The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

by Iain McGilchrist

What we get when we become unaware of the neglected – that is to say, opposing – truths inherent in our position is extremism. We yield power to the dark side by ignoring it: by acknowledging it we free ourselves from its stranglehold.

Life is, after all, a dance to be celebrated, not a series of equations to be solved.

The name hormesis has been given to the phenomenon whereby a substance or process that is damaging to an organism above a certain level may have an opposite effect at lower levels. This reflects Paracelsus’s dictum that all substances are poisons, depending only on the dose.

‘Hormesis’, according to one group of experts, ‘is fundamental to evolution and highly generalizable.’

Manageable small setbacks enable the whole to adapt, endure and evolve.

‘one thing acquired through pain is better for man than one hundred things easily acquired.’55

A principle that is extended too far, without respect to the opposite that is always inherent in it, may turn into the very thing that is not only undesired, but is being denied.

Fear of pain leads to pain and fear: as Montaigne pointed out, ‘anyone who is afraid of suffering suffers already of being afraid’.

I think there are three states of being. One is the innocent expression of Nature. Another is when you pause, analyse, think about it … Then, having analysed, there comes a state in which you’re able to live as Nature again, but with more competence, more control, more flexibility.’

The principle for division and the principle for union need to be brought together, not divided. We need not either both/and or either/or, but both both/and and either/or.74 We need not non-duality only, but the non-duality of duality and non-duality.

If I sometimes seem to emphasise the second unduly, it is for two reasons. In our reductionist culture it is the one of which we more urgently need reminding: a pragmatic reason. More importantly it is, like it or not, the ‘senior partner’ in their relationship: a metaphysical reason. The left hemisphere exists in service to the right. As long as this is respected, all goes well; when it is not, we court disaster. Each needs to be allowed its head: but at the end of the day the products of the first need to be taken up by the second into a newly enriched whole.

Every adult human being must learn to accept the contradictions in himself or herself which we all inevitably embody; and learn even to embrace them. This acceptance and embrace is not just good for us in the sense that, while it does not change anything, it brings us to a position of reconciliation with ourselves: it does really effect a change. It helps us draw the venom of what Jung called the dark side. If we believe we must be only and always good and loving, paradoxically we give rise to the opposite of this in its ‘most unbridled and perverse forms … Apparent contradictions within the human psyche are (as Jung later observed) mutually dependent relations.’

The quantum spontaneity of the universe is expressed in a law of nature, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This outstanding law declares ‘there is no law.’ This is not a paradox. We can more precisely state ‘there is no law that completely fixes the outcomes of every physical interaction, every dynamic event.’ It’s the law. But much of the outcome is lawfully ordered and predictable. Nature is neither inevitably random nor completely lawful and predictable. Quantum spontaneity is only one-half the story. The other half is the regularity and predictability of the universe … The uniquely quantum nature of the dynamic is that quantum dynamics produce both definite new states highly correlated with existing states and spontaneously random new states … The Law of Motion captures the continuity and stability of motion while the quantum nips at its heels injecting wisps of novelty and new possibilities into every change of state.

The coincidence of opposites does not compromise their nature as opposites: rather they fulfil themselves through one another.

Everything is part of one whole, connected to every other part by a matter of degree. But everything is also absolutely unique: has ‘the most intense individuality’.

What makes you the same again and again – from moment to moment – is the very thing that makes you different from others. Internal sameness is a condition of external difference.

As in a thriving society, as in a healthy organism, as in anything beautiful, there is a proper relationship between the principles of differentiation and unity.

An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: ‘There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.’ This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.

Each hemisphere deals in parts of a kind, and each deals in wholes of a kind; this is hardly surprising, because each has to negotiate and make sense of the world. But they do it in different ways, suggesting a different relationship between the ‘parts’ and the ‘whole’. In the left hemisphere case, there are fragments, which must be put together to form an aggregate. In the right hemisphere case, there are wholes at any number of levels, in which parts can be distinguished. In the right hemisphere case things remain maximally diverse, yet unified; in the left hemisphere case things are minimally diverse, yet fragmented.

In societal terms, one might contrast the left hemisphere idea of an individual being, an idea that is, if you like, univalent (individual as defined over against the group); and a right hemisphere idea of an individual being, one that is bivalent, or reciprocal (individual as generated by, and in turn taking part in generating, the group).

Nietzsche called us, in the modern West, the Don Juans of cognition, hungrily acquiring what we take to be understanding, but acquiring only knowledge ‘about’ (wissen), not knowledge ‘of’ (kennen) – and passing everything through the mill of our categorising mentality.17 He that would love, must love individuals, not generalities. You can admire or be attracted to womanhood, or manhood, but you cannot love them.

Generalisation turns things into means to an already defined end, left hemisphere fashion.

We must deal with the actual and individual, not the theoretical and general.

Connexions between relative samenesses (subatomic particles) produce great differences (the 10,000 things); the connexions between differences never produce sameness, but new wholes as they resonate with one another, forming new responsive relationships.

Each living creature (mortal thing) is unique; it is what it does; and doing it is in itself the purpose of the creature’s existence. It is also, paradoxically, through each doing ‘one thing and the same’ that they become the many different beings the poem celebrates. Difference and sameness together, never just difference or just sameness.

The potential takes part in what becomes actual, just as the actual takes part in what, after its appearance, can be potential.

The left hemisphere tends to aggregate the reality-fragments it identifies into categories, within which what the right hemisphere sees as individuals become interchangeable.

And yet it is effective as a single, unified system – which manifestly it is – precisely because of differentiation within. It is a resonant, not simply uniform, whole. If every nerve really always excited all the others, we could not function at all, any more than if no nerve excited any other. Each nerve communicates, potentially, with all others – yes; but either by facilitating and promoting, or by inhibiting and delaying. It is not that in one case there isn’t, and in the other there is, communication. Each is a form of communication.

The synapse is an embodied metaphor of how every complex system, both in nature and in society, works. By its capacity either to strengthen or weaken connexions that are always present to some degree, it enables both independence and interdependence at the same time.

There is a tendency in the human mind to want to embrace either unity or multiplicity, but not both. According to Archilochus’s distinction, ‘a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing’, a distinction made famous by the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, who applied it to categorise (approximately) many great artists and thinkers as hedgehogs or foxes. Yet the intellect requires both. On the one hand, the knowledge of many things is of no use if it is not capable of being held together in a coherent framework; on the other, the single great thought requires unfolding and differentiation.

This is a parallel to the already discussed case of the individual person: internal continuity is a condition of external difference. In a world without boundaries or patterns, although in one sense everything would be different, by the same token everything would be the same. We are what we are by virtue of our defining, delimiting (in each case, literally ‘bounding’) qualities, which nonetheless paradoxically liberate (‘unbounding’) us into being what we are: what we are is disclosed equally by what we are and are not. Which is why groups cease to cohere if they have no criteria of exclusion, one of the commonest observations in sociology.

But what is involved can and should be as much a matter of recognising reliable patterns as imposing a rigid uniformity. Just because we don’t want to pigeonhole doesn’t mean we should deny the existence of pigeons. By doing so, we wilfully blind ourselves to the forms and patterns that are everywhere in the lived world, and which give it the beautiful, orderly, richly meaningful landscape it has, rather than that of a featureless desert, filled only with identical particles of sand scattered hither and thither by every gust that blows.

The left hemisphere thinks reality is what it itself puts together, because that is all it knows – the theoretical construct in which it lives. For it, theory trumps life. If it therefore decrees that a state of affairs shall be a certain way, then reality will, it believes, bend to the decree. Since the left hemisphere uses language to label, this often involves a belief that changing the label will change the reality. The left hemisphere takes truth to be what it says on the piece of paper.

That there is no one fixed reality, and truth is not single or fully certain, does not mean that reality has been mysteriously abolished.

The left hemisphere veers unstably between two unrealistic positions in what it sees as an opposition: either all is fixed or all must be formless flux. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, is capable of seeing that while nothing is fixed over long enough stretches of time, this does not mean that chaos ensues. There is identity over time. The mountain is flowing, yes – always flowing; but equally importantly it does so so slowly that from day to day, from millennium, even, to millennium, we can depend on its massive presence: ‘The mountain sceal stand fast upon the green earth’.

In other words, change is always happening organically, right hemisphere fashion, in accord with the thing itself, with its nature, with its flow, with the tao: not by abrupt disjunctive steps, by theory, by decree, by brute force, left hemisphere fashion.

To remind you, the left hemisphere relies on there being a qualifying feature that makes whatever it is eligible for a certain category. If it ticks the box for that feature, it belongs to the category. ‘Wears a skirt → I know what to do’. The right hemisphere, by contrast, categorises by ‘family resemblance’.61 In other words, you can see that the elements go together and have a likeness, but there is no one feature that each element has to display in order to be a member of the category. There is a likeness in the whole, in the pattern.

A further difference here between the hemispheres is that they categorise to a different degree of generalisation. The left hemisphere has highly generalised, overarching categories, while the right hemisphere has finer-grained, ‘lower-level’ ones.

What we see here is that the right hemisphere’s modus vivendi is to be concerned with the uniqueness of some object in the world. Its imagistic repertoire portrays a vivid scene with a time and a place, and its linguistic faculty further links a word with a definite thing. The left hemisphere, on the other hand, can barely provide images of anything definite, even though it can adequately construe what sort [category] of thing it is presented with.

He draws attention to the fact that human cognition is never just abstract and mechanical, but must be personal as well. As such, it involves not just calculating and categorising, but feeling and judging, and that this is essential to our humanity.

But however we become aware of and cultivate intersubjectivity, however empathic we become, there must always be differences in our bodily experiences and feelings, formed of a personal history, and we cannot dismiss those experiences and feelings as illusory because they are at the very ground of who we are.

‘We have to learn, so to speak, to get out of our own light’, wrote Aldous Huxley; and yet ‘we must not abdicate our personal, conscious self.’

Precisely because the left hemisphere sees what amount to geometric abstractions, and categories, that are snatched from time and embodiment, its analytic bent leads to an abstract, eternally unchanging unity of perfect forms: all uniqueness lost. By contrast, the right hemisphere sees a fractal or holographic world, a multitude of individually unique wholes, or Gestalten, that themselves form part of an ever greater Gestalt, which is filled with implicit differentiation, not just unitary.

The self as conceived by the left hemisphere, should be – and is – an entity that is relatively static, separate, fixed, yet fragmentary, a succession of moments, goal-orientated, with its needs at any moment perceived as essentially competitive (since others may similarly target the same resources), determinate, consciously wilful, circumscribed in the breadth and depth of what it sees, at ease with the familiar, certain and explicit, but less so with all that is fluid, ambiguous, and implicit, and unaware of the limitations of its own knowledge.

The self as conceived by the right hemisphere should be – and is – more akin to a process than a thing, essentially fluid and less determinate, nonetheless forming a unique whole over time, aware that it is fundamentally inseparable from all else that exists, open to others and to experience, more concerned with co-operation than competition, less consciously wilful, more engaged in what one might call ‘active passivity’ (an open attendant disposition, in which one is ready to respond to what emerges), seeing the greater picture in space and time, and aware of the extent of its ignorance.96

This seems to me to reflect the distinction made by Jung between the self (here RH) and the ego (here LH), fulfilling different, but necessary, functions. For him, the self is the product of psychic integration over time and unites conscious and unconscious processes, while the ego is that part of the self identified with the conscious will, and which, though necessary in the earlier stages of development in order to anchor the growing individual in the world, comes to be transcended in the process of spiritual growth.

The concrete pulses of experience [RH] appear pent in by no such definite limits as our conceptual substitutes for them [LH] are confined by. They run into one another continuously and seem to interpenetrate. What in them is relation and what is matter related is hard to discern.

I earlier quoted Bergson’s observation that we can move from an insight to analysis, but not from analysis to insight. The broad and flexible can see the value of being narrow and rigid at times, whereas the narrow and rigid, by definition, can only see the value of being narrow and rigid.

Schelling says that there is no higher revelation in all of science, religion or art, than that of the divinity of what he calls the ‘All’; but this comes on the back of his recognition that each sphere of intellect and spirit – science, religion and art – sees something particular and special.

When one sees Eternity in things that pass away and Infinity in finite things, then one has pure knowledge. But if one merely sees the diversity of things, with their divisions and limitations, then one has impure knowledge.