaps process of language it's not metaphories actually it is not simply on the on the left hand side at all no the starting point for anyone wanting to approach my writings about hemisphere difference is to forget everything that they think they know about it because it's all wrong um however the differences are still very important even if we've got them um a little wrong in the past so it's a question what they are and as you know I've written more about that but in specifically relation to language language has many aspects to it very obviously it has semantics as it were the vocabulary it has syntax the way in which those building blocks of language are put together but it also has many other ways of conveying meaning including privacy the inflection of what we're saying which can reverse its meaning irony a sense of humor metaphor which play around with the meaning if you don't actually have those you won't understand what is being meant and ultimately there's something terribly important despite its rather basic sounding name pragmatics which effectively is the crown of the whole thing it's what does this utterance really mean in Context and the same phrase the same word uttered on a different occasion in a different way in a different setting um could have a vast range of meanings including ones that are frankly opposite to one another when stated broadly and explicitly and I think it's all that stuff the the more difficult complex implicit stuff that the right hemisphere is particularly good at the left hemisphere has extremely rich semantics and a more sophisticated grasp of syntax than the right hemisphere but in some respects it's it's rather than like a um a computer using language I the image of the brain as a computer is one of the scourges of our age so I try to avoid it um because the brain is nothing at all like a computer and I've written a lot about that in particularly the matter with things but in one particular respect the left hemisphere is rather like um the brain's personal computer in the sense that um experience is better appreciated by the right hemisphere because experiences multiple complex unknown until it's um fully present and this is what the right hemisphere is good at then aspects of that can be unfolded in ways that enrich the meaning and for that purpose the data as it were as we would put them into a computer the computer doesn't know what this means but it carries out programmed um according to rules program procedures which add to what we can understand that's why we put it into a computer to take take human beings far too long to do that so we give it to the machine when the machine produces a result once again the machine doesn't know what that means it has to be taken back into the real world to have its meaning and those bits at the beginning and the end of the process are where the right hemisphere is particularly important the procedural bit in the middle the analytic serial process is what the left hemisphere is gifted at but what we know is that when meaning is either unusual and unexpected complex uh or um highly implicit then the right hemisphere is brought into play to understand it so could I mean could you say that um that in a sense the the sort of hemispheres and so far as they deal with metaphors they deal them in very different ways that the the left I'm going to say is almost um like that sort of um sort of one-to-one kind of so I mean red is stop and go is green as it were and that's that's the way it does it whereas the same you know colors for instance might the the right atmosphere I might think sort of red is is life it's it's emotion it's out all those kind of things would that would that be one way if that's one way of thinking about it but we also know that this has bedebbled much of the research that there's a huge difference between a live metaphor I.E one that makes us think of ah connection uh which is very much served by the right Hemisphere and what I call a dead metaphor where we're not even aware that there is a metaphor involved such simple phrases as babies are angels or surgeons or butchers very close to reality in some respects and these stock phrases cliches uh where the left hemisphere is at home it's always a home with what it thinks it knows already is familiar doesn't stretch it too far so the left hemisphere deals with it as soon as there's something that suggests that this is not previously encountered or is complex in its meaning then it's the right hemisphere that seems to be the one that takes on the understanding of it so a phrase like um clouds or pregnant ghosts this is Left-Handed since I don't get that one and the right hemisphere is is aware of the different layers of meaning in it so I mean you might well say but why does that really matter I mean why should I care whereabouts in the brain this goes on and I suppose that comes down to the fact that as far as I'm concerned neurology is never just a simple facts it is Illuminating uh as well the Penfield said the purpose of Neurology is to understand man himself in other words we are understanding what it is to be a human being when we are exploring these things and part of the difference between the hemispheres is they have a completely different Take On The World altogether one is concerned with grasping and getting apprehending they're not necessarily comprehending and the comprehending one the right hemisphere um doesn't have speech directly but most people speeches are left frontal function yes yes I mean that doesn't really something very extraordinary about this sort of capacity to I mean obviously both both things are very useful that we need to be able to respond quickly to things in medical situations in life and as well as um I mean exactly I mean my you know if you're like I was a painter and a poet you're sometimes accused of walking around in a dream which is it's not always unfair but so you do need to have but but there still does seem this actual the sort of seeing that this is that this could be one thing could be another thing is an extraordinary sort of human capacity and I mean in terms of visual things I mean just the the invention of line for instance that you can you lines aren't there I mean that when I draw a line it it becomes an edge it becomes a I mean that isn't sort of given as it were and you can see it very early on in some of the sort of cave um paintings where you start with a um uh using adjustable blowing things around your hand but then you actually might extend it with making a a line down and where does that come from I mean chimpanzees can recognize line drawings but they don't see they make lovely pictures they don't seem to use line in that way and this this kind of jump of I mean does seem very distinctively human I mean I the Neanderthals probably did it as well I mean it's not that um oh absolutely yes yes and of course the making of art is a is a human uh faculty but in essence the point about making connections between things is the root of intelligence and understanding seeing how this represents or marries with that is is at the root of human understanding so it's not to me surprising that we should make shapes that reflect other things that are not as it were explicit in the painting because there are layers of meaning when we're looking at something and understanding it or experiencing something there are many associations and when we make something explicit in a sentence we've reduced all that penumbra of potential meanings connections layers of feeling we've reduced them all to one simple statement and the left hemisphere is much happier with non-ambiguous clear either or black and white statements where things are ambiguous or ambivalent which is essential in in in art because they're not just what they look they seem to be representing in in a sort of very objective sense then that is where the the right hemisphere comes into its own and it has much greater capacity for understanding and being able to as we say process visual images than does the left hemisphere I'm like that your first book against criticism was that as I understand the kind of suggesting that actually that was a kind of left hemisphere way of approaching poetry and yes I mean that was of course long before I knew anything about the brain or more specifically about hemispheres at all um just before I trained in medicine but in fact um it's continuous with my my interests in my later works um I found as a young man that the business of analyzing poetry in seminar rooms was curiously um inimical to the thing that it was supposedly Illuminating because somebody had taken trouble to create something that was completely unique it was also um implicit and um embodied in its impact on us not just cerebral and in the seminar room we turned it into something that was General took the message out of it and said well that's what it's saying um it lost its uniqueness it lost its implicitness because the meaning it became explicit and it became a disembodied cerebral construct so it was really um destroying the thing that it purported to love pointed out that is what we do yes yes I mean there is something although you have a lovely quotation in the in the the recent book where someone describes metaphor um as a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of his creatures when he made him um and I I just love that and it reminded me rather of the the beginning of Genesis where it talks about God making man in his own image um which of course implies that you know God is makes images but also that if we're in His image we are likewise or image making um sort of creatures as it were and this is this is actually uh as a way of understanding the world this is there is something absolutely crucial in in sort of making um in just actually perceiving things that you can't do it unless you actually you you you find sort of similarities and you find um you can almost inhabit the experience yourself rather than inspecting it from the outside so I think a work of art brings the the observant of Beholder the the reader whatever The Listener to a point where they are almost bringing this experience alive again in themselves so that is that that seems to tie up with what I understood you to be saying there but also of course mentioning uh the Book of Genesis it takes one straight into um the difficulties that um that trying to describe anything uh to do with ones and one's um understanding of the Divine and it leads one to use metaphorical language mythical language and myth is not I mean nowadays we use misdemean something that's made up in a sort of negative way it is not true but I'm not using it that way I'm using it in the original Greek sense of Mythos which was a more powerful form of understanding than logos but of course um uh some people who have no sense of metaphor narrative myth or anything come along and treated as it were a scientific statement about you know what God did as a matter of objective record um and clearly completely misunderstand what's being said and don't get near it yeah I mean it's interesting that I mean Aristotle uses the word metaphor but of course he uses he's using it himself in a metaphorical way because I mean Plato actually uses icon I think in the same sort of um uh sense of context there's a lovely essay about it's an American poet called the Greek metaphor Vans and he just noticed in in the sort of modern Greeks out these sort of fans going on I've said metaphors that's because it meant sort of you know delivery event right which takes on back to the fact that the word metaphor is itself a metaphor because it means as in the delivery van something that carries across an implied gap which is between the word and the experience that is being evoked it builds a bridge and it's the building of those bridges that enables us to find meaning to understand so it's absolutely the root of language as a matter of it's not a it's not um an embellishment that comes afterwards it's the Bedrock of language language can't even begin without being metaphorical yes yes and obviously the same is true of sort of painting that yes that you know if you're putting a color there which is just a pigment but actually you're saying this is this is the the the pigment or the thing that I'm seeing in front of me which isn't isn't so naturally given as it were it's a it's a sort of leap yeah and what I love is you're mentioning earlier the Annunciation for Angelica which I think is a scene he did at least four times in different ways and they're all wonderful paintings but of course it is about a moment of enunciation yes in other words they're carrying a cross of a message about something to do with the Divine and the human and that is one of the most powerful metaphors in the whole of Christian painting and painting yes yes well I think this I mean we're beginning to see how this um the how the sort of connection between image making and religion but we would um but before we eat some get on and go further with that those are two things that I think perhaps behind it that it would be worth um mentioning and or glancing out and one is both of which you sort of talk about in the in the new book one is imagination and the other is um is beauty um I mean so if we we start with imagination I mean obviously it's clear as that the word makes clear that the image has come in some ways the the there's an obvious connection with that but I mean you you it's saying very much echoing coverage which I was um that is also imaginations in some ways absolutely Central to the perception of reality yes yes I I you know one of the misunderstandings um of our age is that imagination takes you away from reality but I think the absolutely crucial Point made by Coleridge and Wordsworth was that the imagination gives one that the only chance one has of actually encountering reality if you just look at it as a we're a projection on the screen you're seeing a representation of something but it's only your imagination that can carry you into really seeing the thing as it is clearing out of the way all the judgments the verbalizations monkey mind that's going on in the left hemisphere and allowing one to be in for the first time in the presence of a mountain a lake a waterfall or whatever it is that one is seeing so fantasy is the is the other um idea that needs to be contrasted with imagination fantasy is the faculty whereby we dress up um things that we think we know and turn them into something else so um in the 18th century there would have been players in Lords and Ladies dressed as Shepherds and shepherdesses and this kind of prisoners which is masking the reality is exactly the opposite of the sort of thing that Coleridge and Wordsworth we're talking about where when let's all that go and has no preconceptions but actually comes to experience in an awe-inspiring way the reality that one is facing so in that sense it's also bringing it to life it takes part in the creative process without that in any sense implying that what comes about is is is added on in a human way instead it's actually just making what is already very creative the whole business of the cosmos is creating all the time but our thinking tends to freeze that to stop it the left hemisphere wants to represent that in a manageable way that it can slice up and analyze whereas the right hemisphere is trying to approach the thing as it really is in which it is always creative it is always awe-inspiring yes truly present yes and I suppose what's I mean that's true when we look at a landscape or something like that but it's even if it can something can be more there's a it's it's absolutely the case when you're talking about sort of values them that that they don't as if you don't have imagination they don't appear but but sort of things like goodness and truth and and Beauty uh are as it were I mean they're real but they're without imagination that you're you're sort of blind to them as it were um yeah but I mean obviously all of those are sort of um have a sort of relevance to sort of visual things but but Beauty particularly um um and I mean having said that in you know the Contemporary Art world I found if you if you mention the word beauty um it's almost as if you said a sort of a bad word or something people look at you um some other scans but it seems to me the beauty is actually a are just such a fundamental part of human experience that that I mean to exclude it from a heart would be very bizarre it would be the death of art which I think we in some cases are experiencing in the master in this hemisphere uh I talk about beauty as being brushed out airbrushed out of the picture like a like a Soviet politician who's fallen into disgrace and then we no longer can speak about beauty the word is always powerful and I think this represents um an inversion of uh sense of values that instead of seeing um the value of what is good what is truthful or what is beautiful we see the value of power and it's power that really is the overriding um Drive of of the last few hundred years in in the west and now of course in the East too so that's a that's a shame in in the matter with things my more recent book I as you know devoted chapter to the question of values and I'm talking about the nature of the cosmos and I deal with things like time and space and matter and Consciousness but some people may be surprised that I also include um values and indeed particularly the sense of the Sacred which has a chapter of its own and my point there is that these values are not something that we just sort of make up and paint on to the world they come out of the world in the same way that the the colors of things that we see come and we don't make them up as it were and they're there we see them um and I believe that goodness Beauty and Truth are in that sense ontological Primitives that you cannot get behind them Beyond them or derive them from anything else they have existence whether we like it or not what we choose to apply the terms to May Vary although I think it's fashionable to exaggerate the the amount that that is the case comparing one culture with another broadly speaking the things that are beautiful um and the thought good actions in a particular culture will be found to be pretty much also beautiful and thought to be good actions in another culture with obvious variations yes no I think that's true and I think it's uh I mean that's very much what I've been discovering is that's looking at this long long history but I think that I mean we've we've so we're touched on this all the way through but that really brings me to the central question that uh that I sort of started with about this sort of connection between image making and um religion spirituality on because it seemed to me that when I sort of started reading your books that they uh there's a central well it's a central theme of it was that the the kind of lateralization of the of of the of the the brain and then it gives us a way of of understanding ourselves um and our I mean the first book or the master and Cemetery of of you know of actually human history you can look at it in that way and in this recent book as you were saying you you look at these sort of big sort of philosophical questions and so I wondered that does um do you think this gives sheds a particular the brain lateralization sheds any light on on what is you know historically just obesity I mean you you've said this a little bit at the beginning perhaps we could um go a bit further with this with this obviously in really deep connection with a hundred thousand years or so between image making and and these kind of um spiritual um this is that that um I mean you could almost it's been talked of this kind of co-evolution the things that the two things almost sort of grow together and that's sort of one way of thinking of it but but does does you all sort of take on on on this the sort of that through I don't know lateralization hypothesis if you call it that but it seems to me that you've actually um it's almost stronger than the hypothesis now at this stage but well yes um as you know I believe the Reformation uh not a coincidence that it should take place at a point in which we became more um willing to see things in terms of external objective facts and of course I'm not suggesting that there aren't truths that we understand from our experience of course there are but it's rather special way or rather black and white or either or mentality which led to the destruction of images and I think that where images are destroyed there's a misunderstanding of their nature their true metaphorical nature because as I say a metaphor is a bridge it's a betweenness but for the reformers either the statue of the Virgin Mary was the Virgin Mary which clearly couldn't be the case or it was just a lump of stone or wood in which case it was very wrong to um as it were adore it but that is a complete failure of understanding its metaphorical nature that it's neither just a simple piece of wood or stone nor is it of course the Virgin Mary or Christ or whatever it is and and actually um despite what the reformers thought very few people in the world before the Reformation thought that what they were looking at when they looked at an image was the real thing they understood its metaphorical nature which is also the nature of icons in the Orthodox Church that they are venerated not because um it's not a choice between either this is the the the scene that's represented on either the face of Christ or the Saints whatever it is it's not that but it's also not merely a piece of wood it is something rather special that carries us across to make a connection with a world that is not the everyday world and in that sense that is utterly intrinsic to um the relationship between the spiritual realm and art indeed it's odd that we have to stress it as it's odd that we now have to apologize for using the Criterion of beauty and evaluating a work of art in in any other era in any other place this would have seemed nonsensical and as though we'd lost our Direction which I think is a fair judgment yeah you have there's a lovely quotation that um I think was from tarkovsky you you include in the book where it says the um he says the the allotted function of art is not as often thought to put across ideas or to propagate thoughts is to serve as an example the aim of art is to prepare a person for death to plow and Harrow his soul rendering it capable of turning the good which is I mean but maybe coming a little stronger you apply it to PG Woodhouse or something but but still I yeah I I I absolutely I mean I really resonate with that well tarkovsky is for me um simply the greatest filmmaker of all time and it's something like um so turning which is one uh first grade which is which is so he can and after that there's all the rest but as far as I'm concerned this and then there are filmmakers who are better or worse but Tchaikovsky is in another League altogether he's the only artist of which I think you could without um violence the language a cool Shakespearean and what I mean by that is in the way that which in which all kinds of images of embodied life horses storms birds come back and back with different meanings in the play and they do also in tarkovsky's films he seems to me to be very great film director but the point that he's making is that it's not a vehicle for conveying ideas something that can be explained and often is explained on the wall the artist has a little screen about what he or she meant and and of course your body challenge didn't need to have a little screed on what tell you what was going on um and also when you listen to pieces of music that have been commissioned by the BBC again um the the the composer is invited to the program what it was intended yeah but actually back um not only didn't but couldn't have said what was intended because it is its own best expression I mean that is the point about her work about is it simply cannot be translated into other words or another realm it is its own best expression exactly as it is yes it's about the recent sort of book that I I did I've put sort of poems alongside my paintings because I I've often been asked us to talk about the paintings but in the end the poem is the best I can do of that and it's uh and that I mean into the tarkovsky film I talk you talk about the um the Andrea rublev where he he ends then with the actual the which I think are one of the greatest pictures in the world that uh the Abraham and the angels which I've also offended many times um but um but that is the the icon that I think um um yes right no I mean even thinking about at the end of Andrew Rudolph makes her hair on the back of my neck stand up it's so extraordinary anyway yes yes well but if people really want to understand the connection between art and Beauty and spiritual meaning then tarkovsky is a very good place to start and that's perhaps rather a good place to end it's very good [Music]

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Length: 36min 41sec (2201 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2023