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

by Iain McGilchrist

truth may rarely be pure and never simple, but it sure as hell exists – even if one sign that we were certainly deluded would be certainty that we were in possession of it. Uncertainty here is not a sign of failure, but lies deep in the nature of what we are trying to grasp. Truth is uncertain not because it is empty, but because it is full – rich, complex, manifold. (This is related to what I believe to be the mistaken assumption that because we cannot pin down the ‘meaning’ of the world in which we live, it has no meaning: I will argue that this experience comes not from there being no meaning, but from there being a plenitude of meaning, beyond simple articulation.) Some postmodernists leap from the uncertainty of truth to its non-existence, but this assertion is open to the obvious rebuttal that it is a truth statement, which asserts that the assertion that ‘there is no truth’ is truer than its opposite, that ‘truth exists’. If we seriously doubted the existence of truth, none of us would get out of bed in the morning, because there would be no point in preferring any one course of action to any other. There’d certainly be no point in writing, or reading, a book. No philosopher that ever lived, whatever his professed creed, behaved as if there were no truth.