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

by Iain McGilchrist

Ambiguity is of the essence of human existence, and everything we live or think has always several meanings.

Pronouncements emanating from management culture are the worst. The bureaucratic mind prefers nouns to verbs, abstract nouns to concrete nouns, and, in verbs, the passive to the active voice.

As Lakoff & Johnson make clear, metaphor is not an embellishment of thought, but its very ground.34 The form (metaphor) is not added to the thought, but is itself the stuff of thought, and takes us back to bodily experience;

Reason is not purely literal, but largely metaphorical and imaginative.

Abstraction simplifies.

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.

Rationalistic deductions apply only within the bounds of an abstract model, not in real-world situations, and thus need to be balanced by an intuitive grasp of the whole.

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.

Weyl contrasted algebraic (linear) thinking with topological (figural) thinking, suggesting that we need to be able to draw on both, but that, of the two, algebraic thinking is relatively blind.

all expressions of truth are rooted in metaphor and that literal truth is a chimera.

People who don’t understand that myths are not to be taken literally, but nonetheless exist to express truths that everyday language is too limited, too narrow, too precise to convey, are like people who would dismiss Shakespeare’s King Lear on the grounds that, according to the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the historical Leir (as he was known prior to Shakespeare), fled to France, and with the help of Cordelia and her husband, overthrew his other daughters and sons-in-law, and was restored to the throne.

As far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.’

A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time.

In other words, myths were archetypal, not incidental, truths, reflecting eternal patterns that we could recognise, but which could not, without diminishment, be translated into the everyday terms of logos. And, as Armstrong goes on to emphasise, myths were not primarily propositional, but grounded in action. The truth of a myth was not verified by data, but in the playing out of one’s life: The only way to assess the value and truth of any myth was to act upon it. The myth of the hero, for example, which takes the same form in nearly all cultural traditions … showed us how to live more richly and intensely, how to cope with our mortality, and how creatively to endure the suffering that flesh is heir to. But if we failed to apply it to our situation, a myth would remain abstract and incredible.

Propositional discourse is limited in its ability to approach ultimate reality. Its very terms take us back, as left hemisphere discourse always does, to the familiar. In Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘language makes the uncommon common’. Philosophical language requires a metaphoric and flexible character and thus, according to Whitehead, ‘philosophy in its advance must involve obscurity of expression, and novel phrases’.190 He claims that the history of ideas should be studied with a ‘constant remembrance of the struggle of novel thought with the obtuseness of language’.191 He later adds that one of the two main problems of philosophy is the ‘uncritical trust in the adequacy of language’.192 Although language is indeed the tool required for philosophy,193 it is nevertheless a limited servant that should never become the master.

Myths also have this quality, like language itself, that they do not just derive from one mind alone but from a shared consciousness that stretches over time and place, and are not even consciously – cannot be consciously – conceived.

The more important something is, the more we have to struggle in the attempt to reduce it to language. We would be lost without words, but sometimes it is wisdom to be lost for words. Words are always a representation in terms of something else. The work of art exists precisely to get beyond representation, to presence, even if that presence is itself composed of words, as it is in poetry. If this were not so, a lot of effort could have been spared, as it could all have been better stated in prose. The work of art does not hide, represent, or body forth something else, that must therefore be decoded: it is precisely what it is. And yet neither is it opaque, as though we were stopped at its frontiers. It is semi-transparent, translucent: we see it all right, and yet see through it to something beyond.

I've heard it said that you don't understand something until you can explain it to someone else. That is true only within a limited sphere. However, I cannot explain to my wife why I love the music of Rush, or why I love the ornateness of David Bentley Hart's prose.

Metaphor embodies thought and places it, where it belongs, in a living context. In this, it bridges the gap between language and the world, a gap entailed on us by the very nature of language.

Good metaphors are like good jokes: they rely on making unusual connexions. As Zwicky says, ‘Surprise is common to good metaphors and good jokes … Seeing [a weak metaphor] requires no leap of imagination.’207 A metaphor fails if it is too familiar. Its energy dissipates immediately and it dies. We no longer see the gap that is overcome. The two parties are either so remote that no ‘electrical connexion’ can take place, or so close that none is required: in either case, no leap of imagination takes place. Mythos, relying on implicitness, can be responsive and responsible: inextricably bound up with its reception in the mind of the one who hears or sees, it is itself changed by that reception. Relying on explicitness, logos is unidirectional: it drives a line of argument, it declares ‘how things are’, and by so doing aims to fix them. Each has its uses. But note that in metaphor nothing can remain unchanged by the interaction, which is bi-directional, reverberative. When we call a man a wolf, we don’t just make the man more wolf-like, but the wolf more human.

The implicit nature of myth, which must never be made explicit, permits it to embody something that, once it is looked at directly, turns into a wraith: it collapses into an abstraction.

Though I suggest that paradox arises from two conflicting views, each of which has a claim on truth, I will argue that that does not entail the simple conclusion that they have equal claims. If you are uncomfortable with unequal truths, thus with degrees of truth – ‘surely, either it is true or it isn’t?’ – you will be particularly susceptible to being baffled by paradoxes, since one of the many elements that give rise to paradox is, precisely, that there are degrees of truth: not all truths are created equal. This has consequences for apparent contradiction, since a statement and its denial can often be true in different degrees and different contexts.

Quine-Duhem Paradox. No hypothesis can be tested in isolation from an indefinite set of auxiliary hypotheses; in order to show that a hypothesis is mistaken, it is necessary to isolate that hypothesis from its set of auxiliary hypotheses; therefore, no hypothesis can be shown to be mistaken.

Flow is an irreducible, not an emergent, element in the universe.

a tradition is never static: if it were to become so, it would die. It is there not just to oppose change but to inform it and guide it. It is a living thing, a process of change in response to new circumstances. It is reverberative and responsive, not linear and fixed: forever in flow. Nonetheless, there is a difference between organic change and forced or abrupt change, as there is a difference between training a climbing plant and cutting it off, or uprooting it. A tradition changes by being born anew in each member of the community that shares in it. It is, above all, lived: To embrace a tradition is to make it one’s own by altering it. A passive acknowledgment of a tradition does not allow one to live within it. One must apply the tradition as one’s own.14

The rightful rejection of the Cartesian fantasy of an isolated, decontextualised, rational mind, hopping around the universe accessing uncontaminated truths, is at the heart of the last hundred years of philosophy in Europe, and is what Heidegger, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty and others were striving to achieve and to communicate. Not to have affections, not to have affiliations and loyalties, not to have love, but only reason to act for us in understanding what we do and who we are, is literally a form of madness.

A prejudice literally means a pre-judgment. We inevitably make generalisations in order to guide action when we have little to go on, or little time to weigh up all the factors in a deliberative fashion, which is almost all the time. We couldn’t survive if we did not, since having time to deliberate all the aspects of a situation is rare. Nor would we survive if the generalisations were not reasonably reliable, even though they are primarily of practical value, and cannot be other than highly fallible guides to the truth of particular instances. The knowledge that tigers are dangerous has survival value, and is not disproved by one friendly tiger, though it’s not true in that particular case.

For the health of any society, one of the most important senses is that of the reasonable, one of the best examples of something that is clearly context-dependent, not just in its proper functioning, but in its constitution: a combination of rationality with intuitive understanding. The reasonable is enormously hard to reduce to rules or principles, yet without it we cannot function properly as a society: it is a vital concept in law, and ironically, since the law is often conceived to be about rules and principles, the law may be one of the last places left in which it is evident.

Professionals rely much more on intuition, which is anathema to managerialism. They see the human whole, which the managers don’t; and the more they are made to conform to managerial metrics, the more narrow their vision and practice becomes. Thus is killed the goose that laid the golden egg.

Einstein is full of common sense, yet it is he that wrote that common sense was ‘the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen’. Absolutely correct. No good whatever to science, or for that matter to religion. But important for living a life. And with an almost uncanny accuracy Einstein points to the age of 18. Because it is around this point in life, precisely, that those who are never going to acquire common sense exhibit the fact most tragically. They become seriously ill and risk ending their lives. Consider what happens in this well-known condition in which, most obviously, common sense is lost: schizophrenia.

In a culture in which computation was not grossly over-prized, an experienced individual would function in almost every aspect of life according to embodied skills, unconscious reasoning, and intuition, with, of course, incursions of analytic thinking, but only when an obstacle was encountered. And the passing on of these skills, through shared experience, attention and imitation, would be the whole purpose of a culture and its traditions. In our culture, all mores have been abandoned; and what should remain implicit and in the realm of embodied skill is foregrounded as a ‘problem’ to be consciously solved – with the result that we grossly simplify and omit what is beyond calculation.

It is only by seeing something as in some sense and however dimly ‘like’ something else that we build knowledge, and insight consists in perceiving likeness in dissimilar things. Poetic metaphor – describing one thing in terms usually associated with something quite different – is simply the most familiar use of metaphor and it is, of course, linguistic. But linguistic metaphor is, as it were, only a subset of a much broader mode of human perception which, as the mathematicians attest, includes what might be called non-linguistic metaphor. This broader conception of metaphor is central to insight. In his De arte poetica, Aristotle wrote about the role of metaphor and intuitive perception for poets, but he could

Beauty is a test of correctness that many mathematicians, philosophers and scientists have experienced as a touchstone in their work.

Our current perceptions are governed by past perceptions and preconceptions; yet these too are always influenced reciprocally, if more weakly, by the new perception, the new experience. Much of what goes on seems to us pretty humdrum, largely the confirmation of our current perception (and conception) of the world. But even that is unbelievably complex and rich, and is born of embodied interaction. Clearly what we see depends on the whole context – where we are, with whom and why we are there, the mood we are in, and so on – and also on what our motivations are: are we searching for something? Bored and filling in time? Hungry? Longing for something? What we see is neither subjective nor objective: the terms are irrelevant relics of a superseded Cartesian way of thinking about experience. There is no such thing as perception without such ramifications, because we are not just creating a Cartesian representation of the world, but are involved in the process of the experiential world coming into being. One of the besetting sins of our age is the belief that sensory experience is somehow less real than our abstracted mentalisations about it.

if we lose the sense of just how much we do not know, we lose understanding of even the little that we do know.

a deep understanding of the nature of reality comes in glimpses, or graspings – moments of insight; that, in that insight, all is neither simply single, nor simply manifold, neither simply whole, nor simply not whole, neither simply like nor simply unlike, each thing working with, and by the same token working against, the others; that the One and the Many bring one another forth into being, together generating the reality that has this structure at its core;

If before there was Being there was Nothing, nothing could no longer be thought of as merely the absence of something else, because that implies, precisely, a something else: something outside itself to ground it, and there was no something else. Nothing can only ground itself in itself.

‘there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil’.29 Each truth conceals another, opposing, truth, that becomes apparent as soon as we move from the abstract to a real world context. Moreover we need both the vision that reveals separation and the vision that reveals union.

Opposites genuinely coincide while remaining opposites. Some philosophies tend to collapse into the monism that opposites are identical; others into the dualism that opposites remain irreconcilable and are merely, at most, juxtaposed.34 The important perception is that opposites not only co-exist, but give rise to and fulfil one another (‘sunt complementa’), and are conjoined (like the poles of a magnet) without any intervening boundary, while nonetheless remaining distinct as opposites. And indeed the more intimately they are united, the more, not the less, they are differentiated.

What we get when we become unaware of the neglected – that is to say, opposing – truths inherent in our position is extremism. We yield power to the dark side by ignoring it: by acknowledging it we free ourselves from its stranglehold.

Life is, after all, a dance to be celebrated, not a series of equations to be solved. And the dance, whatever may have evolved from it since, originated as a circle, based on a dipole that is not – and must never become – an opposition, but complementary, an act of consummation: that of man and woman.

A principle that is extended too far, without respect to the opposite that is always inherent in it, may turn into the very thing that is not only undesired, but is being denied. This is an understanding we would appear to have lost almost completely, and which, if we had kept it in mind, might have preserved us from many of the worst follies of contemporary culture.

The imagination thrives on the implicit, and is deadened by the explicit. The explicit is single: the implicit is a coming together of opposites, and requires the simultaneous presence and absence of whatever is being gestured towards.

We need universality and particularity, precision and flexibility, restriction and openness, freedom and constraint – simultaneously. Everything flows from the pairing. We ‘lose ourselves’, and consequently find ourselves, in music, dance, or contemplation of a beautiful painting or landscape.

A faithful man finds in the scriptures that Rabbi X said that a certain thing was true. Later he finds that Rabbi Y said that the very same thing was false. He prays for guidance: ‘Who is right?’ God answers: ‘Both of them are right.’ Perplexed, the man replies: ‘But what do you mean? Surely they can’t both be right?’ To which God replies: ‘All three of you are right.’

Everything is part of one whole, connected to every other part by a matter of degree. But everything is also absolutely unique: has ‘the most intense individuality’.

A determinist states that, in the same conditions, the same phenomena occur. However, the same conditions can never, by definition, obtain in the life of the self, because each, artificially isolated, moment of its duration includes the entire past, which is, consequently, different for each moment. By contrast with the universe of abstract equations, the same situation never occurs twice in the being endowed with memory; since real time is absolutely irreversible, neither the same cause nor the same effect can ever reappear in experience.

‘no movement ever repeats. Looked at in enough detail, every event in the universe is unique … the more detail we note, the more apparent it is that no event or experiment can be an exact copy of another.’