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

by Iain McGilchrist

Instead, a God that is endlessly Becoming is already situated in an eternal Now; and we are back to the true meaning of the first cause – not a cause on a timeline, but an ongoing ground of Being.

According to this formulation, while all beings are an ‘unfolding’ of God in time and space, they are at the same time ‘enfolded’ in the undifferentiated oneness of God, their divine source.

He did not see God and World as wholly separate entities, but as two distinct aspects of a seamless process, the process of creation.

Thomas Aquinas thought of God as an infinite potential, attracting things to their fulfilment. Yet in doing so God is not seen as determining, engineering or controlling, though neither is God merely passive. From this perspective, God is seen as the ultimate good who attracts all things to their flourishing, the possibility that is most fulfilling for them, but does not compel them to take that path: they have the freedom to respond for better or for worse.

The physical reality of a system is entirely contained in (a) the correlations among its subsystems and (b) its correlations with other systems, viewed together with itself as subsystems of a larger system.

All of reality is a network in which our attention artificially isolates different, but cognate, sets of immediate relations at each level with which it interacts.

No single scale of observation can reveal the whole; at the moment selection is made of a scale of observation, the features of other levels of scale are hidden from view.

This gives reality an essentially nested structure, in which what looks like a part at one level, is a whole at another.

The mediaeval idea that we are microcosms, that we reflect the universe, is curiously close to the idea of fractality, or the hologram – we are images of the very forms and processes of the universe. That the cosmos is fractal or holographic is indeed not an idea alien to modern physics.

God comes to know himself in the Other: we come to know ourselves in God: the whole comes to know itself through the part, but the part comes to know itself through the whole.

As Roger Scruton comments on Spinoza the pantheist: ‘the distinction between the creator and the created is not a distinction between two entities, but a distinction between two ways of conceiving a single reality’.

Yet again, we need union, but we need that to be the union of division with union.

There is, further, more than a little similarity here with Hegel’s view of how something becomes an object of thought, an idea. ‘The idea as a process runs through three stages in its development’, he says. ‘The first form of the idea is life: that is, the idea in the form of immediacy [RH]. The second form is that of mediation or differentiation; and this is the idea in the form of knowledge [LH].’ And finally, the result is ‘unity enriched by difference … the third form of the idea, the absolute idea [RH synthesis]’, which Hegel says is ‘at the same time the true first’, having ‘a being due to itself alone’.

If you are already everything, everywhere, always, there is nowhere to go and nothing to be. Everything that could be already is, and everything that could happen already has. And it is for this reason, so the story goes, that God created man. No limitation, no story. No story, no Being.

In other words, there is a continuous reciprocity or calling-forth between the potential and the actual, the unbounded and the bounded, in Whitehead’s terms between God and the World, each helping to shape the other. This meaning is perhaps more apparent in another translation: ‘what is and what is not create each other’.

All that matters most to us can be understood only by the indirect path: music, art, humour, poems, sex, love, metaphors, myths, and religious meaning, are all nullified by the attempt to make them explicit.

Most people who believe in the divine would say that their belief is a matter of experience rather than ratiocination, and that the experience is hard indeed to communicate – like attempting to communicate the taste of pineapple to someone who has never tasted it – but nonetheless carries conviction for the one that experiences.

The divine is not a realm transcending life, but an aspect of life itself.

Once again, it is a matter of seeing exactly where we are, but with different ‘eyes’ – or, in terms of the hemisphere hypothesis, from a point of view from which the right hemisphere is not excluded.

Love is a relationship. That would mean God and the soul do not produce, but are manifestations of, the same love; the logical consequence being that if you take away the love of the soul you take away God, as well as taking away the soul.

Unknowing could be thought of as what happens when we transcend analysis. ‘We experience more than we can analyse’, wrote Whitehead. ‘For we experience the universe, and we analyse in our consciousness a minute selection of its details.’

The smaller the question, the clearer the answer. Expecting clear answers to big questions is to be thinking too small.

‘A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism’, wrote Bacon already in 1597; ‘but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.’

The significant divide is, as usual, not based on the ‘what’, but the ‘how’: not between atheism and belief at all, but between those who approach the world literally and dogmatically, and those who approach the world with a richer understanding of metaphor and a capacity to tolerate uncertainty, be they agnostics or believers in a divine cosmos.

There is, put simply, more to religion than science can possibly prove or disprove.

Throughout this book I have emphasised that there are often ‘incompatible’ truths, and that the intelligent thing to do is not to force an ‘either/or’ (the left hemisphere’s only gambit) but accept a ‘both/and’ (as the right hemisphere understands), since, importantly, they may be truths on different levels, truths of different kinds, or, since all truths can be partial only, may both be needed to see a fuller picture.

Why should we consider literal truth superior to, rather than just different from, metaphoric truth? We need both and they have different proper applications. They are not in conflict.

Thinking you know prevents you knowing, since knowing is always a process, not a state, and one that never ends.

Science is, in Carse’s terms, a finite game; philosophy and religion are infinite games. Science is convergent on a target, that becomes – theoretically, if not in practice – more certain as it is approached, and the point of the process lies in achieving that target; yet philosophy and religion are divergent, as the nature of the target becomes less certain as it is approached, and the point of the process lies in itself. For science knowledge is things; for philosophy and religion knowledge is a process of understanding what these things mean.

Freed from such damaging accretions, however, science and religion have much in common: both being projects that, when carried out in a spirit of humility, are potentially beautiful and good. They are both, at their best, an honest, dignified reaching after truth, of different kinds, though never finally in possession of it.

‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’

Religion takes seriously both the thisness of the individual, at one extreme of the scale, and the fate of the cosmos at the other, and shows them to be part of one whole.

The raison d’être of the left hemisphere is control and calculation. Importantly we are not exempt from being the objects of control and calculation in a culture in which all is controlled and calculated. We have the illusion of being in control, whereas there is in truth very little we can control; rather we are controlled, in what Adorno called die verwaltete Welt, the ‘administered world’, one where a new form of total control has taken root in the form of administration – a self-legitimising bureaucracy.310 It is not that bureaucrats are our new slave-masters; for they are themselves as much enslaved by their bureaucracy as the rest of us.

(The great is not recognised by the limited, not because the great is not great, but because the limited is limited: ‘No man is a hero to his valet; not, however, because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is – the valet’.)

Religion can undoubtedly give rise to fanatical behaviour, oppression and cruelty. The evidence is undeniable. But in this it is not unique: so, alas, can any human structure conferring power, since humans are deeply flawed beings.

In contrast, we need to start to de-indifference our world. We need to seek truths that can re-unite us, that can revive community, not a mere glorified alleged modus vivendi that keeps us separate in our private worlds, while the public world declines to ruin’.

Cultures are living; but precisely because of that they can be killed. A plant can be flexibly trained, but it cannot be avulsed from its roots and still live. And if our culture dies, so will we who live in it.

When Solzhenitsyn asked himself what had given rise to the catastrophic brutalities of the twentieth century, his conclusion was that men had forgotten God.

The business of life then becomes like a dance watched by a deaf person: puzzling, pointless and somewhat absurd.

Nietzsche called happiness and misfortune ‘two siblings and twins who either grow up together – or … remain small together!’

I experience both good and evil as real, and see them as necessary opposites; but while evil can, goodness knows, locally overwhelm good, it cannot subsume good into itself.

If your belief in God stems from the refusal to deny an experienced reality, I suspect denying the reality of evil in experience is like putting the telescope to one’s blind eye.

The coincidentia oppositorum involves both the union and separation of good and evil. It is not possible to get round that. I am reminded again of Escher’s ‘Angels and Devils’ (Plate 24.)

As I maintained at the outset of this book, complex as the concept of truth may be, it is indispensible: some things are truer than others.

A map contains some truth, but unless you can interpret it in the light of real-world experience, it is useless. And although a map depends on the world, the world does not depend on a map. The map is a special case of the world, by which it is included, not the world a special case of the map.

In line with Bohr’s insight, it holds that the deep truths about reality are likely to appear initially paradoxical.

It is often said that we are experiencing a crisis of meaning. Not coincidentally, far more of us than ever before in the history of the world live divorced from Nature, alienated from the structures and traditions of a stable society, and indifferent to the divine.

One of the themes of this book has been that when we don’t truly understand what we are doing and why we are doing it, life appears ‘paradoxical’: we set out to achieve one end and reach its exact opposite.

The person who … keeps on striving when the maximum of influence has already been achieved, knowing only how to press forward and not how to retreat, isolates himself from the human sphere and loses his success. For what is complete cannot endure, and what is pushed to the limit ends in misfortune. Thus the last line says, ‘Arrogant dragon will have cause to repent’.

Because we are part of a living whole in time and space, we have responsibilities to our ancestors, to one another now, and to future generations, something that what we call ‘simple’ peoples and ‘simple’ cultures have always known and taken into account.