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

by Iain McGilchrist

two thousand years of insistence, in the West, on the idea of truth as single, timeless and correct has demonstrated only how multiple, contingent and fallible it seems to be, since it has notably failed to coerce the wisdom of philosophers to any one point of view. The ambition of being able finally to demonstrate truth to someone incapable of seeing, or determined not to see, what one means is a complete waste of time. Why should truth have a coercive quality?12 Truth might be more a matter of something to which we are drawn freely as it were ‘from in front’ – attracted – rather than compelled inevitably ‘from behind’ – pushed. Very little that we take for granted as most essential to life – love, energy, matter, consciousness – can be convincingly argued about, or even described, without becoming ultimately self-referential. You have to experience it to know it: all we can do is point.

This correlates to the idea of the transcendentals, a.k.a., properties of being. These are usually listed as truth, being, unity, and goodness. Some aesthetes add beauty to the list. These amount to first principles, as nothing precedes them. Ontologically, the transcendentals are convertable into each other, and are therefore one (or describe The One.) The One is the source of all things; therefore, all beings have a contingent existence, and the trancendentals are common to all contingent beings. Contingent beings are drawn towards the transcendentals, like a moth to a flame. Beings go astray due to a lack of knowledge; they see imperfectly, and seek after falsities that obscure the transcendentals.