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

by Iain McGilchrist

The coherence of a civilisation depends on accepting the reality and value of principles which we do not, and perhaps never can, fully understand.

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is ‘unenlightened about itself’ in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments.

Anyone who understands poetry, drama, ritual, narrative, music, painting, architecture, or the sheer beauty and majesty of the natural world – or for that matter has ever fallen in love – can see that ultimate meaning will always lie beyond what reason can conceive or everyday language express.

‘Reason seems able to overthrow the deification of everything but itself,’

Meaning arises richly and inevitably out of any embodied form: but it must be embodied. Only in algebra, which is disembodied, can form and meaning be separated.

The left hemisphere tends to abstraction in a number of ways. One is its dependency on linguistic thought.

‘As soon as I have expressed something in a word’, wrote Erich Fromm, an alienation takes place, and the full experience has already been substituted for by the word. The full experience actually exists only up to the moment when it is expressed in language. This general process of cerebration is more widespread and intense in modern culture than it probably was at any time before in history … words more and more take the place of experience. Yet the person concerned is unaware of this. He thinks he sees something; he thinks he feels something; yet there is no experience except memory and thought. When he thinks he grasps reality it is only his brain-self that grasps it, while he, the whole man, his eyes, his hands, his heart, his belly, grasp nothing – in fact, he is not participating in the experience which he believes is his.

A map may be very helpful in orientating you in the world, and helps you to understand aspects of it better; it can help you see further, but only when what it tells you has been returned to the world in front of your eyes. If you start to believe the map is the world, you are lost.

Conceptualising anything is a way of asking ‘what it can do for us’, says Bergson.

Now power is a causal concept, and to obtain power over any given material one need only understand the causal laws to which it is subject. This is an essentially abstract matter, and the more irrelevant details we can omit from our purview, the more powerful our thoughts will become.

Concepts, he writes, are precious in themselves … apart from their original use, and confer new dignity upon our life …so long as their original function does not get swallowed up in the admiration and lost. That function is of course to enlarge mentally our momentary experiences by adding to them the consequences conceived; but unfortunately, that function is not only too often forgotten by philosophers in their reasonings, but is often converted into its exact opposite, and made a means of diminishing the original experience by denying (implicitly or explicitly) all its features save the one specially abstracted to conceive it by.

There is a clear connexion between the will to power of the left hemisphere, and a tendency to try to make reality conform to our theory; wisdom lies in conforming one’s theory as far as possible to experience.

the higher animals are distinguished from mere life, by their abstractions, and by their use of them. Mankind is distinguished from animal life by its emphasis on abstractions. The degeneracy of mankind is distinguished from its uprise by the dominance of chill abstractions, divorced from aesthetic content.

‘The first thing the intellect does with an object’, writes James – and for ‘intellect’ we may substitute here ‘left hemisphere’ – ‘is to class it along with something else.’ It is Procrustean: it simply chops off all that makes one individual different from another.

The viciously privative employment of abstract characters and class names is, I am persuaded, one of the great original sins of the rationalistic mind.

The more philosophy abstracts and generalises, the more it distances itself from a world in which all that is is unique. All our perceptions and thoughts are parts of a living, embodied organism, uniquely embedded in a place and a moment in time.

Conceptualisation is a form of congelation, freezing in time.

A lack of historical sense is the congenital defect of all philosophers … but everything has evolved; there are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths. Thus historical philosophising is necessary henceforth, and the virtue of modesty as well.

Note the assumption that the failing is in humanity if we don’t fit the model, not that there is a failing in the model if it doesn’t fit humanity: the map is, it would seem, more real than the terrain.

All abstractions are only our own simplifications of something that came to us originally in the flesh and blood as perceiving, sensate, intuiting beings, enmeshed in an unfathomable network of human society and its history.

Cognition arises out of emotion, not the other way round. Abstraction literally means something that has been ‘dragged away’ from the context in which it lies, as if one were able to pull the bones out of a body. And abstraction is fine – for an intermediate process. But, to be of any use, what is abstracted must live once more: it has to be returned, as if the sinews, flesh and blood were given back to the bones.

If your line of thinking leads to a conclusion that flies in the face of any kind of wisdom, it is surely worth considering that there is a flaw in the thinking.

Happiness is not as dependent on circumstance as utilitarian and consequentialist philosophy tends to assume. We are not the interchangeable counters of this calculus: we are not only born different, but then go on to forge, to an extent, the different persons that we become.

Thinking takes place in a scale of degrees of distance from the urgencies of an immediate situation in which something has to be done. The greater the degree of remoteness, the greater the danger that a temporary and legitimate failure of express reference to context will be converted into a virtual denial of its place and import. Thinking is always thinking, but philosophical thinking is, upon the whole, at the extreme end of the scale of distance from the active urgency of concrete situations. It is because of this fact that neglect of context is the besetting fallacy of philosophical thought.

Knowledge of something that is by its nature not precise will itself have to be imprecise, if it is to be accurate.

The lust for precision comes from a need for certainty. However, knowledge not only does not imply certainty, but is actually incompatible with certainty. Certainty resides only in our concepts, not in the reality to which we apply them.

Everything is in truth a matter of degree, and everything changes with context – all of which the ‘take’ of the right hemisphere accommodates better than the left.

Our ability to produce and understand generalities was developed and directed to cope with practical requirements; it relates to our tendency to classify our surroundings in a manner that will ensure useful action. All actually existing entities, being unique, can conform only partially to the categories to which our minds consign them; and everything is what it is only within the context in which it finds itself.

But the left hemisphere privileges categories in order to make general predictions; thus matters of degree, context and uniqueness are sheared away when the left hemisphere’s rationality takes over from the right hemisphere’s reason.

It is because of the complexity of truth that we need to reach down into the realm of the unconscious, not just into that tiny part of our embodied being of which we are fully conscious, and where all is clear.

‘the small wisdom is like water in a glass: clear, transparent, pure. The great wisdom is like the water in the sea: dark, mysterious, impenetrable.’

The sharp-cut scientific classifications are essential for scientific method, but they are dangerous for philosophy. Such classification hides the truth that the different modes of natural existence shade off into each other.

Language is neglectful of the unique.

Language relies on approximation: a language with a word for every distinguishable aspect of the world would not be a language at all. It would be like the map that is the same size as the world it maps.

Vagueness can be importantly protective.

Sometimes it is in the nature of our knowledge of the object that we cannot be precise, as with the 9,000,000 year-old dinosaur; and sometimes in the nature of the object of our knowledge, since in real life things tend to spread, blur and ramify: rivers and streams, woods and forests, hills and dales, families and communities are all like this.

There is considerable overlap between areas involved in calculation and those involved in language.78 This is because doing arithmetic involves elements that are obviously linguistic.

The quantification of human variables is almost bound to entail measuring a proxy that is quite different from what it purports to be measuring, and coming up with a figure that implies a degree of precision neither the subject, nor the means of measurement, can sustain.

wrong data are worse than no data’.

But it is quite a jump from such a utilitarian justification of calculation to the wider belief that any conclusion reached by the exercise of reason can be truly rational only through the deployment of calculation.

Like everything else, numbers can be approached in the typical mode of the left hemisphere, or of the right. In left hemisphere mode, they are thought of as absolute entities, abstract, of equal quality, and adynamic (the word ‘statistics’ is derived from the same root as ‘static’). In right hemisphere mode, they may be seen as dynamic relations: music and beauty arise out of the relational nature of numbers, their proportions and structures.

For everything there is an optimal amount, and it is rarely if ever zero or infinity. Even what appears evil may cause some good, and what seems good cause some harm. If it is true that every devil has his angel, it is also true that every angel has his devil (see Plate 24).

Except in artificially contrived situations, such as academic debate, moral decisions are not the product of deliberative calculation, but of unconscious and intuitive judgments, derived from experience and deeply bound up with our emotional sensitivity to others.

The point to be emphasised is that a philosopher may see an important truth and yet be unable to demonstrate it by formal proof. But the fact that his arguments are not logical does nothing to detract from their rationality.

Success in business comes, bizarrely enough, as a by-product of running a good business.

As Kay points out, goals need, in any case, to be flexible, responding to changing circumstances; and these in turn vary depending on how, and why, we pursue such goals. Since the world is, to all intents and purposes, infinitely complex in its structure, we could not predict it, even if there were no ‘black swan’ events, as Nobel Prize-winning economists have found out, with limited capacity to rescue face from egg.

In the first three levels of skill acquisition, algorithms are overall more helpful than not: in the highest two they actually impede excellence. You shouldn’t break the rules until the rules have become second nature – but then you must sometimes break the rules if you are to be successful and excel at what you do.

Beyond all such considerations, many rational and desirable goals are simply incompatible with the state of mind required to pursue them: they must come, if they come at all, as the by-products of a life well lived. Among these are humility, courage, love, admiration, faith and understanding.

There are different kinds of knowledge involved here, as there are different kinds of innocence. There is an innocence of the inexperienced, that of the child, and there is an innocence that lies on the other side of experience – one that is rarely achieved, that of the sage.

It seems to me that good philosophy is of this kind: that the mind is wakened to something it feels it always knew but never saw. This is what Plato called an un-forgetting: anamnesis.