I’ve made a number of references to this early (1982) book “Against Criticism” by Iain McGilchrist, and was curious about it after the success of his (2009) “The Master and His Emissary” and later (2023) The “Matter With Things”. I was particularly curious given its title, since one of my core agenda items is that criticism, as in critical thinking, has been overrated and become #PartOfTheProblem [As Iain and previous reviewers have pointed out the hopefully obvious, for me as for Iain, we’re not against criticism per se, but rather against too much of the wrong kind of criticism.]
When I couldn’t even find a second hand copy for several years, I’d just left it on my book wishlist, and moved on. My British Library membership had lapsed during Covid and I’d never bothered to search for it there. However when Iain appeared at the Oxford Lit Fest in April 2025, there were several references to it, made by him and his interviewers and yet none of the book vendors on hand seemed to even be aware of it, let alone have access to copies. So I searched the second hand book sources, on the ground in Oxford and on-line again, and found a single $2000+ copy advertised. Er no thank you. (And as it happens no longer – in May 2025 – advertised / available anyway.)
So, time to renew the British Library membership, which I did. As I reported, their catalogue showed 2 copies, one in London, one in Yorkshire, but the one conveniently located in Yorkshire was inconveniently (!?!) missing, apparently lost, from their shelves. Anyway, 14th April 2025 I did get BL access to their one copy in the Boston Spa / Thorp Arch (Wetherby, Yorks) reading room and was able to read and review it:
[Raw notes and page scans below.]
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Against Criticism – Iain McGilchrist – 1982
ToC & Intro
Index (but not notes)
Speaking Silence (Ch.1 & 2)
Ch1 Heraclitus – Blake on generalisation
Subjects – “Johnson, Sterne & Wordsworth” – indirection
Tarkovsky, Leonardo’s crack in the plaster. (Who said about Leonardo’s writing?)
Aristotelian view – virtually unquestioned since
Tolstoy p20 Bacon p21 Lucretius p22
Ch2 uniqueness & common salt ~50pp
P35 Common salt parts and wholes, indivividuals and classes
P38 Meaning cannot be filleted out of words (meaning is in usage) like meat from bones – if there’s any meat imagery involved, it is that of the soul in the body. We cannot use still further words to paraphrase that meaning: “Language must speak for itself” – Wittgenstein
P66 “There are proper bounds to rationality, and it is irrational to ignore them. Knowing when and how to use the analytic intellect, and knowing how to use it in conjunction with other faculties, requires a higher degree of intellectual discrimination and imaginative [creative] judgement [choosing the appropriate method / worldview] than it does to abandon oneself to the rigid application of reason. […] One would not call Heraclitus’ philosophy anti-intellectual, though its emphasis on contingency and on the relations between opposites, shows a just sense of the limitations of [the analytical approach].”
P67 – “The critic has nothing to add to the work of art. He offers nothing but what is already there. The reader’s perceptions and understandings are his own, from within. The critic may draw them out, he cannot drive them in.”
P68 – the conclusion to be drawn is not that all our ideas and beliefs are a matter of taste, unless we expand the meaning of taste to include all that we learn from experience in the broadest sense.
P67 – “The only logical position for those who hold the organic view [as opposed to the analytic] is to keep silence on the subject, and allow their practice to speak for itself. There is certainly no way of convincing the reader of its truth; if he wishes to resist, his position is impregnable. One can only try to persuade him of what he already intuitively understands from his experience of the world behind [beyond] language. One can only point him back to experience.”
Lots more p69 …
P71 – Any attempt to say anything [about another thing] will be a kind of abstraction. But we must use language to overleap itself – to get at the uniqueness of what language has no words for. We should be striving against the natural effect of language to classify and reduce each thing to some other thing which is not itself [which would be tautologous – Wittgenstein]. Theoreticians [modellers], on the other hand, aid and abet that tendency in language.
P72/73 Good summary. Literature as truth about life, despite critics. Eg Tristram Shandy.
Only mention of Schlegel his notion of the organic unity, transcendent in Shakespeare.
No Schelling.
Ch’s 3, 4 & 5 on Johnson, Sterne and Wordsworth
Wordsworth sub-headings: (Much Coleridge “Biographia Literaria” btw)
Betweenness / Physicality & Simplicity / Roundness & Time / Suspension / Motion & Water / Active Passivity / Creative Weight / Deflection / Harmonising Opposites / The Particular One [uniqueness in the individual as opposed to the universal generic abstract class] / Reason & Wholeness
Ch.6 Conclusion – Faust and the reasons for reticence.
P231 Wordsworth / Goethe
p232 Faust’s Mephistopheles words / appearance / essence
P234 Kant believed in human progress, because otherwise we’re thrown back on the cheerless gloom of chance. Critical theories offer us the cheerless gloom of certainty.
P235 Feyerabend & Napoleon – experience but not expertise
Too much critical noise, too much information, too little space for thought.
Creation vs critique
Mutual opposites again, “coincidentia oppositorum” earlier Lao Tzu / Tao Te Ching
P238/239 Taoism (and Gibbon) No Pirsig anywhere.
An excursion – mid-Victorian / Western-materialism / scientific world-picture – the greatest intellectual tradition in the west – the majority of these Taoist conclusions would be tacitcly or explicitly endorsedby ANY of the great sceptical humanist writers during the period of 4 or 500 years from which most of what we study, derives. The shared vital sense of the contingent nature of things.
P241 to fail by criteria of unitary perfection is a greater distinction than to succeed.
(Objective) Unitary perfection is trivial
Literary philosophy, theory and criticism … remember
Bacon advancement of learning “Men have abandoned universality or philosophia prima; which cannot but cease and stop all progression. For no perfect discovery can be made upon a flat or a level; neither is it possible to discover the more remote and deeper parts of any science, if you stand upon the level of the same science, and ascend not to a higher science.”
Heraclitus “ men who love wisdom must be enquirers into many things indeed”
[Photo-Scans of Selected Pages on Google Photos.]
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