The Matter With Things Quotes

“By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity – or art, sex, humour, or religion – to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place just theories, messages and formal tropes; stop hearing the music and hear only tonalities and harmonic shifts; stop seeing the person and see only mechanisms – all because of the plane of attention. More than that, when such a state of affairs comes about, you are no longer aware that there is a problem at all. For you do not see what it is you cannot see.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“On the left hemisphere of the brain: 'Because it knows less, it thinks it knows everything.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“Smith and Denton reporting on the spiritual lives of American teenagers found a common belief that, as they wryly put it, God was 'something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist', who was availabe on demand but undemanding. This has been popularly characterised as 'benign whateverism'. Its core is that we should try to be nice, kind, respectful and responsible, and by doing so achieve a state of 'feeling good, happy, secure, at peace.' Worse things might certainly be believed; but this is not enough to support a civilisation, inspire great art, induce fidelity, inculcate sanctity, motivate self-sacrifice, or lead us to insights into the nature of existence.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“You can’t make the creative act happen. You have to do certain things, otherwise it won’t happen. But it won’t happen while you are doing them.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it – if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“Cynicism appears to be a coping strategy by the cognitively less gifted to avoid being duped by others.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“When it is presented with evidence that what it is doing is not working, its invariable response is first to deny that there is a problem, but, if pushed, to respond not that we have done too much of something that is ineffective, but that we simply need to do more of it: because that’s what its theory dictates, and for the left hemisphere theory trumps reality.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“Knowledge of this universe in which we live must be participatory. If you are not prepared to participate, or to take any risks, love will never be part of your life. Risk and vulnerability are of love's essence. And love - as you will know if you have made the experiment and experience it - opens aspects of reality that would otherwise be concealed from you.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“Speaking of the ground of Being, the Zen monk Shunryū Suzuki writes: 'The true source, ri, is beyond our thinking; it is pure and stainless. When you describe it, you put a limitation on it. That is, you stain the truth or put a mark on it.' In the Analects of Confucius it sis written: 'The Master said, does Heaven speak?' Famously Lao Tzu tells us that 'the tao that can be named is not the eternal tao'. In the Eastern tradition, then, there are many such statements of the impossibility of capturing the source of all things in language.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“According to Paul Davies, 'the general multiverse explanation is simply naive deism dressed up in scientific language. Both appear to be an infinite unknown, invisible and unknowable system. Both require an infinite amount of information to be discarded just to explain the (finite) universe we live in.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“The more focal attention is narrowed, the more it takes its object out of the realm of time, space, the body and emotion.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“In the Kabbalah, the structure of human faculties takes the form of a tree with a right-hand side and a left-hand side; humanity’s task is to integrate them, both laterally and vertically.39 Specifically it is held that the mind is made up of two faculties: wisdom (chochmah) on the right, which receives the Gestalt of situations in a single flash, and understanding (binah), opposite it on the left, which builds them up in a replicable, step-by-step way. Chochmah and binah are considered ‘two friends who never part’, because you cannot have one without the other. Chochmah gives rise to a force for loving fusion with the other, while binah gives rise to judgment, which is responsible for setting boundaries and limits.40 Their integration is another faculty called da’at, which is a bit like Aristotle’s phronesis, or even sophia – an embodied, overarching, intuitive capacity to know what the situation calls for and to do it. What is more this tree is a true organism, each ‘part’ reflected in, and qualified by co-presence with, each of the others.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“Intuition appears to be something that, while inevitably fallible, is often more reliable, much quicker, and capable of taking into account many more factors, than explicit reasoning, including factors of which we may not even be consciously aware. It also underlies motor, cognitive and social skills, and is the ground of the excellence of the expert. The attempt to replace it with rules and procedures is a typical left hemisphere response to something it does not understand – a response that is, alas, powerfully destructive. We inhabit a world in which reason is needed more than ever before, yet in which reason is so narrowly conceived that it drives out true understanding. For that we would have had to learn respect for the power of intuition, not as opposed to reason, but as both grounding it, and the means for it to fulfil its potential in making judgments in life.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“And it is one of the messages of this book that imagination is not an impediment, but, on the contrary, a necessity for true knowledge of the world, for true understanding, and for that neglected goal of human life, wisdom. Thus there is such a thing as reasoned truth, just as there is such a thing as scientific truth; but both are inseparable from the humanity that gives rise to them, both are provisional and uncertain. As with science, the vice is that of trying to avoid (what we call) the subjective by asserting (what we call) the objective. This presupposes that there is an ‘us and them’ about the world: something ‘in here’, trying to copy as well as it can something ‘out there’, and usually not doing it well. The one that is thought (on unclear grounds) to do it best is said to be objective, and that in turn is taken to be the truth. But it is the left hemisphere’s process of apprehending the world that gives rise to the very idea of the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ – a false dichotomy.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“it looks like the purpose of the emergence of life from consciousness is to enable the recognition of value.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“. . .depression has repeatedly been shown to be associated with greater realism – provided the depression is not too severe. . . The evidence is that this is not because insight makes you depressed, but because, up to a point, being depressed gives you insight. In understanding one’s role in bringing about a certain outcome, depressives are more ‘in touch’ with reality even than normal subjects. . .”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“Scientists involved in the Biosphere 2 project. . .were puzzled by the fact that trees within the project repeatedly failed to achieve maturity before they fell over. Later, they realised that trees needed wind in order to grow strong. Exposure to winds causes the growth of ‘stress wood’, which is the core of the tree’s strength and integrity. Winds also cause the root system to strengthen.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“It is from motion that we gain our sense of both space and time. The right hemisphere seems to be essential for both, and the capacity for each is linked with the other.69 The left hemisphere’s focus, however, narrows both. If I want to focus precisely on a particular element in my environment, clearly and in sharp detail, I have not just to home in on it in space, but to immobilise or freeze it in time, too. It becomes like a snapshot (what the French call, suggestively, a cliché). The more precise anything is, the less content it has: ‘the more certain our knowledge the less we know.’ The left hemisphere’s experience is fragmentary and therefore taken out of the flow of experiential life, and tends towards stasis. It is concerned with the moment of the ‘kill’. However, outside of this glare of the spotlight, things carry on living, moving and changing.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“Mallarmé said that poetry should evoke mystery.95 So should science and philosophy, if it is true that there are no hard and fast boundaries between the different paths to knowledge, and that the following of all paths to truth leads ultimately to the same place. The wonder of science is not that its clarity reveals how clever we are, but that it reveals, like poetry, a deeper mystery. ‘The more we know’, writes astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser, ‘the more exposed we are to our ignorance, and the more we know to ask.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“Mallarmé said that poetry should evoke mystery. So should science and philosophy, if it is true that there are no hard and fast boundaries between the different paths to knowledge, and that the following of all paths to truth leads ultimately to the same place. The wonder of science is not that its clarity reveals how clever we are, but that it reveals, like poetry, a deeper mystery. ‘The more we know’, writes astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser, ‘the more exposed we are to our ignorance, and the more we know to ask.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“In an age that prides itself on being capable of resolving and clarifying every aspect of experience in such a way as to explain it, in the hope of controlling it, we are too apt, when faced with a question that cannot be answered, either to deny that the question has meaning, or to deny that the problematic entity exists, or both. It is not just Zen wisdom that is founded on pondering irresoluble questions, and paradoxical injunctions: you scarcely need to be a Zen master to see the deficiencies in the all too common modern Western strategy of ruling questions impermissible, or denying the existence of what we can’t comprehend. The most important questions are, precisely, the unanswerable ones.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“A narrow focus, serial analytic approach encourages us to think that the way to understand music is to see what is in each note, and then add them together to find out the sum. Or to understand flow by looking at a single molecule of water, or even at a small sequence of contiguous molecules of water, and work out from that what flow really is.

Two main consequences result from this fallacy of reduction to parts.

One is that the search goes in the wrong direction: not upwards, to understand how a phenomenon such as flow functions in the context of everything it takes part in, but downwards, towards units that not only do not exist as discrete entities, but, even if they did, would contain no more of the secret of flow than an agglomeration of single notes explains Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.

The other consequence of the atomistic, serial, linear approach is a futile search for what causes what. As an example, a lot of effort has been, and continues to be, directed at disentangling what it is that the right hemisphere is contributing, when we say it is good at understanding metaphor. Is it its affinity for novelty? For complexity? For the implicit? For understanding utterances in context? Or for seeing the connexion between superficially unrelated elements? Which causes what?

This is a little like asking what explains the cat’s success in catching mice. Its swiftness? Its agility? Its visual acuity? The sharpness of its claws? Its habit of going out hunting at night? Which is the primary quality? This is the typical left hemisphere approach: if we can only break it up into bits, we will finally understand it, by stringing the bits together in the right order.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“Imagine you are studying the migratory patterns of a certain species of bird. Although we see them soaring and wheeling like free spirits – ‘free as a bird’, we say – they are subtly tethered to the earth. They have freedom to go where they want, it is true, but within certain constraints that are dictated by the realities of their embodied being. To understand a bird’s migratory patterns would require knowing something about the landscapes over which it flies – the opportunities for food and shelter they afford, the weather patterns they give rise to, and so on. These facts would not ‘cause’ the migration, still less are they themselves the migration, nor could they ‘explain it away’: they would simply indicate the constraints on the migration, that helped account for the pattern it tended to take. Sometimes, for contingent, or no discernible, reasons, a bird or birds might vary the pattern considerably and end up in Iceland instead of Scotland. But generally there would be a familiar shape to it, understandable in terms of the whole context: the nature of the land, sea, weather, fauna and flora through and over which the migration route passes.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“I do not know that the brain ‘causes’ consciousness: it might or might not. For example, it might transduce, or otherwise mediate, consciousness. I have my own view on that, which I will come to in a later chapter. But it is a matter of likelihoods: I know of no way of proving the point one way or the other, since the observable facts would look the same whether it gave rise to, or simply mediated, consciousness: just as an alien could not tell merely by looking in the back of the TV set whether it gave rise to, or transmitted, the material it shows.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“Potential is not simply all the things that never happened, a ghostly penumbra around the actual. The actual is the limit case of the potential, which is equally real; the one into which it collapses out of the many, as the particle is the collapse of a quantum field.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“Potential is not simply all the things that never happened, a ghostly penumbra around the actual. The actual is a limit case of the potential, which is equally real; the one into which it collapses out of the many, as the particle is the collapse of a quantum field.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere's task is to 're-present' what first 'presences' to the right hemisphere. This re-presentation has all the qualities of a virtual image: an infinitely thin, immobile, fragment of a vast, seamless, living, ever-flowing whole.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere's task is to 're-present' what first 'presences' to the right hemisphere.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“Pressure to acquire speeds things up; living in tune with the world moves things at the world’s pace once again.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

“subatomic particle is to the atom, as the atom to the molecule, as the molecule to the compound – to the organelle, to the cell, to the tissue, to the organ, to the body, to the family, to the community – and so on up to the whole earth, and the cosmos beyond.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World