The Matter With Things

In my review in the last issue of the first volume of Iain McGilchrist’s Magnum Opus The Matter with Things, I remarked that Iain is the William James of our time and that this book is a Principia in the field of neuroscience, psychology, philosophy and indeed theology which I regard as required reading for every serious scientist and scholar; I also stated my view that the book is the most important seminal work of philosophy in the broadest sense since the publication of Process and Reality by A.N. Whitehead in 1929. Reading the second volume only serves to reinforce this impression. The first volume covered the hemispheres and the means to truth in terms of attention, perception, judgement, apprehension, emotional and social intelligence, cognitive intelligence and creativity. It then went on to discuss the paths to truth in terms of science, reason, imagination and intuition, developing a sophisticated, subtle and multifaceted approach that does justice to all these ways of knowing and their relationships.

In the second volume, Part Three is devoted to the ‘unforeseen nature of reality’, (unforeseen primarily by the left hemisphere) with a series of extraordinary chapters on the coincidence of opposites, the One and the Many, time, flow and movement, space and matter, matter and consciousness, value, purpose, life and the nature of the cosmos, and finally the sense of the sacred. Throughout, Iain’s range of erudition is quite staggering as he draws seamlessly from the widest range of sources stemming from over 50 years of reading and deep reflection. One striking feature is the presence of so many relatively neglected thinkers such as Schelling, Scheler, Bergson, Nicholas of Cusa, Merleau Ponty (at least in British philosophy), Lessing, Goethe, Coleridge, Bohm and Plotinus along with other mystical philosophers. These people find a new and contemporary relevance in the context of Iain’s thesis and will hopefully exert a renewed cultural impact.

Complementarity plays an important role in the overall argument, beginning with the coincidence of opposites generating a creative tension whereby ‘the general is found in the individual, the eternal in the temporal, the spiritual in the embodied.’ (p. 816) Analogously in the brain, the action of the corpus callosum is that ‘in connecting it separates, and in separating it connects.’ Hence Iain argues that

‘we need both the vision that reveals separation and division that reveals union…. opposites genuinely coincide while remaining opposites’ (p. 823) adding that

‘Life is, after all a dance to be celebrated, not a series of equations to be solved.’

An important implication is that ‘nothing good is achieved without a degree of adversity being overcome: health, resilience, courage, skill, knowledge, virtue and wisdom are no exceptions.’ His argument culminates in stating that ‘we need not either both/and or either/or, but both both/and and either/or. We need not non-duality only, but the non-duality of duality and non-duality.’ In Bach’s music we find sameness within difference in difference within sameness, and even discord within harmony and harmony within discord.

The same complementarity is found in the relationship between the One and the Many, the universal and the unique in creative reciprocity and that we can only understand through the immediate experience of kennen rather than the knowing about of wissen which implies taking possession and a will to power; the left hemisphere sees the Many but no longer the One. In discussing time, Iain returns to the primacy of process and flow so eloquently described by Bergson. He comments that ‘reality is what we experience – ever moving, changing, and continuous. Things, however, are secondary, static, products of perception which supervene on ’from above’, not support ‘from beneath’, that field of flow.’ (p. 898) For the right hemisphere, time is not something distinct from being, from reality flowing: it is always thus a becoming, never a something become.’ (p. 902) This has implications for our understanding of causation when it is based on a mechanical relation between two discrete and static events rather than seen as a dynamic self-organising process involving upwards, downwards and sideways dimensions. The left hemisphere represents time as a thing and even a resource, while Iain argues that we need to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness, wonderfully evoking the leisurely nature of the olive harvest on a Greek island (p. 938): ‘we have lost track of what seems now to us like idleness: stillness, silence, peace, deep attention to what really matters.’

This takes us into the chapter on Flow and Movement in the spirit of Heraclitus:

reality flows, consciousness flows, but conceptual thinking does not flow, providing rather the resistance differentiating the primary flow (cf Tao) like a whirlpool. Epistemologically, this is subtly put by Schelling when he observes that ’what in us knows is the same as what is known Schelling (p. 967) Space and matter are treated as aspects of being where, according to Max Scheler, consciousness exists in time, but not in space. Importantly, modernism has lost a sense of depth, both spatially and spiritually and, as identified by Tillich and Heidegger. Consistently with modern physics, Iain suggests that entanglement is more primitive than space, that discreteness is emergent and that energy is ontologically prior to matter.

The major chapter on matter and consciousness running to 85 pages will be of central interest to readers. Resonating with the work of FCS Schiller, Henri Bergson and William James in the 1890s, Iain argues for a ‘permissive’ relationship between matter and the brain rather than a transmissive or emissive (productive) one. He therefore questions the mainstream assumption that matter gives rise to consciousness, suggesting instead – like these earlier thinkers – that the matter limits/inhibits, and the brain structures consciousness, reminding us that matter is in fact disclosed to us experientially by mind. He quotes widely from many physicists, neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers of mind including Schroedinger, Planck, Sherrington, Galen Strawson, Henry Stapp, Penrose, Wheeler, Sir Julian Huxley, Menas Kafatos, Whitehead, Mae-Wan Ho, George Wald, David Bohm and Bernard Haisch, with only one notable omission – the work on reflexive monism by Max Velmans. The discussion is rich, complex and subtle, making it impossible to condense.

An important point reflecting the overall argument summarised on p. 1062 is that

‘We are not distinct from - over against – Nature: we emerge out of, live within, and return to Nature. In a sense we are Nature herself reflecting on Nature’ – participators rather than observers, as John Archibald Wheeler and Richard Tarnas also suggest. The evolutionary perspective suggests that ‘organicism, like consciousness, maybe a foundational principle of the cosmos’…. there is a coming into being…in the process of discovering itself through its creative potential. Hence,

‘The key point is that the ground of consciousness has given rise to something other than itself wholly out of itself, that is nonetheless not wholly determined by the ground of consciousness. (p. 1100) Metaphysically, Iain regards consciousness as integral that must somehow be divided if there are to be individual beings (as New Thought also proposed). Hence, ’the individual correctly perceives a self, but a self that is connected to the whole: wholly a self, and wholly part of the whole.’ He summarises this by saying that ‘what exists is a locally differentiated, but ultimately single, field of potentiality, which is constantly actualising itself. Thus all is one, and all is many.’ (p. 1104) This chapter must be carefully read in its entirety for a fuller understanding.

Iain now comes to value, purpose, life and the nature of the cosmos. His central argument is that value is intrinsic and foundational – ‘to be discovered and disclosed, in the process of discovering and furthering beauty, truth and goodness.’ It is also incapable of empirical verification, but can be experienced in terms of divine qualities, as in the NDE. He explains (p. 1132) that for the utilitarian left hemisphere, ‘value is something we invent and are separate from’, while ‘for the right hemisphere, value is something intrinsic to the cosmos’ and, like truth, is disclosed; its emphasis is on dispositions, processes and relationships viewed from the inside. The reductionist perspective fails to make sense of value, ‘so value itself becomes devalued.’ The same applies to purpose, which science excludes from the outset. Iain argues that purpose is foundational in a similar way to values and that ‘Life is a dance – a celebration; and it has the nature of gift. It is neither a mechanism to be exploited nor a problem to be solved.’

The final chapter of over 100 pages is devoted to the sense of the sacred. Like the chapter on matter and consciousness, this is a contribution of extraordinary depth, complexity and subtlety, a short book in itself. The ground of being is that from which we emerge and to which we return, and can only be apophatically expressed by an ‘un-word’ experientially implying both being and becoming; only knowable through the heart, through spiritual gnosis. For Wittgenstein, ‘to believe in God is to understand the question about the meaning of life.’ Again, disposition in terms of ‘active receptivity’, relationality and open reciprocity is central, as expressed by Meister Eckhart. We need to ‘un-forget’ (anamnesis), embracing what Abraham Herschel called halakhah and aggadah (p. 1229), law as well as the spirit, form and essence, remembering that propositions are just representations. Iain advances a panentheistic view consistent with process theology, whereby God is present but hidden, ‘becoming in the Eternal Now,’ the coincidence of opposites, dazzling darkness.

Iain proposes his own significant formulation of Pascal’s wager, adding a third evolutionary possibility to simply betting on the existence of God: ‘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.’ (p. 1263) This adventurous openness contrasts with the dogmatic literalism of both fundamentalists and the new atheists. Our culture is in decline, bereft of values and in danger of self-destruction by subordinating ends to means because, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suggested, we have forgotten who we are and do not take evil seriously.

The epilogue weaves some key strands together, suggesting that our crisis of meaning derives from the unprecedented fact that we ‘live divorced from Nature, alienated from the structures and traditions of a stable society, and indifferent to the divine.’ It is these elements ‘which have provided us with an overarching sense of belonging.’ (p. 1310) For the modern mind, Nature has become mere resource and the divine a superstition, leading to an arrogant hubris and blind faith in technology that is taking us in a dystopian direction. I agree with Iain that we can only be rescued by dissidents, by reversing the inversion of values, asserting not only what Scheler called Lebenswerte such as courage, magnanimity, nobility, humility and loyalty but also the geistige Werte – the values of mind or spirit, such as beauty, and goodness and truth better understood by the right hemisphere.

Our predicament cannot be addressed by the mindset that caused it, hence the fundamental requirement of a radical revision of our ideas of reality, life and identity, and returning to the original quotation from Plotinus: ’we then – who are we?’ We need to prioritise wisdom over power and control in an interconnected world where relationships are ontologically primary and foundational. The cultural contribution made by Iain in this Magnum Opus is inestimable, and I do believe that our very future depends on widespread understanding and application of his message of harmony, relationality, reciprocity, integration and balance. I urge you to make the time to read this truly seminal work.