The Matter with Things
Blog 6: June 2022
Who are We? What am I doing? Why and how do I feel the way I feel and act the way I act? What is true and real? Reflections over Iain McGilchrist’s recent book “The Matter with things, Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World” (1)
Why reading the book? The unprecedented scientific and technological revolution in the past 200 years explain the remarkable material development of our days. But at a cost: humanity is now clearly reduced to the worst version of itself, a materialistic wanderer with a distorted sense of reality, morally bankrupt. A new existential and moral vision is now vitally needed: we will never resolve problems with the same mindset that has initially originated them.
Background: McGilchrist’s ‘The Matter with Things’ draws on earlier work focused on functional brain neuroscience (2) . Inspired by novel research, the author submitted that left and right hemispheres, while assymetrical but coherent, deal with different kinds of attention and delivers two distinct kinds of experienced ‘worlds’ liable to deceive us. In summary, the left hemisphere (LH) could be seen, inter alia, to apprehend and provide us with isolated details, familiar, fixed, abstracted, out of context, categorizable, general in nature, generally un-animated, as if a sketch, a simplified schemer in a ‘black and white map’, without too much detail, a pathological optimistic realm with a high oppinion of itself. The right hemisphre (RH) in contrast has the ability to look to things only partly known, to focus on a ‘world’ which is ‘septical’, fresh, interconnected, contextualised, ever flowing and changing, graspable, rather unique, embodied, with an animated quality. It presents us the ‘terroir’, a closer-to-reality world: it ‘comprehends’ and provides us with more balanced, evolutionary explanations, the both/and reality-testing ‘space’ which may define a cognitive intelligent realm.
A summary of the author's reflections in a podcast (3) (my own assorted selection):
(…) To develop our moral responsibility, that reaffirm that our lives are not meaningless and pointless as we are continually creating and being created; to revise the reductionism and materialistic view of our lives, reality and the cosmos; to make contact again with the world and reality within and without, this time seeing a non-chaotic world, ‘with meaning and beauty, complex, conscious and responsive’, where we are not survivors of a war of all-against-all, but go back to fundamental and millennium-old questions: ‘But We, who are We?’ (4), what is the world like, how we relate, to better understand what is there for us, including closer relationship of realities emerging from science, art, religion, to see them beyond the usual ‘silos’, avoiding ‘either-or’ (false) dichotomies and replace them with ‘both-and’. The result of fowl thinking is evident on the innumerate crises, from human to environmental deterioration and misery: a world extremely polarized, hostile, fragmentised, short of compassion and humility, largely seen as a heap of resources, ‘stuff’, where we are the product of chance, in a war of all-against-all attitude. A world in which love and spirituality –because unable to be measured– have no meaning, are an illusion (...).
Book structure: The 2-volume publication includes three parts:
Part I (vol.1): Neuroscience and ‘The Ways to Truth’ according to the different worldviews shaped by the two hemispheres of the brain: and the means to truth: attention, perception, judgement, apprehension, emotional and social intelligence, cognitive intelligence, and creativity; ultimately the signature of the left hemisphere in ways that simplifies the take on the world. As a new way of understanding philosophy, we are ultimately confronted with incompatible ways of looking into the world; and able to understand ideas according to their ‘lineage’ and where are they are coming from, namely the signature of the brain’s left hemisphere and the ways it simplifies the take on the world.
Part II (vol.1): Epistemology and the paths to truth, made possible through science, reason, intuition, and imagination: how we come to know anything, what is true.
Part III (vol.2): Metaphysics and the nature of reality: when we look deeply, what do we find? What then is True? At a deeper, transcendent level, apparent opposites may be reconciled or find union (the coincidence of opposites); the one and the many; time; flow and movement; space and matter; matter and consciousness (the latter being the one ontologically fundamental); value; purpose, life, and the nature of the cosmos; and, finally, the sense of the sacred.
Major thoughts emerging from the reading:
There is something wrong with the way we live the world. We need to re-envision what we are, to rediscover beauty and truth if we will ever reverse the destruction of nature and survive as a human species. Our restlessness (5) is narcissistic, greedy, dissatisfied.
There is something bigger at stake, beyond us and the world. The aim is to take people into a place where they see and recognize the validity of a different viewpoint, where both new and not alien, a vision of the world that is not fragmentary, chaotic, without meaning, where we are a plaything of chance, but one that it is beautiful, intrinsically complex, rich, conscious, and responsive, a gift.
What should we do? To me, the above reflections make clear why Hannah Arendt’s voice is still so present in urging us ‘to think what we are doing’ and to act accordingly. (6)
Major topics of the book debate crucial topics such as Matter and Consciousness, questioning for instance how ‘consciousness comes out of matter and how does complexity rise to consciousness? The author points out the fact that the part of the brain that serves the consciousness is the new brain and cerebellum with four times more neurons but does not give us consciousness’. The author believes that ‘consciousness is prior ontologically to matter’ (p. 1649), that consciousness is an unreduceble part of the cosmos. Furthermore, consciousness exists in plants in simple cellular life. We should think of matter as a different manifestation or phase of consciousness (in the sense of chemistry, water forms range from liquid to solid manifestations).
Another much relevant part of the book is the Sense of the Sacred highlighting the paradoxical qualities of words when they resist to express the divine; when you put in words you produce a falsity (such as the manifold expressions of ‘god’ in multiple religious traditions, reminding us that ‘if you understand good is not God you understand’ (7) . This reminds me of Whitehead’s poetic summary that ‘Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within, the passing flux of immediate things […] something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest’ (8).
‘Things’ are on a permanent relationship, all is relational in nature (as the Cosmos, relationship is more primary than the ‘’relata’, the things being related to, in a logical relation). This principle can also be linked with quantum mechanics and Quantum Field Theory which holds that all fields can take up the qualities of particle at a certain moment (including the observer); what fundamentally exists is continuity, and discontinuity within continuity: we need a force for union, but also a force for division, although all unified.: relationship are prior to relata; for instance in quantum entanglement, things are more complexly interconnected than in a Newtonian world.
Ultimately, we have a moral responsibility in being part of what we create, to do our best to do what there is; into Being. Creation is self-creation and co-creation.
P.S.: One cannot do justice to such seminal work in a short blog. Several introductory interviews are available (9) as well as more thorough book reviews (June 2022; and, particularly, March 2023) (10).
Photo (J. de Morais): 'Standing Motion' stainless steel sculpture by Maria Miesenberger, placed on the roof at 'The Artipelag Art Museum', Stockholm (model Klara Miesenberger de Morais)
1 Volume 1: "The Ways to Truth"; Volume 2: "What Then is True?". Perspectiva Press, London 2021. A major, laboriously researched endeavour of over 1500 pages and 5600 bibliographical references.
2 McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale U.P. 2010
3 https://podcasts.apple.com/se/podcast/the-matter-with-things-iain-mcgilchrist/id1414973780?i=1000542249242&l=en
4 https://www.loebclassics.com/view/plotinus-enneas/1966/pb_LCL445.317.xml
5 Saint Augustine comes to mind: ”Things which are not in their intended position are restless” (in Confessions, OUP 2008: 278)
6 Hannah Arendt, ’The Human Condition’, The University of Chicago Press 2018 ed. (1st publ.1958), p. 5
7 St. Augustine: ‘Si enim comprehendis, non est Deus’ (If you can comprehend it, it isn’t God), Sermon 117 in Patrologia Latina (PL), Volume 38, p. 661-671; even Plotinus, whom St Augustine had as a reference, stated that ‘the One’ was ungraspable (Enn. 6. 9. 4)
8 Full quote: [...]‘Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest’.[...] Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, The Free Press 1997 (1st ed. 1925): 191-192.
9 e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ0iA98OhFo
10 https://besharamagazine.org/newsandviews/iain-mcgilchrist-the-matter-with-things-review/ and https://www.academia.edu/99163241/The_Masters_Theory_of_Everything_A_Review_of_Iain_McGilchrists_The_Matter_with_Things