The Master Betrayed

Remedial Struggle

What grows does not do so without friction. What heals does not arrive from elsewhere, but from the very place of strain.

There is a temptation in modern life to imagine that struggle is a sign of failure, an unfortunate interruption to a process that ought, if properly managed, to be smooth and efficient. We are inclined to see difficulty as something to be eliminated rather than endured, and danger as something from which we must retreat. Yet, as McGilchrist reminds us through the words of Hölderlin, it is precisely where the danger lies that the saving power also grows. The remedy is not imported from outside the problem; it emerges from within it.

This episode explores struggle not as a battle between opposing forces, but as a generative meeting. What is often labelled dialectic has come to sound suspicious to the modern ear, perhaps because it has been reduced to a crude clash of ideas. But properly understood, it describes a process by which apparent opposites yield to one another in order for something new to come into being. The image of bud, flower, and fruit captures this beautifully. The bud does not fail by becoming a flower, nor does the flower perish by becoming fruit. Each stage must give way, not because it was wrong, but because it was incomplete.

This yielding is not annihilation. What comes later depends entirely on what came before. The careful practice of scales does not disappear when the musician finally plays with fluency; it has been absorbed, transfigured. In the same way, the individual and the community are not adversaries locked in a zero-sum contest. Each depends upon the other for its very existence. To destroy one in the name of the other is to impoverish both.

Struggle also reveals itself in the way truth comes into view. To illuminate one aspect of reality is always to cast others into shadow. Heidegger’s image of a torch in a darkened room captures this dynamic with clarity. Wherever we shine the light, something appears, but far more remains hidden. The mistake is to assume that what lies outside the beam does not exist, or that the illuminated corner somehow contains the whole room.

Attention, then, is never neutral. What we attend to shapes what we are able to see next. The model we adopt primes our perception. If we approach the world armed only with a mechanical metaphor, everything begins to resemble a machine. Joints become hinges, movements become levers, life itself is reduced to an assembly of parts. This is not because the model is entirely false, but because it is partial. Every model reveals something, and every model conceals something.

The difficulty of our time is that we have become forgetful of what our dominant models conceal. While physics long ago abandoned the dream of a clockwork universe, much of biology and psychology has continued to rely on mechanistic assumptions. Living beings are treated as complicated devices, rather than as processes unfolding over time. Yet even a single cell resists such simplification. It is not a thing assembled from parts, but a dynamic pattern of relationships, continually becoming.

To loosen the grip of an entrenched model, McGilchrist suggests, is not something we can accomplish by force. We cannot simply snap out of a way of seeing. What we can do is cultivate a different quality of attention. This involves learning to stand back, to resist the urge to categorise prematurely, and to remain present to experience before we decide what it is. It means listening not only to reason, but also to imagination, intuition, and the body’s own intelligence.

Such listening must be paired with questioning. One of the most neglected disciplines in education is the ability to argue both for and against a position with equal seriousness. This is not a call for relativism, but for humility. If we have never inhabited another point of view, we have no way of knowing what our own obscures. To sample other traditions of thought – whether from different cultures or different eras – is not to abandon one’s commitments, but to test them.

And yet, we cannot live without taking a stand. A life lived in perpetual suspension is no life at all. The point is not to occupy every position at once, but to have moved enough to know that the one we occupy is not the whole landscape. Some models are more encompassing than others. The fact that two things are necessary does not mean they are of equal value. Glasses may improve sight, but they depend entirely on the existence of eyes.

This asymmetry runs deep in reality itself. Division and cohesion, separation and union, are not enemies but complements. Heat and cold are not opposing substances, but ends of a single continuum. Without division there can be no union, but without union division has no meaning. The danger lies in mistaking a useful fiction for an ultimate truth.

Remedial struggle, then, is not something to be overcome on the way to life; it is the means by which life deepens. Growth requires resistance. Understanding requires concealment as well as revelation. To engage reality fully is to accept that harmony is not achieved by eliminating tension, but by learning how to live within it.