11 TAKEAWAYS FROM THE MATTER WITH THINGS
BY DAVID MCILROY
Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and literary scholar. He is a polymath, best described as a natural philosopher.[1]
A former fellow of All Souls’ College, he has a glittering academic and professional career. His 2009 book The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (“TMHE”) is a masterpiece. In it, McGilchrist shows how there are two ways of attending to the world: one which seeks to take it apart and to manipulate it and the other which embraces it in its wholeness and connectedness. These two ways of attending to the world are typical of the left and right hemispheres respectively. He has expanded on this thesis in a monumental follow-up work, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (“TMWT”).
McGilchrist’s basic contention is that the two hemispheres of the brain have two different ways of perceiving the world (TMWT Introduction pp.17-32, ch.3 p.104). The right hemisphere looks at the world holistically, responding to its flow.[2] The left hemisphere looks at the world analytically, seeking to break it down into things that can be manipulated (TMWT Introduction p.21). The optimum way to use our brain’s potential to connect with reality is for the right hemisphere (the Master) to attend some part of the world, for the left hemisphere (the Emissary) to seek to apprehend that part, and for the results of the left hemisphere’s analysis to be re-integrated into the right hemisphere’s vision. After the parts have been examined, “There is … a need for effortful recomposition to make the whole comprehensible”. (TMWT ch.9 p.331).
In McGilchrist’s own words,
“all that is to be known must initially ‘presence’ to the right hemisphere (we have no other access); then be transferred to the left hemisphere so as to gain expression through re-presentation; and that re-presentation returned to the right hemisphere where it is either recognised for its consonance with the initial presencing and subsumed into a new Gestalt, or rejected.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1229).
McGilchrist’s argument is that healthy individuals, groups, and societies approach the world first via the right hemisphere, reacting to what is found there to form an impression of how everything links together; then the left hemisphere looks in detail at elements that can become objects of human action in isolation, and then the results of the left hemisphere’s inspection are returned to the right hemisphere where the individual elements are reintegrated into a more profound understanding of the whole. In unhealthy individuals, groups, and societies, the move to isolate and manipulate is the primary move, and the left hemisphere creates a feedback loop that fails to acknowledge the reality of that which can be embraced but cannot be grasped, that which must be accepted but cannot be captured in words.[3]
Already in The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist was arguing that in modernism, the left hemisphere had triumphed resulting in “an excess of consciousness and an over-explicitness in relation to what needs to remain implicit; depersonalisation and alienation from the body and empathic feeling; disruption of context; fragmentation of experience; and the loss of ‘betweenness’.” (TMHE ch.10 p.397). “Ultimately there is nothing less than an emptying out of meaning.” (TMHE ch.10 p.398).
McGilchrist’s 1,578 page follow-up, The Matter with Things, is the most devastating demolition of reductive materialism since Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.[4] At TMWT ch.26 p.1165, McGilchrist states: “It seems to me that the reductionist account is contrary to scientific findings, unreasonable, counterintuitive, and shows a complete refusal to exercise intelligent imagination”.
McGilchrist’s claim is that in modernity the West has “systematically misunderstood the nature of reality” (TMWT Introduction p.3) as a result of succumbing to “the reductionist view that we are – nature is – the earth is – ‘nothing but’ a bundle of senseless particles, pointlessly, helplessly, mindlessly, colliding in a predictable fashion, whose existence is purely material, and whose only value is utility.” (TMWT Introduction p.5). McGilchrist nicknames this reductionism “nothing buttery”.
Things have gone wrong because the left hemisphere believes that its comprehension of the part is total. “The awareness coming from the right hemisphere can embrace that of the left, but not the other way round.” (TMWT Coda to Part III p.1314). The left hemisphere makes at least two fatal mistakes: it regards its representation or analysis of the part as definitive in place of attending to the part itself and it treats the part in isolation from its relationship with other parts of the flow of reality. Instead of humbly submitting the results of its analysis to the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere becomes stuck in a feedback loop. The world as created by the left hemisphere becomes a totalising narrative, a metaverse, from which broader reality (especially those aspects which cannot be reduced to language, measured or manipulated are excluded (TMWT Introduction p.26, Introduction pp.43-45)).[5] “The left hemisphere adopts a theory, and then actually denies what doesn’t fit the theory.” (TMWT ch.4 p.172).[6]
In late modernity, we have mistaken the map, the theoretical schema created by the left hemisphere, for the reality of the lived world that our right hemisphere connects us with (TMWT ch.9 p.317, ch.15 p.573). The “consequences … are far-reaching – indeed devastating.” (TMWT ch.9 p.305). Our lives are “lived” under the shadow of the “dead hand of mechanism, scientism,[7] and bureaucracy” (TMWT ch.9 p.329).[8] Analytical philosophy and the dominance of the machine metaphor in science[9] have created “a tradition in which most academics now are so thoroughly schooled that they can’t see that there is a problem, let alone how to escape it.” (TMWT ch.9 p.347).
At one level, TMWT is the “unfolding and differentiation” of McGilchrist’s key claim that our left hemisphere-dominated worldview is having a multitude of nefarious ramifications. But it is also McGilchrist’s attempt to integrate a lifetime of insights into a coherent overall framework. The result is a work of such depth and subtlety that any attempt to summarise it risks descending into caricature or parody. An important claim McGilchrist makes is that “We cannot know anything without attending to it, and the nature of that attention alters what we find” (TMWT ch.26 p.1129). This, of course, means that my reading of McGilchrist is partly determined by the questions I brought to his text and the context of my life in which I am reading his work.
11 takeaways
With that warning in place, eleven key features of McGilchrist’s worldview can be drawn out of the summary he offers on TMWT Epilogue p.1329:
1. Relationships are ontologically primary, foundational; and ‘things’ a secondary, emergent property of relationships.
2. Matter is an aspect of consciousness, not consciousness an emanation from matter.
3. Individuation is a natural process, whose aim is to enrich rather than to disrupt wholeness.
4. Apparent opposites are not as far as possible removed from one another but tend to coincide.
5. Change and motion are the universal norm, but do not disrupt stability and duration.
6. Nothing is wholly determined, though there are constraints, and nothing is wholly random, though chance plays an important creative role.
7. The whole cosmos is creative; it drives towards the realisation of an infinite potential.
8. Nature is our specific home in the cosmos from which we come and to which in time we return.
9. The world absolutely cannot be properly understood or appreciated without imagination and intuition, as well as reason and science: each plays a vitally important role.
10. The world is neither purposeless nor unintelligent, but simply beyond our full comprehension. The world is more a dance than an equation.
11. At the core of the world is something we call the divine, which is itself forever coming into being along with the world that it forms, and by which, in turn, it too is formed.
The remainder of this article will reflect on these eleven aspects, taking them roughly in turn (but postponing consideration of the second aspect almost to the end).
The primacy of relationships
A left hemisphere view of things regards each thing in isolation and as “nothing but” itself. McGilchrist dismisses this reductionist ‘nothing buttery’ as inadequate to our experience of the world and inconsistent with the findings of quantum physics (TMWT Introduction p.5).
McGilchrist, like Wordsworth, sees wonder, connectedness, and significance in nature. Speaking of his experience of the natural world, he writes: “nothing ‘super’ needed to be added to the ‘natural’ for it to invoke wonder.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1215). “In short, creation and the mystery of what lies behind it become sacred; and the disposition that sees it thus is what is meant by a religious disposition. It is a disposition that perceives depth.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1217).
McGilchrist’s view of nature has similarities to that of Henri de Lubac, who famously argued that there is no natura pura, that nature is always already everywhere laden with God’s grace.[10]
Nothing in nature exists in isolation, “everything exists only in relation” (TMWT ch.21 p.846). Although at points McGilchrist entertains the possibility that things and their relations are equally fundamental,[11] his preferred view is that “relationships must be primary, since entities become what they are only through their situation in the context of multiple relations.” (TMWT ch.24 p.1006) and “things are secondary properties of phenomena that emerge out of the web of experience, as ‘objects’ that attract our focussed (left hemisphere) attention. … an object is … what presents itself as useful to grasp.” (TMWT ch.22 p.885). “Relationships are prior to relata” (TMWT ch.12 p.459, ch.24 p.1006).[12]
The primacy of relationships leads to McGilchrist’s eighth feature of reality: human beings are part of nature. Instead of thinking of human beings in opposition to their environment, we urgently need to rediscover that we are part of the world, and to re-form our attention to the world in ways that nourish and sustain it in its relationships with us and us in our relationships with it.
Religion is, for McGilchrist, a key way of emphasising the importance of relationships. “A religious cast of mind sets the human being and human life in the widest context, reminding us of our duties to one another, and to the natural world that is our home; duties, however, that are founded in love, and link us to the whole of existence. The world becomes ensouled. And we have a place in it once more.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1283).
The Particular and the General
*The second feature is considered later
Our world is one in which there is a high degree of regularity but also an amazing amount of individuation. Every fingerprint and every snowflake is unique. Individuation and connectedness produce a creative tension. Things are recognised for what they are not because they are identical with other things, but because of their resemblance to a pattern. “Everything is part of one whole, connected to every other part by a matter of degree. But everything is also absolutely unique” (TMWT ch.21 p. 843). “If there were no general patterns at all, there would not be uniqueness, but mere chaos.” (TMWT ch.21 p.844).
Thus, McGilchrist concludes: “The claim that All is One is well-intentioned, but, it seems to me disastrous, because it is just half a truth. … the other equal truth is All is Many.” (TMWT ch.21 p.875). “Whatever exists in time and space is ipso facto unique; though in it and through it one sees the general and the timeless, not as separate but as another facet of the same entity.” (TMWT ch.21 p.879).
The Reconciliation of Apparent Contradictions
The dialectic between the One and the Many is an illustration of McGilchrist’s fourth feature of reality, that two superficially contradictory perspectives can be held in tension with one another, but ultimately reconciled by integrating one into the other. Thus, McGilchrist sees reality as exhibiting a kind of exitus – reditus movement (separation leading to deeper union), with “the ultimate priority of the principle of union over that of division, despite the necessary part played by division at one stage of the process.” (TMWT ch.21 p.847).[13]
At times McGilchrist appears to verge towards Manicheism (the belief that good and evil are equally primary and equally balanced). “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.” (TMWT ch.15 p.598). The title of chapter 20 of TMWT, “The coincidentia oppositorum” continues this impression.
However, just as the left and right hemispheres of the brain are asymmetric (TMWT ch.20 p.836), so too McGilchrist sees an asymmetry in the coincidentia oppositorum (TMWT ch.20 p.833) and in the foundations of physical reality (TMWT ch.24 pp.1028-35). McGilchrist advocates for balance, harmony, and complementarity, but not for symmetry. “Small imbalances, differences among sameness, at all levels in nature make it work, starting with the initial inequality of matter and antimatter.” (TMWT ch.20 p.833). In a similar way, “I experience both good and evil as real, and see them as necessary opposites; but while evil can, goodness knows, locally overwhelm good, it cannot subsume good into itself. The goodness of loved can embrace its opposite; the evil of hate cannot.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1300). The tension between asymmetric opposites is creative, perfect symmetry is inert.
Change and Motion are what Give Things their Identity
The left hemisphere worldview gets stuck in superficial paradoxes: for it, something either has to remain static or it becomes a different thing. McGilchrist argues that: “in the deep … structure of reality opposite truths do actually coincide, and we must therefore accept both.” (TMWT ch.16 p.641). In part, this is because, he thinks “many, if not all, logical paradoxes can be seen as arising from the left hemisphere’s attempt to analyse something that is better grasped as a whole by the right hemisphere.” (TMWT ch.16 p.642). “[W]e need to resist choosing one truth only and ignoring the other; rather, we must see how the greater truth may hold both together.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1231).
The right hemisphere worldview can embrace paradox, seeing how different perspectives can be integrated into a deeper vision. Our own experience of growing up and growing old is that we are the same person even as our life extends through time and the cells in our body are replaced. McGilchrist’s view, following Balbir Singh, is that “What we ordinarily call a thing is itself a process, a ceaseless coming to be and passing away.”[14] This means that being is not a static quality but a continuous presencing. “If one espouses a view of the world as a flow, not as a collection of things; then all that exists is not just, inertly, being, but always ‘be-coming’; and time and movement is bound up in that very concept.” (TMWT ch.22 p.934).
Heraclitus is the Greek philosopher most associated with emphasising change over statis. For McGilchrist, “Heraclitus points not to change only, but as much to permanence: flow which ever changes but ever remains. There is no succession of things involved in this change, because they always flow, interpenetrating one another.” (TMWT ch.23 p.953). “Flow, then, is not primarily about change, since it is equally about persistence” (TMWT ch.23 p.954). “[C]hange is accentuated when one sees ‘things that flow’; persistence when one sees the flow itself.” (TMWT ch.23 p.954).
Nicholas Wolterstorff once said that there has never been a satisfactory philosophy of time. McGilchrist sees time as “a way of precipitating out into infinitely various actuality the undifferentiated oneness from which the universe began” (TMWT ch.22 p.888). “Time, for the right hemisphere, is not something distinct from being, from reality flowing: it is always thus a becoming, never a something become.” (TMWT ch.22 p.902). “Time is the coherence-giving context in which we live.” (TMWT ch.22 p.906).
This is a Participatory Universe
McGilchrist strongly affirms Wheeler’s famous pronouncement: “This is a participatory universe.”[15] (quoted in TMWT ch.25 p.1057). The world for us is the world as we experience it. This world cannot be manipulated howsoever we wish (as the left hemisphere is apt to think) but neither it is unresponsive to our attention.
McGilchrist consistently defends the position that “there is something other than the contents of our own minds to which each of us aims to be true – and the right hemisphere is, on any account we can advance, a better witness to that reality than the left.” (TMWT ch.22 p.882). “[W]e do actually deal with reality and know it, just with an aspect of it that we partly call forth ourselves by our approach.” (TMWT ch.25 p.1052).
Through our consciousness, our focus of attention, our response to the real world:
“… this is how we bring all our world into being: all human reality is an act of co-creation. It’s not that we make the world up; we respond more or less adequately to something greater than we are. The world emerges from this dipole. We half perceive, half create.” (TMWT ch.19 p.765). “… we are social beings who co-create one another and the world.” (TMWT ch.21 p.874).
“The nature of the attention that we bring to bear on the world, and the values which we bring to the encounter, change what we find; and in some absolutely non-trivial sense, change what it is. At the same time, the encounter … changes who we are.” (TMWT Epilogue p.1330-31). This is something we share with all other creatures. “In organisms there is never just action without both interaction and mutual construction.” (TMWT ch.12 p.451).
The openness of the universe to our participation is the concomitant of McGilchrist’s sixth feature of reality. The insights of quantum physics reveal that in nature, nothing is wholly determined, though there are constraints, and nothing is wholly random, though chance plays an important creative role.
For McGilchrist, the world has the contours of structure which make free action possible. We can plan, choose, and act because the laws of nature exhibit sufficient regularity to make our agency effective. This involves God, who could wholly determine everything, drawing back in order to create something other than, and in relationship with, God. Thus, “for the cosmos to be at all, both the principle of love (chesed), and the power of restraint (gevurah), are required.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1260). God has to allow the other to be in order for the other to respond in genuine love. “What does love mean, to the lover or the one that is loved, if it is compelled?” (TMWT ch.28 p.1262). “The existence of human free will is the ultimate expression of tzimtzum, the ‘standing back’ of God.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1257).
McGilchrist’s participatory view of the universe reinforces his claim that relationships are primary. “The idea that God is love, or even the ‘word’ (logos), suggests that ultimately what is primary is relationship: a word exists only in the betweenness of utterance and audition, which has the same structure as love. Love is an experience always in process, never a thing or anything like a thing.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1237).
Love is fundamental to the shape of the universe.
“One way of thinking of this (it is hardly original) is that a divine principle of love needs something Other to love, since love is essentially directed outwards; that that Other must be free to respond, since a love that is compelled is not love; and that this necessarily means that the Other must be free to reject the love that is proffered. This seems to me necessarily true, if such a divine principle of love exists.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1301).
So love is key to our lives. “We are temporarily material entities, capable … of playing a part in creation itself … We are embedded in the cosmos that gives rise to us … What is wonderful about us is not our pitiful lust for power, … but precisely our capacity to be vulnerable, to wonder, and to love: which alone makes what we most value possible.” (TMWT Epilogue p.1330).
An ‘engineering God or a detailed plan’ are ideas that McGilchrist explicitly rejects (TMWT ch.27 p.1179). “The grounding consciousness is not deterministic. It has none of the characteristics of an omnipotent and omniscient engineering God constructing and winding up a mechanism. It is in the process of discovering itself through its creative potential …” (TMWT ch.25 p.1099). McGilchrist is emphatic that “the beautiful colours of the flowers and birds, and all the other beauties of nature, were [not] created by an engineering God for human delight”. (TMWT ch.26 p.1148). Instead, “we, as they, are the manifestations of an intrinsically beautiful cosmos” (TMWT ch.26 p.1164).
McGilchrist’s rejection of an engineering God means the embracing of Aristotelian / Thomist / Leibnizian teleology, of final causes, of what McGilchrist calls “intrinsic purpose”.
“If you understand purpose to mean extrinsic purpose, you invent an engineering God who made the universe as an infinitely complex mechanism to serve some unknown end of his own. Such a God is just a projection of the left hemisphere’s fantasy of endless power to manipulate – a divine left hemisphere, detached from the cosmos and running the show according to a foreordained plan. … If, like me, you can’t … believe in such a God, you might jump to the conclusion that this infinitely complex ‘mechanism’ has simply no purpose. But that is just to make the same error, that of conceiving purpose only in extrinsic terms: as if the only alternatives were the purposes of an engineering God, or a cosmos without purpose.” (TMWT ch.27 p.1169).
Instead, McGilchrist argues: “things are better thought of as being attracted towards certain goals, rather than pushed blindly forwards by a mechanism from behind.” (TMWT ch.27 p.1190). “Nature’s purposiveness includes and is predicated on the freedom of her creatures” (TMWT ch.27 p.1186). Once we have accepted that human beings are not the only things with intrinsic purpose, then we realise that we are part of nature, that we belong in and with nature (McGilchrist’s Eighth Feature of Reality).
Understanding the World requires more than the use of Science and Reason
Because of the left hemisphere’s blindspots, “the right hemisphere is a more reliable guide to reality than the left hemisphere. … it has a greater range of attention; greater acuity of perception; makes more reliable judgments; and contributes more to both emotional and cognitive intelligence than the left.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1285).[16]
McGilchrist is critical of narrow, unfeeling, ratiocination. Reason is important, but is limited and never entirely separable from emotion (TMWT ch.4 p.167, ch.14 p.549, ch.15 p.579).[17] Explicit reasoning needs to be counterbalanced by intuition (the synthesis of experience with unconscious reasoning) (TMWT ch.8 p.256, ch14 p.554) and imagination (TMWT ch.14 p.549).[18] “[R]eality is neither undiscoverable, nor discoverable by the intellect alone, but by the whole embodied being, senses, feeling, intellect and imagination.” (TMWT ch.15 p.576). “Human cognition is never just abstract and mechanical, but must be personal as well. As such, it involves not just calculating and categorising, but feeling and judging, and that this is essential to our humanity." (TMWT ch.21 p.873).
“Some things can only be experienced or understood when they are not put to analysis. This is not because analysis defeats them, but because they defeat analysis.” (TMWT ch.14 p.565). Therefore, the left hemisphere fails to take proper account of them: “by focussing too much on reason we miss all the things that can’t be reasoned about, or precisely expressed – only alluded to.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1265).
Reliance on ratiocination rather than experience therefore opens the way to radical scepticism because, as Bryan Magee claims (with some degree of hyberbole): “direct experience which is never adequately communicable in words is the only knowledge we ever fully have”[19] (quoted in TMWT ch.28 p.1196). In denigrating this, the left hemisphere approach fails to recognise that “there is a distinction between something beyond our means of grasp and something beyond our means of knowing.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1205).
Because of the interconnectedness, the richness, and the multi-layered nature of the world and our experience of the world, “metaphor … is fundamental to how we understand the world.” (TMWT ch.19 p.757). McGilchrist approves of Aristotle’s observation in De arte poetica that “a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars”.[20] “All understanding whatsoever is, at bottom, metaphorical.” (TMWT ch.15 p.632). Elsewhere he says: “It’s metaphors all the way down”.
Our dependence on metaphors reveals our need for myths and for metaphysics. “Just as there is no option to think without metaphor, there is no such thing as not having a myth” (TMWT Epilogue p.1330). “[U]ltimate meaning will always lie beyond what reason can conceive or everyday language express.” (TMWT, ch.14 p.569). “The beauty and power of art and of myth is that they enable us … to contact aspects of reality that we recognise well, but cannot capture in words.” (TMWT ch.15 p.631). Thus, “the most fundamental truths, of both a physical and psychical nature, can ultimately be expressed only in terms of poetry.” (TMWT ch.10 p.387).
Reality is Bigger Than We Can Grasp
Therefore, in order to find our home in the world, we need to approach the world as something to be embraced rather than manipulated. We need to assume the connexion with the world that we are going to find. McGilchrist insists that “belief is dispositional, not propositional” (TMWT ch.28 p.1262) and that “a true understanding requires a certain disposition of the mind towards its object. … True understanding … already presupposes a connexion, rather than being the prerequisite of such a connexion.” (TMWT ch.26 p.1127).
The view from nowhere, and the God’s-eye perspective, are not open to us (TMWT ch.15 p.612). Our knowledge of the world is always situated, contextual and partial. The reason that we cannot pin down the “meaning” of the world, is not because it has no meaning, but because there is “a plenitude of meaning, beyond simple articulation” (TMWT ch.10 p.390). There are things, (like love, sunsets, and even the joy of being in a good bookshop) which we cannot reduce to writing not because they have no meaning but because they are overflowing with meaning.
McGilchrist writes:
“if we lose the sense of just how much we do not know, we lose understanding of even the little that we do know.” (TMWT ch.19 p.775). “mystery [does not] betoken a lack of meaning – rather a superabundance of meaning in relation to our normal finite vision.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1258).
Nicholas Cusanus made the point in the fifteenth century that infinity “is intrinsically unknowable because there is no comparison” (TMWT ch.28 p.1259). Whilst some kinds of mathematic infinities can be conceptualised, we do not know and cannot imagine what it would be to be outside the constraints of space-time. “Uniqueness brings everyday language to a standstill. Anything truly unique cannot be expressed in such language, which is why whatever is profound, personal, or sacred, if it is to be expressed in words, can be so expressed only in poetry, the language of the right hemisphere. In poetry, language subverts its normal tendency to precision and becomes rich with ambiguity, with potential meaning again; and through the rifts created in the enclosing veil of language the light once more streams in.” (TMWT ch.21 p.867).
McGilchrist’s speculations about God are therefore apophatic. God is the surplus in creation that cannot be encapsulated, that resists formulation, and that refuses all attempts at reduction. “There can be no certain truth in speaking of the divine. But there is resonance, and the test is whether it answers to experience.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1250).
McGilchrist endorses the via negativa and the mystical theology of, in particular, Meister Eckhart (TMWT ch.28 p.1212). McGilchrist calls Eckhart, “The greatest of the mediaeval mystics … associated with what has been called a ‘metaphysics of flow’.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1236). He quotes McGinn,[21] who writes that Eckhart saw “God as negatio negationis is simultaneously total emptiness and supreme fullness.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1255).
Our fundamental calling is to experience, to enjoy, rather than to analyse, to rejoice in rather than to exhaust. The metaphor McGilchrist repeatedly reaches for here is that of a dance. “[Thomas] Fuchs sees that our lives as social beings must belong to something that is best expressed as a dance or a piece of music, if we are to enmesh, engage, connect” (TMWT ch.23 p.969).[22] “Life, in its essence, is a making new: a wholly superfluous, super-abundant, self-overflowing – an exuberant, self-delighting process of differentiation into ever more astonishing forms, an unending dance, in which we are lucky enough to find ourselves caught up” (TMWT ch.21 p.853). We are to go with the flow, to connect with our partners, to follow the harmonies.
Consciousness is Prior to Matter
McGilchrist’s emphasis on experience leads to his affirmation that consciousness is prior to matter. The left hemisphere worldview thinks that material things are simple and can be understood in their totality, but that consciousness is a mystery which must be explained away as either an illusion, an epiphenomenon or as somehow magically emerging from matter. A major theme in TMWT is that no things can be fully understood apart from their relationships to everything else in the universe, with the consequence that our understanding of matter is necessarily partial and incomplete. Matter is therefore far more complex than is commonly assumed, and that the best explanation is that “matter appears to be an element within consciousness that provides the necessary resistance for creation; and with that, inevitably, for individuality to arise.” (TMWT ch.25 p.1049).[23] McGilchrist’s claim that matter is the creation of consciousness, rather than vice versa, has similarities with the idealist philosophy of George Berkeley (TMWT ch.2 p.77).
Given the total failure of the materialistic worldview to explain consciousness and, McGilchrist would argue, its fundamentally mistaken account of matter, McGilchrist argues that it is more consistent with experience, more powerful as an explanation of the nature of the world, and therefore more reasonable, to regard consciousness as equally fundamental as, or even as prior to, matter (TWMT ch.10 p.394).
McGilchrist insists that the metaphysical questions are the most important questions of all, and that they cannot be answered from within a left hemisphere framework (hence the inability of scientism to make sense of the questions).
“For me, and for many philosophers historically, the deepest question in all philosophy … is why there should be something rather than nothing. And close on its heels comes the question why that ‘something’ turns out to be complex and orderly, beautiful and creative, capable of life, feeling and consciousness, rather than merely chaotic, sterile, and dead.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1193).
McGilchrist’s answer to the second question is that the best explanation for the qualities of the matter of the universe is that it is the product of a cosmic scale mind.
“But if the material cosmos is an emanation or projection of a grounding consciousness it will as a matter of course have the necessary, apparently fine-tuned, conditions to come into existence; it will naturally have the qualities of order, beauty and complexity because it issues from a consciousness that, like us, is attuned to and gives rise to such elements; it will naturally produce conscious beings, and the conscious beings will naturally be able to speak its language, since they are generated by it. Of course this does not answer the unanswerable question, why there is something rather than nothing.” (TMWT ch.25 p.1098).
Speaking of the relationship between the mind and the body, McGilchrist writes: “During life it is possible that the spiritual and physical are entangled, neither causing the other, neither depending on the other for its existence, but their entanglement certainly depending on the co-existence of each” (TMWT ch.22 p.916). Thus,
“we find the soul not by turning away from the body, but by embracing it in a way that spiritualises the body; and we find the sacred not by turning away from the world, but by embracing it, in a move that sanctifies matter. The soul is both in and transcends the body, as a poem is in and yet transcends mere language …” (TMWT ch.24 p.1014).
God is becoming with Nature
If consciousness is prior to matter, then the universe is a product of Mind. McGilchrist does not endorse pantheism, the idea that, as Roger Scruton puts it when commenting on Spinoza, ‘the distinction between the creator and the created is not a distinction between two entities, but a distinction between two ways of conceiving a single reality’ (TMWT ch.28 p.1248).[24] Instead, he prefers panentheism (the view that “all things are in God, and God in all things” (TMWT ch.28 p.1231)), because it “permits something further: the possibility that God has a relationship not just with the divine self, but with something Other; and this, it seems to me, is the drive behind there being a creation at all.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1248).
McGilchrist is clear that God is both wholly transcendent and wholly immanent (TMWT ch.28 p.1231, 1248). As for God’s transcendence: “God is above all not a thing alongside other things – even one equipped with ultra-special powers. God simply is – in a use of the verb that requires that we understand God both to have Being and to be the ground of Being at one and the same time.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1201).
Beings participate in Being. As McGilchrist puts it, in express agreement with Thomas Aquinas and classical theism on this point:
“To exist, … is to have a share in being … given by God, … it is a revelation of God. … God gives himself in a certain respect in creation; in giving the world being, he is giving what he is, even if he is giving it so perfectly generously as to give it away, to make something truly other than himself.”[25]
Moreover, “to say that God gives himself definitively, and even in a certain sense perfectly, in creation does not at all mean that the created world, even taken as a whole and in all of its mysterious depth, exhausts the meaning of God. God infinitely transcends the world, and so the world in its natural reality falls radically short as a revelation of God.”[26]
Therefore, “God is certainly greater than but includes the universe” (McGilchrist, quoting Keith Ward,[27] TMWT ch.28 p.1232). “God … can say ‘yes’. And to say ‘yes’ to everything includes saying ‘yes’ to ‘no’ – limitation – which may explain the existence of sin.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1254).
For McGilchrist, following Alfred North Whitehead, God’s ability to inhabit the universe (even to the point of becoming a human being if the Christian mythos is to be believed) is expressed in the idea that God is Becoming.
“God, truth, and infinity are all processes, not things; comings into being, not entities that are already fixed. … Ultimately Being and Becoming are aspects of the same thing. …However, as usual, there is an asymmetry: they are not equal. In the philosophy of Whitehead, the divine is Becoming, and Becoming is even more fundamental than Being.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1241).
McGilchrist’s panentheism draws on a number of thinkers, including the Christian theologian Jürgen Moltmann: “In the panentheistic view, God, having created the world, also dwells in it, and conversely, the world which he has created exists in him” (TMWT ch.28 p.1267).[28] McGilchrist’s panentheism rejects any notion of creation as a machine or God as a clockmaker who simply winds up the clock and then lets it tick away by itself.
McGilchrist is a theist rather than a deist. His God is continuously co-creating in the unfolding universe rather than having departed the scene. In a way similar to Moltmann’s account of the Holy Spirit as the holistic Spirit, McGilchrist suggests “that whatever creative energy underwrites the unfolding of the phenomenal universe is continually active and involved in that universe; that the future is tended towards, but not closely determined; rather it is open, evolving, self-fulfilling.” (TMWT ch.27 p.1172).
McGilchrist poses his own wager, with an express nod to Pascal:
“if God is an eternal Becoming, fulfilled as God through the response of his creation, and we, for our part, constantly more fulfilled through our response to God; then we are literally partners in the creation of the universe, perhaps even in the becoming of God (who is himself Becoming as much as Being): in which case it is imperative that we try to reach and know and love that God. Not just for our own sakes, because we bear some responsibility, however small, for the part we play in creation …” (TMWT ch.28 p.1263).
Panentheism is what McGilchrist thinks is part of the best explanation for the world as it presents, or better, presences itself to us. “While invoking God does not … answer our questions, it is part of a picture – a Gestalt – that makes more sense to me as a whole than a Gestalt that avoids the divine.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1259). McGilchrist’s openness to God is part and parcel with his rejection of materialism, determinism and the metaphor for the universe as a machine or a clock. “… [I]f the nature of reality is not already fixed, but rather, evolving, participatory, reverbative, it is both rational and important to open your mind and heart to God, in order to bring whatever it is evermore into existence.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1263).
As the extracts above show, McGilchrist’s natural philosophy shades into a natural theology in which qualified affirmations about the divine can be offered. McGilchrist’s God is “that which underwrites, timelessly and eternally, whatever is: in other words, the ground of Being.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1194).
God is “a co-ordinating principle in the universe which is evidenced in order, harmony and fittingness; a principle that is not only true, but the ultimate source of truth.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1206). But McGilchrist acknowledges: “I have … no final answers to any of the big questions. … I believe the concept of God to be fraught with difficulties. … I am merely indicating that … there is almost certainly more here than we have words for, or can expect ever to understand using reason alone.” (TMWT ch.25 p.1195). Thus, “What the term ‘God’ requires of us is not a set of propositions about what cannot be known but a disposition towards what must be recognised as beyond human comprehension.” (TMWT ch.25 p.1207).
Consistent with his apophaticism, McGilchrist does not want to be dogmatic in his assertion of panentheism. “We should resist the temptation to take it as gospel – which is why I talked about a ‘speculative’ theology of panentheism. There are no certainties here.” (TMWT ch.25 p.1248).
Conclusion
McGilchrist offers a philosophical vision with many strengths. It is relational, it is anti-reductionist, and it integrates perspectives from a variety of disciplines into a more than plausible whole. Any society in which such a vision has arisen will be greatly enriched if only we will take the time to attend to it.
McGilchrist has also dared to think about what a wholehearted and fully engaged attention to reality suggests about “God”. This has implications for other ways of thinking about God, and in my next article, I will consider McGilchrist’s ideas in the light of classical theism and Christian theology.
This article was originally published on Perspectiva’s Substack
[1] I am enormously grateful to Dr. McGilchrist for his generosity in giving me time to ask questions to clarify my understanding of his work.
[2] “Flow is an irreducible, not an emergent, element in the universe.” (TMWT ch.16 p.648).
[3] “The left hemisphere simply ignores, dismisses, and ultimately denies the existence of, anything it can’t pin down and measure.” (TMWT ch.8 p.295). “Since the left hemisphere uses language to label, this often involves a belief that changing the label will change the reality. The left hemisphere takes truth to be what is says on the piece of paper.” (TMWT ch.21 p.863).
[4] Oxford, OUP: 2012.
[5] “The left hemisphere is both unreasonably willing to jump to conclusions (and stick to them), and inclined unreasonably to put in doubt the basics of existence.” (TMWT Coda to Part I p.375).
[6] At TMWT ch.10 p.398-9, McGilchrist reports the experience of an American woman whose brother had been taken to the morgue. When she kissed him, she felt that he was still warm and that he had a pulse. When she drew a nurse’s attention to these vital signs, the nurse replied: “That’s odd, but you needn’t worry about it, dear, because it says here on this chart quite clearly that he’s dead.”
[7] “… science cannot possibly fulfil the burdensome role of sole purveyor of truth. This is not a failing of science. Good science is aware of its limitations. Scientism, the belief that science will one day answer all our questions, is not.” (TMWT ch.11 p.407).
[8] One manifestation of this is “the triumph of procedure over meaning in every walk of life.” (TMWT ch.9 p.351). The left hemisphere is “a little like a high-ranking bureaucrat, protected from the world which he or she must administrate: adept at knowing and observing the rules, but knowing little if anything about life as it is lived there. All that it leaves to the right hemisphere.” (TMWT Coda to Part I p.371). McGilchrist expands on his critique of bureaucracy at TMWT ch.28 p.1286.
[9] “The brain is often compared to a computer. This metaphor is one of the scourges of our time.” (TMWT Coda to Part I p.372). See also TMWT ch.11 p. 410 “… the machine model remains only a model, a form of metaphor. … even at the relatively lowly level of explanation it has exhausted its potential, something that was obvious in physics some time ago, and is becoming increasingly obvious in the life sciences.” At TMWT ch.12 p.474, McGilchrist ventures the supposition that: “one element in the model’s popularity is that it encourages the sense that we can easily understand what life is and learn to control it – Faustian fantasies, in other words, of omniscience and omnipotence that reductionists quite rightly dislike when they see them attributed to a God (I share their qualms).”
[10] Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel: Etudes historiques (Paris: Aubier, 1946) 2nd edn (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1991).
[11] At TMWT Coda to Part III p.1307, McGilchrist says: “Relations are not secondary to relata, and it may be argued that relata may be secondary to relations, as the nodes in a web are secondary to the intersection of the threads …”
[12] The primacy of relationships does not come at the expense of individuality. For McGilchrist, “A good relationship is one in which each party is maximally fulfilled as a differentiated individual, without this in any way detracting from the relationship” (TMWT ch.10 p.393-4).
[13] “This primacy of union over division, however necessary division might be, is reflected in the fact that one can move from an extended whole in space or time to parts (though losing almost everything on the way), but not from the parts to the whole.” (TMWT ch.23 p.978).
[14] Balbir Singh, Indian Metaphysics (Humanities Press, 1987) 10, quoted in TMWT ch.23 p.993.
[15] J.A. Wheeler, “Information, physics, quantum: The search for links”, in. Wojciech Hubert Zurek (ed.), Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information (Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1990).
[16] In TMWT ch.21 p.857-8, McGilchrist criticises the left hemisphere for first artificially separating things, and then artificially aggregating things, imposing and organising them into categories by an act of cognition, rather than adopting the right hemisphere approach of seeing existing individual entities both as wholes and in context.
[17] “Reason is not opposed to feeling, but dependent on it.” (TMWT ch.18 p.740).
[18] “I take imagination to be our only means of approaching reality of any kind, a fortiori that of God. It is certainly not a guarantor of truth – there isn’t any; but its absence is a guarantor of failure – failure to properly understand truths of any kind, including those of science.” (TMWT ch.28 p.1270).
[19] Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey through Western Philosophy (Phoenix: 1998) p.98.
[20] Aristotle, De arte poetica XXII.10, §1459a6-8.
[21] B. McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, (Herder & Herder, 2001), 84, 93-94.
[22] T. Fuchs, ‘Temporality and psychopathology’, (2013) 12 Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 75-104.
[23] Aquinas would disagree that matter is necessary for consciousness to arise, seeing angels as immaterial individuated beings: Summa Theologiae I.50.1.
[24] R. Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1986), 78.
[25] D.C. Schindler, Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018), 158.
[26] D.C. Schindler, Love and the Postmodern Predicament, 162.
[27] Keith Ward, ‘The anthropic universe’ 2006: www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/the-anthropic-universe/3302686.
[28] Moltmann, God in Creation (Fortress Press, 1993), 98.