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

by Iain McGilchrist

Joseph Campbell writes: 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.’

William James made a distinction between what he called the once-born, those who are naturally uncomplicatedly happy, and the twice-born, those who attain happiness only through enduring and surviving a state of abject misery. And he described the transformation of Tolstoy

in traditional Chinese architecture, the last three tiles are always left off the roof, as the first great Chinese historian, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, records: Even heaven is not complete; that is why when people are building a house they leave off the last three tiles, to correspond. And all things that are under the sky have degrees. It is precisely because creatures are incomplete that they are living.

There is also a necessity for slight imperfections in DNA transcription for there to be change and creativity: evolution.

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.’

The process is one, as Nietzsche makes clear, of triumph by reductionism: ingestion (appropriation by the left hemisphere), followed by digestion (lysis into parts).

As Solzhenitsyn remarked in his Nobel acceptance speech: Were nations to disappear, we would be impoverished in exactly the same way as if all people suddenly became alike, with the same character and the same face. Nations are part of the wealth of the human race. Although generalised, they are its individuals. The smallest of them has its own special colours and hides in itself some special facet of God’s design.

Sitting Bull’s rejection of the white settlers: ‘If the great spirit had desired me to be a white man, he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans, in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in his sight. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows.’

the left hemisphere is both a splitter and a lumper, the worst of both worlds, in which things are first artificially separated, and then artificially aggregated, by an effort of cognition.

Individuals are, after all, Gestalt wholes: that face, that voice, that gait, that sheer ‘quiddity’ of your friend, defying analysis into parts. Once you break everything down into parts – generosity, kindness, humour, brown hair, blue eyes, etc – you are lost in the realm of generalities only.

Pallis reported in detail the case of a man with a right posterior cerebral artery infarct, who told him: I found out all faces were alike. I couldn’t tell the difference between my wife and my daughters. Later I had to wait for my wife or mother to speak before recognizing them. My mother is 80 years old … I have difficulty in recognizing certain kinds of food on my plate, until I have tasted or smelled them. I can tell peas or bananas by their size and shape

regular solids, being easily categorised and typical, are accessible to the left hemisphere in a way that complex, irregular and unique forms found in nature are not.

Abraham Heschel, in his classic meditation on time, The Sabbath, wrote: We are all infatuated with the splendour of space, with the grandeur of things of space. Thing is a category that lies heavy on our minds, tyrannizing all our thoughts … Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact. This is obvious in our understanding of time, which, being thingless and insubstantial, appears to us as if it had no reality.

Circular time is the time of the body with its many rhythms, the time of nature’s seasons, and of the rise and fall of civilisations. The shape of circular time made our relationship to one another and to the world porous, rather than, to use the term employed by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, ‘buffered’: we were at home in the world, dwelling in it, rather than skating over it for a while on our simple linear path.

There can be time only if it is not completely deployed, only provided that past, present and future do not all three have their being in the same sense. It is of the essence of time to be in the process of self-production, and not to be; never, that is, to be completely constituted. Constituted time, the series of possible relations in terms of before and after, is not time itself, but the ultimate recording of time, the result of its passage, which objective thinking always presupposes yet never manages to fasten on to.

Another schizophrenic patient, when asked, after a home visit, if she had been happy to see her mother, replied: ‘There’s movement: I don’t much like that’.

we now know that two objects, objects that are completely identical, identical in every way, can behave differently. Two identical radioactive atoms decay at different times. Their future is not determined by their past or by their condition, their quantum physics wave function. Identical conditions do not lead to identical futures.

If Romanticism had never arisen, there would have been no prefigurings of it in Classicism.

As soon as this particular attention drops any part of what it held beneath its gaze, immediately that portion of the present thus dropped becomes ipso facto a part of the past. In a word, our present falls back into the past when we cease to attribute to it an immediate interest

Hence time moves slowly in childhood, because, compared with our longing for the future, our ‘shared’ time seems to move too slow. In age, by contrast, the future is feared, and the past is highly charged with meaning – more than the present or future could be – and that draws us back: hence ‘shared’ time seems to us to be moving on too fast.

As we get older we get less good at allowing ourselves to be absorbed in activities without keeping a watchful eye on time, ‘looking before and after’, as Hamlet says, and time becomes more pressing. It is less embodied, less lived: more like a fretful travelling companion.

One reason we are pulled to and fro is that we try to combine an objectified image of time seen from the outside, with the experience of time as inhabited. Such an attempt is never completely successful.

As it is written in the Chuang Tzu: There are no fixed limits Time does not stand still. Nothing endures, Nothing is final. You cannot lay hold Of the end or the beginning. … The game is never over, Birth and death are even, The terms are not final.

Aristotle quotes the poet Agathon’s lines that ‘One thing alone not even God can do, / To make undone whatever hath been done’.208

We do not regret the loss of each note of a melody as it is played: we do not regret the passing of each step in the dance.

there has arisen the Slow Movement, whose raison d’être, according to Norwegian philosopher Guttorm Fløistad, is that our most profound needs, those for closeness, care, love and appreciation of the good things in life, as well as of one another, depend on slowness in human relations:

The question always must be: what is our new way of doing things stopping us from experiencing (and how valuable or otherwise was that), and what are we doing with the time so ‘retrieved’ (and how valuable or otherwise is that)?

The ancient Greeks had no great love of work, either. They saw it as a necessity whose purpose was to clothe, shelter and feed the population, but that once that was out of the way, they could get back to the real business of life: namely, leisure. By this they did not mean just lazily lying about, nor, as leisure often seems to be nowadays, the frenetic pursuit of stimulation in a desperate attempt to fill the void so that we do not have to contemplate the emptiness of existence. No, it was in a way the opposite. A cultivation of stillness, the devotion of time and attention to what matters, and that has no ulterior purpose or instrumental ‘point’– and is therefore in grave danger, nowadays, of being considered ‘pointless’: scholarship (which comes from the Greek scholē, leisure), and the pursuit of insight, simplicity, beauty.

In the German philosopher Josef Pieper’s lectures, delivered just after the Second World War, and later published as Leisure: the Basis of Culture, he wrote: ‘there can only be leisure, when man is at one with himself’. 219 We tend to overwork, he pointed out, as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence. Busy-ness, he contended, was the true laziness, a failure to engage fully and responsibly with oneself and the world.

Historically the attitude that ‘busy-ness’ was both abnormal and regrettable was far commoner than our own view of work as a way of life.

When we are asked to be thankful we no longer have to work as hard as our forebears, she says, the comparison conjures up the dreary life of mediaeval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, labouring by candlelight late into the night. These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time.

As we saw in Part II, Eastern traditions prize silence and mistrust language. Their philosophic utterances are largely apophatic, drawing attention to what is not the case. Much Eastern thought deliberately disrupts conceptual and linguistic thinking, pointing to its limitations: for example, ‘the tao that can be named is not the real tao’. Such disruption could be seen as the whole aim of Zen, if having an overt aim were not in itself to subvert what Zen stands for.

‘animals swimming in isolation and in groups are known to extract energy from the vortices in environmental flows, significantly reducing muscle activity required for locomotion.’

In the performance of mediaeval choral music there was a pulse, or tactus (the Latin word for touch), a measure based on the beat of the human heart, that was developed, propagated, sensed and shared through bodily contact, singers often touching one another’s shoulders with their hands.

Reality, like the river, is a flow, which only seems to be composed of discrete drops when we try – and fail comprehensively – to catch it in the net of language: the bits that we do catch, the drops from the net, are an artefact of our process of investigation. No net, no drops. Similarly modern physics tells us that the entities that we discover when we probe the subatomic world are shaped by the process we use to investigate it – famously so, in the case of particles and waves.

A continuing mystery about dendritic snowflakes is why all six of their branches seem to be more or less identical. The theory of dendritic growth explains why the side branches will develop at certain angles, but it contains no guarantee that they will all appear at equivalent places on different branches, or will grow to the same dimensions; indeed, these branching events are expected to happen at random. Yet snowflakes can present astonishing examples of coordination, as if each branch knows what the other is doing.

The Gulf Stream, which ultimately keeps Northern Europe warmer than Labrador (at the same latitude) by carrying heat from tropical South America northwards across the Atlantic Ocean, bears with it every day twice as much heat as would be produced by burning all of the coal mined globally in a year.

David Wade, in his excellent short book Li: Dynamic Form in Nature

word retrieval problems affecting specifically verbs have been repeatedly found in other movement disorders

What if abnormal patterns of emotional behaviour – being withdrawn, apathetic, autistic or hyperactive, for example – which all had motor aspects, could be at least in part attributable to dysfunction of the cerebellar regulatory system?

Thinking and moving, perceiving and acting, are bound up with and reflected in one another. Walking has been long considered an aid to fluent thinking – the philosophical school founded by Aristotle was known as ‘peripatetic’, from the habit of walking while discussing philosophy.

Wittgenstein repeatedly remarks on the way that stopping acting and engaging with the world in order to reflect on it makes things appear alien.

abstractions are always secondary developments from lived experience.

Space is the potential for something to move within it; time is the potential for something to change within it.250 Both become actualised in flow. To attempt to negate motion, then, threatens to undermine any means we might have of approaching and understanding reality.

there are not things that flow, but there is just – flow, which manifests as things flowing; it’s the flowing that is the ultimate reality.

Something unknown is doing we don’t know what – that is what our theory [of the physical world] amounts to. —Sir Arthur Eddington

Max Scheler points to the dynamic and living quality of time, compared with the adynamic and comparatively inanimate quality of space. ‘Life’, he wrote, is an event or a process. It can only be defined functionally and dynamically. No structural definition is sufficient and there is no way one can grasp its meaning by invoking some spatial arrangement of its parts … Life is a sort of being, which can only be properly got to grips with by emphasising its coming-to-be … A spatial arrangement is a pre-requisite of the inorganic. Within living creatures events are not arranged along any spatial dimension, but along temporal.

This is reminiscent of the lines from the Tao Te Ching: Thirty spokes meet in the hub, but the empty space between them is the essence of the wheel. Pots are formed from clay, but the empty space within it is the essence of the pot. Walls with windows and doors form the house, but the empty space within it is the essence of the home.

A patient complains: When I look in a mirror, I no longer know if I’m seeing myself there in the mirror, or if it’s that I’m in the mirror, seeing myself here. I’m standing between two mirrors, so that an endless series of ‘seeing myself’ results, which bewilders me.

By contrast, when the dimension of depth was expanded, a psychedelic state resulted similar to that described by Huxley in The Doors of Perception. Lines seemed sharper, colors intensified, everything seemed to have a place and to be in its place, and to be aesthetically satisfying. The hand of God was manifest in an ordered world … Colours seemed intensified, lines more distinct, and sounds crisper.